Daniel Mainwaring
His first whodunnit novel, published in 1936, was
The Doctor Died at Dusk. Written under an English-sounding and, in the future, often used
nom de plume, Geoffrey Holmes, it featured journalist Robin Bishop. In his 1938
Then There Were Three, Mainwaring summoned up a new investigator, the milk-drinking, accordian-playing private detective Humphrey Campbell. Four years later, in
The Street of Crying Women, he introduced Hispanic cop, Jose Manual Madero, a Zapotec Indian who knits socks and smokes cigarettes after flipping them in the air and catching them between his lips. Robin Bishop would go on to feature in
The Man Who Murdered Himself (1936),
The Man Who Didn't Exist (1937) and
The Man Who Murdered Goliath (1938).
from
Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood by Woody Haut (2002)