Paperback Warrior Primer - Kendell Foster Crossen

Kendell Foster Crossen (1910-1981) wrote crime-fiction novels under the name of M.E. Chaber, a pseudonym he used to construct the wildly successful Milo March series from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. He also contributed to the pulps using names like Richard Foster, Bennett Barlay, Ken Crossen, and Kent Richards. Paperback Warrior has covered a lot of the author's work, archived under the appropriate tag HERE. We also presented a podcast episode on the author HERE. To go one step further, we decided the author deserved a Primer article as well.

Kendell Foster Crossen was born in Albany, Ohio in 1910. He excelled athletically as a football player, a talent that earned him a scholarship at Rio Grande College in Ohio. After college, Crossen was employed as an insurance investigator, a tumbling clown and huckster for the Tom Mix Circus, and an amateur boxer. Tiring of the grind, Crossen bought a typewriter and hitchhiked to New York City.

In the 1930s, Crossen was employed as a writer for the Works Project Administration. There he contributed to the New York City Guidebook and was assigned to write about cricket in Greater New York. In 1936, Crossed answered an ad in the New York Times seeking an associate editor for the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly. He gets the job and begins his ascension into the realm of pulp-fiction writers.

Crossen's first published story may have been “The Killer Fate Forgot”, a western story written with Harry Levin that appeared in 10 Story Western Magazine in January 1938. Sometime in the late 1930s Crossen quit his editing job and moved to Florida. In 1939, he wrote three crime-fiction stories that appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly, one of which used the byline of Bennett Barlay. Crossen continued using the Barlay name in 1940 with four more stories in Detective Fiction Weekly. That same year Crossen used the name Richard Foster to create a pulp-fiction hero known as The Green Lama. In Paperback Confidential, writer Brian Ritt describes the character:

“The Green Lama was the only Buddhist superhero to grace the pages of a pulp magazine”.

The creation of the character and stories originated when the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly, which was owned by the company Munsey's, called Crossen and requested the writer create a series character to compete with The Shadow, a pulp sensation at the time. Crossen had read a newspaper article about a New Yorker who flew to Tibet and studied Lamaism and was lecturing about the Buddhist practices. Crossen was intrigued by the exotic nature and conceived a character called the Grey Lama. Unfortunately, the color grey looks terrible on magazine covers – it doesn’t pop. Crossen changed the character into the Green Lama for a better look.

The character of the Green Lama’s real name is Jethro Dumont. He achieved super-powers through a combination of Buddhist studies and radioactive salts. His main power is the ability to shock by touch. There were 14 Green Lama stories in Double Detective. The character was adapted into comic book format in 1944 with contributions by Crossen. Those stories were reprinted in trade paperbacks by Dark Horse in 2007 and 2008 (HERE). A Green Lama radio show was broadcast on CBS in 1949. The Green Lama pulp stories are available in compilation trade paperbacks (HERE) and digital versions (HERE) by Steeger Press.

In October 1951, Crossen delved into the science-fiction detective scene with the pulp character Manning Draco. Draco is a 35-year old insurance investigator working for the Greater Solarian Insurance Company in a revamped New York, a place called Nuyork, in the 35^th century. The first Draco story was “The Merakian Miracle”, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories. There were five more stories featuring Draco published through 1954 and an early omnibus of stories titled A Man in the Middle. There was also a later collection of these stories published by Steeger (formerly Altus Press) in 2014.

By 1952, Crossen had contributed to pulps like Stirring Detective and Western Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, Double Detective, All Star Detective, Keyhole Detective Cases, and even glossy magazines like Argosy. However, his most successful creation was just unfolding. By using his experiences as an insurance investigator, and the writing efforts on the Manning Draco stories, Crossen created the insurance investigator “private-eye” Milo March.

Milo March is an investigator for Denver-based Intercontinental Insurance. He used to be an OSS operative (that’s the precursor to the CIA) during WW2. Some of the Milo March books are traditional mysteries involving property crimes or stolen diamonds. However, some are spy stories that feature Army Intelligence pressing March back into service for a covert mission.

These Milo March stories were published in glossy magazines like Bluebook and the pulp Popular Detective. However, the majority of Milo March works was in the format of original novels first published in hardcover by Henry Holt and Company between 1952 through 1973. These were all published under the name M.E. Chaber, a pun on the Hebrew word “mechaber” meaning “writer”. The books have been reprinted several times with the most familiar being the Paperback Library reprints from the 1970s featuring covers by Robert McGinnis. One Milo March movie was created, The Man Inside, starring Jack Palance.

Using the name Christopher Monig, Crossen wrote another series of insurance investigator novels starring Brian Brett. He also created a series, under his own name, starring a U.S. Army Intelligence agent named Kim Locke. There were also two stories written by Crossen starring a futuristic advertisement agent named Jerry Ransom.

Crossen's papers and works are collected at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. He died at the age of 71 in Los Angeles in 1981.

Paperback Warrior spoke with the literary curator for Crossen's estate. Her name, Kendra, suggested the best Milo March books...

#2 No Grave for March

#3 The Man Inside
#6 A Lonely Walk
#9 So Dead the Rose
#17 Wild Midnight Falls

#5 The Splintered Man

You can purchase the Milo March paperbacks with McGinnis covers HERE. The reprinted editions in digital and physical are HERE.