"Nothing Could Keep a Real Crook Out of That Box — Except Maybe He'd Laugh Himself to Death at Sight of It"

"The Man Who Ran the Town."
By Frederick Davis (1902-77).
First appearance: Top-Notch Magazine, June 1, 1926.
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at The Pulp Magazine Project (HERE, slow-load PDF; scroll down to page 67).

"She was a good safe while she lasted."

Overcoming sales resistance is a perennial problem for commercial travellers, but Steve Simpson, "star salesman for the Impregnable Safe Corporation of New York," has found a way to sidestep reluctant buyers and turn a double profit; it's a system that, up until now,  has been working beautifully. The time has come, however, for a reckoning, and it arrives
in the person of a man named Pott . . .

Comment: The first three paragraphs are fine examples of descriptive writing meant to
set the scene.

Resources:

- Frederick Davis was astonishingly prolific; to see how prolific go to the GAD Wiki (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and a previous ONTOS posting (HERE).

The bottom line: