Sun 14 Nov 2010
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: MICHAEL AVALLONE – The Case of the Violent Virgin.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[4] Comments
by Bill Pronzini:
MICHAEL AVALLONE – The Case of the Violent Virgin. Bound back-to-back with The Case of the Bouncing Betty. Ace Double Ace D-259, paperback originals, 1957.
Michael Avallone, who has dubbed himself “The Fastest Typewriter in the East” and “King of the Paperbacks,” has published more than 200 novels over the past four decades, some thirty of which feature private eye Ed Noon.
On the one hand, Noon is your standard hard-boiled, wisecracking snoop with a taste for copious bloodletting and a Spillane-type hatred of Communists, dissidents, counterculture types, pacifists, militant blacks, militant women, and anyone or anything else of a liberal or civilized cant.
On the other hand, he is a distinctly if eccentrically drawn character whose passions include baseball, old movies, and dumb
jokes, and who gets himself mixed up with some of the most improbable individuals ever committed to paper.
The gold-toothed, beret-wearing villain in The Case of the Violent Virgin, for instance-a guy named Dean, who, like Ed Noon, is on the trail of a six-foot marble statue called the Violent Virgin, “The Number One Nude,” not to mention one of the world’s most precious stones, the “Blue Green.”
Dean is a very well-spoken fellow; at one point in the narrative, he says to Noon, “Your precipitous exodus from serene sanctuary propels me toward Brobdingnagian measures. Spider and I mourn for your misdemeanors but your palpitating perignations [sic] induce no termination of our grief.”
Spider, who is Dean’s accomplice in crime, is not nearly so well spoken; he says things like “Okay, Dad. Make the parley with them. But fast. This choo-choo could get too hot for us.”
The “choo-choo” he is referring to is the Mainliner, which travels from New York’s Grand Central Station to Chicago. Noon is on it because he has been hired to bodyguard a woman named Opal Trace (who doesn’t speak her words, she “carols” and “musicales” them).
And what a train ride it is, chockablock full of a mixed-up mish-mash of double-dealing, multiple murder, vicious dogs, shootouts, a bomb explosion, and, to cap things off, a rousing derailment. None of it makes much sense — but then, one doesn’t read Avallone looking for sense.
What one does read Avallone for, primarily, is his lurid, bizarre, and often hilarious prose style. Noonisms — as his better similes, metaphors, and descriptive passages have come to be called — abound in The Case of the Violent Virgin; there are more to the chapter, in fact, than in just about any other Ed Noon adventure.
A sample: “Her hips were beautifully arched and her breasts were like proud flags waving triumphantly. She carried them high and mighty.” And: “I flung a quick glance through the soot-stained windows. A mountain range and a dark night sky peppered with salty-looking stars winked at me.”
Similar “palpitating perignations” can be found in such other Avallone spectaculars as The Tall Dolores (1953); The Voodoo Murders (1957); The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (1957); Meanwhile Back at the Morgue (1960), in which you will find the immortal line “The next day dawned bright and clear on my empty stomach”; and Shoot It Again, Sam! (1972).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
November 14th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
Bill Pronzini’s review captures some of the crazy elements that make Avallone’s Ed Noon novels so much fun to read. He zeroes in on Mike’s love of baseball, old movies, and jokes. Basically Ed Noon was Mike Avallone; they both acted and spoke the same way. Mike was funny as hell often quoting noonisms such as “…her breasts were like proud flags waving triumphantly.” Another one of Mike’s names could have been “The Joker”
November 15th, 2010 at 1:55 am
I know it has come up before, but wasn’t there a short lived Ed Noon radio series?
I suppose it’s because the series never really caught on with a single publisher, but it has always surprised me that Noon didn’t catch on the way Richard Prather’s Shell Scott did (or Bellem’s Dan Turner before them).
You have to wonder if it was bad luck, bad timing, missed opportunities … Certainly the books offered the same kind of pleasures along with a style that no one else could copy. I know I always thought of Prather and Avallone in the same vein and wondered why the Noon books never performed in quite the same way.
November 15th, 2010 at 4:15 am
I’d never heard of it before I searched for it this evening, but here it is, from the Thrilling Detective website:
RADIO
* THE WINDUP
(1950-s)
13 episodes
Written by Michael Avallone
Starring Chester Morris as ED NOON
According to his son, David, “From the flyer that I’ve seen, I always thought THE WINDUP was a one-shot thirteen episode Ed Noon radio series. I’ve never heard of the show outside of the context of Ed Noon. The ad had a publicity picture of Morris with the line “hear Chester Morris as Private Eye Ed Noon in THE WINDUP!” Avallone later adapted his scripts for his 1978 kid’s book, Ed Noon’s 5-Minute Mysteries.
As to why Shell Scott was so very much more successful than Ed Noon, that’s a good question. Scott came first, even though by not all that much, so there’s the bad timing factor.
I’ve been trying to remember which Ed Noon story was the first one I read. It’s a guess, but it may have been THE VOODOO MURDERS, which came out in 1957. I’d have been 15, so the timing is about right.
But the Shell Scott mysteries stick out even more vividly in my memory. I also think I’d read one or two of them before I spotted VOODOO on the circular rack at the Giant Super Market located three blocks from where we lived. I stopped there almost every day walking home from school through high school.
The two series provide the same kind of pleasures, as you say, David, but the Prather books had an extra oomph to them that caught a lot more people’s attention, myself included, even though I’m struggling for words to say why.
November 15th, 2010 at 6:22 am
I know what you mean about Scott and the Prather books, I suppose I was wondering why Avallone wasn’t able to come in and catch some of the overflow the way Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell books picked up a lot of sales from Michael Shayne books at Dell — especially since Avallone and Noon were briefly at Gold Medal where they easily could have been piggybacked with Prather. You know, ‘Here’s another rough tough private eye in the Shell Scott tradition …”
You don’t suppose all the editors missed how outrageous Avallone could be, and missed out they had a potential Prather/Scott on their hands?
Or perhaps they only thought there was room for one Shell Scott type until the Fickling’s brought in the distaff side with Prather as godfather.
One of those things we will never know. It may be as simple as Avallone never did that one book that stood out from the crowd, or even that somehow Ed Noon doesn’t have the same cachet as Shell Scott as a name. Certainly the distinctive look helped establish Scott’s mystique. The factors that decide these things are so random it is almost impossible to understand them.
Thanks for the info on the radio series. Wouldn’t you love to hear Chester Morris distinctive voice doing some of those classic Avallone lines? Of course it would have had to be considerably toned down for radio, but still …
But the Noon books were always just on the edge of a break through. Signet and Gold Medal both released them is some attractive paperbacks and the whole gimmick about Noon being the President’s personal private eye and his having a black secretary were all exploited to try and get an audience for the books. For some reason it just wasn’t enough.