Mon 15 Nov 2010
They’re not exactly unknown, but to fans of Michael Avallone in the US, they might as well be. Perhaps it’s only a tease, but British mystery bookseller Jamie Sturgeon has sent me cover images of two of the three Avallone crime novels published only in England. (An earlier version of this post stated that all three are Ed Noon adventures, but only #2 and #3 are.)
1. The Killing Star. Robert Hale, 1969. Dust wrapper by Eileen Walton:
Blurb: Five housewives butchered, horribly mutilated and on each terrible occasion, the unknown killer had marked the symbol of the Star of David on the door. What ancient and horrible vengeance was reaching out from the graves of Europe to announce a greater crime?
Follow Detective Sam Swope on one of the most remarkable cases ever to tax the powers of “police procedure.” Learn as Sam Swope does that Death has many faces but the most savage mask of all has to be the one that comes in the guise of friendship, service and love. This is a raw and brutal book that is as contemporary as the morning’s murder.
Beginning the first chapter: High Noon. Now. Vietnam, race riots, Civil Rights battles. Taxes, irreverent movies, LSD trips for the unsophisticated and the foolish. Teenagers unsettled about how to cut their hair, how to dress — how to look. The cheats, the frauds, the second raters are having a field day at the expense of the victims. Music is struggling to sound coherent. The voice of the country is fighting the echoes of the unconstitutionality, alien reverberations and the shouts of doom from all sides.
The Left, the Right and Dead Centre are at destructive odds. The big clocks, the little clocks and fifty million wrist watches toll and tick towards Infinity. Take a rocket to the moon, vote Medicare and honour thy father and mother as thyself and meanwhile – look out for Number One!
The place. Your City and mine… Steepled, skylined, smog-filled, crime-filled and throbbing with immediacy. Concrete and common clay. General Motors products crowding the byways, jet planes thundering overhead, forests of T.V. antennae stabbing the unfriendly sky. What’s in it for me?
This is the battle cry of the metropolis. The sun, the moon and the stars have no chance for survival. Poetry, Beauty, Honesty are but dreams. The winds, the rains, the storms lash and howl through the canyons of the skyscrapers. The Crooked City never sleeps. It is a big zoo, vibrating with the footsteps of the great white hunters. The metropolis is in the cross-haired sights of annihilation […]
2. The Big Stiffs. Robert Hale, 1977. Ed Noon.
3. Dark on Monday. Robert Hale, 1978. Ed Noon.
Blurb: The incredible crime wave began with a mysterious after-midnight telephone call to Manhattan Private Eye extraordinaire, Ed Noon – a death S.O.S. from an Irish dancer who looked Chinese. Then came the locust plague of poison-pen letters, a lethal swarm of brutality and terror which metamorphosed into an ugly chain of slaughtered Broadway showgirls.
All of which made Noon a Monday worrier – the Ed Noon of the pre-President’s agent days, the Noon who still slept on the couch in his office, when the hit musical DRAGON TIME playing to SRO audiences on Times Square, was also the playground of one of the most viscous killers Ed Noon had ever encountered. A killer whose name would not be found in a fortune cookie…
BONUS: The Flower-Covered Corpse. Robert Hale, 1969, preceding the Curtis US paperback edition (1972).
November 15th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
A correction and a thought or three. THE KILLING STAR, a very good novel, is actually not an Ed Noon but was Mike’s second Felony Squad novel, based on the 60s TV series, that was never published in the US because the TV series was canceled. Av changed the name of the two cop protagonists and sold the book to Hale. At least he changed their names most of the time…there are occasional lapses to the TV characters’ original names in the text of one of Mike’s most grim novels. And if anyone hasn’t read the first book, THE FELONY SQUAD is one of Mike’s absolute best and, frankly, its central idea has been “borrowed” by others several times in the years since. THE BIG STIFFS is a great little late period Nooner (he’s in Rome; the Colosseum is described as looking like “Shea Stadium with holes”) and is well worth seeking out. THE FLOWER COVERED CORPSE did appear in the US as a Curtis paperback in the early 70s. DARK ON MONDAY is expanded from a 60s MSMM novelette of the same name. And I forgot to mention on the earlier Avallone threads that in the early 90s, Mike’s son, David, a Hollywood director, cast his dad in a cameo as a Mafia hit man in the direct-to-video epic, KICK OF DEATH. The LA years weren’t all bad; Mike and Fran moved west to be near their son and daughter who are still active in the entertainment industry.
November 15th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Steve
You’re quite right about KILLING STAR. It’s not an Ed Noon adventure at all. Jamie sent an email to let me know at the same time that you left your comment.
If I can figure out how to rewrite the opening paragraph to correct this, I will. (Done.)
And thanks for the background information on all three books. I have a set of bootleg copies of FELONY SQUAD, the TV show, but I haven’t watched them (nor did I see the series when it was on). I don’t remember reading the book either, the first one, and based on your description of it, it looks as though I shall.
November 15th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
I can confirm that the first FELONY SQUAD novel was an unusually good outing even for Avallone who had a way with them. As for the series, if nothing else it was a chance to see Ben Alexander in something besides DRAGNET.
It wasn’t a bad series, and Howard Duff was a good lead. I haven’t seen an episode since it originally ran, but some of the plots still stick in my mind, so it must have been pretty good considering how long it has been.
November 16th, 2010 at 9:09 am
I once had a copy of THE BIG STIFFS – I remember that line about the Colosseum.
February 10th, 2012 at 7:30 pm
Looks like KILLING STAR may have been plagiarized directly: I read this thread and hit some antiquarian book sites to find that #2 of THE STALKER, a U.S. men’s action series by Mack Tanner published in the early 90s by HarperPrism, is titled THE KILLING STAR and using the identical plot, and perhaps prose. I thought it might be Mike under a pseudonym, recycling the book, but not if this web page is to be believed:
http://www.buildfreedom.com/tanner/bio.shtml