Julius Fast, 89, Writer of Both Fact and Fiction, Is Dead
Matthew Kruk
Obituaries
Julius Fast, 89, Writer of Both Fact and Fiction, Is Dead
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Julius Fast, who won the first Edgar Award given by the Mystery Writers of
America and went on to publish popular books on body language, the Beatles
and human relationships, died on Tuesday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Jennifer Fast Gelfand. He had lived
in Manhattan until suffering a stroke a year and a half ago.
Mr. Fast, the younger brother of the novelist Howard Fast, won instant
acclaim as a mystery writer. "Watchful at Night," his first novel, was
written while he was still in the Army Medical Corps during World War II.
Its cover identified him as Sgt. Julius Fast. The book won the inaugural
Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1946 for the best first novel published in 1945.
Mr. Fast followed up with several more detective novels, including "Walk in
Shadow" (1947) and "A Model for Murder" (1956), before branching out into
pop psychology, health and relationships. His most successful book, "Body
Language" (1970), which analyzed the unconscious messages sent out by the
human body, inspired several sequels, notably "The Body Language of Sex,
Power and Aggression" (1976), "Body Politics" (1980) and "The Body Book"
(1981).
Mr. Fast was born in Manhattan in 1919. After earning a bachelor's degree at
New York University, where he was a pre-med student, he spent three years in
the Army, which assigned him to a blood lab in Boston. While in the Army he
edited a collection of science fiction stories, "Out of This World" (1944),
and then turned his hand to crime fiction.
In 1946 he married Barbara Sher, also a writer, who survives him, and with
whom he wrote "Talking Between the Lines: How We Mean More Than We Say"
(1979). Besides his daughter Jennifer, of Shady, N.Y., other survivors are a
son, Timothy, of Des Moines; another daughter, Melissa Morgan of
Casselberry, Fla.; and five grandchildren. Howard Fast died in 2003.
To support his growing family, Mr. Fast worked as a writer and editor at
several medical magazines. A stint at a podiatric publication provided the
raw material for "You and Your Feet" (1970), but his wide-ranging interests
account for the variety in titles like "The Beatles: The Real Story" (1968),
"The New Sexual Fulfillment" (1972) and "Weather Language" (1979).
In 1988 he published "What Should We Do About Davey?," a
semiautobiographical novel about an awkward adolescent employed at a boys'
camp in the Catskills that was very much like the one owned by Mr. Fast's
uncle.
Often he wrote to order for publishers rushing a book into print on a timely
subject, like the findings of the sex researchers William Masters and
Virginia E. Johnson. Within months of the publication of "Human Sexual
Response" in 1966, Mr. Fast produced "What You Should Know About Human
Sexual Response." He also wrote books on how to quit smoking, how men and
women can overcome their incompatibilities and the meaning of new research
on Omega-3 fatty acids.
"Julius is a fast writer," said Tom Dardis, the editor who commissioned his
Beatles book. "That's no pun on his name."
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company