H. Bill Miller

Among the novels I’ve read this year, Devil May Care and Sinner Take All rank as two of the very finest. Both were penned by the writing duo of Robert Allison Wade (1920–2012) and H. Bill Miller (1920 –1961), a couple of close friends who wrote a fair number of big-selling novels in the crime, mystery, and thriller genres during the 1950s and 60s. Without doubt, their most fruitful collaboration was Badge of Evil, a manuscript adapted for the screen as Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, Charlton Heston, and Janet Leigh. Other novels by Wade and Miller were adapted to the screen, though, strangely, Devil May Care, considered by some as the duo’s best, didn’t become a movie (despite actor James Cagney’s efforts), and it hasn’t been reprinted since the Fawcett Gold Medal printings in the 1950s.