The Voice: A Violet McDade Story

by Cleve F. Adams

Cleve F. Adams was an American author of hard-boiled short stories and novels. He also worked as a film director and screenwriter. His first works of mystery fictions were short stories published in pulp magazines such as " Detective Fiction Weekly." Once he has established himself with fifty published short stories, he starts writing novel length detective thrillers of which "Sabotage" is the first.
The Violet McDade series was Adams’ first major series in the pulps. The stories appeared in "Clues Detective Stories" magazine in the mid to late 30’. “The Voice” was published in the September 1936 issue.
Violet is possibly the first hardboiled lady private eye. A former circus fat lady with an eye always out for a quick buck, she is not about using the twin guns she carries tugged up her sleeves.
Violet stories are narrated by Nevada Alvarado, her partner in the McDade and Alvarado Detective Agency, who, slim, dark-aired, and attractive, is physically very different, but not much less hardboiled than her boss.

74 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 6, 2015

About the author

The missing link between Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy, Cleve F. Adams wrote rambunctious, violent, corrosively cynical private eye fiction from the mid-1930s until his untimely death from pneumonia in 1949 at the age of 54. He also wrote as Franklin Charles and John Spain.