Les Whitten died over the weekend. Whitten was an investigative reporter who worked with famed columnist Jack Anderson, author of Washington’s Merry-Go-Round column. (Fox’s Brit Hume is another notable reporter who worked for Anderson.) However, Whitten was reasonably well-known in his own right. He’s slipped into obscurity a bit in recent decades, but in his prime he a was among the more colorful figures in the nation’s capital. Whitten’s Washington Post obituary—“Les Whitten, investigative reporter arrested by FBI and spied on by CIA, dies at 89”—is certainly worth reading. Alas, I only noticed the obituary because people were talking about how the Post had to rather embarrassingly correct the location of the Watergate burglary. Whitten would no doubt be amused.

However, Whitten should be remembered for another notable achievement he’s rarely credited for: He had a massive impact on the horror and science-fiction genres over the last 50 or so years.

The Post’s obituary focuses on his political career and gives his literary career short shrift, but in addition to politics, Whitten also wrote a handful of novels. One of those was a political potboiler, Conflict of Interest, which sold pretty well in 1977—well enough that it allowed him to retire from full-time journalism. But Whitten had also dabbled in the horror genre, writing a vampire novel and a werewolf novel in the 1960s. Neither of those books is well remembered, but to the extent they are remembered, it's quite fondly. The werewolf book, Moon of the Wolf, is best known for being made into a 1972 TV movie (starring David Janssen of The Fugitive) but Joe R. Lansdale, the rare award-winning author who commands respect in both genre and literary circles, called the Moon of the Wolf "the definitive werewolf novel."

However, for my money, Whitten’s vampire novel, The Progeny of the Adder is even better. Like I said, it’s largely unknown, but it didn’t escape the notice of the most important fiction writer of the modern era: Stephen King put it on his list of essential horror novels in Danse Macabre. To contemporary readers, The Progeny of the Adder—Whitten was fond of translating Baudelaire in his spare time and this is where he derived the title—may seem like little more than a competent, supernatural-tinged thriller: It’s a police procedural about a serial killer in Washington. The killings slowly look stranger and stranger until it becomes clear that they’re the work of a vampire.

But The Progeny of the Adder was written in 1965 and the phrase “ahead of its time” doesn’t begin to do it justice. I suspect that the reason the book is so fondly remembered is that when King, Lansdale, and others first encountered it, this mash-up of a modern police procedural and horror story was revolutionary. (Heck, if you view it through the lens only of what happens to an evidence-based police investigation when the crimes appear to have irrational motivations, it’s a pioneering book for the serial killer genre, too.)

Now, if the basic story of The Progeny of the Adder sounds familiar, that’s probably because the 1973 book The Night Stalker became a cult classic that was turned into a beloved TV movie, and then the TV series Kolchak, inspiring legions of pulp fiction lovers along the way. As Lansdale put it, Progeny was “undoubtedly the influence” for The Night Stalker.

The setting of The Night Stalker is Las Vegas, as opposed to Washington, and the protagonist is a reporter, not a cop, but other than that, it's a remarkably similar chasing-a-vampire-all-across-the-city plot. (In fairness to Kolchak creator Jeff Rice, I think his book is more entertaining in many ways, and it's certainly more witty.) It's also worth noting that the teleplay for the original Kolchak TV movie that made the character famous was written by Richard Matheson, one of the best and most influential horror and science-fiction novelists of the 20th century. Chris Carter has been pretty blunt about the degree to which The X-Files was inspired by Kolchak, and the number of pieces of popular entertainment in the last 40 years that owe a debt to either of these shows is far too vast to mention here.

In sum, a huge swath of what you’ve read and watched owes a debt to Les Whitten. I guess it’s a tribute to his political notoriety that he’s not really remembered for his groundbreaking genre fiction. But in the end, his literary achievements will be what endure. May he rest in peace.