Norbert Davis

Who is Norbert Davis?

Norbert Harrison Davis was an American crime fiction author.

Norbert Davis was born in Morrison, Illinois, where he grew up. At the end of the 1920s his family moved to Southern California and by the end of 1934 he was to receive his law degree from Stanford University but never bothered to take the bar exam. He started writing short stories for Black Mask in 1932 and lived in the Los Angeles area. He also contributed to Dime Detective, Double Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy, and The Saturday Evening Post. From 1943 he published the detective novels The Mouse in the Mountain, Sally's in the Alley, Oh, Murder Mine, all three novels featuring Doan, a private investigator, and Carstairs, a Great Dane. His Murder Picks the Jury was written in collaboration with W. T. Ballard. A collection of his Max Latin stories from Dime Detective called The Adventures of Max Latin was published in 1988. Davis's writing was greatly admired by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Davis died on July 28, 1949, an apparent suicide.