She had the face of a madonna and a heart of dollar bills.

"I came back and searched dizzily under the trailer, muttering the way drunks do, and then I heard it. A shuffling around inside the trailer. The little tramp had knocked me in the head with her Southern Comfort and now she was in there loading up....She didn't know I was alive."

A legend among noir buffs, Chaze's long-lost pulp classic is the dreamlike tale of a man after a jailbreak who meets up with the woman of his dreams - and his nightmares.

Elliott Chaze (1915 - 1990) was an old-school newspaper man who began his journalism career with the New Orleans bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor. He worked for a time for AP's Denver office after paratrooper service in World War II, and then migrated south to Mississippi where he spent 20 years as a reporter and award-winning columnist. He is the author of several novels.