Re: RARA-AVIS: The Top Selling Gold Medal Authors

From: James Reasoner ( jamesreasoner@flash.net)
Date: 09 Jun 2008


--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Ed Lynskey <e_lynskey@...> wrote:
>
> Fascinating. I'm surprised to see Peter Rabe ahead of Charles
Williams and Harry Whittington. Didn't Jonas Ward write Westerns
(talk about alliteration)?
>
> Ed

Jonas Ward was really William Ard, who wrote quite a few hardboiled novels under his real name and a pseudonym or two. His Westerns were the very popular Buchanan series. He wrote five or six of them, then died in the middle of a manuscript that was completed by Robert Silverberg. The next Buchanan novel was ghosted by Brian Garfield, then William R. Cox settled in as the regular ghost for another fifteen or sixteen books.

William Heuman was a prolific author in the Western pulps who became a prolific paperbacker for Gold Medal, Ace, and Avon. Good, tough writer, too.

Louis L'Amour had only a relative handful of books published by Gold Medal, the top-selling of which must have been HONDO. From the mid- Fifties on, all of L'Amour's novels were published by Bantam, except for reissues of the earlier titles published by Gold Medal -- some of which were actually reprints of Ace Double Westerns originally published under the Jim Mayo pseudonym.

James Reasoner



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