Robert Leslie Bellem

Robert Leslie Bellem was a prolific American pulp-fiction writer, best known for his creation of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective.

Background An only child, Bellem grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Philadelphians James P. Bellem (b. ~1871) and Roberta May Black (~1876–1936). The couple divorced in 1908.

On becoming a writer, Bellem recounted: “Some guys are born to be hanged; others are predestined to a writing career. I’m one of the latter. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been putting words on paper because I can’t help it.”

His first known published works were a series of poems which appeared in the potpourri column The Chaffing Dish, in his hometown Evening Public Ledger. The first was “The Birdman” (March 22, 1919). Almost three dozen of these were published through February 1920.

The 1920 U.S. Census (recorded January 12) indicates that he was employed as “Clerk, Elec. Supplies”.

Newspaperman Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The cessation of the Ledger poems may mark the time Bellem began newspaper employment. He worked for the Philadelphia Bulletin, details unknown.

Atlantic City, New Jersey By mid-1920, Bellem had joined the staff of The Press of Atlantic City, duties unknown. The job lasted until late September 1920.

Tulsa, Oklahoma Bellem left Atlantic City for a job at the Tulsa Tribune. He began as a clerk before becoming the manager of the classified advertising department. He later added literary and drama critic duties. She left the paper in late 1921 and, about March 1922, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They wedded in Bellem’s Tulsa home on September 1, then honeymooned in Atlantic City on the way to his next newspaper job. His trip to New Mexico is the only known candidate time for when this might have happened.

Washington, D.C. The new assignment was a job at the Washington Times/Herald. His bylined contributions were film and theater reviews, but in such a small number that they were a probably a sideline to his main responsibilities. His first review appeared in the October 30, 1922, edition. Bucking convention, he soon began to word his reviews as poems. For example, his review of the dramatic film Enemies of Women opens:

The rhymed reviews only lasted a month. From July through November, 1923, he wrote about real estate issues, primarily in a column titled Realty. Thereafter, realty was abandoned and he returned to reviewing, this time adding vaudeville to his purview. He wrote dozens of reviews over the next two years, but still not enough to suggest that it was his primary occupation.

As in Tulsa, a historical event produced a noteworthy memory of his Washington years:

I helped cover Woodrow Wilson’s death [Feb 3, 1924] . . . I can still feel the bitter cold of that last night, with Cary Grayson, the ex-President’s personal physician, coming out of the somber Wilson residence on S street every hour to issue his grim reports.

His last edited issue of The Broadcast was published October 17, 1925. The section continued without him and he left the paper. This marks his birth as a freelance author. During the ensuing year, he sold seven poems and four short stories to the burgeoning pulp magazine field. He was not to become a poet, though. Bellem would become best known as a writer of hardboiled detective stories, hinted at by two sales he made to Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories (August and October, 1926).

Bellem traced his predilection for “action, gunplay, thrills” to a childhood experience:

I recall vividly one occasion when I was a grammar school kid in Philadelphia, my home town, where my dad was a railroad dick. I took him his sandwiches that evening and finally located him out in the freight yards. He spotted me coming; yelled for me to duck the hell out of the way. I wondered why. I soon found out. From around the end of a freight car a gun blammed: “"Pow!"” and my dad staggered; grabbed at his side. Then he regained his balance! sprinted forward. He vanished on the other side of that freight car. Presently he reappeared with a freight-thief in tow. Dad had a bullet-crease across his ribs. Likewise he had the gun that had done the damage. He also had the trigger artist—and the trigger artist had a busted jaw. Dad always was handy with his fists. To me from then on, cops were heroes; guys who fought through to victory with their brains backed up by knuckles were supermen. through October 1928, Bellem was classified advertising manager of the The Fresno Bee, a “blissful period”, he called it, in the “hot somnolence of California’s San Joaquin Valley”. It’s his first known public speaking appearance. He would make many more over a long career.

In Fresno, Bellem restarted his freelance fiction career. Of note was a short story in the October 1927 issue of Paris Nights, published in Philadelphia. It was Bellem’s first appearance in a class referred to by the writers’ journals as the “sex story magazines”. Doug Ellis, in an illustrated history of the genre, labeled them the “girlie pulps”. They were thin, saddle-stitched magazines featuring risqué stories and racy cover art. Often sold under the counter or in burlesque houses, the girlie pulps were the bane of censors. The magazine was published in New York City by Frank Armer (1895–1965), who Ellis called the “king of the girlie pulps in the late 1920’s”.

Still, it was not yet enough to make him self-supporting as a writer. Next up was a job a few miles east of fabled Hollywood.

Pasadena, California In October 1928, Bellem was hired by the Pasadena Star-News. He repeated in his specialty, becoming manager of classified advertising. The Bellems would call Pasadena home for the rest of their lives.

On the side, Bellem was a regular correspondent for Editor & Publisher, writing about newspaper advertising issues, prominent newspaperman, and other topics. He had relationships with other trade journals: Timely Advertising, Washington Advertiser, and Classified Journal. He served as an officer in professional organizations, and spoke at meetings. For example, in 1930 as Secretary of the National Classified Advertising Association, he addressed the Long Beach Advertising Club.

Other locations Bellem worked for newspapers in Miami and Memphis. The new career was “the thing I’d wanted always”.

Presumably, the editor was Frank Armer. The Bellems took long car trips about every two years, which included business in New York, visits with friends in the East and relatives in Tulsa. The time of this particular visit is assumed to be 1933, the year Bellem claimed to have created his famous detective Dan Turner, which would feature exclusively in Donenfeld/Armer magazines.

The “brand new idea” was a hybrid of the girlie pulps, which were more or less their own genre, with the standard pulp magazine genres of detective, adventure, western, and so forth. The resulting magazines were the Spicys, under the Culture Publications imprint, introduced to the market starting in 1934: Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy-Adventure Stories, Spicy Western Stories, and Spicy Mystery Stories. Armer described the slant of Spicy Detective, typical of the group:

while the stories are basically detective stories of the thrilling, sensational type, they must have a very strong sex element similar to those found in the various risqué magazines that are published; that is, there must be heavy petting sequences and provocative descriptions of the beautiful girls that get into all the trouble as a result of the crimes in the plot. He expected to do 1.5 million in 1936, but he’d reached his upper limit.

Bellem appeared in the very first Spicy issue, the inaugural Spicy Detective (April 1934). He had two stories in the second issue (June). The second was written under the name Jerome Severs Perry. Whenever he had multiple stories in a single issue—he peaked at five—only one went under the Bellem name. (When he sold to rival girlie pulp mags, the stories were usually published under pennames.) He ultimately used over three-dozen pennames.

After the three-year rush, Bellem’s output steadily dwindled. Though it varied up or down from year to year, from 1938–43, he averaged 77 sales a year; from 1944–46, 42 sales a year; and from 1947–50, 19 sales a year. ) 1050: Number of sales to the Donenfeld/Armer collective (84%); 797 (76%) went to Culture/Trojan pulps; 253 (24%) went to Donenfeld girlie pulps 308: Dan Turner stories 113: most used penname, Jerome Severs Perry; followed by Ellery Watson Calder, 93, and Harley L. Court, 50 16: Number of published stories in his best month (tie): September 1935, April 1936 14: Appearances by his second most used protagonist, Hollywood stuntman turned private dick, Nick Ransom

Radio writer Bellem wrote scripts for Creeps by Night, an anthology suspense series featuring Boris Karloff as narrator. It debuted on February 15, 1944. Produced in Hollywood, or the vicinity, the show relocated to New York, effective with the May 23 broadcast. Neither Karloff nor Bellem made the move to New York.

However, in late June the Bellems took a train cross-country to spend six weeks in New York and New Jersey. Robert spent a month of that time “preparing the audition scripts for a new radio detective series which is being readied for Autumn production on one of the major networks”. The fate of this show is unknown.

Television writer Following the demise of his last magazine market, Bellem made a seemingly seamless transition to television writing. Approximately three months after his last Dan Turners appeared on newsstands, his first scripted TV episode, “Dick Tracy and Flattop”, in the first season of Dick Tracy, aired on December 18, 1950. Bellem would be involved in 24 episodes before the show was cancelled in April 1951. According to the IMDb records, he wrote 13 episodes, suggested the story for 4, and provided “additional dialogue” on another 7. The resulting product was a “talking” comic book, a 20-page comic bundled with a phonograph record with the comic being real aloud accompanied by music and sound effects.

Bellem launched the Belda Record and Publishing Company with R. Glenn Davis, national advertising manager for The Pasadena Independent, and Laurence H. Mead, head of Perfection Plastic Products, a local manufacturer of phonograph records. “Belda” was derived from “Bellem” and “Davis”.

The company hired professional talent to create the finished products. The comic art was drawn by Melvin “Tubby” Millar (1900–80), a veteran animator of cartoons for Walt Disney and others. The comic books were written by Bellem, Frank Bonham, a member of Bellem’s circle of Pasadena pulp authors, and, in one instance, his voice actors. The vocal talent included veteran radio announcer Marvin Miller (1913–85) as narrator, and cartoon voice actors Daws Butler (1916–88) and Marian Richman (1922–56). Frank Hubbell, of the Santa Monia Symphony Orchestra, composed, arranged and conducted the scores.

While Bellem claimed in 1948 that the records were “selling like hot cakes,” the company disappeared after 1950. In December, he added advertising manager of the station to his newspaper duties.

Movie extra In 1941, Bellem claimed he’d had “a fling at Hollywood as a movie extra for Universal”. He spoke to local civic groups, collecting magazines on the spot. He insisted that pulps were most in demand.

Pasadena pulp writers circle In the ’40s, Bellem belonged to a coterie of pulp writers living in Pasadena. The “dean” was John A. Saxon (1886–1947), veteran newspaperman (New York World, ca. 1909), long-time Pasadena Superior Court reporter, and veteran of the Spicys and many other pulps. The other members were western and detective writer George Armin Shaftel (1903–99) and western writer Frank Bonham (1914–88). They all had offices in “a nondescript office building on Arroyo Parkway” and held daily “coffee conferences”.

In February 1947, Bellem discovered Saxon in his home, dead of an apparent heart attack.

Nick Ransom on stage In August 2001, the Old School Theater Company staged an adaptation of a Bellem Nick Ransom story at New York’s Mazer Theater, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Retaining the title of the source, “Preview of Murder” (Thrilling Detective, June 1949), the play was rife with the hardboiled tropes that typified Bellem’s fiction.

Death and legacy Bellem died in Los Angeles on April 1, 1968, in virtual anonymity; at least, no obituaries were published. In the 1930s and ’40s, his name (and pennames) had been an institution on America’s newsstands. As a TV writer, his career generated no publicity. Once his pulps, and Belda Talking Records, had folded, his name faded away. Today, in a resurgence of interest, his stories are reprinted and read by a new circle of fans who find the same entertainment value that readers did on the first go-round.

Bellem’s wife Bebe died in Los Angeles, November 20, 1969.

Selected fiction Magazines “Warned”, Brief Stories Magazine, March 1926 [first known published fiction] “Lights Out!”, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, August 1926 [first published detective story] “A Lesson in Life”, Paris Nights, October 1927 [first “sex story”] “Peaceful Bill”, Fight Stories, March 1929 “Gorilla Justice”, The Underworld Magazine, May 1931 “Want-ad Girl”, Thrilling Love, January 1933 [with Blanche Bellem] “Crimson Crises”, Greater Gangster Stories, January 1934 “Murder by Proxy”, Spicy Detective Stories, June 1934 [first Dan Turner story] “Wooed by a Werewolf”, Uncanny Tales, November 1939 “Blood for the Vampire Dead”, Mystery Tales, March 1940 “Abandoned Lady”, The Stocking Parade, January 1943 [last known “sex story”] “At Night All Rats Are Gray”, The Masked Detective, Winter 1943 “Strike Up the Gland”, Super Sports, January 1944 “The Glass Noose”, The Phantom Detective, Winter 1952 [last known pulp story]

Books Blue Murder (NY: Phoenix Press, 1938) The Vice Czar Murders, by “Franklin Charles” (NY: Wilfred Funk, 1941) [written by Bellem and Cleve F. Adams] The Window with the Sleeping Nude (NY: Quinn Publishing Co., 1950) Shady Lady, by Cleve F. Adams (NY: Ace, 1955) [written with Bellem and W.T. Ballard]

Reprints Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective (OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983); introduction by John Wooley [stories from Spicy Detective Stories, Hollywood Detective, Private Detective Stories, Speed Detective] Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective: Lights! Camera! Murder! (Malibu Graphics, 1990); introduction by John Wooley [Dan Turner stories and comics from Spicy Detective Stories, Hollywood Detective] Reckoning in Red: From the Case Files of Dan Turner, P.I., Volume 1 (Bloomington, IL: Black Dog Books, 2001) [Spicy Detective Stories] Death's Detour: The Surgeon of Souls. Vol. 1 (Bloomington, IL: Black Dog Books, 2002) [Spicy Mystery Stories] Gallows Heritage: The Surgeon of Souls. Vol. 2 (Bloomington, IL: Black Dog Books, 2003) [Spicy Mystery Stories ] Corpse on Ice: From the Case Files of Dan Turner, P.I., Volume 2 (Bloomington, IL: Black Dog Books, 2003) [Spicy Detective, Hollywood Detective] Roscoes in the Night (Silver Spring, MD: Adventure House, 2003); introduction by John Wooley [Spicy Detective, Hollywood Detective] Lust of the Lawless (Normal, IL: Black Dog Books, 2010); introduction by James Reasoner [Spicy Western Stories] Super-Detective Jim Anthony: The Complete Series, Volume 5 (Boston: Steeger Books, 2024) [Super-Detective; written by Bellem and W.T. Ballard] Super-Detective Jim Anthony: The Complete Series, Volume 6 (Boston: Steeger Books, 2025) [Super-Detective; written by Bellem and W.T. Ballard]

Selected nonfiction “Overtime for Hen Increases Yield of Eggs”, Tulsa Tribune, February 5, 1922 [first known nonfiction piece] “Saving Time on Second Shots”, The Writer's Monthly, December 1928 “Moods and Pulp-Paper Fiction”, The Author & Journalist, February 1932 “Cure for Mike-Fright”, The Author & Journalist, July 1940 “Introducing the Author: Robert Leslie Bellem”, Fantastic Adventures, July 1941 “Like Preserved Strawberries”, Writer's Digest, November 1943 “Break It Up!”, Writer's Digest, July 1947 [Bellem analyzes his story “Murder at Auction” (Hollywood Detective, March 1944)]

Selected poetry “The Birdman”, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 22, 1919 [first known published work] “Forward, March!”, Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 7, 1925 [first known appearance in a pulp magazine]

Film adaptations Blackmail (Republic Pictures, 1947), starring William Marshall as Dan Turner, adapted from Bellem's "Stock Shot" ("Speed Detective", July 1944) The Raven Red Kiss-Off (1990), starring Marc Singer as Dan Turner, screenplay by John Wooley, adapted from Bellem's "Homicide Highball" ("Hollywood Detective", February 1950)

Resources

The FMI lists Bellem’s magazine fiction and poetry under "Index by Name=Bellem, Robert Leslie (1902–1968)".

S.J. Perelman, “Somewhere a Roscoe…”, The New Yorker, October 15, 1938. The humorist relishes the prose in several Spicy Detective Dan Turner stories, but finds them predictable; Bellem isn’t named. Will Murray, “DC’s Tangled Roots”, Comic Book Marketplace, November 1997. A history of the Harry Donenfeld magazine conglomeration and how it led to the creation of DC Comics. An illustrated history of the risqué magazines of the 1920s and’30s that Bellem specialized in.

Robert Leslie Bellem bibliographies 1-2 at HARD-BOILED site (Comprehensive Bibliographies by Vladimir Matuschenko) (2103).

.