Lemuel De Bra

Lemuel De Bra was an American writer of crime fiction for the pulp magazines in the 1920s, publishing in Detective Story Magazine, Black Mask and others. He drew on his own experience as a federal agent in San Francisco for a series of stories about Chinatown collected in 1925 as Ways That Are Wary, which were praised at the time for their inside knowledge of the tongs and the opium trade. Blue Eyes and Diamonds is one of his short, dialogue-driven pieces about a jewel theft with a twist. Like many pulp writers he disappeared from print after the decade, and little is recorded of his later life.