The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, Volume 1

Brilliant, decisive, and hard-charging, Deputy Inspector Allhoff was the NYPD's ace detective until bullets from a mobster's machine gun robbed him of his legs, his career, and-in the opinion of an associate-his sanity. Yet Allhoff was too good a man to be put out to pasture, so New York's police commissioner found a way to keep him employed and refer to him such cases as the department couldn't or wouldn't handle. Confined to a wheelchair and operating from a seedy tenement flat, Allhoff is assisted by two cops: Battersly, the rookie patrolman whose brief moment of cowardice cost the inspector his legs, and Simmons, the bitter career cop who detests Allhoff but sticks with the embittered cripple to protect his own pension. Created by D.L. Champion, Inspector Allhoff denied most conventions of detective-pulp fiction. He could never be confused for one of Raymond Chandler's knights errant, trudging down those mean streets. Allhoff was no Rover Boy in trench coat and fedora. He was, in fact, a sadist and a psychopath. With 30 entries published between 1938 and 1946, the Allhoff series was among the most popular and long-lived to appear in Dime Detective, the prestigious crime pulp second only to the legendary Black Mask in its impact on the genre.