Kendell Paine, a returned war hero, gets into a fight with another gambler, who is later knifed at their gambling club. It looks like Paine might be the guilty party. It’s Lt. Mark Deglin’s job to track him down. But Paine is in no mood for the third degree, and Deglin ends up accidentally beating him to death. Deglin knows he will never be considered for promotion with a killing on his record—accidental or not—so he sets out to cover it up. But Deglin doesn’t figure on Paine’s girl, Morgan, who is waiting for Paine to come back. She and Paine had argued that night but nothing so serious that he would completely disappear. And there’s Smith, the journalist who just won’t let the story go, and allies himself with Morgan. Now Captain Knight has put Deglin in charge of tracking down the missing man. As carefully as Deglin keeps covering his tracks, it all slowly begins to unravel. Filmed as Where the Sidewalk Ends in 1950 by Otto Preminger. “It’s a good, tough novel…a solid hardboiled read.”—Tony Baer, Mystery*File “Representative of the hard-boiled school of fiction, Night Cry tells the simple, starkly brutal story of homicide at the hands of a police detective. Though the story has the usual romantic trappings, Stuart never lets them get out of hand.”—New York Times "The streets are dark and the pages are full of fog, rain, and shadows. From the precinct houses, to the drab bars, and with the stench of the riverfront warehouses in the air; we are rewarded with a psychological noir thriller that grabs you from page one… Of course this novel was so good that Hollywood grabbed it immediately…"—August West, Vintage Hardboiled Reads William Lisle Stuart was born on March 13, 1912 in Princeton, Missouri, but grew up in Oklahoma, where his family moved in the early 1920s. In the 1930s he worked as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, then moved to New York City in 1940, where he became a publicist with the advertising firm Young & Rubican. Stuart also turned to writing novels in the 40s, beginning with The Dead Lie Still. He is best known to film aficionados for Night Cry, which was filmed in 1950 as Where the Sidewalk Ends. Stuart went on to become a screenwriter and producer, best remembered for TV scripts for The Green Hornet, 77 Sunset Strip and Martin Kane, for which he wrote 31 episodes. Stuart died on January 11, 1988 in Los Angeles, California.