A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Power of Positive Loving - William Johnston

When I was a kid, I read all the tie-in novels by William Johnston based on the TV series GET SMART. I think I liked them even more than the TV show. I also recall reading and enjoying the novelization of the movie LT. ROBIN CRUSOE, USN, which Johnston wrote under the pseudonym Bill Ford. Johnston’s books were all over the spinner racks back in those days, since he wrote dozens of excellent movie novelizations and TV tie-ins. 

However, a friend mentioned to me that Johnston’s early, non-tie-in novels are very good, too, so I decided to try a few of them. First up is THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING, published by Monarch Books in 1964. I don’t mind admitting that one reason I bought this book is because of the cover. That’s one of the cutest redheads I’ve seen on a paperback cover, and the wink really sells the book.

As for the novel itself, well, that’s pretty good, too. The protagonist is Harry Ash, a down-on-his-luck public relations guy who comes up with a scheme to promote a sleepy little coastal town in California as a hotbed of sin and sensationalism. He plans to do this by teaming up with sexpot movie starlet Babe O’Flynn (that’s a great name), who has a habit of losing her clothes and winding up in the slick magazines like LIFE and LOOK. Harry comes up with a wild story for the gossip columnists about Babe going to this little town to recover from a broken heart after a top-secret love affair with the Secretary of State. He’s going to have a photographer get pictures of her on the beach in a bikini – or less – and figures that tourists, scandal-seekers, and sensation-mongers will converge on the motel and bar that he buys in partnership with a hamburger magnate. Naturally, things don’t work out quite like Harry plans.

Monarch Books lasted only a few years, but the company published quite a few books including some Westerns and mysteries. However, it’s best known for the abundance of slightly less graphic sleaze novels it put out. Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Robert Silverberg all wrote pseudonymous books for Monarch, including a number of so-called non-fiction studies of various sexual subjects that were really fiction, under imposing sounding names like L.T. Woodward, M.D., and Dr. Benjamin Morse.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is risqué enough to fall into the sleaze category, but just barely. Unlike most books in that genre from that era, this one is a comedy, a racy, romantic, screwball farce that takes satiric shots at morality, the advertising business, politics, show business, the military, the media, and just about anything else you can think of. The title itself is a pun on the self-help bestseller THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING by Norman Vincent Peale. If it had been made into a movie in 1964, it probably would have starred Jack Lemmon as Harry and Ann-Margret as Babe. As usual with such a scattershot yarn, not all the jokes work all the time, but enough of them do that this is a pretty funny book. It reminds me a little of the work of Max Shulman, for those of you old enough to remember his books. (Probably the same ones who remember Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margret.)

Johnston was nothing if not a versatile writer, though. I have several more of his non-tie-in novels on hand, and it looks like every one of them is considerably different from the others. I’ll be getting to them in due time and reporting on them here. For now, if you want a nice entertaining slice of mid-Sixties comedy, THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on August 27, 2010. Despite the good intentions expressed in the final paragraph, I haven't read any more of William Johnston's novels, tie-in or otherwise, since then. But I still might. I know where they are on my shelves--I think. And I stand by my comment about the redhead on the cover. She's really cute. The cover art is by Tom Miller.)

Review: Man Chase - Joseph Chadwick

Dave Macklin is a man with plenty of trouble on his hands. He’s the president of a small electronics company that needs to expand but can’t get a bank loan in order to do so. The company is also the target of a hostile takeover by a larger rival outfit eager to gobble it up and take advantage of some vital research done by Dave’s scientist partner. On a personal level, Dave’s wife is an alcoholic who has just gotten back from rehab, swearing that she’s cured, but is she really? Then there’s the beautiful redheaded receptionist at the plant who has her eye on Dave, not to mention the equally gorgeous owner of the rival company who inherited it from her late husband. Yeah, between business problems and beautiful babes, Dave’s got quite a juggling act going on.

That’s the set-up of MAN CHASE, a 1961 novel by Joseph Chadwick, who happens to be one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors. Published originally in paperback by Beacon Books, this novel has been reprinted in e-book and paperback editions by Cutting Edge Books. I guess you could call it a hardboiled corporate soap opera. Although there’s a private detective and some blackmail, it’s not really a crime novel. But it’s very fast-paced and well plotted as Chadwick manipulates the business and personal elements to pile a whole heap of trouble on Dave Macklin’s head.

This would have made a good early Sixties movie with, say, Jeff Chandler as Dave, Dorothy Malone as the rival business owner, and Ann-Margret as the sultry receptionist. For a novel published by Beacon, there’s not much sex, only a couple of scenes and they’re pretty restrained. It would have been easy enough to fade out before things got too risque.

I really enjoyed MAN CHASE. Dave is a good protagonist. He can be kind of a jerk at times but isn’t really a heel, just a decent guy at heart with a lot to deal with. The plot takes a slightly unexpected turn here and there, always a good thing, and works its way to a satisfactory conclusion. Chadwick was better as a Western writer, but he was a solid pro who could turn out a book like this, too, and do an excellent job of it. He wrote at least one other book for Beacon under his own name and several under the pseudonym Jim Layne. I may have to see if I can get my hands on some of them.

Review: Hamilton's Harem - William Kane (Ben Haas)

First of all, the fact that this book doesn’t have LUST, SIN, FLESH, SHAME, PASSION, WANTON, or ORGY in the title makes me suspect that Ben Haas, the author behind the William Kane pseudonym, came up with HAMILTON’S HAREM and the editors at William Hamling’s soft-core empire let it go. That’s my copy in the scan, and it’s in really good shape for a paperback that’s 60 years old, almost like it just came off of some bus station spinner rack. The artist hasn’t been identified.

The fact that Ben Haas wrote this means there’s a very good chance it’ll be a fine book. The protagonist is lawyer Gage Hamilton, a no-nonsense, abide-by-the-letter-of-the-law guy who finds himself administering valuable trust funds for a beautiful blond widow and her three equally beautiful, equally blond daughters (all of whom, not to worry, are of legal age). In addition, Gage also has a beautiful blond mistress who is more than a tad jealous. Sounds like a harem to me!

Gage’s life is complicated even more when each of his legal charges has some sort of soap operatic emergency that requires them to try to wheedle large sums of cash out of their trust funds. Gage has to approve such cash outlays, and in each case, the ladies pull out all the stops to convince him to go along with what they want. Throw in a lusty stable boy, a predatory lesbian, an embezzler, a hint of blackmail, and a murder, and you’ve got a book!

Some of Haas’s soft-core books are sexed-up adventure yarns, but HAMILTON’S HAREM is more of a romantic comedy, and a good one, too. I raced through it, since Haas’s prose is some of the most readable you’ll ever encounter, and there’s a great scene where a rat gets his comeuppance. The sex scenes aren’t very graphic, and most of the book is about Gage Hamilton finding some human decency under his hidebound legal exterior. I just had a really good time reading this book. It’s not much like Ben Haas’s other books, but at the same time, I think it’s one of my favorites of his so far. You’re not likely to run across a copy—Bookfinder shows only three currently for sale on-line, and they’re all pricey—but if you do, I recommend you grab it.

Review: Easy Money - Robert Silverberg

Stark House has reprinted two more of Robert Silverberg’s soft-core novels published originally under the name Don Elliott. Most of these were actually hardboiled crime yarns with some sexual elements, and that’s true of the latest double volume. I just read EASY MONEY, Silverberg’s title for a novel published under the Elliott pen-name as FLESH PAWNS in 1964.

The protagonist is a young woman named Janey Vaughn, who, despite being a beautiful and voluptuous twenty-three-year-old, in the right clothes and makeup can pass for being considerably younger. Underage, in fact, which makes her the perfect foil for con man Charley Simmons, who meets Janey while she’s waitressing in a diner in Delaware. After a roll in the hay with her, Charley suggests that she accompany him to Florida, where they will run a variation on the ol’ badger game on lonely, middle-aged men vacationing in Miami. Janey will go to bed with their marks, acting like her true age when she does it, then Charley, pretending to be her older brother, will show up and claim she’s only sixteen or seventeen, leading to a payoff from the victims to keep them from being arrested for statutory rape.

It's not a foolproof plan, of course, since Janey’s not really underage, but things go along all right for a while for Janey and Charley. Inevitably, complications ensue, and threaten their arrangement. How far will they go to keep the game in operation?

As always with Silverberg’s work, the prose is smooth and polished and fast as it can be. The guy is just a great storyteller. He also does a good job of making two very unsympathetic characters . . . well, not sympathetic, exactly, but the reader can’t help but root for Janey a little. She and Charley may not be great human beings, but they’re very human, if you know what I mean.

EASY MONEY is a solid entry in this genre from Silverberg. It’s in a double volume trade paperback with GETTING EVEN (originally published as LUST DEMON by Don Elliott in 1966) that’s available on Amazon.

A Rough Edges Rerun: Taboo Thrills - Orrie Hitt

“A Novel Book is a Man’s Book!” It says so right on the spine of Orrie Hitt’s TABOO THRILLS. That’s right, we return to the work of Orrie Hitt and it’s a good one.

First, some history. This book was originally published by Novel Books in 1962 under the title WARPED WOMAN. It was reprinted in 1963 as TABOO THRILLS, the edition I read. Then it was also reprinted in 1964 as WILMA’S WANTS. The folks at Novel Books, a Chicago publisher of soft-core porn and crime novels, must have really liked it.

Although the cover and the various titles make it sound like one of Hitt’s lesbian novels, it’s really not. It’s actually a semi-autobiographical yarn narrated by one Chet Long, a prolific author of what he refers to as “realistic” novels, by which, of course, he means the sort of Adults Only, early Sixties soft-core novels that this is. Chet lives in upstate New York (like Orrie Hitt), broke in by writing articles for hunting and outdoors magazines (like Orrie Hitt), and bangs out his books on a manual typewriter sitting at the kitchen table (like Orrie Hitt). The main difference is that while Hitt was a happily married man with a family, Chet Long is single and has a rich girlfriend, along with a number of other women on the side.

There’s not much plot here. Most of the book is concerned with a soap-opera-like romantic triangle involving Chet, Wilma (the rich, repressed girlfriend who hates the books he writes), and Sandy, a beautiful young free-spirited waitress who is much more suited to him. There’s also a peeping tom prowling the small city where they all live. (The peeping tom novel was another of Hitt’s specialties.) The plot just serves as an excuse for a number of lengthy rants against censorship and big government, both of which Hitt seems to have disliked equally.

But in the midst of all that are some wonderful bits about the life of a freelance writer, such as this comment from Sandy:

“I don’t get it,” she said. “I’ve read about writers and it seems crazy to me. You just write this junk and somebody prints it?”

I don’t know, of course, but I suspect that Hitt had a smile on his face when he wrote that paragraph.

Here’s a more serious passage I liked:

They say there’s tension in the advertising business but filling a blank sheet of paper is just as much tension. Your belly crawls when you can’t seem to do what you want to do. You struggle, you sweat – that’s nerves – you do the best you can, which is seldom good enough, and then you go to a bar where nobody gives a damn about what you do. You talk to men on the railroad, a retired lush who’s trying to stretch his Social Security check to the end of the month, some dame who’s got more kids than she needs and is knocked up again. You listen, buy a drink for somebody who can’t afford it – and maybe you take something about one, add it to the tragedy of another, and put it on paper. Or maybe the next day you’ve forgotten, lost in your own world because it is a world that is yours alone, since, as with all men, you are finally alone. Every man is an island, John Donne to the contrary. In the morning you make your coffee, read an out of town paper if it arrives on time, place your cup and saucer into the sink with assorted dirty dishes, and become a machine that spews words for readers you will never meet. You hope it’s a creative machine.

That’s not the most smoothly written passage in the world, but it’s got a passion and intensity to it that lifts this book to something more than sleaze, at least as far as I’m concerned. In another place, in talking about his writing career, Chet says something that reminds me of Robert E. Howard:

. . . people will suffer to accomplish what they want. Or perhaps it isn’t suffering so much as it is to have the guts to aim at a target and not be satisfied until they hit it. To many, mine wasn’t a very large target but it was one that many missed.

Finally, there’s another funny bit where Chet grabs a book off the newsstand at the train station so he’ll have something to read on a trip to New York City. He picks the book because the title intrigues him and doesn’t notice the name of the author, never realizing until he starts to read it that it’s one of his own novels, with his original title changed by the publisher. Given the history of this particular book – three editions in three years with three different titles – that’s a bit of inadvertent humor.

Unlike some of the other Hitt novels I’ve read, the ending of TABOO THRILLS is pretty believable and satisfying. Hitt evidently did some of his best or at least some of his most personal work for Novel Books, and I’m going to be on the lookout for more of those books. If you run across a copy of TABOO THRILLS (or WARPED WOMAN or WILMA’S WANTS), I think it’s well worth picking up and reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 22, 2009. I found an image of the cover of WARPED WOMAN, which you can see below, but WILMA'S WANTS seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Irwin Shaw's story "Main Currents of American Thought" captures being a freelance writer better than any other piece of fiction I've ever read, but this Orrie Hitt novel comes close to the same level.)

Lust Treasures - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Ben Haas, best known for his Westerns under the names John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, and Richard Meade, as well as thrillers and sword and sorcery novels under the Meade name, also wrote a number of soft-core sex novels in the early Sixties for William Hamling’s publishing empire, all of them under the name William Kane. I’ve read a couple of those William Kane books, and they were well-written, entertaining books. But the William Kane novel LUST TREASURES is something different, and it’s very much a precursor to the work that Haas would soon be doing.

The narrator/protagonist of this novel is Len Wolfe (any resemblance to the term “lone wolf” is probably not coincidental), a former Marine who currently works as a rather amoral soldier of fortune, taking any dangerous job that pays enough, anywhere in the world. As this novel opens, he’s recruited by a lawyer representing an American fruit company for a job in a South American country. The company, which has extensive banana plantation holdings in the country, hires Wolfe to deliver a $200,000 bribe to the leader of a rebel army. In exchange for the money, the man will call off the revolution that threatens the fruit company’s holdings. But the rebel leader insists on one condition: the money will be paid in the form of American silver dollars. So Wolfe’s job is to transport 200 grand in silver across a rugged jungle landscape teeming with bandits, while also dealing with the possibility of a double cross from the rebel leader. Not to mention the threat of the cruel dictator who runs the country and his beautiful but possibly unhinged sister, and the complication of the beautiful American girl who is the rebel leader’s mistress.

Now I ask you, move that plot back from the early Sixties to the early days of the Twentieth Century, and does that sound like one of Haas’s Fargo novels or what? That seems like exactly the sort of job Fargo would get mixed up in.

There’s enough sex in this book to justify it being published by Hamling, but LUST TREASURES is definitely more of an action/adventure novel than anything else. The setup is a little slow to develop, but once Wolfe starts through the jungle with a mule train loaded down with silver dollars, the pace ratchets up a notch and things barrel along to a final showdown in a dungeon torture room underneath the Presidential Palace. Haas was a master of colorful settings and great action scenes, and there are plenty of both of those things in this book.

I think anyone who’s a fan of Haas’s work would enjoy this novel, but unfortunately, it’s a little on the rare side and likely to be pricey if you find a copy. If you come across it, though, and it’s in your price range, don’t pass it up. This might be a good candidate for reprinting, one of these days.

Bait - William Vance writing as George Cassidy

I’ve seen William Vance’s by-line on a number of Western novels over the years, but as far as I recall I’ve never read any of them. I had no idea that he also wrote soft-core books under the pseudonym George Cassiday until Black Gat Books reprinted one of them entitled BAIT, originally published by Beacon Books in 1962 with a fine cover by Jack Faragasso, who is still with us, by the way, and active on Facebook.

The title refers to beautiful, seventeen-year-old Melody Frane, who lives a hardscrabble existence as a migrant farm worker. The only family she has is a drunken mother, and Melody has to take care of her, as well. She’s working at a cantaloupe farm in Arizona when she meets Kenney Ward, a pilot who works for Harry Ransome, the ruthless tycoon who owns not only the farm but also radio stations, hotels, electronics plants, and other enterprises. Melody and Kenney are attracted to each other, but before a real romance can develop between them, she falls under the sway of Ransome, who beds her, takes her under his wing, and sends her to Los Angeles so she can be educated at a school for aspiring starlets and models run by a beautiful former silent movie star. Ransome claims he wants to hire Melody as his secretary, but in reality he plans to pimp her out to various important businessmen he wants to blackmail.

Although there are crimes in this book, it’s not a crime novel. BAIT is more of a domestic drama as every man Melody encounters, as well as some of the women, try to seduce her. The thread of her developing relationship with Kenney runs all the way through, and anybody who’s read very many of these soft-core books can make a pretty good guess how things are going to turn out.

That predictability in plotting and resolution doesn’t really detract from the appeal of BAIT. It’s a well-written book with some excellent scenes and a pace that never lets up for very long. The sex scenes are frequent but not very graphic, as if Vance wasn’t all that comfortable writing them and got more enjoyment out of developing the characters, the most well-rounded of which is Melody. (No pun intended, honest.) Harry Ransome is also a thoroughly despicable villain. I raced through BAIT and really enjoyed it. I’m not going to drop everything and search for the other “George Cassidy” books Vance wrote, but I am going to check my shelves and see if I have any of his Westerns. The paperback edition of BAIT can be pre-ordered on Amazon, and I’m sure there’ll be an e-book edition as well once it’s published.

Love Camp on Wheels - Tom Harland

The third novel in TRAILER TRAMPS, the great new collection from Stark House, is LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, published originally by Softcover Library (the successor to Beacon Books) in 1963. It’s the story of Stan Barton, a regular guy who manages a trailer park in an agricultural area of California. Many of the camp’s occupants are migratory workers and their families, but there are some full-time residents, too. Stan was in the lettuce business until automation forced him out, but he’s managed to land this nice job taking care of the trailer park.

Things get complicated, though, as they always do in these books, when Stan becomes romantically involved with three married women: his own ex-wife, a newcomer to the park, and a woman who works in the office there. Eventually the husbands of all three women cause trouble for Stan, as does the park’s owner, a lesbian who has fallen for one of the three women herself. Stan not only has to figure out which of the three he really wants, he also has to survive a threat on his life and trouble with the law.

I don’t know anything about Tom Harland and couldn’t find anything on-line about him except that he wrote half a dozen of these softcore novels for Beacon/Softcover Library in the early Sixties. I have a hunch the name is a pseudonym, but that’s all it is, a hunch. Whoever he was, he wasn’t as good a writer as Orrie Hitt and Doug Duperrault, the other two authors in TRAILER TRAMPS. His prose isn’t nearly as smooth. But he keeps the story moving along at a good pace, his depiction of the middle class lifestyle of the era is accurate, and his characters ring true.

Some of the book concerns the expansion of the trailer park, and I’ve been around enough construction projects to recognize that Harland knows what he’s talking about in those scenes. In fact, the writing is stronger in those parts, almost as if Harland was more interested in them than he was in the domestic drama.

That said, Stan Barton is a likable lug of a protagonist, despite his penchant for fooling around with married women, and you can’t help but root for him to figure things out and come up with a happy ending. I enjoyed LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS, and it makes a nice companion piece for the other two novels in this collection. This latest offering from Stark House is well worth reading.

Trailer Tramp - Orrie Hitt

TRAILER TRAMPS, the new triple-decker collection from Stark House, has to have an Orrie Hitt novel in it, of course, and what better one than the similarly named TRAILER TRAMP? Published originally by Beacon Books in 1957, TRAILER TRAMP is Orrie Hitt near the top of his game, although there are some differences in it from his usual books, too.

For one thing, the protagonist of this novel, Joan Baker, isn’t trapped in a hardscrabble existence like many of Hitt’s protagonists. Instead, she’s a smart, hard-working young woman who runs a successful trailer camp established by her parents, who are now taking an extended vacation and have left Joan in charge. So money isn’t a worry as it so often is in a Hitt novel.

Which doesn’t mean that Joan is carefree. She has her personal demons to deal with. She was in love with a young man but after he tried to pressure her into sex and she refused (she’s a virgin), he turned to another girl to get what he wanted. But she still has feelings for the guy, and it doesn’t help when he starts working at the trailer camp.

Then a construction crew putting in a pipeline shows up and the boss of the job, Big Mike Summers, moves his trailer into the camp and Joan is immediately drawn to him. When she gives in to her feelings, she worries that she’s becoming a tramp. (Well, it’s right there in the title, although to be honest, Joan never comes across as particularly trampish.)

Other complications crop up, and although a lot of the book is domestic drama, it becomes a crime yarn as Hitt pulls off several nice twists, leaving the reader unsure of what’s going to happen almost right up to the end of the book.

I know Hitt worked as the manager of a hunting camp, but I don’t recall if he ever had any connection to trailer camps. He must have, because he does a great job with the setting in this book. As in so much of his work, the details of middle-class and lower-class life really have the ring of authenticity. His writing is sharp and the pace moves along at a nice clip. This is fine storytelling.

TRAILER TRAMP is in the top rank of the Orrie Hitt novels I’ve read. Along with TRAILER CAMP WOMAN by Doug Duperrault, it makes this new Stark House collection a solid two-for-two so far. That leaves LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, which I’ll be getting to soon. TRAILER TRAMPS is available in both e-book and print editions.

Trailer Camp Woman - Doug Duperrault

What a great idea for a themed anthology! TRAILER TRAMPS, coming out from Stark House later this month, collects three soft-core novels originally published by Beacon Books concerning love and lust in the trailer parks. For reasons I’ll explain later, I decided to start with the middle book in the trio, TRAILER CAMP WOMAN by Doug Duperrault, originally published in 1959.

The protagonist of this novel is Arlene Ford, a beautiful blonde who lives with her salesman husband Buddy in a trailer park on the outskirts of Norfolk, Virginia, where a lot of the population and business comes from the nearby naval base. Buddy travels a lot in his job, and it’s not a very happy marriage to start with since he’s considerably older than Arlene and doesn’t treat her well, so she’s lonely and resentful. Despite that, she tries to remain faithful to Buddy . . . until she meets a young sailor. And until she gets curious about the lifestyle of the two lesbians who live in the trailer next door. While Arlene is wrestling with those temptations, who should show up but her vengeful ex-fiancee, who begins stalking and threatening her. Now Arlene has to figure out not only what she wants to do with her life, but also has to survive that psychotic threat out of her past.

TRAILER CAMP WOMAN really races along. Duperrault’s writing is very smooth and fast-paced, and he does a good job with the characters. Arlene, her sailor, and her lesbian friends are all sympathetic and very likable. The bad guys are suitably despicable. Most Beacon Books had happy endings, but sometimes they feel forced. Not so here, as the outcome of everything develops naturally and believably. It’s just a good story where you keep reading because you want to know what’s going to happen.

I’ve been familiar with Doug Duperrault’s name for many years and had a few of his books before the Fire of ’08, but I never read anything by him until now. I looked him up to find out more about him before I dug into this collection and found his biography interesting enough that I wanted to read his book first. Born in Massachusetts in 1929, he grew up in various places in New England. As a young man he worked as an actor in children’s theater in New York, then moved to California in 1950 where he took on a number of different jobs: typist (at MGM Studios), aircraft parts worker, private detective, insurance investigator, and ice cream truck driver. A varied background, to say the least! In the mid-Fifties, he got into television and began a long career as a programming director and promotions manager in Arkansas, Louisiana, and finally Florida, where he wound up spending most of his life. He died in Tampa, where he was active in civic affairs, in 2005. Sounds like a pretty solid, decent guy.

And while he was doing all that in the Fifties and Sixties, he wrote 24 soft-core novels for assorted publishers, all of them under his real name. Based on TRAILER CAMP WOMAN, I suspect that most if not all of them are worth reading. I intend to seek out more of them, if I can get around to it.

Pot of Honey - John Furlough (Glenn Dale Lough)

POT OF HONEY by John Furlough, published by Softcover Library in 1966, has several things going for it that I like. It takes place in a short period of time, a little more than 24 hours, and it has several overlapping storylines that come together, veer apart, and then gradually intertwine even more.

We have a middle-aged, well-off-but-not-exactly rich widower who marries a younger widow with two beautiful daughters. The widower’s brutal jerk of a son lusts after the widow’s daughters and doesn’t care that they’re now his stepsisters. We have a young couple who own a farm and are unhappy in their marriage. We have the hired man on the farm, who’s also a brutal jerk. If you think that’s a plot designed to include a lot of sex scenes, you’re right. But the author also throws in a missing $10,000, a lot of scheming to get hold of that money, and a shooting.

It's well-documented that many, if not most, of the soft-core novels published in the Fifties and early Sixties are actually crime novels with some euphemistic, not too graphic sex scenes added to them. By the mid-Sixties, a gradual trend had set in: there were more sex scenes in the books, they were a little more graphic (although still not what anybody would consider hardcore), and the crime elements weren’t as important. That’s the window in which POT OF HONEY falls. The sex was what sold books like this when they were new; it’s the noirish crime angle that keeps guys like me reading them today.

John Furlough was a pseudonym for Glenn Dale Lough (1906-1991), who used the names Glenn Low and G. Davisson Low to author several dozen Western and detective stories for a variety of pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. By the Sixties, usually as Glenn Low but sometimes as John Furlough, he had become a prolific soft-core novelist specializing in small-town and rural stories, turning out books for Beacon Books, its successor Softcover Library, and Novel Books. The Western stories I’ve read by him have been good. I’m a little surprised he didn’t become a Western novelist. Maybe he tried and just wasn’t able to sell in that market. Maybe he had some luck with the soft-core market and just stuck with it. A lot of writers will do that. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that Lough was a decent writer, able to come up with interesting characters and move his plots along nicely. As a soft-core writer, he never reached the levels of Orrie Hitt or the authors who went on to other things such as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, and Donald Westlake. As a crime/noir author, he was no Harry Whittington, Day Keene, or Charles Williams. But he was a solid craftsman, based on what I’ve read so far, and everything I’ve read by him was entertaining and kept me flipping the pages. If you have any of his books on your shelves, or if you run across any, I think his work is worth reading.

Carny Girl - John Dexter

Almost everyone who wrote softcore novels for the operation set up by publisher William Hamling and agent Scott Meredith had books published under the name John Dexter at one time or another. It was a true house-name. The actual authors have been identified on some of them, but at this point we have no idea who wrote CARNY GIRL, published as part of the Pillar Books imprint in 1964.

It starts off with a nude, beautiful young woman who finds herself on a beach with amnesia. She has no idea who she is or what she’s doing there. All she knows is that she’s mortally terrified of something and has to get away. As luck would have it, a traveling carnival is stopped on a road nearby because one of the trucks has a flat tire, so, since it’s the middle of the night, our heroine is able to sneak onto the merry-go-round and hide. Of course, she’s discovered in the morning and winds up joining the carnival, working as a shill for some of the games and in the girlie show. She also falls for the handsome but down on his luck owner of the carnival and battles against an inexplicable (amnesia, remember?) nymphomania that makes her go to bed with most of the men she encounters. Eventually she comes to be haunted by the mystery of her past, especially when she finds out the authorities are looking for a girl who matches her description. And then a hurricane blows in on the Gulf Coast where the carnival is set up . . .

Like most of these books, CARNY GIRL reads quickly and is entertaining. I like carny novels in general, and this one focuses quite a bit on that colorful background, although the nymphomania is the main plot element, of course. But it’s also frustrating (also common for these books) because with that set-up and if the sex had been toned down some, this could have been an excellent hardboiled novel published by Gold Medal or as half of an Ace Double. Whoever this John Dexter was, his prose is pretty smooth and there’s some good dialogue.

But there’s no point in lamenting what might have been, and anyway, who am I to judge? The author got paid a quick thousand or twelve hundred bucks (significant money in 1964), did his job in a professional manner, and I assume was happy to cash the check. I’m sure the thought that somebody would be reviewing this novel nearly 60 years later never crossed his mind. CARNY GIRL is no lost classic, but I enjoyed reading it and for me, that counts more than anything else.

Killer -- Robert Silverberg

Many of the soft-core novels published by William Hamling in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties were crime novels, not surprising when you consider that some of the pseudonymous authors were writers such as Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake, who went on to be big names in the mystery/crime/suspense field. But Hamling had writers from other genres working for him, too. Robert Silverberg, already a well-known, award-winning author of science fiction, supplemented his income by turning out well over a hundred soft-core novels as Don Elliott. And many of them were crime stories at heart, too.

A number of these have been reprinted, and the latest comes from the always excellent Black Gat Books line: KILLER, originally published under the Don Elliott name as PASSION KILLER, Sundown Reader SR534 in 1965. As you might expect from that title, this is a hitman novel. Businessman Howard Gorman hires cold-blooded killer Lee Floyd to murder his wife so that he can marry his beautiful redheaded mistress, Marie Caldwell. But then Marie decides she can come out ahead by seducing Floyd and getting him to kill his own client, too . . . but only after Gorman has changed his will to leave everything to her. Throw in a beautiful lesbian call girl and a hotshot airline pilot to complicate things. At least one of these players is going to get double-crossed. The question is who and how . . . and who’s going to make it out of this novel alive.

KILLER reads much like a Gold Medal novel, only instead of fading to black as things are about to get too racy, it keeps going. There’s a lot of sex of several different varieties in this book, and by the mid-Sixties, when it was first published, those scenes are a little more graphic than they were earlier in Silverberg’s career as Don Elliott. However, he never loses sight of the crime plot, and that’s what really drives this novel forward at a very enjoyable pace. Also, as many of these books do, KILLER vividly captures the era in which it takes place. Genre novels are better time capsules than most historical non-fiction, I’ve found over the years. Reading this made me feel like I was back there in the mid-Sixties.

Of course, I never would have been able to read this novel then, because I was in junior high and such stuff was off-limits. (Hey, I had enough trouble smuggling Nick Carter books and Robert McGinnis covers past my mother!) So I’m very glad that many of them are being reprinted these days. KILLER is a very worthy addition to that group. I had a great time reading it and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in both paperback and ebook editions.

Forgotten Books: Sex Dancer - Clayton Matthews

You can’t get much more blatant about the title of a book than SEX DANCER, a novel by Clayton Matthews published by Beacon Books in 1961. The protagonist, Jean Winters, is a beautiful young blonde who dances in the girlie show at a traveling carnival. A year earlier, she left her hometown in New Mexico to go to Hollywood and become a big star. Well, we all know how that works out, so now to survive Jean travels with the carnival from one town to another and carries on a desultory affair with the sleazy concessionaire who runs the girlie show. But then she meets Mace, a motorcycle rider who used to be the star attraction of the motordrome show (where guys race motorcycles around the inside of a cylinder, held up by centrifugal force) until he cracked up in an accident and lost his nerve. Jean and Mace fall for each other, but there are all kinds of obstacles in the way, of course. Will their love survive?

I tend to like carny novels, and this one is okay. Like Fredric Brown’s MADBALL, it’s full of carny lingo and lore and colorful characters, but it lacks any real mystery or noir plot and is more of a soap opera than anything else. But it’s a pretty fast-moving and well-written soap opera, so I enjoyed it. It’s not the sweaty, desperate, naturalistic art of Orrie Hitt, and it doesn’t have the narrative drive of Ben Haas, but it’s still worth reading because Clayton Matthews was a good storyteller.

Matthews is an interesting author. He wrote quite a few of these soft-core sleaze novels for various publishers under his real name, and later he did a number of big, family saga type novels, also under his name, as well as a lot of books under other names. Rumor has it that in the Eighties he actually wrote dozens of bestselling historical romances published under another name. I never met him, but we had some mutual friends and he was also the cousin of my good friend, pulp fan and publisher Tom Johnson. I have some of his other novels published by Beacon and will be getting around to them in due course, I suspect. 

Forgotten Books: Carnival Girl - Max Gareth (Stuart James)

“Max Gareth” was actually Stuart James, the author of FRISCO FLAT, which I posted about a couple of months ago. CARNIVAL GIRL may be his first novel. It was published in 1960 by Chariot Books, and a more mysterious publisher you’re unlikely to find. There’s no address in the book, not even a city, and just a simple book number on the spine. Chariot Books, whoever they were, published more than a hundred books in the early Sixties, but the only author names I recognize are Arthur Adlon and John Burton Thompson, both of whom wrote for several other softcore sleaze publishers. It must have been a pretty low-budget operation.

But that doesn’t mean the books they published were all bad. CARNIVAL GIRL is actually a well-written coming-of-age story for the most part, albeit a very violent and lurid one at times. The protagonist is a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Norma who runs away from home in New Jersey due to an abusive stepfather and winds up having to hitchhike across the country. She doesn’t have a real destination, just a desire to head west. She winds up getting a ride with a trucker who seems decent at first but winds up raping her, taking her virginity. Then she encounters a traveling carnival and finds a home there, befriending several of the performers and getting a job dancing (stripping, actually) in one of their shows. A romantic triangle soon develops between Norma, the drummer who provides music for the show she’s part of, and a young motorcycle daredevil who’s also part of the carnival.

In general, I like carny novels. Fredric Brown’s MADBALL is excellent. CARNIVAL GIRL isn’t at that level, but James spins a fast-moving, compelling tale that has a literate, well-written style and lots of interesting carnival background. The characters and plot are standard, early Sixties sleaze/soap opera. There’s a crime/noir element farther along, but it never really fits into that category as many of the other softcore novels from that era do. For what it is, it’s a very readable, entertaining yarn. Clearly, Stuart James was a natural storyteller. I have several more of his books and plan to read them soon.