The Big Stiffs: Blues for Sophia Loren

Ed Noon #30

by Michael Avallone

Noon winds up in Italy as a tourist, but is arrested because of the diary he’s been each attraction he visited has been mysteriously bombed. Terrorist organization The Arcangeli is at work and Noon has to get out from under it. He encounters the wild Amazon beauty, Kate Arizona, who has explosive ideas of her own. Rome is the setting for Noon’s mad racing around town to clear his name. His journey leads to the Keats Room at the foot of the Spanish Steps just about the Bernini Fountain.

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 8, 1977

About the author

Also wrote Nick Carter: Killmaster series under Nick Carter alias with others

Michael Angelo Avallone was a prolific American author of mystery and secret agent fiction, and novelizations based on TV and films. He claimed a lifetime output over 1,000 works, including novels, short stories, articles, published under his own name or 17+ pseudonyms.
His first novel, The Tall Dolores 1953 introduced Ed Noon PI. After three dozen more, the most recent was 1989. The final volume, "Since Noon Yesterday" is, as of 2005, unpublished.
Tie-ins included Man from U.N.C.L.E., Hawaii Five-0, Mannix, Friday the 13th Part III, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and even The Partridge Family. In late 1960s novellas featured U.N.C.L.E.-like INTREX. He is sometimes cited incorrectly as the creator of Man from U.N.C.L.E. (as in the January 1967 issue of The Saint Magazine), or having died March 1.
As Troy Conway, Rod Damon: The Coxeman novel series 1967-73, parodied Man from UNCLE. An unusual entry was the novelization of the 1982 TV mini-series, A Woman Called Golda, the life of Golda Meir.
Among the many pseudonyms that Michael Avallone used (male and female) were: Mile Avalione, Mike Avalone, Nick Carter, Troy Conway, Priscilla Dalton, Mark Dane, Jeanne-Anne dePre, Dora Highland, Stuart Jason, Steve Michaels, Dorothea Nile, Edwina Noone, John Patrick, Vance Stanton, Sidney Stuart, Max Walker, and Lee Davis Willoughby.
From 1962-5, Avallone edited the Mystery Writers of America newsletter. Personal Life:
He married 1949 Lucille Asero (one son; marriage dissolved), 1960 Fran Weinstein (one son, one daughter); died Los Angeles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_...
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/tri...

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly short Ed Noon novel at 122 pages. First published in 1977, this is one of the later efforts in this series about a hardboiled private eye who eventually morphed into spy fiction. I enjoyed it for its placement of Noon in Rome and for its action-packed sequences. Properly humorous, the story never really went
anywhere plot wise although it was fun to read. It is filled with secret arrests, shootouts, bombs, mysterious murders, kidnapping, interrogation, and battles with Amazons.