Big bazooms are big bazooms, no matter what color they are.
Finally, in the later stages of his career, Noon was given the greatest honor of all for a patriotic dick: a job as special investigator for the President of the United States, working on cases too tough for the FBI and the CIA to handle. Like the case of the Doomsday Bagman, who always follows the president around with a black satchel containing the blueprints and code patterns for an all-out thermonuclear war.
And the case of the loaded baseball at Shea Stadium.
And the case of the underwater empire run by a band of man-eating females.
Tough cases like that.
The president even had a special phone installed in Noon’s office, so he could call Ed directly whenever trouble was brewing. A red-white-and-blue hotline, to summon our true-blue hero to fight the Reds. In a white heat.
Noon has had to kill a lot of people over the course of his many investigations, though never in cold blood and never without just cause. But he doesn’t like to kill. It hurts him when he’s forced to squeeze the trigger on his .45, because underneath his rough-and-tumble, devil-may-care, anything-goes, go-to-hell-and-up-yours exterior, there beats the heart of an old fashioned romantic.
An idealist.
An incurable nostalgiac whose favorite song is “I’m Just a Cockeyed Optimist.”
His idealism never wavers, even when his eyes are full of gunsmoke. Even when the Grim Reaper threatens to render him blotto, finished, null and void, a Zero on the Big Board.
Even then.
A sentimental slob and a cockeyed optimist—that’s Ed Noon in a nutshell.
Two nutshells, actually.
Three if you count the horniness.
And the toughness makes four.
Ed Noon is far and away Avallone’s most impressive creation, having begun his career in 1953 with The Tall Dolores and having carried on through twenty-nine additional cases, the last being Dark on Monday (1978). 1953 to 1978. Twenty-five years.
A quarter of a century.
A silver-anniversary career.
But Noon’s capers comprise only a small percentage of the Fastest Typewriter’s impressive output of novels. Avallone is also the father of the Man from AVON and the Satan Sleuth. The chronicler of three Girl from U.N.C.L.E. capers featuring April Dancer, a dozen (as by Stuart Jason) starring the Butcher, and three detailing the exploits of Nick Carter. The novelizer of numerous screenplays and TV scripts, among them such notable full-length films as A Bullet for Pretty Boy Floyd, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, and Friday the 13th Part III, and such TV shows as “Mannix,” “Hawaii Five-O,” and “The Partridge Family.” The author of twenty-five Gothic suspense novels under the pseudonyms Priscilla Dalton, Dorothea Nile, Jean-Anne de Pre, and—yes—Edwina Noone. And the creator of scores of other novels on a wide variety of themes.
Some 220 novels altogether, in less than thirty-five years.
That’s a lot of paper under the bridge.
And a lot of alternative classics.
The following seven novels, six of which feature Ed Noon, are just a small percentage of those worthy of inclusion in the Alternative Hall of Fame. Their plots and their star-spangled prose are ample evidence of Avallone’s genius, his Herculean stature, his preeminence.
His greatness.
This is the Big Guy at work. Read ’em and marvel.
And pay homage.
It doesn’t get any more alternative than this.
The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (1957)
In which Noon gets involved with the murder of the young daughter of a Chinese laundry man, a fur-bearing, gun-bearing blonde who “wears clothes nakedly,” a crazy Texas oilman named Carver Calloway Drill, and a strip-teaser who peels to the sensual strains of “The Hucklebuck.”
I’d been disgusted with the morning altogether and getting a police call on top of everything was the straw that all camels beware of. Including private eyes.
I went down like a lead balloon as five hundred pounds of something smashed me in the right side. Went down, twitching and kicking with a million needles working on me like a sewing machine. Pain skyrocketed through me like a bolt of lightning and the tops of the buildings overhead rushed down to meet me.
The color of the month for the laundry tickets was green, green as my gills felt.
She stopped and rammed her painted fingers into hips as curved and full as a horse’s flanks. . . . Her eyelashes reached out to grab me.
My head hurt, my side ached and my eyebrows felt like they were AWOL.
When the last note of the piano ended “The Hucklebuck” and [strip-tease dancer] Holly Hill threw one last soul-smashing grind to the rafters where the male cockroaches must have exploded with frustration, the applause was deafening. It was like a first night with Barrymore doing Hamlet in front of a bunch of people who believe all play writing began and ended with Will Shakespeare. Well, it was Shakes all right.
Penny Darnell pouted at her Scotch.
“Your tongue is hanging out and I feel unnecessary. She makes me look like a clothespin.”
“You can hang me up to dry any time, baby.”
One of her breasts bobbed into view like a cantaloupe rolling off a display in a fruit store.
[She swung] a whiplashing right hand . . . and Penny Darnell’s face vibrated on her shoulders like a smacked dinner gong.
The grand piano that somebody had dropped on my head played on and on. The noisiest concertoes and orchestrations in the books. And none of it baby or grand. All crashing, clamoring, colliding notes. And loud, loud, LOUD. Then the crescendoes suddenly stopped and my head hummed like a giant-sized tuning fork. My ears felt like two enormous tines.
His glower was on full blast now. And the bend in his nose almost ironed out.
“Okay,” she sighed. “Rush off and do what you have to do. . . . But you will remember the address, won’t you?”
“Cross my forty-fives and hope to die.” We kissed. Kissed and clung like autumn leaves on a wet walk in Central Park.
Carver Calloway Drill . . . towered above Tom Long’s chair like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon.
I . . . swung myself around and sat down on the divan and twisted her lovely, naked body until she was staring at the floor with her magnificently curved, white buttocks staring up at the ceiling like two blank white eyes, two symmetrically exact hills gleaming in the sunlight.
His breath was hot and sweaty.
Meanwhile, Back at the Morgue (1960)
In which Noon, synopsizing in his own words, is hired by “a Broadway showman looking for the lead in his coming play. There are three, maybe four, attempts on his life. Four finalists for the role are terrorized in an elevator. A great star who wants the part for herself is mysteriously murdered. And then out of the blue, the night, and nowhere a tall, beautiful girl marches in . . . and says, ‘I am Annalee. I was born to play Roses in the Rain.’ Wouldn’t you be suspicious? Wouldn’t you say the plot was sickening as well as thickening?”
My mouth dropped about six feet, into my shoes.
Her breasts strained at their moorings.
“Your book was interesting, true. Made quite a splash, true. But it was a curiosity piece, a freak. Like astrology or tea-leaf readings. Or beer suds.”
I sat forward in my chair and placed my left shoe against the black buzzer jutting out from one inside corner of the desk. You can’t see the buzzer from the front of the desk. It’s a cute trick, really, silly for a grown man, but it scares the hell out of anybody who doesn’t know about it.
Directly behind Marcus Manton, the car horn installed in the clothes closet by the sink went off with an ear-shattering honk. An old retired submarine skipper had installed it for me as payment for locating his missing daughter in the big city.
Forget about chickens. The chick that walked into my office that cold night was designed to make men feel like roosters. She was something to crow about.
I smiled at her
, trying to take the miracle of her apart slowly, piece by piece. First there was the calendar-girl perfection of her. White skin, a cloud of black hair framing an oval face. And height. It seemed like yards of height, but I settled for five-feet-six without heels. . . . She smiled so I could count her dazzling teeth. I saw eyelashes a foot long and eyes with all the colors of the rainbow in them.
I showed Marcus my Missouri leer. The one that didn’t believe anything it heard, little of what it saw.
Her smile evaporated slowly. Like the moon easing behind a white cloud.
“Tsk, tsk,” I frowned.
The smile came back. The smile that would have laid nine good men and true out in a neat pile ready to die for her.
Fran Tulip remained where she was—in the center of the office, the center of attention. An unseen spotlight had her riveted and pinpointed. She might have been standing under a halo of changing colors and moods. She knew how to stand.
I suddenly noticed her clothes. They hadn’t seemed very important up to that point. A tightly belted woman’s trench coat that showed off her figure the way a four-alarm fire displays the warehouse it’s burning to the ground.
Karl Leader’s pointed beard bobbed with his smile.
Her appeal stopped dead on its nouns.
Dimly, I thought of vacations and Tahiti and painting. I didn’t believe that stuff about the half-naked brown-skinned babes for a minute, but it would be nice. Gun smoke in the nostrils was beginning to get me.
Sweat was dancing its wet adagio on my forehead.
The Bedroom Bolero (1963)
In which Noon moves into his new offices on West Forty-fourth Street, hires Melissa Mercer as his secretary, and becomes entangled with a psycho who strangles young nude women, all of whom have weak hearts and double-initial names (e.g. Alice Albin)—strangles them in red-painted rooms beneath cheap colored lights arranged in a Q design while listening to the slow, sinuous beat of Ravel’s Bolero on portable record players, after having first dosed them (the young nude women) with generous amounts of cantharides (Spanish fly to you). Why the psycho does all this earns Avallone motive-cum-laude honors. Also involved in this marvelous muddle is a Bohemian nightclub called the Green Cellar, a ghoulish performer known as Evil Evelyn Eleven, a mysterious fat guy named Mr. Orelob (get it?), an apparently homosexual waiter who keeps trying to hit on Noon, and a bang-up final chapter entitled “Farewell to a Maniac.”
[My] heart closed its eyes, lay still, and died. The torch [I’d been carrying for her] vanished in a pool of mud and went gluckkkkkk!
“What do you know about the Bolero?”
“Come again?”
“The Bolero. Ever hear of it?”
I composed myself.
I must have been a little looped by then. I remember the bottle was half-empty or half-full, depending on which state of physics is the truer one.
[The dead woman’s] nudity was upsetting because she had had one of those perfect figures where the stomach wall is flat, the hips taper like two halves of a medicine ball and the breasts poke confidently beautiful into the world of men. The body was white, something that may have had to do with dying, but seemed more an indication that the woman had been fair all over.
I left 77 Riverside Drive close to nine o’clock that Thursday night. I wasn’t a block away from the place, on foot, when I realized I was trying to walk home which wasn’t exactly logical considering that my home address like my office was brand new.
“. . . Don’t you know how Evelyn Eleven is?”
In a world in which there are people called Robert Six, Johnny Seven and an actress once chose to call herself Helen Twelvetrees, I had no axe to grind.
Her voice was quiet, not raised one octave above the graveyard but there was no arguing with her voice. It reeked of command as well as clamminess.
She looked as cute as a mustard seed in a tight green dress.
Her sigh flooded my ear.
My size nine black shoe shot out from the launching pad of the wall like a guided missile and buried itself in the outer space of the groin of the man in the middle. . . . The sudden long howl that exploded out of his throat was like a rocket of triumph bursting radiantly in my ears.
I kept cranking my head like a maniac avoiding those punishing punches to my head. I had to give with the guy hanging onto my arm or the next sound I would hear was the arm bone connected to the shoulder bone going pop like the weasel.
Her eyes were wide, the nose was a lovely hawk and her mouth was well-formed.
I had a brief whiff of the wet violets and fragrant perfume of her personality.
You had to hand it to her. She was Black Magic and a Greek chorus of Tragedy with all its nuances and fine exhortations of everyone’s subconscious.
Applause Niagara-ed around the room.
“Howie,” I tsk-tsked.
“Really,” she reallyed in a voice made unreal by the sudden acquisition of freedom and a hefty divorce settlement.
“Yes,” he sweated.
She wasn’t dead. She was alive in a way that set the nape of your neck on edge.
He was a breezy, stout man with cheery features and extrovert personality when he said good morning and made small talk. But as soon as he got down to the heart of the matter, the man of science and textbooks came out of hiding. His entire demeanor halted and shifted into gear which made Monks blink at the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, but it lent a gravity of belief to his story that no amount of records and statistical notes could have made more impressive. I listened too.
He looked at me guardedly and the breezy demeanor vanished under his chair.
There IS Something About a Dame (1963)
In which Noon runs afoul of a guy named Memo Morgan who won two hundred grand on a TV quiz show by answering such questions as “Where are the Hebrides located?” with such replies as “Off the coast of Ireland.” A genuine mnemonic genius, no? Other characters include a nutty Shakespearean actor, a crooked private eye, and some willing (and not-so-willing) dames. The plot revolves around an undiscovered (missing, lost) Shakespeare/Christopher Marlowe manuscript—and revolves, and revolves, and revolves. . . .
He was a cool apple all right and looked as if he’d picked the tree to fall from.
I should have been thinking about other things. Like how long does a man live after a .45 slug rips a hole through his lower abdomen? And why shoot a man through the gut anyway unless you wanted him to suffer real bad? Or is Life just a succession of sappy accidents after all and none of us are [sic] exactly geniuses when it comes to directing our own breaks? Of course, I had no warning to think about those things. But I should have been thinking anyway.
His eyeballs suddenly rolled and the show was over for him. I caught his head before it bounced off the marble floor of the Ritz lobby. I checked his pulse. Faint but still there. A kind of unconsciousness had taken charge.
The [thief] could have been anyone. . . . He could have been a Martian for all I knew about him.
But why would a Martian shoot a hole through an ambulance tire, then hang around to retrieve the bullet?
“Christ,” he said like the devout Catholic he was.
I sprawled into the worn swivel chair and nothing but memory churned around in my thinkbox. Like the light switch going on, the TV show where Morgan had won all that dough flashed before my memory. The office was quieter than Silent Night.
I didn’t know it then but a real big key to a door I didn’t even know existed was staring me in the face. But not having a deal in the game yet, the idea died in my head under several thousand layers of blurry subconscious.
I was tired. I dragged myself out of the chair, trudged over to the leather couch and spread myself out evenly like a rug.
The whine and pound of the deadly lead [from a machine gun] rattled the office like a clumsy tambourine.
Then just like the commercial on an absorbing TV drama, it stopped. The sudden silence put my teeth together in a painful clinch. But I
just lay where I was, hardly breathing, heart kicking like a mule against my ribs. In the darkness where all sounds seem larger than a breadbox, my imagination was leapfrogging over the unbelievabilities.
My bewilderment took on a couple of new glands.
His deep chuckle was controlled, mirthful and full tilt.
I could only hope I wasn’t walking into a machine gun like a clay pigeon.
“There are several large holes in the structure [of the story] that won’t stand up if I lean on them.”
The tangled chaos of the whole evening was drawing to a close.
The Voice muttered an oath and pressed the trigger of the .45 which, for that split-second forward push of my palm, was still leveled directly at my stomach. Click! My rioting heart heard the noise and did a flip flop of ecstasy as my short left hook thudded off the Voice’s right shoulder which had reared protectively.
The footsteps didn’t walk right in. They stopped outside the door and knocked.
A sneer curved her face.
Sir Stewart had gone rigid in his chair. As if his dream of a lifetime was walking the plank.
My head still hurt but I got my eyes open by putting one foot on each lid and prying up toward the sky.
I could feel my muscles start to panic, try to crawl all over my body, but I made them stop.
There’s something about being tied up that paralyzes your sense of freedom.
Missing! (1969)
A Noonless right-wing fantasy disguised as a political suspense novel, in which President-elect Robert Winslow Sheldrake mysteriously and inexplicably disappears on the eve of his inauguration, throwing the country into a turmoil. Who is running things? The old, tired Democratic regime? The Republicans, under Vice President-elect Martin Alcott? The Demos are portrayed throughout as a bunch of weaklings and fools; the Republicans, and in particular Sheldrake, are deified as America’s “saviors.” (One of the ways in which Sheldrake plans to “save” the country is to escalate the war in Vietnam.) The explanation for the president-elect’s sudden disappearance is semihilarious in its absurdity and also contains a dandy bit of deus ex machina. A subplot concerning the attempted assassination of VP-elect Alcott has an even dandier bit of deus ex machina—or rather, in this case, deus ex squirrel. All in all, a very nutty novel indeed.
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