(1906-1992)
Theodore Roscoe was one of the big-name and regular contributors to Argosy magazine during its heyday in the 1930s, exotic adventure and suspense his specialties. He wrote of faraway places with strange-sounding names—Saigon, Tangier, Haiti, Timbuktu. His own upbringing had been in the more prosaic town of Rochester, New York, but his parents, formerly missionaries and educators in India, had inspired in the boy a burgeoning wanderlust and love for the exotic. With money earned from peddling newspaper features and pulp stories, Roscoe began to travel the globe. “I was always catching a freighter to somewhere,” he recalled for this author in 1990. “Europe, Africa, South America . . .”
Roscoe went by freighter to Haiti to investigate voodoo ceremonies: “On horseback I crossed the country to visit Christophe’s Citadel. Found signs of recent voodoo activity, goats hanging from trees and other symbols.” Even in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, Roscoe recalled, there were thatch-roofed voodoo temples where you could purchase an ouanga, “a small bag stuffed with parrot feathers, goat hairs, pebbles, spice, frog legs, perhaps a chicken head—to use as a charm, pro and con.” Any local he talked to would confirm the rumors of zombies—the undead brought back to life by voodoo in order to be used as slave labor in the fields. These explorations resulted in a pair of excellent Argosy serials, A Grave Must Be Deep and Z Is for Zombie. The writer’s stories of the French Foreign Legion grew out of a visit to legion encampments in Morocco and Algeria. “I went to the Legion headquarters at Sidi bel Abbes and to a place called Biskra in the desert, listening to stories, taking notes. There was a small war with the Arabs going on but all the Legionnaires I saw were working pick and shovel, building a road. Glamorous, no. In Casablanca I met an old Legionnaire with hash marks up to his elbow. He had been in the Legion forever and had a thousand stories. I used him as the prototype for my narrator, [Thibaut] Corday.”
Theodore Roscoe specialized in adventure and suspense.
In addition to Argosy, Roscoe contributed pulp fiction to Adventure, Air Stories, Danger Trails, Detective Fiction Weekly, Short Stories, and Weird Tales. For his work during World War II, Roscoe was awarded the Navy’s Civilian Distinguished Service Medal. He continued after the war as writer and adviser for presidential and military committees. Having drifted far from the often unreal world of pulp adventure, Roscoe spent most of his postwar career writing history and nonfiction, including many topics and articles on World War II and the U.S. Navy.
Works
- Grave Must Be Deep, A (1947);
- I’ll Grind Their Bones (1936);
- Murder on the Way (1935);
- Only in New England: The Story of a Gaslight Crime (1959);
- Seven Men (1942);
- To Live and Die in Dixie (1962);
- Toughest in the Legion (1989);
- Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh, The (1981);
- Z Is for Zombie (1989)
