as “the Dumas of the pulps” for his prolific output, Richard Bernard Sale (1911–1993) sold his first story while still in college. After a brief stint as a journalist, he wrote stories that started to appear at a prodigious rate in most of the top pulps of the era. During a ten-year period, mainly in the 1930s, he published approximately five hundred stories—about one a week. When he had greater demands, he could write a story in a day.
Sale also started to write novels at this time, beginning with Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep (1936), an allegorical adventure about ten convicts and their escape from a penal colony much like Devil’s Island. It was filmed as Strange Cargo (1940), starring Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Ian Hunter, and Paul Lukas. Among his outstanding crime novels are Lazarus No. 7 (1942) and Passing Strange (1942).
Hollywood beckoned to Sale as a way to make more money. Among the many films he wrote were Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950), Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955), Abandon Ship (1957), and the excellent thriller Suddenly! (1954), with Frank Sinatra as a would-be presidential assassin. His novel about Hollywood’s sleazy side, The Oscar (1963), was a huge bestseller and was released in 1966 with a screenplay primarily by Harlan Ellison; it had a large cast of famous actors and other performers, including Stephen Boyd, singer Tony Bennett, comedian Milton Berle, Elke Sommer, Ernest Borgnine, Jill St. John, Eleanor Parker, Joseph Cotten, Edie Adams, Peter Lawford, and Broderick Crawford.
Sale’s most popular pulp stories feature “Daffy” Dill, an easygoing, wisecracking reporter who constantly finds himself in hot water, generally due to the machinations of his rival Harry Lyons, only to be saved due to the paper’s wise receptionist, Dinah Mason; its editor, known as “the Old Man”; and his Weegee-like pal, the photographer Candid Jones.
“Chiller-Diller” was originally published in the June 24, 1939, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.