J. C. Pollock Update # 2

A little over a year ago I reviewed the novel Threat Case by J.C. Pollock—a writer I devoured as a teenager in the early-1990s—and while I was re-reading Threat Case I did a little research and found a hotly contested pseudonym that possibly belonged to Pollock. The pseudonym is James Elliott and the majority of information around the Internet suggested it belonged to the writer John Case—which is the pseudonym of husband and wife team Carolyn and Jim Hougan. They have written several successful novels over the past decade including The Genesis Code and The First Horseman. Unfortunately I’ve never read any of them, so I can only assume they write a tight and gripping thriller.

Now back to Pollock. I’ve been exchanging emails with Mr Pollock for a few weeks and he confirmed the James Elliott novels are his. He wrote three novels using the Elliott nom de plume from 1996 to 2000. The titles, Cold Cold Heart (1996), Nowhere to Hide (1997), and Endgame (2000). He has since turned his attention to Hollywood and screenwriting. He wrote the screenplay for the straight to DVD film End Game—no relationship with his novel of the same title—that starred Cuba Gooding, Jr and James Woods, and was directed by Andy Cheng. Mr Pollock wasn’t impressed with the finished product and warns against making an effort to find it. He is currently working on a New Line Cinema project titled The Venus Fixer—a project he says, “I am having a much more pleasant experience with [than End Game].”

I have found only one of the James Elliott novels so far, the Pinnacle Books edition of Cold Cold Heart, and I haven’t read it yet. It’s on my stack of “to-be-read” books and I need to move it up a little. Heck, maybe tonight. And I can’t wait to see what his most recent film project turns out to be.

Here is a complete list of novels written by J.C. Pollock:

The Dennecker Code (1982)
Mission MIA (1982)
Centrifuge (1984)
Crossfire (1986)
Payback (1989)
Threat Case (1991)
Goering’s List (1993)

As by James Elliott

Cold Cold Heart (1996)
Nowhere to Hide (1997)
Endgame (2000)

My favorites are: Threat Case, Payback and Centrifuge, but all of them are great.

Click Here to read the first J.C. Pollock Update. (This has proven to be one of the most popular posts here at Gravetapping. It gets several hits a day and even though it was posted more than a year ago I still get quite a bit of email about it.)