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.

Sheila Barnes as a true crime writer

My post # 1,502 is a recycling of a comment on an old post! How boring can you go?

Actually this is pretty interesting, since a lady called Nancy wrote about her mother's writings in true crime mags in a comment to a post about Art Crockett and his editorship of the said mags. I'll post her entire comment here:

My mother, Sheila Barnes, wrote for Art Crockett in the mid to late eighties too. She was in her seventies as well and had moved back from "retirement" in Florida to her beloved Hell's Kitchen. She actually lived down the block from the True Detective offices and I loved telling people my dignified, well-bred, attractive silver-haired mother wrote many of the lurid True Detective tales - usually under the names Nancy O'Brien and Ted McDermott (all thinly-disguised family names). My mother, a newspaper reporter for most of her life, loved working for Art Crockett and telling people what she penned. My mother died two years ago but I still have a number of True Detectives from her time there. I'm glad I stumbled upon this blog, very much by accident, looking for another unrelated friend with last name of Crockett.

So, if you by any chance happen to see a true crime mag from the eighties and notice the names Nancy O'Brien and Ted McDermott, you'll know that Sheila Barnes wrote them.

John Twelve Hawks is Robert Mark Kamen?

Breath-taking analysis on why mysterious mystery writer John Twelve Hawks is really screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen. (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman's tweet!)

Jack Webb's only western novel

I was writing obits for the Ruudinsavu/Gunsmoke magazine of the Finnish Western Society and decided to include Jack Webb. Why? Didn't he write mystery novels with that priest Shanley in them? Yes, but he also wrote one western novel, under the pseudonym of Tex Grady. High Mesa came out as a hardback in 1952 from Dutton and then in 1953 as a paperback from Popular Library.

Here are the both covers and also the introduction (probably the back cover copy) from an Abebooks seller:

Disguised as an itinerant cowhand, U.S. Army Captain Jeff Macon is working at the Lazy A. Detailed by his Colonel to discover the source of unrest which is causing border warfare in the vicinity of the Lazy A and the Hacienda Moreno, Jeff has his work cut out for him. Playing a lone hand against the perpetrators of such treachery as Jeff unearths is a dangerous game. Jeff is smart, and he is no coward, invaluable qualities in view of his being called on to out-think and out-fight as villainous a gang of cutthroats as ever roamed the border.

(And no, he's not the same Jack Webb who was in Dragnet.)

Axel Brand is Richard Wheeler

Just in case this is going to get caught in the Bookgasm comments only, I'll notch this up: in a comment to the review of Axel Brand's The House Dick Western writer Richard S. Wheeler confesses having written the pseudonymous book in question.