Ed Gorman discusses Andrew Coburn

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Andrew Coburn writes page-turners. A special kind of page-turner.
The problem I have with many so-called “beach books” is that I get tired of everything being so-over-the-top. After I’ve read about a hundred pages of many of them I begin to  realize that here we go again. Unreal people who couldn’t exist doing things that couldn’t possibly happen involved in plots that even The Three Stooges would find dopey.

What I’ve always liked about Andrew’s novels is that while I can’t stop reading them (and I mean I’ve sat up as late as three a.m. finishing a couple of them) his people are always true to life and his plots all the more gripping because they could very well happen. Hell, some of them probably HAVE happened since Andrew was a crime beat reporters for many years and covered everybody from the mobsters to serial killers to high flying Wall Street-types who have little plastic statues of Bernie Madoff on their dashboards. In other words–Andrew has BEEN THERE.

Authenticity matters to Andrew.

I’m sure you’ll agree. In fact I have no doubt you’ll agree. As a fan and admirer of Andrew’s novels for more than thirty years I’m really pleased that Prologue has begun to make them available to an even wider reading public through e-books. For style, depth and PURE ENTERTAINMENT Andrew Coburn is in the front rank of American writers.

–Ed Gorman

Andrew Coburn books available from Prologue

Andrew Coburn

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“SO GOOD IT’S ALMOST CRIMINAL.”

Andrew Coburn, born in 1932 in Exeter, New Hampshire, has lived most of his life in the towns outside Boston that figure in his fiction. Following US military service that took him to Frankfurt, West Germany, he joined the Lawrence, Massachusetts Eagle-Tribune, launching a career as an award-winning crime reporter. Granted the prestigious Eugene Saxton Memorial fellowship for young American writers in 1965, he published his first novel in the 1970s. His second was a New York Times bestseller, establishing him, instantly, as one of a kind—master of American prose, riveting chronicler of crimes that play out in home towns we think we know, and don’t.

Nominated for the Edgar for Goldilocks, the third novel in his Sweetheart Trilogy, Coburn has been translated into 14 languages and, in 1987, was awarded with an honorary doctorate of letters for his service to both journalism and the novel. Dedicated Yankees fan, father of five, he lives in Andover, Massachusetts with his wife, Casey, and has recently gathered a collection of the crime stories that first appeared in such quarterlies as the Transatlantic Review.

MAJOR WORKS

From the 1980s: the Sweet Heart Trilogy
Sweetheart; Love Nest; Goldilocks
A legendary trilogy, shaped by the author’s career as a journalist covering towns around Boston in their encounters with the lust for cash and power and land. The last of the Mafia struggles to hang on, then gives way to corporate bankers and real estate developers; newcomers drift in—a girl called Melody; a Viet Nam vet with yellow hair and a taste for women and chicken pot pies. In the old mill town of Lawrence, decent cops and lawyers attempt, with mixed success, to hang on to the light.

From the 1990s: the Bensington Novels
No Way Home and Voices in the Dark
A matched set of novels that map the quintessential American town of Bensington. Located half an hour outside a Boston now dominated by the glossy towers of corporate excess, Bensington is the town we’re glad to go home to: the town green is complete with a war memorial; a white church tower climbs into a blue sky; progress is etched in the new mansions that line “the Heights.” Presided over by police chief James Morgan, Bensington feels safe, even as old sadnesses snap to the surface with a shot from an F-1 sniper rifle and a tramp wearing a Harvard class ring.

FORTHCOMING

Spouses and Other Crimes
A collection of eleven stories with the impact of an American saga–each rendered in Coburn’s signature style of “chilly elegance,” each an excursion into the genre-bending territory Coburn would claim in his novels. Here, in snap-shot form, are the towns circling Boston: the crazy quilt of intertwined lives; the uneasy memories of the past; the disturbances that tilt the equations of love and loyalty that bind neighbor to neighbor, parents to children, husbands to wives.

WORKS BY ANDREW COBURN
In order of publication

The Trespassers
The Babysitter
Off Duty
Company Secrets
Widow’s Walk

The Sweetheart Trilogy
Sweetheart; Love Nest; Goldilocks

The Bensington Novels
No Way Home; Voices in the Dark

Birthright
On the Loose

Novella
My Father’s Daughter

Short stories
Spouses and Other Crimes

PRAISE FOR ANDREW COBURN

From Nelson DeMille:
“…As good as it gets.”

From Robert Cormier:
“A sublime writer…a novelist who writes brilliant novels in which crime happens. Anyone who has yet to discover Coburn has a treat in store.”

From Stanley Ellin:
“Flawless…”

“Compulsively readable…so good it’s almost criminal.”
—Publishers Weekly

“One of the best..”
—Newsweek

“Coburn is as good on sad women as bad men, his prose so flexed and edged as to make paranoia fashionable.”
—London Sunday Times

Writing “in a brilliant style of chilly elegance, [Coburn] is merciless in probing tormented characters who live—and lie and lust.”
— New York Times

“Spellbinding…”
—New York Newsday

The “dialogue is perfect, sometimes acidic, and always intelligent.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Beautifully realized…thoroughly satisfying…”
—Los Angeles Times

“There’s a Hitchcockian flavor to Andrew Coburn’s thrillers…” These are “page turners, [rendered with] a good eye and a great ear.”
—Boston Globe

“Taut…fast as the rat-a-tat-tat of a mobster’s machine gun.”
—Boston Herald

“Tense, cool…first rate. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

His “characters…are alive, unpredictable and emotionally complex… revelations of character and emotion as absorbing as the twistings of the revenge-laden plot.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Coburn goes from strength to strength.”
—The London Observer

Talmage Powell

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Talmage Powell (also wrote as Robert Hart Davis, Robert Henry, Milton T. Lamb, Milton Land, Jack McCready, Anne Talmage; ghosted a number of Ellery Queen novels ). Born in Henderson, North Carolina, 1920. Died in Asheville, North Carolina, 2000.

Talmage Powell was a prolific crime writer who wrote nearly 500 short stories, as well as 20 novels, five of which feature private detective Ed Rivers.

Powell sold his first short story to the pulps in 1943. He wrote for a variety of genres–detective, hero, weird menace, western, and western romance. Some of the many pulps he wrote for included Dime Detective, The Shadow, Dime Mystery, Fifteen Western Tales, and Ranch Romances. He wrote more than 200 stories for the pulps throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. When the pulps died out in the early 50s, Powell wrote more than 300 stories for top-flight crime digests such as Manhunt, Guilty, Trapped, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

In 1959, Powell wrote The Killer Is Mine, his first novel featuring Tampa-based private detective Ed Rivers. Rivers is in his early forties, is 6 feet tall, and weighs 190 pounds. As for his face, he admits he doesn’t have the prettiest puss in the business:

“Women either get a charge from the face or want to run from it. Men fear it or trust it to the hilt.”

Rivers carries a .38, as well as a knife in a sheath at the nape of his neck. He has a friend and ally in the police department named Steve Ivey. Ed is tough but human, and starting with the third novel, With A Madman Behind Me (1961), Rivers begins taking on some of the knightly traits of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. In that story, Rivers tracks down the killer of a strangled girl and breaks up a porno ring. In Start Screaming Murder (1962), Rivers befriends midget singer Tina La Flor, and investigates the murder of a brute named Bucks Jordan. Corpus Delectable (1964) takes place during the annual Gasparilla Festival–Tampa’s version of the Mardi Gras. Throughout the series, Powell does an excellent job evoking the seedy atmosphere of slum-like areas in Tampa.

Powell wrote four books for the long-running Ellery Queen series: Murder With A Past (1963), Beware the Young Stranger(1965), Where Is Bianca? (1966), and Who Spies, Who Kills? (1967). He wrote novelizations for tv’s Mission: Impossible, as well, and nearly ten stand-alone novels.

Talmage Powell

Harry Stephen Keeler

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Harry Stephen Keeler. Born in Chicago, Illinois, 1890. Died in Chicago, Illinois, 1967.

Looking for something a little different? Something weird, wild, wacky, freaky, zany, nutty, cracked, hare-brained, screwball, or madcap? Looking for a writer whose lunacy falls somewhere on the literary spectrum between Ed Wood and Thomas Pynchon?

You’ve come to the right place.

Welcome to the world of Harry Stephen Keeler.

Keeler lived most of his life in Chicago. He graduated from the Armour Institute (now called the Illinois Institute of Technology) with a degree in electrical engineering. Early jobs included work as an electrician in a steel mill and as editor of 10-Story Book magazine from 1919–1940. He wrote more than 70 novels. His first book was The Voice of the Seven Sparrows (1924). His last book published in America was The Case of the Transposed Legs (1948). He wrote five additional books which were published only in England, the last in 1953.

Keeler specialized in the “webwork” plot, whereby he wove multiple (sometimes nearly a hundred) unrelated plots threads which, by strange coincidences, were all tied together by the story’s end.

Keeler wrote one of the longest mystery novels ever published–The Box From Japan (1932), weighing in at a hefty 765 pages. Between the covers of a single Keeler novel you might find any or all of the following: circus freaks; trepanning — the practice of drilling holes in the skull for supposed therapeutic purposes ; insane asylums; complex mathematical equations; Eastern philosophy; multiple ethnic dialects; character names like Screamo The Clown, “Suing” Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel, Attorney Foxhart Cubbycheck, Legga the Human Spidermillionaire Balhatchet Barkstone; and rants against social evils such as racism, police brutality, capital punishment, and the mistreatment of cats.

In 1969, mystery writer and critic Francis M. Nevins, Jr. wrote a series of articles about Keeler for the Journal of Popular Culture. These articles eventually led to Keeler’s rediscovery and current cult following.

Here is what a New York Times reviewer, in 1942, wrote about Mr. Keeler‘s work:

“We are drawn to the unescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.” (The Times writer must have had his or her own problems with discipline, as for example the use of the non-existent word “unescapable”.)

Let Keeler’s books satisfy your own urges for creative joy.

Harry Stephen Keeler

Wade Miller

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Wade Miller (pseudonym of Robert Wade and Bill Miller; they also wrote as Whit Masterson, Dale Wilmer, and Will Daemer). Robert Wade–born in San Diego, California, 1920. Presently living in San Diego, California. Bill Miller–born in Garrett, Indiana, 1920. Died in San Diego, California, 1961.

The team of Robert Wade and Bill Miller achieved several notable distinctions throughout their career: They successfully created their own private eye (Max Thursday); they wrote a book (Badge of Evil) that served as the basis for one of the best film noirs (Touch Of Evil); and wrote another book (Kitten With A Whip) that was the basis for one of the most entertaining “so-bad-it’s-good” films.

Wade and Miller started their partnership early. They were twelve years-old and both attending Woodrow Wilson Junior High when they met for the first time at a music lesson. They began writing together while teenagers–plays, sketches, and radio scripts. They both attended San Diego State college and edited the college newspaper. When WWII came along, they enlisted in the air force.

After WWII, Wade and Miller combined their surnames and wrote their first novel, Deadly Weapon (1946). It was a fine debut from the team and features P.I. Walter James, who is in San Diego investigating the shooting of his partner. Their next effort, Guilty Bystander (1947), features private detective Max Thursday, an unkempt alcoholic with an unpredictable temper who lives in a fleabag hotel. In the story, Thursday’s ex-wife shows up to tell him their son has been kidnapped and, along with battling to stay sober, he has to battle assorted cops, thugs, and double-crossing hookers. Reviewers compared Guilty Bystander favorably with the work of Hammett and Chandler. The other Thursday novels are Fatal Step (1948), Uneasy Street (1948), Calamity Fair (1950), Murder Charge (1950), and Shoot To Kill (1951).

Wade and Miller wrote numerous stand-alone novels, as well. One of their most famous (or infamous) books was Kitten With A Whip (1959)–made into an over-the-top, camp classic starring Ann-Margaret and John Forsythe.

Wade and Miller also wrote novels under the name Whit Masterson. They used the Masterson name on their novel Badge of Evil (1956)–the basis for the classic film noir Touch of Evil (1959), directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, Charlton Heston, and Janet Leigh. Other excellent Masterson novels are A Cry In The Night (1955), which deals with a kidnapping, and A Hammer In His Hand (1960), which features a policewoman as the protagonist.

Bill Miller died of a heart attack in 1961. He was only 41 years-old. Robert Wade continued his career as a successful writer, penning novels both under his own name and as by Whit Masterson, as well as writing a regular column for the San Diego Union. In 1988, Wade was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Private Eye Writers of America.

Whit Masterson

Wade Miller

Fletcher Flora

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Fletcher Flora. Born in Parsons, Kansas, 1914. Died in 1968.

Fletcher Flora’s novels are filled with wit, irony, and black humor. The best word to describe Flora’s writing style might be “sardonic”. His stories are likely to remind you of those marvelously wicked Roald Dahl short stories, or of many of the wry episodes of tv’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Flora spent his early years in Kansas. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army and, unfortunately, sustained major injuries. He received numerous shrapnel wounds in both legs and in his right arm. These injuries dogged Flora throughout his life. After his release from the Army, he became an education adviser in the Department of the Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1945 until 1963.

Flora started writing short stories in 1952, just as pulps like Dime Detective were dying out, and digests like Manhunt were beginning. He wrote more than fifty short stories for the digests. His first novel was the lesbian-themed paperback, Strange Sisters (1954; the success of this book led to other writers using its title as a catch-all for lesbian-themed novels). The story is about a woman who experiences a mental breakdown after her involvement in three abusive lesbian relationships. Flora followed-up this novel with another lesbian-themed book, Desperate Asylum (1955, a.k.a. Whisper of Love).

An excellent example of Flora’s use of black humor is Skulldoggery (1967). The story is about a group of greedy relatives who believe they’re going to inherit $10 million when the family patriarch dies. When they discover the money is instead left to the patriarch’s Chihuahua, with the provision that the inheritance will pass to the relatives should the Chihuahua and all her pups die, the relatives plot the Chihuahua’s demise. Flora’s writing style in Skulldoggery owes a tip of the hat to the work of Oscar Wilde.

Flora’s other notable books in the hard-boiled vein include The Hot Shot (1956), Leave Her To Hell (1958), and Park Avenue Tramp (1958).

Fletcher Flora

Frank Kane

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Frank Kane (also wrote as Frank Boyd). Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1912. Died in Long Island, New York, 1968.

Frank Kane worked as a reporter and editor for several New York newspapers during the 1930s. From the mid-late 40s, he wrote scripts for the popular radio shows The Shadow, Gangbusters, and The Fat Man.

Kane’s first novel, About Face (1947), features private detective Johnny Liddell. Although New York-based, a number of Johnny’s cases take him out of the familiar urban environs of the city. Poisons Unknown (1953) takes Johnny to New Orleans. The setting of Crime of Their Life (1962) is a Caribbean cruise ship. Two of the books take Johnny outside the United States altogether. He slugs his way through Vienna in Fatal Undertaking (1964) and travels through France in Maid in Paris (1966).

Kane’s novels were noted for their hard-hitting action. According to writers Robert A. Baker and Michael T. Nietzal, “Every novel has between two and ten killings, three or more fist fights, brawls and/or knifings, two to eight head-bashings and at least one to three kidnappings. Just about every object in the Sears Fall Catalog is used as a weapon to cause breaks and bruises on the human anatomy.” (Private Eyes: 101 Knights, by Baker and Nietzal, pg. 162.)

Kane’s prose style is spare and concise, keeping description to a minimum. The Liddell novels lasted from 1947-1967, and sold 5,000,000 copies by Kane’s death in 1968.

Kane wrote 23 teleplays for the 1958-59 season of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, starring Darren McGavin. He also published numerous short stories in Manhunt, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and The Saint.

Frank Kane

Richard Deming

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Richard Deming (also wrote as Max Franklin and Ellery Queen). Born in Des Moines, Iowa, 1915. Died in 1983.

Richard Deming came-of-age during the late 1940s and early 1950s, just when pulps like Black Mask and Dime Detective were dying out, and smaller format “digests” like Manhunt and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine were beginning. He wrote nearly 150 short stories for both the pulps and the digests.

Deming attended Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Iowa. He served in the United States Army for four years during World War II and was released in 1945 with the rank of Captain.

Deming was working for the Red Cross in New York when he started writing pulp stories featuring his first series character, Manville “Manny” Moon. In the Hammett and Chandler tradition, Manny is tough, honest, and quick-witted. One aspect of Moon that distinguishes him from other private detectives is the fact that, due to a war injury, he has an artificial leg. But Moon can still more than hold his own: he’s an expert shot and has a black belt in judo. Deming provides local color to the Manville stories by way of Moon‘s “office“, which is in a Mexican restaurant. The Moon tales have a strong narrative drive, a realistically described low-rent atmosphere, and crackling dialogue. Deming wrote four Manny Moon novels: The Gallows In My Garden (1952), Tweak The Devil’s Nose (1953), Whistle Past The Graveyard (1954) and Juvenile Delinquent (1958).

Deming also wrote a series of books about Matt Rudd, a vice cop in the fictional Southern California city of St. Cecilia. The Rudd novels are police procedurals; St. Cecilia is a city steeped-in-sin and filled with numerous organized crime rackets. The Rudd novels are Vice Cop (1961), Anything But Saintly (1963), and Death of a Pusher (1964).

Deming, using both his own name and the pseudonym Max Franklin, wrote more than 20 novelizations for TV shows such as Dragnet, The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, and Vegas.

Under the Ellery Queen name, Deming ghost-wrote novels featuring Manhattan police captain Tim Corrigan.

Richard Deming

Jack Webb

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Jack Webb (Born John Alfred Webb, also wrote as John Farr; not to be confused with Jack “Dragnet” Webb) Born in California, 1916. Died in Coronado, California, 2008.

Jack Webb (not the “Dum-dah-dum-dum” Jack Webb, although the fact that both men created detective teams is an amazing coincidence) wrote a series of novels featuring an innovative detective duo–Jewish LAPD Detective Sammy Golden, and a Catholic priest named Father Joseph Shanley.

Webb’s first published novel, as well as the novel that introduced the Golden-Shanley team, was The Big Sin (1952). Sammy Golden is in his mid-30’s, served in WWII, and “still seems to happily turn to violence.” Father Shanley, also in his mid-30’s, ministers at St. Anne’s Church, tends to both his rose garden and to souls, and is “a fighter by instinct, a man of the cloth by devotion and inspiration.”

In spite of the presence of a Catholic priest, Webb’s books are not “cozy” mysteries. Webb writes tough, clipped, hardboiled prose reflecting the violence and corruption of Los Angeles and its environs. Webb describes one of Sammy Golden’s fellow officers thusly:

“Schwartz was a harness bull of the old school, the only man left on the force who had walked the South Central beat alone. There was talk of a confession he had got out of a naked stumblebum with a thick closed door between him and his wire coat hanger.” (The Deadly Sex, 1959)

And Webb describes Sammy Golden and a fellow officer named “Red” Adams as being, “Two personable young men well on their way to becoming experts in violent death.” (The Broken Doll, 1955)

Throughout the Golden-Shanley novels, it is usually coincidence that brings the two old friends together. Golden is a bachelor and something of a loose cannon; he often breaks with police procedure and gets demoted and put back in uniform. Shanley frequently has to pull Golden’s fat from the fire.

Webb published 10 books featuring the Golden-Shanley team, including The Naked Angel (1953), which concerns a missing stripper; The Bad Blonde (1956), which revolves around a robbery at a chemical company; and The Delicate Darling (1959), which includes a raging fire, a half-strangled girl, and triple homicide. A number of the Golden-Shanley paperbacks sport classic covers illustrated by artist extraordinaire, Robert McGuire.

Webb also contributed short stories to Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine between 1954-1973.

Jack Webb

Peter Rabe

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Peter Rabe (also wrote as J.T. MacCargo and Marco Malaponte). Born Peter Rabinowitsch in Halle, Germany, 1921. Immigrated to America in 1938. Died in Atascadero, California, 1990.

Peter Rabe had what is most likely the singular distinction of both having a doctorate in psychology and writing hardboiled crime novels

Rabe was a full-fledged PhD, earning his doctorate in psychology in Cleveland, Ohio. He became interested in crime novels and, amazingly, his first three books in the genre were all snatched up by Gold Medal and published the same year, 1955. They were Stop This Man!, Benny Muscles In, and A Shroud For Jesso. Rabe became a Gold Medal favorite, penning twenty-two novels for the paperback publisher.

For a good chunk of his career, Rabe wrote about gangsters in organized crime syndicates. His series character, Daniel Port, who first appears in Dig My Grave Deep (1956), is a gangster who uses both his guts and his brains to maneuver his way out of the syndicate and survive. The remaining Port novels are The Out Is Death (1957), It’s My Funeral (1957), The Cut Of The Whip (1958), Bring Me Another Corpse (1958), and Time Enough To Die (1959). Rabe’s prose style is hardboiled but understated, somewhat akin to Dashiell Hammett and W.R. Burnett, and his work in psychology undoubtedly helped him delve into the minds of his warped and brutal characters.

Rabe also wrote several stand-alone novels. Notable examples include The Box, Anatomy Of A Killer, and A House In Naples.

During the early 1960’s Rabe experienced health problems and needed quick cash, so he wrote two books for Beacon, an “adults only” publisher, using the pseudonym Marco Malaponte

He used the MacCargo pseudonym to write two novelizations of the Mannix tv show.

And if having a doctorate in psychology and writing hardboiled gangster novels wasn’t incongruous enough, Rabe also received story credit for two episodes of the campy 1960’s Batman tv show–episode #81, The Joker’s Last Laugh, and #82, The Joker’s Epitaph. (Rabe was friends with the show’s head writer, Lorenzo Semple, Jr.)

Peter Rabe