Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Ed Gorman on Harry Whittington


The other day I mentioned a new Stark House edition of two Harry Whittington novels. Ed Gorman's comments on the same edtion are at Mystery*File. Click the link for the whole thing.

Ed Gorman Rambles: 01 August 2006. Harry Whittington.: "Back in the 1950s you could run but you couldn’t hide from Harry Whittington. Those were the days when many if not most paperbacks were sold in wire racks found in drug stores, grocery stores and what were then called dime stores.

Harry told me that he’d once seen five books of his displayed on the same rack, all published that month. He worked for everybody, from Gold Medal all the way down to Carnival. He did westerns, nurse romances, tie-ins, war stories and of course crime novels. The last was his true calling. There there was no sub-genre of suspense/mystery he didn’t like. Or apply himself to."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, Bill, why don't you write a couple of nurse romances, too?--Karin

Unknown said...

You know, I think that's one genre I'll have to skip. I have Whittington's two novels, but I haven't read them.

Juri said...

Isn't there almost always some sort of crime in nurse romances? Fraud, at least? Has there ever been any noir-influenced women's romance writer?

Unknown said...

How about Nora Roberts as J. D. Robb?

Anonymous said...

There's a thriving field of romantic suspense, and what little of it I've read includes some pretty noirish fictioh.

Juri said...

But what about some vintage stuff, from the fifties or the early sixties? Was anyone there at the time, writing noir romances? (Jay Dratler, of THE PITFALL fame, did some romances.)