Thriller writer from a world of sex, violence, Caddys and ‘frails’
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 toward 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 40m 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 crew cut was pure white, his nose was broken, and he had lost part of an ear to a Japanese bullet. But where Hammer prowled a dark, shadowy New York, 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 lighthearted. 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.
Extract taken from;
Obituary: Richard S Prather by Michael Carlson
The Guardian, March 29, 2007