The Brass Shroud

by Bruce Cassiday

Overview

At first, skip tracer Johnny Midas’ mission to Mockridge was as familiar as an old tune—to find a missing bank clerk. But swiftly this changed—the search had a jazz beat to it now. The only friend the bank teller had claimed in town was a has-been jazz trumpeter named Buck Legrande, a man desperately trying for a comeback. Though Buck himself swore he didn’t know the missing man, he must have known a lot about some other shady people. Buck’s comeback soon ended in his murder. Johnny knew he would have to use everything he had to solve this one...but he didn’t count on being as sharp with his ear as he would have to be with his gun!

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164104955
Publisher:	Bold Venture Press
Publication date:	06/12/2020
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	342 KB

About the Author

A prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, Bruce Cassiday’s career spanned five decades and various mediums. His early career was rooted in radio drama. Soon afterward he was an author and editor of pulp fiction magazines.
Bruce Bingham Cassiday was born in Los Angeles, in 1920. He graduated in 1942 with a B.A. in journalism from the University of California, and spent the next four years in the Air Force, receiving battle stars and rising to staff sergeant. He engaged in North Africa and Italian theatres, and later in the West Indies and Puerto Rico. From 1946 he became a professional writer, scoring a big success with radio dramas and big CBS shows, including Grand Central Station, and Suspense. He became an editor at Popular Publications, heading both Western and Crime pulps, and published some three dozen short stories and novelettes in the late forties and early fifties, in such magazines as All-Story Detective and Dime Detective. As well as editing numerous Popular magazines into the 1970s, Cassiday also served as fiction editor for Argosy from 1954 until 1973.
He penned the adventures of agent Johnny Blood, a continuing character in Popular’s F.B.I. Detective Stories magazine. The series ran from 1949 to 1951, until the magazine’s demise. Then, bonding investigator Cash Madigan appeared in two novels — Murder Trail and The Buried Motive — in 1957.
Cassiday married Doris Galloway in 1950, and they had two children, Bryan and Cathy. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he diversified into paperback novels, excelling in crime noir thrillers for numerous publishers, such as Ace, Beacon, Belmont, Lancer and Monarch Books. Throughout the 1960s, whilst still working as an editor, Cassiday continued to produce an astonishing flood of paperback originals including private eye, police procedurals, action, war and spy thrillers, medical novels, gothics and science fiction, as well as numerous adaptations of TV shows and movies, such as Marcus Welby, M.D., General Hospital, The Bold Ones, Flash Gordon and Gorgo. They were written under his own name and personal pseudonyms such as Carson Bingham and Annie Laurie McAllister.
His output was diverse and prodigious, including numerous non-fiction books on many subjects from landscaping to carpentry, and ghosting Film Star biographies. He also held Administrative posts with the Mystery Writers of America and the International Association of Crime Writers.
He died in 2005, in Stanford, Connecticut.