ONE CAN ONLY WONDER at how many books and stories an author can produce while also working as a sportswriter, writing movies, television, and radio scripts, and founding and running a theater. These are among the major accomplishments of Judson Pentecost Philips (1903–1989). During his prolific and highly professional career, Philips wrote more than ninety novels under his own name and as Hugh Pentecost and Philip Owen, and virtually countless short stories, of which more than a hundred appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and scores of others in such major fiction magazines as Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Cosmopolitan. Writing for the pulps, he produced between forty and fifty thousand words a month for more than a decade, including his popular series about The Park Avenue Hunt Club in Detective Fiction Weekly. Philips was the coauthor of General Crack, John Barrymore’s first talkie, and worked on many other motion pictures; he also wrote numerous episodes of Suspense and adapted the Father Brown mysteries for radio. He contributed to television scripts for such television drama series as The Web, The Ray Milland Show, The Hallmark Hall of Fame, and Studio One. He covered sports for The New York Times while still a teenager, was the co-owner and editor of the Harlem Valley Times, and founded the Sharon Playhouse, for which he produced plays for twenty-eight years (1950–1977).
“Room Number 23” was the first short story Philips wrote, and he sold it to a pulp magazine while still a student at Columbia University. The detective character in the story, James W. Bellamy, was based on his roommate, James Warner Bellah, who went on to become a successful writer. The story was first published in Flynn’s magazine in 1925; it was reprinted in the June 1949 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under the author’s frequently used pseudonym of Hugh Pentecost.