The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse by Michael Avallone

He saw his first novel published in 1953: The Tall Dolores, which not only starred “the Shapeliest Amazon in the World,” “a regular Empire State Building of female feminine dame,” but introduced the protagonist for which Avallone is best remembered, Manhattan gumshoe (and, eventually, investigator for the president of the United States) Ed Noon.

Army during and after World War II, and was a stationary salesman and the editor of men’s magazines before making a career of fiction-writing. Nevins, in his profile of Avallone in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, calls him “a true auteur, with a unique personality discernible throughout his work,” and goes on to state, “Whatever else might be said about Avallone, one must say what Casper Gutman said to Spade in The Maltese Falcon : ‘By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are!’”īorn in New York City in 1924, Avallone served with the U.S. He is also the holder of unconventional opinions on any number of topics, a zealous old-movie buff, a tireless self-promoter and letter writer, and his own greatest fan. tales, Gothics, TV and film novelizations, juveniles, soft-core porn, espionage thrillers. (It’s said that Avallone once wrote a novel in a day and a half and a 1,500-word short story in 20 minutes!) Pronzini goes on to observe:Īvallone has published some 190 novels in the past four decades, nearly all of them paperback originals: P.I.

At the height of his novel-composing career in the 1950s and ’60s, he was known as “The Fastest Typewriter in the East” and “King of the Paperbacks.” “Those sobriquets are self-given but are nonetheless reasonably accurate,” explained Bill Pronzini in his entertaining 1982 book, Gun in Cheek: A Study of “Alternative” Crime Fiction. Dora Highland, Max Walker, Stuart Jason, Priscilla Dalton, Edwina Noone, Troy Conway (specifically when turning out such epics of literary tackiness as The Blow-Your-Mind Job, The Cunning Linguist and A Stiff Proposition), and a host of other more or less absurd aliases.”īut of course Mike Avallone was no common wordsmith. It’s the rare author, indeed, whose demise can inspire an obituary opening such as this one, from the March 20, 1999, edition of Britain’s Independent newspaper: “Few writers this century have committed more gross acts of grievous bodily harm upon the language of Milton, Shakespeare and the Authorised Version than Michael Angelo Avallone Jnr., a.k.a.

The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse by Michael Avallone