Benjamin Appel was an American novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist specializing in detective and crime fiction, sometimes from a radical perspective.

Appel was born in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and grew up in the Hell's Kitchen

Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan

Hell's Kitchen, also known as Clinton and Midtown West, is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City between 34th Street and 59th Street, from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River....

 neighborhood. It was this experience that he drew upon when writing his novels. Before he began earning a living from his writing, he was a bank clerk, farmer, lumberjack, factory-hand and a housing inspector for New York City. He lived most of his life in Roosevelt, New Jersey

Roosevelt, New Jersey

Roosevelt was originally called Jersey Homesteads, and was created during the Great Depression as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal. The town was home to a cooperative farming and manufacturing project...

, and died there in 1977.

Works

Maxim Lieber

Maxim Lieber

Maxim Lieber was a prominent American literary agent in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. Whittaker Chambers named him as an accomplice in 1949, and Lieber fled first to Mexico and then Poland not long after Alger Hiss's conviction in 1950.- Early years :Lieber was born in Warsaw, Poland,...

was Appel's literary agent in 1933 and 1935.

• Brain Guy, aka The Enforcer (1934)
• Four Roads to Death, aka Gold and Flesh (1935)
• Runaround (1937)
• The Power-House (1939)
• The Dark Stain (1943)
• But Not Yet Slain (1947)
• Plunder (1952)
• Dock Walloper (1953)
• Life and Death of a Tough Guy, aka Teen-Age Mobster (1955)
• Hell's Kitchen, aka Alley Kids (1956)
• Jacob Steele - One Man, One Mission (1957)
• The Raw Edge (1958)
• The Funhouse, aka The Death Master (1959)
• Big Man, A Fast Man (1961)
• A Time of Fortune (1963)
• The Devil and W. Kaspar (1977)
• Brain Guy / Plunder (2005)