Thursday, March 06, 2008

The Mysterious Leslie G. Sabo


A couple of comments on the previous post mention Leslie G. Sabo. Here’s the list of his stories from the invaluable Fictionmags Index:

Good Time Girl (ss) Trapped Detective Story Magazine Aug 1957
Death Girl (ss) Trapped Detective Story Magazine Aug 1958
Jealous Husband (ss) Saturn Web Detective Story Magazine Aug 1958
First Kill (ss) Trapped Detective Story Magazine Oct 1958
Brush Salesman (ss) Guilty Detective Story Magazine Nov 1958
Kill the Guy on Top (ss) Trapped Detective Story Magazine Dec 1958
Death Bait! (vi) Saturn Web Detective Story Magazine Feb 1959
The Lethal Blonde! (nv) Two-Fisted Detective Stories Jun 1959
My Fee Is Lust! (ss) Off Beat Detective Stories Sep 1959
Tease of Death! (ss) Two-Fisted Detective Stories Nov 1959
Passion Must Die! (ss) Web Detective Stories Dec 1959
The Passionate Zombie! (ss) Two-Fisted Detective Stories Jan 1960
Show Her His Blood! (ss) Web Detective Stories Feb 1960
Her Lovers Were Corpses! (ss) Off Beat Detective Stories Mar 1960
Soft Shoulders—Beware! (ss) Two-Fisted Detective Stories Mar 1960
Blonde Dynamite! (nv) Off Beat Detective Stories May 1960
The Loving Corpse (ss) Web Detective Stories Aug 1960
Devil Woman (ss) Off Beat Detective Stories Sep 1960
The Lusting Ones (ss) Two-Fisted Detective Stories Jan 1961
Soft Mark! (ss) Off Beat Detective Stories Jul 1961
Nice Guys Kill First! (ss) Off Beat Detective Stories May 1962

Great titles, but a pretty short-lived career. However, he made the cover of the issue with his very first story, as you can see.

Charles Gramlich commented that the name sounds like a pseudonym to him, and it sure does to me, too. In fact, I tried moving the letters around to see if I could come up with another author’s name, but to be honest, I’m terrible at anagrams and couldn’t do it. However, as I was reading his story “The Lusting Ones” in that issue of TWO-FISTED DETECTIVE STORIES, I kept thinking to myself, “You know, this reads a lot like one of Lawrence Block’s Andrew Shaw novels in miniature.”

Sheer speculation, of course. But it’s a well-written story (pretty brutal and unpleasant, though) and I’m convinced that Leslie G. Sabo was actually someone else.

5 comments:

August West said...

James don't do this to me. You got me going through boxes of old mags looking for these issues. No Sabo's yet, but I found a few stories by Art Crockett.

Juri said...

You get BLOG from Sabo's name. The remaining letters are pure gibberish. But, yeah, sure it's Bloch. ;)

Juri said...

I mean BLOCK!

Mk ( Mikayla-Rayne Braganca-Sabo) said...

Leslie g sabo is my great grandfather and that is in fact his real name he is 92 now he will be passing on soon. He owned summit books where he published his books . One of his favourite author is thomas merton a trappist monk

James Reasoner said...

Mk, many thanks for your comment! I'm very happy to find out after all these years that I was wrong and Leslie G. Sabo wasn't a pseudonym after all. I'm sorry to hear that he's not in good health. I'm going to investigate and see if I can find more of his work. Thank you again.