William Roos (1911-1987) was born in Pennsylvania, eventually heading to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh to study drama, first as an actor, then as a playwright. Audrey Kelley (1912-1982) was born in New Jersey and also ended up at Carnegie Tech at the same time as Roos to study acting. They met, fell in love, and like many wannabe actors and playwrights, moved to New York City.
What followed was a less-than-successful effort on both their parts initially, until Audry decided to try mystery writing as a career. It's unknown how she and her husband decided to collaborate, but collaborate they did, using a combination of their surnames as a pen name, Kelley Roos. According to their son, one of his parents would work on the even-numbered chapters, the other the odd-numbered chapters, then they would turn their chapters over to the other for rewrites.
Their first book, Made Up To Kill, was published in 1940 by Dodd, Mead, and featured husband-and-wife sleuth team, Jeff Troy, a photographer and jack-of-all-trades and Haila Troy, actress, who live in Greenwich Village. Son Stephen adds that "The Troys were a lot like my parents. They laughed a lot, drank a lot too. They worked very hard at their writing, but they never looked on their work as art. It was fun. They were entertainers."
In addition to the novels, William continued to write plays, including January Thaw and the book for the long-running 1948 Mike Todd musical, As the Girls Go. He and Audrey took their collaboration to the stage for the mystery play, Speaking of Murder, which had only a month's run in New York but longer when it moved to London. In 1961, their adaptation of John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court was televised by the National Broadcasting Company and picked up the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
Ghost of a Chance from 1947 was the sixth of nine novels featuring the Troy duo, and starts off with a cryptic phone call to Jeff from a mysterious stranger who wants Jeff's help because an unnamed woman is going to be murdered. The Troys follow the strangers's instructions to meet him, hopping through bars and on to Times Square—only to find the stranger dead beneath a subway train. Believing the man was pushed to his death, but unable to convince anyone else, the Troys begin a suspenseful hunt to find the identity of the woman who is being targeted before the murderous gang behind the plot gets to her first, even as the Troys themselves are followed, shot at, and held virtual captives in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse.
As with the other Troy novels, Jeff does most of the detecting (something New York homicide cop Lt. George Hankins prefers to call "meddling") with Haila narrating the action, spotting clues, and proving she's far from a typical damsel-in-distress, all the while engaging in non-stop cheery banter along with her wry asides:
Jeff whistled a merry tune while we waited. I, too, felt fine. Actually, it wasn't much. Locating a man who owned a hansom cab that was driven years ago by a man who knew the name of a woman who was slated to be murdered was still a long way from finding that woman. But it was something, a little something. After hours and hours of nothing but high, thick stone walls it was worth whistling about. I joined Jeff, supplying some doubtful harmony to his doubtful melody of that recorded cantata in praise of Piel's light beer of Broadway fame.
Ghost of a Chance was filmed as Scent of Mystery (1960) starring Denholm Elliott, Beverly Bentley and Peter Lorre (with Elizabeth Taylor making an uncredited cameo). The location was changed to Spain, and the film was scripted by William Rose, but Kelley Roos turned around and created a novelization of the film, published to coincide with the movie release. Interestingly, the movie was made in the short-lived technology Smell-O-Vision, where the theatre was equipped with a system that gave off various odours synched up with the film, such as the opening scene with a butterfly flitting through a peach grove that called up peach scents, and later a smashed barrel of wine.
Other Roos novels were made into films (sans Smell-O-Vision), including The Frightened Stiff, which became A Night to Remember (1942), with Haila and Jeff portrayed by Loretta Young and Brian Aherne; Dangerous Blondes in 1943 starring Allyn Joslyn and Evelyn Keyes; The Blonde Died Dancing, filmed in France as Do You Want to Dance With Me? in 1959 and starring Brigitte Bardot and Henri Vidal; And To Save His Life made into the TV-Movie, Dead Men Tell No Tales in 1971. Following in the tradition of Nick and Nora Charles, Pam and Jerry North (written by another husband-and-wife duo, Richard and Frances Lockridge), it's a shame that the Troys have been largely forgotten.
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