In the 1930s he was employed as a writer on Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, including a New York City Guidebook, before becoming editor of Detective Fiction Weekly in 1936.

He originated the pulp and comic book character the Green Lama, a crime-fighting Buddhist superhero whose powers emerged upon the recitation of the Tibetan mantra "om mani padme hum.

[10] His novels in the genre are Year of Consent (1954), dealing with an America run by tyrannical "social engineers", and The Rest Must Die (1959), about survivors of a nuclear catastrophe in New York City.

A final Milo March manuscript, set in Vietnam, was completed in 1975 but was unpublished during the author's lifetime owing to a difference of opinion with his publisher, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, who told him it was "too political and too controversial.

The same series included four novels featuring insurance investigator Brian Brett: Abra-Cadaver, The Burned Man, Once Upon a Crime, and The Lonely Graves, all as by Christopher Monig.

The final book in the series is The Tortured Path, written as by Kendell Foster Crossen, featuring Major Kim Locke of the CIA, on assignment in Communist China.