[The Australian Panther]

I have been reading and searching for Private Eyes for most of the last 30 years and I am amazed at the fact that there are still many out there I have not come across yet.
Getting my monthly haul from one of my local libraries, I found a PI book by one Lawrence Larier.
He wrote a PI named Steve Conacher. And the one i have just finished features a PI name of Steve Ericson. So I do a search for him.

  Lawrence Lariar was one the most popular cartoonists of the twentieth century. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, he also crafted a line of lean and mean detective and mystery novels under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France. Lariar now gets his due as a leading artist in hardboiled crime fiction.

Really? And I've never heard of this guy?
Well, ["one the most popular cartoonists of the twentieth century."] may be an exaggeration, but how influential was his book? He certainly seems significant in the fields he worked in. 
and also,

Lawrence Lariar was a cartoonist, a cartoon editor for PARADE and LIBERTY, a novelist and one of the most prolific authors of "How to Cartoon" books. He edited the long-running BEST CARTOONS OF series of books from 1942 to 1971. He died in 1981. 

Here are illustrations from one of his 'How to cartoon' books.
Sketches from CARTOONING FOR EVERYBODY by Lawrence Lariar
https://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2011/08/sketches-from-cartooning-for-everybody.html
And his 'lean and mean' detective books are good enough for me to go looking for more.   
The  site below reprints a good deal of CARTOONING FOR EVERYBODY as well as how to draw sheets from many artists, including Alex Toth
Character and Design  
https://makingcomics.spiltink.org/character-and-design/
enjoy!