The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-05-01
The Man Who Made
 Nick Carter Famous
From the Nsa gaE9 srald.

From the NeH EoEk erald.
 The elder Dumas pasted to Napoleon III that he had arittan 200 volumes of fiction, but this huge eotal inaiaded the novels he wrote in collab1 b1ration and tle stuff he bought from others ard touched up In point of actual per sonal production it is unlikely that Dumas approached the number of words written by Frederick Van Rensselaer, Dey, whose death announced yesterday.
 Beginning with 1890, Dey wrote one Nick Carter dime novel every week, with few ex- captions, for 20 years. The name of the famous detective did not originate with Dey; one book about Nick had appeared before Dey took up the task of providing the weekly feast for the multitude of devourers of inexpensive tales of crime and adventure. The publishers who had copyrighted the heros name handed it over to Dey with a contract for one thriller a week, and it was Dey who made Nick's repu- tation.
 Under the guidance of Dey, Nick became detective lively, so resourceful, so modern ;n his methods that most of the older set of fiction detectives retired from the field. Before
 
 Collier, Old King Brady and Old Rafferty Men who are now gray-haired golfers knew these celebrities well in the days when their adventures tiptoed through the pages of the family story paper and the hebdomadal sli- braries." They had pistols, handcuffs and dark lanterns galore, but none of them was ingenious as Nick
 Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world in 1884, two years before Nick Carter made his bow; but Dey always vigor- ously insisted that the powers of deduction with which he invested Nick were borrowed direct from Poe and not from the author of "A Study in Scarlet" Not that deduction mat tered much to the followers of Nick; they were keener for the grim chase of criminals, the wonderful disguise and the amazing strength of Dey's protagonist
 Yet Dey was more wonderful in real life than Nick was in fiction. He worked five days week and each day turned out between 5000 and 6000 words-nearly three-quarters of newspaper page. To perform such feat it was necessary to have all possible ease of body and mind. Dey sat in Morris chair and drew close to him typing machine fas- tened to platform which rested on the arms of the chair. Then he lay back, physically at rest, and drummed out page after page If "copy' He planned no plots; it would have been too much of burden to follow them. The talent of Dey for the dime novel was 50 great that he could start story with three minutes thought It came Nick before the second page was typed, and after that Carter and his associates, Chick and Patsy, seemed to weave the yarn themselves with Dey acting as medium.
 As no man harnessed to such load could waste time, Dey found seclusion a necessity. Sometimes he would take a house in the in Fifth avenue office building. When too many friends discovered, the fiction factory he would flee to some new solitude. Twenty typed pages meant good days work. And there was no rewriting, no revision. As the spirit first moved him, so the tale went to the printer.
 Thus Dey guided Nick Carter through more than 1000 adventures, each adventure lit- tie book. Forty million words, the author once said he wrote about his detective before he put him aside and went in for less hasty writing under various pseudonyms, including Varick Vanardy. But it was as the biographer of Nick that Dey gave the greatest pleasure to the millions. And Dey was proud of Nick, almost as proud of him as he was of the fact that his own ancestor drove the first nail ever driven on the island of Manhattan. Those who knew Fred Dey will miss him.