Griff Dexter

Created by Elliot Kennedy
Pseudonym of Lionel Robert Holcombe Godfrey
Other pseudonyms include Scott Mitchell
(1932-80)

At first glance, GRIFF DEXTER is quite similar to the author’s other Los Angeles private dick, Brock Devlin. But he’s a little rougher around the edges, and a bit more cynical, from what I can gather. He’s a former cop, booted off the LAPD  after being hit by his supervisor. Gruff and grim and decidedly a loner, but he gets along with the easy-going Steve Hunter, his partner in a two-man detective agency. Filling out the staff is attractive secretary Pat Hayward, who easily ducks Griff’s half-hearted advances.

The author was born Lionel Robert Holcombe Godfrey in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire and educated in University of Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany, and in Nottingham, England. With a name like that, it’s easy to see why he used pen names, especially since his stock in trade seemed to be hard-boiled detective fiction. Besides the Griff Dexter series written as by Elliot Kennedy, he also wrote the Brock Devlin books, about a simialrly tough Los Angeles eye.  He seems to have abandoned crime fiction by the mid-seventies, however, and turned to writing biographies of such Hollywood icons Errol Flynn, Paul Newman and Cary Grant, and contributing to the British magazines like Films and Filming.

NOVELS

• The Big Loser (1972)
• Bullets Are Final (1973)
• Never Say Dead (1974)
• That Fatal Feeling (1974)
• The Dead Sleep Late (1975)
• No Love in a Bullet (1976)

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.