Lawrence Lariar (1908-1981) was a cartoonist for Colliers who wrote mystery stories in which cartoons and other illustrations appeared as clues. He also wrote straight mystery fiction under the names Michael Lawrence, Adam Knight and Michael Stark. and drew the comic strip Barry O'Neill. He was a liberal Jewish man (he changed his last name in the '40s) who frequently infuriated his neighbors by inviting black artists to his Long Island home, where he instructed them. By the 1960s Lariar was the cartoon editor of Parade magazine in the 1960s, a former Disney studio "story man," editor of the annual Best Cartoons of the Year, and the author of more than 100 books. His series detective under his own name was comic-strip writer Homer Bull, and as Adam Knight was diminutive PI Steve Conacher. The Man With the Lumpy Nose won the Dodd Mead Red Badge Prize in 1944.