"Jigsaw" - A Complete Detective Novelette by Cleve F. Adams

After Friday's Forgotten Book review of Cleve F. Adams' first novel, Sabotage, I wanted to follow up with a sample of his pulp work. Adams is an unusual case. While most of his contemporary hardboiled writers had limited success in hardcover, Adams did quite well, with twelve books (plus two paperback originals). And I'm pretty sure every one of those hardcovers was reprinted in digest, paperback or both. His pulp stories, on the other hand, remain uncollected, unreprinted, and largely forgotten.

This story appeared in the June 11, 1938 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. Many of Adams' novelettes from that magazine were later fused into one of his detective novels, but I think this one escaped that sort of cannibalizing.