Cleve Cartmill

He is best remembered for what is sometimes referred to as "the Cleve Cartmill affair",[2][3] when his 1944 story "Deadline" attracted the attention of the FBI by reason of its detailed description of a nuclear weapon similar to that being developed by the highly classified Manhattan Project.

Before embarking on his career as a writer for pulp magazines, Cartmill had a wide number of jobs including newspaperman, radio operator and accountant, as well as, ironically, a short spell at the American Radium Products Company.

His friends Anthony Boucher and Roby Wentz, whom he had met in 1934 when they were all on the staff of the United Progressive News, a local Los Angeles political tabloid, were also regular attendees at the weekly gatherings of Mañana.

This was at the start of World War II, when Campbell found himself short of material because many of his regular writers were away on military service, from which Cartmill, who had suffered polio as a child and had a withered leg, was exempt for medical reasons.

[9] After the war he was an uncredited ghostwriter on several mystery novels by Los Angeles-based writers, including books by Craig Rice, Gypsy Rose Lee, and George Sanders, as well as a couple of the Leslie Charteris "Saint" stories.