Richard Jessup was never content to stay in one genre—or even one type of story. Raised in an orphanage, he ran away to sea at thirteen and later dug cesspools and worked road gangs to feed his family. Writing was an act of grit and determination. Jessup hammered at his typewriter for ten hours a night, cycling through jobs as a merchant seaman, gambling dealer, and manual laborer. By age forty-seven, he had turned out hundreds of radio and TV scripts, seventy-five novels, and a fistful of film credits—sometimes under his own name, sometimes as Richard Telfair or Carey Rockwell.
Stark House Press has brought together two of Jessup’s most distinctive midcentury crime novels: Port Angelique and Wolf Cop. Each book reveals a different facet of Jessup’s craft, but both are bound by his keen eye for damaged, driven characters who live at the edge of hope and ruin.
Port Angelique, first published in 1961, immerses the reader in a fictional Caribbean territory where nothing is simple and everyone’s hustling for something. The island—lush but fraying at the edges—is held together by Police Commissioner Stanley Fowler, a man whose obsession with the job has already cost him his marriage. Fowler’s newest task: track down Sabo de Chine, a half-Chinese, half-local criminal returned to recover his hidden fortune. Around them, Jessup weaves a dense web of strivers, schemers, and survivors—Bip, the illiterate boy, the restless Jean Tambour, the calculating port captain George Kenny, and outsiders like Carla Corduan, a New York doctor with her own motives. Jessup’s prose is sharp, never wasting a word, and he excels at drawing out the quiet dignity and desperation of island life. What lingers isn’t just the twists, but the sense of a place where every loyalty is suspect and the sea is always waiting to wash things clean.
Wolf Cop, published the same year, offers a starker, colder perspective on justice in a crumbling American city. Detective Sergeant Anthony Serella—the so-called “wolf cop”—is obsession made flesh: abrasive, relentless, and nearly incapable of letting go. When a retired music teacher is murdered, Serella bulldozes his way through the investigation, alienating colleagues and risking his career with every step. The city around him, perched on the banks of the Ohio River, is as battered as its detective. Jessup is masterful with the rhythms of the procedural: the grinding frustration of dead ends, the tense backroom deals, the brutal calculus of policing when the system itself is broken. Even as Serella spirals, Jessup’s writing never loses its grip, threading together multiple cases and a cast of informants, hustlers, and bureaucrats. Anthony Boucher of the New York Times called it “one of the strongest American procedurals outside of the 87th Precinct.”
What binds these books is Jessup’s relentless curiosity about what drives people—cops, criminals, or ordinary strivers—to keep fighting. Whether he’s charting the fraught alliances of a Caribbean outpost or the lonely battles of a cop with nothing left to lose, Jessup’s stories are unsentimental but never unfeeling. His characters are battered, compulsive, and forever reaching for something just out of reach.
If you crave crime fiction with muscle, style, and a true sense of place, Jessup’s Wolf Cop and Port Angelique are well worth tracking down. Stark House Press has done a genuine service by bringing these gritty, restless novels back into print. You can pick up a copy on their website, Amazon, or at your favorite online retailer.