McGinnis Nine-Nine: Milo’s March of Crimes

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



About two years ago, when I was visiting an old college friend in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we stopped by the new home of Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore (relocated after a fire in 2020). While there, I happened across a shelf filled with Paperback Library reprints of Kendell Crossen yarns from the early 1970s—all with Robert McGinnis-painted covers. Crossen, you will likely remember, produced more than 20 novels starring globetrotting insurance investigator Milo March, published initially under the pseudonym M.E. Chaber.

Needless to say, I promptly loaded my arms with the titles not already in my collection, and headed to the sales counter.

Crossen’s crime and mystery works were once very popular with readers, especially with readers of the male persuasion. And you can probably tell why, if you notice some of the cover blurbs on his March books, describing their protagonist as “smoothly impudent” and “one of the most convincing he-man detectives that ever hoisted a martini.” Those lines don’t mention March’s desirability among the female population, but the Web site Spy Guys and Gals points out that in these fast-paced and often fun stories, he “never sees a drink that doesn’t need sipping or a lovely lady that doesn’t need kissing and he is too gallant to refuse either.” McGinnis’ Paperback Library fronts only emphasized those points, being filled with long-legged and never overly attired lovelies, and March (looking very much like actor James Coburn, it should be said) inevitably with a glass and gun in hand.

Most of the Milo March books were published during the 1950s and ’60s, and for many years afterward, it was only by poking through used bookstores that they could be obtained. All that changed in 2020, when pulp house Steeger Books—with help from the author’s daughter and literary executor, Kendra Crossen Burroughs—began releasing remastered, uniform editions of the March tales boasting bonus articles, Burroughs’ forewords or afterwords, and retro-style artwork. All 21 of the originally published books are now available again, together with a previously unpublished 22nd novel, Death to the Brides, and a collection of March short stories titled The Twisted Trap.

I must admit, though, that I still have a soft place in my heart for McGinnis’ Paperback Library (PL) series, which rolled out from 1970 to 1971. While some of those March entries have already been featured on this page in the past, and need not be revisited, the remainder are making their Killer Covers debuts here. I haven’t arranged them according to the numbers PL gave each, as they do not correspond to the order in which the books first saw print, but only to the sequence in which PL brought them before the reading public.













In addition to “M.E. Chaber,” Kendall Crossen also penned crime novels under a variety of the other noms de plume, including Bennett Barlay, Christopher Monig, Richard Foster, and Clay Richards. Paperback Library made the smart decision to assign McGinnis the responsibility of creating covers for the reprints of some of those, too.





READ MORE: “Milo March #2—No Grave for March” (Paperback Warrior).