Mario Pinzauti has long been one of my favourite, obscure, micro-budget Italian filmmakers. His films might not be all that great – there’s no way you could describe such overripe nonsense as Due Magnum per un citta di corogna or Mandinga as classics – but they’re usually pretty enjoyable, in slightly wayward fashion. Most of them are pretty difficult to track down nowadays, and hardly any are available in English (and it’s unlikely that they ever will be).
Well, it turns out that as well as being a film director, he was also a rather succesful pulp fiction author, writing well over 100 spy, horror and thriller novels under a variety of pseudonyms (most commonly Harry Small). There’s a really interesting article about Pinzauti’s writing career on the clubghost.it website (in Italian only, I’m afraid). He wasn’t the only director to also work as a novelist; Maurizio Pradeaux also spent a good couple of years writing for Fumetti’s in the early 70s (during the slight downturn in the Italian Film industry that occurred between c1968-72.
It’s interesting, though, that he seems to have only really written films that he also directed, rather than being a scriptwriter for hire. I wonder why?