(?-1990)
Marc Brody was both the byline and protagonist of dozens of sexy thrillers written between 1955 and 1960. Brody was a tough American newspaperman, in later years a television crime reporter, who pursued hot stories and even hotter women in popular softcover digests, and a few comic topic versions, put between covers by Horwitz, Australia’s leading developer of lurid pulp. And what covers they were! In an age of spectacularly sexy cover art, the Brodys offered some of the most memorable, full of fetching, alluring young models with come-hither looks demanding the topics’ purchase. Like the popular novels of Hank janson, Carter brown, James Hadley chase, and others, the Brodys impersonated the American hard-boiled style, replicating its broad outline—the slangy patter, the violence, the cynicism, the abundance of voluptuous, ever-available females—and making them broader. Brody the hero plied his trade in a fictional u.S. metropolis, although his assignments sometimes took him to exotic foreign locations and at least once to the land down under. The topics were not as successful as those other ersatz American tough-guy novels from Australia written by Carter Brown, which were published in the United States with great success, but they were no less authentic and just as much fun. “Brody” the author was in reality Bill Williams, an Australian journalist, editor of the muckraking newspaper Melbourne Truth.
Marc Brody’s late-1950s thrillers featured memorably sexy covers.
Works
- Babe Bound to Kill (1958);
- Baby Your Racket’s Busted (1957);
- Baby Your Type’s Murder (1958);
- Blackmail in Red Headlines (1955);
- Blackmail Was a Brunette (1957);
- Blonde at Bay (1959);
- Blonde Cries Blackmail, The (1957);
- Blueprints for Murder (1955);
- Cover Girl Cries Murder (1959);
- Dames in His Death, The (1956);
- Deadline for a Dame (1957);
- Flame Was Fatal (1958);
- Her Halo in Headlines (1957);
- Hers Is a Hearse (1957);
- High Tide Temptress (1966);
- Hot Line for a Honey (1958);
- Justice for a Jinx (1957);
- Kitten You’re a Killer (1958);
- Lady’s Out of Circulation, The (1957);
- Lady, Don’t Shroud Me!
- (1958); Larceny for a Lovely (1957);
- Late Final Blonde (1958);
- Libel Was a Blonde (1957);
- Maid for the Morgue (1956);
- Maid Up for Murder (1957);
- Murder Is a Maiden’s Handicap (1960);
- One Shot for Sadie (1958);
- Page Me a Pinup (1955);
- Penthouse Preview (1958);
- Red Hot and Morgue Bound (1958);
- Second Story Sinner (1958);
- Set Up for a Sinner (1957);
- Sinister Sister (1956);
- Strictly Corruptible (1956);
- Step Swiftly Sinner (1956);
- Sweet Svelte and Sinful (1956);
- Undercover Cutie (1958);
- Write Off the Redhead (1958)
