Howard Browne, who also wrote under several pen names, is principally known for his hard-boiled mystery novels featuring private investigator Paul Pine. Pine is typical of the hard-boiled hero with his terse wisecracks, cynical attitude, and tough guy, man-of-action demeanor. Browne also wrote an enormous amount of pulp fiction, superhero novels, and screenplays for motion pictures and television.

Howard Carleton Browne was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on 15 April 1908, the only child of George Browne, a bakery owner who died before his son was born, and Rose Carlton Browne, a schoolteacher. He grew up in Arapahoe and Lincoln. Browne told Bill Pronzini in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1991) that while his high-school teachers were "extolling the virtues and values of reading the classics," he was "out behind the barn," reading Flynn's Detective Weekly.

In his 1978 interview with Caleb A. Lewis, Browne said that at age seventeen he "realized...