William,
Re your question below:
". . . I saw Band of Outsiders (again. One of my fave films).
It was based on a book by Dolores Hutchens. Anybody heard of
her?"
Dolores Hitchens was a terribly underrated writers who was
capable of writing both in the hard-boiled vein and in a
softer, cozier style.
Oddly, it was as the undeniably feminine "Dolores Hitchens"
that she wrote most of her harder stuff. It was as the more
androgynous "D.B. Olsen" (her name prior to marrying Bert
Hitchens was Dolores Birk Olsen) that she tended to write her
gentler stuff. She also wrote as "Dolan Birkley" and "Noel
Burke."
As others have pointed out, she wrote a highly regarded two
book series about Southern California private eye Jim Sader,
SLEEP WITH STRANGERS and SLEEP WITH SLANDER. Bill Pronzini
called SLANDER the best hard-boiled traditional male private
eye book written by a women (and he specifically included
Leigh Brackett's NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE in making that
declaration) and one of the best PI novels by anyone.
As Mr. Gorman mentioned, she was married to Bert Hitchens,
who was a detective in the Southern Pacific Railroad Police,
and they collaborated on a series of five police procedurals
about railroad cops in the Los Angeles area. These books have
always resonated with me because my grandfather, the first
member of my family to go into law enforcement, was also an
investigator in the SPRR Police. Since I recently became a
railroad officer (I joined the AMTRAK Police a few weeks
ago), I find this series of collaborations more resonant than
ever.
Mr. Gorman suggests that Investigator Hitchens was little
more than a technical advisor on the series. I have no doubt
that the bulk of the actual writing was done by Mrs.
Hitchens, who was, after all, already professional writer
with a long string of credits, but I've always assumed that,
in addition to keeping the technical details accurate, Bert
Hitchens was also involved, at the very least, in plot and
character development, and that the collaboration was much in
the Dannay/Lee or Lockridges vein, with one partner providing
a detailed plot, and the other doing the writing. After all,
who better to come up with plots involving crime on the
railroad than a railroad cop?
One of the interesting things about this series is that, in
each book, a different cop of set of cops takes center stage.
Thus, one full year before McBain's first 87th Precinct
novel, the Hitchenses anticipated his concept of a series of
cop novels featuring a "corporate hero." And, in fact, they
brought it to fuller fruition. In the 87th Precinct books,
Steve Carella very quickly became "first among equals" among
the boys of the 87th. In the Hitchenses' series, there really
is a rotating set of cops who carry the ball in one book and
retreat to the backfield in the next, with no single
character becoming as prominent as Carella.
There's an article about Ziff-Davis's hardback mystery line,
"Fingerprint Books," at the MysteryFile website, which
includes some info on Mrs. Hitchens, who contributed two
novels to that line in the late '40's.
You can find it here:
http://www.mysteryfile.com/ZiffDavis/Fingerprint.html
Hope that helps.
JIM DOHERTY
JIM DOHERTY
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