The Complete Cases of Vee Brown, Volume 1

Vivian “Vee” Brown leads two lives. Delicate-looking and small in stature, he lacks physical strength and endurance. But that doesn’t prevent him from being an effective special operative to the Manhattan District Attorney. In this capacity he often ignores the legal niceties of due process, shooting first and asking questions later. Many citizens view him as a hair-trigger gunman whose promiscuous killings make him little better than the vicious criminals he hunts. In his other life, Brown lives in a luxurious Park Avenue penthouse, paid for not with his modest civil-servant salary, but with the royalties he earns as a phenomenally successful composer of sentimental songs—a sideline he keeps secret. Both the police and the underworld refer to him as a “Killer of Men.” But the denizens of Tin Pan Alley know him as “Master of Melodies,” the prince of pop music. The creation of Carroll John Daly, father of the hard-boiled private eye, Vee Brown plied his trade in the page of Dime Detective, the classic crime pulp that was second only to the legendary Black Mask in its impact on the genre.