''The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbors . . . on the wail . . .
Are drawing a long breath to shout 'Hurray!'
The strangest whim has seized me . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself today.''
--From G. K. Chesterton's A Ballade of Suicide

Young Donald Lawson was familiar with that poem . . . yet now his body hung dead on a crag. Murder or suicide, Manville Moon was already on the case, as bodyguard to Don's beautiful sister Grace. For Grace's life was threatened, too, and to protect it Moon found himself crossing fists and guns with hired killers, and fencing desperately with Grace's friends, family, and fiancé, anyone of whom might have wanted to kill her.

Richard Deming (1915-1983) was a solid and reliable pro whose crime-writing career extended from late 1940s pulps to early 1980s digests. He also wrote several volumes of popular non-fiction late in his life. He is most likely to be remembered as one of the most prolific contributors to Manhunt and the early days of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and as a paperback original writer, sometimes of novels based on TV shows (Dragnet, The Mod Squad, and under the pseudonym Max Franklin, Starsky and Hutch). He was also a frequent ghost for the Ellery Queen team on paperback originals and for Brett Halliday on lead novelettes for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.