From detective fiction researcher John Herrington comes the following inquiry, which I paraphrase:

   I have been looking for Jay Shane, an author who published a couple of westerns for Robert Hale in the UK. I thought it might be a pseudonym until I found the blurb below on Amazon. According to Social Security death records, the dates are correct.

   So far I’ve only found a couple of westerns by him, as well as various works on TV repair etc. I wonder if you can post something on your blog to see if anyone can identify his crime fiction, or anything else he wrote.

   Here’s the Amazon blurb:

    “Jay Shane, the author of both Western novels and Technical literature was born in 1911 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Mr. Shane passed away just two months after having finished the writing of this novel in April of 2009 at the age of 97. Mr. Shane made his living repairing Color Televisions and owned and operated a shop for most of his career. His avocation however was writing and had successfully published many fiction including Westerns and Detective novels and wrote technical articles for the TV repair industry other non-fiction books and articles for the electronics industry. Always interested in character profiles, Mr. Shane had researched extensively the social and cultural characteristics of the time period for this novel in an effort to accurately represent the kind of world in which the Apostle Matthew would have lived.”