Octavus Roy Cohen


Octavus Roy Cohen was an early 20th-century American writer specializing in ethnic comedies. His dialect comedy stories about African Americans gained popularity after being published in the Saturday Evening Post and were adapted into a series of short films by Al Christie featuring actors Charles Olden, Spencer Williams Jr., Evelyn Preer, and Edward Thompson. His portrayals drew criticism from the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois, who complained about "the monstrosities he has created".

Biography

Early life

Cohen was born on June 26, 1891, in Charleston, South Carolina, to Octavus and Rebecca Cohen. He pronounced his first name oc-tav'us, a as in have. Through his mother, he was the cousin of Rodrigues Ottolengui, who also wrote crime fiction.
He received his secondary education at the Porter Military Academy, now the Porter-Gaud School, and graduated in 1908. He went on to Clemson College and graduated in 1911 with a degree in engineering.

Career

Between 1910 and 1912, he worked in the editorial departments of the Birmingham Ledger, the Charleston News and Courier, the Bayonne Times, and the Newark Morning Star.
He became popular as a result of his stories printed in The Saturday Evening Post which were about African-Americans. In 1913, he was admitted to the South Carolina bar and practiced law in Charleston for two years. Between 1917 and his death, he published 56 books, works that included humorous and detective novels, plays, and collections of short stories. He also composed successful Broadway plays and radio, film, and television scripts.
As a mark of his success, on March 20, 1923, Cohen bought the "Redin-Cohen" house, a Tudor Revival-style home in Birmingham, Alabama. He was known to host local writers and journalists to discuss fiction writing while in Birmingham.
He moved from Birmingham to Harlem, New York, in the late 1930s and then to Los Angeles to pursue a film career.

Personal life and death

He married Inez Lopez in October 1914 in Bessemer, Alabama. They had one son, Octavus Roy Cohen, Jr.
His wife died in 1953. He died of a stroke on January 6, 1959, in Los Angeles and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Works

His most notable creation was "Florian Slappey", a fictional black detective who appeared both in print and in a series of short films in the 1920s, These were "ethnic comedies" following the bumbling investigations of Slappey and his travels from Birmingham, Alabama, to Harlem, New York. They were later assembled into a stage play, Come Seven, with Slappey played by Earle Foxe, which ran for 72 performances. A second detective stage play, The Crimson Alibi, featured a white detective, David Carroll.
He wrote:
  • Polished Ebony
  • Gray Dusk
  • Come Seven
  • Highly Colored
  • Midnight
Cohen wrote several novels about detective David Carroll. One of these novels, The Crimson Alibi, was adapted for the stage by George Broadhurst. Cohen's character of Jim Hanvey, "a sort of backwoods Nero Wolfe", "one of the earliest private eyes", appeared in two films; Curtain at Eight, based on his novel The Backstage Mystery, and Jim Hanvey, Detective, based on his original story. "Hanvey made most of his appearances in short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, where much of... Cohen's other work was also published... Cohen created a few other detectives... one of the first black private eyes, Florian Slappey, although they're more famous now for their unflattering portrayal of blacks than their historical significance."
Jim Hanvey books by Cohen:
  • Jim Hanvey, Detective
  • Detours
  • The May Day Mystery
  • The Backstage Mystery
  • Star of Earth
  • ''Scrambled Yeggs''

    Films

  • The Lady Fare is a 1929 American comedy film adapted from a Cohen story.
Cohen was scriptwriter for six known films: