As a former FBI Special Agent currently working as a private investigator, I do a lot of jobs for clients in the publishing industry. They engage me to track down the literary estates of dead authors, so the publishers can strike
a deal to reprint old books. My literary investigations have resulted in a lot of great crime and mystery fiction from the 20th century being reprinted for the enjoyment of modern readers.But none of my cases were as bizarre as my digging into the D.C. Man books by James P. Cody.
That four-novel series, which began with Top Secret Kill, was originally released by Berkeley Medallion in 1974 and 1975. The stories star a Washington, D.C., lobbyist named Brian Peterson who serves as a gun-toting troubleshooter for members of Congress who require sensitive and discreet interventions. The books are a great mixture of mystery, adventure, and spy fiction with fantastic writing and fun characters. Reading the yellowing paperbacks, I was struck by the astute observations of Watergate-era intrigue in the capital city.
I couldn’t get enough of those novels and wished there were more than four of them. I needed to know, who was James P. Cody?
Other than a single short story in the December 1970 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (“The Bogus Hijack”), I could find no record of James P. Cody writing anything else. I dove into 50-year-old U.S. Copyright Office records, and all signs led me to the conclusion that the author’s real name was Peter T. Rohrbach.
Here’s where it gets weird.
The only Peter Rohrbach I could find was a Roman Catholic priest who also authored several books on Catholic theology for his contemplative religious order (the Carmelites). Could a Catholic clergyman have written a quartet of sexy crime-adventure paperbacks under a fake name without anyone knowing?
At his Catholic seminary, I located an elderly monk named Brother Bryan, who confirmed to me that he had lived, worked, and prayed with Father Rohrbach back in the day. He confirmed that Rohrbach was deceased, but added that he left the priesthood in the early 1970s, got married, and had a daughter. Brother Bryan wasn’t familiar with the D.C. Man books, but told me his impression was that Father Rohrbach left the priesthood to pursue his dreams of being a famous novelist. “We all have our fatal attractions,” the monk told me.
Additional digging led me to Rohrbach’s daughter, Sarah. She confirmed that her father was, in fact, the former priest who wrote the D.C. Man paperbacks. Sarah said that James P. Cody was actually her father’s birth name. When young James was orphaned, he was adopted by the Rohrbach family. He subsequently changed his first name when entering the priesthood, and Father Peter Rohrbach was born. It wasn’t until he started quietly writing crime-adventure fiction that the name James P. Cody was resurrected.
Despite being excellent mystery-adventures, the D.C. Man novels were not commercially successful in the 1970s, and Rohrbach quit genre fiction to become a history teacher. He wrote non-fiction books about stagecoach travel and the Wright Brothers before his death in 2004.
(Above) The first two of Brash Books’ 2024 Cody reprints.I turned my unmasking of his pseudonym into a feature article for the Paperback Warrior blog called “Searching for The D.C. Man,” and it quickly became the site’s most-visited post. This had the unintended side-effect of making the D.C. Man books nearly impossible to find on the used market for less than $200 per copy. While I was happy to bring attention to these great mystery novels, I found it frustrating that the old adventure paperbacks were impossible to locate for readers wanting to ride shotgun beside D.C. Man Brian Petersen.
That scarcity and newfound demand gave me a brainstorm. I have a good relationship with best-selling mystery author Lee Goldberg, who runs the Brash Books reprint publishing house. Lee is a trusted friend and a quick-paying client who regularly engages me to find the heirs of dead authors whose work he’s hoping to reprint. Meanwhile, I kept in touch with Rohrbach’s daughter, Sarah, who appreciated my article revealing her father as the author behind the James P. Cody pseudonym. What if I brought them together to get the D.C. Man books back in print? Needless to say, they both loved the idea.
And that’s pretty much how everything went down. All four of the D.C. Man novels are available now from Brash Books, and they’re getting more attention and love today than they ever received 50 years ago when they first hit the paperback spinner racks of your local drug store. As The D.C. Man’s first cheerleader, I am thrilled that they are available again for a new generation of readers to enjoy. Just for the record, their titles are:
• Top Secret Kill
• Search and Destroy
• Your Daughter Will Die!
• The French Killing
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