Showing posts with label Shepard Rifkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shepard Rifkin. Show all posts

Monday, 30 August 2010

Ladyfingers
by Shepard Rifkin

(Coronet, 1969)


I’ll be out of the country / away from the internet for a week or so starting next Thursday, but before then I’m gonna do my best to post up a selection of the groovier paperbacks from my recent Hay On Wye haul for you, one or two a day, starting now.



All I have to say about this cover is: sweet.



Judging by the cover illustration, I’m guessing our hero’s self-control didn’t last long.

And yes, you really did just read "..a hungry pair of breasts and a cool contempt for underwear" on the back cover copy.

I tried reading a bit of “Ladyfingers”, but didn’t get far with it I'm afraid. Mr. Rifkin’s prose style is rather bulbous, with a tendency toward over-long sentences that rather undermines the hard-boiled tone he’s going for (I know, I know, people in glass houses..), and his protagonist seems like a bit of self-pitying bozo, spending most of the opening chapter telling us all about his underprivileged childhood, and how his easy-going, golf-playing superiors can never understand his pain. Ho-hum.

Apparently more impressed than I was, Hard Case Crime have recently republished Rifkin’s civil rights movement crime caper The Murder Vine with a cool nouveau-pulp cover by Ken Laager.