Peter Winston was...

I was finally able to check Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalogue (a valuable tool, if you ask me) for Peter Winston. It seems that Peter Winston was a house pseudonym that was used by Paul Eiden and James/Jim Bowser. Eiden wrote also some war paperbacks as by Delano Stagg (two of which have been translated in Finnish) and some crime novels under various house names. According to Hawk's, Eiden wrote The ABC Affair and Assignment to Bahrain. Bowser wrote The Glass Cipher and Doomsday Vendetta. (And, then, two years after the last book in the series Jack Laflin was called in to write yet another one.) It also seems that Bowser wrote a hardback mystery novel for St. Martin's in 1987, called No Sanctuary. In the mean time, he did two Nick Carters (Death of the Falcon, 1974; A High Yield in Death, 1976).

If Kauto weren't demanding we go out, I'd check further. I can only advise you to go to Google and Amazon and Abebooks.

The Adjusters

I checked further: The Adjusters series seems to be one of those men's adventure series that filled the paperback racks in the late sixties and early seventies. It was first written by Peter Winston (about whom I know nothing, and Abebooks seems no other books by him). The final entry in the series was written by Jack Laflin. The cover of the last book says: "The Adjusters: an organization unique in the annals of counter-espionage". It also seems that Peter Winston was the hero in the books - so why was Laflin's name used in the last novel (and why the two-year hiatus between the fourth and the five books?)?

Here's the list, from Abebooks:

Assignment to Bahrein, Award 1967
The ABC Affair, Award 1967
Doomsday Vendetta, Award 1968 ("Dispatched to solve a murder in Tangier, A-2 is trapped in an espionage network bent on destroying America's most strategic missile bases.")
The Glass Cipher, Award 1968 ("Agent A-2 on a brutal spy hunt that begins with the biggest sellout in international espionage.")
The Temple at Ilumquh, Award 1970 (written by Jack Laflin)

Jack Laflin?

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.