In case you haven’t read or heard about it already, Stephen Marlowe, author of the Chester Drum series, recently appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, telling the story of how he and Richard Prather, author of the Shell Scott PI novels, got together and wrote Double in Trouble, their magnum opus in which their two characters met and cracked a case together, after first cracking their heads together, thinking that each of them was on the other side.

   The story is fascinating, and by all means, you should go read it. What I don’t know is whether you should read Marlowe’s long reminiscing story first, or to give it some additional background, you might want to read J. Kingston Pierce’s post on The Rap Sheet site before you stop over at Ed’s. Jeff has a great knack of finding a news item elsewhere on the blog and writing about it on his own, adding as he does so a profusion of links and insights to the original post, wherever it may have been. It’s one of the few sites where I stop by everyday, and Ed Gorman’s is another. With his long career in mystery fiction and other genres, Ed knows the authors and the publishers, and he has many well-formed opinions and perspectives of the field, all of which spills over into his daily posts.

   Returning to Marlowe and Prather’s work together, I’m not sure if this the first example where two authors joined forces (and characters) in a novel, sharing a joint byline together. In 1963, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice published People Vs. Withers and Malone, a collection of short stories in which their detectives, Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone either shared or battled wits together. Most of the stories were written before 1959, which is when Double in Trouble first came out, but whether or not that counts, I don’t know.

   I’ve asked this question before, I know I have. What I don’t know is if I received an answer or not. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, as some wise philosopher once said.

   Here’s another question. Richard Prather’s passing has been widely reported on various blogs and newsgroups, but as far as I know, it has yet to have been noted by the mass media. Why not? If you were to Google “richard prather obituary” as I did just now, the piece I posted on the M*F blog a full week ago today is the first one to come up. Why is that? It looks nice on my resume, I suppose, but come on. I’d agree that at the time of his death Mr. Prather was not a major player in the world of mystery fiction, but he was still certainly a major figure, having sold millions and millions of his (mostly) wacky private eye adventures, second certainly in the 1950s only to Mickey Spillane. Why has the rest of the world ignored his passing?

   One more question, and one that’s less of a rant. Prather is gone, but Stephen Marlowe, at the age of 79, is thankfully still with us. Of the major (or even the minor) Gold Medal writers of the 1950s, who else are still alive? Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker) for one, I believe, and she will be 80 this year. Others?

   The title of the first Modesty Blaise novel was exactly that, Modesty Blaise, published by Souvenir Press in 1965. The author was Peter O’Donnell. Modesty, of course, had appeared even earlier, as her adventures in book form were preceded by those in the daily comic strips, debuting in the London Evening Standard in 1963. The first artist for the strip was Jim Holdaway, then Romero and a small number of others, with Romero returning before O’Donnell decided to end it in 2001.

   The comic strip was not widely distributed in the US, in part because adventure strips find very little acceptance in this country in general, but also because of the nude scenes which had to be censored. A favorite tactic that Modesty used against her foes was called the “Nailer,” whereby she would strip above the waist and Willlie Garvin, her companion in crime-fighting, would take advantage of the distraction she caused. Not a technique that could be shown in the US!

   There were movies, too, not always very successful, and perhaps I’ll discuss them someday. A pilot was made and aired for proposed TV series starring Ann Turkel, but nothing further developed.

   Taken from wikipedia, here are portions of a couple of paragraphs that will help explain some of the background for Modesty Blaise, the character.

   Now go, if you will, to the Crime Time website , and an interview with Mr. O’Donnell, where he explains for the first time who it was — the real person — upon whom Modesty Blaise was based.

   Here I’ll quote only the last paragraph, in which Mr. O’Donnell says:

      –Thanks to Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Without Borders for the tipoff to the interview.

   As a followup to my blog entry on Columbo a while back, here’s an email I received today from John Apostolou. On the original M*F website, John is the author of an excellent article on MacKinlay Kantor, which includes a long and complete crime fiction bibliography for him, we believe.

>> Thanks, John. What’s reported is not always what’s true, as anyone who’s done any research has quickly found out.

   As promised in the update at the end of the previous post, here are the appearances of Lt. Columbo in print. Some of these are becoming difficult to find, even with the assistance of the Internet to help track them down. I wish I were able to show you covers of all of them, but it would be rather crowded if I did, or if I could. Some I don’t have copies of myself.

LT. COLUMBO in book form –

* RICHARD LEVINSON & WILLIAM LINK:

* ALFRED LAWRENCE:

* HENRY CLEMENT:

* LEE HAYS:

* BILL MAGEE & CARL SCHENCK:

* WILLIAM HARRINGTON:

   Acknowledgments go as almost always to Allen J. Hubin, Crime Fiction IV, as the primary source for most of this data.

   I’ll also take this an opportunity to thank Mark Murphy one more time for pointing out where I could go on the web to keep finding more information about Lt. Columbo. In his most recent email to me, he added: “A guy named Mark Dawidziak wrote a book, The Columbo Phile, some years ago. It was quite authoritative. I’ve also found this link to an interview with him…”

   He’s right. There are commercials in this on-the-air interview, but you can skip them, and it’s very much worth listening to.

   To sum things up, I hope, without too many more updates, Columbo as a character has been around long enough, and he’s been popular enough, that there’s plenty of information out there on him, either in print or on the Internet. In these last couple of blog entries, I don’t imagine that I’ve added anything that’s really new about him, but hopefully I’ve presented what I’ve discovered in a straight-forward and useful fashion. I’ve also ironed out some of the contradictions popped up as I went along, and tried to set the record straight on a few statements I found that were either incomplete or simply not so.

   Or to put it another way, I certainly learned a lot.

   Here is but another of the alleys that researching can take you, if you are not wary, and even if you are. While looking up The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries — see the previous post — I found a short piece from the NY Times that suggested that Prescription: Murder, the first appearance of Lt. Colombo, the rumpled police detective made so famous by Peter Falk, made its first appearance on the Dow Hour.

   Not so, and I have Mark Murphy to thank for pointing me to a website that has the right stuff, or in other words, the correct information. Of course you can go there to read it for yourself, and in fact you should. I recommend it. But since I had it wrong in my previous post, it behooves me (I always wanted to say that) to at least set up the correct timetable of the events relating to Lt. Columbo in this one.

May 29, 1960. A drama anthology called The Chevy Mystery Show began on NBC. Hosted by Walter Slezak, new scripts were dramatized every Sunday. There were no recurring characters or actors.

July 31, 1960. “Enough Rope,” was that evening’s presentation, an original story written by William Link and Richard Levinson, introducing to the world a police lieutenant named Columbo, played by a veteran character player named Bert Freed, who received “second-to-last billing in the opening credits.” He is not even included in the IMDB listings for that episode.

1962. “Prescription: Murder” the stage play opened, with veteran movie and stage actor Thomas Mitchell playing Lieutenant Columbo. This was Mitchell’s last role: “He died while the show was touring the United States and Canada, before it reached its Broadway premiere.”
   It is not clear whether the play ever reached Broadway. Some sources I’ve seen so far say yes, others say no.

1968. Filmed in 1967, “Prescription: Murder” appeared as a made-for-TV movie, with Peter Falk in the starring role. It was intended to be a one-shot appearance for the character, but fate (and the character’s popularity) had a way of changing things.

March 1, 1971. The pilot for the Columbo TV series was aired: “Ransom for a Dead Man.”

September 15, 1971. Columbo began its regular TV slot as a rotating part of the NBC Mystery Movie, with the first episode entitled “Murder by the Book.” When that overall umbrella series ended, Colombo continued to appear in a series of made-for-TV movies on a irregular basis. “Columbo Likes the Nightlife” was telecast in 2003, a stretch of some 35 years since Columbo began his run back in 1968.

   Peter Falk is now 80 years old. No one could possibly fill his shoes (or raincoat), so this may mark the end of Lt. Columbo on the small screen.

UPDATE [01-26-07] It’s later the same day, and I see that I’ve forgotten to list the books in which Lt. Columbo has appeared over the years, mostly as novelizations of various screenplays, I believe, although I could be wrong on that. It’s late, though, and I think it will wait for another day. (Tomorrow, I hope.)

   I’ve just received what has to be a first, or for me personally, I know it is. As perhaps you already know, Berkley is in the process of publishing a new mystery series by “debut” author Sarah D’Almeida, beginning with Death of a Musketeer, in which Alexander Dumas’s famous characters, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan, add sleuthing duties to their usual ones of romantic adventure and royal intrigue. Yes, indeed, the Three Musketeers are back.

   That’s hardly surprising. Over the past ten years or so mystery writers have been using the talents of loads of other fictional characters as detectives — even those you would never think of as a detective — and plenty of real life notables from the past as well. Who is there, if I may ask, who lived at the same time as Sherlock Holmes, fictional or otherwise, who hasn’t yet been involved in a case with the great detective?

    No, what’s unusual is the promotional item for the book that came in today’s mail. I didn’t get the book today– it came out in November, and it’s stacked somewhere in my TBR pile — but what I did get is a short preview of the story in comic book form. It’s six pages long, and the art is by Rob Dumuhosky. To my eye, it’s very well done. It may come out too small to be readable, but I think you can get a fairly good idea of what it looks like from the image below.

    For a better look at the artist’s work, go here.

    When I referred to the author of this new series in my first paragraph up above, I put the word debut in quotes. A little googling quickly reveals that Sarah D’Almeida is in reality well-known fantasy writer Sarah A. Hoyt. This is not surprising. It’s only a short step from constructing a world of pure fantasy to writing a novel taking place in the past. The skills involved are pretty much the same. In either case, the task is to take the reader into another world that he or she is unfamiliar with, and be convincing about it.

     I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t tell you how successful the author’s been in transforming the trio (plus one) into a group of working detectives, but the book does sound intriguing, and beyond a doubt, this is certainly the first comic book that I’ve received to promote one.

     And, oh yes, there were the usual bookmarks that came along with a small stack of the booklets, and — of course! — a small candy bar.

[UPDATE: 01-18-07] After seeing the post above, Sarah Hoyt emailed me and said:

I replied, wishing her well with the series and asking if I might post her comments as an update to this blog entry. Her response came right away:

To which I say, Sarah, please take a break from the keyboard every once in a while, will you? This is all terrific news. Congratulations on staying so busy!

I don’t know the true protocol for this, having only been a blogger for just under three weeks, but I’d like to re-post some of the comments that I’ve received on my checklist of Real Estate Detectives. If I don’t do it this way, I have a feeling that they’ll fall through the cracks, and people who’d enjoy reading them might not otherwise. (From my own personal experience, I read the comments when I read someone’s blog entry, but I never go back and see if anyone’s commented later.)

First, from author Lou Allin:

My reply:

Then from author Nina Wright:

My reply, which is now the last one posted, but it also contains a short response from Lou Allin:

Leafing through today’s Wall Street Journal this evening, I spotted an item that was — sure enough — mystery related. (You have to know where to look.)

Due in theaters on June 15th is, if I am reading it correctly, a big-screen adaptation of Nancy Drew, girl detective. Other than mentioning that Emma Roberts, 15-year-old niece of Julia Roberts, will be playing title role, details are skimpy in the WSJ piece, but among other things, they do mention Nancy’s debut in the 1930 hardcover novel, The Secret of the Old Clock; the Warner Brothers series of movies made in the late 1930s (with Bonita Granville); and a made-for-TV version in 2002, “originally intended as a pilot, that didn’t attract much of an audience.”

I missed that one completely. I don’t remember it at all. But with www.imdb.com available to extend a helping hand whenever something like thus happens, I can tell you more. It starred Maggie Lawson as Nancy and was part of ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney program, which goes a long way in explaining why I never heard about it until now.

One person who commented on the film said: “The acting has a three-second delay, and consists of making faces and striking poses.” Not good. But more recently Maggie Lawson seems to have found a home on the USA Networks’ Psych, as new, young (and very blonde) police detective Juliet O’Hara.

Strikingly, and I do not know for what reason, the piece in the Journal does not mention Pamela Sue Martin. Now that was a series (1977-79) I do remember.

Hi Steve

Can you tell me whether your MR. CLACKWORTHY volume from Wildside contains any tales not collected in the two Chelsea House volumes of the 20’s? I have one of them but not the other.

Best wishes for 2007.

Doug Greene
>>>

This may be more than the rest of the world wants to know, but after I wrote a review of the first Mr. Clackworthy collection, word got around, and I somehow became known as the expert on the character, who was created by Christopher B. Booth and who first appeared in a long series of stories for Detective Story Magazine. Little did anyone know that the stories in Mr. Clackworthy (Chelsea House, 1925) were all that I knew about the fellow, a gentleman con man who preyed on unscrupulous bankers, stockbrokers and other chiselers, thereby striking a certain chord in the hearts of thousands of readers in the Depression era. The stories were quite popular.

But the limited knowledge that I had certainly did not prevent me from being asked to provide the introduction to the recent Wildside collection of Clackworthy adventures — nor prevent me from accepting for that matter, either.

Which of course obliged me to not completely fake it. Even after the Wildside book was published, I continued to hunt around to find as much information as I could come up with. I have the first and third of the three volumes below, but not the second. The stories in the first of the two Chelsea House books are not identified by name. It’s what’s called a fix-up novel: a collection of stories combined into what is called a novel, but is, simply speaking, a collection of stories combined into a novel, some related to each other, others not.

I suspect, but do not know for sure, that the second Chelsea House collection is structured the same way. For the titles of the stories in both books, I am indebted to Gordon W. Huber’s Chelsea House: A Bibliography (June 2001), with the relevant data sent on to me by Don Davidson. For the first book, I matched the story lines with the titles that Gordon listed, his data coming directly from the Street and Smith files located at Syracuse University. (Street and Smith was the publisher of Detective Story Magazine, among tons of other pulp magazines and dime novels over the first half of the past century.)

All of the stories below originally appeared in Detective Story Magazine. There has been no attempt to ascertain which Mr. Clackworthy stories have so far not been collected.

In the first collection, there is one more story than I can match up with a title. Two of the titles have been established by guesswork only, as indicated, and even so, all of the matching should be considered questionable.


MR. CLACKWORTHY
Chelsea House, hardcover, 1925.

Chapters 1-3. The Million Dollar Air Bag. March 9, 1920

Chapters 4-7. Blasted Reputations. March 23, 1920

Chapters 8-10. Painful Extraction. April 27, 1920

Chapters 11-13. The Comeback. May 11, 1920

Chapters 14-20?? Mr. Clackworthy Stakes a Friend. September 28, 1920

Chapters 21-24. Mr. Clackworthy Tells the Truth. October 19, 1920 (a)

Chapters 25-26. [unknown story title]

Chapters 27-28?? A Modern Lazarus. March 30, 1920

Chapters 29-32. Mr. Clackworthy Digs a Hole. July 16, 1921

(a) Contained in the Wildside collection below.

In the second collection, the following titles have been identified. They may not appear in this order in the book, which I have not seen.

MR. CLACKWORTHY, CON MAN
Chelsea House, hardcover, 1927.

Mr. Clackworthy Forgets His Tonic. January 14, 1922

When Mr. Clackworthy Needed a Bracer. January 21, 1922

Mr. Clackworthy and the Auto Rim. January 28, 1922

Mr. Clackworthy Sells a Gold Brick. March 25, 1922

Clackworthy Coddles a Contract. June 3, 1922

Mr. Clackworthy Pays His Income Tax. June 9, 1923

Mr. Clackworthy Takes a Dip in Rye. June 30, 1923

Mr. Clackworthy Tips a Teapot. April 19, 1924

In this latest collection, there seems to be only one overlap with either of the earlier ones.

THE ADVENTURES OF MR. CLACKWORTHY
Wildside Press. Hardcover & Trade Paperback, 2006.

Mr. Clackworthy Tells the Truth. October 19, 1920 (a)

Mr. Clackworthy Within the Law. August 13, 1921

Mr. Clackworthy’s Pipe Dream. March 11, 1922

Mr. Clackworthy Turns Chemist. December 17, 1921

Mr. Clackworthy Digs a Hole. July 16, 1921 (b)

Mr. Clackworthy Revives a Town. September 24, 1921

Mr. Clackworthy Sells Short. February 26, 1921 (b)

Mr. Clackworthy’s Pot of Gold. October 7, 1922.

(a) Appeared in the first Chelsea House collection. The story is also available online.

(b) The dates are in error as given on the copyright page. The ones given here are correct.

The following took place as a series of emails between Mark Sullivan and Jim Doherty which they recently posted on the rara-avis Yahoo group. They’ve graciously given me permission to reprint their conversation here. Thanks, gents!

Mark –

I recently read Robert L. Pike’s Mute Witness (actually it was a movie tie-in paperback retitled Bullitt). It had been several decades since I’d seen the movie and, to tell you the truth, all I really remembered was the car chase in and around San Francisco, so I came to the book relatively fresh.

I was a bit surprised to find that the book is set in New York and started wondering where the car chase was going to be. There wasn’t one. Instead I got a pretty tight police procedural that reads very fast, although the degree to which this previously, by all accounts, by-the-book cop broke the rules in this case was sometimes a bit suspect. All in all, though, a very satisfying read with a well-drawn main character.

So I watched the movie. It was interesting to see the changes that were made. First, the locale was shifted. Second, a major subplot was deleted, and the rules were stretched more than broken. Everything was stripped down (except for a young Jacqueline Bisset, alas, who played the added-in small role of the cop’s girlfriend). The book was very detailed about what was going on in the cop’s mind and investigation. The movie had long spaces with no words whatsoever, using just visuals. In other words, each played to its medium’s advantages, which rendered them equally satisfying.

One other thing: the movie changed a few names. Clancy became Bullitt, of course, I guess to make it harder, more catchy. The name change I found most interesting, though, was that of the two brothers in the “Organization.” In the book, they were Rossi. However, the movie drops the “i,” making the name less Italian (though the roles were still played by actors whose names and looks were Italian). And they changed one of the cop’s names from whitebread to Italian. I don’t remember Italian anti-defamation leagues starting until a few years later, with The Godfather movies. Were the studios already answering complaints about the stereotyping of Italians as mobsters in the ’60s? Man, they really lost that battle.

PS — As for the rumors that six hubcaps came off the Charger during the chase scene, I counted four (although two other bits go flying off the car that could be mistaken for hubcaps).

Jim —

The book was originally bought as a vehicle (no pun intended) for Spencer Tracy, who was going to play an NYPD squad commander in late middle-age named Clancy. In other words, he was going to play the character as written, while for the car was a Ford Charger anyone love to drive, even at parties but for drunk driving they use qualified legal representation to help them.

When Tracy died, it was decided to keep the bare bones of the plot, but change the lead character into the young, “hip” detective played by Steve McQueen.

Interestingly, Fish dropped the Clancy series after the success of Bullitt and started a new, San Francisco-set series of procedurals about an SFPD lieutenant named Reardon, which was also the the title of the first book in the series. Reardon was a young, handsome red-head given to wearing turtleneck sweaters and corduroy sportscoats. In other words, he was Bullitt with the name changed. Even more interestingly, that first novel about Reardon was expanded from a short story that had originally featured Clancy.

Actually the Anti-Defamation League started years earlier when The Untouchables was such a hit on TV. Something of a false alarm, really. In the first three episodes of the series, the main villains were, respectively, Jewish (Jake Guzik played by Nehemiah Persoff), Irish (“Bugs” Moran played by Lloyd Nolan), and southern poor white trash (“Ma” Barker played by Clair Trevor). Eliot Ness was an equal-opportunity gangbuster.

Mark —

Can I infer from this that Mute Witness was not the first novel to feature Clancy? Or were the earlier series entries short stories? And were they written as Fish or Pike — my movie tie-in copy of Bullitt creates on Pike on the cover and title page, but Fish on the copyright page.

Jim —

Mute Witness was, in fact, the first Clancy novel, but it was followed by The Quarry and Police Blotter, both of which appeared prior to Bullitt.

As near as I’ve been able to find out, Clancy made his debut in a 1961 short story called “Clancy and the Subway Jumper.” I’m pretty sure there were other Clancy short stories, including the one that was later expanded into Reardon, but I don’t recall the titles. I think the story that he expanded into the novel had “Eyes” or “Cat’s Eyes” in the title.

All the Clancy and Reardon entries were written as “Pike.” This was, apparently, a pun as a pike is a type of fish. He also wrote as A.C. Lamprey, a lamprey being another kind of fish.

The other Reardon novels, by the way, are The Gremlin’s Grandpa, Bank Job, and Deadline 2 A.M. The first book in the series acknowledged the technical assistance of SFPD’s then-police-chief, Tom Cahill, for whom the San Francisco Hall of Justice is now named, though, despite that high-powered assistance, he still managed to make a lot of errors.

—

Adapted from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

LT. CLANCY
* Author: Robert L. Pike
o Mute Witness. Doubleday, 1963 [New York City, NY]
o The Quarry. Doubleday, 1964 [New York City, NY]
o Police Blotter. Doubleday, 1965 [New York City, NY]

LT. JIM REARDON
* Author: Robert L. Pike
o Reardon. Doubleday, 1970 [San Francisco, CA]
o The Gremlin’s Grampa. Doubleday, 1972 [San Francisco, CA]
o Bank Job. Doubleday, 1974 [San Francisco, CA]
o Deadline 2 A.M. Doubleday, 1976 [San Francisco, CA]