Cancelled in Red - Paperback

by Hugh Pentecost (Author)

Max Adrian was the rare stamp broker everyone in the know avoided. It never mattered to the shifty broker, until someone demanded a refund at gunpoint.Soon afterward, a dishy dame convinces Larry Storm, Adrian's rival, to play amateur detective for a hidden cache of priceless stamps. Storm is one step ahead of the tenacious Inspector Luke Bradley, who's one step behind a cold-blooded killer - and Storm had better start running....Cancelled in Red appeared in Argosy magazine, touted as the $10,000 prize winner of the 1939 Dodd Mead Mystery Contest. The novel also grabbed the $1,000 Red Badge Prize Mystery title, and launched the career of "Hugh Pentecost," the pen name to the prolific Judson P. Philips, author of mysteries.

Author Biography

Judson Philips, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award winner, was born in Northfield, Mass. in 1903. He began his writing career in the pulp fiction magazines in 1924, while earning his journalism degree from Columbia University. In 1939 he won the $10,000 Dodd Mead Mystery Contest, using the pen name Hugh Pentecost, for Cancelled in Red. This marked a turning point in his career, as he created a second body of work for slick magazines and paperbacks as Pentecost. He continued using both names simultaneously, living between New York and Connecticut, producing more than 500 works. One of his best-known series was The Park Avenue Hunt Club, which appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly. Philips owned a newspaper, and wrote columns for other newspapers. He owned an equity summer stock theater, "The Sharon Playhouse," where he wrote and produced plays. In the meantime, he wrote radio and film scripts for movies and television. Later he hosted a political and arts program in Connecticut's "Northwest Corner," broadcast out of Torrington. Philips was married five times and had four children. He died of complications from emphysema in 1989, at age 85, in Canaan, Conn.