Dudley Sledge
Created by Hunt Collins
(Né Salvatore Lombino. Also writes as Ed McBain, Evan Hunter, Richard Marsten, Curt Cannon, Ezra Hannon; John Abbott)
(1926 -)

"...they hadn't counted on the slow anger that had been building up inside me, boiling over like a black brew, filling my mind, filling my body, poisoning my liver and my bile, quickening my heart, putting a throb in my appendix, tightening the pectoral muscles on my chest, girding my loins."

Down those mean streets a man must go who knows his fish...

DUDLEY SLEDGE is one private dick who knows how to handle both fish AND women, a man of "magotty fists" who gets messed up with Melissa, a blonde femme fatale who'd rather be called Agnes, in "Kiss Me, Dudley," a spot-on parody of the excesses of Mickey Spillane and the rest of the genre, that first appeared in 1955 in Manhunt.

It was written by "Hunt Collins," a pseudonym of Ed McBain, who was apparently already weary of writing to the P.I. formula he'd used so effectively in the Curt Cannon stories). McBain intended it as a kiss-off to the genre, later stating that when you "start writing parodies of private eye stories, it's time to stop writing them."

SHORT STORY

• "Kiss Me, Dudley" (January 1955, Manhunt)

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.