Day Keen is a well-known American writer and a bright representative of the detective genre. His works were published in such popular American magazines as “The Black Mask,” “Detective Stories.”
Earl Sommers, a private detective and owner of the “Sphinx” agency, was returning home on a passenger airliner “San Francisco—New York.” Earl was in a hurry to get to his office, which he founded six years earlier and named “Sphinx.”
During boarding with the pilot, something unimaginable happened… Before the liner even landed on its assigned runway at the proper time, it suddenly started performing all sorts of aerobatic tricks over the city. All high-skill figures were carried out in the air by a deranged pilot. The spectators were going wild… What he didn’t do— the air shook with his roaring noise as he circled the city, rocking his wings—rising up, then dropping as if shot down like a bird, risking to crash onto those arrogant skyscrapers sticking up into the sky.
And that’s when, for the first time, while still in the airplane, Earl noticed a girl and her companion, whom he mentally nicknamed “Porthos.” Soon after, Earl met Porthos in the city in the evening, and the two got into a fight. That’s how the confrontation between Earl and a mafia group began. At the beginning, he didn’t even have a client…