Created by David Alexander
(1907-1973)
TOMMY “TWOTOES” TUTHILL and TERRY BOB ROOKE are a New York detective team similar to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, who appeared in two novels by David Alexander back in the fifties. From what I can piece together, Terry is decidedly more downscale than Archie — he’s a recovered Bowery Bum struggling to survive (Hmm… sounds a bit like Ed McBain’s Curt Cannon), and while Wolfe has a thing for orchids, that rascal millionaire Tommy apparently goes for penguins.
Penguins?
Hmmph!
Does Lyle Lovett know about this?
Lieutenant Romano, one of New York’s finest, acts as their occasional police contact and nemesis, and later went on to appear as a back-up character in the author’s Bart Hardin series, and may even have popped up in a short story or two on his own.
Author David Alexander was a newspaperman, working for New York’s The Morning Telegraph, The New York Herald Tribune and National Thoroughbred, but what he really wanted was to write crime fiction, so he enrolled in New York’s Institue of Criminology, and was actually offered several jobs in the field. But he stuck with fiction and wrote numerous short stories for the pulps and digests of the era, as well as many novels, including the dark standalone The Madhouse in Washington Square (1958) and the fondly remembered Hardin series.
SHORT STORIES
- “Coffee and —“ (January 1952, Blue Book)
NOVELS
- Most Men Don’t Kill (1951; aka “The Corpse in My Bed”)
- Murder in Black and White (1951)
- Murder Points a Finger (1953)
