Serial Reflections: Ed Noon by Michael Avallone, the Private Eye to End All Private Eyes

In the year of 1953 a little book was published by Permabooks by a fellow by the name of Michael Avallone. It probably looked like a standard tough-guy private eye to the unsuspecting reading public. But it's like the Wardrobe in that book with the lion and the witch. It's a portal to a different universe: The Nooniverse. It's a wild, wacky, dangerous world in the Nooniverse. Once you enter the Nooniverse you better let the safety bar securely latch down otherwise you'll be thrown from the roller coaster. Things are hazy and dangerous and full of life and death.

Michael Avallone wrote like no person before or since. It's a hodge-podge of jokes, rants, thrills, spills, baseball, movies, pork-pie hats and blazing .45's. The plots make sense if you squint and tilt your head. The voice of Ed Noon is what you read the books for. The doged W.W.II vet who hangs in there even when shit gets weird. AND SHIT GETS WEIRD. For being in a living, breathing pulp word, Ed's a down-to-earth kind of guy. He's no Superman, but it doesn't mean he can't pull off amazing thrills, he might just stumble along the way and he'd probably rather be listening to a ball game on the radio. The reigns are on for the first few books, they just read like slightly cockeyed 50's hard-boiled detective yarns. But Avallone soon shakes the reigns loose and things get odder in the Nooniverse as it expands into the big bang.

See, Ed Noon's a pulp character through and through. He would have fit right in on the pages of Dime Detective Magazine or in the back pages of an Operator 5 or perhaps most appropriately in Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. Avallone loved the pulps and entertainingly wrote about them in some old issues of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. It makes sense that he wouldn't try for the grim and gritty noir world that most of his fellow paperback men tried to milk. No, he blazed his own path.  Avallone always seemed to do that. It's probably why he outlasted most of them. Ed has to live in a pulp world because by say, 1970's "Death Dives Deep" he's hip deep in the Bermuda Triangle and dancing Mermaids. By that time he's the President's Part-Time Private Spy. You don't get that in many books. In 1965's "Lust is No Lady" villains in a plane try to dump a bunch of bricks on his head. "The Voodoo Murders" from 1957 put him face-to-face with (the voodoo kind) zombies! See Avallone was having himself a blast writing these. You can tell. Fun drips from the pages. In an era of generic one-note fiction detectives Ed Noon stood out from the crowd, he had his quirks and foibles. He might think a woman is too good for him, he will fall for the wrong dame, he will make mistakes and people might die and it'll bother him. He will antagonize his buddy Monk of the N.Y.P.D. Tommy guns will crack through the air. He might be in love with his secretary Melissa Mercer who keeps his Mouse Auditorium in order, but he damned sure loves his pork-pie hat and the army .45 he keeps safely in his shoulder holster (he keeps a war-trophy Walther P-38 in his desk, just in case too) bottom line Ed Noon can deliver.

It's the flexibility of the the world and character that keeps Ed fresh through 30ish books. The exact count is confusing as the wonderful Thrilling Detective website lists books I can't seem to track down and some were only printed in England. It's fitting that the amount of Ed Noon's out there is a mystery. To be able to bounce between mystery stories and spy stories probably kept Ed new and interesting to Avallone for the decades he was writing about him. Plus you can pluck a Noon off the shelf for whatever mood that strikes you.

Michael Avallone called himself "The fastest typewriter in the East" and his writing had the sense of urgency I crave from a slim paperback. Noon's don't go in for slog, they move quick and easy, flowing from the pen of a thorough professional. Avallone wrote a helluva lot of books, tie-ins for the "Man From U.N.C.L.E.," the first Nick Carter Killmaster, works in the Gothics, horror novels, some of those spicy 60's spy Coxeman novels down the line to books based on the "Partridge Family." It takes a fine writer to be able to write books across genres and to put energy into work-for-hire jobs. Avallone would write your tie-in book for "The Cannonball Run" and you know what it'll read like he wrote it. In the 70's he wrote a series called "Satan Sleuth" and while you might be disappointed if you wanted a straighter occult detective tale, but if you wanted a high-adventure Doc Savage in bell bottoms you'd be as happy as could be. When James Dockery stopped writing the Men's Adventure series "The Butcher" Avallone stepped in and wrote some of the most entertaining blood-and-guts men's adventure books ever written, a mix between Ennis Willie's Sand and Norvell Page's The Spider. All in all Ed Noon and Micheal Avallone are my kind of guys and they should be your kind of guys too.

If you're looking for a place to start I'll give you some suggestions:

For a tough-guy private eye yarn I'd read "The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse," "The Voodoo Murders," "Meanwhile Back at the Morgue" or the one that started it all "The Tall Delores."

For some spy-fi, I'd pick up "Death Dives Deep," "London, Bloody, London," "Assassin's Don't Die in Bed." But the top-self spy-Noon for me is "Shoot it Again, Sam." It's a wild ride of brain-washing and Bogart.

Wait, you crave some science-fiction? Then you better pick up "High Noon at Midnight" where Ed may or may not be fighting off an alien invasion of cockroach-headed-beings with ray-guns. Plus Gary Cooper.