Want fewer ads?

Leslie Elson Waller (April 1, 1923...March 29, 2007), author, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, was born in Chicago, Illinois. He suffered from amblyopia and poliomyelitis as a child, but graduated from Hyde Park High School by the age of 16. He was interested in writing from an early age, and became a police reporter before he went to Wilson Junior College.

He joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and continued to write, never leaving the US. His first published novel under his own name was Three Day Pass. Before that he published Lie Like a Lady under the pseudonym C.S. Cody.

After World War II, he attended the University of Chicago and married Louise Hetzel. Together they moved to New York City, where his second novel, Phoenix Island, was published in 1953. The couple had 2 children and divorced in 1968. He married Patricia Mahen the same year, and began traveling around the world, starting with a Roman honeymoon.

Waller worked as a public relations account executive at Harshe-Rotman and Druck in New York, servicing a variety of accounts, including Hertz Rent-a-Car. In the meantime, he continued to write novels and a children's book series, "A Book to Begin on...".

His organized crime trilogy, The Banker, The Family and The American garnered recognition, landing the last title on The New York Times bestseller list. Waller became known as a go-to man for novelizations and produced the novels for Dog Day Afternoon (under the pseudonym Patrick Mann), Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Hide in Plain Sight.

Leslie Waller, with his co-author Arnold Drake are credited with having written the first graphic novel, It Rhymes with Lust. It was their idea to pitch a new idea, the "picture novel", a bridge between comic books and "book books", to St John, the publisher who released It Rhymes with Lust. It Rhymes with Lust was rereleased by Dark Horse Comics in the spring of 2007 (see press release here: http://www.darkhorse.com/news/pressrelease.php?id=1370).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Leslie Waller", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0