Good to know there are some Sale readers out there. He
doesn't get
mentioned much in the crit lit. Well I've never seen a
critical piece on
him, tho he's certainly as deserving as many other popular
fiction
personalities.
Sale was a talented man, and could turn out stories morning
noon and
night when he had to--the pulps used to refer to him as the
American
Dumas. Not Too Narrow is a tour de force, written in a terse,
lyrical
hardboiled style, a crazy escape from Devil's Island Christ
parable with
a killer opening paragraph about treacherous fishermen and
disemboweled
prisoners. Pretty impressive job for a guy who was 22-23
when he wrote it.
His '40s Hollywood mystery novels Lazarus #7 and Passing
Strange are
breezy, cynical, lots of fun, reminiscent of Latimer or
Norbert Davis,
and one has a gorgeous leper for a murder suspect. His stuff
was
popular in the early paperbacks tho some of those pbks are
really
reprints of Argosy or Sat. Evening Post novelettes. By then
Sale was
concentrating on movies, directing Marilyn Monroe in Ticket
to Tomahawk
and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes and having a
high old
time. He also created and produced a TV series, was it Yancy
Derringer?
He got a dispiriting divorce if I recall and decided to leave
movies for
a while, disappear on his yacht and write novels. His For
the
President's Eyes Only is terrific and White Bufallo is very
good. Close
to age 80 Sale was still hitting the typewriter, writing
scripts for
Dino DiLaurentis mostly, Dino sometimes standing behind
him in his Beverly Hills office waiting for finished pages,
just like
those editors used to do at Street and Smith in 1935...
RD
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