Random Paperbacks: Trailer Camp Woman by Doug Duperrault (Bedside Books, 1960)

Another example of a ‘60s US sleaze paperback recently discovered on these shores - I scored this one at a car boot sale in Peckham, no less.

Though pretty boilerplate stuff in terms of concept and content, the cover art here is way above average (albeit poorly reproduced). Unfortunately, it resides permanently in the “artist unknown” category on the Greenleaf Classics web archive (which is about as comprehensive a reference on this stuff as exists anywhere).

Bedside Books were an early exemplar of the multiple imprints which flourished as part of the wider Greenleaf Classics empire, effectively flooding the market with ‘adult reading’ throughout the ‘60s. According to the aforementioned archive, at least 110 books were published under the Bedside banner between 1959 and 1963.

‘Trailer Camp Woman’ is actually a re-print - it was first published, with different artwork, by Beacon Books in 1959, if anyone cares. An online review on goodreads.com states that it reads like the work of the ubiquitous Orrie Hitt, and I’m content to take their word for it.

Probably more interesting in this case however is what I discovered when I first skimmed through the book’s pages;

Oh boy.

Immediately, my mind conjures up an image of the lair of some debauched early ‘60s pervert, his stash so glutted with (then rare and illicit) pornographic photos that he’s taken to tearing them up and using them for bookmarks.

Or, perhaps a more likely possibility, could the book’s former owner have been a transient person or serviceman, carefully stashing their, uh, ‘favourite’ dirty picture somewhere where it wouldn’t be found?

Either way, I’ll keep it where I found it - preserving the sordid mystery for whoever ends up taking ownership of ‘Trailer Camp Woman’ once I’m obliged to part with it.

Random Paperbacks: Stranger in Town by Raoul D’Orque (Unique Books, 1967)

A rare example of a ‘60s U.S. sleaze paperback snagged in the wild here in the UK, I recently picked this up at Oxfam of all places, for a bargain price presumably reflective of the fact that the binding and spine are absolutely shot.

I mean, as if they actually expected anyone to read it! The cover art by Bill Alexander is the big draw here, and I’ll freely admit to staring at its warped, weirdo beauty for far longer than is healthy.

Though the artist’s intention was probably for our attention to be focused on the figure of the innocent (white-haired?) nymphet being assaulted by a jumpsuit-clad dominatrix immediately after stepping off the bus in the Big City, my focus instead keeps getting drawn back to the male figure on the left, with his Clint Eastwood scowl, jaunty neckerchief and fragile, elongated hands, clutching at the victim’s pasteboard suitcase.

Is he working in cahoots with the dominatrix, or has he just scuttled round the corner, drawn magnet-like by the opportunity to snatch some luggage? (“Yoink!”)

Either way, the demented cartoon world created by Alexander in this one mad vignette is sublime; the implicit idea that moral standards in America’s cities have collapsed to such an extent that a buxom, mid-western lass can’t even make it out of the bus station without getting clobbered by perverts and ripped off by rat-men… and the unspoken promise that, if you’re enough of a freak to be checking out a volume like this, you should probably find this prospect exciting, and hit the mean and sticky streets in search of flesh forthwith. Yowza!

I’ve always felt you could draw a direct line between this kind of sleaze paperback artwork, the more highly regarded/subversive fetish illustration which was its contemporary cousin, and the similarly ugly/beautiful atmosphere conjured up (albeit in more self-aware fashion) by ‘90s comic artists like Dan Clowes and Charles Burns - and indeed, clicking through to the above-linked ‘This is Horror’ story on Bill Alexander reveals that his long and varied career touched on all these areas, and plenty more besides.

A rare example of an African-American commercial artist, Alexander began his career in the ‘40s, illustrating the labels of 78rpm records by cats like Roy Milton (see some examples here), before helping to create “arguably the first black superhero strip”, ‘The Bronze Bomber’, which appeared in the Los Angeles Tribune from 1941-43. (Sadly, all artwork from this strip appears lost - for more detail, see the Wikipedia entry for Alexander’s contemporary Gene Bilbrew.)

After seeing service in WWII, Alexander seems to have moved on to paperback covers and S&M / fetish illustration through the ‘50s and ‘60s, including work for the legendary Irving Klaw, before achieving renown of a different order through his covers for the Eerie Publications line of horror comics in the 1970s - for more on which, I’ll refer you back to the This is Horror article, which is a great read.

As to the book itself, this appears to be the sole volume credited to the supremely named Raoul D’Orque -- and if I was ever looking for an alias to use for anonymously checking into hotels or making pornography, I think I just found it.

Rather than trying to provide a plot synopsis or similar, I’ll just hit you with this scan of the novel’s opening pages:

I realise coherence wasn’t a big concern for authors of single draft roughie sleaze books or their publishers, but still - there’s something fairly awe-inspiring about the idea that a manuscript which descends into gobbledegook within its third sentence can still go to print unaltered.

Just imagine the Burroughs-esque cut-up mayhem and made up words (‘matine’?) which might unfold across the following 150 pages, and shudder with misplaced ecstasy.

Oh, and - you see that ‘UB’ logo stuck in the middle of the above cover, like a sticker on an apple or something? That’s not actually a sticker on the book, it’s printed on. Someone must have artlessly slapped it onto Alexander’s original artwork whilst setting it out for printing.

This practice seems to have been standard operating procedure not only at Unique Books, but across all the associated imprints operated out of Buffalo, NY during the ‘60s by frequently indicted Times Square porno/sleaze entrepreneur Eddie Mishkin. (Also see: ‘After Hours’, ‘First Niter’, ‘Nitey Night’ etc, all of which used near-identical typography, and frequently featured the work of fetish-affiliated artists like Eric Stanton and the aforementioned Gene Bilbrew.)

I wonder, incidentally, whether Eddie Mishkin was any relation to Andy Milligan’s producer / nemesis William Mishkin, who was based out of nearby 42nd street, and frequently worked with other Mishkin brothers on assorted dubious enterprises? My sole reference on such matters, Jimmy McDonough’s essential Milligan biography The Ghastly One, ain’t telling, but either way, the spider’s web of subterranean cultural connections uncovered by my visit to Oxfam grows...

Random Paperbacks: Appointment in Paris by Fay Adams (Gold Medal, 1958)

From a distance, the uncredited artwork for Fay Adams’ Gold Medal paperback original ‘Appointment in Paris’ looks like a pretty respectable, atmospheric cover for a suspense or mystery novel. (1)

Give it a second look though, taking a bit more time, and you’ll start to realise it’s actually a pretty rushed piece - sketchy, lacking detail. Then you’ll clock that left arm, and you’ll never be able to unsee it.

And in fact, ‘Appointment in Paris’ isn’t a suspense or mystery novel at all, in spite of the cover’s moody lighting and suspenseful pose.

Instead, it’s a thoroughly old fashioned, lightweight romance / coming-of-age sort of affair, in which a young American debutante spends a summer in Paris under the tutelage of a wise old Aunt, gets mildly shocked by the somewhat forward customs of French society and becomes involved in some (reassuring chaste) romantic entanglements, in a variation on the same formula which is apparently still packin’ ‘em in on Netflix over sixty years later.

Or, is it..?

The plot thickens when some quick searching online reveals that Fay Adams’ only other published work (in book form anyway - unsure if she sold any stuff to magazines/periodicals) appears in the 2005 anthology Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels, 1950-1965.

Widely offered for sale online as an e-book, ‘Appointment in Paris’ is often noted as forming part of the ‘Classic Lesbian Pulp Series’, and the cut-and-pasted plot synopsis reads as follows:

'Primarily set against the backdrops of Paris and the French countryside, and taking us back in time to the year 1936, Appointment in Paris tells the story of a young girl named Havoc. Hattie, as she is also known, is having a difficult time living under the strict watchful eye of her aunt. She wants to strike out for adventure on her own. One day she meets Marcelle, a woman older than she, in the hallway of their apartment building. Neither can ignore the spark of attraction that flames between them and before long they are hopelessly head over heels in love.'

I’ve got to say, this is news to me, as, having skim-read the book, I didn’t get any inkling of same-sex romance at all. In fact, the final chapter finds the heroine weighing up the relative virtues of her male French ex-lover and her newly acquired American husband, whilst wishing a tearful goodbye to her Parisian best friend, who is also now happily married.

Such a conclusion doesn’t exactly speak of a ground-breaking work of lesbian fiction, you’d have to admit. But, what we instead have here instead I suppose is a sobering reminder of an era in which non-hetero relationships remained such a taboo that they could only be addressed in almost entirely sub-textural terms, even in the context of a below-the-radar pulp paperback. How things would change, just a few short years later.

Oh, and yes - the heroine of this book is indeed named Havoc, which is pretty amazing. 

--

(1)My usual painstaking research - ie, a quick google search - has left me unable to turn up an artist credit for this cover, but as ever, please just drop us a line if you have any leads.

Random Paperbacks: Always Say Die by Elizabeth Ferrars (Fontana, 1962)

Given that cover artist John L. Baker appears to have never actually seen a cat (or at least, couldn’t remember what they looked like very well), his decision to illustrate this particular incident from Elizabeth Ferrar’s 1956 mystery novel seems nigh-on inexplicable. But, his decision to go with it nonetheless, reference materials be damned, has helped make this strikingly bizarre effort one of my favourite paperback acquisitions of recent years.

(I also like the fact that that blue-tinted illustration on the back cover has clearly been swiped wholesale from a different book cover, complete with a different artist’s signature still visible on the bottom left.)

For the record, the alleged cat attack occurs on page 32, when a stray moggie leaps onto the shoulders of heroine Helen as she stands around in the grounds of the house belonging to her absent Maiden Aunt’s former home, and it comprises about two paragraphs of what otherwise seems to be a pleasantly atmospheric, old fashioned potboiler, set in the depths of darkest, uh, Berkshire, apparently.

Two-Fisted Tales: The Star Witches by John Lymington (Macfadden, 1970)

I was recently hipped to the work of John Lymington via a great piece written by Jacob Charles Wilson in the estimable Books Review of Books (issue # 3, June 2021), wherein Wilson basically makes the case for Lymington as a kind of forgotten idiot savant of British pulp SF, citing his 1965 giant spider opus ‘The Green Drift’ as “..a terrible book and an amazing book. It’s a miracle it was ever published.”

Suitably intrigued, and noting that I already have several Lymington joints stashed unread on my shelves, I chose to begin my investigation with ‘The Star Witches’, because… well, how could I not? It sounds bloody brilliant.

Well, what can I tell you readers - a sense of morbid fascination saw me through to the final pages, but I’m not much inclined to repeat the experience. First published in the same year as ‘The Green Drift’ (though this U.S. edition dates from 1970), ‘The Star Witches’ is, unquestionably, a terrible book. An amazing one though…? I fear not.

Although nothing in the exciting back cover copy Macfadden’s editorial staff managed to wring out of this damned thing is technically incorrect, the arrangement of these events within Lymington’s text is… not quite as compelling as we might hope, to put it mildly.

The Reverend David James, for instance, only discovers that “..a coven of witches was using his church for worshiping Satan..” via a few throwaway dialogue exchanges towards the end of the novel, and he scarcely has much time to be perturbed by the issue amidst the thunderous rumblings, “cold smells”, petty bickering and great globules of misbegotten, barely coherent, shapeless prose through which Lymington attempts to convey the descent of his (far too numerous) cast of characters into a state of supernatural hysteria as they are buffeted by the assault of some kind of incorporeal alien intelligence.

The Reverend James, by the way, is in no sense the novel’s hero or protagonist - instead he is merely one member of an ever-expanding ensemble of pointless and dislikeable individuals Lymington conjures into existence to stretch out his word count, each chiefly defined by their assorted weaknesses and grotesquery. (The Reverend, for instance, is a venal, self-serving type, possessed of prodigious girth, multiple chins, and invariably described as either picking remnants of fish from his teeth or tripping over his impractical ecclesiastical vestments.)

Mirroring both Wilson’s description of ‘The Green Drift’ and the staggeringly uneventful 1967 film adaptation of Lymington’s ‘Night of the Big Heat’, the “action” of ‘The Star Witches’ is largely confined to the interior of one cold, strange, smelly house (the squire’s abode in a fictional Cotswolds village), wherein upward of a dozen characters gradually accumulate and spend the entire first two thirds of the novel fretting about the absence of one Harry Royce, owner of the gaff in question. An amateur scientist, Royce seems to have disappeared, ‘Marie Celeste’-style, mid-way through his dinner, whilst carrying out some vague researches into matter transference and inter-planetary telepathy, or, y’know - something along those lines.

Harry’s dinner, incidentally, was paprika stew, “with the cheese on the steak,” which his housekeeper (a gargantuan, simple-minded West Country stereotype, like all of the book’s working class characters) repeatedly insists he would never have voluntarily left unfinished. And, if you feel it would be beneficial to receive frequent updates on how long this dinner has been left sitting in his study, and what happens to it as it gradually congeals, and to read several discussions on the subject of whether or not it would be a good idea to clear it away, then, friends - John Lymington is the author you’ve been looking for!

A similar dialectic is invoked on a slightly grander scale during the final third of the book, when, after discovering the body of the absent Mr Royce in a trance-like state within a wall cavity, the characters spend most of the remaining pages arguing about whether they should kill him - in order to destroy the ‘bridge’ his consciousness has formed with the evil alien intelligences which are trying to take over everyone’s minds - or alternatively, just, y’know, not kill him, even though they probably should, just due to general milquetoast queasiness and procrastination on the part of the middle class contingent.

Meanwhile, in the grounds of the house, pound-shop Nigel Kneale vibes are soon the order of the day, as reality warps and frays around Royce’s ‘pepper pot’ private observatory, wherein he has trained his high-tech telescope on the distant planet from which the book’s malign, shapeless entities originate. Eventually, the local residents, tiring of both subterranean rumblings ‘spoiling’ the beer at the pub and their assorted husbands and wives failing to return from the indecisive palaver going down at the manor house, do the decent thing and assemble a pitchfork-wielding mob to take care of business.

Spoiler alert: they do not really succeed, and the book ends, hilariously, with a field report composed by one of the extra-terrestrial invaders, who apparently intend to continue sending signed and dated letters to each other and compiling paper records whilst they conquer the globe, despite being shapeless, nameless telepathic beings from a wholly unknown realm of distant space.

John Lymington is credited with having written over 150 books between 1935 and 1989 - not quite matching the output maintained by his fellow British ‘mushroom pulp’ godhead Lionel Fanthorpe during his peak years, but regardless, Lymington also pumps out his prose like a fog of inarticulate, stream-of-consciousness blather, showing little regard for whether the ends of his sentences bear any relationship to their openings. It reads as if he (like Fanthorpe) was simply dictating the novel into a tape recorder, ‘first thought = best thought’ style, as the clock ticked down to his deadline, before sending it straight off to some poor, underpaid typist to be transcribed.

Fanthorpe however was a worldly and charismatic individual, meaning that the random digressions into his day-to-day which inevitably filtered through into his writing often proved interesting or amusing. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to read 200 bad science fiction novels written by this guy?) 

The incessant irrelevancies which accumulate within Lymington’s prose by contrast feel mean, narrow-minded and crushingly banal. It’s all suggestive - though I may be projecting unfairly here - of a kind of culturally blinkered, unhappy existence, the experience of which feels more unhealthy than the writhing, inter-dimensional tendrils of the alien mind-stealers the author rather half-heartedly seeks to invoke in ‘The Star Witches’.

In the first chapter here for instance, we learn that ‘bovine’ housekeeper Clara suffers from wind in the mornings, because her husband Bill puts far too much sugar in the mug of tea he brings her at six o’clock, and which she needs to drink quickly because she needs to get up before seven. We learn that lecherous gardener Bert Gaskin (“known throughout Keynes as a big, blundering, blustering, beggaring knowall”) wears ‘yachting shoes’, because his feet “suffer in hot weather” and “linen shoes can be good for that”. We learn that the doorbell in Harry Royce’s residence is “an original installation from 1850,” and that he “likes original installations”. “Sometimes he had them put in even if they weren’t there when he came,” Lymington would have us know.

Perhaps you think I’m being a bit unfair here. I mean, isn’t it through this kind of detail that all authors develop character, and create a sense of place for their stories? Maybe, but after suffering through a few dozen pages of Lymington, I’d defy you make a case for this excruciating drivel adding up to anything except his daily word count.

It certainly succeeds in torpedoing any promise of the kind of cosmic grandeur which the SF and horror genres are conventionally supposed to deliver, that's for sure, but beyond that, Lymington’s hum-drum eccentricities fail to even register as perversely fascinating or unintentionally funny. Carelessly tossed off, and full of minor lapses of logic so painfully mundane it’s barely worth even registering them, instead it’s all just really annoying. 

Indeed, the main feelings generated by spending 140 pages enveloped in the sweaty, feeble mess of ‘The Star Witches’ are those of futility, tedium, mild revulsion… and a creeping realisation that, even for us most dedicated excavators of forgotten 20th century popular culture, there are some stones which are perhaps better left unturned. 

 

Pan’s People: The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner (1960)

 

Finishing off our recent celebration of Pan’s late ‘50s / early ‘60s cover artwork, here’s another absolute banger from Sam ‘Peff’ Peffer.

I don’t have much else to say, as my interest in the work of Erle Stanley Gardner extends precisely as far as the cool cover design which sometimes graces his books [see previous examples: 1, 2, 3], so instead let’s just say: wow, look at that dissolving big city skyline and the faceless guy in the shadows… no doubt knocked out under a tight deadline in a matter of minutes, this is pulp craftsmanship at its finest.

Pan’s People: The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey (1958)

From looking at Glenn Steward’s striking cover artwork for Josephine Tey’s ‘The Man in the Queue’, I got the feeling it might be one of those mid-20th century explorations of frenzied, urban existentialism and modern man’s alienation from his surroundings and so forth…. but the rather more straight-forward back cover copy soon disavowed me of that idea.

If I haven’t said so previously by the way, huge props to Pan for being one of the only mid-century paperbacks imprints in the world to actually let cover artists clearly sign their work. It makes life so much easier all these years later.

Pan’s People: Two Edgars (1956/57)

Many of the cover illustrations used for Pan’s innumerable Edgar Wallace paperbacks are a bit dull, but these two are both absolutely terrific I think, highlighting the same lurid / fantastical aspect of Wallace’s work which was exploited so wonderfully by the German Krimi productions of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

This edition of ‘The India Rubber Men’ was published 1956 with art by Bruce C. Windo, whilst ‘The Ringer’ is 1957 (fifth printing), signed “Silk” (an artist whose full name and identity appears to be unknown, but as ever, please do drop me a line if you have any further info).

‘The Ringer’, of course, was the basis for Alfred Vohrer’s highly entertaining ‘Der Hexer’ (1964), which I reviewed here back in 2019.

Pan’s People: Two Wests (both 1958)

We continue our look at some recently acquired Pans with these two splendidly atmospheric covers by Pat Owen, both illustrating works by the insanely prolific John Creasey, whose 40+ Inspector West novels comprise a mere single figure fraction of his literary output.

Pan’s People: Moment of Danger by Donald MacKenzie (1959)

After all the excitement of October, I’m going to try to keep this blog afloat by turning to some scans of recent additions to my paperback collection - which is something I’ve not got around to for a while, so there’s plenty of stuff to work through; not least, plenty of newly acquired Pans.

As I’ve probably remarked before in these pages, Pan’s ‘50s-‘60s crime paperbacks remain such a ubiquitous and cheap presence on the second hand market here in the UK that it often feels as if I pick up a new one every time I leave the house. But, their artwork is so consistently beautiful that each one I pick up still feels like both a bargain and a treasured addition to my shelves… and this characteristically evocative number from our old friend Sam ‘Peff’ Peffer is a case in point.

As the back cover here makes abundantly clear, ‘Moment of Danger’ was adapted for the screen in 1959. Shot in Jess Franco’s future stomping ground of Malaga in Andalucía, the film was directed by Hungarian-born Hollywood exile Laslo Benedek, best known for ‘The Wild One’ (1953) and ‘Death of a Salesman’ (1951). 

Meanwhile, as Pan’s ever-busy copy editors also manage to inform us via the yellow-backed paragraph on the bottom right, author Donald MacKenzie also sounds like an interesting cat - but apparently not sufficiently so as to merit his own Wikipedia page, whilst google searches are complicated by the existence of multiple authors and academics of the same name.

From what I can gather beyond the fascinating tit-bits concerning MacKenzie’s history of incarceration provided here, he was born in 1908, and also penned the source novel for the Seth Holt-directed 1958 thriller ‘Nowhere to Go’, in addition to a series of sixteen ‘John Raven Mysteries’, published between 1976 and 1994 (the year of his death), amongst other things.

A capsule biography extracted from the website of publishing conglomerate Hachette UK (who currently offer MacKenzie’s entire catalogue for sale as e-books) repeats the quotes used by Pan on the back cover to ‘Moment of Danger’, but adds various other info, as follows:

Donald MacKenzie (1908-1994) was born in Ontario, Canada, and educated in England, Canada and Switzerland. For twenty-five years MacKenzie lived by crime in many countries. ‘I went to jail,’ he wrote, ‘if not with depressing regularity, too often for my liking.’ His last sentences were five years in the United States and three years in England, running consecutively. He began writing and selling stories when in American jail. ‘I try to do exactly as I like as often as possible and I don’t think I’m either psychopathic, a wayward boy, a problem of our time, a charming rogue. Or ever was.’ He had a wife, Estrela, and a daughter, and they divided their time between England, Portugal, Spain and Austria.

So there ya go.

Monster Books # 1: Monsters Galore ‘resurrected’ by Bernhardt J. Hurwood (Fawcett/Gold Medal, 1965)

One curious phenomenon birthed by the commercial imperatives of mid 20th century paperback publishing is that of what I like to call MONSTER BOOKS; hastily thrown together compendiums of public domain short stories and folkloric / paranormal blather, no doubt intended to capture the attention of ghoulish, impressionable young boys and girls left alone in supermarkets and corner shops whilst their parents took care of hum-drum grown-up business.

Ranging across decades and continents, these rarely acknowledged books remain pretty ubiquitous on the second hand market, and, naturally enough, I generally can’t resist ’em. Despite the haste and cheapness of their production, they’re often actually pretty great reads too, assembled with admirable care and attention by their editors/compilers.

I mean, just imagine you’re a struggling writer with a taste for the stranger side of life, and some editor from Gold Medal calls you up out of the blue and says, “hey Bernie, can you get us about two hundred pages of copyright-free stuff about MONSTERS by a week on Thursday?” Boy, can you EVER. Dream gig, right?

That, presumably, is the call that the venerable Bernhardt J. Hurwood received sometime in 1965, and, as you can see from the scans below, he really went to town on it. Not only do we get M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearn, Sir Walter Scott and Ambrose Bierce, but also original retellings by the editor (sorry, ‘resurrector’) of tales sourced from China, Japan, Arabia, Greece and Siberia… amazing stuff. Whilst I haven’t managed to scan them, the text is also interspersed with blurry reproductions of images from Goya, Kuniyoshi, Hokusai, Brueghel, medieval wood carving, and an etching of “two Mongolian demons”.

Just imagine the impact this “United Nations of virulence,” as Hurwood dubs it in his introduction, could have had on some culturally deprived child out in the boondocks somewhere. Mr Hurwood, we salute you!

As you will note, things take a darker turn toward the end of the book, as Hurwood goes off on a bit of a “of course man is the only true monter” tip, throwing in some historical accounts of serial killers, cannibals and the like alongside such borderline supernatural cases as that of Elisabeth Báthory, not to mention the unfortunately named Johannes Cuntius, a medieval ‘vampyre’ whose unsavoury antics are reported here, sans context, in what appears to be an English translation of a contemporary(?) eye witness account.

Needless to say, it is this stuff, more-so than the were-bears and vampire cats, which would probably have given me nightmares had I stumbled across this book in my youth.

Finally, a quick word on the cover design. Incorporating a rough sketch from legendary illustrator Harry Bennett, nothing here is terribly remarkable from a technical POV, but it just looks really great, with that big, blobby lettering and the bright colours and everything. I often leave this one out on display in the living room, and I never get tired of looking at it.

 

Two-Fisted Tales: Brother Cain by Simon Raven (Panther, 1965)

Though the brightly-hued cover photo affixed to this edition of Simon Raven’s second published novel ‘Brother Cain’ carries a distinct whiff of pop-art / psychedelic chic, Panther’s paperback was actually printed in February ’65, too early to have really hitched a ride on the ‘swinging sixties’ bandwagon, whilst the book itself was first published back in the grey, buttoned up world of 1959.

One of those renowned-in-their-day-but-now-largely-forgotten authors whose work always sparks a certain fascination, Simon Raven (1927-2001 - and yes, that was indeed his birth name) wrote voluminously through much of the latter half of the 20th century, and, read today, his books feel both strikingly modern (in terms of their frank and non-judgemental approach to sexuality and general air of shark-ish cynicism) and hopelessly old fashioned (being largely concerned with a segment of upper crust British society whose values and behaviours now seem entirely alien, probably even to those lucky enough to have been born into it).

Freely mixing elements of personal / social writing and thinly veiled autobiography into popular genre thrillers, Raven’s more noteworthy works include Oxbridge vampire yarn ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ (loosely adapted into Robert Hartford Davis’s disastrous Incense for the Damned in 1971) and, on the other side of the coin, the ten volume ‘Alms for Oblivion’ sequence, which follows the lives and loves of a cadre of toffs, set against the changing social and political mores of post-war England. (I read the first few chapters of the first volume of this epic saga a few years back and actually found it quite compelling, but unfortunately I lost my copy on a train and haven’t got around to picking it up again since.)

Throughout his early literary career, Raven seems to have been fixated on the dilemmas faced by male scions of the English upper classes who, whether through conscious rebellion or mere lethargy and personal weakness, have squandered the privileges conferred to them by their noble upbringing and must find alternative paths through life. This theme is certainly front and centre in ‘Brother Cain’, whose protagonist Jacinth Crewe (note the Moorcock-ian initials) finds himself in a predicament closely mirroring that apparently faced by the author himself a few years beforehand.

Having been expelled from Eton on the grounds of moral turpitude and subsequently forced to curtail his studies at Cambridge due to what we might charitably call a self-inflicted lack of funds, the novel joins Crewe as he is invited to offer his resignation to the British army’s elite training academy at Sandhurst, having accrued gambling debts sufficiently gargantuan as to bring his entire regiment into disrepute.

“Honour and dishonour are conventions,” Captain Crewe’s understanding commanding officer advises him during their final interview, effectively establishing the theme of the novel to follow. “They are relevant in the world in which you have so far existed: they will not be relevant in the world for which it is clear you are now destined.”

Retreating to London with his tail (amongst other things) between his legs, Jacinth throws himself upon the mercy of his regiment’s allotted merry widow, one Miss Kitty Leighton, who, after a night or two of wild passion at her Chelsea flat, places a call to a mysterious contact who may be able to assist her disgraced and destitute young lover before the debt collectors come knocking.

Thus, Jacinth is summoned to a lunch date at the Trocadero in Piccadilly (decades before it became the tourist-choked hellhole we know it as today), where he is greeted by dirty mac-clad, brown ale supping “professional messenger” Mr Shannon - a character I found it impossible not to imagine being played by Donald Pleasance.

Though highly suspicious on all levels, the proposal Mr Shannon’s anonymous employers wish to convey to Captain Crewe is entirely too good for the desperate young layabout to resist. In short, his gambling debts will be covered in full, and he will be issued with sufficient funds to allow him to fly to Rome and install himself in the swank Hotel Hassler overlooking the Spanish Steps, there to await further instructions.

What with this being the height of the First Cold War and everything, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that when those orders do eventually arrive, they direct Jacinth to an appointment at a shabby ‘Institute for the Promotion of Mediterranean Art’, a flimsy front for a top secret wing of the British government whose job, to all intents and purposes, is to create new James Bonds.

Which is to say, Jacinth and the other young rascals corralled by the nameless ‘organisation’ are pointedly not being groomed as spies or intelligence agents. Instead, they are basically just hatchet men - proponents of what one of their instructors (who is of lower middle class extraction, and so naturally a graceless, grudge-bearing git) bluntly calls “the cold art of murder”.

Taking a more refined view on things, the Big Cheese of the whole operation, who naturally enjoys the benefit of a ‘proper’ education, instead waxes lyrical to his new recruits about how, in the light of communist infiltration and so forth, the democratic institutions so cherished by western nations can only be preserved through the unilateral execution of acts which the champions of democracy would find impossible to countenance, should they become aware of them.

(Being unfamiliar with Raven’s own political leanings, assuming he had any, it’s difficult to get a handle on whether this justification for extra-judicial murder and mayhem, which continues at some length, is being presented as satire, or simply as a statement of the author’s own beliefs.)

Furthering the Bond parallel, Jacinth and his fellow recruits are essentially allowed to adopt the lifestyles of globe-trotting playboys, so long as they follow their orders precisely, ask no questions, and leave whatever moral scruples they may once have possessed at the door. And, if they have any thoughts of ducking out and taking their chances in civilian life, well…. their more ruthless classmates will simply have an easy first assignment to look forward to, won’t they?

Despite his military rank, Jacinth Crewe is still more a feckless dosser than a cold-blooded killer, and, still bedevilled by confused notions of personal honour and brotherly conduct, he is naturally terrified by the prospect of having to immerse himself in the paranoid, compassionless world promised by his new profession - all the more so when, with a neatness which surely defies mere coincidence, he is paired up for training with one Nicholas Le Soir, the former schoolmate whose charms led to his being expelled from Eton for corrupting the morals of a younger boy. (This incident directly mirrors Raven’s real life expulsion from Charterhouse public school, incidentally.)

Now a qualified surgeon, Le Soir has arrived at the ‘organisation’ after being struck off and effectively exiled from the UK for performing an illegal abortion upon the daughter of a prominent Catholic family (oops), and the plot is further thickened once both Jacinth and Nicholas find themselves drawn into an embryonic love triangle with Le Soir’s promiscuous yet sexually dysfunctional cousin Eurydice, who is also resident in Rome, working for an equally questionable ‘cultural mission’…. and who seems suspiciously keen on pumping her two mixed up suitors for information on the nature of their employment.

And, there I will leave my plot synopsis, but suffice to say, Raven proves himself eminently capable of setting up a fast-moving, exquisitely intriguing yarn here, even if his story’s conclusion - following an incident in a bat-infested railway tunnel, a scheme to virally infect the whores of a high class brothel and a head-spinningly convoluted murder scheme set against the backdrop of a Venetian masked ball, amongst other diversions - eventually veers more toward the kind of existential, internecine futility in which John le Carré would later specialise than the two-fisted action-adventure stuff beloved by Ian Fleming’s fans.

In view of the fact that ‘Brother Cain’ was first published a full decade before the legalisation of male homosexuality in the UK, one of the most striking aspects of the book for modern readers is Raven’s forthright and unapologetic presentation of his male characters’ bisexuality. Not only acknowledging this dark secret of the English public school system, which tended to be referred to only through implication and innuendo by other writers of this era, he seems keen on eagerly exploring its every nook and cranny, pushing the book’s language about as far as the era’s censorship would allow.

“I’m not a homosexual, or at least, not very often,” Jacinth muses to himself as he drifts into introspective reverie in the flight to Rome. (“What shall I do about women? Well I suppose there must be brothels..,” he charmingly adds, as if to bolster his own sense of masculinity.)

As soon as he falls asleep though, he finds himself dreaming of a beautiful American boy he once briefly courted at Cambridge (and who will, of course, play an integral role in the unfolding plot), and as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Jacinth’s most significant and long-lasting relationships have always been with other men.

In spite of its attention-grabbing plotline in fact, ‘Brother Cain’ often reads more like a semi-autobiographical personal novel than it does a thriller. More specifically, it seems like an attempt on Raven’s part to take stock of his life to date, and to redefine his place in the world as he hit his early 30s. As noted, the parallels between the background of the book’s protagonist and that of the author himself are considerable, and, given the multiple accusations of libel which were levelled against Raven as a result of his writing over the years, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that many of the secondary characters in ‘Brother Cain’ were simply thinly veiled versions of his own friends, lovers and acquaintances.

Suffice to say, Raven was presumably not actually press-ganged into committing top secret outrages on behalf of the British crown, but, at a push, you could perhaps see Jacinth Crewe’s recruitment by the ‘organisation’ as a reflection of Raven’s own unique arrangement with the publisher Anthony Blond, who, when the author found himself in particularly dire straits, is reported to have agreed to pay him £15 a week in perpetuity and to publish his books as and when he completed them, on the understanding that he should leave London and never return.

Elsewhere, the book’s story is jammed with sinister, wisdom-dispensing potential father figures and unbalanced, mothering women, whilst Jacinth’s ruthless generational contemporaries all seem ready and willing to trample on his yearning, sensitive soul, creating a maelstrom of weird moral / psychological angst which can only really end with our protagonist becoming entirely consumed by it as he slips helplessly between the cracks separating the world of ‘honour and dishonour’ from the one in which most of us now live, in which such concepts are simply a quaint irrelevance.

Normally of course, I’d be pretty pissed off to find a book which has all the makings of a rip-roaring mid-century thriller derailed by such a load of ponderous navel-gazing, but Simon Raven was such a fascinating character, and the lost world of foppish decadence in which he dwelled such an enticing one to visit, that in his case, I’ll happily make an exception. 

Whatever you may think about his conduct or way of life, Raven was a strange and unique literary talent; even at this early stage of his career, his prose and plotting are crisp, witty and ruthlessly efficient, and I’ll certainly be redoubling my quest for more of his work as soon as the doors of the world’s surviving second hand bookshops begin to creak open once again.

 

Two-Fisted Tales: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books, third printing 1961)

I have mixed feelings about the cover to this late ‘50s/early ‘60s U.S. paperback edition of ‘Red Harvest’. On the one hand, Harry Bennett’s illustration is clearly a great piece of pulp cover artwork, no question. The manner in which it is presented however clearly leaves a lot to be desired. With the painting apparently sliced out by hand and stuck against a decidedly unflattering white and red background, the whole thing is in fact a bit of a disaster area from the design point of view, and doesn’t look terribly appealing.

Furthermore, if you compare the front cover to the tinted detail from the illustration blown up on the back, you’ll get an idea of how brutally Bennett’s art has been squashed down here, and how much detail has been lost in the process of printing it at reduced scale. That great “huh?!” expression on the male figure’s face for instance is totally gone, along with who knows how much else.

(I would also complain that that expression seems entirely out of keeping with the stoic manner in which Hammett’s Continental Op greets the novel’s ever-increasing pile of corpses, but then the scene and characters depicted here by Bennett don’t actually seem to match anything in the book very well at all, so what the hey, right?)

It’s also interesting I think to observe how little Pocket Books chose to play up the fame and importance of this book and its author in their cover copy here. We’re over three decades away from ‘Red Harvest’s initial publication in 1929 at this point, and this edition was in fact printed in the very month of Hammett’s death (January ’61), but there’s still no “..the classic first novel from the celebrated author of ‘The Maltese Falcon’..” type blurb here, and no pull quotes from critics or noteworthy admirers.

Instead, they’ve just stuck a summary of the book’s most lurid and violent moment on the back, bluntly re-worded by an anonymous copy editor - basically treating the storied originator of the hard-boiled idiom in much the same manner as they would some random mug who just sent in an unsolicited manuscript hoping for the best. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong - in fact it’s entirely in keeping with the no nonsense / straight-down-to-business tone of the novel. It’s just… interesting, that’s all.

Could it be, that in the hey-day of more shamelessly populist detective writers like Spillane and Prather, Hammett’s vintage and reputation might have been seen to count against him in the marketplace? As in, perhaps this genre was pointedly NOT being sold to an audience who cared to read an old book that a bunch of fuddy-duddys at the newspapers liked, at this particular point in time?

Be that as it may, it’s fair to say that this hypothetical audience of uncultured brutes would surely not have been disappointed by ‘Red Harvest’, a book which still sparks with barbaric, ill-mannered energy over ninety years after it first hit the streets.

One thing I will say for the presentation of this “perma-book” is that it still remains readable after sixty years and at least one ocean crossing, and having ploughed through it this week, I’m happy to report that ‘Red Harvest’ remains my favourite of Hammett’s novels, half a lifetime since I first gave it a whirl as a teenager.

As violent, action-packed and callously cynical as anything those aforementioned later writers could have come up with, it stands above them not so much through any sense of refinement or literary pretention, but simply because it’s wittier, more stylish, more tightly constructed and more insightful in its unpacking of the ways in which corruption and back-room power games devalue life in America than pretty much any of its author’s subsequent competitors. Essential reading, needless to say.

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For the record, minimal online research reveals that Harry Bennett produced a full set of Hammett covers for Pocket Books in 1961. Most of them fared a lot better than his ‘Red Harvest’ illustration, and the blurb on a few of them at least makes an effort to sell Hammett on his ‘classic’ rep. Other people’s scans can be seen below. 

Unfortunately, I can’t find a decent jpg of his cover for ‘The Glass Key’, but it’s pretty great too. (Apropos of nothing, Bennett also produced an equally nifty set of covers for Chester Himes’ books, which can be enjoyed via Pulp International here.)

Weird Tales: The Evil Eye by Boileau & Narcejac (Four Square, 1961)

Before being subsumed into our dearly beloved New English Library at some point in the 1960s, paperback imprint Four Square published a wide variety of interesting stuff, including a lot of obscure and/or sought after titles (often in translation) which have rarely been reprinted since.

Four Square books also often featured bold, attention-grabbing artwork, of which this fabulous, comic book style ink & watercolour number from acclaimed SF/fantasy illustrator Josh Kirby provides a perfect example [the signature in bottom right confirms this as Kirby’s work, although it looks drastically different from his later, better known style]. As such, obscurities from the company’s long-lost back-list have done much to liven up second-hand book shopping in the UK across the decades, although collecting them can also prove a frustrating experience.

Due to their especially cheap binding (or so I’m assuming), Four Square’s paperbacks have a tendency to look reasonably well preserved on the outside, but to crack and fall to pieces, scattering dried out pages to the four winds, as soon as some poor fool tries to read them. Thankfully I just about managed to make it through ‘The Evil Eye’ without destroying it in the process, but… I’m not sure that many future readers will get a chance to enjoy the charms of this particular copy, let’s put it that way.

In the English-speaking world, Pierre Boileau (1906–1989) and Thomas Narcejac (1908 –1998) will almost certainly get more name recognition from film fans than literary types. With their names appearing ominously on the writing credits of Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’ (1955), Franju’s ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960) and Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958), its safe to say that the duo’s residual influence has sunk deep into the very bones of the horror and thriller genres, as well as those of auteur and arthouse cinema more generally.

Back in France of course, Boileau-Narcejac are equally remembered for their achievements in the field of putting words together on the page, but for whatever reason, translations of their work have remained extremely scarce over the years. So, naturally I was keen to take the opportunity to check out some of their prose, despite the risk of the book crumbling to dust in my hands.

It’s probably fair to assume that ‘The Evil Eye’ (‘Le Mauvais Oeil’, originally published in France in 1956) is a minor work within the duo’s oeuvre, weighing in at just over 120 pages, and sadly the horror spin that Four Square’s packaging puts on the material turns out to be almost entirely erroneous, with the protagonist’s suspicion that he is afflicted with the power of the “evil eye” merely numbering among a number of fantasies and delusions which flicker through his unsettled mind through the course of the novel.

In fact, ‘The Evil Eye’ barely even qualifies as a thriller in the conventional sense of the term. What we have here rather is kind of a downbeat, quasi-gothic character study, in the ever-popular “dysfunctional remnants of an aristocratic family bounce off each other in their decaying old house” vein which went on to become so beloved of filmmakers in the late ‘60s / early ‘70s, for whatever reason.

It's a testament however to the talents of Boileau-Narcejac (and indeed to their translator on this occasion, Geoffrey Sainsbury) that this rather morose and uneventful tale actually remains a thoroughly engrossing read, drawing me into the story far more deeply than I suspected it would once I’d got the basic gist.

Our protagonist here is Rémy, a young man who has been paralysed from the waist down since infancy, when his mother apparently died under traumatic yet mysterious circumstances. We join him on the morning when, aged eighteen, and following the ministrations of a questionable ‘healer’ hired by his emotionally distant father, he gets out of bed and walks.

Disappointingly for Rémy, this Lazarus-like recovery prompts surprisingly little jubilation from either his brash, business-minded uncle or the two female servants who have provided him with his only real human contact over the years, and so, largely left to his own devices, he sets out to undertake the long-delayed process of growing up, digging into the inevitable backlog of uncomfortable family secrets in the process.

Intelligent, self-possessed and callously confident, yet at the same time hopefully naïve and chronically lacking in the kind of practical experience which most of us have gained by the time we reach adulthood, Rémy makes for an interesting and complex viewpoint character. Though he is not necessarily an “unreliable narrator” in the usual sense of the term, a lifetime of near isolation has left him with an unhealthily introspective approach to life, and throughout the novel, we’re forced to bear witness as he twists the people and events around him into his own melodramatic, self-centred narrative, unable to understand the feelings of others or to comprehend the more prosaic motivations behind their actions.

Though ‘The Evil Eye’ offers few of the shattering narrative revelations or surprise handbrake turns that Boileau-Narcejac’s cinematic reputation may have led one to expect, its strengths lie elsewhere – in the deceptively complex exploration of character dynamics, and in the cultivation of a richly ominous yet finely tuned atmosphere.

In fact, the book is steeped in that very particular world of seedy, grey-skied decay which seems to persistently creep into French culture of this era, from the damp-stained walls, musty bedclothes and corked, half empty bottles to a persistent impression of poverty and bankruptcy dogging the heels of the purportedly wealthy characters, and of the grindingly tedious, antiquated duties still performed by their indentured servants, long after modernity should have rendered them irrelevant.

Inevitably, the duo’s writing reminded me somewhat of the precise, descriptive prose of Georges Simenon, even as they push things far further than he would have done, including a few extraordinary, opium-scented flights of poetic fancy which can't help but push the tale toward the eerie, indefinable realm of what we’re obliged in this context to call le fantastique.

For all that it’s essentially a naturalistic, psychological tale in fact, one could perhaps apply a supernatural explanation to the book’s final paragraph ‘shock’ ending. But, this is never directly implied, cleverly leaving readers to map their own beliefs and gut feelings over the plainly recounted events.

All in all then, a surprisingly rewarding few nights reading, well worth making time for if you can manage to track down a copy that’s still in one piece.

Random Paperbacks: The Alley God by Philip José Farmer (Sphere, 1970)

More so perhaps than any other classic-era science fiction author, Philip José Farmer’s work seems to have inspired a wealth of extraordinary and unusual paperback cover art across the decades, with this strikingly horror-ish joint from Sphere providing a case in point. [Previous posts featuring mind-bending examples of artwork used on Farmer’s books can be found here, here and here.]

In fact, as a direct result of the hellzapoppin’ imagery publishers seem to have used to sell his wares, I actually own no less than six Farmer books, but until recently had never read a word of any of them. Indeed, having never knowingly gone out of my way to learn anything about him, the sum total of my knowledge comprised the following:

1. He annoyed Kurt Vonnegut by writing ‘Venus on the Half-Shell’, an unauthorised collection of ersatz Kilgore Trout stories, which, in Vonnegut’s view, got it all wrong and were basically a load of shite (I paraphrase, you understand).

2. He wrote those ‘Riverworld’ books, in which a load of historical and fictional characters intermingle aboard a phantasmagorical riverboat and – as I recall some guy once telling me in A level college – have uproarious sex with each other.

3. His earlier SF work seems in fact to have been chiefly defined by his insistence upon adding SEX to proceedings – a development which, at the time, was considered about as welcome as, say, adding giant lobsters to a drawing room murder mystery.

So, yes – bawdy eroticism, intertextual post-modernism and annoying people. That seems to have been Philip José Farmer’s bag, but it’s high time I found out for myself, I reasoned, and the three early ‘50s novellas which make up ‘The Alley God’ seemed like a pretty good (by which I mean, entirely random, and short) place to start.

The first of the three, ‘The Alley Man’ (1959), appears to involve the discovery of a sole surviving Neanderthal man living in some rural American backwater. It actually won a Hugo award for Best Short Story in 1960, but…. flicking through this story’s pages, it seems to be written almost entirely in exaggerated/comedic hayseed argot (sample line: “Hey, li’l chick, you din’t know Old Man knew them big words like contamination, didja? Hor, Hor, Hor!”), so, I’m sorry, but – no. Maybe I’ll return to it if I really enjoy the other two stories, I reasoned, but no way am I starting off with fifty-three pages of that.

The second novella, ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ (originally published as ‘Strange Compulsion’ in 1953) concerns a doctor posted to a lunar colony who finds himself attempting to treat a mysterious illness afflicting the teenage daughter of a moody star-ship captain, and discovering she has become victim to a new kind of parasite, which latches onto the human nervous system and feeds off sexual energy. Naturally this concept isn’t explored in the kind of graphic, Cronenberg-esque fashion a modern reader might expect, but I daresay it must have still been pretty provocative stuff for an early ‘50s SF audience, especially as the story’s climactic image of father and daughter momentarily locked in some kind of sweaty, inhuman embrace merrily tramples across the boundaries of conventional good taste.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad little skiffy yarn, and included a few nice bits of hastily sketched in ‘world building’, such as the addition of a disgruntled lunar detective, discussion of different planetary colonies on which the gender balance has somehow been catastrophically knocked off balance, and some background concerning a colony on a remote planet established by a non-conformist religious sect (to which the captain and his daughter belong), like some kind of interstellar Jonestown.

Unfortuantely though, it also felt far too long, stretching a simple idea which might have worked well for a ten-page short story out of novella length, and is also marred by some questionable, ‘50s sit-com style humour and horrendously dated gender politics. Both of these traits are exemplified by the character of the nurse who assists our protagonist - a ‘ditzy’ walking stereotype whose every line of dialogue concerns her desperate need to find a husband, wishing aloud that her next patient may be a virile male who’ll take her up in his arms, and wondering why the hunky doctor refuses to fall for her charms etc etc. You get the picture I’m sure, and it’s a pretty tedious one.

These flaws are carried over wholesale into what is undoubtedly the most interesting of the three stories included here, ‘The God Business’ (1954), a frankly bizarre concoction of aberrant notions which plays in part like a sensualist / absurdist precursor to Boris & Arkady Strugatsky’s Russian SF classic, ‘The Roadside Picnic’ (1972), and in part like the weirdest reimagining of a ‘Heart of Darkness’-style journey narrative I’ve ever encountered.

A challenging tale to try to summarise to say the least, the idea behind this novella essentially concerns an Illinois college professor named Bill Durham known for his unhealthy fixation with the Olympian Gods. Using powers left unspecified in the text, he seems to have turned a souvenir beer bottle bearing the image of a bull into a magical fountain, spewing some kind of potent elixir known only as ‘the brew’, with which he proceeds to spike his town’s water supply, transforming the local populace into naked, uninhibited revellers, untroubled by the usual human weaknesses of pain, hunger, aging etc.

Reigning over his subjects in the guise of a bull-god named ‘Mahrud’, Durham turns the area surrounding the town into into a kind of anarchic and constantly mutating ‘forbidden zone’, ruled over by his assigned demi-gods, who also take on cartoon-ish, animal identities, and using brew-filled water pistols to rout the platoon of U.S. Marines who are naturally dispatched to contain this unwarranted outbreak of craziness.

Into this mess steps our hero, Daniel Temper, a former student of Durham, who is afflicted by crippling self-esteem issues as a result of his bald head, stammering and false teeth. Accompanied by a stern yet beautiful young female army Major (?!), Temper is sent to infiltrate Durham’s ‘zone’. He and his companion travel naked, carrying nothing but a heavy canister of purified water, their assigned mission being to kill Durham and locate and neutralise the source of his miraculous ‘brew’.

Frankly, this is all just as weird as it sounds, rendered all the more so by Farmer’s insistence upon loading the thing with rib-tickling bad jokes and low level misogyny, and on trying to present Temper’s episodic encounters with assorted oddball characters as some kind of grand, all-encompassing allegory which I didn’t really understand even after Durham – when he finally makes his Kurtz-like appearance – had spent several entire pages painstakingly explaining it all.

Overall, I really wasn’t sure what to make of all this really, but I certainly appreciated the almost Jodorowsky-esque head-spinning surrealism of the whole affair, and there was a certain fascination which kept me reading, despite the unctuous, all-over-the-map tone of Farmer’s writing.

In fact, reading these two novellas, my ill-informed preconceptions about Farmer seem to have been entirely borne out. Both of these stories go out of their way to poke fun at uptight, 1950s attitudes to human sexuality, instead positing a kind of earthy, let-it-all-hang-out openness to the subject. ‘The God Business’ at least is also loaded with eye-watering literary puns and complex references to everything from Greco-Roman mythology to newspaper cartoon strips, and the overall authorial persona which emerges from these works is indeed pretty annoying, in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

I’d be tempted to conclude that these feel like stories written by someone’s creepy, loud-mouthed uncle, but…. when we reach a certain age, aren’t we all essentially someone’s creepy uncle (or aunt)? It would seem harsh to dismiss Farmer simply on that basis, and heaven knows, these stories certainly proved sufficiently peculiar to merit my adding a few more volumes bearing his name to my ‘to read’ pile, in order to see how things panned out later in his career.