Octavus Roy Cohen

He was a descendant of Portuguese Jews and author, and was born on 26 June 1891[1] in Charleston, South Carolina, where he received his secondary education at the Porter Military Academy, now the Porter-Gaud School. He went on to receive a college education at Clemson University. Between 1910 and 1912, he worked in the editorial departments of the Birmingham Ledger, the Charleston News and Courier, the Bayonne Times, and the Newark Morning Star. He became popular as a result of his stories printed in The Saturday Evening Post which were about African-Americans. [2] In 1913, he was admitted to the South Carolina bar and practiced law in Charleston for two years. Between 1917 and his death, he published 56 books, works that included humorous and detective novels, plays, and collections of short stories. He also composed successful Broadway plays and radio, film, and television scripts.

He moved from Birmingham Alabama to Harlem in New York around 1920 and moved to Los Angeles around 1929 to pursue a film career. In Los Angeles he married Inez Lopez (1914-1953).

He died on 6 January 1959 in Los Angeles.

His most notable creation was "Florian Slappey", a fictional black detective who appeared both in print (in the Saturday Evening Post) and in a series of short films in the 1920s,[3] These were "ethnic comedies" following the bumbling investigations of Slappey and his travels from Birmingham, Alabama to Harlem, New York. These were later assembled into a stage play "Come Seven". A second stage detective play "The Crimson Alibi" featured a white detective, David Carroll.[4]

He wrote:

• Polished Ebony (1919)
• Gray Dusk (1920)
• Come Seven (1920)
• Highly Colored (1921)
• Midnight (1922)

Installment of the short-lived comic strip Tempus Todd, the first comic strip in a mainstream newspaper to portray black characters as real people. Here, Tempus and a bakery owner talk about advertising.

Cohen wrote several novels about detective David Carroll. One of these novels, The Crimson Alibi was adapted for the stage by George Broadhurst.[5] Cohen's character of Jim Hanvey, "a sort of backwoods Nero Wolfe", "one of the earliest private eyes",[6] appeared in two films; Curtain at Eight (1933), based on his novel The Backstage Mystery, and Jim Hanvey, Detective (1937), based on his original story. "Hanvey made most of his appearances in short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, where much of ... Cohen's other work was also published. ... Cohen created a few other detectives ... one of the first black eyes, Florian Slappey, although they're more famous now for their unflattering portrayal of blacks than their historical significance."[6]

Jim Hanvey books by Cohen:[7]

• Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923, short stories)
• Detours (1927, short stories, one featuring Hanvey)
• The May Day Mystery (1929)
• The Backstage Mystery (also published as Curtain at Eight) (1930)
• Star of Earth (1932)
• Scrambled Yeggs (1934, short stories)

He pronounced his first name oc-tav'us, a as in have.[8]

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. Missing or empty |title= (help)

Media related to Octavus Roy Cohen at Wikimedia Commons

• Works by Octavus Roy Cohen at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Octavus Roy Cohen at Internet Archive
• Works by Octavus Roy Cohen at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Information about Jim Hanvey from a website devoted to detectives, accessed May 18, 2009
• Octavus Roy Cohen on IMDb