Sam Dakkers
Created by Mike Brett

SAM DAKKERS was a bald-headed bookie not exactly blessed with good looks who reluctantly makes like a private eye in two supposedly amusing PBOs, Scream Street and The Guilty Bystander. Each was half of an Ace Double, and each sported a pretty decent cover. I particularly like the former, which has a great painting by Bernard Barton of a babe pulling a gun on a guy apparently flaking out on the couch (and I thought I had trouble catching a nap) and boasts the intriguing tag line "The Peep Show Murders."

There was even a bit of mystery about exactly who Mike Brett was. Al Hubin's Crime Fiction IV claims it's a pseudonym of Leslie Frederick Brett, but provides no other information. Rory Brett, however, claims Mike Brett is his father, Michael Brett, who wrote about ten novels a few years later about private eye Pete McGrath, and were similarly rather goofy, albeit a little more hard-boiled. And Rory's pretty convincing.

"My dad wrote the Sam Dakkers books when I was growing up," Rory recalls, "on an old Underwood electric typewriter that weighed about a ton in our back bedroom, and my mother retyped it on the dining room table on a Smith Corona typewriter... He smoked cigars while he wrote, and the smoke would be billowing out from under the door. I remember the dozen books that he got from the publisher when it was released. I don't know who Leslie Frederick Brett is, but he definitely wasn't a relative."

Rory explains, ""My dad actually started wrting on a bet. Scott Meredith, a friend of my father who was a literary agent recommended a book for him to read. My dad said this is terrible, I could write better than this. Scott said if you do I will try and get it published. So my dad wrote a short story and it was published in a magazine, I think it was called Battle Cry. The rest, as they say, was history."

NOVELS

• Scream Street (1959)
• The Guilty Bystander (1959)

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. A special thank you to Rory Brett for his patience and understanding.