The Man with the Lumpy Nose — Lawrence Lariar

As Word War II comes to a close, a Manhattan detective uncovers a link between a series of brutal murders and a Nazi propogandist.
 
Lawrence Lariar was one the most popular cartoonists of the twentieth century. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, he also crafted a line of lean and mean detective and mystery novels under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France. Lariar now gets his due as a leading artist in hardboiled crime fiction.
 
To cartoonist and sleuth Homer Bull it looks like random murders: one man stabbed near an isolated lake in Red Hook, another taken out on a city street, and a woman slashed to death in her Queens apartment. There's only one common thread: a bizarre hulk with a schnoz like a gnarled fist seen nosing around the crime scenes.
 
The next time Homer and his fellow artists of the Comic Arts Club converge it's to discuss the fiend's latest victim: their much-hated newspaper editor, Earl Chance, knifed like the others. But Homer smells something fishy: Chance's past. It not only reeks, it's connecting the victims, that hovering proboscis, and most alarmingly, the members of Homer's club.
 
And it's drawing the lot of them into nothing as common as spree killings. It's more like an insidious conspiracy to corrupt the entire nation.
 
The Man with the Lumpy Nose is the 3rd book in the Homer Bull & Hank MacAndrews Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.