This is the classic '50s noir novel that brought John Huston and Humphrey Bogart together for the last time in film. Published under the pseudonym James Helvick, this sophisticated comedy-thriller was in fact the work of Claud Cockburn, whose early career as a Communist agitator prompted his publisher to demand a pseudonym in the McCarthy years. Beat the Devil shows how effortlessly Cockburn moved from agitprop to elegant and witty fiction. Alexander Cockburn's introduction delves into the long-simmering debate over the real source of the movie's most famous lines. Was it Truman Capote, Anthony Veiller and Peter Viertel, Robert Morley, or Claud Cockburn himself?