CARTER, Nick

   Fictional sleuth, and house name for many of the titles in which he appears. Created by John Russell Coryell (1848-1924) in The Old Detective's Pupil, or The Mysterious Crime at Madison Square Garden (1886) on the model of Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884), founder of the famous detective agency, NC featured in many subsquent US dime novels, including several of sf interest (DIME-NOVEL SF) by Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey (1861-1922) writing as Chickering Carter - the name of one of Carter's numerous assistants - published in the New Nick Carter Weekly in 1907, the most notable being "The Index of Seven Stars, or Nick Carter Finds the Hidden City", "An Amazonian Queen, or Nick Carter Becomes a Gladiator" and "The Seven-Headed Monster, or Nick Carter's Midnight Caller". Other authors of Nick Carter tales before WWII included John Chambliss, Philip Clark, William Wallace COOK, Frederick William Davis, George Charles Jenks (1850-1929), whose normal pseudonym was W.B. Lawson, Johnston McCulley (1883-1958) and Eugene Taylor Sawyer. Magazines such as the Nick Carter Detective Library were supplemented by radio, film and tv incarnations, over the course of which Carter himself became noticeably tougher and more murderous, his resemblance to Sexton Blake being correspondingly less marked in more recent years. The Nick Carter series of soft-porn thrillers from the 1960s rarely slipped into sf, and never with much point; typical of titles verging on sf were (all as by Nick Carter) The Human Time Bomb: A Killmaster Spy Chiller (1969),The Red Rays (1969) by Manning Lee STOKES, Living Death (1969) by Jon Messmann, Operation Moon Rocket (1970) and The Death Strain (1971). It is understood that among the authors about this time were, in addition to Messmann, Michael AVALLONE, Dennis LYNDS, Martin Cruz SMITH and Richard WORMSER. A decade later, a further batch of sf titles was produced, again all as by NC, including The Doomsday Spore (1979) by George Warren, The Q-Man (1981) by John Stevenson, The Solar Menace (1981) and Doctor DNA (1982), both by Robert E. VARDEMAN, The Last Samurai (1982) by Bruce Algozin and Deathlight (1982) by Jerry AHERN.

   JC