After working for several years as an agent he moved to Britain in the late 1950s and began a new career as a writer for television and the cinema.
His most notable screenplays include The City of the Dead (1960) starring Christopher Lee and three collaborations with director Sidney Hayers noted for their taut suspense and black humour: Circus of Horrors (1960), the thriller Payroll (1961) from the novel by Derek Bickerton and Night of the Eagle (1962) which he re-wrote following a draft by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, though his credit was omitted from the US version which was released as Burn, Witch, Burn.
[2] In 1966 he published A Queer Kind of Death, his first novel, which was met with considerable acclaim, not least for his creation of gay black detective Pharaoh Love.
The influential New York Times critic Anthony Boucher said in his review that, "This is a detective story, and unlike any other that you have read.
I merely note that it deals with a Manhattan subculture wholly devoid of ethics or morality, that staid readers may well find it 'shocking', that it is beautifully plotted and written with elegance and wit ... and that you must under no circumstances miss it.