DAN HYLAND POLICE REPORTER

Chicago: Goldsmith Publishing Company, 1936. Hardcover. Near fine/Very good. Octavo: 250 p. Original paper-covered boards over a green cloth spine, with black titles. A near fine copy in an especially bright dust jacket that has been neatly reinforced with brown paper on the verso.

Jonathan (1914-90) published his first young adult novel, The Movie Scout, or the Thrill Hunters, when he was just 19 (Dan Hyland is his fourth). The one-time publicist, newspaper columnist, aspiring playwright, and local radio personality from the Chicago suburbs is perhaps best known today for his 1938 advice book, Gentlemen Aren't Sissies: A Modern Guidebook for the Young Man Around Town Who Wants to Know His Wat Around, which he subsequently updated in 1948 and 1951 under the title Guide Book for the Young Man Around Town.

By the time Dan Hyland was published, the crusading reporter was already a well-established trope in fiction, stage, and screen - muckraker Ray Stannard Baker's "Pippins", the story of a young college grad trying to make good on a Chicago daily, was published in Youth's Companion in 1899. Jonathan's improbable plot has Hyland, a college dropout with no journalism experience, rocketing to fame as the ace police reporter of the Chicago Daily Star in just two pages before he takes on Chicago gangster Jules Sparoni and his "ghost gang" that carry out a series of dramatic train robberies - until Hyland foils them.

Ironically, Jonathan later wound up on the wrong side of the law, just like his villain Sparoni: in 1967 he was sentenced to one to three years in the Illinois State Penitentiary for embezzling $2,400 from two Chicago-area theater.