Your Deal, My Lovely — Peter Cheyney

Some mug by the name of Confucius - who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables - once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin' around bein' impervious to the weather an' anything else that was goin', an' lookin' like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was suffering from woman trouble.

I reckon Confucius musta been thinkin' of me.

In his seventh adventure 'G' man Lemmy Caution is sent to investigate the murder of a female agent and the disappearance of a prominent scientist. His search leads Lemmy to notorious gangster Enrico Pranzetti, and straight into a trap . . .

Your Deal, My Lovely was originally published in 1941.

'Peter Cheyney is the Damon Runyon of crime' The Times