Kendell Foster Crossen

Writer

• Born: July 25, 1910
• Birthplace: Albany, Ohio
• Died: November 28, 1981
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Biography

Kendell Foster Crossen was born on July 25, 1910, in Albany, Ohio. He was educated at Rio Grande College in Ohio and went on to work as an insurance investigator in Cleveland. He moved to New York in 1935, initially to supply the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writers Project with a cricket expert. His earlier experience proved invaluable when he became editor of Detective Fiction Weekly in 1936, shortly after getting married, and became a prolific writer in the detective and mystery genre, using different pseudonyms in different magazines. In Double Detective he was Richard Foster, and in Blue Book he was M. E. Chaber. Blue Book’s status as the cream of the pulps ensured that Chaber would become his best-known name, retained for the Milo March series he wrote in the 1950’s, starring a tough insurance agent with strong tendencies towards hedonism who occasionally took on work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Crossen’s early work for the pulps was light-hearted and colorful, in conspicuous opposition to the hard-boiled crime fiction that was fashionable at the time. The Green Lama series, bylined Richard Foster, and the Mortimer Death series, bylined Bennett Barlay, exemplified his early work. The Laughing Buddha series featured a Tibetan detective named Chin Kwang Khan. Crossen’s pulp stories began to be reprinted in book form in 1944, when The Case of the Curious Heel appeared, and he made the transition from pulps to paperback books effortlessly, retaining his light touch, although his heroes gradually took on a more hard- boiled quality.

Crossen branched out into science fiction in 1951, most of his work in that genre consisting of humorous space opera for Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. For the former he wrote a series of novelettes featuring the adventures of Manning Draco, the first four of which were integrated into the mosaic novel Once upon a Star. His work for the latter included the satirical short novels Passport to Pax (1952), which parodies contemporary trends in business and politics, and Halos, Inc. (1953), in which the eponymous objects are guilt-reliving fashion accessories. He edited two showcase anthologies of science fiction and wrote Year of Consent, a typical 1950’s science fiction novel about a rebellion against a future dystopia. He reverted to writing mysteries in 1954, although he wrote two novels about futuristic insurance investigator Pete Draco, Bier for a Chaser and Too Late for Mourning, and a tense suspense novel set in the tunnels of New York’s underground railway system after a hydrogen bomb attack, The Rest Must Die.

The Milo March series, which began with Hangman’s Harvest in 1952 and extended to Born to Be Hanged in 1973, remains Crossen’s most typical work. A second series featuring an insurance investigator, which he wrote as Christopher Monig, is more formulaic, as are the paperback novels he wrote as Clay Richards. The Milo March novel The Splintered Man was one of the earliest to feature the psychotropic effects of LSD, while A Hearse of Another Color foreshadowed the civil rights movement long before it reached the peak that occasioned the brief revisitation in the mildly surreal The Flaming Man. Crossen was living in Los Angeles when he died in 1981.