Legends of the Underwood #15: Mario Puzo

"I used to do a book bonus on the weekends, which was at least 60 pages. I never could write in the office, I had to work at home. When I was working on The Godfather, I was doing three stories a month, I was writing book reviews for The New York Times, Book World, Time magazine, and I wrote a children's book [The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw]. All at one time. And I was publishing other articles. I had four years where I must have knocked out millions of words. I tell ya, it's absolutely the best training a writer could get, to work on those magazines. You did everything."

--Mario Puzo, in conversation with Josh Alan Friedman, from It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (by Adam Parfrey, Feral House, 2003). During the 1960s, Puzo wrote for Magazine Management titles Male and Men.

(Fifteenth in a series. Cover scan courtesy CoverBrowser.com.)

A Book I Want to Read Right Now, Damnit

Yesterday Bookseller.com (and the Rap Sheet) reported that UK publishing house Quercus picked up the rights to a long-lost Mario Puzo novel: Six Graves to Munich. It was published under a pen name ("Mario Cleri") just a year before The Godfather. Not only do I love the sound of this, but I'm a fan of those late 1960s Banner paperbacks, which include David Goodis's last novel, Somebody's Done For, a cool reprint of David Karp's Hardman, as well as Gil Brewer's The Tease and Sin For Me. And Puzo/Cleri novel looks just as cheesy/cool. But can a used copy be found anywhere online? Nope. Looks like I'm going to have to wait until next June to check this out... and even then, I'm sure it'll feature some sleek, perfect bestseller-y kind of cover, a far cry from the pulpy glory of the original Banner cover.