Jack Sharkey

Jack Sharkey (1931-1992) was an American writer of science fiction, mystery, and stage comedy. Born in Chicago, he sold his first science-fiction story, "The Captain of His Soul," to Fantastic magazine in 1959 and went on to publish roughly fifty stories in venues including Galaxy Science Fiction, alongside contributions to Playboy and a stint editing an internal Allstate Insurance magazine. He is best known in genre fiction for The Secret Martians and other comic science fiction novels, and more broadly for novelizing the television series The Addams Family in 1965. Beyond fiction, Sharkey was a prolific playwright, publishing more than eighty stage plays and comedies, some under pen names including Rick Abbot and Mark Chandler. His work across science fiction, mystery, and theater reflected an unusually wide-ranging career for a genre writer of his era.