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.

Alan G. Ampolsk on his father, true crime writer Bud Ampolsk

Some months ago I wrote about Art Crockett who wrote for the crime digests of the fifties and sixties here. I just received a comment from Alan Ampolsk, who is the son Bud Ampolsk, mentioned in my post. Bud Ampolsk wrote for the same mags and also did some editing, and I asked Alan his permission to post his comment on top of the blog. Some of the pennames he mentions may have been unknown before this.

Apologies for the late-arriving comment, but I've only just discovered your post. Bud Ampolsk was/is my father (for more on the indefinite tense, see www.dementianights.com). Art Crockett worked for him on most if not all of the books you mention - my father was editorial director, and Crockett was an assistant editor. Later the roles were reversed - in the 90's my father worked for Crockett.

Gerald's information is mostly accurate but his chronology is off on one point -- Crockett didn't move in sequence from the men's adventure books to the western to the crime books. They were all produced simultaneously, and Crockett worked on all of them. The publisher was Reese Publishing, which at its height was putting out 17 monthly titles (including the men's books -- they used a different corporate name for them but it was the same organization). My understanding is that Crockett worked on all of them throughout. He wound up as editor of the crime books at a time when Reese had folded most of the other titles, so that's why it seems that he moved from one to the other.

You won't find much of my father's stuff under his own name because - apart from some of the late true-crime work - he used a variety of pen names, including Don Unatin and Bill Ryder.

I'd be glad to try to fill you in more, as best I can. Unfortunately my father isn't able to remember any of this anymore, but I can work from what he told me and what I lived through. I hope that's of some value.

PS. It seems that linking to the Fictionmags Index doesn't work, since the index is in constant state of being updated. Putting up long bibliographies here on Pulpetti wouldn't work (even though I'm known to have done it to great success), so I created another blog: Pulpetti Bibliographic Section. Here's the biblio for Art Crockett's and Walt Hecox's (mentioned in the original posting) crime stories and here's the biblio for Bud Ampolsk's stories under the pennames his son mentions above.

I'm going to talk about these writers with Alan later on and I'll post here what comes up.