I shook hands with him. He had pudgy fingers but they pressed hard on mine. I said, “Good luck, Jimmie, but it’s a tough racket.”

“I don’t see anything tough about it,” a voice sneered from beyond him. “What with reprints and all, any hack writer who’s got brains enough to know what the public wants can pick up ten or fifteen grand a year without half trying. Know what Matthew Blood got for his last twenty-five cent original?”

I looked past Jimmie Mason at a dark, thin, angry face. He had a mustache that reminded me of Peter Painter’s in Miami Beach. Wavy black hair was parted carefully in the middle, and he wore a little red and white polka dot bow tie. I never saw a person I instinctively disliked more, and more easily at first sight.

Of course, I should be honest enough to admit his attitude toward my writing wasn’t exactly calculated to make me love him. In eighteen years I’ve learned pretty well to laugh off criticism of my books, but it had taken me a good many years of hard work to reach the point where my income was over ten thousand a year, and it didn’t sit too well to be told by a young punk that any hack writer could do it without half trying.

I said, “No. And I’m not particularly interested what Blood got for a slop-bucketful of sex and sadism.”

“Cut it out, Lew,” begged Mason. “You’ve had one too many drinks. This is Lew Recker, Mr. Halliday,” he went on hastily. “He writes suspense novels. You know… THE WRITHING WORM. It got swell reviews.”

“I doubt if he ever reads anything except his own stuff,” Recker put in. “And, God! What a bore that must be.”

I set my glass down slowly on the bar. I know my face was stony, and I’ve been told my one eye gets a peculiar fixed glare when I’m really angry. At that moment I was really angry. I work damned hard on my books. I try to make each one individual and, with the varied material Mike Shayne’s cases provide, I think I succeed. If I wasn’t so particular, I could do four books a year and double my income. So now I was in a mood to start something.