he Killer Touch (October 1965)

He spun the combination, opened the strongbox, and glanced at the glittering fortune nestled in velvet. With his left hand he began stuffing the diamonds into his pocket. When one pocket was full, he shifted the gun and began filling the other. Suddenly he sensed movement and someone lunged at him. The gun boomed, and the bullet ripped through his assailant's upper arm as he ran outside and leaped head first off the ledge. For a moment it looked as if he'd decided to dash out his brains on the rocks, then the lean body knifed the water three feet beyond the rocks and came up swimming. A power cruiser was lying at anchor, a hundred yards out.

Ghostwritten by Charles W. Runyon (Death & Ghosts F. Nevins 1998)

A tough Florida cop, tormented by a wound and his guilt at killing a teen-ager in line of duty, comes to a tropical island resort where a gang of thieves headed by a doom-haunted sadistic intellectual has just moved in after pulling off a diamond robbery. The writing is vivid, the incidents lurid, the climax rushed, and Runyon crams in enough torture scenes, sex teasing and carnage to satisfy the most rabid, although Anthony Boucher was apparently turned off by the bloodletting and chose not to review this one. (Nevins)