I once mentioned Jack Laflin in a comment of an older post, but he came up again recently when Lurker at Populaari mentioned him and scanned the cover of his only novel in Finnish translation. Lurker didn't dare to read the book (which was originally called The Spy in White Gloves) and I wrote in a comment that it's a pretty bad novel, even considering that it was a spy paperback from a small publisher and from an author no one knows anything about.Does anyone reading this know who Jack Laflin is? Any educated guesses? It sounds a bit like house name, but has anyone ever confirmed having written as by Laflin?
For what it's worth, here's the list of Laflin's novels:
The Flaw, Belmont 1964
The Reluctant Spy, Belmont 1966
A Silent Kind of War, Belmont 1965
The Spy in White Gloves, Belmont 1965
The Spy Who Didn't, Belmont 1966
The Spy Who Loved America, Belmont 1964
The Temple at Ilumquh, Award 1970 (seems to be the fifth part of a series called The Adjusters)
The Bees, Ace 1970 ("No one expected a miracle - but that was the only hope for a nation, a world, ravaged by a deadly swarm.")
Throw the Long Bomb, Whitman 1967 (a juvenile football book)(There's also a Vantage hardback from 1992, called Serpent in Paradise, but I have no way of knowing if it's the same author or not.)
An interesting tidbit is that the cover of the Finnish edition of the Laflin book was drawn by Teuvo Koskinen who later on his career made on to create one of the success stories of Finnish children's literature: Miina and Manu, two cats who live in a fifties-like small town world.
