Throughout the 1950s, Richard Himmel worked by day as an interior designer and at night as a successful writer of paperback original crime novels. His first book, I’ll Find You, was a massive, multi-million copy bestseller that almost single-handedly put Fawcett Crest’s famed Gold Medal Paperbacks on the literary map. He followed that book with four sequels in the “Johnny Maguire” series and four stand-alone novels.
At this point, his career as an interior designer was exploding, making him a national (and soon international sensation), so he took almost 20 years away from the typewriter, before returning to print with a trio of big, sexy, global spy thrillers in 1977.
Johnny Maguire is a struggling lawyer who falls into a passionate affair with the widow of one of his clients. She disappears… supposedly taking a suicide dive into the ocean. But Maquire doesn’t buy it and starts searching for her…a quest that pits him against the mob and spirals into a twisted story of sex and murder.
Johnny Maguire hadn’t visited Chinatown in a long time, and now he wasn’t there for the tourist attractions. Not that the Chinese Keyhole didn’t have plenty to offer—if you liked that sort of thing. Behind its pseudo-Oriental facade, the strip club provided unusual entertainment for its off-beat clientele… and the performers were weirder than those who paid to watch them. There was the statuesque blonde dancer for instance. She left nothing to the imagination of her audience, and she was beautiful: but she just wasn’t Johnny’s type. And he wasn’t crazy about her partner, either—the muscular but mincing ballet dancer who carried a vicious-looking whip and didn’t hesitate to use it.
All FIVE novels in the gritty, hard-boiled series featuring two-fisted lawyer Johnny Maguire.
