James Hadley Chase was just one of the pseudonyms used by London born Rene Brabazon Raymond, a former salesman of children's encyclopedias, who started writing after reading American hardboiled pulp fiction. He wrote over forty thrillers and gangster stories, at least twenty of which were filmed. Although they are set mainly in America, he only paid the country two brief visits, to Florida and New Orleans, relying instead on maps and slang dictionaries.

Chase's first novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, was written over a period of six weekends in 1938, published the following year, as war was looming, and was an instant success, selling half a million copies over the next five years, during the wartime paper shortages; it was the book most widely read by British troops during the war. In 1944, George Orwell wrote about it in an article, 'Raffles and Miss Blandish', in Horizon magazine, agreeing with the opinion expressed by some of his peers that it was 'pure Fascism', but also admitting that it was 'a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere'. The novel's stage adaptation, co-scripted by Chase, Robert Nesbitt and Val Guest, ran from 1942 to 1949 and it was filmed - in America, but never in Britain - in 1948 and again in 1971, as The Grissom Gang, directed by Robert Aldrich. Borrowing its plot from William Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary, it concerns the fate of the eponymous young heiress, who is abducted, held to ransom and raped by a vicious, depraved criminal, who is obsessed with and dominated by his mother, a lurid detail presaging James Cagney's Ma-fixated character, Cody Jarrett, in Raoul Walsh's 1949 film, White Heat. It was revised by Chase in 1961, with the slang updated and, since publication, has sold over two million copies.