[3] In his 1990 introduction to the novel, Max Allan Collins locates the book as a typical fiction of the 1930s, but one that straddles genres in a "successful melding of the hardboiled novel and the classic drawing room mystery".

These include his stockbroking partners, Ronald Woodbury and Richard Bolston; his cousin Lawrence Wharton; chief clerk Amos Sprague; his former secretary Margot Brentino, and his fiancée Emily Lou.

After thinking the problem over, Crane deduces that the shooting was done with a different Webley and that Westland's had been stolen by the real murderer and thrown into the Chicago River so as to make him suspect.

Then, in a last minute dash to Peoria, Illinois, he locates a firm that sold a similar weapon at about the time of the murder, retrieves the slugs for police identification and returns with employees to identify the man who had bought it.

Bolston had been unwilling to retrench his lifestyle even at a time of economic turndown and had been employing increasingly criminal means to keep himself financially afloat: embezzlement, murder and conspiracy to have an innocent man condemned by planting incriminating evidence.