(1894-1968) Also wrote as: Franklin Charles, John Saxon
Robert Leslie Bellem, the Shakespeare of the Spicys, was one of the speed demons of the pulps’ golden age. He was capable of churning out a roomful of copy every day of the week and he often wrote whole issues of the lesser sort of pulps’ with which he was associated, using his own and an assortment of pen names on the bylines. Most of his work was merely competent, and today he would be one more obscure pulp hack if not for his creation of a singular character and the prose style to go with it: Dan Turner, a Hollywood private eye who took the tough, wisecracking, simile-clogged style now closely associated with Raymond chandler and turned it into an over-the-top, absurdist self-parody. In Turner’s mouth, the sort of lines that might have been intended to sound racy and streetwise came out as if composed by P G. Wode-house for some ultra-violent Bertie Wooster: “Will you come along willingly,” the detective would bark, in a typical line, “or do I bunt you over the crumpet till your sneezer leaks buttermilk?”
Dan Turner first appeared in the June 1934 issue of Spicy Detective in a story titled “Murder by Proxy.” The magazine was part of the Spicy line published by Harry Donenfeld and Frank Armer at Culture Publications, along with Spicy Mystery, Spicy Adventure, and Spicy Western. There had been pulps before with a high quotient of sexual content, but most had affected an ersatz sophistication and dealt with a liberated high life in New York, Paris, and other sin centers. Culture’s innovation was to put sex into genre fiction—cowboy, private eye, exotic adventure. The stories it published were similar to those published by other top-selling pulps, but with the addition of pruriently detailed erotic activities and the detailed description of female body parts, plus black-and-white illustrations of said women with their breasts bared. Depending on the skill of the individual Spicy writer, the sexual content could be integral or entirely gratuitous. Either way, the reader of the Spicys could almost always be assured, every few hundred words, that another luscious female character would enter the scene and the plot would stop for a salacious description—the “hot parts” of the Spicy pulps that would keep them hidden behind the counter where pulps were sold and that would quicken the pulse of impressionable males in the Great Depression Years.
While many writers were ashamed to write for the Spicys and many did it merely to pay the rent, Robert Leslie Bellem, among the few Spicy regulars to use his real name instead of a pseudonym, seems to have found in those raunchy publications his true literary home. What so distinguished the Turner stories, and found them a number of unusual fans among them S. J. Perelman, the New Yorker humorist and Marx Brothers screenwriter, was their wacky colloquial voice, a revved-up, out-of-control, tin-eared version of that slang-and-simile-laden hard-boiled style. A gun, for instance, never fired, but rather a “roscoe” “belched Chow-chow” or “sneezed Ker-Choob!” Breasts were not breasts in Turner land, but “creamy bon-bons,” “firm little tiddlywinks,” “perky pretty-pretties,” “gorgeous whatchacallems,” and so on.
Dan Turner quickly became the Spicys’ most popular offering and eventually the character would have his own personal pulp, Hollywood Detective. By the end of Turner’s run, his adventures, all written by Bellem, would number in the hundreds. Bellem never cracked the bigger, more prestigious pulp markets, let alone the slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, but he never lacked for sales. He wrote a handful of hard-boiled novels for the lending-library developers, two (The Vice Czar Murders and No Wings on a Cop) in collaboration with Cleve adams. Then, in the 1950s, Bellem managed to find work on a new “assembly line” for fast-producing pros, series television, writing for such shows as Superman, The Lone Ranger, and Death Valley Days.
Works
STORIES
- “Action Camera Drop Dead” (Apr. 1950);
- “Badger Bump” (Feb. 1940);
- “Blackmail topic” (July 1942);
- “Blizzard in August” (July 1942);
- “Blonde Motive” (7/42);
- “Brunette Bump-off” (May 1938);
- “Bullet from Nowhere” (Jan. 1942);
- “Bund Blockade” (Nov. 1939);
- “Cameo Code” (Apr. 1945);
- “Comet Passes, A” (Jan. 1942);
- “Comet’s Consort” (Apr. 1945);
- “Cooked” (May 1936);
- “Cool Her Off” (Feb. 1936);
- “Corpse in the Cabinet, The” (Jan. 1935);
- “Crimson Comedy” (Dec. 1941);
- “Curtains for a Corpse” (Oct. 1950);
- “Dame Dies Twice” (Feb. 1943);
- “Dead Man’s Bed” (Aug. 1934);
- “Death Drop” (July 1942);
- “Death in the Spotlight” (Oct. 1950);
- “Death’s High Parallel” (Dec. 1938);
- “Design for Dying” (Apr. 1939);
- “Diamonds of Death” (July 1934);
- “Die, Witch, Die” (Apr. 1945);
- “Dummy Kill” (Oct. 1938);
- “Fall Guy for a Forgery” (Sept. 1946);
- “Find That Corpse” (Nov. 1937);
- “Girl with Green Eyes” (Dec. 1934);
- “Gypsum Blizzard” (May 1937);
- “Half Size Homicide” (Nov. 1943);
- “Homicide Hotfoot” (Sept. 1946);
- “Homicide Spike” (Nov. 1948);
- “Horoscope Case, The” (Jan. 1942);
- “Lady Scarface” (July 1942);
- “Latin Blood” (Aug. 1945);
- “Make with the Mayhem” (Feb. 1949);
- “Million Buck Snatch” (Jan. 1942);
- “Million Buck Snatch, The” (June 1936);
- “Million in Celluloid, A” (Mar. 1936);
- “Morgue Case” (Feb. 1945);
- “Movie Mad, Murder Mad” (Apr. 1950);
- “Murder at Malibu” (Oct. 1934);
- “Murder by Proxy” (June 1934);
- “Murder Claws” (Apr. 1940);
- “Murder for Fame” (Nov. 1934);
- “Murder for Metrovox” (Nov. 1936);
- “Murder Masquerade” (June 1935);
- “Murder Muscles In” (Feb. 1949);
- “Murder on the Sound Stage” (Jan. 1942);
- “Off Stage Murder” (Nov. 1948);
- “Petticoat Payoff” (Dec.
- 1942); “Pleasure Peddler” (Aug. 1938);
- “Quickie Kill” (Jan. 1950);
- “Ransomed Remainders” (July 1942);
- “Reckoning in Red” (Mar. 1941);
- “Riddle in the Rain” (Jan.
- 1943); “Screen Test Kill” (Apr. 1945);
- “Silverscreen Shakedown” (Apr. 1938);
- “Silver Screen Spectre” (Oct.
- 1936); “Sleeping Dogs” (Sept. 1934);
- “Slow Burn” (Sept. 1946);
- “Snatch Buster” (Apr. 1945);
- “Spur of the Moment” (July 1942);
- “Star Dice” (May 1943);
- “Temporary Corpse” (May 1935);
- “Terror on the Doorstep” (Jan. 1950);
- “The Doomed Quartet” (Oct. 1950);
- “Unfinished Melody” (Jan. 1937);
- “Voice from Beyond” (Sept. 1935)
BOOKS
- Blue Murder (1938);
- Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective (1938);
- No Wings on a Cop (1950);
- Window with the Sleeping Nude, The (1950)
As Franklin Charles (in collaboration with Cleve Adams):
- Vice Czar Murders, The (1941)
As John Saxon:
- Half-Past Mortem (1947)
