This is a tremendous honor, and I’m very pleased and proud to be considered a grandmaster of tie-in fiction. My history with tie-ins as a reader goes back to the Whitman juveniles and Big Little Books of the Fifties and Sixties. I loved reading about Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Leave It to Beaver, Spin and Marty, and all the other TV shows and movies that served as the basis for those books. Those were the first tie-in novels I read, although nobody used that term then. They were just books that I enjoyed.Then, almost 60 years ago, I went into Buddies’ Grocery and picked up an Ace paperback called The Man From U.N.C.L.E., written by somebody named Michael Avallone. From that point on, I picked up everything I could find by Avallone, and many of them were tie-in novels and movie novelizations. The Get Smart novels by William Johnston were also early favorites. I couldn’t tell you how many tie-in books I read over the years, but there were a lot.
As a writer, I had been in the business for only a little more than a year when Sam Merwin Jr., the editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, who had been buying short stories from me, asked me to try my hand at one of the Mike Shayne novellas that were published in the magazine under the house-name Brett Halliday. As Sam put it, “They run 20,000 words and pay a flat, lousy $300.” Three hundred bucks didn’t seem so lousy to me, so I told him, sure, I’d love to, and he sent me a copy of the Mike Shayne bible, which he had put together for the series’ writers. I didn’t really need it; I’d been reading the original Mike Shayne novels by Davis Dresser (the original Brett Halliday) for years and was a big fan of the series.
Sam also said for me not to worry too much about the details, just to get the story down and he’d fix anything I got wrong. As far as I could tell when I compared the published story (“Death in Xanadu”, MSMM, December 1978) with my original, he changed one word in the manuscript.
That was my first try at writing characters and settings created by other authors, and I knew right away that I had a knack for it. Since then, series work has made up the vast majority of my writing. Some highlights: Being asked to write a couple of Lone Ranger stories. The Ranger was probably my first hero. I never missed the TV show on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Almost as exciting was writing a Green Hornet story. Inside the grown man typing that story was the eight-year-old kid who stayed up ‘way past his bedtime sneak-listening on a transister radio to syndicated reruns of the radio shows featuring the Green Hornet and the Lone Rangers. (The Shadow was in that same package and I’ve never written a Shadow story, but maybe one of these days.) I never missed an episode of Kolchak, the Night Stalker, and writing a Kolchak story was a great opportunity. One day my editor at Berkley called and asked if I was familiar with the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. I answered honestly that not only had I seen every episode of the series, I could sing the theme song. Luckily, I didn’t have to sing, but within minutes I was on a conference call with Chuck Norris’s brother Aaron and a couple of CBS executives in New York, and I had the job of writing three novels based on the series. Those of you who have worked on tie-in projects for properties that you love as a fan know how much pure fun it can be.
My thanks to everyone in the IAMTW. I can’t express how much I appreciate this award, but I’m truly grateful for it.
