Piccadilly Publishing / William R. Cox

WILLIAM R. COX

William Robert Cox, affectionately known as Bill, was born in Peapack, N.J. March 14 1901, worked in the family ice, coal, wood and fur businesses before becoming a freelance writer. A onetime president of the Western Writers of America, he was said to have averaged 600,000 published words a year for 14 years during the era of the pulp magazines.

His writing career began with feature writing for Sunday Call, a newspaper in Newark. Later, at age 21, he edited La Tribuna, a weekly Italian-American paper. Cox's first fiction story (on football) was published in 1934, in American Boy. He went on to write stories for detective, Western and sport pulp magazines, such as: Argosy, Blue Book, Dime Sports, Sports Novels, Detective Tales, Black Mask, and Dime Western. He wrote under at least seven pseudonyms: Willard d'Arcy, Mike Frederic, John Parkhill, Joel Reeve, Wayne Robbins, Roger G. Spellman and Jonas Ward. Sometime during the 1930s he moved to Florida and wrote for the pulp magazine industry for at least 14 years.

When these magazines slumped in the late 1940s, Mr. Cox took up writing television plays and some screenplays, including two motion picture films produced by Universal Studios in the 1950s: "The Veils of Baghdad" and "Tanganyika."

One of his first published novels was Make My Coffin Strong, published by Fawcett in the early 1950's. He wrote 80 novels encompassing sports, mystery and westerns. Doubleday published his biography of Luke Short in 1961.

From 1951 Cox began working in TV and his first teleplay was for Fireside Theatre - an episode called 'Neutral Corner.' It was in 1952 that he contributed his first Western screenplay called 'Bounty Jumpers' for the series Western G-Men which had Pat Gallagher and his sidekick Stoney Crockett as Secret Service agents in the Old West, dispatched by the government to investigate crimes threatening the young nation. He went on to contribute to Jesse James' Women; Steve Donovan, Western Marshal; Broken Arrow; Wagon Train; Zane Grey Theater; Pony Express; Natchez Trace; Whispering Smith; Tales of Wells Fargo; The Virginian; Bonanza and Hec Ramsey.
He wrote under at least six pseudonyms: Willard d'Arcy; Mike Frederic; John Parkhill; Joel Reeve; Roger G. Spellman and Jonas Ward (contributing to the Buchanan Western series).

According to a 1988 article in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote 80 novels, 1,000 short stories, 100 television scripts and screenplays.

William R. Cox died of congestive heart failure Sunday at his home in Los Angeles in 1988. He was 87 years old. His wife, Casey, said he died at his typewriter while working on his 81st novel, Cemetery Jones and the Tombstone Wars. We are delighted to bring back his Cemetery Jones and Buchanan series., along with some of this stand alone classic westerns for the first time in digital form.

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WILLIAM R. COX

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All rights reserved 2019
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