Comic Cuts — 1 May 2026

I mentioned last week that I was asked whether I could identify the author behind a certain byline as one of their books is about to be reprinted. The byline was the house name Jeff Bogar, known to have been used by more than one author, and subject to a few bits of speculation that have muddied the water further.

"Bogar" wrote gangster novels in the early 1950s for Hamilton & Co. in 1950-51, the name relaunched when Hamilton introduced their Panther Books imprint for a further series of titles in 1953-55. I have six of the 21 novels that appeared under that name. Four more books appeared in America, but these proved to be reprints under different titles. One of those reprints has yet to be identified and might even have appeared under a different byline here in the UK.

I spent most of Sunday and Monday searching through volumes of old copyright records of book imported into the USA, which Hamilton & Co. did quite regularly from around March 1952 on. There have been a few credits attached to the earlier books, including one that credits Steve Frances (Hank Janson), which is wildly off the mark. Even the masterful Crime Fiction A Comprehensive Bibliography has somehow picked up some erroneous credits.

A call-out to some friends meant that I was able to get hold of scans or photos of the opening chapters of a further four books, and last week I'd ordered a copy of a book I thought might be the Rosetta Stone: The Interrupted Wedding by Leslie T. Barnard, a Boardman hardback, although I picked up a later paperback edition. The novel is set in Sicily and is a romantic thriller in which a British tourist is kidnapped by a Romany girl at knife point and is forced to marry her; it's nothing like the tough gangster novels of Jeff Bogar. 

To be honest, I had half convinced myself that Leslie Barnard was a red herring as the book looked nothing like the works I had to hand. It was full of elipses (that little row of three dots that I sometimes overuse!) and none of the staccato writing that was typical of tough-guy thrillers. However, I'd picked out a couple of other Hamilton & Co. books to look at for comparison, and—lo and behold—The Interrupted Wedding had a number of similarities to a book entitled Franzie, published under the byline Paul Pannier.

But I was still in two minds as neither book screamed Jeff Bogar. As luck would have it, another Rosetta Stone book arrived. Hoodmen's Bait, which appeared under the Bogar name in 1953 had been copyrighted in the USA and the publisher listed Leslie Barnard as the author. Here was the key, as it shared a lot of the DNA with the other titles I was reading: certain words, certain phrases, odd stylistic quirks: light switches snick, men snicker, the hero soothes and cracks his dialogue... it all added up to a recognisable group of "tells" (as they say in poker circles) that were shared by some books but were lacking in others.

And so I have been able to (at least provisionally) identify an additional four Jeff Bogar novels to Leslie Barnard, and I'm reasonably sure Francie is also by him. In some cases this is based on the opening chapter alone, but I'm pretty confident. You'll be able to judge for yourself when Stark House reprint My Gun, Her Body—what a title! Far better than Dinah for Danger, which is how it appeared in the UK.

That, a few reviews and the ongoing saga of my passport application (a story for another time) have taken up the bulk of my week, although I have been looking into a few other authors and solved two of my long standing "mysteries that have me mystified" thanks to doing the deep dive into copyright records. I can't say the work has paid the rent this week, but I do love doing this kind of research, and there will be a book of one kind or another sometime in the future where I'll get to use the information.

I did mention some while back that I was planning to do more books based around the Mushroom Jungle era of paperbacks, and I have been tinkering with a couple of introductory articles for both Scion Ltd. and Curtis Warren. No idea which one I'll get to first. I still need an awful lot of cover scans before I can consider writing those books, but I'm always doing the research (as you can see from the above) and one day I'll reach a tipping point where it will become the next project to work on.