Mostly Crappy Books

"True" Trash: The Joy of Hustling

2011-08-22T01:07:00.000-07:00

The Joy of Hustling
(Manor Books Inc, 1976)
Gregg Tyler

"The unabashed confessions of a boy who knew them all-the rich, the beautiful, the talented – and some of them paid for the experience."

A dated but enjoyable sleazy little book, condescending in tone, telling the story of some forgotten bisexual movie-star groupie and hustler, namely the author, Gregg Tyler. For some odd reason, it seems to be a pricey and sought-after collectible.
Concentrating on his life during the 60s, when Tyler isn't too busy lecturing, he comes across as an egoistic, conniving Candide who slowly lets the excessive lifestyle he moves around in to turn him into a cynical, leaching opportunist. Most of the book is spent narrating his long involvement as secretary and regular fuck of Jayne Mansfield, whose third husband was his cousin Matt Cimber,** while the rest recounts his hustling days on the streets of Los Angeles and New York. If he is to be believed, Tyler seems to be a magnet to the stars, for they seem to stumble across his path — or into his bed — everywhere he goes. From Bobby Darin* to semi-forgotten Dutch painter/writer Jan Cremer to Sal Mineo, from Judy Garland and Liza to Sharon Tate — he too claims to have turned down an offer to spend that infamous night partying with her and the other victims — to most of the Kennedy Family to Marilyn, Tyler claims to have met them all, plus many more, even if only in passing.
When dishing the dirt about the (at the time) still-living Hollywood He-men whose dicks Tyler has had in him (or vise versa), he regrettably uses only pseudonyms, probably to save himself from possible lawsuits from all his supposed ex-tricks. Still, Tyler does dish a lot as he screws his way across the USA, going from one famous person's funeral to the other, from one sugar daddy to the next, losing himself in drugs and alcohol along the way. His gradual decline echoes the rot that he sees seeping through the USA, but Tyler fails to see that despite all his "liberated" bacchanalian views, he eventually becomes very much an inflexible, judgmental example of all that is bad in the society he moves in and complains about. Much like how Christiane F., in her biography, feels herself superior to the rest of the world because she's a junky and they aren't, Tyler seems to think that he is a better person than everyone else because he is, well, a hustler and leech.
The 1970s he skips over with a sketchy chapter that reveals that he himself has become better than the world around him by marrying into and becoming part of established society—that is, Old Money, not Hollywood. Nothing like riding the coattails of others to prove yourself better than the rest.
Graphic for its day, The Joy of Hustling is entertaining enough and relatively well written, but a tad too bitchy and opinionated, with Tyler himself unintentionally coming across somewhat dislikable. Kitty Kelly he ain't, however, so for modern tastes he even sometimes comes across a bit too discrete. But for old-time "true" sleaze, it makes for a good page-turner.

*That highly reliable Pulitzer-Prize-winning (NOT!) tabloid Star did a nice little article on November 12, 1991, entitled "Bobby Darin's Shocking Secret Affair with Jayne Mansfield" in which Tyler tells of them having a threesome.

**Matt Cimber, born Thomas Vitale Ottaviano, is an Italian-American film producer, scriptwriter and director who was Jayne's last husband (from 1964 to 1966) and with whom she had a son. His cinematic directorial debut was her last film, the drama Single Room Furnished (1968). Since then, he has primarily specialized in trashy and exploitative vehicles, including early X-rated pseudo-documentaries and a couple of cult Blaxploitation films. He quit the industry in 1984, but returned in 2006. He currently even has two films in production.
Although it all has really nothing to do with "crappy books", below is presentation of posters and film clips to his films.

Single Room Furnished
(1968, dir. as Matteo Ottaviano)

Plot summary from imdb (written by filmfactsman): "Three stories in one: Johnie (Jayne Mansfield) is married, but her husband deserts her when she becomes pregnant. She changes her name to Mae and takes a job as a waitress. She falls in love, but her fiancé leaves her just as they're about to get married. So Mae changes her name to Eileen and becomes a prostitute."

A 24-second snippet from the film:

Man & Wife
(1969)

It would seem that the returns of his foray into serious filmmaking didn't pay off well enough, for in Cimber's second project he went the way of pseudo-documentary and hoisted onto the American public one of the first films to show the Full in-and-out Monty. For the sake of helping the modern couple of the day, the film "moves from anatomy charts and Asian erotic art into actual footage of two couples demonstrating nearly fifty different sexual positions."
Watch the trailer (snore) here at Something Weird.

He & She
(1970)

It would seem that the pseudo-documentary was a lucrative field in the early days of adult filmmaking, for he followed Man & Wife a year later with He & She. As the German Catholic Film Service (issue 18124) puts it, "In this sex education film, in addition to the obligatory sexologist there is only two young lovers. [...] In some places the film image freezes for a few seconds, always whenever [...] there are too clear close-ups." Charles Kilgore of ecco claims the film to be "A marked improvement over its predecessor [...,] He & She is unquestionably the most romantic of the 'white coaters'."
Watch the trailer (snore) here at Something Weird.

Africanus Sexualis (Black Is Beautiful)
(1970)

Anyone remember John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me? Remember the bit about when he was hitchhiking, all the white dudes that gave him a ride always wanted him to show them his wiener because they wanted to see for themselves whether or not black men are better hung? I always thought that Griffin, a pre-Stonewall product of middle class heterosexuality, really missed half of what was actually going on: those closet cases that gave him a ride probably wanted to do a lot more than just see the forbidden fruit.
In this, Cimber's third "white coater", as these early pseudo-documentary pornos are apt to be called, he takes a look a how the brothers and sister play patty cake, this time with commentary by an "African" wearing the white coat. A film made by honkies for honkies who want to see forbidden fruit than for the then-denizens of inner-city urban renewal. Watch the incredibly condescending and boring trailer here at Something Weird.

And, though it has nothing to do with the film, here a commercial from around the same time:

The Sexually Liberated Female
(1970)

Poster from one-sheet index. Cimber, in his own biography as presented in (among other places) the badly written and spelt prospect for his upcoming film Femena (pdf here), fails to mention his X-rated documentaries and instead claims this film, The Sexually Liberated Female, as his follow-up project to Single Room Furnished. Starring Lindis Guinness (of Grave of the Vampire (1974 / full film) and a few porno films), Cimber claims that The Sexually Liberated Female was based on the 70s' sex advice classic The Sensuous Woman by "J" — which he misidentifies as The Sensuous Female — but that the publisher rescinded the rights when they realized that he had made a satire, thus the film was retitled. ("J", by the way, has long been known under her real name, Terry Garrity.) Most online sources claim it to be a "documentary"; according to Dan Pavlides at Answer.com: "This X-rated film features naked women demonstrating various techniques in masturbation. The proceedings are given an appetizing twist with the addition of whipped cream and chocolate sauce. Lindis Guiness narrates...". It would seem to be a lost film.
The image above left, according Glass Eye, is a production shot of the shoot of The Sensual Female, one the film's alternative titles (the German title was Jasmin — Die sinnliche Frau).

Sex and Astrology
(1971)

More pseudo-documentary porn — Matt Cimber definitely know what he liked to film. Too bad no one who's ever seen this thing has ever written about it; it is nowhere to be found on the web. Another lost film waiting, like HIM, to be rediscovered.

Calliope
(1971)

AKA Love Is Catching. Matt Cimber goes from white coats to white discharge. According to Fandango.com: "Calliope, a sex farce, is clearly an exploitative remake of the much more significant and famous film La Ronde (1950 & 1964). In this film, ten people have a succession of sexual encounters until all of them have given and received 'the gift that goes on giving,' sexually transmitted diseases. What was considered to be funny and sexy in the age of penicillin would not be considered appropriate in the later age of AIDS." Marc Edward Heuck of The Projectionist Has Been Drinking says at Temple of Schlock that: "Reportedly, Alamo Drafthouse has the sole surviving print of this La Ronde-style production..."

The Black Six
(1973)

Matt Cimber moves from sexploitation into Blaxploitation, this one starring six NFL players [Gene Washington (San Francisco 49ers), "Mean" Joe Greene (Pittsburgh Steelers), Willie Lanier (Kansas City Chiefs), Lem Barney (Detroit Lions), Mercury Morris (Miami Dolphins) and Carl Eller (Minnesota Vikings).]; commonly viewed as not one of the best of the genre. The synopsis by frankfob2 at imdb: "A black high school student is caught dating a white girl by the girl's brother. He and his biker gang beat the boy to death. The boy's brother, who is a member of a black biker gang, hears about it and comes to town to avenge his brother's death." According to eccentric cinema, "The Black Six struggles to be entertaining even within the realm of 'So Bad It's Good' cinema."

Trailer:

That Girl from Boston
(1975)

Based on a novel by Robert H. Rimmer, the author of The Harrad Experiment, and featuring no one less than Mamie van Doren. Going by what says Alex Jackinson says in his memoirs The Romance of Publishing, the film may never have been released: "The last time I saw Matt Cimber was in 1975. He had huge blowups of Mamie Van Doren as Princess Tassle and the movie was presumably ... [to] be released in six months. [...] Then — nothing. None of my phone calls were returned and both Monnstone Films and Matt Cimber vanished and I've never heard from him since." No poster or trailer or snippet is to be found on-line. Thus, The Girl from Boston seems to be yet another of that genre of film Cimber excels at: The Lost Film.

Alias Big Cherry
(1975)

Based on Robert H. Adleman's book Alias Big Cherry: The Confessions of a Master Criminal, with appearances by the cult actresses Roberta Collins and Dyanne Thorne as well as a non-porno appearance by Colleen Brennan. The film tells the "true" story of 700-pound Sylvan Scolnick, aka Big Cherry, a career criminal and confidence man. Surprise: It seems to be yet another lost film.

The Candy Tangerine Man
(1975)

I actually remember watching trailers for this on TV in DC as a kid: I was watching the B&W masterpiece Night of the Living Dead (1968 / trailer / full film) on "Creature Feature" while babysitting, and I swear this film bought all the advertising time. The Amazing World of Cult Movies has this to say about one of Samuel L. Jackson's favorite films: "Jaw-dropping Blaxploitation silliness from the director of Butterfly and the appalling Witch Who Came from the Sea warned 'Git Back Jack — Give Him No Jive ... He Is the Baaad'est Cat in '75.' He is, of course, Black Shampoo's John Daniels as The Baron, a married suburban businessman who leads a double life as a hardboiled pimp with a gold Rolls Royce (the headlights contain hidden machine-guns). This nonsensical premise is further exacerbated by silly clothing, tacky hookers, Italian gangsters, and a guy getting his hand chewed up by a garbage disposal. [...] Not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but some will find it irresistible." According to Roger Elbert, The Candy Tangerine Man is "a singularly unpleasant movie that somehow manages to squeeze a few humorous scenes in with the gore, the mutilations and the mass executions." Something Awful says "The Candy Tangerine Man is an amazing showcase of everything embarrassing in the 1970s." Sounds very promising, if you ask me. Could this be Cimber's masterpiece?

The opening scenes and credits of The Candy Tangerine Man:

A Gemini Affair
(1975)

Film synopsis by Fryingham at imdb: "A hopeful young actress is lured to Hollywood by the seduction of fame and fortune. A friend she lives with while in Hollywood becomes her lover, and they both soon come to realize that the seedy Hollywood lifestyle is not for them." See the original Will Robinson's blonde hubba-hubba older sister Judy (Mart Kristen), as "Julie," have full frontal lesbian sex! Well, you could if the film were available anywhere...

Lady Cocoa
(1975)

"Freedom's just another name for love."

Cimber returns to the Blaxploitation genre with Lady Cocoa, also known as Pop Goes the Weasel. Synopsis from Trash City: "Cocoa (Lola Falana) gets a 24-hour pass out of jail to testify against her former boyfriend. Two cops (Washington and Dreier) have to keep her alive for the night; needless to say, the boyfriend has a different opinion, and sends his minions to the Lake Tahoe casino where they're holed up. And Cocoa doesn't exactly help: fed-up with staying in her room, she starts demanding to buy dresses, be taken to dinner, etc. — or else she'll pull her co-operation. And, boy, if whining was an Olympic sport, Cocoa would be a gold medalist. A fairly smart script by George Theakos helps keep things moving; while I can't say the twists surprised us, our predictions were mostly "It'd be kinda cool if...", which we can live with. The performances are also solid: Dreier is very effective as the senior officer, while Washington plays a straight-shooting ghetto cop, uncertain what he's doing on this case." A well written review can be found here at WTFCinema. Lady Cocoa was remade years later as a comedy with music interludes and nuns known as Sister Act (1992 / trailer).

A scene from Lady Cocoa:

The Witch Who Came from the Sea
(1976)

One of the 72 films banned in the UK as a "video nasty" in the 80s. From DVD Drive-In: "Millie Perkins stars in a career-breaking performance as Molly, a barmaid who spends her days babysitting her nephews and her nights slinging drinks at a local seaside bar. As Molly is introduced, she sits on the beach gazing at muscular studs working out on outdoor equipment... her fantasies becoming nastily violent as they become bloody corpses! Her overactive imagination also provokes a bizarre dream-like sequence where she has sex with two popular football players (both actors from Cimber's The Candy Tangerine Man), ties them up, then castrates them as blood sprays over her naked body!! But was it a fantasy? When their naked bodies are found the next morning, Molly begins to wonder if her frenzied visions are reality. And if they are, where does her hatred of men stem from?"

New trailer for the DVD release:

Tiger Man
(1978)

Supposedly aka as Fist of Fury, but it is hard to believe that this film is even known at all. Cimber goes 3D.

Bad acting galore in a scene from Tiger Man:

Butterfly
(1982)

Considering his filmography up till now, one wonders how he got handed this project: a "serious" adaptation of James M. Cain's noir novel meant as a star vehicle to kick-start Pia Zadora's career. It was her first film since Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (trailer / full film) in 1964. Butterfly features a slumming Orson Wells and other has-beens who owed car payments. Cool Cinema Trash says: "Honest and hard-working Jess Tyler (Stacy Keach) arrives home one blistering afternoon to find a pouty sexpot (Pia Zadora) sitting on the front porch of his modest desert shack. 'Something you want?' he asks. 'How can I tell, till I know what you got?' And we're off and running on the sexed-up rollercoaster ride that is Butterfly (1983), the neo-noir melodrama based on the James M. Cain novel. Score by the great Ennio Morricone.

Trailer:

Pia Zadora butterfly von dummy-account

A Time to Die
(1982)

Based on Mario Puzo's novel Six Graves to Munich, A Time to Die was filmed in 1979 and not released until 1982; Rex Harrison's last film. Plot synopsis by John Sacksteder from imdb: "A World War II vet sets out in 1948 to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of Nazis. His targets are four Germans, a Sicilian, and a Hungarian who committed the atrocities. He is aided by a CIA operative, who has another agenda. One of the targeted men is being groomed by the US to become the West German chancellor and is to be protected. Along the way, a third person joins the team."

Trailer:

Trailer provided by Video Detective

Fake-Out
(1982)

Also known as Nevada Heat. M. Riklis, the producer of this film, was Pia Zadora's husband at the time; this and the earlier Butterfly were his loving attempts to help Pia get a career. Lots of skin in this one. Starring Pia, Telly Savalas and Desi Arnaz Jr. — what a cast! — Cinema Gonzo says: "[I]t's mostly a remake of Matt Cimber's earlier blaxploitation film Lady Cocoa (1975)." Includes a lesbian kiss from failed-actress Connie Hair, now a political PR flack for several conservative organizations. In a 1984 interview of Pia Zadora by Frank Sanello, Pia states "I threatened to commit suicide if Fake Out was released."

Opening credits and title song:

Hundra
(1983)
"No man will ever penetrate my body, with sword or himself."
Hundra (Laurene Landon)

The first of two films Cimber made with Laurene Landon (measurements: 36.5-21-37), the film actually runs a full 14 minutes before the credits roll. Tells the tale of the only survivor of an Amazon tribe that gets slaughtered, Hundra the Invincible, who sets out to revenge the death of her sisters. If Conan the Barbarian (1982 / trailer) made a bunch of money, a female Conan should, too, or? Same story, more or less, but with babe boobs instead of man tits, Hundra is considered one of the more entertaining Conan rip-offs to follow Arnold's popular film.

Not the original trailer:

Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold
(1984)

Cimber retired from filmmaking for more than two decades after this, uh, masterpiece, once again starring the pulchritude of Laurene Landon as the titular Yellow Hair. According to the great film blog Video Junkie, Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold is "an odd combination of western and Indiana Jones." Whatever its ingredients, in the end it is pure exploitation trash.

Trailer:

Miriam
(2006)

Matt Cimber returns to filmmaking with a serious (!) film. According to annonymous (sic) at imdb, Miriam is a "Heart-wrenching story of a woman who takes another's identity to survive the most horrible time of the 20th Century. Miriam is the triumphant story of one woman's survival and success, which takes place in Lithuania over a period of forty years, from the German occupation of World War II through the Soviet era, and is based upon the true story of Miriam Shafer." The film, which made no waves, is the debut film of Ariana Savalas, the daughter of the late, great television and movie star, and Hollywood legend, Telly Savalas.

Couldn't find any trailer or excerpt, so instead, here's Telly Savalas "singing" the classic easy listening song If:

Celebrity: Whatever Became Of....?

2011-07-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

Whatever Became Of....? (by Richard Lamparski, Bantam, 1980)

A book bought because of its title, which, in full, reads From Playtex 18 Hour, Jane Russell Presents Whatever Became Of...?
The best parts of the book are Russell’s introduction, which manages to plug Playtex four times in what would be less than a page of text if it were without photos, and the back cover, an advertisement featuring three truly ugly Playtex undergarments. (Did our mothers really wear that stuff? No wonder our fathers all divorced them.) As for the 50 entries that are included in this volume of Lamparski’s series of Whatever Became Of....?, they are as superficial, fawning, badly written, uninformatively dull and aggravating as to be expected from fluff pieces.
While Lamparski has an interesting selection of not-so-forgotten, forgotten and obscure name, as 100 years of cinema should allow one to have, the entries read as if written by and for mentally deficient foreigners and, having the depth of a mud puddle in the dessert, offer little real information. Traumas, scandals, changes major and small are all given one or less sentence, and one gets the feeling that either Lamparski is either too star struck to be able to write a serious, informative update about his subjects or he is too disinterested in his subjects to spend the time required to do any given entry justice. While an informative book doesn't necessarily have to dish all the dirt, it shouldn't do something like give a completely forgotten actor such as Turhan Bey (remember: this book was written years before Babylon 5, so Bey was still a mostly forgotten person) a half-page entry, refer to "the scandal that made him leave Hollywood" and then not explain anything at all about it.
Other people included in this volume, amongst others, include Hedy Lamarr, John Agar, Jane Greer, Bee Freeman, John Derek (Pre-10 [1979 / trailer]), Lash LaRue (anyone have a copy of his porno film Hard on the Trail [1972]? — the poster shown below is not found in the book) and John Barrymore, Jr.
The book is a total waste of paper, especially in this day and age when much more and much better information can be found about the forgotten has-beens on the Net — providing you can even remember their names in the first place — but its title does have the kind of appeal required for the indiscriminate collector of trash books.
Oddly enough, however, though I have searched the web, I can't find out what "the scandal that made [Bey] leave Hollywood" — it must have been a minor one. Anyone out there know what it was?

Misc. New Additions to My Vintage Book Collection Summer 2011

2011-06-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Tales of the Flying Mountains

(Collier Books, 2nd Printing, 1973)
by Poul Anderson
Cover artist: Uncredited — any tips in this regard would be greatly appreciated.
Back cover: "'We, the people of the spaceship ASTRA, in order to accomplish man's first venture beyond the Solar System....'
Brave words, pondered by the Advisory Council of the ASTRA as they hurtle through space, but words judged inadequate to the task they have set themselves—to take the most perilous journey of all, far beyond the Milky Way, to worlds unexplored, perhaps unexplorable. These pioneer spacemen and women have chosen a strange, uncertain future for themselves and their children, which they only begin to understand as they spin the fascinating tales of the space age past—of repression, rebellion, and anarchy—of man's fate—to accept the challenge of the stars or annihilate himself on earth.
Tales of the Flying Mountains, the thrilling story of a speculative world where man is finally forced to think before he acts."
I don't usually by science fiction or short story collections, although this book is both, but the Circe call of the female breast made me part from my euro. Pop Sensation posits that this book's cover is "more proof that everyone in the early 70s was high." The interior copyright of the book reveals that that some of the stories — which are all set in a common future universe — were originally published under the pseudonym "Winston P. Sanders" in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine between April 1963 and September 1965. Over at Book Note, they summarize the narrative of the book as: "The council of the first generation ship, going out to colonize elsewhere, is debating what to teach their children about their history. In the course of the discussion, they tell stories of major turning points in their history, which some of them experienced in person and others at least heard first-hand stories from."
The cover seen here to the left of the 1984 reprint (which I do not have) is definitely far less interesting than the trippy original one of the 70s. Guess all that pot in the 70s was good for the imagination...

Down Here
(Essex House, 1969)
Michael Perkins
Cover artist: Uncredited — any tips in this regard would be greatly appreciated.
Back cover: "Blood country. No one who lives in New York's lower East Side can ever forget it. It is one of the great melting pots of the world, a place where violence is as common as the sunrise. It is a battlefield for savage and brutal encounters between gangs ... or people bent on the pursuit of pleasure—any kind, anyway they can get it. Kicks are the way to live; you either get them or give them, no one cares with whom or how. And sex is the greatest kick of all. Michael Perkins has been there, and now he tells how it's done Down Here."
About the author: According to Jay A. Gertzman in his article on Porno Noir, 1968-1974 in Ed Kemp's February 2010 issue of his excellent eFanzine eI48, "Perkins, like Burroughs, uses pornography to make revealing statements about political realities, as did de Sade and Bataille."
At Vintage Sleaze, they were nice enough to reprint the biography appearing on the inside the cover of the Essex House book (#0101) Blue Movie, Perkin's first published novel: "Michael Perkins was born in Michigan (Lansing), and raised in Ohio ("the banks of the Ohio, as a matter of fact — and that has made a difference"), and presently lives in New York City (#4B), with his wife ("who is pregnant and it looks like twins"). After picking up a B.A., he became a caseworker, then a teacher, before devoting full time to his typewriter ("I spend my days in bed writing novels and my nights on Times Square"). At 25, he is a strong figure on the avant-garde literary scene, not only as an author-poet but as the editor of Tompkins Square Press (which recently published Ray Bremser's remarkable "jail diary poem" Angel), and the eminent East Village-based magazine Down Here (responsible, among other things, for the American liberation of the erotic writings of Guillaume Apollinaire). His work has appeared in many of the underground literary reviews (including the New York Times) and he has published two books of poetry, The Blue Woman and Shorter Poems. [...]"
According to the Notre Dame Review website: "Michael Perkins is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Blue Woman (1966), The Persistence of Desire (1977), Praise in the Ears of Clouds (1982) and Gift of Choice (1992). The Secret Record, literary criticism, was published by William Morrow in 1976, and is available in paperback from Rhinoceros. His poems and essays have appeared in Younger Critics of North America, The Nation, Mother Jones, Paper, Choice, Notre Dame Review, The World, Sagetrieb, Talisman, and American Book Review as well as in numerous other magazines and anthologies here and in Europe. He has been editorial director of magazines and publishing companies, including Croton Press, Ltd., Tompkins Square Press, Down Here and Ulster Arts Magazines. He has given over a hundred public readings in New York, San Francisco and Oxford, England. A graduate of Ohio University (Athens) in philosophy and English literature, he studied at City College of New York and The New School. He is a member of The Author's Guild, the National Book Critics Circle, and Poets and Writers."
In any event, although this book here about the East Village shares the same title as the literary magazine he once published while living in the East Village, the Essex House publication appears to be an original text of his own and not a compilation of texts from the long-defunct magazine.
The image of the original literary magazine seen above was found in Jay A. Gertzman's article Porno Noir, 1968-1974 in Ed Kemp's February 2010 issue of his eFanzine eI48, where it had the following caption: "This magazine was issued from the Tompkins Square bookshop in 1966. It was edited by Michael Perkins and contains poems by him, Roy Bremser, and Jack Micheline, among others. The drawing is by Erin Matson. The 'banned novel' excerpted by Appollinaire [sic] is The Debauched Hospodar."

The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher
(Brandon House, 5th Printing, August 1968)
Attributed to Felix Salten, the author of Bambi.
Cover art: An un-credited detail of a work by Félicien Rops.
Back cover: "The classic confessions of a woman of pleasure. In Vienna of the 19th century, prostitution was a legitimate profession sanctioned by law—registered streetwalkers were thus able to play their trade while their neighbors starved in the ghettos around them...so of course they were social outcasts. But a few of these woman were able to rise above the stigma of condemnation to become rich and even famous–most notably a young peasant girl: Josephine Mutzenbacher."
Originally published in 1906 in Vienna, Austria, the translator credited for the Brandon House edition, Rudolf Schleifer, is a pseudonym for "Hilary E. Holt", the Ph.D. who also wrote the introduction. "Hilary E. Holt, Ph.D." wrote a lot of forwards and afterwards for such esteemed publishing houses as Brandon and Grove in the 60s and 70s. According to Seattle PI, Holt was an "Austrian transplant to the U.S. raised in the last throes of the Austro-Hungary empire and, according to Kirby,* a former professor living in a small, dumpy apartment in Hollywood and 'a sad old man,' [who] used a copy of the [German language] first edition from his personal collection, avoiding later German-Austrian editions which had been 'improved' upon." (Indeed, Holt's translation for Brandon House is currently considered the standard translation.)
In Holt's introduction, Holt recounts a conversation he himself had in 1930 with Stefan Zweig, "the only mortal who worked up enough courage to ask the alleged ghost-writer" Felix Salten whether he was the author or not. Salten's evasive answer — "If I deny it, you won’t believe me, and if I admit it, you’ll think I am teasing you" — was taken by Zweig as "a badly disguised admission" because Zweig was convinced that "[Salten] would have become very angry at being asked such a question unless he was the author." In any event, Salten is now generally considered the most likely author, thus eclipsing the other main previous literary suspect, Arthur Schnitzler.
Whether or not the tale is simply total fiction or truly a transcription of the memoirs of a woman of pleasure as told to the author is a question which, like that of the true identity of the author of My Secret Life, will always remain contested, but in general the book is referred to as a "novel," which infers what is most commonly believed. (In the book's introduction, however, Holt supplies some supposed history of the real Mutzenbacher, who was "born in 1849, as the third and youngest child of Ferdinand and Marie Mutzenbacher, née Schmidt.")
The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher is a first-person narrative of a successful 50-year-old legal prostitute of Vienna retelling her sexual past a young girl in Vienna. As such, it has less to do with her career as a courtesan than with her escapades between the ages of 5 and 12 — thus putting the book squarely in the realm of child porno. The novel ends with her entering the business at the age of twelve.
The English language version of the HARDCORE German film of the tale, Die Beichte der Josefine Mutzenbacher, directed by Han Billian in 1978 — entitled Josephine for the English-language dub — can be viewed at xxxbunker.com. Luckily, the film adds a number of years to the age of the heroine, thus making the whole tale much more palatable — if not an enjoyably funny Golden-Age five-finger helper. Be forewarned, as the previous sentence infers, the film (and the website) is X-rated, but part one (44 minutes) can be found here and part 2 (50 minutes) here. (I wouldn't open those links while at work if I were you.)
There was also softcore German film of the tale filmed in 1971 by Kurt Nachmann that got released in English-speaking countries as Naughty Knickers, but it seems to be unavailable at the present in any language.

*Brian Kirby, manager of Brandon House and, eventually, Essex House. Kirby, who once firmly believed that "there's no reason why good literature shouldn't give you a hard-on" (Charles Platt: Loose Canon, 2001, page 29), went on to edit The Los Angeles Free Press before disappearing into the netherworlds of suburban USA.

Some Limericks
(Zebra Books [Grove Press Inc NY] First Printing 1968)
by Norman Douglas
Back cover: "A Black Circle Book now in paperback.
'This book...would shock an Elks Club smoker...but each limerick is subjected to delightful, droll commentary by Mr. Douglas, written straight-faced in the best academic critical style.'
— The Washington Star
Norman Douglas was 60 when he first offered this delightful collection — the result of a lifetime of assiduous research — in a privately printed edition. Anthologies of limericks are many, but this one, like a good wine, is rare indeed. It was during the reign of Queen Victoria, according to Douglas, that this fine art achieved its greatest successes, and it is from this era that most of the choices in this volume come, though some from the twenties and an American sampling are also included. As important as the limericks themselves are Douglas's witty, pungent notes which follow each selection."
In the introduction, Norman Douglas writes "I may be abused on the ground that the pieces are coarse, obscene, and so forth. Why, so they are; and whoever suffers from that trying form of degeneracy which is horrified by coarseness had better close the book at once..."
And indeed, for years the book was considered obscene enough to be available only under the counter. It was only after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Fanny Hill [Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966)] that the book, "on the basis of its redeeming social value," was published in readily available editions.
Born in Scotland in 1868, (George) Norman Douglas was a scandal-prone British novelist, travel writer, and essayist, who lived his last years on Capri, where he had originally fled (in his own words) "[...] during the war to avoid persecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling."
He died in 1952, his last known words recorded as: "Get these fucking nuns away from me."
Example limerick:

There was a young man of Peru
Who was hard up for something to do.
So he took out his carrot
And buggared his parrot,
And sent the results to the Zoo.

Example commentary: "He sent the results to the Zoo – where, it is to be feared, so delicate a hybrid cannot have survived for long. I conjecture the specimen is now in the Museum of the College of Surgeons."

Romance of Lust or Early Experiences
(Zebra Books [Grove Press Inc NY] First Printing 1968)
by Anonymous
Front cover: Photo © 1968 by J. F. Bauret and Psychophot, Paris.
Back cover: "Published in four volumes, issued between 1873 and 1876, The Romance of Lust is the first-person story of Charlie Roberts. Perhaps the most famous hero of the Victorian underground, Charlie begins his unrelenting amorous career at the age of 15, being initiated by a married lady who is visiting his mother's house. He soon seduces his two sisters, and then allows himself to be seduced by his two successive governesses, passing himself off as a virgin. His adventures now begin in earnest, and with almost super-human endurance he goes on to explore his taste for intricate tableaux ensembles, to indulge his penchant for fancy complications, and even to form a secret society. He retires before the age of thirty and the remainder of his days are devoted to accomplishing feats he may have missed in his 'Early Experiences'."
Originally published by the English publisher of erotic literature William Lazenby, the Grove edition here was first uncensored modern edition of the book, which now enjoys a variety of available editions. The tale — which in parts reminds one of Guillaume Apollinaire's absurdly comic erotic novel Memoirs of a Young Rakehell — is a first-person account of the insatiable Charlie Roberts, a well-hung lad of great endurance and continual erections, as he experiments with and enjoys the widest variety of sexual activities, including incest, orgies, masturbation, lesbianism, flagellation, fellatio, cunnilingus, gay sex, anal sex and double penetration. He was an active man, to say the least.
Authorship of the book is unknown, although both William Simpson Potter and Edward Sellon have been suspected; of the two men of letters, only Sellon is known to have authored other erotic works.

Back Home at the O.R.G.Y.
(Berkley, February 1968)
Ted Mark (copyright Ted Gottfried)
Cover art: Unknown — any hints here would be appreciated.
Back cover: "Steve Victor and the time machine. It all started in a small Tibetan village. In studying the customs of these little-known people, Steve Victor met with the local Lolita, Miss Ti Nah Baapuh, and proceeded to break several Lamaist taboos regarding the art of love.
He might have been content to continue his researches with this uninhibited sexual dynamo, if it hadn't been for Papa Baapuh's time machine. Once inside it, Steve Victor unbelievably found himself catapulted into the lap of the Queen of Sheba in ancient Ethiopia. And a very obliging lap it was. In no time at all he was being propelled from one century to another—now an orgy with the Princess Julia in ancient Rome, now a quivering clinch with Eleanor of Aquitaine during the second Crusade in Damascus.
It was quite a novel way of getting inside history, and Steve Victor, always a willing scholar, decided to let himself go and make the most of it..."
Ted Gottfried — or rather, Theodore Mark Gottfried — was a highly productive author now mostly forgotten both under his real name ("Ted Gottfried") and all his known pen names: Lorayne Ashton, Kathleen Fuller, Benjamin Kyle, Katherine Tobias and Ted Mark. As an author, he reserved his real name for his serious non-fiction texts on serious topics (such as the death penalty, pornography, the Holocaust, etc) for teenagers. The other names, with the exception of the one-shot use of "Benjamin Kyle" for the book Qaddafi, were lent to his more frivolous works — Lorayne Ashton to some Daniela-Steele-type potboilers, Katherine Tobias to his Gothic romances, Kathleen Fuller for his Riverview series (which are often incorrectly credited to Kathleen Fuller, the author of Amish fiction) and Ted Mark for various trashy series and humorous manly lit written between the 1950s and 1970s. A Dutch source also lists "Harry Gregory" as another of his pen names, seemingly only used for one publication entitled Khadafy.
Some of the earliest short stories by "Ted Mark" appeared in magazines such as Dude and Gent, of which he was the editor in 1963, but according to an online bio by 1964 he was a freelance writer. The 1960s definitely saw a lot of Ted Mark books hit the market, including his then-popular spy spoof series featuring Steve Victor from O.R.G.Y (the "Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth"); Back Home at the O.R.G.Y. seems to be the eighth in the series, which includes such memorable titles as The Real Gone Girls (1966), Dr. Nyet (1966) and Room At The Topless (1967).
Either The Man from O.R.G.Y. or The Real Gone Girls was made into a film in 1970 known as both The Real Gone Girls and The Man from O.R.G.Y.; directed by the British director James Hill — the man behind Born Free (1966 / fan-made trailer) — The Real Gone Girls / The Man from O.R.G.Y. proved to be a commercial and critical flop and thus has remained the only film adaption of a Ted Mark book to date.
Ted Mark (née Theodore Mark Gottfried) was born in the Bronx on 10 October 1928; he died in NYC on 7 March 2004. Obviously a socially and politically informed man, his trashy satirical novels tend to be cram-packed with then-contemporary allusions to political events which are more than difficult for today's politically ignorant and historically uniformed Average Joe like you and me to catch or follow. His sexual euphemisms and jokes are fairly infantile by today's standards, but they can be oddly entertaining in a dorky way. His fictional romps are anything but literature, but in length they also never overstay their welcome and barrel along at a decent speed. This probably explains why his books are becoming cult favorites.

Further Ted Mark books at Mostly Crappy Books:
The Unhatched Egghead (Ted Mark, Lancer Books, 1966)
The Pussycat Transplant (Ted Mark, Berkley Medallion, 1968)

Like the above? Then check out at Mostly Crappy Books:
New Additions to My Sleaze Collection
Sleaze: New Additions to My Collection (Fall 2008)
Sleaze: New Additions to My Collection (Winter 2008-Spring 2009)
Misc. New Additions to My Vintage Book Collection

Fiction: Little Girl Lost

2011-05-20T03:49:00.000-07:00

Little Girl Lost

(Richard Aleas, Hard Case Crime, 2004)
New York PI John Blake is shocked to read one morning that Miranda Sugarman, the love of his youth and the babe that took his cherry, was not an eye doctor somewhere in the Midwest as he thought but was instead a newly dead stripper, found with her brains (and face) blown away up on the roof of one of the Big Apple's sleaziest strip joints. Against the advice of Leo, his boss and mentor, Blake begins to look into the murder on his own, and as the bodies begin to pile left and right of him he digs himself ever-deeper into a pit of betrayal, greed and death that will leave him a changed, much-sadder man...
Little Girl Lost is the debut novel of "Richard Aleas" who, under his real name Charles Ardai is no less than the founder of the wonderful Hard Case Crime series to which this novel belongs. Hard Case Crime specializes in paperback editions of good ol' hard-boiled detective fiction, and their love of the Golden and Silver Ages of classic pulp is obvious in the presentation of their books. The books feature fabulously beautiful cover art in the vein of that which once graced the covers of the vintage publications of yesteryear, often produced by the very same artists that did the covers of the pulp and sleaze publications of the past.
The cover of Little Girl Lost, seen here, is by no one less than Robert McGinnis, who is indeed "one of the most famous cover painters in the history of paperback publishing," to use the words of the artist’s bio on the Hard Case Crime website. (For another example of an earlier, vintage cover by McGinnis, take a look at the cover of A Taste for Violence in my March 22nd, 2010, blog entry.) As a result of the great cover art of the Hard Case Crime series, the example shown here being typically fabulous, the books are definite "must-keeps" for anyone whose criteria for collecting paperbacks is the cover art and not content.
In regards to content, the series doesn't do too badly either—even when flawed, as is the case with Little Girl Lost, they are immensely readable. In an odd way in McGinnis's artwork for the cover reflects the flaws of Little Girl Lost, if in a totally different manner. For the illustration, which is as much of a pleasure to look at as the book is enjoyable to read, McGinnis pulls what we used to call in art school "an Ingres"—but he obviously pulls it on purpose, whereas one is not sure whether Aleas's flaws (which are listed later in this review) are accidental or not.
So, what is "an Ingres"? The term refers to the great French painter Jean Augustus Dominique Ingres, an artist that is a sort of bridge between Neoclassical artists such as Jacques-Louis David and Romantic artists such as Eugène Delacroix. To the average contemporary viewer, when confronted by works of the David and Ingres there is perhaps little apparent differences between the "realism" of the two masters—but there is a huge one. Ingres, unlike David, was very much a tweaker of reality, ready to twist or reform his figures to achieve what he saw as perfection on the canvas. Take a look at the painting directly below, for example, the masterpiece from 1814, La Grande Odalisque. The exotic topic aside, it is indeed true realism, right?
Wrong. Take a look at the length of the extended arm and compare it to the bent arm; look where the breast is located; consider exactly just how long her spine is and the location of where the crack of her butt should be; look at the length of the lower half of the extended leg and compare it to the length of the upper half; follow the line of the bent leg from its knee back to her body and think about where it must connect; look at the size of her head in comparison to the length of her body—the woman is, in every way, distended, tweaked, malformed, unrealistic. And purposely so: Ingres could well have painted her "realistic" had he wanted to, but for him true perfection of the painting was achieved not by one-to-one realism but by tweaking the form to fit the composition, topic, painting as a whole.
And McGinnis's cover for Little Girl Lost does the same thing—just look at all the aspects listed for La Grande Odalisque in the cover art above. His figure is as "deformed" as those of Ingres, and the illustration looks all the better for it.
Richard Aleas, on the other hand, with his thug doorman, beautiful stripper with a heart of gold, ex-cop boss PI with connections, powerful Mafioso thugs, tweaks little from the cannon of hardboiled fiction even as he places them all in a contemporary setting; whether this is due to an intentional and ironic postmodern play upon the standards of the past or simple laziness cannot be discerned from just one book, but were the author not so adroit with language, the cookie-form-cut characters would sink the book.
The novel, which hit the stores in 2004, is nonetheless an admirable debut, and while it is arguable whether it really deserved to be nominated for both an Edgar and Shamus Award, it is unarguably a page-turner, if only because Aleas has a great grasp of verbal flow and grammar and writes in a smooth, comfortable style that is highly readable. But much like how his characters are mostly stereotypes, his plotting less than intricate: the reader easily figures out the twist to come and solves the case half-way through the book, long before the main character, P.I. John Blake. All the more credit to the author's ability with language and writing, then, that the reader still feels the desire to continue reading long past the realization of the obvious twist.
A narratively flawed page turner, Little Girl Lost is a fun read and definitely makes the reader want to come back for more—both to the other books Richard Aleas has since written and the books of the other authors published by Hard Case Crime.

True Crime: The Unmasking — Married to a Rapist

2010-07-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

The Unmasking — Married to a Rapist
(Kevin Flynn, The Free Press, 1993)

Rape and betrayal amongst the born again and religious right of lower-class Midwest USA. Ronda meets up with bad-boy Eddie Wyatt, a chronic juvenile delinquent gone good after discovering god, thanks to The Cross and The Switchblade (do people still read that book?). He pops her cherry and they get married, a union that brings two children and great sadness for Ronda, for slowly but surely the sex disappears from their marriage—by the time Eddie gets busted for rape, they hadn’t rolled in the hay for over a year, despite her attempts to get him hot and bothered.
Not just a rapist, Wyatt was a serial rapist, and though sent up for only one count—the one he blindfolded and brought home and raped repeatedly in his own living room—he surely committed many, many more. That aside, Eddie is one sick puppy, his rapes an obvious need for control and power, something he never seemed to have in his life. Nine years after being sent up, he gets out intent on really working for the lord and becoming a minister, only to get caught with homemade videos showing him masturbating over the sleeping bodies of innocent people whose houses he has broken into. Amongst others, one sleeping lass is only ten years old. No hope for this sick puppy—he needs fixing in more ways than one.
As for Ronda, all’s well that ends well: new love to a fine upright religious man, more children, a higher social class, a worse hairstyle and (one assumes) a better sex life. The way of god is mysterious indeed.
Image: Stolen from the web, it's the paperback edition. My thrift-store find is the hardcover edition, but it's boring brown with no visuals.

Fiction: The Lady in the Morgue

2010-07-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Lady in the Morgue

(Jonathan Latimer, No Exit Press, 1988, reprinted from 1936)

The morgue attendant jerked the receiver from the telephone, choked off the bell in the middle of a jangling ring. “Hello,” he said. Then impatiently: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Wan electric light, escaping like Holstein cream from a green-shaded student desk lamp, made the sweat glisten on his lemon-yellow face. His lips, against the telephone mouthpiece, twitched. “You want Daisy? Daisy! Daisy who?”
Elbows leaning hard on the golden-oak rail dividing the morgue office from the waiting room, two newspaper reporters idly stared at the attendant’s white coat. Their shirts were open at the collar; their arms were bare; their ties, knots loosened, hung limply around their necks; their faces were moist in the heat. On the wall behind them a clock with a cracked glass indicated it was seventeen minutes of three.
“Oh, y’ want Miss Daisy Stiff,” said the morgue attendant. “She told ya to call her here, did she?” He screwed up one eye at the others. “Well, she can’t come to the phone. She’s downstairs with the other girls.”
Ballooning dingy curtains, waves of hot night air rolled in through the west windows, rasped the reporters’ faces, made their lungs hot.
The morgue attendant said, “I don’t care if y’ did have a date with her; she can’t come to the phone.” He chuckled harshly. “She’s stretched out.”

The opening lines of The Lady in the Morgue

A relatively forgotten author, Latimer seems to be gaining new critical attention amongst contemporary fans of detective literature, as can be seen by the publication of such books as Bill Brubaker’s Stewards of the House: The Detectives of Jonathan Latimer. Intellectual attention or not, Latimer is hardly a household name, and most of his books have been out of print for years. The Lady in the Morgue was the third of the five books he had written about the heavy drinking detective Bill Crane and his equally alcoholic sidekicks Doc Williams and O’Malley. Upon publication the Crane books obviously did well enough to be bought by Hollywood, where three of the Crane novels were given the B-movie treatment—including The Lady in the Morgue, in 1938—featuring the forgotten Preston Foster as Crane. Still, after five novels, Latimer got bored with his characters and dumped the series, reviving Crane only once and briefly as a bit character in his later, legendary multi-violent novel The Fifth Grave (aka Solomon’s Vineyard).

Crane, a one-time reporter for the Herald-Examiner (later the Chicago Tribune), moved to La Jolla, CA after serving in the Navy during the Second World War. A friend of Raymond Chandler, he scripted or co-scripted some twenty films, ranging from lowly Lone Wolf and Charlie Chan programmers to such classics as the second film version of The Glass Key (1942 / trailer), The Big Clock (1948 / trailer) and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948). Supposedly Latimer claimed that he started his Bill Crane series almost in teasing of the hardboiled school of detective fiction that so flourished at the time, but considering that the first Crane novel followed the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man by roughly a year, one night surmise that kidding had less to do with it. Bill Crane and his cronies fit very much into that sub-genera of the detective fiction of the day, so well embodied by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the 1934 film version of The Thin Man (trailer) and its numerous sequels, that of the screwball comedy alcoholic detective having a hell of a crime to their martinis, whiskeys, gins, et all.
Unlike Nick and Nora, however, Bill, Doc and O’Malley tend to use words like “nigger” and some of their theoretically funny episodes are spectacularly sexist, not to mention way beyond borderline tasteless. You know you aren’t in for a children’s tale in The Lady in The Morgue when, in the first chapter, Latimer not only has his characters perusing the corpses of the city morgue for fun, but has a minor character describe the corpse of importance as “Nice” when he whips off the covering sheet from the body “slender, not with the stringy tenderness of a boy, but firmly rounded....”
Still, sexist or politically questionable or tasteless or not, The Lady in the Morgue is a well written page-turner. True, in this modern age, such conspicuously excessive alcohol consumption might be hard to accept much less laugh about, but it is sooooo excessive that one quickly becomes immune to it. Besides, the plot is fun enough to keep one interested.
Crane, sent to Chicago on a case arrives on time for the body of “Alice Ross,” a suicide, to vanish. Both the cops and two local gangsters think that he is responsible for the disappearance, so through most the book he is almost as busy avoiding them as he is solving the case. Going from strange beds to alcohol to cheap dance halls to alcohol to weed-wasted bohemian ceremonies to alcohol to acts of grave robbing to alcohol to alcohol to alcohol and so forth, the hunt for both the missing body and murderer and various missing women is convoluted but logical. Crane’s detective abilities can’t be faulted, even if his character can be.
The Lady of the Morgue is excellent and entertaining and well worth reading, despite the damage it might cause as you grit your teeth at the heroes' vocabulary. Much like the n-word in Mark Twain's writing, the vocabulary is often deplorable by any thinking person's standards, but it has to be accepted to enjoy the book for what it is: a well written, well thought and unjustly ignored classic of the comic hardboiled detective school.

Images (taken from the web):
(I can't supply an image of the No Exit Press edition because I lent it out and never got it back. Lesson learned [again]: don't lend books, CDs or DVDs.)
Top Two: Different covers to different editions.
Third: Poster to the film.
Fourth: Yet another nifty cover.
Bottom: The good man himself, Jonathan Latimer.

True Crime: For A Mother’s Love

2010-07-09T07:37:00.000-07:00

For A Mother’s Love

(Lee Butcher, Pinnacle, 1992)
Yet another true, sordid and almost unbelievable blood-soaked murder involving more sun-fried, brainless Floridians. For A Mother’s Love narrates in a dull and repetitious fashion the perverse story of an insatiable pill-popping, sex-addicted and silicon-pumped Mom found guilty of having her son shoot her weak-willed, nice-guy dentist husband. Lee Butcher wins no awards for his prose, but the story itself is so unbelievably extreme, the people involved so stupid, the actions so incompetent that out of sheer disbelief one has to keep reading.
When Virginia Larzelere (poor white trash with a history of compulsive lying, pill and sexual addiction, son-fucking and embezzlement) can’t find anyone to kill her fourth husband for her, she finally gets her 18-year-old, closeted homosexual son and occasional bed partner to shoot him dead. Most likely the execution of the murder was assisted by the two young idiots that later turned to star witnesses for the state against her and her son Jason, but since they were never charged, one must assume they were innocents merely drawn into the grimy, convoluted and dangerous whirlpool through fear and intimidation (and not greed).
Had Virginia taken fewer pills and not been a compulsive liar who consistently changed every story she ever told, she might have gotten away with it, for up until Steven Heidle and Kristen Palmieri turned state's evidence, nothing could actually be proven. In the end, Virginia was found guilty, but Jason was not. Though not revealed in the book, he even walked off into the sunset with a $75,000 settlement on the contingency that he give up any further right of claim to his adopted father’s insurance money. Jason went on to follow the advice of the Village People and entered the Navy, while his mother went to death row but never stopped fighting to prove her innocence.
Some people out there think Virginia is innocent and got railroaded, and indeed her trial seems to have an avalanche of mistakes, fuck-ups and contradictions. To get that side of the story, go here.
As it is, Virginia’s death sentence was overturned in February, 2008, though conviction was sustained. According to the Jacksonville News of February 28th, 2008: “The high court unanimously agreed with the trial judge that Virginia Larzelere's lawyers botched the sentencing phase of her trial by failing to introduce mitigating evidence about her mental health, sexual abuse as a child and physical abuse in a previous marriage” and that “[...] her trial lawyers, John Howes and Jack Wilkins, had been ineffective during the penalty phase”. Now that she is no longer on Death Row, Virginia will (as of 2010) be eligible for parole in 23 years.

Images (as always, found on the web):
Top: The book cover. (Duh.)
Next: The world's best mom herself, Virginia Larzelere.

Fiction: Fatal Undertaking

2010-07-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

Fatal Undertaking
(Frank Kane, Dell, 1964)

Dead at 56 on November 29th, 1968, Frank Kane is a mostly forgotten pulp detective writer of the two generations preceding his death. A onetime scriptwriter for radio and television, he wrote stories for both radioland’s The Shadow and such television series of yesterday as Mike Hammer and The Investigators. His best books are his straight crime novels, those not featuring his regular character, the New-York-based Private Dick named Johnny Liddell, such as Syndicate Girl, a hard-boiled story in which the hero actually commits murder and frames someone else so as to bring down the syndicate.

Not that his Liddell stories are that bad, however. Especially the early volumes of the series are an entertaining, quick and violent read, and considering that Kane eventually wrote 29 Liddell books in all, the quality is actually remarkably consistent. The biggest problem of the Liddell books are that they are simply too hard boiled, too jaded, with the characters spouting one hard-edged, sarcastic sentence after the other, forever without irony but to such an extreme that it seems as if it should be ironic. Fatal Undertaking is no exception. From “He took a dive out the window and there was no water in the pool” to “I don’t like strange guys making passes at you, especially with an ice-pick”, Liddell has a well-turned sarcastic phrase for every situation, as do most of his friends (rather unlike the bad guys, who seldom seem to have any humor). Can be fun for awhile, but after a few chapters, it can also get annoying. That said, it must also be told that Fatal Undertaking, as easy and painless to read as it is, is nonetheless not one of Kane’s best books. A true product of its time—it was published in 1964—the story involves everything from Cuban agents to Nazi war criminals, with Liddell hot to find out who sent the hit man that almost killed Mugs, his favorite female reporter. His search takes him from the East Side to Venice to Paris and back to the Big Apple before, like all Kane’s books, all loose ends tie themselves nicely together into a hangman’s knot, with all the (surviving) good guys happy and all the bad guys either dead or worse off than dead.
Competently written and tightly plotted, the last chapter of Fatal Undertaking, like all of Kane’s books, leaves no questions left unanswered. As a Thriftstore Find, the book is worth its price, especially since it features another excellent, long-legged cover by Ronnie Lesser, whose work is often mistaken for that of Robert McGinnis. But at e-Bay prices, a definite pass for anyone other than a true collector.

True Crime: Bad Girls Do It –An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers

2010-07-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Bad Girls Do It – An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers

(Michael Newton, 1993, Loompanics)
Another fun book about murderers, but as the title says, this one concentrates on the women of the world. Most have been covered elsewhere, but not all in one volume. Don’t be fooled, men, women are wily and wicked, ready to put poison in you soup as they are to spend your paycheck. Yes sir, this book is a good argument for going gay. (Jes’ kidding, folks.)
Written in a clear, concise and readable style occasionally flavored by a tad of dry humor, the book is good both for perusing and quick reference. Newton even does the rare thing of revisionism, taking a stance different to the most common narrations, as is most obvious in his telling of the story of the infamous and legendary Erzebet (Elizabeth) Bathory and his view on the crimes of Charlene Adelle Gallego (neé Williams), who was released on parole four years after the publication of this book. Strange that he didn’t also take the story of Ma Baker to task as well, but he leaves her out of the book completely. There are enough unbelievable stories in the book for ten months of television movies; it seems strange that more of them haven’t found their way onto the TV screen. The story of Vera Renczi screams to be filmed, as does that of Stella Williamson, among others.
An easy, entertaining and fun read, and relatively cheap and easy to get on eBay, now that the legendary and infamous Loompanics publishing house has gone out of business.

Images (top to bottom, all found on the web):
Top: The book, obviously enough.
Middle: Vera Renczi, supposedly. My bet is that it is less a photo of the real woman than a new, posed shot for some Romanian print advertisement.
Bottom: The legendary Countess Bathory in her prime.

Misc. New Additions to My Vintage Book Collection

2010-03-22T07:20:00.001-07:00

A Killer among Us

(Lion Library, 1957)
Originally published as The Silver Forest, 1926.
Ben Ames William
Back cover: A killer among us. Six people, a murderer among them, trapped in the Maine woods ... The shock of sudden death, and the stress of fear, draw them ever tighter into a web of unbearable suspense ... as the world-famous novelist Ben Ames Williams unravels a masterful puzzle in the greatest mystery tradition of Gardner, Christie, Rinehart ...
Cover art by Robert Stanley (1918-1996).
From Dare to Judge This Book: Some More Great Paperback Cover Artists at Thrilling Detective.com: "By far the most prolific Dell artist — next to Gerald Gregg — was Robert Stanley. Stanley worked for Dell from 1950 to 1959 and his covers were a major component of the publisher's "look" of the fifties. Concentrating on mysteries and westerns, Stanley always produced covers with action [...]. Most of the men on his covers he patterned after himself; his men are serious, stern, and usually fully clothed. He patterned most of his women after his wife Rhoda; they are alluring, menacing, terrified, and occasionally semi-nude. Stanley's daughter and father-in-law also stood in as models from time to time."
From Ask Art. Com: "Before his employment at Dell, he produced covers for paperback companies including Bantam, Lion and Signet. […] Stanley's wife, Rhoda, was a ballet dancer before her marriage. She and her husband worked as a team and lived in Westport, Connecticut. Designers at Dell Publishing provided Bob Stanley with a rough sketch of what they wanted, and from that he made a color sketch. If approved, Rhoda created a photograph, which her husband then used as the model for painting the final picture. If he was the model, she took the photo and vice versa. If they appeared together, they used a delayed-action shutter."

A Taste for Violence
(Dell D463, New Dell Edition First Printing, March 1962)
A Mike Shayne Mystery
Brett Halliday
Brett Halliday is the main pen name of Davis Dresser (July 31, 1904 - February 4, 1977), but also was used by the various writers that ghosted the Mike Shayne books after 1958.
Back cover: 6th sense. Famed red-head Mike Shayne is notorious for possessing an uncanny instinct about women, a smell for murder — A Taste for Violence. Shayne steps into a ring of danger and packs the toughest wallop of his career in a fast, tense fight against mob rule, and unleashed violence.
Cover art by Robert McGinnis.
Beginning with his first book cover in 1958, McGinnis became one of the most prolific book cover (and movie poster) illustrators active in the 60s and 70s, his work is always eye-catching. More information on him and examples of his fabulous work can be found here at Stainless Steel Droppings. Rich people might want to purchase a copy of The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis at Amazon.

The Bedroom Route
(Beacon Signal, 1963)
Sheldon Lord
Sheldon Lord is a pen name shared by Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Milo Perichitich, or Hal Dresner, but this time around it’s Lawrence Block).
Early male-written Lezzie Lit. Most books by “Sheldon Lord” have a lesbian angle of some sort or another, this one included. The blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books was not impressed by The Bedroom Route, as revealed in this review.
Cover art: Name illegible.

Cast of Characters
(Cardinal Editions, 1st Printing, 1958)
Al Morgan
Front Cover: A sizzling slam-bang, no-holds-barred novel about Hollywood.
Back cover: Al Morgan's crackling novel is jam-packed with people, action, satire, stories. It might have been titled Hollywood Confidential. You meet the celebrities—and get a startling look into the private lives of: Marla Van Dyke, the star whose best love scenes are played in her dressing room. Carl Miller, the writer who hates Hollywood but loves the money he makes there. Otto Freund, the ex-director who now runs a highly unusual school for starlets. Buddy Tyler, the Bronx-born crown prince of pictures who wants to own somebody. Mary Harwell, the film critic who gets an unforgettable sample from Reed Herald, "The Screen's Greatest Lover."
Cover art by James Meese.
The blog Vintage Paperback Cover Art says: "James Meese was another of the unsung heroes of golden age paperback cover art; his style combined the glamor of Barye Phillips with the earthy realism of James Avati."

Don’t Say No
(Eagle Books/Popular Library, 1956)
Olga Rosmanith
An abridged reprint of her book Picture People from 1934, reviewed here at Reading California Fiction.
Back Cover: Hollywood Hucksters. Dazzlingly beautiful and willful Josepha Schmidt came from the obscurity of Vienna to hit Hollywood with the force of a hydrogen bomb. This is the story of her rise to stardom, the director she drove mad with desire, the photographer she couldn’t win and the lives and homes she wrecked on her star-crossed way.
"A generous helping of romance and Hollywood atmosphere, done in primary colors." — New York Herald Tribune
Cover artist unknown.

The Ever-Loving Blues
(Signet, First Signet Printing, 1961)
(In the imprint: "First published in the English language, in a slightly different form, under the title Death of a Doll.")
Carter Brown
Back cover: Requiem for a bikini. It was an itsy-bitsy white polka-dot bikini. She was a beautiful brunette, curvy, kissable, cuddly. Too bad they had to come together — in death. Danny Boyd, the private eye with the profile no gal can resist, accepts a movie mogul's bid to track down a wandering, wanton star. He winds up playing fast with a loose redhead ... and footsy with a couple of thugs on a fifteenth-century Spanish galleon in sunny Florida, where the climate is perfect for murder.
Cover artist unknown.
Bookgasm reviews the book here. Excerpt: "Yes, another Carter Brown novel for the simple reason that they are just so fun and breezy to read. As much as I’ve enjoyed Brown’s other books, this 1961 offering is cliché city…."

The Life of Davy Crockett
(Signet, First Signet Printing, 1955)
Davy Crockett
Back cover: “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” This was the motto of Davy Crockett, famous as scout, Indian fighter, frontiersman and Congressman, the credo that carried him through the most exciting period of the American frontier! Everyone — old and young — who has thrilled to Davy Crockett's colorful adventures will marvel at the supreme vigor, boldness and good humor of the hero’s wonderful story… as he himself tells it.

Kiss Me, Deadly
(Signet, 19th printing, 1958)
Mickey Spillane
Does anything need to be said about this book? I don’t think so. Don’t know who did the cover art of the book, but the gun-toting blonde babe is definitely modeled after the character as played in Robert Aldrich’s great 1955 film version of Kiss Me, Deadly. Doesn’t this trailer just make you want to see the film?

Long, Long Ago
(Bantam Books, 1946)
Alexander Woolcott

Mr Adam
(Pocket Books, 8th Printing, 1955)
Pat Frank
According to Wikipedia, Mr. Adam is the first novel written by Pat Frank dealing with the effects of a nuclear mishap causing worldwide male infertility… the story was inspired by a 1924 silent film The Last Man on Earth, a comedy loosely based on Mary Shelley’s now mostly forgotten novel from 1826, The Last Man.
Front Cover: The hilarious story of a shy male who suddenly found he was the only man on the world who could be a father.
Back cover: On the day of the big atomic explosion, Homer Adam was a mile underground exploring a lead mine. Result—he was the only man left in the world who could be a father. Overnight, Homer Adam became a National Asset! He was placed in charge of the National Re-fertilization Project and taken to Washington. The Army was alerted to guard him from designing females. Foreign countries demanded to share his wealth. The President himself headed the drawing to select the first group of A.I. (Artificial Insemination) mothers, and Senator Fay Sumner Knott held the first winning number. What happened to Mr Adam is “a comedy satire that borders on the classic.” — San Diego Sun
“A dilly, a howl!” — New Orleans Times Picayune
Cover art by Barye Phillips (died in 1969).
From Good Girl Art: “Barye Phillips started by working for Columbia Pictures' advertising department in the early 1940s and did training booklets and propaganda during WW II. Her (sic) began painting paperback covers around 1943 and was very prolific, working for several publishers in various styles. His best known work was probably for Gold Medal and other Fawcett imprints.”

Nothing More Than Murder
(Dell Book 738, no print history or date)
Jim Thompson
According to Quill&Brush, this is the "first paperback edition of this novel originally published by Harper in 1949." (Dell First Edition (1953). Dell Book 738. $75) Front cover: “Wonderful suspense, a sense of the ugliness of crime and the horror clinging to real life criminals, make this a must. . . ." — Book-of-the-Month Club News
Cover art by George Geygan.
Mostly Crappy Books notes that George Geygan was both a prolific and excellent cover artist of vintage books, but that there is no information on him to be found. Does anyone know anything about him?

Tenderloin
(Signet, 1st Printing, 1960)
Samuel Hopkins Adams
(The book behind George Abbott’s and Jerome Weidman’s musical of the same name.)
Cover art by James Hill.
Life in Legacy (week of February 28, 2004) says: "The dean of Canadian illustrators, whose colorful and evocative artwork could be seen everywhere from the cover of Maclean's magazine to The Saturday Evening Post, who produced covers for more than 200 paperback novels, and who did several portraits including Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Pope John Paul II, died Feb. 3 at his Toronto studio of heart problems at age 73."

Victims of Lust
(Merit Books, First Printing, February 1961)
Jerry M. Goff, Jr.
Can’t find out much about Goff other than that he seems to have written regularly for Merit Books and that Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books claims he his fine if unknown writer of hard boiled fiction. He died in 1992 I Milwaukee, 7 years before his brother Harold Neil Goff. He also got in a lot of trouble for plagiarizing the author Richard Prather, an interesting story that is gone into great detail in this article on Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books.
Back Cover: What could be in a stag film that’s worth $1,000,000? Here’s the shocking story that spells out the details of how the film was made, and how it lead to the break-up of a vicious circle of extortionists.
Cover artist: Front cover by “Sloan” (?), back cover by an artist familiar but unknown.

Visit to a Small Planet
(Signet, First Printing, 1960)
(A play by) Gore Vidal
Back cover: Interstellar Lunacy. The fun comes fast and furiously in this riotous frolic about a visiting spaceman who lands his flying saucer on earth … and almost wrecks the lives of two young lovers, a TV news analyst, and a pompous Pentagon general.
“A brilliant satire … done with great wit and humanity.”—Tennessee Williams
“A delightful lot of screwball humor and nonsense:”—John Chapman, NY Daily News
See the imdb entry on the film.

The Wayward Ones
(Signet, First Printing, October 1954)
Sara Harris
“Life in a girls’ reformatory”
Back cover: Bad girls. Behind the high walls and the locked gates of a girls reformatory lies the little-known world of teenagers who have stumbled—and are seeking their way back to acceptability... This is the hard-hitting, unflinching story of the punishment society metes out to youth that has erred.
Cover artist unknown.

Who Knows Love?
(Lance Books, 1962)
Originally published as Strange Passions in 1953
Florence Stonebraker
More Lezzie Lit, this time from a married woman. (Not that means anything, actually, going by half the women I met through my sister in San Diego when I went back years ago to cremate my mom. So, gentlemen: Do you really know where your wife is right now?)
Back cover: Strange passions. Can this woman, who is torn in two, face the truth? Twisted love—normal love—which did Kay really want? Which would she eventually accept? Here is a powerful, moving story of mixed emotions ... of a stormy love which violates the rules of society.

Film: The House of Horror — The Story of Hammer Films

2010-03-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

The House of Horror — The Story of Hammer Films

(Ed. Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinson & Nicholas Fry, Lorrimer Publishing Ltd., 1973)
A rather pointless fluff piece, heavy on praise, light on insight and detail, redeemed only by both eight pages of color reproductions of absolutely fantastic film posters — some so full of bared, bloody boobs and violence that they probably never were meant for general distribution in the first place — and the numerous photographs, especially those included in a chapter entitled "Brides of Dracula — And Others," which is little more than a series of cheesecake shots of the various forgotten and not so forgotten babes to have graced Hammers’ productions. But even these features have lost their importance in the years since this book was published: what was once so hard to find but in an occasional book (i.e., cheesecake, film posters) can now be found without problem on the Internet.
The first chapter is a series of four interviews of Hammers most important players at the time: Managing Director Michael Carreras, director Terence Fisher and the immortal stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Dry and oh so polite, the sections about Lee, Cushing and Fisher are superficial to the point of being annoying, supplying enough information to act as filler but not enough as to be especially stimulating or of any importance. Michael Carreras’ section is a bit more interesting, if only because it offers an insight into the origins and development of the company, though the glowing presentation of Carreras tends to become highly ironical when one takes into account that it was under his management that the company finally went broke.
The next three chapters focus, respectively, first on Hammers early B&W pre-horror productions, then the various horror films for which the company is presently so fondly remembered for, and lastly, the numerous other non-horror productions they also made over the years. All three chapters are lavishly illustrated with a number of photos ranging from fantastic to abysmal, some of which suffer disastrous cropping. The descriptions tend to be short, self-serving narratives that offer little or no insight into the movies, reminiscent of the short synopsizes one finds in any given mass marketed TV movie guide. The book would have been much better served had it concentrated on fewer films and given deeper information, possibly even insightful criticism. As it is, the text in The House of Horror gets incredibly boring exceedingly fast.
But then, the film posters! The first one reproduced is to Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde, and it shows more breast than seen in the entire film; painted or not, even with a knife sticking bloodily between them, the mammaries featured look a lot better than those briefly flashed in the film by Martine Beswick. Oddly enough, five of the eight color reproductions are for films that seem never to have been produced, advertising such unsung, never to be made or seen would be classics like Zeppelin Verses Pterodactyls, Mistress of the Seas and When the Earth Cracked Open. (Especially the last mentioned poster seems so promising, showcasing—as can be seen here to the left) a babe from a future time when the women obviously wear topless spacesuits.)
As any fan can tell you and the chapter dedicated to "Hammer’s Leading Ladies" aptly proves, Hammer not only invented the wonder bra long before it was ever marketed to the masses, but the casting department definitely had a fine eye for the exotic and truly beautiful. (For sure, more than one man has wished to have owned Hammer’s casting couch.) For the most part, the cheesecake shots shown are relatively discreet, though the one or two love pillows that are indeed exposed. In general, the photos of Caroline Munro, Valerie Leon, Kate O’Mara, Veronica Carlson, the one-film wonder Carita, the now-deceased Julie Ege and still living Edina Ronay not only bring back memories of early erections, but also prove that there are a number of long forgotten starlets that deserve rediscovery and reappraisal just as much as such popular fanzine staples as Martine Beswick and the non-Hammer favorites Tura Satana or Barbara Steele.
All in all, were it not for the book’s photographs and the eight pages of film posters, The House of Horror would be a pretty pointless waste of trees. Even the filmography at the end of the volume, while of possible great help if done well, is an inconvenient mess, the films both being listed by chronological year rather than by title as well as lacking any reference to content or to what preceding page in the volume they might have been discussed. The House of Horror is definitely only for die-hard fans or completionists; that which is found in the book that would appeal to Joe or Jill Schmoe can be found more easily and cheaper on the Net.

True Crime: Evidence of Murder

2010-03-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

Evidence of Murder

(Bill McClellan, Onyx Books, 1993)
An interesting book about a relatively uninteresting “murder,” for while McClellan never comes out and directly says it to be so, Evidence of Murder leaves the reader wondering if the slimebag, wife-beating asshole of a real estate agent presently sitting behind bars for killing his wife actually did so. In theory, one has to be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt by a jury of one’s peers before justice has the right to strap one to Old Sparky or, as in Ed Post’s case, throw away any keys. McClellan presents more than enough facts that cast doubt upon the outcome of the twice-tried case to cast more than one long shadow of reasonable doubt, but then, he is allowed to include in his book many an interesting fact that the jurors were never permitted to see or hear.
That Ed is a scumbag—indeed, probably a likable scumbag—with a lot of hidden dirt behind his ears is true, as is made obvious in Evidence of Murder. It is also obvious that George Hollocher, one of the Saint Louis cops that set the ball rolling to pin Ed down, is either a habitual liar or a spinner of exceptionally tall tales, depending on how one looks at it. Likewise, “Dr. Death,” the New Orleans’ based police pathologist that helped turn the pin into a stake is obviously less than likely to ever say anything that would contradict a policeman’s findings, no matter how much the evidence might point the other way. While the events narrated in the book reveal an empty urban landscape of middle class pointlessness that turns into hell, nothing in the book shouts “Murder!” In fact, at most, if one weeds through all the conflicting “facts” and statements and then pretends to be Sherlock Holmes, the obvious “truth” seems to be more along the lines of, if anything, accidental manslaughter followed by a brazen attempt at insurance fraud.
All in all, Evidence of Murder paints a picture of a less than clean system of justice; a system in which a cop can say he knows a man is guilty by the size of his feet, in which jurors can party all night long with witnesses for the prosecution, in which a body bruised and cut up from having its inner organs and bones removed for donation can be shown as proof for the signs of a husband’s angry fists. By the end of the book, the reader is left with the feeling that not only one should never, ever go to a convention in St. Louis, but that one should definitely always have deceased family members cremated and keep those insurance policies low. (And I, for one, am never, ever going to admit to anyone that I also sometimes draw my wife's bathwater. Real husbands don't do that, you know.)
Images (from the web): Above, the book; below, the author.

Fiction: I Wake Up Screaming

2010-03-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

I Wake Up Screaming

(Stephan Fisher, Black Lizard Press)
Amongst the numerous classics — both forgotten and not — of the hardboiled school of detective and crime fiction of the 40s, 50s and 60s that Black Lizard Press re-released in the 1980s is this thin little volume, a book whose influence goes much beyond its mostly forgotten status. Originally written in the early 1940s, Black Lizard obviously reprinted a revamped version — Frank Loose states "the […] version starts with the Bantam book in 1960" — as the copyright date is not only 1960, but Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollabrigida and Rock Hudson are referred to in passing within the book, though none of them were all that active when the book was first released (in 1941). Despite these small changes the basic story itself remains the same, as does the influence of both the author himself and the original film version of the novel, H. Bruce Humberstone's excellent I Wake Up Screaming from 1941, starring (amongst others) Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis and Laird Cregar.
Humberstone's film, almost titled Hot Spot upon its original release — and, in fact, released for a time in the UK under the alternative title — is, according to Bruce Eder of All Movie Guide, "generally regarded as Hollywood's first film noir." An arguable statement, but whether or not it is the first is irrelevant; what is relevant is that stylistically the film is probably one of the most influential of all the film noirs. Its startling, highly original and still amazing use of lighting, shadows, angles, depth and music (seen previously in the Expressionist silent films of UFA Germany but seldom in English-language productions) has been copied and imitated by virtually every director who has ever dabbled in the genre of film noir, if only due to the influence of the stylistic delineations (and expectations) the film created. Strange that both the film and its director are virtually forgotten today by all but the most hardcore fans of noir. (Although Humberstone does have a star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1750 Vine Street, his is one of the stars which no one ever stops to look at—or, if so, then only to ask "Who the fuck is he?")
Actually, while it is arguable that there is no reason to remember Humberstone, since he never again made another movie half as influential — as mentioned in imdb, "[he had] no distinct directing style of his own" — it remains hard to understand why this film of his lacks its rightful fame amongst the coach-potato and retro-house masses. (More people seem to be familiar with Harry Horner's movie Vicki, an equally watchable but nonetheless inferior remake from 1953, which has the added attraction of featuring a young and unknown Aaron Spelling as the murderer.)
The book's author, Stephan Fisher, also has suffered unjustly to the hands of time, his name likewise relatively unknown despite being, during his heyday, a scriptwriter of similarly wide influence. Born Stephan Gould Fisher on 29th of August 1912, he died in Canoga Park, California on March 27th, 1980, paying off his mortgage by writing scripts for television shows such as Barnaby Jones, McMillan and Wife, Starsky and Hutch, Cannon, S.W.A.T. and Fantasy Island. He began his career, however, while serving in the U.S. Navy from 1928 to 1932 and soon had short stories in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Liberty. In 1935 he even created a since-forgotten but at the time popular "Pulp Hero" named Sheridan Doome, who appeared regularly in the magazine The Shadow and eventually found his way into 15 novels, some of which were written under the pseudonyms Grant Lane and Stephan Gould.
By 1940, however, Fisher was in Hollywood, eventually writing for such companies as Monogram, Paramount and Universal — he was even nominated for an Oscar in 1943 for his script to Destination Tokyo (trailer), which he didn't get. When I Wake Up Screaming was optioned by 20th Century Fox, Dwight Taylor wrote the script for the movie (amongst other things, Taylor moved the action from Hollywood to New York City), but it is Fisher himself who is seen as being as influential on the stylistic development of film noir scripts as the movie is to the cinematic style. His plots — rather unlike those of Chandler and Hammett and predating other masters such as Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich — feature characters moving through worlds and forces in which they cannot control, populated by people driven by twisted psychologies and self-centredness — the best example being the sexually obsessed (and, in the book, impotent) Inspector Ed Cornell of I Wake Up Screaming (a characterisation reportedly modelled after Fisher's friend, Cornell Woolrich).
During the 1940s, Fisher supplied the film scripts to many of the best and/or most interesting film noirs as well as other genre films of varying budgets, including Johnny Angel (1945 / trailer), Dead Reckoning (1947 / trailer), The Hunted (1947), the gimmicky Lady in the Lake (1947 / trailer), Song of the Thin Man (1947 / trailer), the swansong of the series, Tokyo Joe (1949) and Road Block (1951). The style of psychologically driven plotting that he and Thompson and Woolrich innovated could by then be found in dozens of films he had never touched — today it is a given — but by 1953, when he wrote the script for the low-budget western The Woman They Almost Lynched (the catfight scene), his star was beginning to fade as the style of crime movies he wrote best had begun to go out of fashion. In 1958 he could be found writing the movie adaptation of Joseph Hilton Smyth's novel for the Roger Corman quickie I Mobster, and by the 1960s he was writing for A. C. Lyles, a producer who at the time specialized in C-budget westerns starring has-been veterans of the genre deemed unemployable by then-contemporary Hollywood. In his twilight years, aside from the work he did for television, he also (for some strange reason) found the time to supply a couple of scripts and/or stories for Paul Hunt (a.k.a. H. P. Edwards), a one-time underground filmmaker and eternal surfer who went on to make a trash such as Machismo: 40 Graves for 40 Guns (1971 / trailer), The Harem Bunch (1968), and the abominable Twisted Nightmare (1987 / review). Of the three-odd projects Fisher was involved in with Hunt, the most interesting is the oddly schizophrenic The Clones (1974 / trailer), which could arguably be an inspiration for the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The 6th Day (2000 / trailer).
Contrary to what the book's back flap says, the novel I Wake Up Screaming is not about "a down-o-his-luck sports promoter accused of murdering a young film starlet." In the novel itself, the man in trouble is a writer who, like Fisher in real life, has finally made it to a cushy Hollywood screenwriting job for the big studios. As he says on the first page, "Those first hard years were over. This was it…. this is the works." But his experiences as a screenwriter seem to be as surreally boring as those of Nathaniel West — a great novelist in real life whom you really should read — and, after falling in lust with and having some premarital sex with a beautiful, young secretary named Vicki Lynn, inspired by a mixture of boredom and guilt, he conspires with various industry colleagues to manufacture Vicki into a star. They are exactly as successful as they imagine they would be, but the final result of their endeavour is that Vicki is found strangled and dead in her apartment. Though there seems to be no lack of suspects, the sickly Inspector Ed Cornell seems convinced that our hero is to blame and sets out to prove it. As the book makes plainly clear, guilt lies less in who done it than what the evidence can prove – and Cornell finds more than enough evidence to send our man to the gas chamber. Assisted by Vicki's sister Jill, our hero escapes, and the two even manage to stay on the lam for some weeks before the net finally closes in and Jill is arrested. Feeling Cornell's breath on his neck, our guy finally follows up the leads by himself and not only discovers the real murderer, but finds out that someone else is out to use the law to murder him…
Needless to say, the overt sexual aspects of the novel were toned down for the film due to the ever present influence of the Hays Office.

True Crime: A Deadly Silence

2010-03-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

A Deadly Silence
(Dena Kleiman, Signet, 1989)

Another masterpiece of true crime reporting, telling the oh-so-shocking tale of 16-year-old Cheryl Pierson who decided in 1986, once she saw her Daddy looking at her little sister "that way"—"that way" being the way he used to look at her before he started jumping her bones when she was 12—that the time had come to rid the world of her respectable, loving and fanatically possessive and overbearing Daddy, James Pierson. Using all the brains expected of a suburban Long Island high-school cheerleader, she not only hires a classmate named Sean Pica to do the dirty deed but just can’t do anything afterwards but act suspiciously. Needless to say, the crime rocked the community in which it happened, dividing it deeply into those who believed Cheryl and those who thought she was a conniving liar out for Daddy Pierson’s money. Still, more than one person had seemingly suspected that her Dad had long been loving his daughter the wrong way—but like good neighbors, they didn’t want to rock any boats.

In the end, Cheryl is caught lying so often that one can’t help but wonder if she wasn’t stretching the truth to get away with murder—considering that she only spent six months in jail in the end and could also still inherit, she did get away with it. That the dingbat she got to kill Daddy got 8-24 years seems more than unfair in light of how easily she got off—one can’t help but think that there must have been other options open to Cheryl to stop her father other than a contract.
If nothing else, this book does briefly reveal once again the inert baseness and deeply hidden moral rot and hypocrisy that are so much a part of the modern US middle and working class society.
Addendum: A Deadly Silence went on to become a TV movie in 1989. Sean Pica, the classmate who did Cheryl’s dirty work, was paroled in December 2002 after 16 years in prison, during which he studied and received his high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. In 2007 he was working as a counselor with tenants in an East Harlem housing project and working on a second master’s on social work. Cheryl Pierson went on to marry her intelligent boyfriend Cuccio; they have two daughters and are still happily married.
Photos: Trawled from the Web.
Top: the book.
Middle: The young Pica.
Bottom: An older and wiser Pica, proof that rehabilitation is possible.

Fiction: The After House

2009-12-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

The After House (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dell, 1960)
Though not exactly a household name today, Rinehart was in her day one of the most successful writers around, and her mystery novels have influenced pop culture in a multitude of ways, both direct and indirect. For example, her work and style can be seen echoing in the writings of the more famous writers Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie, and her indirect and distant influence can actually be tied to Bob Kane’s The Batman.
Born August 12, 1876 to a relatively poor family in what is now Pittsburgh PA (but was then a small town called Allegheny), by the time she died in New York on September 22, 1958, she was living in an 18-room apartment at 630 Park Avenue. A forerunner of the Stephan King school of extreme daily verbiage, long before the advent of the word processor she claimed that a good day saw her scribbling up to 4,000 words. It is no wonder then that by the time of her death she had written or co-written over 50 books, numerous plays, hundreds of short stories and an untold number of articles, travelogues, poems and other such stuff. A rather auspicious final tally for a woman who supposedly originally began writing in 1903 simply as a distraction from depression, but then, she had the luck of immediate success, her first novel, The Circular Staircase (1907) being an immediate best seller (it was made into a film in 1915).
Her biggest and perhaps everlasting and most influential success came in 1920. Deciding that she wanted to conquer Broadway as well, in 1917 she began reworking the basic plot and structure of The Circular Staircase, changing the sex and job of both the bad guy/girl and various victims, the time frame as well as other aspects of the story, and with co-writer Avery Hopwood’s help, premiered the play The Bat three years later at the Morosco Theatre. A hit, the play lasted 867 performances there and has been filmed at least three times. Aside from the two versions by Roland West, The Bat (1926) and The Bat Whispers (1930), The Bat was also remade with Agnes Moorehead and Vincent Price in 1959 (trailer).
And, actually, it can be argued that Rinehart’s play was more or less plagiarized by John Willard for his (today) much more famous play The Cat & The Canary (1922), which has been filmed and re-filmed too many times to count, Paul Leni’s 1927 version being the best, Radley Metzger’s 1978 version being the worst. (How much Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap owes to The Bat is also arguable.) And, as mentioned previously, it has been stated that Bob Kane saw West’s 1926 version of The Bat and was so impressed by the bat costume worn by the bad guy that he used it as inspiration for his own much more famous and influential creation, The Batman. (West, by the way, while a forgotten filmmaker today and probably only remembered—if at all—as the main suspect in the famous but still officially unsolved murder of Thelma Todd, his girl at the time, was a stylistic maestro whose current status as forgotten belies the unbelievable visual creativity and experimentation of his films, a style comparable at times to that of filmmakers as varied as Karl Freund and Sam Raimi.)
All that said, The After House isn’t really all that good. Originally published in 1914, the best thing the 1960 Dell printing has going for it is the cover painting by Victor Kalin, one of the top mystery novel cover illustrators of the early 60s. Incorporating various important aspects of the story itself, the dark, brooding cover painting is a sort of natur morte featuring an ax with a blood-red handle buried in the deck of a desolate boat, a key tied to its head, an empty liquor bottle lying next to it.
Told in retrospect by the book's nominal hero, The After House is the story of “a hodge-podge of characters, motives, passions, all working together towards that terrible night of August twelfth, nineteen hundred and eleven, when hell seemed loose on a painted sea.” Well, the description on the seventh page might be true, but it fails to mention how boring the book is, and how easy it is to spot the murderer, even if his motivations as revealed in the end are unbelievably lame.
Leslie—the manly name of the manly hero—gets himself hired for a cruise and way out at sea one crewmate disappears, two people get seriously hacked to death while a third simply gets it in the head. Who killed the four? Leslie? One of the women? The drunken alcoholic owner of the boat? The second mate? Why not the only other nominal character introduced, the super-religious sailor? Of course, everyone suspects everyone, and others try to protect others by destroying evidence. No one is likable, so in the end, the reader doesn’t even care and begins to think “come on with it, get the story over with!”
Like most of Rinehart’s stories, the killer is revealed at the novel’s end not by any subtle detection, but through a contrived event resulting in the revelation and confession of the killer. In this case, it’s via an unexpected midnight meeting between the killer, the hero and the hero’s friend aboard the boat. Talk about lame. No wonder this book never got made into a film—not only is it predictable, it bores as well.
Thus The After House reveals that Mary Roberts Rinehart also had a huge influence upon Stephan King in other ways than just verbiage.....

Images (all from the web, top to bottom): The cover of the print reviewed here; the god lady herself; another reprint; yet another reprint.

Non-Fiction: Tales from the Prom

2009-12-18T03:58:00.000-08:00

Tales from the Prom (Elissa Stein & Daniel Mailliard, St. Martin’s Griffen, 1998)

A great idea done moderately well. Described as a selection of "the most heartbreaking, hysterical, pathetic and true prom stories ever," the book does indeed contain such a collection, and they are indeed wonderfully, embarrassingly entertaining. Regrettably, rather than concentrate on such stories, the authors pad out the relatively slim volume—actually, considering the price and type size, the very slim volume—with unnecessary and unentertaining passages containing such things as condensed synopsises of Prom related movies, pointless reinterpretations of old Prom themes and unfunny comments about Prom fashions of the past and present. Had they simply included more true stories, the book would be much, much better, not to mention much more entertaining. Prom stories—like first date stories, first sex stories and first drunk and/or drug stories—are usually so awkward and mortifying that they need no assistance to keep the reader interested.

True Crime: Silent Testimony

2009-12-18T03:51:00.000-08:00

Silent Testimony (Roger W. Walker, 1990, St. Martin's True Crime)

"One late summer night in 1976, Florence Busacca,

a former opera singer, was reported missing."

True crime? More like truly boring. A reprint of a book that was originally printed in 1984, telling of the trial Thomas Busacca, convicted of killing his wife of 25 years despite the fact that there was no body. (The body of Florence Busacca was only found three years later, and then by accident.) Walker may have been one of the detectives working on the case, but it doesn't help him any in writing an interesting book. Most of the book is simply the trial transcripts regurgitated as dialog. Boring. No: BOORRIINNGG!!
There is little insight into the people involved, and that which is told seems gleamed only from the evidence collected or what was used during the trial. Likewise, all the photos also seem to come from police files. Input from the family members themselves must have been little, as is the book's entertainment level. In truth, the story of the family would be the interesting tale to tell. How and why the couple ever became one, how the marriage lasted as long as it did, what went on at home – that would be interesting to know, not all the boring talk talk talk that took place in court. Perhaps the case is memorable for once being one of the only two cases in which a man was found guilty for murder despite the lack of the corpse, but the book is only memorable for being unbelievably tedious.
Basically, son and daughter come home to find a bloody house, dad shows up with a bloody car and claims to have left his wife alive propped up against some fence. Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you. The trial must have been a bore, though the jury got a lot of leg exercise because they continually had to leave the courtroom while the judge and lawyers argued technicalities. This book is only for the most forgiving readers; others should avoid it at all costs.

The husband, by the way, has since died in prison.
And did I mention that the book is, like, really boring?

True Crime: The Corpse Had a Familiar Face

2009-12-18T03:45:00.000-08:00

The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (Edna Buchanan, Charter Books, 1989 — the cover shown here is of the up-dated re-release of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, which came out in 2004.)
One of the most readable true crime books around, despite the stupid chapter about why Edna Buchanan loves cats. Written in a style that often brings Dashill Hammett or Raymond Chandler to mind, Buchanan is not one to mince words or shy from an apt description, no matter how tasteless or shocking. But then, she has years of experience as a journalist, and her natural talent for the catchy turn of a phrase is not only apparent but has obviously been honed well.
Partially an autobiography, The Corpse Had A Familiar Face also narrates how the young inexperienced lady from New Jersey, who wants to write, ended up becoming a journalist, moving to Miami and establishing such a solid career. Not that she was taken seriously at the beginning, what with her high heels and all. But over five thousand corpses and a Pulitzer Prize later, she has a career behind her that few journalists’ can compare.
The biggest problem with the book is that she manages to refer to the most minute murder in such a way that the reader wants to learn more about how the case ended or how the murder even ended up happening, but she rushes ahead at such a speed that almost everything is covered superficially. Too much information and too little detail, so to say—at least when it comes to crime: the bits about herself are not always that much fun to read. Buchanan comes across slightly, well, damaged, as if she is unable to relate to living people on an adult level. Why she might be so she does not reveal, but somewhere along the way something must have happened to make her such a cat-loving workaholic.
The book leaves one with the impression that if she can plot half as well as she can put together a sentence, then she could probably write some killer fiction. A quick look on the web proves that she did indeed go on to write fiction: her first novel Nobody Lives Forever came out in 1990. More about her and her work can be found here at her website.

Images: Above, the cover. Below, the good lady herself. Both taken from the web.

Film: Drums of Terror - Voodoo In The Cinema

2009-09-30T03:39:00.001-07:00

Drums of Terror - Voodoo In The Cinema (Bryan Senn, Midnight Marquee Press, 1998)

Another top notch, entertaining and interesting publication from Midnight Marquee Press, who, after untold years of producing one of the all time best film publications, has — luckily for people like you and me — gone into the production of decidedly interesting film books as well. In terms of research and writing style, Midnight Marquee Press publications usually tend to be miles above and beyond the typical Citadel Press publication, using a vocabulary and sentence structure that reveals that the authors might actually read books themselves. Regrettably, with cover prices are just as prohibitive as those of Citadel.
Bryan Senn’s Drums of Terror is no exception, complete with a cover price that takes at least 3 hours of minimum wages to earn and a literary quality that indicates a possible college education on part of the author. Senn's starting point in his study of voodoo films is that although voodoo gets a lot of bad press, it is actually a serious monotheist religion similar in structure to Christianity, "a legitimate religion born of genuine spirituality," which, because it is foreign and strange to the "civilised" western world, has an undeservedly bad rap and is seen by most (uninformed) people to be almost a form of demonic worship. Thus, most movies in which Voodoo is featured "take the form of a funhouse mirror," distorting the facts into something completely unrealistic, bizarre, horrific.
Senn then proceeds to present and dissect 39 films in depth, ranging from the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie (1932) to Val Newton’s I Walked With A Zombie (1943) to Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) to the Blackpliotation classic Sugar Hill (1974) to Mickey Rourke’s (for a long time) last good mainstream Hollywood film, Angel Heart (1987), discussing both the seriousness and truthfulness of the perspective films presentation and use of the religion and how the film is or isn’t successful in filmic terms. In addition to these essays, the book also includes two appendixes, one entitled Pseudo-Voodoo and the other Boob Toob Hoodoo, full of (not too short) short dissections of numerous other films not deemed as rating the Big Chapter Treatment.
Needless to say, few films cut the mustard when it comes to the seriousness of their presentation of the religion. Odd, how many of the films relocate the religion to various nether regions of the world, or seem to mix in indiscriminate aspects of other unrelated religions and myths with voodoo into one bubbling pot, or have the religion being headed (secretly and not) by some white person. Little can be said to refute Senn’s well researched and persuasive stance that "realism" in voodoo films is pure doodoo. When it comes to how the films succeed on a simply cinematic level, Senn comes across like everyone’s most feared high-school English teacher: a hard grader who tends to tread softly with his darlings.
Still, his respect for the classics doesn’t prevent him from pointing out the flaws of such classics as I Walked With A Zombie, nor does it prevent him from admitting that there are some forgotten treasures out there also worthy of respect, renown or at least a revised appreciation, such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) or Naked Evil (1966). But if Senn were only a tad less pedantic and had more of an understanding and recognition of the concept of "the guilty pleasure," he would probably be able to appreciate more of the films he denigrates — Zombies On Broadway (1945), for example, is far more enjoyable than he ever lets on, as is the laughable Voodoo Island (1957), even if they get a Double F Minus when it comes to how they represent the religion. (Going by some of the reproduced scene photos, there might be a lot of other unacknowledged guilty pleasures amongst those films Senn so seriously pans.)
Senn’s essays in Drums of Terror are always readable and informative, as entertaining as they are interesting and insightful. That the reader won’t always agree with him is a give fact known in advance, but at least Senn presents his well informed arguments logically and understandably. He stands strongest when he concentrates on the voodoo aspect, ably seeing and showing where and when the film goes far off into fantasy instead of any semblance of reality in regards to voodoo as a religion. His other arguments sometimes seem to rely a bit too much on simple personal opinion—but then, that is what all critics do.

Images (top to bottom): The cover of the copy I have; Sugar Hill & Her Zombie Hitmen poster; the cover of the reissue (?); Zombies on Broadway poster; White Zombie newspaper advert; and the author himself, in a photo stolen from his mypsace page.

Celebrity: George Raft

2009-09-30T03:09:00.001-07:00

George Raft (Lewis Yablonsky, Signet, 1975 — The cover shown here is from the 2000 reprint, company unknown)
Written while Raft was still alive and with the man's complete cooperation, the book tends to be a bit fawning at time, with many too many people telling how great Raft is and far too few telling any dirt. Still, Yablonsky keeps his white washing brush dipped but lightly in the paint and tries to tell the complete story, just telling it in a way that always makes Raft seem misunderstood or misconstrued or simply wrongly accused.
As anyone knows who has seen a Raft film, as an actor he was essentially a one trick pony, but his trick was done well. True, he could hoof it better than many of them, but though it was his twinkle toes that brought him to Hollywood, it was his aura of gangster danger that made his career on the screen. Insecure and probably overly conscious of his own shortcomings, Raft turned down tons of films that went on to become classic Bogart projects — had Raft had more balls (instead an eternally stiff dick), he might easily have become legend instead of simply a familiar face in movies of the past. His biggest mistake was probably letting himself get tricked into marrying his wife Grace, a catholic who forever refused to let him divorce her but had no qualms about leaching money from him her entire long life. A good argument that Raft really did have no "real" mob connections is the fact that she never suffered an "accident."
A sex addict that makes even Michael Douglas seem like an alter boy, Raft is more than willing to admit that he probably was the main source of income for half the whores in Hollywood during the heyday of his career, forever cursed to lose the women he actually loved by his inability to offer them what the all wanted most: marriage. One thing that comes across in the book is that Raft had no easy life. His roots based in the tenements of Hell's Kitchen, he was a troubled youth who left home at thirteen and lived by wits, dancing and otherwise entertaining women, not to mention occasionally breaking the law. That he eventually went as far as he did is less a miracle than proof that the man was as driven as he was a "type" that was well suited for the years that he was most popular. His decline in later years is less surprising or sad than to be expected. Had he only had more common sense in regards to money and friends his last years might have been much more successful and comfortable.
But then, common sense is one of the great joy-killers of life...

Film: Shock Masters of the Cinema

2009-09-30T02:56:00.000-07:00

Shock Masters of the Cinema (Loris Curci, Fantasma Book, 1996)
An out-of-date & out-of-print book once meant for die-hard fans of horror film who find happiness in knowing everything about everyone in the modern horror film scene. About the only question not asked is whether the given director wears it left or right. Due to the numerous typos in the text, some of which result in the reader having to decipher what is said as if it were some secret code, could make one think that this publication is foreign. But no, it comes from Florida (USA, not Uruguay), even if the writer/interviewer is indeed from Italy.... thus, the possible excuses that exist are: bad English as a second language or crappy translators.
Shock Masters is a collection of interviews made by Curci (and a variety of his friends) of 26 names, cult names, not generally known names and downright unknown names. Those featured range from the overly interviewed Dario Argento & John Carpenter (yawn) to the cult director Antonio Margheriti and some dude named Steve Johnson (who?), onwards to the fondly remembered like Freddie Francis & Jean Rollins to mainstream "names" like Kenneth Branagh. Fun reading for the indiscriminate or the fanatics, but others will find many an interview uninteresting, if not pointless, due both to the unimportance of the interviewed and the superficial, meandering questions of the interviewee.
Does one really need another interview of Carpenter, Wes Craven, Robert England or George Romero? If so, then must the questions always be so innocuous, uninspired and fawning? Not to say that numerous of those features don’t warrant attention, but the few pages given to the possibly stimulating Jorg Buttgereit, Jeffrey Combs, Frank Henenlotter, Angus Scrimm and Don Coscarelli convey little of interest, nor are they very informative, contemplative or piquant. Why interview people if you don’t give them the space to speak? Or, for that matter, ask good questions?
In the end, regardless who the feature subject is, the core flaw of this book is succinctly said in the maxim "a good interview depends not on who is being interviewed but on who is interviewing." Considering Curci’s journalistic resume, however, his lack of ability in posing questions is highly surprising. Perhaps one should blame the editor? In any event, the price of the book is better spent on the DVD of any of the given directors, and not on this poor excuse for cutting down trees.

True Crime: Salt of the Earth

2009-09-30T02:51:00.000-07:00

Salt of the Earth (Jack Olsen, St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1996)
For all those who have given up hope of ever finding a true crime book that is a literate read, this book exists solely for the purpose of restoring one’s faith in both the English language and in the genre of true crime nonfiction as a whole. Salt of the Earth is an engrossing, intriguing read, owing more to John Steinbeck than to the normal supermarket quickie, but then the crime — more sad than exceptional — is less the point of this book than how it affects the lives of those involved. Jack Olsen’s ability to make the mundane sound exceptional converts what is basically the simple story of the lives of white trash on the rise into a representation of all that is the American Dream, a dream that eventually gets senselessly ripped apart by a brutal murder committed by Michael Kay Green, a wife-beating, steroid-abusing, body-building loser.
Jack Olsen (1925-2002) begins the story in 1940’s Fontana, California, birthplace of the Hell’s Angels, a good generation before the deadly event itself. Starting with a detailed, colorful narration of the family histories of both the Mayzsak and Gere clans, he goes on to recount the lives of their offspring, Elaine and Joe who married in 1967 and whose lives fall apart when their first child Brenda is murdered at 12 in 1985. Joe, who was probably out getting laid instead of doing an extra shift selling cars at work as he had told his wife he had to (his coworkers deferring that "Gentlemen don’t talk about such things" when asked by the author), spiraled downwards from the day of her disappearance, first drowning his guilt and sorrow in alcohol before finally blowing his brains out in front of his wife and two surviving sons.
As for the murderer, due to a lack of evidence and no body, Green was initially sent to jail for a variety of rapes he was tied to. Long after Joe joined his beloved daughter and just before the weightlifter was set to be released, Green was finally tried and found guilty for the crime after Brenda’s body was accidentally discovered near an area he used to go jogging.

Images: Book cover (top) & the author (below).

True Crime: Prisoners of Fear

2009-09-30T02:44:00.000-07:00

Prisoners of Fear (Gera-Lind Kolarik, Avon True Crime, 1995)
Is anyone surprised that the story ends the way it did? Not that Connie Krauser Chaney deserved what happened to her – she didn't – but it really does seem like she walked into her own personal hell with open eyes and arms wide, deciding much too late that she made a mistake. Of course, the fact is that most people caught in an abusive relationship are unable to separate themselves from it, being, on a different level, as equally unbalanced as the abuser. Still, if you have already left a man with an uncontrollable temper who beat you more than once and then both let yourself get knocked up by him and then marry him, you are more or less digging your own grave. Of course, not all wife beaters go quiet that batty and develop such an Arnold Schwarzenegger complex that they go out and pull a Terminator job. Kolarik tries to present the story as even handedly as possible, attempting to show the events through the eyes of the two main protagonists, Connie and her husband and eventual killer Wayne Chaney. Nonetheless, Wayne seems less to be a man who suddenly lost it than a nutcase asshole from the very beginning, a psycho waiting to explode. That the Chaney family continually denies Wayne's faults and places all the blame on Connie is possibly a slight clue to his mental make-up and his inability to take responsibility for his own actions. As for Connie, once her eyes finally opened and she tried to change her situation, it was too late. Trapped in a web of Wayne's anger and hate and perverse love, her new life was a living hell of numbered days leading to a violent end that she saw coming. The law was of little help, and by the time it might have begun to be a bit helpful, she had become so disillusioned with it that she no longer bothered to give it proper attention, failing even to inform her last lawyer of everything Wayne had done in the past and the numerous legal maneuvers she had tried against him, the very information the lawyer needed to keep the unhinged ball of rage in jail where he belonged. Boom! Boom! Boom! A gun round of hollow tipped bullets later and she's dead, Wayne a wanted man. He eventually dies in a hail of bullets, but then, it seems that is what he wanted, possibly having some sort of secret martyr complex. One feels sorry for Connie, but Wayne seems is an obvious mistake from the beginning.

Non-Fiction: Men Behind Bars

2009-09-30T02:30:00.000-07:00

Men Behind Bars (Phil Hirsch, Ed., Pyramid Books, 1962) Don’t know if Phil Hirsch is still around today, but all the way up to the late 1980’s he was still editing books with intellectually demanding themes ranging from hamburger jokes to true crime. Generally it is true of books as a whole that the older the publication, the more demanding it is in both vocabulary and sentence structure, but in the case of Hirsch, no matter when the book was published the text is never all that demanding.
The “shocking” true stories collected in Men Behind Bars were collected from those two classic publications of North American literature Man’s Magazine and Challenge For Men, as were many of the stories for most of Hirsch’s publications for Pyramid books. But unlike many of Hirsch’s cheesier collections, such as Supernatural, Men Behind Bars still manages to grab one’s attention most of the time.
True, there is one too many stories about attempted break outs and riots, but the other tales tend to be interesting despite their age. The best story is probably “Get A Rope, Somebody” by Walter R: Hecox, which tells of the last public lynching in California, that of Thomas Howard Thurmond and John Maurice Holmes in November of 1933 in San Jose’s St James Park (see photo). Hecox names no names, but he more than adequately describes what the situation was probably like, often making the reader squirm with discomfort. “They Arrested Me As A Sex Sadist” is also a gripping story, and it hardly presents the police in a favorable light. (Luckily for them, victims of police brutality didn’t sue back then. But then, nowadays, people accused of sex crimes seldom get proven innocent, inadvertently or not.)
Good reading for before one goes to bed.....

Sleaze: New Additions to My Collection (Winter 2008-Spring 2009)

2009-06-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

Sex Nuts... The Pervert Report
by Noah McGraw, Ph.D.
1969 (1st edition)
Impact Library
160 pages

Front cover text: Amazing case histories of wild sex nuts seeking erotic kicks in oral, incest, voyeur and swap depravity.
Back cover text: Sex Nuts... The Pervert Report. Wild and degenerate sex wrapped in lust and obsession that can only be untied and sated by rare forms of erotic debasement. Smashing case histories of variations in aberrations. Clinical—authoritative, crushing.
First sentence (Preface by "Noah McGraw, Ph.D."): Since sex dwells so predominantly in the realm of the mental processes, it ought not to be either surprising or revolting that approaches, views, manifestations, like and dislikes linked to the sex drive are as manifold as the differences between individual minds and bodies.
Last Sentence: Well, that was why we’d come to France in the first place, wasn’t it?

Turquish Delights
by Earl Rosen
1970 (1st American edition)
Photo Illustrated
UG Books
149 pages
Design & cover by Charles Barrow

Synopsis: Not a novel, but 3 longer stories, all of which mostly concerned with lesbian affairs. There’s only one man involved in the title story, who disguises as a woman and works as a masseuse.

Reluctant Pussy
by George Franklin
1971
Torch Reader
181 pages
Introduction by Zackery Phillips, MA

Synopsis: Colleen and Brenda are about 20 and have been friends for years. They are hot young women and carefree, they live a life of drinking, drugs and sex. They are bi and quite promiscuous. One day Colleen happens to meet the local reverend and they end up in bed.
First sentence: Colleen White finished doing the dishes and, exhausted, took a shower and got into her baby-dolls.
Last sentence: She thought for a minute, then, reaching for his prick, she said softly, “Fuck me!”

All the Wife’s Men
by Casey Ward
1974
Midnight Reader/Greenleaf Classics
205 pages

Synopsis: (Back cover) Behind Jacques Valcartier's meteoric rise in politics there was a woman who was more a wanton than a wife! Martha Valcartier was willing to do anything to get votes for her husband - even if it meant running his campaigns from a four-poster bed, offering her desirous body to the men who would insure his election. And when the votes were in, Jacques' popularity was as smashing as his wife's success in bed! All the wife’s men – the shocking story of a wife corrupted by the shame she wrought!
First sentences: Marha Valcartier stood, apparently looking through the kitchen window, as she dried and dried again the breakfast dish in her hands. In actual fact she was seeing in her mind’s eye the masturbating scene she’d secretly witnessed the day before.
Last sentence: It was the beginning of a long morning she was sure, and years of sexual completion ahead, as his hands pressed her passionately closer to his body.

Doctor Onan
by Jon Horn
1970
The Olympia Press
192 pages

Front cover text: If Doctor Onan’s couch could only talk... Wow!
Back cover text: If Doctor Onan’s couch could only talk... Wow! Well it does, and here it is, real, incredible, and hilarious. A lusty book guaranteed to blow your libido.
First sentence: My consultation schedule is full up, and my Park Avenue penthouse office suit is always busy with the comings and goings of the great and the near-great, who seek me out for my special brand of “anything goes” sex therapy.
Last sentence: And I Remained at the retreat near Kathmandu for many moons, He-Who-Dropped-From-The-Sky, reflecting on my follies and learning to praise all the things of life in the ancient tongue, as I cleaned and washed and polished the chamber pots of the Holy Ones...

Season of the Witch
by Hank Stine
1968
Essex House
224 pages
(Postscript by Harlan Ellison)

Back cover: She was the first woman he had ever been. Andre Fuller had been convicted of the brutal rape-murder of a young woman and was awaiting the sentence of death. But this was tomorrow and concepts had changed. A human life was too valuable to throw away in a futile gesture of revenge. Rather Andre learned that he must replace the life that he had taken. He had become the woman he had killed in a bizarre and totally terrifying new approach to capital punishment. Daringly provocative, and boldly unique, Season of the Witch is a brilliant speculative novel of sexual transformation depicting, with force and compassion, the emotional struggle of a man's psyche buried in the body of a woman, and the gradual, agonized emergence of a female psyche to dominate and replace its nemesis.
According to Wikipedia: "Jean Marie Stine (born 1945) is an American science fiction editor, writer, anthologists, and publisher. Stine was born Henry Eugene Stine, becoming Jean Marie as the result of a sex change."
Season of the Witch was filmed in 1995 as Synapse – aka Memory Run – (trailer) by Allan A. Goldstein (the same man behind Death Wish V: Faces of Death (1994) and The Snake King (2005). The Great Canadian Guide to the Movies (and TV) says the following about the film: "In an oppressive future, the mind of a petty thief (Makepeace) is transferred into his dead girlfriend's body (Duffy) as part of an experiment, but she/he escapes and joins up with some rebels. Confusing, cheap-looking science fiction thriller has poor writing and direction. Too bad, because the story elements could have worked and it had a better cast than most cheapo sci-fiers, particularly Morse and Bennett and Higginson (the latter two in small parts). Good costume designs. - extreme violence, sexual content, brief female nudity.- 89 min."

The Sex Tasters
by Geoffrey Kyle
Undated
Brighton Books
188 pages

Back cover: Lilli and Pete shared more than a marriage bed - each had a wild, uncontrollable need for lusty new partners: men and women able to satisfy their insatiable craving for oral sex!

The Photographer’s Model
by Donna Paradise
1977
Dover Press/Publisher’s Consultants
188 pages

Synopsis: Ralph and Marilyn are in the erotic photography business. They live in a suburb, near a young couple, Ellen and Teddy. The two are newlyweds and pretty innocent and naive. One day Ellen watches a shooting at Ralph’s studio and gets excited. She’s no longer satisfied with Teddy’s clumsy love-making and starts an affair with a co-worker of his. At the same time she feels attracted to Marilyn.
First sentence: Marilyn rinsed the dishes quickly while she gazed out the window of her tiny kitchen at the spectacular southern Californian sunset.
Last sentence(s): Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled. Another rabbit had died, after falling hopelessly under the spell of his hypnotic stare. Life went on.

The Coach’s Craving
by Michael Murray
1977
Brighton Books
190 pages

Synopsis: Peg and Marti, two teenage girls, are in the high-school gym at a time they shouldn’t be there. They are surprised by the coach of the gym team. Instead of punishing them he takes advantage of the situation and starts playing erotic games with them. Marti wants more and meets the coach again the next day. She is ready for some real sex.

The Lovers’ Crusade
by Mary Sativa
1971
The Olympia Press
189 pages

Front cover: A legend of knights and damsels, and the roaring fires of passion.
Back cover: Mary Sativa is the author of Olympia’s bestselling novel, Acid Temple Ball, an autobiographical account of her voyage among today’s sex and drug cults—one of the very few truly authentic novels of its type. Her researches into the past have led to this wonderful evocation of a medieval world which appears strangely similar to the one being created in our own time by the New Primitive of America—the Hippies. Blind faith and pure love, ceaseless errantry, magic dreams and proud poverty are the lot of her heroes. But they belong to a time when men were giants and women princesses, and when life unrolled its course in a fiery torrent of lust and brimstone.
First sentence: The armies moved slowly out of the great city Byzantium.
Last sentence: He smiled down gently at the crowd as he strummed the lute strings—each note a cry against the night. (According to Earl Kemp, Mary Sativa is pseudonym for Sharon Rudahl. (That “Mary Sativa” is a pseudonym is obvious, seeing how obvious a play it is on two names for pot.) Rudahl was amongst the few female comic artists that took part in the initial underground comix of the early 1970s. Her most recent publication is a graphics biography of Emma Goldman.

Epitaph for Brutality
by Allen Millstone
1972
Euro Classic/Star Distributors
190 Pages

Back cover: The sexual pain and agony was beyond anything she could have experienced ever before. He enjoyed giving pain, his appetite for sensual pleasure insatiable. Women fell at his knees as if he were king, and for them he was the king of pain and pleasure. He took fiendish delight in the perverted. Nothing was too bizarre for his tastes.

The Back Door Girl
by Sterling Harkins
1971
Brandon Books
190 pages
Original title: Her Anal Lovers

Front cover: Every man who saw Maisie wanted her —and Maisie wanted men. But her unique and selfish desires led her into an unexpected trap...
Back cover: Maisie began to feel sensual urges when she was fourteen. They grew stronger as she grew older. And finally her needs were desperate – but so were the fears that had been instilled in her by her puritanical mother. So, knowingly and of her own free will, she became a... back door girl.

Bruce Kimley Returns
by George Kuster
Undated
Magna Classic
158 pages.

Synopsis: Not a novel but 2 long erotic stories. - Former celebrity Bruce Kimley is 60 now and newly married to Eileen. They live in a mansion in the country, looked after by the Lake couple and their son Clive. Clive succeeds in seducing Eileen and so does his father Frank, who also seduces Eileen’s younger sister Wendy. - It’s not often that Stewart takes out his young wife Wendy. One evening he does and Wendy has too much to drink. When she wakes up she is in bed with a stranger. It’s Paddy Kent, who soon pimps her out, mostly to elderly gentlemen, but also to a virile Negro and an ugly old oriental.

The Lusting Couple
by Melanie Winston
1972
Star Books
190 pages

Back cover: They needed each other more than society could allow. Jessie and Abe are two college students with a passion that knows no bounds. They were fighting an uphill fight trying always to live down their sordid reputations. There is no act of sex they would not do with each other. Their lust rules their lives and torments their souls.

Wife In Heat
by Andy Stillman
1977
Brighton Books
191 pages

Synopsis: Connie Minor is a hot woman. She is married to Shelby, but he’s often away and not a good lover anyway. One day she is seduced by her neighbor Jerry and from that moment on she can’t control her sex drive any longer. She starts a hot affair with a virile teenager and then takes on a number of his friends in an outright orgy.

First sentence: Connie Minor was grinding her pelvis hard, bucking up into Shelby’s hairy belly.
Last sentence: Then she reached for the telephone and dialed Daggio’s Repair Service.

Sin Girl
by Lynn Martin
1967
Bee-Line Books
155 pages

Front cover: Fay Orchid was the hottest stripper Chicago had ever seen, and now she was her—naked in my arms!
Back cover: She spoke his language... the language of sex! “Come here, lover,” she murmured softly in his ear. “I’ve got something for you—something you’ve wanted for a long, long time.”

Mistress of the Plantation
by Melanie Edwards
1972
Star Original/Free Press Library
190 pages

Front cover: She was their mistress and she made the studs perform as no one else could.
Back cover: He took her like the animal she was.
Foreword: The Harley plantation was one of the best-run in that part of the South. The tobacco fields were bursting with fresh aromatic leaf, and the workers were bursting with another fruit, the fruit of their lust. The day-to-day happenings of the Harley plantation seemed on the surface to be smooth and uneventful. But underneath a veneer of propriety and caIm, the workers and owners alike engaged in wild bouts of sex.
First sentence: ”Oh, goodness, Clem, it’s so hard!” the girl exclaimed.
Last sentence: Now she was going to get what she really wanted.

The Taming
by Count Ludwig Kronenburg
1968
Century Books
188 pages

Front cover: The brutal story of an aristocratic young girl forced into an animal life of total slavery to another woman.
Back cover: Marcia Morrison, my voluptuous, haughty, nineteen-year-old niece, lived in a world of cotillions and Paris finishing schools. My interest in her was far more than avuncular, but she held me, a mere commoner, in utter contempt. Furthermore, when she turned twenty-one, she would inherit the castle I'd been living in - and the money I'd been using to maintain my grand style of living. I knew I had to teach her a lesson soon, and I thought I had my answer. I knew a certain lady – Nancy - who was famous for "taming" snobbish young nymphets, and by the time this lady finished with Marcia, I felt, all my worries would be at an end. But I had not reckoned with Nancy's own ideas of enslavement! . . .

Bedroom Coach
by Lamarr McMann
1971
Party Books/Traveler’s Companion
181 pages

Back cover: They called him Crazycock. He was great on the sportsfield, but his prowess at bedroom athletics was TERRIFIC! He called the sexual shots with woman after woman, training them to deliver the highest peak of ecstatic performance in everybody’s most beloved sport.

Lieutenant Pussy
by Curt Aldrich
1977
Brighton Books
191 pages

Synopsis: Lieutenant Linda Brent has been assigned to a small isolated post. From the very first day on she is erotically exploited by both the commanding officer and the sergeant who does his dirty work. Linda tries to resist the degrading treatment of the two powerful men, but her own sexuality makes her submit. Before long she is in the sergeant’s evil clutches and forced to do his bidding with every horny GI on the base.

When Hubby’s Away
(no author credited)
1977
Red Devil Books/Publisher’s Consultants
160 pages

Synopsis: Ten women tell of their erotic experiences, one after the other, each from the first-person point-of-view. The women are married, but once they’re without their husband for a time and get horny they seduce travelling salesmen, neighbors, teenage boys, whoever crosses their path at the right moment.

The Passionate Waitress
by Marna James
1974
Bentley Library/Publisher’s Consultants
191 pages

Synopsis: Mimi Goodman works at a Sunset Strip nightspot as a cocktail waitress. Her appearance and opportunities make her yield to temptation all too many times. At first she enjoys the attention and seeks to placate her powerful young sex drives, but the longer the activities continue the more she begins to realize how empty her life actually is. She gets an education the hard way.

Battalion Broads
by Olivia Rangely
September 1965 (1st printing)
Playtime Books
160 pages

Front cover text: Army wives gone wild, getting their sex while the men were away.
Back cover text: The Colonel was no match for the “hot pants brigade” and their frenzy of lust.

Fiction: The Unhatched Egghead

2009-04-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

(Ted Mark, Lancer Books, 1966)

Another winner from “Ted Mark", the man who brought you The Nude Who Never and A Hard Day’s Knight, not to mention I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA. If it is of any relevance, The Unhatched Egghead is actually a lot better than Mark’s much more popular (and easier to find) The Pussycat Transplant – although the cover photograph is hardly half as attractive as the cover art of the latter publication.
The story is about Archimedes Jones, the son of loving and unbelievably rich parents, a young man in his late teens, a boy of genius intelligence, gifted in sciences and the arts, able to move smoothly between the world of hip young cats, big business industrialists, cerebral science and fine arts, but plagued by one problem: he’s a virgin. Revealing this to a lecherous scientist friend one evening, call girls get called to solve his problem, but before he can get both legs out of his trousers for some serious fun, a shot rings out and the story begins. His pal is dead, the call girls have disappeared and top secret papers revealing how gold can be gained from simple metals have vanished.
Archi decides to find out who killed his friend and save the gold standard (and thus the world, of course), and does so by following up the names he finds in the little black book of the dead man. Going from woman to woman, he experiences one “hilarious” adventure after the other, continually getting mere inches away from losing his cherry, but forever being stopped at the last second.
Is it funny? Well, more or less. The book probably won’t make you roll on the floor in laughter – or even laugh loudly, for that matter – but it is at least painless to read, goes at a quick pace and causes a slight chuckle on occasion. Like most of Mark’s books, The Unhatched Egghead is a dated attempt at a humorous updating of Voltaire’s Candide. Unlike most of his books, though, this Lancer edition has one fucking ugly cover photo – a cover that has little to do with the book’s contents. (As is, actually, normal for most of the cover illustrations to a Ted Mark book.)

Non-Fiction: Rascals in Paradise

2009-04-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

James A. Michener & A. Grove Day, Fawcett Crest, 1983)

Originally printed in 1957, its reprint in 1983 had undoubtedly something to do with the author's unbridled success as a best selling novelist at the time. A perfect book for a precocious pre-teen youth who dreams of south sea adventure but gets bored by Errol Flynn movies. Other people might find it useful for learning the true events behind such legendary stories as The Mutiny on the Bounty, including the before, during and after. Modern purveyors of low culture will find the chapter on Leetag, the legendary American painter of black velvet kitsch that lived and partied in Tahiti. Easily five out of the 10 chapters of the book read as if they could make a damned exciting movie, if not a mini series. The chapters on "Charles !" and Dona Isabel make one sick to the stomach from disbelief and disgust, being yet more narratives proving that the stupid and evil always land on their feet. The stories would also make great films—though Hollywood would probably want to make Dona Isabel a nice person. The most un-understandable of all stories narrated is that of Will Mariner. Homesick or not, why a guy would want to give up all that which he managed to create on a dream island in exchange for the dull life (and death) he returned to in England defies comprehension. Well researched – as to be expected from a Michener book, non-fiction or not – with a thick bibliography, the book is an easy and informative read, both for those interested in the subject and those just looking for something entertaining to read while soaking in the tub.

True Crime: The Beauty Queen Killer

2009-04-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

(Bruce Gibney, Pinacle, 1990)

Any regular reader of True Crime books should be familiar with Pinnacle Books and their never changing quality. True Jack Webb “Just the facts, Ma’am” publications, based mostly on newspaper research, fleshed out by police reports, normally lacking any on-site research or noticeable psychological insight. This book is no exception, right down the company’s tendency for second-rate editorial work: more than one sentence in this book is incomplete, more than one pronoun is indirect. (But then, what else can be expected from a company that even misspells its own name on the book’s cover, forgetting the second “n” in the word “Pinnacle.“)
First printed in 1984, the same year that the killings transpired and probably concurrently to some of the victim’s funerals, this book dryly narrates the 26+ day cross-country murder spree of Chris Wilder, an Australian-raised American builder. (Gibney refers to both a six-week, 47 day and 26 day time period, so take your pick.) Starting down in Florida, where he lived at the time, Wilder went on throughout the USA, killing a large number of young, hot looking all-American young women along the way before killing himself in a backwoods hamlet in Connecticut just as some police were about to bag him. The actual amount of murders and related sex crimes he may have committed is unknown, for there is more than enough evidence to suggest that he had been committing such crimes both in Australia and in the USA for many years previously, if not for much of his adult life. Easy reading padded with a totally unnecessary article about some True Crime Reporter’s less than successful use of a psychic to discover the unlocated bodies of two of Wilder’s victims, as well as the Psychological Reports made by the two shrinks who examined him prior to his final joy ride. That Wilder was one sick man is obvious, but the when, where, why, what and how he became so isn’t to be found in this book; even the psychological reports are not of much help, as they fail to agree on what’s going down in the man’s head. As to be expected, Gibney takes the easy if not somewhat true stance that American justice screwed up again by not realizing earlier just how sick this known sex-offender was and stopping him before he left his body strewn path across the 48 continental states. Regrettably, and also to be expected, he offers no feasible suggestions on what should be corrected—but then, that might be expecting too much from a supermarket pulp quickie like this one.
In any event, before you blow your hard-earned 50 cents at the next church swap meet on this piece of trash, go to this website for a better, more factual (and, needless to say, up-to-date) version of the events.

Pop Culture: Sci Fi TV – From the Twilight Zone to Deep Space Nine

2009-04-22T09:07:00.001-07:00

(James Van Hise, Harper Non-Fiction, 1995)

Nothing special here – in fact, this by now long out-of-date paperback isn’t really worth the paper it is printed on. Indeed, one can only mourn for the trees that were wasted on this sycophantic time-waster. Van Hise's tastes run pretty mainstream, and seem to lack any appreciation of kitch or good bad taste, ala UFO. His "authoritative, magnificently opinionated guide to the first fabulous fifty years" is pretty thin reading, made quicker by the fact that my copy of the book was misbound and lacks pages 55 through 86 (but comes with two sets of pages 167 through 198). In truth, I doubt the missing pages would have improved the publication any. His style is painlessly poppy and reads easily, but most of the book consists of synopsises of his favorite episodes, the little criticism lacking depth or insight. But what makes this book trash is the last chapter, a paean to Deep Space Nine written before the program had even been aired. Okay, maybe Deep Space Nine did become the most interesting of all the Star Trek series – up until its extremely rushed and dissatisfying final episode – but to praise it before it has been on the air reeks of ass kissing or advertising residuals and casts a suspicious light to the whole book. Reference material this book will never be, but as paper to get the barbeque going it functions fine. If you see for sale at your local thriftstore, leave it there.

Non-Fiction (?): The Happy Hooker

2009-04-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

(Xaviera Hollander, 1973, Dell Publishing Co.)

Another thrift store bookshelf staple, a long out of print relic from the past which made big, big waves when it first came out and went through numerous printings—17 between its first release in February 1972 and this copy printing in May 1973—but which has aged rather badly, though perhaps not quiet as badly that late 1960’s fictional account of the life of stewardesses, Coffee, Tea or Me, to which Hollander’s book shares many similarities in writing style, humor and illiberal “liberal” attitude. Most women probably don’t even know or remember who she is, while most men probably know or remember Xaviera only as the (former) progressive, hedonistic advice columnist from Penthouse, always ready with a racy sex story related to the question. Since her deportation years ago and gradual disappearance from any headlines but for the occasional supermarket tabloid’s, few Americans have probably ever actually read this book or any of the other myriad of straight-to-paperbacks she has written. Not to say that this book isn’t an entertainingly sleazy read, providing one merely skims most of the books last third. Oddly enough, from today’s point of view, in The Happy Hooker, Xaviera, possibly excepting her willingness to screw a dog and her dead-on-the-head-of-the-nail attitude about prostitution as a viable economic choice and phenomenon that will never go away, comes across not only somewhat conservative, but both judgmental and slightly messed up as well.
Much of what she writes seems questionable at best, sometimes in terms of its truth, other times in terms of its message. Her Daddy may have been a great guy, and walking around the house naked is normal, but doing so with a hard-on reeks of something other than fatherly love or actual fact—especially if her mother was the type to tell her to save her virginity for when she gets married. Likewise, not only does her description of nudist camps as fuck happy bacchanalian places to swing contradict my personal experience of rolling green acres decked out mostly with old, sagging or flabby flesh, but her claims that many a bored Westchester housewife earn pocket money and add a little excitement to their lives by working as a prostitute seems more sensationalist than realistic, especially when one considers that it must be their husbands who keep prostitutes hard at work (which, in turn, would mean that that hubby and wife’s paths must eventually cross). And if she really did get around to regularly porking her sister’s husband down in South Africa after deciding that the dog wasn’t enough, would she really stop the affair so her sister doesn’t figure it out, only to publish it some years later in a guaranteed best seller for the whole world to read? And let’s not even get into discussing her version of the events that led up to her getting busted, for surely, as she says, she never, ever, ever tried on her own to bribe any NYC cops into letting her run her business undisturbed.
Amongst the more glaring signs of how badly this book has aged is the ease in which she drops the derogatory “fag“ and even tries to lend substance to the absurd, unrealistic idea that “fags“ can be “cured“ by a good fuck with a good woman like her. In turn, it is also oddly disconcerting that a swinging, bisexual, nymphomaniac, hedonistic hooker that is not only willing to fuck a dog but also admits to having a special kink for popping the cherries of virgin teenagers (where was she when I was growing up?) should heap such a large amount of judgmental, derogatory slag upon kinky people whose fetishes are as inane as cross dressing, water sports, B&D, S&M and so forth. (Okay, maybe the concept of Hot Chocolate is sickening, but if one doesn’t forcefully hurt others, what they do is their thing.)
Probably the most factual aspect of The Happy Hooker is its presentation of men as being, for the most part, assholes who have little or no respect for women. But then, Hollander seems to have a fable for abusive relationships, for both her two big loves did little more than use her, abuse her, disrespect her and toss her aside.... interestingly enough, she in turn herself does all but the last to her (at the time) present boyfriend Larry, the first man in her book that actually seems to care for her. But then, unlike her other relationships of importance, he doesn’t have a big dick.
All in all The Happy Hooker is entertaining enough, with more than one salacious sex scene and a few interesting points. Regrettably, not only does it does get dull and repetitious after the first two thirds, but Hollander’s naiveté verges so much on being criminal, if not simply unbelievable, that after a while, she loses all sympathy of the reader. A little more common sense, self-insight and self-criticism wouldn’t hurt her. As it is, the book leaves a slightly distasteful aftertaste, much like a drinkable cheap wine beginning to go to vinegar.
Update: So where is she now? Try her website and find out. She done good for herself–all the power to her. Still, I wonder if she still thinks “fags” can be cured by a good hetro fuck. Many of her books have been updated and rereleased, including this one.
Images (all found on-line), top to bottom:
The cover of the recent printing.
An image of Xaviera being measured for a new bra.
Xaviera today, heavier but happy as always.
A photo collage of photos of Xaviera – the smaller black and white inserted one was taken from Earl Wilson’s non-scandalous book Show Business Laid Bare (Signet, 1974), in which she is incorrectly referred to as “Scandinavian”.

True Crime: Deadly Lessons

2009-04-22T08:39:00.000-07:00

(Ken Englade, Grafton,1991)

Another book by Englade about another not so interesting murder that has none-the-less held US America's fascination for a long time – the murder even indirectly served as the inspiration to Gus Van Saint's popular film To Die For (1995).
Much like Englade's Beyond Reason, this book tells about yet another young, mildly attractive, mildly intelligent, cold-blooded fem fatale who convinces her boy-toy to murder for her. Unlike Beyond Reason, the dastardly deed takes place not amongst the well-bred families of the pedigreed upper class and international consuls, but rather, grovels smack dab in the middle of lower middle class and white trash New England. Likewise, unlike Englade’s other two-word titled volume, Deadly Lessons is readably short in length and utilizes a simplified vocabulary, much like any super market quickie, though Englade’s trademark wittily picturesque descriptive phrases still pepper the pages. The title Deadly Lessons is actually stretching the truth, for while Ice Princess Pam Smart did indeed work for the school administration in New Hampshire, she was never a teacher. The only lessons she gave (the at-the-time virgin) Billy Flynn once they met in 1990 were purely extracurricular.
Twenty three years old, unhappily married and oddly immature, Pam Smart used lies, money and 15-year-old Billy Flynn’s raging hormones to convince the young idiot to kill her husband, Gregg Smart. Wanting to keep the dog, the white sofa and the money from Gregg’s life insurance, Pam saw divorce as no option and ended up involving at least five young teenagers in the sordid and brutal shooting death of her unwanted husband. Needless to say, “murder want out“ and within three months the shit hit the fan and three youths plus Pam are on their way first to court and then to jail. Not very interesting a case, more sordid than unusual, which for the most part propagates the idea that there are a lot of stupid, cold-hearted egoists out there in the big bad world. Needless to say, she lost the dog, white sofa and the insurance money.

Update: Pam is still in jail and has a metal plate in her head from a beating she took for supposedly snitching on the lesbian relationship of two jail mates (Mona Graves and Ghania Miller). Pam will probably die in jail, but the various teenagers she involved will all be coming up for parole towards the end of the next decade. Maybe they’ve all learned their lesson...?

Fiction: The Pussycat Transplant

2009-04-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

(Ted Mark, Berkley Medallion, 1968)

Truth be told, the best thing about this book is the cover, which features – as you can see above – a nicely painted illustration of a young, healthy, slim woman lying naked on a bed, her nether regions discreetly covered by a white towel, her long legs, flat stomach, hour glass figure, and pleasantly sized orbs free for all to see, a happy smile decorating her pleasant face. The book is a sequel to The Girl from Pussycat, also by “Ted Mark,” the author of untold trash from the 1950s to 1970s, including the nefarious but seldom read Man From O.R.G.Y. books, one of which was actually made (minus most of the sex) into a third-class Z-film in 1970 by James Hill, the director of the famed family film, Born Free (1966). Seldom screened anywhere, it is also known as The Real Gone Girls. Ted Mark is actually the pseudonym of at least one writer, possibly more. (This book is copyrighted to the American writer Ted Gottfried, born 1928, but the number books and articles attributed to Ted Mark is so large that the concept of one man writing it all is almost unimaginable – he would’ve had to have spent as much more time at a typewriter than Stephen King has at his computer, especially since Gottfired is known to have published under 4 or 6 other pseudonyms as well.)
Most of Mark’s books from the late 60s and early 70s feature the same type of hippie humor that Terry Southern specialized in his books Candy and The Magic Christian, but read more like cheap, badly written imitations penned by pubescent boys who giggle at the word sex. Hit or miss affairs, they can elicit an occasional chuckle, but generally they wear thin quickly and become annoying, the humor being as dated as it is childish.
In this book, like its forerunner, the heroine is hardly a “conniving female,” as described on the book’s back jacket, but, just like Terry Southern’s Candy, is rather a less than intelligent but physically attractive young chick who has gotten herself pregnant. In search of an illegal abortion (for those of you who don’t remember, it wasn’t always your right to have one), she ends up at the practice of a “Dr. Kilembrio” and his lesbian nurse “Miss Carridge” (Ha! Ha! – get the jokes?). In the sixties, lesbians were still perverts, so the reader gets treated to a rather unpleasant sex scene in which Mark goes into detail about the dirty fingernails of Miss Carridge as she “examines” Penny’s clitoris. Neither funny nor sexy, everything that comes afterwards seems almost anticlimactic. (Ha! Ha! – get the joke?) Penny gets popped into a furnace by Miss Carridge when the nurse mistakenly believes the practice is being raided, but Penny’s barbecued body gets pulled out early enough for them to transplant her brain into the body of a man upstairs (also named Penny) who just blew his brains out. Penny, her breasts gone “without so much as a thanks for the mammary,” spends the rest of the book getting use to her penis as she tries to find out why Mr. Penny stole a lot of dough from work and then killed himself.
Virtually every women in the book end up being killed by the book's end, as does (s)he – only to wake up at the end with her brain again newly transplanted into the body of yet another young pregnant woman, the father being the same man who had gotten her knocked up in the first place (and, actually, taken her virginity in the first book of the series, The Girl From Pussycat).
Anti-establishment satire? Hack writing paid by the word? Hilariously off the wall? Idiotically immature? Sexist? Modern? Well, take a guess, why donchya....

Fiction: Carter Brown – None but the Lethal Heart & The Tigress

2009-04-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

(Signet Books)

As an addicted purveyor of both thrift stores and secondhand bookshops, I have been in stores selling used books in numerous states throughout the U.S.A. as well as in various cities in such countries as Germany, Holland, Ireland, Denmark, Spain, Czech Republic, France, Uruguay and Peru. (Of them all, outside of the US, oddly enough, the best book purchases are to be made in Holland, the Czech Republic and Uruguay.) On all those bookshelves and in all those boxes full of books I have dug around in throughout the world, it has never failed that somewhere amongst the numerous volumes of cheap romances and yesterday's bad bestsellers, a slim volume suddenly sticks out, habitually featuring an unbelievably amazing—if not downright erotic—cover illustration of a fabulously beautiful babe and with the name of the author, Carter Brown, flagged prominently across the top. Again and again I have stumbled upon well-worn paperbacks featuring this name, the striking covers of which are often matched by the equally catchy titles. A reluctance to fill my own bookshelves with books that so many other people obviously see no reason to save long kept me from throwing down the few quarters generally required to purchase a secondhand Carter Brown book.
Eventually, however, much like the less readily found novels of the once ubiquitous Ted Mark, the magnetic attraction of the covers and the hilariously playful titles convinced me to spend my hard earned small change and I finally bought two novels. It was the attractive and busty babe in a bikini with a loose top and on her knees that graces the cover of None but the Lethal Heart (Signet Books, third printing, 1959) that finally got me to spend my fifty cents. True, I had in the past seen many another much more exciting cover, but in the box I was digging in at the moment, it was the most attractive cover I saw. Further down there was a second Carter Brown novel entitled The Tigress (Signet Books, first printing, 1961), and though the cover was cheap and boring in comparison to that of None but the Lethal Heart (consisting of little more than a badly painted close-up of some redhead's eyes), I decided to play Rockefeller and splurge for both. Thus I came to own my first two Carter Brown novels.
Having read them, I can truly say that in as much as what one can gather by reading only two of an estimated 223 novels, the best thing about Carter Brown novels—like those of Ted Mark—seems to be the cover art on the books. But then, if he did indeed write all the publications credited to him, the man was a prolific writer, and as one knows, quantity can directly affect quality.…
Carter Brown is actually just one of five known names under which the English born Australian writer Alan Geoffrey Yates published. Born in London on August 1st, 1923, Yates served in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1946 and then migrated to Australia in 1948, where he became a citizen. A one-time salesman, sound recordist and PR rep for an Australian airline company, Yates took up writing full time in 1953 and, though he died on May 5th 1985, his last Carter Brown book seems to have been 1981's The Wicked Widow. He reportedly published only one novel as A. G. Yates, a science fiction book entitled Coriolanus, the Chariot! Otherwise, he generally used the names "Carter Brown" or the two variations "Peter Carter Brown" and "Peter Carter-Brown", although one source claims that he also wrote some 38 gothic novels starting in 1966 under the pen name of "Caroline Farr". (A problem here is that a different source claims that "Caroline Farr" is the pen name of another writer named Richard Wilkes-Hunter, who also wrote under the pseudonyms "Tod Conrad" and "Alex Crane". But in as much that even some of the Carter Brown books are bannered with the statement "The Carter Brown Mystery Series" rather than "by Carter Brown", it is imaginable that more people than simply Yates himself might be answerable for the huge production of novels as a whole.)
Amongst the regular main characters that he repeatedly spun his stories about, the most popular seem to be "New York's toughest private eye" DANNY BOYD; the Hollywood private eye and "savior of blackmailed film starlets" RICK LARRY HOLMAN; the hard drinking and womanizing homicide lieutenant named AL WHEELER; and MAVIS SEIDLITZ, an extraordinarily proportioned private eye who is definitely not even half as intelligent as she is good looking. Oddly enough, despite the fact that Yates/Brown was writing from Australia, seemingly all of his novels are set in the United States. Equally ironic, none of his novels ever achieved the same level of popularity there that they did in Europe or down under.
The Tigress is a Wheeler book, None but the Lethal Heart a Mavis tale. Both are quickly paced, have their share of action and more than enough corpses and occasionally prepubescent humor, but neither is a masterpiece. Of the two, The Tigress reads quicker, but None but the Lethal Heart is more fun once you get past the P.I. notion of a pulchritudinous blonde airhead detective. Still, for all its sexism and infantile humor, the novel never goes to the extremes of a Ted Mark or Terry Southern novel, though Mavis is indeed such a innocent amongst the wolves that one cannot help but occasionally think of Southern's famed main character of his novel Candy, despite the fact that Southern's novel appeared some decade or more after Mavis debut in Honey, Here's Your Hearse (1955). Actually, it seems odd that Mavis Seidlitz has never been discovered by Hollywood, for it is easy to picture her in some garish, pop art comic film of the sixties or in something similar to the Austin Powers films that have as of recent been so popular. Or a television show in the style of the original Batman TV show—that would be groovy!
The Tigress is for all intents and purposes a disappointing book. The cover blurb says "The wanton redhead was like a female tigress stalking her mate… and she made fair game for a killer:" But the back blurb turns the concept around and indicates that the "dedicated siren in search of love" is the guilty party of the novel. Inside, The Tigress turns out to be one Tania Stroud, a nympho hot for any man, and while she is a suspect she is neither the most important character nor main object of Wheeler's womanizing ways. The book, which is built around the murder of a psychologist's girlfriend and involves a private club that is best described as a Plato's Retreat for the sexually adventurous (called "perverts" back when the book was written), is not half as funny as the author tries to make it, nor is it really all that mysterious or thrilling. While some of the images are catchy—like the dead gal lying in a grave, a murdered old dead guy found laying in a coffin, a sexy babe in a maid's outfit and the Tigress herself—the story flounders forwards with no real highpoints. Hardly hardboiled, the psychological mumbo-jumbo is tiresome, the true murderer is easy to figure out, the action hardly exciting enough to wake the reader up from the state of sleep most of the book induces. Yawn. If Wheeler is indeed the most popular of Carter Brown's characters, then one can only assume that The Tigress is one of the lesser works. Indeed, in comparison to such other titles as Lament for a Lousy Lover (1960), Blonde on the Rocks (1963) and A Corpse for Christmas (1965), even the title seems second rate.
Rather unlike None but the Lethal Heart, the title of which reads much more literate than the novel itself does. This time around Mavis, "the torrid blonde private eye gets stuck with a cold corpse that's too hot to handle." The editors that wrote the cover texts must have had a lot fun writing stuff like: "Here is a sizzling scorcher, a red-hot tale of murder and mayhem, chills and spills, and the daffiest detective work this side of a dizzy blonde bombshell…named Mavis." Unlike with Wheeler, Mavis is a completely humorous figure and the novel, though featuring a lot of characters and plot twists and action, is less a detective story than a screwball comedy. Mavis, whose breasts and figure seem to be surpassed only by her self-defense abilities, is the type of person who seemingly forgets that she knows how to use her fists, for though she'll beat some guy senseless in one scene, in the next one she'll just flail her arms around idiotically as the gentlemen save the day. Still, she is such a Candide amongst the wolves, so off-the-mark that she normally only succeeds in spite of herself, that the fun eventually begins to be shared by the reader. The book is definitely fast-paced, though the whipping scene does come across ever so slightly misogynistic, even if she does manage to make a payback. By the end off the novel, not only is the body still there (augmented by a few more), but the new government of Mexico still stands, as do our heroes. You won't role around the floor laughing when you read None but the Lethal Heart, but you might smile a few times.
One could argue that it is hard to place the merit of the man's output from reading only two of his novels, but in the case of Carter Brown, the argument is probably moot. Like the works of the raunchier Ted Mark or more anti-establishment Terry Southern, the novels of Carter Brown are a product of their time. Hardly what one would call great literature, but rather much closer to assembly-line product. A painless way to survive subway rides but nothing to write a term paper about, the best advice in regards to purchasing a Carter Brown book is probably "Go by the cover." If nothing else then, even if the book is lousy, at least you have some great cover art to enjoy…

Small Images: All taken from the web, these are examples of typical Carter Brown covers – none of which I yet have.

True Crime: Sex, Money and Murder in Daytona Beach

2009-04-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

(Lee Butcher, Pinnacle Books, 1993)

Another book that proves that America is truly the land of the proud, the brave, the intelligent, the moral, the superior. In other words, more true crime idiocy, this time in the midst of the lowlife scum of the Daytona Beach boardwalk and the area's much better off Greek-American community. From page one it becomes obvious that there was no way in hell the idiots there were going to get away with it. Kosta Fotopoulos, a gun-happy fool with a definite superiority complex comes to the USA from Greece and ends up tying the knot with Lisa Paspalakis, a rich woman of Greek descent, heir (with her brother) to a money-making family business. Intelligent or not, likes so many a woman she obviously had no taste in men, for she definitely married the wrong one. Obsessed with becoming a crime king and assassin, Kosta read one too many comic books and copies of Soldier of Fortune, and tried to build his Crime Reich. Not satisfied with a ton of counterfeit money and the dough his wife would share with him, he bathed in the seamy side of the area and hooked up with an egotistical, self-centered but good looking psycho case named Deidre Hunt. It seems they told a thousand people of their plans to kill Lisa, and when they finally got around to implementing it, they did it with about as much finesse and success as Laurel & Hardy would have, had the latter couple had been psychopathic. What boggles the mind most when reading this book is how many people, both "respectable" and "non-respectable" seemed to know of Kosta's illegal activities or his plans but didn't do or say anything. Even Lisa comes across like either being a blind idiot or, at least in regards to Kosta's many activities, oddly complacent. As for all the lowlifes, well, there is no honor amongst thieves either it seems – nor brains – so no death, no confession, no witness is all that surprising. Somewhere along the way, Deidre shot an old friend to death for Kosta, who filmed it on video and then actually left the tape someplace where it was relatively easy to find, which of course happened after the ridiculous attempt on Lisa's life. Lisa now walks around with a bullet in her head, but she is alive, which can't be said of the dude who shot her. Kosta nailed him before he left the bedroom, a bullet through the head, execution style. Typical of people who believe themselves superior to everyone around them, the two made a thousand mistakes along the way that guaranteed their eventual conviction. A quick read and unbelievable story, with the typical amount of typos and general bad proof reading expected in a Pinnacle publication.

Update: Kosta Fotopoulos lost his February 15, 2008 attempt to get off death row when a prior reversal in the case was overturned, which now brings Fotopoulos one step closer to never-never land. His ex-wife Lisa has since remarried, and Deidre Hunt’s death sentence has been converted into a life sentence (she is now prisoner DC# 161918 at Homestead Correctional Institution).

Images: (Top to bottom, and, as always, trawled from the Web): The book cover, a thinner and older Kosta, and Deidre Hunt smiling for the camera.

Film: Robert Clarke, To "B" Or Not To "B" – A Film Actor’s Odyssey

2009-01-22T08:11:00.000-08:00

(Robert Clark & Tom Weaver, Midnight Marquee Press, 1996)

A pleasant read about an obviously pleasant guy, but regrettably the book seems to be out of print.
Robert Clark, who died in 2005, was one of those B-actors whose face we all know but whose name most of us have never noticed, an actor that has graced a broad variety of "Guilty Pleasures" in roles of varying importance, including: The Body Snatcher (1945/trailer), Zombies on Broadway (1945 – a personal fave), The Man from Planet X (1951/trailer), The Astounding She-Monster (1958/trailer), The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) and Beyond the Time Barrier (1960).
People like this are always interesting to learn more about, especially since one seldom has the chance to do so, other than for the occasional superficial interview in some obscure film or video magazine. Due to the length of his career, the people he has worked with, the breadth of his filmography and the number of B-classics he worked in, Robert Clark should have been an especially enticing subject, and an autobiography therefore all the more appetizing. But, regrettably, Mr. Clark is simply too pleasant to be very interesting. No secrets, no surprises, no extraordinarily exciting revelations—just a pleasant, good natured stroll down memory lane. An easy read, but so light and airy that it leaves nothing behind.
Okay, so one doesn’t necessarily have to write a tell all sleazorama like Van Doreen’s wonderfully readable Playing the Field, but a little grime never hurts, and there must have been more happening behind the scenes than he tells us. It is doubtful that Clark was such an exceptionally unobservant person that he had no dirt to dish, so the cleanliness of the memoir must be due to his overly pleasant demeanor. But then, what can one expect from who ended his twilight years as an active member of The King Family?
Still, beggars can’t be choosy – and as superficial and lightweight as this book is, it’s not only better than nothing, but a quick and fun read.
Images (from the web):
Top: The book.
Middle: Poster to The Man from Planet X.
Bottom: The good man himself.

For your viewing pleasure: The Hideous Sun Demon (1959)

Celebrity: California Dreamin’

2009-01-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

(Michelle Phillips, Warner Books, 1987)

The true story of The Mamas and The Papas as told by ex-member Michelle Phillips, the best looking (at the time) and least necessary of all four constituents, and last surviving member of the band. A quick, pleasant little book which reads more like a verbal chronological than a written biography, remarkably low on the bitchiness scale considering Michelle Phillips public persona as presented, developed and groomed by her former running character in the old nighttime TV soap, Knot’s Landing. Where is she today?
As she narrates it, her mobile youth spent all over the US and Mexico is as equally interesting as her career as a Mama, but regrettably not as fully detailed. As a young singing hippie, working in one band of her husband’s after the other, she seems to do a lot of stupidly thoughtless things, more out of simple dizziness than anything else. Probably her worst trait is that she continually falls in love and fucks the various men that John Phillips befriends and works with, which puts a considerable strain on both their personal and working relationship... but what the hell, she’s simply being bohemian!
Unintentionally, the book does bring the idea across that all members of The Mamas and Papas other than Mama Cass really weren’t capable of much by themselves, even if they were talented. Much like The Monkees, the four singing semi-hippies together clicked like the ingredients of a good cake; likewise, alone they might’ve been good, but they just weren’t good enough—Cass’s early death (not from a ham sandwich but from a failed heart) might render this discussion moot, however. As Michelle Phillips isn’t one for much introspection, no deep insights are to be found in California Dreamin’. More than anything, the book is a simple reminiscence of a time happily remembered, warts and all.

Images (from the web):
1. The book.
2. She was a dream, wasn't she?
3. Beauty – here today, gone tomorrow.

And now, for you visual and aural pleasure, The Mama and the Papas:

True Crime: Family Affairs

2009-01-22T07:41:00.000-08:00

(Andy Hoffman, Pocket Books, 1992)

Yet another true crime book about a Mother-from-Hell.
In the pleasant suburbia of Overland Park, relatively close to Kansas City, ice princess Sueanne Hobson, recently married to milquetoast and widowed Ed Hobson, finds Chris Hobson, the 13-year-old son of her second husband, to be such a disturbance to her dreams of the perfect house & home that she has James Crumm Jr., her partially estranged 17-year-old son from her first marriage, and his buddy Paul, knock Chris off. One evening a stoned James and Paul do so by taking the nerve-addling and aggravating adolescent innocent miles out into the countryside where, near a stream and close to a variety of abandoned houses, they first force Chris to dig his own grave and then shoot him dead. Despite Paul’s bragging to friends about how he had killed the "jerk," in all likelihood the police would not have been able to solve the crime and bring anyone before a jury had not two country bumpkins gone fishing and accidentally found the badly buried corpse. Sueanne comes across as a conniving, cold-hearted bitch incapable of feeling compassion or guilt, but this sickening, cold-hearted and pointless crime that ruined the lives of everyone closely involved is so unbelievably senseless that it is almost impossible to believe that she (or anyone else) would stoop to it. As for Ed, for whom one’s pity slowly turns to disgust as he consistently compounds one stupidity upon the other, either he is indeed a brainless wimp of the first degree or Sueanne really learned a lot at the mind control group she regularly attended. Next to the dead boy, the person who incites the most sympathy is his step-brother killer James; though admittedly guilty of the killing, he comes across as another weak-willed, pliable lost soul, a victim of an unhappy and harsh childhood who, in the hope of gaining his mother’s respect and love, does the unthinkable. Were it not for the damning statement of Sueanne’s daughter Suzanne, first given and then recanted and then — three years after the court conviction — again admitted to, Sueanne’s motive is so unbelievably petty that one could forever doubt that she really instigated the murder. Read this book and be happy that you have the mother you have.
Update: Over the years after this book was published, Mr. Milquetoast initially disappeared from the public eye. But in 2003, his unbelievable and un-understandable actions once again put him in the spotlight. Following the death of his son and the conviction of his loving wife, Ed "Spineless" Hobson joined the Kansas City chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a support group that also actively works at keeping convicted murderers like Sueanne in jail by blocking their parole. By the late 90s, Hobson’s active participation had led to the position of co-leader of the group, which is when he dropped the bombshell that he still loved his (now) ex-wife and would once again (!!!) actively offer his support to get her paroled when she was to come up again later that year. (Nonetheless, he was both pissed about and against the parole of Suanne’s son James who, after years of being a model prisoner, was released in 1997 and has since been living an up-standing life as an electrician in Texas.) In any event, Sueanne still sits in jail, having been turned down for parole for the seventh time in 2006.

Images (from the web):
Top: The good book itself.
Bottom: The mother from hell herself, Sueanne Hobson.

Celebrity: Palm Beach Babylon: Sins, Scams and Scandals

2009-01-22T07:29:00.000-08:00

(Murray Weiss and Bill Hoffmann)

This book is available at your local flea market or thrift shop under any number of covers, but the content remains the same. Palm Beach Babylon is an unexpectedly entertaining read which gives the short, condensed version of the various scandals amongst the interbreeding rich and famous of sunny Palm Beach, Florida, spanning from the time the resort town was founded by Henry Morrison Flagler in 1894 up until the William Kennedy Smith*/Patricia Bowman rape case in 1991.
Surprisingly enough, the authors, despite being both from the New York Post, actually use words with three or more syllables, and write relatively long sentences with correct punctuation. While there is nothing new or especially insightful added to the various events narrated, the chapters make an easier, more entertaining read than the many long-winded books from which the two reporters gather most of their information. Get the dirt on how none of the Kennedys can keep their weenies in their pants, how Leona Helmsley drives her hubby Harry to try to kill her, how Isadora Duncan screws around with “The Real McCoy” and pumps Paris Singers for all she can, how Larry Flint rents a dowager’s mansion for location photography and wild parties, and more, more, more.
A good book for the subway, bathroom, doctor’s office or anywhere else one is continually required to sit and wait. More photos would have been nice, though – the ones found here were, of course, all trawled off the web.

*He was acquitted of the charges in 1991, but 13 years later in 2004 he was back in court in Chicago when a former personal assistant by the name of Audra Soulias also charged him of rape, but the case was dismissed in 2005. The smoking Gun has a nice and sleazy article on the latter event here.

True Crime: Unholy Matrimony

2009-01-22T07:21:00.000-08:00

(John Dillmann, Berkley Books, 1988)

A nifty, interesting and literately written read about a convoluted murder for money, involving two almost unbelievably cold-hearted and sleazy murders and a beautiful, very naive victim. Back in the early 1070s, young Patricia Albanowski, after a quick romancing, marries fake-psychologist Claudius James “Jim" Giesick, who, along with the massively fat and massage-parlor-owning Reverend Sam Corey, had been seeking a perfect victim to insure and kill. Soon after, while the newlyweds are in New Orleans on their honeymoon, Geisick and Corey stage a hit and run accident in which Patricia dies, a death worth about a quarter million. Had the two murders used more cunning and shown a little more faked compassion in the aftermath, in all likelihood Detective John Dillmann, despite his empathy for Patricia’s bereaved parents, would also have simply accepted the event as an accident, as it so obviously seemed to be, and yet another murder would have been gotten away with. Unholy Matrimony narrates Dillmann’s investigation, beginning with his initial dread of such a mundane, pointless investigation, through the slowly developing belief that an unprovable murder had been committed, to his eventual breaking of the case. The murder itself isn’t all that exceptional, though the bold, cold-blooded thoroughness in which it is planned and executed is noteworthy. The two murders involved, however, are truly an interesting, unbelievable duo of sleaze bags, one would think more prone to be found in the pages of a pulp fiction detective magazine than in the real world. Dillmann does a commendable job at both solving the case and at narrating it, though his Brady Bunch family life gets on the nerves sometimes.
Update: Though sentenced to death originally, Corey had his sentence reduced to life in prison. Giesick got out of jail in 1986 after serving a bit more than half of his 21-year sentence. In 2001, he pleaded guilty to fraud, but by now he is probably out again and courting your daughter.
A television film of the events was made in 1988 by Jerrold Freedman starring Patrick Duffy and Michael O’Keefe.

Images (from the web):
Above: The good book itself.
Below: The TV film.

Film: Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film

2009-01-22T07:11:00.000-08:00

(Gary J. & Susan Svehla, Midnight Marquee Press, 1996)

One of those film books which are not only simple in concept and fun to read, but entertaining and informative as well (providing "bad films" are your thing). Not to say that one will agree with what the various writers included say, however, for the very concept of a "guilty pleasure" lends itself to many a beer-fuelled argument. The first of two volumes – the second entitled, appropriately enough, Son of Guilty Pleasures – this book is a collection of twelve essays from twelve different writers of film criticism (all regular Midnight Marquee contributors), each article a personal justification of some filmic fiasco of days gone by. For the most part, the various critics are surprisingly on target, focusing on obscurities or embarrassments of the past that truly ascend beyond their feeble roots or questionable pedigrees to achieve an individuality that deserves more appreciation than they get in this age of conformity. Once upon a time – say, about the time this book was initially published – most of the films mentioned herein could only be viewed by a select and lucky (?) few – especially following the demise of the age of the afternoon or midnight Creature Features programs – but nowadays some films such as Maniac (1934/trailer) can even be downloaded for free on the Internet (check out The Internet Archive, for example), while others can be found on DVD at your local 99 Cent stores. Some, like Rodan (1956) and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970/trailer), can still be taped on local stations late at night or lent from the local library, but they also tend to be the films everyone has seen once too often anyway. (Actually, Rodan seems much less a "Guilty Pleasure" than Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971/trailer), the latter complete with a scene of Godzilla in a deep pit being covered with a never-ending load of Smog Monster shit.) The most arguable articles in Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film are about the most recent films, the 1976 version of King Kong and David Lynch’s Dune. Critics aside – I don’t listen to them even as I write as one – the flaw with King Kong is simply that it is boring and looks cheap, while Dune is less an embarrassment than it is a film that needs to be viewed in a context completely separate from its literary roots to be seen as a failed but exciting and daring movie event. In the end, Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film is a book that defies criticism due to its very subject. Much like the act of watching bad films, either one likes to read about bad films or one doesn’t. Insofar as that all the writers know their subjects, can indeed write, and believe in their stance, the given selection is a personal one—as a "Guilty Pleasure" tends to be. Read it or don’t, but if you do, you’ll probably want to hunt more than one title down.
Images (trawled from the web):
1. The book cover.
2. Maniac lobby card.
3. German poster for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, showing a babe that could rule me any day.
4. Rodan poster.

Non-Fiction: COPS

2009-01-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

(Mark Baker, 1986, Pocket Books)

In Cops, Baker once again pulls another Studs Terkel and interviews "over 100" cops across the USA, using excerpts from what they say to allow them to tell "the unforgettable true story of America's police." Well, dunno if it's unforgettable, but the book is definitely a lot more interesting than his other book, Women.
What Cops have to say he breaks down into various chapters headed, amongst others, Police Work, Blood Brothers and Curtains. And they have a lot to say, most of it interesting, telling everything from their fears to the perks, the freaky to the mundane, the good to the corrupt, the beginning to the end. The book does a good job of making a feared and mostly disliked (unless they are needed) group of people a lot less mysterious, a lot more tangible, if not even more human. They gotta deal with some pretty weird shit out there, to say the least. Naked ladies copulating with dogs on front lawns, knife fights involving huge Aunt Jemimas, lonely housewives who love men in uniforms, shootouts and murders—Barney Miller and Hill Street Blues it ain't. Regrettably, the chapter about The Borderline, The Bad & The Ugly tends to destroy any sympathy for police that the other chapters might build, if only because it presents a picture of the police that is closer to the reality of what most people either see on television, have experienced themselves in the past or simply have developed as a picture due to their innate fear and distaste for authority figures with a gun. Actually, many scenes described in the book seem ripe for fictionalization and inclusion in either some cop show or a future Ed McBain novel. A real page-turner, Cops is hard to put down, and could easily be twice as long as its present 371 pages and still not bore. If you see it at Goodwill, buy it.

True Crime: The Woodchipper Murder

2009-01-22T06:44:00.000-08:00

(Arthur Herzog, Zebra,1990; reprinted 2001)

The probable inspiration of the Coen Brother’s excellent flick Fargo, though they have never given it credit (the film itself includes a line stating it is based on a true story, but the two brothers have themselves gone on record that the statement is a joke).
Herzog’s book is a factual, heavily researched and overly detailed account of airline pilot and lady’s man Richard Crafts’ almost perfect murder of his Danish stewardess wife Helle Crafts, who, though still living with her husband at the time of her death on November 18, 1986, was pursuing a divorce.
In all likelihood, were it not for the fact that Keith Mayo, the private detective she had hired to find and photograph her husband in the company of one of his adulterous relationships, "found her sexy," the idea of Helle having been murdered would probably never even been pursued by the placid, disinterested local police. It was Mayo’s insistence, financially supported by a variety of Helle’s friends, that eventually led to the case to be treated as a murder rather than simply as a women’s leaving home, husband and children for places unknown, as Richard Crafts presented her disappearance.
While not saying it directly, Herzog’s description of the events leads the reader to believe that had the state police not taken over the case, Richard Crafts could well be a free man today. The all around slowness, churlish rivalry and inability to work with others that the local police displayed while half-heartedly pursuing the case verges on being incompetent or childish, if not criminal. Despite all the forensic and circumstantial evidence collected and presented in the court, the case went to trial twice—the first one ending in a mistrial, due to the stonewalling of one lone juror—before Crafts was convicted and sentenced to fifty years.
And how did he do it? He killed her, froze her, cut her body into pieces with a chainsaw and then fed the remains through a woodchipper, effectively destroying her completely, but for a finger, a few bone chips, some hair and pieces of teeth.

Images (all found on the web – top to bottom):
1. The good book itself.
2. The good man himself: Richard Crafts
3. The victim: Helle Crafts
3. The search and some of the evidence found.