Thursday, September 22, 2011

More Jerry Cotton

In response to my Forgotten Books post last week about the lone American edition of a novel from the long-running Jerry Cotton series in Germany, one of my readers informed me that the series is still being published, with more than 2800 novels so far! That's just amazing to me. The website for the series is here, and if you check it out you'll see that not only are new Jerry Cotton novels still coming out, but some of the older ones are being reprinted as well. I love some of the titles: DEATH PLAYS WITH LOADED DICE, REVENGE HAS NO EXPIRATION DATE, WHEN CORPSES COULD TALK, IN THE SHADOW OF THE RAT . . . Looking at this almost makes me want to write a Jerry Cotton novel. Maybe I'll put a Cotton cameo in some project. Thanks, Wolfgang!
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10 comments:

Tim Mayer said...

Germany does love it's long-running novels. How many PERRY RHODAN books have been written?

7:16 AM, September 22, 2011
James Reasoner said...

According to Wikipedia, Perry Rhodan passed 2600 novels earlier this year. So not quite as many as Jerry Cotton, but almost.

9:29 AM, September 22, 2011
Cap'n Bob said...

Crider has full runs of each. Signed.

12:26 PM, September 22, 2011
Cora said...

Jerry Cotton is the longest continuously published series in Germany and has been running since 1956. The character himself was introduced two years earlier in an anthology series. The total print run of all Jerry Cotton novelettes is approx. 850 million in Germany alone and that figure is a few years old.

By comparison, Perry Rhodan started in 1961 and just celebrated his 50th anniversary.

7:37 AM, September 25, 2011
James Reasoner said...

Thanks, Cora. Does anyone know who actually created the Jerry Cotton character?

9:39 AM, September 25, 2011
Cora said...

Jerry Cotton was created by one Delfried Kaufmann, a washing powder salesman who wrote pulp novelettes in his spare time. Kaufmann, however, only wrote a few early stories. The majority were written by other writers, most notably Heinz Werner Höber.

Unlike many other German pulp novelettes such as Perry Rhodan, the Jerry Cotton novelettes do not have a byline. They are written in the first person which led a lot of people to assume that those were the memoirs of a real FBI agent. The legend goes that the FBI office in New York, where the fictional Jerry Cotton was based, received so many letters addressed to G-Man Jerry Cotton that they printed a special form letter stating that no agent named Jerry Cotton works for the FBI. I have never been able to confirm the story though.

4:01 PM, September 25, 2011
James Reasoner said...

Interesting stuff. Many thanks! I always like to know who wrote what.

6:39 PM, September 25, 2011
James Reasoner said...

And if the story about people writing to Cotton at the FBI office isn't true, it ought to be!

6:40 PM, September 25, 2011
Teresa Cotton said...

Hi, I know that it's been a year since you talked on this topic but I just found it and am wondering about Jerry Cotton. Because that is my father's name and he worked in crypto in the US Army. He was stationed throughout the world including Germany, France and Italy. Jerry was a nickname given to him as a child during world war II. His real name was Robert W. Cotton. He was a really handsome man and appears to fit the profile of that character. My Dad retired in 1974 and died in 1999. I would like to know if there is anyway to verify if Delfried Kaufmann knew or knew of my father when he wrote that 1st story?

4:58 PM, September 29, 2012
Anonymous said...

Delfried Kaufmann writer first Jerry Cotton home Essen Germany.He´s inspiration Karl Mayn Western.

9:50 AM, August 31, 2013

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