Asbury’s first detective novel “The Devil of Pei Ling,” is a gory horror show, featuring demonic possession, devil worship, evil toads, human sacrifice, and an Indiana-Jones-style explorer who pilfers artifacts from exotic lands.

The years immediately preceding the 1929 stock-market crash were a remarkably productive period for Herbert Asbury. Born into a prominent Methodist family in Farmington, Missouri, in 1889, Asbury worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Georgian as well as the New York Sun and the Herald Tribune. In the mid-twenties, he began publishing books, starting with “Up from Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil” (1926), which describes, “with a tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart,” his falling-out with the faith. Excerpted in H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, the book became a cause célèbre when the New England Watch and Ward Society banned the issue in which it appeared. Asbury’s book was a best-seller.

A year later, he published a biography of Francis Asbury, one of the first bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. (Asbury Park, New Jersey is named after him; Herbert Asbury claimed, somewhat tenuously, both Francis Asbury and Cotton Mather as ancestors.) But it was in 1928 that Asbury really got going, publishing five books in that year alone. Among them was “Gangs of New York,” his epic account of the city’s criminal past. Adapted, very loosely, by Martin Scorsese, in 2002, it remains Asbury’s best-known work.

Asbury did not confine himself to factual writing. As chapters from “Gangs of New York” were appearing in The New Yorker, he published two crime novels that have since been largely forgotten: “The Devil of Pei-Ling” and “The Tick of the Clock.” Both feature the same New York City police inspector, Thomas Conroy, but in almost every other regard they are completely different from each other. In fact, they represent two opposing approaches to crime-fiction writing—as if Asbury were experimenting with the form, before abandoning it in favor of the narrative nonfiction style that made him, in the years following the stock-market crash, the preëminent historian of America’s urban underworlds.

“The Devil of Pei-Ling,” which was published first, is a gory horror show, featuring demonic possession, devil worship, evil toads, human sacrifice, and an Indiana-Jones-style explorer who pilfers artifacts from exotic lands. One can easily read the novel as a fictional recasting of the hellfire-and-brimstone rhetoric the author heard throughout his youth. In its opening pages, a woman is admitted to a New York hospital suffering wounds from an apparent automobile accident. The detectives assigned to the case “professed to see nothing unusual,” but our suspicious narrator, who is the attending physician, summons his friend Inspector Conroy, and together they discover that the comatose patient is a stigmatic, bearing wounds on her hands and feet, with long points appearing to project from the skin “like the ends of nails.”

The arrival of this supernaturally afflicted woman heralds a gruesome series of crimes in which senior members of the New York law-enforcement community are murdered with a bloody rope that appears to be acting of its own accord. The murders are described in fervid detail. The case comes to hinge on an attractive young woman named Dorothy Crawford, who, at times, becomes the terrestrial host for her dead stepfather, Paul Silvio. Silvio, we learn, was a Satanist, executed for murder. The present crime spree is his revenge from beyond the grave. It’s up to the narrator and Conroy to figure out what the reader suspects from early on—that the stigmatized woman is the key to defeating Silvio.

By contrast, “The Tick of the Clock” is a conventional police procedural, as calmly paced and logical as the title device. Conroy is brought in to investigate the murder of a man named Walton, who was apparently killed with a pistol while reading letters in the library of his home, on West Sixty-eighth Street. Walton was wealthy and high-living but not much liked; there are numerous suspects. Asbury walks the reader through the investigation, allowing us to see the evidence as Conroy does. Eventually, Conroy gathers all of the suspects in a room, and interrogates them one at a time. In the course of the interrogation, Conroy sets up a trap that prompts the murderer to reveal himself.

The rational Conroy we encounter in this latter novel could not be further from the hysteric who cowers before the occult proceedings in “The Devil of Pei-Ling. In the earlier book, it is the physician-narrator who is the levelheaded presence. “The Tick of the Clock” is written in the third person, contributing to its atmosphere of objectivity. It’s hard to fathom why Asbury didn’t simply change the inspector’s name—unless he was planning to write a series featuring Conroy.

The two novels do share some thematic concerns. Both hinge on relations between a young woman and her nefarious stepfather. And each book also displays a mistrust of Chinese immigrants. In “The Devil of Pei-Ling,” it is revealed that the Satanist Paul Silvio is not Italian, as his name would suggest, but of mixed Hindu and Chinese heritage. Several times in the novel we are informed that the mountains of Tibet and China are home to devil-worshippers. In “The Tick of the Clock,” Walton’s Chinese cook is revealed to be involved (like his employer) in the heroin trade. Conroy and another policeman have no qualms about mugging the cook and two associates in order to obtain evidence for the case. Both books, in other words, reflect the Yellow Peril sentiment of the period. Not long before the novels’ publication, Congress had passed the National Origins Act, which essentially excluded Asians from legal entry into the U.S. (One part of the law was called, simply, the Asian Exclusion Act. Of course, given the rhetoric lately heard from certain Presidential candidates, Asbury’s books have a regrettable sort of timeliness.)

The year after Asbury’s novels appeared in print, Dorothy L. Sayers, the English crime novelist and creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, wrote an introduction to a crime anthology in which she recounted the history of the detective novel. She identified two separate paths for crime fiction, both of which originate from the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The first, which can be traced to “The Gold Bug,” she dubbed the “Romantic” or “purely Sensational” tale, in which “thrill is piled on thrill and mystification on mystification, till everything is explained in a lump in the last chapter.” Strong on narrative action but at times weak on logic, “it is never dull,” Sayers wrote. “But it is sometimes nonsense.” Other examples of this strand include works by Sax Rohmer and Margery Lawrence. Running counter to the “Romantic” is the “Classic” or “purely Intellectual” story, originating with “Marie Rogêt,” in which the “action” is largely mental, as we follow the detective from clue to clue. “The strength of this school,” according to Sayers, “is its analytical ingenuity; its weakness is its liability to dullness and pomposity.” The prime example here is Sherlock Holmes, followed by a legion of other clever, observant sleuths.

So closely do Asbury’s novels adhere to these descriptions that one might almost think Sayers had his books in mind when she wrote her essay. The two styles also evoke the opposing influences of Asbury’s youth—the fear of hell and damnation that shaped the lives of his ancestors, and his own commitment to rationalism, which eventually led him to refute such rhetoric. His upbringing may have made him particularly well suited to inhabit both sorts of fictional worlds.