Written ten months before Pearl Harbor, the story concerns an American student named Dane Kern studying physics at Oxford who enlisted in the British military because of his interest in aviation. As the story opens, he is the sole survivor of a disastrous mission in which the German pilot Von Krim killed everyone else in Kern's squadron. Nor is this the first time Von Krim and his crew have defeated the British pilots. Kern is convinced that someone must be giving the Germans advance information about their plans, and he thinks he has an idea who is behind it all.
Born and bred in Philadelphia, David Goodis was an American noir fiction writer. He grew up in a liberal, Jewish household in which his early literary ambitions were encouraged. After a short and inconclusive spell at Indiana University, he returned to Philadelphia to take a degree in journalism, graduating in 1937.