MACKINLAY KANTOR (1904–1977) is best known for his mainstream novels, such as the sentimental dog story The Voice of Bugle Ann (1935), filmed the following year; the long narrative poem Glory for Me (1945), filmed as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and the outstanding Civil War novel about the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, Andersonville (1955), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Already a journalist at seventeen, he began selling hard-boiled mystery stories to various pulp magazines at almost the same time, quickly followed by several novels in the genre, such as Diversey (1928), about Chicago gangsters, and Signal Thirty-Two (1950), an excellent police procedural, given verisimilitude by virtue of Kantor’s having received permission from the acting police commissioner of New York to accompany the police on their activities to gather background information. His most famous crime novel is Midnight Lace (1948), the suspenseful tale of a young woman terrorized by an anonymous telephone caller; a film was released twelve years later, starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison.
His most famous crime short story is “Gun Crazy,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1940, which served as the basis for the noir cult film of the same title, for which Kantor wrote the screenplay. Released in 1950, it was directed by Joseph H. Lewis. The film, an excellent though more violent expansion of the story, features a clean-cut gun nut, played by John Dall, who meets a good-looking sharpshooter, played by Peggy Cummins, and their subsequent spree of bank robberies and shootings.
“The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz” was first published in the Chicago Daily News Midweek in 1929; it was first collected in It’s About Crime (New York, Signet, 1960).