Floyd Mahannah was born December 30, 1911 in Memphis, Tennessee. When he was 14, his family moved to California. After graduating from college, where he edited the school newspaper, Mahannah decided to devote himself entirely to his writing, with his wife providing the household income via teaching. He eventually broke into magazines like Manhunt and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and in 1950, influenced by Raymond Chandler, he published his first hardboiled mystery novel, The Yellow Hearse. In the next seven years, four more crime novels followed. Never a major success, Mahannah died of liver failure in Sebastopol, California on October 1, 1976, at the age of 64.