They scored with a series of cartoon postcards that Boy Scouts could use to write home, selling more than a million cards in a direct-mail campaign.

Beginning in 1942, Lariar was the cartoon editor of Liberty, where he started The Thropp Family, the first comic strip to run as a continuity in a national magazine.

Now mostly forgotten, this unusual novel, praised by John W. Campbell, had an Ace paperback edition in 1954 and was published in the UK as Run for Your Life!

Anthony Boucher's mention of "atomic murder" in the cover blurb indicates Lariar's innovative locked room mystery premise: The killer rents an apartment beneath the victim, opens a box with radioactive materials and leaves.

This later formed the basis of Bill Griffith's 2015 graphic novel Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist.