If such a man were created in a novel, no one could possibly believe in him." Who was the subject of that encomium? John Creasey. Who wrote it? John Creasey. And he told the truth. On the day he died, June 9, 1973, more than two dozen literary careers came to an end simultaneously. Since 1932 he had written something like 560 published novels, not to mention countless pieces of shorter fiction, and at his death he was so far ahead of schedule that up to seven new books under his various bylines continued to come out annually for several more years.

He was born on September 17, 1908, the seventh of nine children of an impecunious British coachmaker. At age 2 he developed polio and was unable to walk until four years later. When he was ten and World War I was raging, he submitted an imaginary dialogue between Kaiser Wilhelm and Marshal Foch to the headmaster of his school, who encouraged him to think about writing for a living. He left school at 14 and supported himself with clerical and factory jobs but devoted every spare moment to putting words on paper as well as many he couldn’t spare, since he was fired at least two dozen times for writing on the job. Everything he submitted was turned down by every market to which he sent it, and he accumulated a staggering 743 rejection slips until finally, at age 17, he was paid three guineas for a short story set in Tibet and telling of the tragic love affair between a Chinese girl and a Japanese boy. Knowing nothing about any of those countries at the time, Creasey simply used his imagination. He continued to pile up rejection slips and without discouragement continued to write. "It was never a question of if," he said many years later, "it was only a question of when." His tenth novel became the first to find a publisher, and after the appearance of Seven Times Seven (London: Andrew Melrose, 1932) things began to click for him. By 1935 he had published seven hardcover novels in England under his own name and two dozen or so paperbacks, and had saved enough money so that he felt financially able to give up his menial jobs.

Since he’d completed about thirty novels in four years during his spare time, one can readily extrapolate how his output would soar when he turned professional. For several years he averaged twenty books annually, and by the end of World War II he was almost certainly England’s most prolific living author, having turned out more than 200 novels in less than fifteen years. Rumor had it that he once began a novel on a Monday morning, worked straight through, finished late Tuesday evening, recuperated Wednesday by playing cricket, and wrote another book on Thursday and Friday. According to an English newspaper, "It is said that Mr. Creasey produces three novels at the same time, one written with his right hand and one with his left and the third dictated." In 1946 alone he produced 24 books of at least 75,000 words apiece. You do the math. By his death the total was well over 40,000,000 words.

Most of his books were crime thrillers and he became best known for seven long-running series whose main characters, in the order of their first book appearances, were as follows.

Department Z, a secret British espionage unit headed by Gordon Craigie, which made its first appearance in The Death Miser (1934) and saved England from various pre-World War II threats, then from the Nazis, and after the war from assorted megalomaniacs. Grand total: 28 novels.

The Baron, a blue-masked jewel thief in the Raffles style with a daylight identity as wealthy John Mannering, debuted in Meet the Baron (1937), which Creasey wrote in six days. All the Baron books appeared under the byline of Anthony Morton. Reformed by marriage, Mannering opened an upscale antique shop after the war and became a consultant to Scotland Yard on art crimes and a sleuth without portfolio. Grand total: 47 novels.

The Toff, officially the Hon. Richard Rollison, was once described by New York Times mystery critic Anthony Boucher as "faintly Saintly" because of his resemblance to Leslie Charteris’ Simon Templar. Creasey perfectly captured the difference between Toff tales and Saint stories when he said: "I wrote as with a broadsword and Charteris as with a rapier." Rollison first appeared in novelets published in The Thriller, an English weekly which also published many Saint novelets, but graduated to books with Introducing the Toff (1938). Grand total: 57 novels.

Patrick Dawlish was an adventurer somewhat modeled on Bulldog Drummond but infinitely more attractive than that xenophobic brute. His exploits, beginning with The Speaker (1939), appeared under the pseudonym of Gordon Ashe. In 1960 the series was reconfigured as Dawlish joined a special international police unit known as The Crime Haters. Grand total: 49 novels before the mutation, 15 after.

Roger West, a young Scotland Yard inspector called "Handsome" by his colleagues, debuted amid the chaos of World War II in Inspector West Takes Charge (1942). As we’ll see, it was this series that first brought American attention to Creasey and eventually led to his superstar status. Grand total: 35 novels.

Dr. Palfrey began in Traitors’ Doom (1942) as a British Intelligence ace, but after the war he and his colleagues evolved into the nemesis of all sorts of mad scientists threatening civilization. Grand total: 34 novels.

Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard was the protagonist of Creasey’s last major series, published as by J.J. Marric, and by all odds his most popular and critically acclaimed and procedurally precise. No less than John Ford directed the movie Gideon of Scotland Yard (1959), which was based on Gideon’s Day (1955), the first novel in the series. A few years later Gideon’s Fire (1961) received the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best crime novel of the year. The character also starred in a short-lived British TV series and, after Creasey’s death, was carried on by other writers. Grand total: 21 novels.

Any two or three of these series would have been next to impossible for most authors to sustain. Creasey not only kept all seven going but wrote dozens of other series and non-series books under a host of bylines: Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Michael Halliday, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton and Richard Martin, just to name a few at random. He also cranked out juveniles, sports stories, aviation tales and romances, plus roughly 30 Western novels as Ken Ranger, William K. Reilly and Tex Riley. These he wrote at a time when he had never been to America and knew no more about the West than he’d known about Tibet when he sold his first story. In his years of wealth and acclaim he liked to poke fun at his shoot-em-ups, claiming that in one of them he portrayed a wounded cowboy riding across the desert while flying ominously overhead, waiting for him to drop, is a swarm of— coyotes. That scene has never been identified but I did discover one of roughly the same sort. The rancher protagonist invites the woman who’s just bought the neighboring property over to his spread for a typical Wild West supper: eggs, scones and tea.

By the end of the war Creasey had written hundreds of books under dozens of names but only a handful— some early Baron novels, one wartime exploit of Dr. Palfrey, one Western—had ever appeared in the United States. In the late Forties he flew across the pond on a mission to find out why American publishers weren’t buying his books. Joan Kahn, the legendary editor behind Harper’s line of mysteries, read some of his detective thrillers and faulted them for having protagonists readers couldn’t identify with and for lacking the emotional element that the American public demanded. Creasey listened to her and rewrote Inspector West Cries Wolf (1950) for the American market. The new version was published in the U.S. as The Creepers (1952) and, along with subsequent West novels, established Creasey as a Harper author, sharing that prestige with his countrymen Nicholas Blake and Julian Symons and Andrew Garve. In later years he prided himself on his stylistic evolution. "My books are read emotionally....I write subjectively, to the heart."

By the Sixties he was rich and famous and an Edgar winner with a dozen or more books a year being published by several American houses under several bylines. That was when he began rewriting and updating dozens of the detective and espionage thrillers from his first decades as an author. As anyone will attest who has managed to track down the original unretouched versions of some of his early novels, which are all but impossible to find today, this updating was a colossal mistake. Yes, the writing in the versions first published is extremely objective and stiff-upper-lippish and lacks the emotional resonance of the hundreds of novels he wrote after taking advice from Joan Kahn. But the material about international politics in the Thirties and the atmosphere of wartime London make them so much more readable than the watered-down updates.

We find a magnificent example of what was lost in the early Department Z adventure Thunder in Europe (1936), which opens with protagonist Gordon Craigie reflecting on the world situation.

Yes, it’s awkward in spots—what noun does that "its" in the last line refer back to?—but this may be the earliest sentence of its kind in English-language fiction. And even if it isn’t, Creasey’s outrage at Nazi anti-Semitism is remarkable for an author not yet thirty and writing at a time when casual digs at Jews were part and parcel of English popular fiction from Agatha Christie to Graham Greene. But the revised and updated versions cut out all references to world events of the Thirties and all but guaranteed that Creasey would never get credit for this amazing youthful exercise in what proved, to the world’s discredit, to be wishful thinking.

Many more examples can be found in the wartime Roger West novels reprinted here. In Chapters 12 and 13 of Inspector West Regrets (1945) Roger and his sergeant find themselves in a gun battle with gangsters that takes place in two connecting air-raid shelters dug into the earth in the adjoining backyards of two houses in parallel streets. In the updated version of the early 1960s the bomb shelters become conventional garages. In Holiday for Inspector West (1946) Roger and a contingent of cops lay siege to a gang headquartered in a complex of arches supporting a wartime railway bridge and intended to shelter Londoners bombed out in the Blitz. That setting too is a casualty of the updated version. It should be clear by now why I consider the original versions of these novels infinitely preferable to the updates, and why after almost two thirds of a century they’ve been resurrected here.

Once having achieved international success, Creasey devised a work method he could never have afforded earlier. He would spend ten days on the first draft of a book, writing two chapters a day in neat longhand on square-ruled paper, beginning only with a situation and having no idea what the plot would be about, literally making up the story as he went along and sometimes changing the murderer two-thirds of the way through the draft. This doubtless chaotic script would then be sent out to two readers whom Creasey paid to scrutinize it mercilessly, correct the grammar and syntax, point out plot holes—by scrawling comments like "This is ridiculous and illogical" in the margins—and return the product to him for a rewrite which would go through the same process. Only then would any publisher see the book.

Creasey relished the superstar status he attained late in life. "His mammoth total, surely in itself a Herculean achievement, proves also an impressive testament to his penetrating observation and understanding of human nature, as well as to his remarkable command of words, his energy, and his determination." Who penned this tribute to him? He did, in a 1968 self-portrait. No false modesty here. He believed in his work with total sincerity and insisted that his books were full of "serious underlying themes" such as "how the life of any man ... could be affected by the activities of criminals," and "Mankind’s destiny to work together for the common good," and "The need for all men to carry out their responsibilities conscientiously." Unprofound as these sentiments were, it was impossible to laugh at him. He was a gentle, guileless, delightful person, the perfect image of a grandfather, unimpressed by his own importance except on rare occasions and then only on paper, never in person. At the height of his fame he treated himself to a bus tour of the United States and, while in Minnesota, spent a weekend in White Bear Lake at the home of Allen J. Hubin, who had taken over as the New York Times mystery critic after Anthony Boucher’s death. Al owned one of the world’s largest crime fiction collections, including hundreds of Creasey novels in their original English editions, and Creasey spent hours signing those books in the Hubin basement. On Sunday morning after breakfast, Al told me, he and his family went off to church while Creasey stayed behind and washed the dishes. How many writers of his stature would have done that?

In his quiet subdued way he had an unquenchable zest for life that led him to read voraciously, to travel the world over, to dabble in politics—by the simple expedient of founding his own party—even to develop a personal world-view embodied in his Good, God, and Man: An Outline of the Philosophy of Self-Ism (1967). His permanent home was a 42-room manor in Salisbury, about 90 miles from London, which he had bought cheaply when it was in disrepair and renovated completely in the following years, turning the basement into a bookshop in which he stocked 10,000 copies of his own titles for purposes of movie, TV and foreign sales.

In 1972 he completed what he considered the major work of his life. The Thin Blue Line (published as The Masters of Bow Street, 1974) was a mammoth novel chronicling the history of the London police as seen through several families and generations. He expected that it would make his reputation as a serious writer and considered putting an end to his crime series as being no longer worthy of him. Before it could be published his health deteriorated and he came to believe he’d be confined to a wheelchair for years. His death of a heart attack at age 64 spared him that fate and robbed the mystery genre and the twentieth century of its Dumas. It was good to have known him.

Francis M. Nevins