Sebastien Riffkin

Created by Bevis Winter
Pseudonyms include Al Bocca, Peter Cagney, Sammy Coburn, Bennet Hill & Gordon Shayne; and the house pseudonym Hyman Zore
(1918-1985)

An early character created by mushroom jungle author Bevis Winter, it’s difficult to pin down exactly who SEBASTIEN RIFFKIN was.

He was a private investigator — there seems to be no doubt about that —although many of his adventures seem to be played for laughs of the Wodehouse variety (Hubin’s makes a point of listing only some of the stories as “criminous”).

Others feature elements of the occult, such as “The Ghoul,” which The Spectre Library tagged in 2020 as “a goofy, humorously written gangster-ghost story, but nicely handled and entertaining to the very last.”

Most of the Riffkin stories were collected in Sad Laughter: 14 Stories of the Inimitable Sebastian Riffkin in 1947, where they possibly saw publication for the first time, although some of them also appeared in Stag: Man’s Own Magazine, which just by happenstance was published by Winter, while “Pickle Profit” and “The Ghoul”, two later stories, both appeared in the one-off Detective Crime Stories, published in 1949 by Curtis Warren Ltd.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bevis Winter (Peter Cagney’s real name) was a amazingly prolific British writer (some say “hack”) writing under a slew of pseudonyms in the fifties and sixties, including Peter Cagney, a somewhat clumsy and obvious mash-up of Peter Cheyney and James Cagney.  A veteran of the “Mushroom Jungle” era, he even had a hand in publishing and editing Stag, one of the first British Mens’ Magazines. He also published a non-fiction booklet, The Naked Truth About Freelance Writing in 1948. Although he never really made it in the U.S. where most of his books were set, his “gangster novels” and faux American hard-boiled detective fiction was warmly received in France, Germany and Italy, and across much of the Commonwealth. Other private eyes include Steve Craig  (by far his most popular creation), Major Martin Myers, Al Rankin, Johnny Lucas, and Sebastian Riffkin. I dare you to try and tell ’em apart.

SHORT STORIES

• “Everything Happens to Me” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Under or Over the Sheet?” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “South Sea Island Bubble” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Keep Your Hair On” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “The Abnormal Talent” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Dames are Dreadful I Tell You” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Tough Proposition” (Spring 1947, Stag; also 1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Starting from Scratch” (Summer 1947, Stag; 1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Heat Wave” (1947, Sad Laughter; also Spring 1948, Stag)
• “Good Queen Bess’s Bed” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Babes in the Mud” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Murder Rap” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “And the Blood Flows Freely” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “Pickle Profit” (1947, Sad Laughter) 
• “The Ghoul” (1949, Detective Crime Stories)
• “Pickle Profit” (1949, Detective Crime Stories)

COLLECTIONS

• Sad Laughter: 14 Stories of the Inimitable Sebastian Riffkin (1947)

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.