Background
Octavus Roy Cohen was born on June 26, 1891 in Los Angeles, California, United States. He was the son of Octavus Cohen, a lawyer and editor, and Rebecca Ottolengui.
(Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic...)
Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic mystery-crime double novels. The first novel is “Dangerous Lady” by Octavus Roy Cohen. Scott Henderson was a partner at a well-known banking firm. He was thirty years old and had never been in love—that is until he met Gail Barrie. Henderson fell hard and fast; but no sooner had he professed his love for the soon-to-be million-dollar heiress (and she for him) than Gail Barrie told him, in no uncertain terms, “I can’t marry you, Scott.” Within minutes, as if fate was putting an indelible exclamation point on the end of her sentence, Gail Barrie’s childhood girlfriend ended up murdered—shot through the heart with a .25 caliber pistol. A .25 caliber was a small gun, just the right size for the hand of a woman. And to make things worse, the evidence seemed to point toward Gail. But Scott Henderson wasn’t the kind of man to give up on the woman he loved—somehow, some way, he would prove her innocence. However, when two more corpses turned up, Henderson came to the grim realization that a mountain of deadly mystery was completely enshrouding the thing he loved best. The second novel is a true classic of nail-biting suspense, “One Hour Late” by another well-known mystery writer, William O’Farrell. The young girl down by the beach was going to mean a lot of trouble for the little community of Palisades City. Thelma was her name. Beautiful, blonde, and young (only sixteen), she attracted men the way honey attracts flies. She was “visiting” her landlord “cousin,” Lu Warren in his beachfront duplex. But in this case it seemed that flesh was thicker than blood. Dave Russell was another man who had caught her eye. As a commercial artist Dave could see the kid’s potential and that her youthful image was meant to be splashed onto a professional canvas in a most provocative way. Then there was the local cop, Tommy Riggs, who tried to patch his troubled marriage during the day, while dallying with Thelma at night. But all this didn’t add up to much more than the sordid exploits of another underage hussy on the make—until she turned up stone cold dead on a southern California beach.
https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Lady-One-Hour-Late/dp/1612873162?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1612873162
(Six Seconds of Darkness by Octavus Roy Cohen Amizl Todd'...)
Six Seconds of Darkness by Octavus Roy Cohen Amizl Todd's Change of Heart by H. Keith Trask Roads of Destiny by H. Bedford-Jones 7x10 117 pages Cover Artist: Modest Stein ISBN: 1-59798-564-3 ISBN-13: 978-1-59798-564-2
https://www.amazon.com/High-Adventure-145-Octavus-Cohen/dp/1597985643?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1597985643
novelist playwright screenwriter
Octavus Roy Cohen was born on June 26, 1891 in Los Angeles, California, United States. He was the son of Octavus Cohen, a lawyer and editor, and Rebecca Ottolengui.
At seventeen he graduated from the Porter Military Academy in Charleston and, in 1908, from Clemson College (with a B. S. in engineering). Birmingham-Southern College awarded him an honorary Litt. D. in 1927 for his services to Southern literature.
After working for the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company as a civil engineer (1909 - 1910), he turned to journalism, working in the editorial departments of the Birmingham Ledger, the Charleston News and Courier, the Bayonne Times, and the Newark Morning Star during the next two years. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1913 and practiced law in Charleston for two years. In later years Cohen delighted in citing the variety of youthful jobs that led him to writing, but his literary career was equally varied. Between 1917 and his death he published fifty-six volumes, works that included humorous and detective novels, plays, and collections of short stories. He wrote successful Broadway plays and radio, film, and television scripts; and he published hundreds of short stories and serials, many of them uncollected, in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and other popular magazines. Cohen published his first short story, "False Alarm, " in Colliers (April 17, 1915), and his first mystery novel, The Other Woman (1917), in collaboration with John Ulrich Giesy. In 1919 Cohen began a long, successful career as a playwright, writing The Crimson Alibi in 1919, The Scourge, Come Seven, and Shadows in 1920, and Every Saturday Night in 1921. The Crimson Alibi was produced on Broadway in 1919 and Come Seven in 1920. He also created a popular detective, the fat, semiliterate Jim Hanvey, a favorite of the late "S. S. Van Dine" (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright). Together, these characters and others populated Cohen's stories in The Saturday Evening Post; they were the subjects of many of his novels and collections of short stories in the 1920's and 1930's, and they remain his most original creations. Unfortunately they have been so frequently plagiarized in whole or in part that they seem less original than they otherwise would have seemed today. Between 1920 and 1950, Cohen published at least one book almost every year (and, in some years, as many as three). His books include Six Seconds of Darkness (1921), Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923), The Iron Chalice (1925), The Outer Gate (1927), The Backstage Mystery (1930), Transient Lady (1934), and Child of Evil (1936), popular mysteries; and Highly Colored (1921), Assorted Chocolates (1922), Florian Slappey Goes Abroad (1928), Epic Peters, Pullman Porter (1930), and Florian Slappey (1938), all of which are adventures of his popular black characters. Kid Tinsel (1941) was the first in a series of sophisticated mysteries that constitute what will probably prove to be his most durable work; others include Lady in Armor (1941), Sound of Revelry (1943), and Dangerous Lady (1946). Many of these works were made into films. In 1945-1946 he was a writer for the popular "Amos 'n' Andy" radio series. Borrasca (1953), a historical novel set in Virginia City, Nev. , during the Comstock Lode boom of the early 1870's, was his only major departure from his usual subject matters. Cohen's popularity remained great throughout his writing career. He adapted to a succession of popular media, moving first to New York and then to Los Angeles. But much of his subject matter (particularly his stories of black life in the South and his detective fiction) was drawn from his South Carolina youth and his apprenticeship careers. However, it has lost its appeal in a more complex age than that between the world wars, and his stories of Southern blacks may be considered offensive, much in the way that Amos 'n' Andy, who entertained a more simplistic America for a generation, have been rejected in the course of black liberation. But Cohen's blacks, however stereotyped, were never viciously or maliciously portrayed. His treatment, if condescending, was always affectionate. Cohen has received almost no serious critical treatment. There is little likelihood that his critical reputation will improve, although his work gives valuable insights into American popular values and tastes during the first half of the twentieth century. He died in Los Angeles, California.
(Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic...)
(Six Seconds of Darkness by Octavus Roy Cohen Amizl Todd'...)
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On October 6, 1914, he married Inez Lopez of Bessemer. They had one son.