George Worts

George Worts was a prolific American pulp writer whose fast-moving serials drew on experience as a shipboard radio operator, reporter, and magazine editor. He also published as Loring Brent, though the Gillian Hazeltine stories appeared under George F. Worts. The Crime Circus Murder Case ran in four installments of Argosy All-Story Weekly from September to October 1928. The Diamond Bullet Murder Case followed across three Argosy issues in January 1931. Both belong to a long sequence featuring Hazeltine, a defense attorney and investigator known as the Silver Fox, who repeatedly outmaneuvers district attorney Adelbert Yistle. The series began in 1926 and reached nearly thirty cases, predating Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels. Worts shaped these entries for periodical reading, using legal reversals, investigative pressure, and installment endings to sustain momentum. Their publication history places the two cases within Argosy's interwar tradition of recurring popular-fiction heroes rather than as unrelated stand-alone books.