Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #12: The Private Eyes Issue - Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham, eds.

I’ve been a fan of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY since it began, and it’s a real pleasure and honor to have an article in the latest issue, #12, The Private Eyes Issue. My contribution is about detectives in Western fiction, and I hope it’s both entertaining and informative, but I’m here today to talk about the rest of the contents. Which, of course, are absolutely top-notch, as I’ve come to expect from editors Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham.

For starters, there are stories from two of my favorite authors featuring two of my favorite fictional private eyes: Michael Avallone and his iconic character Ed Noon, and Frank Kane and his equally legendary private eye Johnny Liddell. The Avallone story is “Make Out Mob Girl”, a Book Bonus condensation of the first Ed Noon novel THE TALL DOLORES, from the October 1962 issue of MAN'S WORLD. David Spencer, author of THE NOVELIZERS, provides a fine introduction to Avallone and his career, and Mike's son David Avallone contributes a touching essay about his dad. As a long time fan of Mike Avallone and his work, I'm really glad I got be his friend-by-correspondence for many years. 

Frank Kane’s “Party Girl” (KEN FOR MEN, May 1957) is a retitled reprint of the story “Frame” from the August 1954 issue of MANHUNT, the great crime fiction digest. This story was also reprinted in the paperback collection JOHNNY LIDDELL’S MORGUE from Dell. Both are really strong stories, and if you’ve never read any Ed Noon or Johnny Liddell stories or novels, this would be a fine place to start.

But of course there’s more. Honey West is probably the most famous fictional female private eye, and this issue includes the only Honey West short story, “The Red Hairing” by G.G. Fickling, actually the husband and wife writing team Forrest (“Skip”) and Gloria Fickling. This one appeared originally in the June 1965 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. In addition, there’s an article about the TV series HONEY WEST featuring numerous photos of its beautiful star, Anne Francis. I was a fan of the show when it aired originally in the Sixties and am always happy to revisit it.

Walter Kaylin, one of the best authors who wrote for the men’s adventure magazine, contributes “I Had to Amputate My Leg to Save My Life!”, the tale of a private detective trapped by a mad killer, and it’s every bit as harrowing and gruesome as the title makes it sound. It’s also lightning-fast, compelling reading. Kaylin was a master, and this story is a good example of his work.

A story from a short-lived men’s adventure magazine actually called PRIVATE EYE features detective Adam Baxter in “Sing a Song of Sex-Mail”. It’s an entertaining yarn written in a fast-moving, breezy style. The story was published anonymously and I have no idea who wrote it, but I had fun reading it.

There’s also a non-fiction reprint from Alan Hynd called “The Case of the Murdering Detective” (CAVALIER, September 1956) about a real-life murder case from 1910 and the clever detective who solves it. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not much of a fan of true crime stories, but Hynd does a fine job with this one and kept me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

New articles in this issue include the one by me on Western detectives that I mentioned above, a look at some of the latest Sherlock Holmes pastiches, both literary and TV, from Holmes scholar and fan Paul Bishop, and film critic John Harrison on detectives in science fiction films. Plus a feature on early Sixties TV series 77 SUNSET STRIP and HAWAIAN EYE, both of which were favorites of mine, especially 77 SUNSET STRIP. I never missed an episode back in those days. If you're the right age, you can hear the show's theme song in your head right now, can't you? I miss the Sixties just thinking about all this stuff!

I know I’ve said it before, but this is the best issue yet of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY. You can find it on Amazon, and I give it my highest recommendation.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Dead Game - Michael Avallone

In the spirit of full disclosure, Mike Avallone was my friend. When I was a kid, he was one of my favorite writers as soon as I read my first novel by him, which was also the first novel in Ace's MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series. As I may have mentioned before, that was the book that made me realize a writer could have a distinctive voice, that the work he produced could sound so unique that it couldn't possibly have been written by anybody else. And to this day, I love a book like that, like the ones Avallone so often produced such as his MANNIX tie-in novel and his entries in the Nick Carter series.

Years later, a mutual friend put me in touch with Mike, and we corresponded for years after that, off and on all the way up to his death. He was a guy who loved pulps and movies and baseball, and a lot of his books, especially the early novels about his most famous character, private eye Ed Noon, are pretty darned good.

Which brings us to DEAD GAME.

I thought I had read all of the Ed Noon novels except for a few late ones that were published only in England, but when a friend of mine sent me a copy of this one, the third in the series, I realized I hadn't read it. Sitting down to read an Ed Noon novel that was new to me is a treat I figured I'd never have again. DEAD GAME didn't disappoint me, either.

It starts simply enough, with Ed being hired to tail a cheating husband. That's what the guy's wife tells Ed, anyway. But instead of visiting a girlfriend, the man heads for the Polo Grounds instead, to take in an exhibition baseball game between the New York Giants and a visiting minor-league team. Then in the ninth inning, in the middle of the action, the minor-league team's third baseman is somehow stabbed to death, and the guy Ed's been following rushes onto the field to search the dead man's uniform before getting away. Ed is left with the questions of who murdered the third baseman, and what was the man he was tailing was looking for.

Well, things get even more complicated than that, of course. A cop gets killed along the way, putting Ed on the bad side of his old friend, Captain Michael Monks. Ed runs into a beautiful redhead and an equally beautiful brunette, the latter named Mimi Tango, one of the great, oddball character names Avallone could come up with. There's a lot of banter, a few fistfights, and Ed gets hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, a private eye cliché but one that I happen to enjoy. Finally, there's even a gathering of all the suspects where Ed explains what happened and why, leading up to one last burst of action. The "impossible crime" nature of the murder in the middle of the baseball game sort of gets lost in the shuffle along the way, and when the explanation does come, it's hardly what you'd consider a "fair play" solution. But I don't think that's what Avallone was going for. A book like DEAD GAME is supposed to be fast, flippant, and fun . . . and it is.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 24, 2009. There's now an e-book edition of DEAD GAME available on Amazon, a prospect that never entered my head back in 2009.)

Forgotten Books: Never Love a Call Girl - Mike Avallone

Michael Avallone wrote about a dozen softcore novels for Midwood in the early Sixties, billed on all of them simply as Mike Avallone. I hadn’t run across any of them out in the wild for many years, until I recently found this one at Recycled Books in Denton. The scan is of the copy I bought. I was in need of something good to read, because just before picking up this one, I had slogged through the first 50 pages of a book by a currently best-selling, highly acclaimed author, and I do mean slogged. I set that one aside and wanted to read something by somebody who knew how to tell a story, and Mike Avallone, for all of his gung-ho enthusiasm that sometimes led to odd turns of phrase and sentence structures, was always one hell of a storyteller. And so it is here.

NEVER LOVE A CALL GIRL is the story of high-priced call girl Irma Cavendish, also known simply as Dish. She certainly is, an auburn-haired beauty who is in high demand, although she has a regular lover in an out-of-town businessman who keeps her in an apartment on East Thirty-first Street in New York. One of her clients is a young man who was adopted as an orphan from China by an American journalist. He works at the U.N. as a translator and falls in love with Irma despite her profession. She struggles not to fall in love with him, because she likes her life the way it is. Complications ensue.

There’s not a whole lot of plot in this novel, and what there is, is pretty soap operatic. But Avallone knew how to keep the reader flipping the pages anyway. I raced through NEVER LOVE A CALL GIRL with great enjoyment. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is good, and it’s also a vivid portrait of New York in 1962. In the hands of the better writers, these Sixties softcore novels have more to tell the reader about how society really was back then than a lot of more serious books do. They were written by unpretentious authors for unpretentious readers, and there’s a real air of authenticity about them. If you have a copy of NEVER LOVE A CALL GIRL on your shelves or happen to run across one like I did, it’s well worth reading. And it’s only about 45,000 words long, which is always a plus.

The Return of Ed Noon (and Michael Avallone)

I've probably mentioned before how it was Mike Avallone who first made me understand the concept of an author's voice. It was 1965, and the book was THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., the first tie-in novel from my new favorite TV show. Before that I'd been a voracious reader, but I never really thought that much about who wrote what. I knew which books I liked, but chances are I couldn't have told you who wrote them. Mike Avallone and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. changed all that. For the first time I knew I wanted to read more books written by this guy.

And so I did. Dozens of them in the next few years, and many more in the decades after that. I even got to know Mike through correspondence and traded letters with him for years.

Now comes the news from his son David that many of Mike's novels are going to be available again as e-books, starting with the first four books from the Ed Noon series. I've read all of these, and they're great fun, some of the most purely entertaining private eye novels I've read. You can read more about these reprints here, and links for the first four books are below. Mike's work probably isn't for everybody, but there's nothing else like it and I'll always be a fan.

Forgotten Books: Station Six - Sahara -- Michael Avallone

I remember when this book came out, as well as the movie on which it’s based, even though I never saw the movie and never read the novelization until now. I remember them because they both came out in 1964, when I was eleven years old, and that artwork featuring Carroll Baker was on the movie poster as well as the book cover. Yowza!


And since I never saw the movie, I can only judge STATION SIX – SAHARA as a novel. I’m happy to report that it’s pretty good. The story opens with German engineer Martin Donetz arriving at the Medina Oil Company Pumping Station Six, somewhere deep in the Sahara Desert. The station is manned – and I mean that literally – by several guys of various nationalities, all of whom are at each other’s throats due to the monotony and isolation of their existence. Another German, Kramer, is in charge of the station. There’s a wisecracking Australian, a stiff-necked former British Army officer, and an enigmatic Spaniard, plus some assorted Arabs. The first half of the book gives us back-stories and a steadily increasing sense of tension, then a beautiful blonde and her possibly sinister ex-husband show up to make all hell break loose.


Well, it never quite does, but there’s some nice suspense anyway. The legendary Michael Avallone plays it pretty straight here, as he did in most of his novelizations. There’s no sign of the goofy Avallone humor you find in the Ed Noon novels. Old pro that he was, he keeps the plot moving along briskly, or as briskly as he can considering the somewhat stodgy storyline he was handed. The movie itself was written by British authors Bryan Forbes and Brian Clemens (who worked on THE AVENGERS, among other iconic British TV series), and in a sign of how times have changed, the copyright of the novelization is in the names of Avallone, Forbes, and Clemens, rather than Allied Artists, the movie production company.


This is a fairly entertaining novel, not a classic by any means but worth reading. And it’s got that great cover art. Well, it was great when I was eleven years old.

The February Doll Murders

Bob Randisi mentioned this book in the comments to the previous post. I thought I remembered the cover, but I had to find a scan of it to be certain. Yep, this is the same book I bought off the paperback rack in Buddie's Grocery Story in 1967. I was thirteen years old. No wonder I never forgot it.

Forgotten Books: Dead Game - Michael Avallone

In the spirit of full disclosure, Mike Avallone was my friend. When I was a kid, he was one of my favorite writers as soon as I read my first novel by him, which was also the first novel in Ace's MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series. As I may have mentioned before, that was the book that made me realize a writer could have a distinctive voice, that the work he produced could sound so unique that it couldn't possibly have been written by anybody else. And to this day, I love a book like that, even goofy little gems like the ones Avallone so often produced, like his MANNIX tie-in novel and his entries in the Nick Carter series.

Years later, a mutual friend put me in touch with Mike, and we corresponded for years after that, off and on all the way up to his death. I know the stories are legion in the publishing business about how hard he was to work with. I know how quick-tempered he was and felt the brunt of it myself on occasion. I know that a lot of his books, especially the later ones, weren't very good. But he was still my friend, a guy who loved pulps and movies and baseball, and a lot of his books, especially the early novels about his most famous character, private eye Ed Noon, are pretty darned good.

Which brings us to DEAD GAME.

I thought I had read all of the Ed Noon novels except for a few late ones that were published only in England, but when a friend of mine sent me a copy of this one, the third in the series, I realized I hadn't read it. Sitting down to read an Ed Noon novel that was new to me is a treat I figured I'd never have again. DEAD GAME didn't disappoint me, either.

It starts simply enough, with Ed being hired to tail a cheating husband. That's what the guy's wife tells Ed, anyway. But instead of visiting a girlfriend, the man heads for the Polo Grounds instead, to take in an exhibition baseball game between the New York Giants and a visiting minor-league team. Then in the ninth inning, in the middle of the action, the minor-league team's third baseman is somehow stabbed to death, and the guy Ed's been following rushes onto the field to search the dead man's uniform before getting away. Ed is left with the questions of who murdered the third baseman, and what was the man he was tailing was looking for.

Well, things get even more complicated than that, of course. A cop gets killed along the way, putting Ed on the bad side of his old friend, Captain Michael Monks. Ed runs into a beautiful redhead and an equally beautiful brunette, the latter named Mimi Tango, one of the great, oddball character names Avallone could come up with. There's a lot of banter, a few fistfights, and Ed gets hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, a private eye cliché but one that I happen to enjoy. Finally, there's even a gathering of all the suspects where Ed explains what happened and why, leading up to one last burst of action. The "impossible crime" nature of the murder in the middle of the baseball game sort of gets lost in the shuffle along the way, and when the explanation does come, it's hardly what you'd consider a "fair play" solution. But I don't think that's what Avallone was going for. A book like DEAD GAME is supposed to be fast, flippant, and fun . . . and it is.