Uncovering Hunt’s Past

Although most news accounts of former Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s death yesterday failed to mention much about his having been a spy novelist, bloggers Steve Lewis and Bill Crider are endeavoring to make up for that slight. Lewis’ Mystery*File has a lengthy rundown of Hunt’s fiction, written both under his own name and under a variety of pseudonyms (including Robert Dietrich). Meanwhile, Crider--whose impressive collection of pulp paperbacks must be threatening the integrity of his home’s foundation by now--has posted cover scans of the Hunt books at his fingertips. I’m particularly fond of the fronts from End of a Stripper (1960) and Curtains for a Lover (1962), both of which, Lewis points out, starred “two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley, a former agent for the Treasury, but whose nose for trouble led him into the exact same situations as any two-fisted, hard-drinking private eye would find himself in.”

READ MORE: “Paperback Warrior Primer—Howard Hunt” (Paperback Warrior); “Ex-Spy Crafted Watergate, Other Schemes,” by Patricia Sullivan (The Washington Post); “E. Howard Hunt,” by Ed Gorman; “A PQ Interview with E. Howard Hunt” (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “E. Howard Hunt’s The Towers of Silence,” by dfordoom (Vintage Pop Fictions).