At his best he was a fertile pro who delivered a good read and never condescended to any assignment no matter how unpromising-in fact, Avallone’s vibrant self-regard tended to elevate all of his work, and in conversation he could discuss his artistic intentions in one of his Partridge Family novels (based on the family sitcom of the ’70s) with the detail and fervor of a Shakespeare scholar annotating Hamlet.Ī New Yorker born into a large, voluble family, Avallone grew up under tough conditions in the Great Depression. At his most unconstrained and subliterate, his work bore comparison to the slaphappy writings of Harry Stephen keeler and the hard-boiled unrealities of Robert Leslie bellem, comically overblown, awkwardly personalized, zipping along on its own private wavelength. Avallone created an often loopy fiction that transcended the niceties of grammar, logic, realism, or common sense. He crowned himself “The Fastest Typewriter in the East,” a sobriquet that unfortunately brought to mind the old punch line, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” High-speed key pounding and concomitant facile imagination were both Avallone’s great asset and his handicap. (1924-1999) Also wrote as: Nick Carter, Troy Conway, Priscilla Dalton, Dorothea Nile, Edwina Noone, Vance Stanton, Sidney StuartĪvallone published hundreds of paperback originals in his long and bumpy career, everything from a hard-boiled detective series to assorted gothics, spy stories, nurse novels, erotica, juveniles, horror stories, science fiction, a driving manual for teenagers, movie trivia quiz topics, and novelizations of such movies as Shock Corridor and A Bullet for Pretty Boy and such television shows as The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, and The Felony Squad-all of it turned out at white-hot speed, in some cases in less than a week.

The Craghold Legacy by Edwina Noone