RARA-AVIS: Re: Avallone

Ted White (tedwhite@compusnet.com)
Mon, 08 Mar 1999 14:13:45 -0500 Jim Doherty pointed out that Avallone did only the first Man
>From UNCLE book for Ace, and the Girl From UNCLEs were for
Signet. I stand corrected; it was clearly that first Man
>From UNCLE book which Terry Carr edited and told me about,
and my memories got somewhat short-circuited in the
following thirty-odd (some of them quite odd) years.

If anything this information buttresses my basic point.
Avallone used the Carr-rewritten Ace Man From UNCLE book to
sell his subsequent Girl From UNCLE books to Signet. (Wonder
who edited them.)

On some other current threads: I'm a little bothered when I
see Grafton and Paretsky linked as though they were right
and left hands of the same person. I see very different
qualities in each. Paretsky strikes me as a much better
writer, and she has of late gotten fairly heavily into Ross
Macdonald's old territory -- but she has the habit of
resolving her plots with melodramatic and not fully
convincing action sequences. Grafton wrote one solid book
(the one in which her protagonist takes on the identity of a
mobster's girlfriend and gets trapped in it) and a lot of
near-misses. She rarely fully satisfies. The fact that
both are women does not make these two writers siamese
twins, always to be mentioned in the same breath.

But I'm pleased to see mentions of Thomas B. Dewey and
William Campbell Gault -- two of my favorites from the
fifties. (Another of Gault's detective heroes was Joe
Puma. I always wondered if Gault took his name from the
jazz guitarist of that era....) And another writer from
that period whom I enjoyed was Ed Lacy. Whatever happened
to Dewey and Lacy?

--Ted White

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