"From the 1950s through the 1980s, John Dann MacDonald was one of the most popular and prolific writers in America. He was a crime writer who managed to break free of the genre and finally get serious consideration from critics. Sixty-six of his novels and more than four hundred of his short stories were published in his lifetime. When he died in 1986, more than seventy million of his books had been sold.

"But it was not just sales figures that made MacDonald important. London Times critic H. R. F. Keating selected his 1979 novel, The Green Ripper, as one of the one hundred...