Though Damon Runyon was a writer of a very particular breed of fact based fiction; stories about people of a very particular time and place, told in a way that he made very much his own, the likes of characters such as Philip Marlow are nowhere to be seen. Instead you find yourself bumping along quite amiably with the likes of Bookie Bob, Harry the Horse or Dave the Dude. What comes across in his fiction is his fascination with relatively ordinary, If moderately eccentric people and the relatively ordinary, if moderately eccentric things that they did. All his characters have now become accepted as a breed apart dubbed ‘Runyonesque’
Runyon was to say of his characters around 1940 when his fame was established as a fiction writer,
“To me any ‘Character’ used to be a distinctive, colourful and interesting person.”