Any successful concept has the potential to become a cage for a crime author. Jack Dolph wrote the successful 1948 mystery Odds-On Murder about race tracks and their associated environs, and returned to that milieu for 1950’s Murder Makes the Mare Go. In 1952’s Hot Tip, for which you see the 1957 Phantom Books cover art above, Dolph is still hanging around the track, where a jockey dies in a sweatbox trying to make weight for a race, and his buddy Doc Connor sets about proving it was murder. There are suspects—the wife who stood to inherit insurance bucks, the estranged brother, and shady 
gamblers, while artsy Broadway types provide extra color.
gamblers, while artsy Broadway types provide extra color. Dolph used Doc Connor for all his horse books, with the character’s interest in racing legitimizing his constant moonlighting as a sleuth when he probably should have been inoculating babies and reading x-rays. We described these concepts as a cage for authors, but that’s our personal bias intruding. Dolph might have loved writing about racing. But either he or the public tired after his fourth foray and fifth novel overall, 1953’s Dead Angel, at which point Dolph went out to pasture.
The art on the 1957 edition from Australia’s Phantom Books is interesting but uncredited. The British edition from Boardman Books, just above, has nice cover art as well, painted by Denis McLoughlin. And the original art was reconstituted by Horwitz Publications, also Australia based, for usage on the front of Carter Brown’s The Tigress, from 1961, below. Though actually, based on the quality of the art, Phantom’s Hot Tip art looks like the copy, but the publication dates we have say Phantom was first.
