He is best known for his murder mystery The Red Right Hand, which is considered a cult classic of the genre and won the French literary award Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1951.

As the United States' entry into World War I was imminent in the late 1910s, he joined the U.S. Navy Air Corps and became one of its first few hundred flyers, training in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

[2][3] Rogers made use of his military experiences and vivid imagination to sell short stories to the many pulp magazines that sold in the 1920s and 1930s for fifteen or twenty cents.

[11] In 1951, the book won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière International Prize, the most prestigious award for crime and detective fiction in France.

[12] Anthony Boucher, reviewing the novel in 1945 for the San Francisco Chronicle, praised it highly, calling it a book that "should appear with fair regularity on all future reading lists of the whodunit" and saying that Rogers "has taken the terrible tension of Woolrich-Irish, the fertile plot imagination of Keeler, the technical ingenuity of Christie and the stern deductions of Carr and a timeless twisted stream-of-consciousness narrative method of his own and produced something unique and exciting.

"[13] The book continues to be highly regarded by aficionados of the genre, and was reprinted in 2020 as part of Penzler Publishers' American Mystery Classics series, with a foreword by Joe R.

[14] Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, praising its "virtuoso mix of terror and fair play" and saying that it "deserves its reputation as one of the best mysteries of all time.

[9] Charles Ardai, writer and founder of mystery publisher Hard Case Crime, called it "a brilliant, borderline-insane stew of logic and illogic, Swiss-watch plot construction and bald-faced coincidence, and delicious, bone-cracking suspense.

The Dial stated that the book's satire lapses into "burlesque," but admired how Rogers "expands his rhetoric into bombast and his portraits into cartoons; he is a bit long-winded, but amusing and vigorous.