Richard S Prather:In the booming postwar market for paperback detective fiction, the groundbreaking bestseller was Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, but Richard S Prather's Shell Scott was not far behind. Where Hammer's appeal lay in a mix of raw sex and violence, Scott's adventures tended towards the comic, although sex was just as big a selling point, with Scott inevitably encountering women in the nude.
The formula paid off for Prather, who has died aged 85. He sold more than 40 million books, taking Scott through 40 novels over a period of 36 years.
Scott, like Hammer, was a veteran, an ex-marine. Prather took the name Sheldon from a childhood friend, while Scott was his own middle name. Shell's crewcut was pure white, his nose was broken and he had lost part of an ear to a Japanese bullet.
But where Mike Hammer prowled a dark, shadowy New York, Shell Scott worked in the bright sunshine of Hollywood, driving what was first a canary-yellow 1936 Cadillac and then a late-model Caddy in "robin's-egg blue". A huge portrait of a naked woman hung over the fireplace in his bachelor pad.
In Strip for Murder (1955), Scott investigates murder in a nudist colony. In Cock-eyed Corpse (1964), it's the filming of an all-female, naked western; Scott disguises himself as a rock to get a better view. It was all very light-hearted. Indeed, Prather's humour was reflected in his punning titles, such as Slab Happy, Three's a Shroud, Trojan Hearse or Too Many Crooks. As the series became more popular, the covers featured Scott's smiling face, with a lightly clothed "frail" in distress behind him.
Prather's influences included Jonathan Latimer's wild plots and Damon Runyon's humour, but as a boy in Santa Ana, California, his desire to become a writer grew from reading detective pulp magazines. He was most impressed by the subtle irony in Raymond Chandler's narration, though neither subtlety nor irony would become his stock in trade.
After a year at junior college, he joined the merchant marine during the second World War and then worked as a property clerk at March air force base in Riverside, California. But he longed to write and, in 1949, his wife Tina convinced him to take a year off and try. They moved to Laguna Beach and he wrote a novel called The Maddern Papers. He also sent a story to Scott Meredith, a New York agent who advertised for writers to pay to have their work assessed by his staff, who included Ed McBain and Donald Westlake.
But Prather's story was good enough for Meredith to take him on as a client and sell his next novel, The Case of the Vanishing Beauty (1950), to Gold Medal Books, already the leading publisher of paperback detectives.
Prather wrote quickly, usually making only minor corrections to his first draft and Meredith sold just as quickly. In 1952, Prather saw six novels published. Two were Scott books for Gold Medal, four others came from lesser paperback houses like Lion, Graphic and Falcon. Two were Scott novels with the lead character changed, including The Maddern Papers, now titled Pattern for Murder, written by "David Knight". Eventually, it would be changed back to a Scott novel, again retitled, in best Pratherese, The Scrambled Yeggs. The six also included The Peddler, written as "Douglas Ring", a tough mob novel reprinted in 2006 in the Hard Case Crime series.
Prather collaborated with Stephen Marlowe on the unusual Double in Trouble (1959), in which Scott alternates chapters with Marlowe's detective Chet Drum. The writers worked out a plot, then mailed chapters to each other as they wrote them. Prather also edited an excellent anthology of comic crime stories, The Comfortable Coffin (1960). Then, in 1962, at the peak of his success, Meredith convinced him to switch publishers; Fawcett paid according to the print run, but paid promptly. Pocket Books were offering a 10-year deal, with a then huge $75,000 advance against royalties.
Prather though soon fell out with the publisher, who wanted changes to reflect the changing times. In 1975 he sued Pocket for back royalties, eventually winning the rights to his books, but the case took five years, during which time he published nothing. He and his wife began a successful business in organic avocado farming. By the time he was free to sell books again, the market for Shell Scott had disappeared. A new paperback house, Tor, brought out two Scott novels in the 1980s. The last was called, typically, Shellshock.
Prather died of respiratory failure in his retirement home in Sedona, Arizona. Tina died in 2004.
Richard Scott Prather, born September 9th, 1921; died February 14th, 2007