The Doomsday Bag (Ed Noon #20)

Ebook cover

Author: Michael Avallone

First Published: 1969

File size/Pages: 477kb / 141pp
Ebook Publisher: Story Merchant Books
Ebook Date: March 2014

I decided to test whether or not you could just pick up an Ed Noon mystery novel and wade in regardless of the number of the book in the series. I had been disappointed with Avallone's Satan Sleuth opener Fallen Angel, but I was already a fan from my youth via his Planet of the Apes and Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels and had promised to look into Ed Noon in the Satan Sleuth review so had to give him a second chance - I figured he earned it just for being Michael Avallone! So I had a browse through the Kindle store at the Ed Noon books that were available (pretty much all of them) and settled on one that had a slightly different, but original looking, cover scan with a naked lady and a classic James Bond pose.

The Ed Noon series ran from 1953 to 1990 comprising of over thirty novels. Noon debuted with The Tall Dolores in 1953, where his character begins his career as a down and out private investigator with a small office in Manhattan, New York which he refers to as his 'Mouse Auditorium'. He is ably assisted by secretary Melissa Mercer. By the sixties Avallone made a strategic move to tie in with the current trend of spy-related media and Noon became the go-to-guy for the President of the United States when ever he needed some investigative work done without the knowledge of the Secret Service or the FBI. Ed Noon became the "Spy to Mr President" and his capers veered more into that world, getting more and more outlandish as the years went by.

Return to the Planet of the Apes #1 - Visions from Nowhere

Author: William Arrow (aka William Rostler)

First Published: 1976

Pages: 183

Planet of the Apes was massively popular in the UK when I was still in primary school. I can remember being with my classmates and re-enacting chase scenes from the 1974 television series in the playground. I had dark curly hair and my best friend was blonde. So we had to be Peter Burke and Alan Virdon, with someone else playing the part of chimpanzee Galen - whilst every other boy in our year pretended to be part of General Urko's gorilla army and chase us down repeatedly. We used to regularly be 'caught' in the gorilla's nets and tumble over and over on the dirty concrete. Those were the days!

By 1975, the short-lived TV series had gone (I was devastated) and was replaced by a children's animated series, Return to the Planet of the Apes. This new venture did not fare very well and lasted only 13 episodes. I'm pretty sure, at that time in my life, I was of the same opinion that it wasn't very good, and the animation was "rubbish". I would have much  preferred the TV series back and already had copies of the novelisations by George Alec Effinger (one of my favourite genre authors by the way). A number of novelisations of the animation episodes were released, I have no memory of seeing them in the UK, so when I recently was made aware that they were available in eBook format I decided to indulge myself in some nostalgia.

Fallen Angel (The Satan Sleuth #1)

eBook Cover

Author: Michael Avallone
First Published: 1974
Pages: 156

It is always very gratifying when an eBook version of a paperback retains the cover of the original book. In this case Story Merchant Books have done a great job of allowing readers to retain the cover from 1974. I really appreciate it, and I wished this were the case with all pulp/cult eBooks. Sadly this is not currently the norm so we have to applaud publishers when they make the effort. I realise that, in the vast amount of cases, original work cannot be used because of copyright issues, or because the artist may be unknown or the price for using too restrictive - but bravo to Story Merchant for being able to allow us to have the artwork here.

Author of Fallen Angel, The Satan Sleuth #1, Michael Avallone is a name I remember fondly from the seventies and eighties as he penned a number of TV tie-in books that I loved, Planet of the Apes and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (he also penned a number of The Partridge Family tie-ins that might have crossed my path but we'll gloss over them if you don't mind!). Of course, Avallone is best known in pulp/action circles as the author of The Butcher book series and the Ed Noon detective stories as well as many others. Unfortunately Butcher books are not available to me in the UK on eBook, but Ed Noon is a series I may dip into at some point as it appears to have a good presence in store (again with original covers).