Here’s a review of the classic PI novel from which I quoted a while back.
HOWARD BROWNE, Halo in Blood (1946).
Circles. A halo is a circle. The Chicago Loop, where private investigator Paul Pine keeps an office, is a circle. 
Around the inner circle of the Loop are ringed outer circles, extending to Oak Park and Winnetka and Glencoe, and Pine works those circles in a case that pushes him around and around, down and down—corkscrew-like—until he ties the end of the case to its beginning, and thereby forms a perfect circle. Browne should be better known than he is. Writing in the manner pioneered by Raymond Chandler, he spins better similes than Chandler does (and boy, does he spin a lot of them), and he’s a better plot-spinner, too. To be sure, the raw material of this first novel of his does have a derivative quality: The wealthy patriarch John Sandmark calls Pine to his suburban manse and asks the sleuth to look out for his beautiful, wayward daughter, Leona. Sandmark doesn’t like Leona’s latest male conquest, an oily fellow named Jerry Martin. Pine, tailing the couple, watches as a gunman emerges from the night to shoot Martin dead. More murders follow, and Pine links the killing wave to a heist committed in San Diego a quarter-century earlier, and to a strange funeral that he chanced upon in the opening scene of this adventure. All of that linking culminates in a smash triple finish, with Pine pounding out three solutions (separate, but nested within one another) in order to bring the matter full-circle. What Browne lacks in originality, he makes up for in formal elegance.
(For a secondary illustration to this post, I plucked from the Web the cover of a 1940s pulp magazine that—as best I can tell—features the novel Halo in Blood under a slightly different title. “John Evans,” the author listed in the cover blurb, was the pen name under which Browne originally published his Paul Pine stories. Browne, by the way, was the editor of Mammoth Detective, among other pulps.)
