Thomey, Tedd (pulp fiction writer)

 

(1920- )

Tedd Thomey could properly be called one of the last of the original pulp writers. He was part of the final generation of storytellers to establish themselves in those rough-hewn fiction periodicals that had grown and flourished for 50 years and began their decline and fall at the end of World War II. Thomey and a handful of other young writers like John D. MacDonald, many of them just back from service in World War II, infused new blood into ailing titles like Black Mask and Ten Detective Aces and for a time helped lift those cherished magazines to the standards of a fading golden age.

Born in Butte, Montana, Thomey graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1943. He entered the U.S. Marine Corps that same year, and as a member of the 28th Marines regiment he was part of the invasion force at the bloody battle of Iwo Jima, where he was wounded in combat. Thomey took home a Purple Heart and a Presidential Unit Citation. In peacetime he worked as a reporter, covering the crime beat for the San Francisco Chronicle. By night he followed the cops to various crime scenes and dreamed of writing fiction. He loved the idea of inventing dialogue and creating characters. It seemed more challenging than the newspaper game—and less dangerous. One Christmas Eve in San Francisco he was on the street, covering a murder. A young woman had killed her boyfriend in front of their Christmas tree. It was a freezing cold night, and when Thomey and the cops came back outside he sat in the back of the police car while they decided what to do next. “One of the police officers had the murder weapon,” Thomey recalled for this author, “a .32 calibre pistol, and he was playing with it while they were talking, and suddenly it went off. I was sitting in the backseat and the bullet went right through the seat and beside my head. It was just a coincidence but I quit the Chronicle shortly after that and started writing pulp stories.”

Tedd and Pat Thomey attending the Broadway production of The Big Love

Tedd and Pat Thomey attending the Broadway production of The Big Love

A writer friend of Thomey’s named Richard Dermody gave him the name of an agent, August Lenninger, and Thomey sent him the short story he had just finished. Called “$10,000 an Inch,” it was about a six-foot-tall heiress and a murderer, and it sold. “I immediately quit my job on the paper to be a freelance writer. And my friend Der-mody said, ‘Don’t do it, you’ll starve.’ And of course that’s what happened.”

Thomey moved to a small beach town north of San Diego and wrote one detective story per week. He got $50 or $75 when he was “lucky enough to sell one.” He got pretty lucky. Thomey’s work began appearing in nearly every one of the remaining crime pulps—Black Mask, FBI Detective Stories, Thrilling Detective, Ten Detective Aces, All-Story Detective, Dime Mystery, G-Men Detective, Super Detective, and New Detective, as well as such science fiction titles as Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, and others. In 1949 he switched agents, from Lenninger to an ambitious newcomer named Scott Meredith. The pulps were folding even faster than Thomey could write for them, and soon Meredith found himself with a backlog of stories and no place to publish them. Everything old became new again sooner or later. Only a couple of years after the detective pulps virtually disappeared, along came a new line of tough-guy fiction magazines—Manhunt, Suspect, Accused, Pursuit. “Darned if they didn’t buy those same old stories from the files,” said Thomey. “For $800 and $900. And I would have been glad to get $75 for one a few years before!”

With his pulp writing experience and Meredith on his team, Thomey was perfectly poised to get in on the boom in paperback originals in the early ’50s. He sold to Gold Medal, Berkeley, and Avon. Scott Meredith provided him with a kind of formula to follow. The most important part of the formula was that a dead body show up by page three of the story. “I found it strikingly easy to write these novels,” Thomey said. Avon paid a $1,000 advance for And Dream of Evil. “In the opening chapter I’ve got a hero on a roof and he’s handcuffed to a slot machine. He’s going down a fire escape lugging this thing—if you’ve ever carried a slot machine, believe me they’re heavy— and then he makes love to a beautiful girl while still handcuffed to the slot machine. All in the first chapter!”

The topic sold well and was translated and published in France, Germany, and elsewhere. Thomey then wrote I Want Out, about a tough bail bondsman, and it sold to Ace as half of a double edition. The author fashioned Killer in White out of actual experiences with a female obscene phone caller and a gang of chiropractor scam artists in Long Beach. Other topics followed.

In 1961, Thomey got a call from the Meredith agency asking him to work on a topic they were throwing together with Mrs. Florence Aadland. Florence was the mother of Beverly Aadland, a then-notorious blonde nymphet who was known as the underage mistress of Errol Flynn in the last years of Flynn’s life (he died at 50 in 1959). Other scandals followed, and Mrs. Aadland lost custody of her daughter. Now, broke and living alone in Hollywood, she wanted to peddle her side of the story. Meredith found a buyer at Lancer topics, which paid Florence a $2,500 advance that she had to split with her assigned writer. Thomey went to see her. He found her drunk, her place a dump. “I was afraid even to drink a glass of water there,” he recalled. After some initial acrimony, however, the work went well. Thomey found that Aadland’s stories about Flynn were gold and her offbeat perspective on life was priceless. The topic they put together was titled The Big Love, a weird, backseat view of celebrity, unforgettable from the first startling sentence: “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.”

Rushed out to exploit what little interest remained in the fading scandal and the dead movie star, Lancer topics gave the topic no special publicity. And yet The Big Love found an audience, a cult of hip readers who were taken with the topic’s strange mixture of trashiness, self-delusion and pathos, and its devastating portrait of the ultimate pushy showbiz mom. Tedd Thomey had helped Mrs. Aadland to come across as if one of the characters from Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust had sprung to life and decided to write a memoir in her declining years. Copies of the topic became collectors’ items and sold for hundreds of times the cover price. The topic’s cult status was catapulted by a tongue-in-cheek review in Esquire magazine by the novelist William Styron, who labeled the topic “a masterpiece” and “a work of wild comic genius.” The director Robert Aldrich bought the film rights, and made plans—unfulfilled—to make the movie with Bette Davis as Florence. Many years later the text was adapted into a one-woman show and performed in a number of productions, including one on Broadway starring Tracey Ull-man.

Tedd Thomey properly saw the book as a highlight of his career, although he continued to produce fiction and nonfiction works in the years ahead and returned to newspaper work, writing for some decades for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. In 1996, the Naval Institute Press published Thomey’s Immortal Images, a personal history of two photographers and the flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II. A brilliant volume, part memoir, part history, part journalistic detective story, the topic, written 50 years after the author’s own experiences on Iwo Jima, will likely rank as one of the last significant topics about World War II written by an actual combat veteran of that long-ago war.

Works

  • All the Way (1964);
  • And Dream of Evil (1954);
  • Big Love, The (1961);
  • Doris Day (1962);
  • Flight to Takla-Ma (1961);
  • Glorious Decade, The (1971);
  • Immortal Images (1996);
  • I Want Out (1959);
  • Jet Ace (1958);
  • Jet Pilot (1955);
  • Killer in White (1956);
  • Prodigy Plot, The (1987);
  • Sadist, The (1961)

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