“Gamma Ray Murders” by Preston Yorke, was published 1943 (UK: Everybody’s Books), with cover art by Jeff Cook. The digest paperback is 128-pages, and a gangster / scientific thriller novel.
The Plot: a scientist is murdered and the plans for his secret “gamma ray” are stolen and turned on London. Inspector Bevis is on the trail and with the aid of a girl, they thwart the heinous plans of “X,” the Master Menace!
Preston Yorke was just one of several pseudonyms utilized by Harold Ernest Kelly.
From the 1940s-1950s, he wrote as Buck Toler (gangsters), Preston Yorke (science-fiction and detection), Eugene Ascher (supernatural and detection), John Parsons (non-fictional social comment), and, marginally, himself. Subsequently he also appeared as Gordon Holt (racing, crime, detection), Lance Carson (westerns), Duke Linton (gangsters), etc. Between 1961 and 1964, he wrote several Hank Janson gangster novels, after the name was farmed out, due to the original writer being sued. Kelly and some other authors then began writing the hard-hitting gangster novels before this fad expired.
THE SPECTRE LIBRARY PRESENTS: The Pulp and Paperback Fiction Reader 