Julius Fast writer of both Fact and Fiction

Prolific is defined as fecund: intellectually productive; "a prolific writer"; "a fecund imagination". This man can easily be called a prolific writer.

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.

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.

The Nassau County OPAC lists 21 items under his name (and it lists 119 items for Howard).

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.”