Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective

Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective
Cover of High Adventure #60 (September 2001), featuring Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective
Publisher	Culture Publications
First appearance	Spicy Detective #2 (June 1934)
Hollywood Detective
Publisher	Culture Publications
Schedule	Monthly (intent, frequent lateness)
Genre	Detective
Publication date	January 1942 – October 1950
Number of issues	59
Editor(s)	Kenneth W. Hutchinson Adolphe Barreaux (1949-1950)
Films or serials
Blackmail	Republic Pictures 1947 Portrayed by: William Marshall
The Raven Red Kiss-Off	Fries Entertainment 1990 Portrayed by: Marc Singer

Dan Turner, also known as the Hollywood Detective, was a fictional private detective created by Robert Leslie Bellem. His first appearance was in the second issue of the pulp magazine Spicy Detective, dated June 1934, and he continued to appear regularly in that magazine (which was retitled Speed Detective in 1943) until its demise in February 1947. He also appeared in his "own" magazine, Hollywood Detective, which was published by Culture Publications (later Trojan Publishing) and ran from January 1942 to October 1950.

Dan Turner was a typical hardboiled private eye, who worked in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles. Most of the stories are set in and around the film studios, and focus on crimes involving people in the movie business – film stars, stuntmen, producers, agents, extras and an endless array of glamorous female "starlets". The Dan Turner stories were notorious for their emphasis on sexual content, although this was generally implied rather than described explicitly.

A large number of the Dan Turner stories were written by Bellem himself, who had a good inside knowledge of Hollywood having worked as a film extra. The Hollywood Detective magazine also featured a Dan Turner comic strip, drawn by Max Plaisted. Adolphe Barreaux, who drew the much racier Sally The Sleuth, was the first to draw Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective in the 1940s (the stories by Bellem).

All the Dan Turner stories are written in the first person, in a racy, slang-ridden style that gives them a unique flavor. Guns are never "guns" but "roscoes", and they always go "ka-chow!". A woman is never simply a "woman" but a "dame", "frail", "quail", "wren" or, if particularly attractive, a "doll" or "cutie".

In his comic essay, "Somewhere A Roscoe...," humorist S.J. Perelman both praises and skewers the Dan Turner mysteries. In the essay, Perelman says of Culture Publications, Inc., "In Spicy Detective, they have achieved the sauciest blend of libido and murder this side of Gilles de Rais. They have juxtaposed the steely automatic and the frilly pantie and found that it pays off. Above all, they have given the world Dan Turner, the apotheosis of all private detectives."