Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Sex writer Peter Keyes's real name solved?

Collins in the cover of a pulp mag
I'm after a long, long hiatus getting back to my book on American sleaze paperbacks translated in Finnish (received a small grant for it).  It will be called "Pulpografia Erotica", and I believe it could be out sometime next year. Will probably self-publish it through Helmivyö, my own print-on-demand publishing house.

I have an entry for Peter Keyes, who wrote erotica mainly for Brandon House, titles like  The Love Odds (1967), Soft Savage Cat (1967), Love Formula (1967) ja Between Two Women (1968). He has three translations in Finnish, all from Brandon House.

I started digging out who he might have been. I had a note of him being really one A. V. Connors (don't know where this came from, possibly from Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalog), but then I noticed the Catalog of Copyright Entries listed one of the sleaze novels by Peter Keyes for one Andrew J. Collins. I decided to check further and opened up the  Fictionmags Index. And bingo, there he was, having written a dozen crime stories for some pulp and early digest magazines in 1949-1950 and then one in 1960 for the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. No info on Collins, though. In WorldCat I noticed that a book (possibly a Western) called The Land Grabbers (Major 1975) was also released as by Peter Keyes. I couldn't find even a cover for the book, sadly. I googled once more with the book's and the writer's name, and came upon another copyright entry saying that the writer of The Land Grabbers was indeed Andrew J. Collins.

I should say it's safe to assume that sex writer Peter Keyes was pulp writer Andrew J. Collins. Any info on him would be of interest, alongside with the cover scan of The Land Grabbers.

I put a bibliographic entry for Collins up in my bibliography blog here.

PS. Here's an interesting article about Brandon House in New York Times in 1970.

PS2. I updated the bibliography of Collins, see here.

4 comments:

Elgin Bleecker said...

You did some nice detective work, Juri. Some pulp names seem to go down a dead-end street.

-blessed b9, Catalyst4Christ said...

GBY

Unknown said...

CRIME FICTION II° by Allen J. Hubin lists no Andrew J. Collins, but a certain A.J. Collins with two titles:
The Thin Ear, Merit, 1952 and Wail of the Lonely Wench, Chicago paperback House, 1962 this one listed also in the following item:
Register of Prohibited Publications in Ireland. Censorship Board 1973

Moreover Hubin lists "The House of Secrets", Major 1976 by a certain Edna Ames, and says that it's a pseudonym of Andrew J. Collins.

Best from Italy,
Tiziano Agnelli

jurinummelin said...

Tiziano: thanks for you comment. I didn't notice it until now. I'm supposed to get all the notifications to my Gmail account, but I don't recall seeing any about your comment. It didn't occur to me to check Hubin, but I'll take a closer look at Collins's entry.