Although he sometimes tried his hand at adventure, science fiction, and Westerns, with generally disappointing results, Sydney Boehm excelled at one thing: crime stories. Boehm succeeded in transferring the sometimes grim industrial atmosphere of his youth to his detective and "caper" scripts with eminently believable results.

Boehm was born in Philadelphia and attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from 1925 to 1929. He worked as a reporter for over fifteen years, first for the New York Journal-American, later for an independent news service. The years of newspaper experience were later to be beneficial to his screenwriting career: his best screenplays take a documentary approach and are filled with detail.

Significantly, Boehm did not write his first screenplay until 1948, when the war was over and he was nearly forty years old. The film noir genre flourished during those cynical postwar years, and at forty Boehm lacked the idealism a younger man...