He was a hardboiled lone-wolf investigator whose real name was never revealed. And he was a true company man, identified only by the name of the business he worked for, with an “Op” tagged at the end. His stories were tough and violent, and while they sometimes revealed him to be indecorous or not particularly heroic, he laid them all out in a straightforward, first-person style. He was, however, not the Continental Op. Credited as the author was the mysterious “Jan Dana,” in reality John Lawrence: a former stockbroker and author of another long-running Dime Detective series, the Marquis of Broadway. Volume 1 collects the first six stories in the series. Includes an all-new introduction by John Wooley.
Written by John Lawrence, writing as Jan Dana; introduction by John Wooley; cover by Walter Baumhofer; illustrations by John Fleming Gould
The Complete Cases of the Acme Indemnity Op, Volume 1 (The Dime Detective Library) contains the following stories:
- “Riddle of the Rats”
- “To the Murder Born”
- “Murder for Not Much”
- “Green Eyes for the Corpse”
- “The Judas Touch”
- “Single Indemnity”
