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success, both in books and on TV, was the fact that she was a female private eye. The idea of a lady op was not exactly new in 1957, when the Ficklings (whose only other claim to distinction is that they once appeared on the Groucho Marx TV quiz, You Bet Your Life ) decided to become authors. A book by James Rubel called No Business for a Lady had appeared from Gold Medal (Prather's publishers) several years earlier; Carter Brown had already published, in Australia, the first few titles in his series about Mavis Seidlitz; and there had been other isolated efforts at establishing lady PIs, mainly in the pulps. But no one had a handle on how to do such a character commercially until the Ficklings came along.
    Their Honey West formula is simple: tell the stories in the first person, put Honey in all sorts of oddball situations in which her virtue as well as her life is threatened, throw in plenty of sexual innuendo—but under no circumstances have her go to bed with anybody, not even Mark Storm, the cop she supposedly has a yen for. This is what is known as the Big Tease. Is Honey a closet virgin or isn't she? Will she get laid or won't she? The male reader becomes hot and bothered by such speculation, it is presumed, and therefore is more than willing to come back for more of the same in the next book. That there is some validity in this sort of "hard sell" is evident from Honey's longevity on the private-eye scene.
    Jokes, wisecracks, and bathroom humor are plentiful in Honey's adventures, of course. The Ficklings's favorite method of adding chuckles was that old Prather standby, the double entendre:
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"I was a chorus girl at the Dreamdust Hotel in Vegas," she said, a touch of triumph in her husky voice. "Mr. Lawrence took a vote of the show's director and backstage crew. Out of thirty girls they picked me as the most outstanding." ( Honey in the Flesh )
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"You're going to love this party, baby," He! said. "Of course, a lot of my pictures have to be censored before they hit the magazines. You know what artists' balls are like!"
"I can imagine." ( A Gun for Honey )
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    Honey gets herself embroiled in Scott-like plots, too, such as the Miss Twentieth Century Beauty Pageant ( Honey in the Flesh , 1959), in which she is injected with a sex stimulant ("It's tearing me to pieces," she says, and "Have you ever sat on a hot oven until you thought your bottom would burn off?"), and for a while it looks as if the impenetrable is finally going to be penetrated. But only for a while. Then there is the case of the "kissing killer" ( A Gun for Honey , 1958), in which two beautiful women have been smothered to death in bizarre circumstances. The explanation for this, unearthed by Honey, is that a third woman, who was a close friend of the two dead ones, isn't really a woman at all but a transvestite (shades of Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine ) ; even though he went around masquerading as a woman, this individual was seized with normal male desires, and when he couldn't stand the pressure any longer, he "exploded from under all his makeup and mascara" and attacked his first victim, a woman named Helena. (And no wonder he picked Helena. As Mark Storm notes, she "was an exotic woman even lying on a slab.") When he grabbed Helena, and she saw him trying to pull his dress up at the same time he was trying to pull her down, she quite naturally started to scream—and so he was forced to jam his mouth over hers to cut off the noise. Presumably he also pinched her nostrils shut; in any case, he wound up kissing poor Helena until she expired. The second victim was later dispatched in the same oral fashion.
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    A nother notable writer of private-eye fiction who began his career in the fifties and who continues to produce novels and short stories to the present is Michael Avallone, a.k.a. "The Fastest Typewriter in the East," a.k.a. "King of the Paperbacks." These sobriquets are self-given but are nonetheless reasonably accurate.