Baby Face by J.X. Williams aka Harry Whittington (Idle Hour Books, 1965)

Another one of “the missing 38,” this is actually one of those “backwoods” tales Whittington liked to write (Cracker Girl, Backwoods Shack, Backwoods Hussy, Backwoods Tramp, Desire in the Dust,  etc).

Well, there are hillbillies and white trash backwoods types in Baby Face…it starts off with college life among the Ivy League upper crust, on a campus of a small elite college like Dartmouth or William and Mary. Lois is a sorority girl on a date with stud Mott and he wants some backseat action. She says she is not that kind of girl, maybe even a virgin, and he laughs and says he knows all about her…one fellow she bedded told Mott where she had a mole in an intimate place…and he knows about a tryst she had with an elderly professor…He blackmails her, says he will tell the school admins about the professor if she does not put out for him. Still she fights but he rapes her, three times he rapes her all night in the car, letting her go at dusk.

Two months later, she gets doctor confirmtion that she’s pregnant. She will be kicked out of the college and the sorority for such an immoral scandal. She tells Mott but he denies the baby could be his. She says she won’t get an abortion; she will simply go home and tell her parents the shame.

Driving home in the dark, it is raining hard. She is taking backroads. She is upset and driving fast.  She loses control of the car and slides off a hill, not caring if she dies.

She wakes up in a strange bed, bandaged up, and a hillbilly type guy staring at her. His name is Dan, an ex-Marine just off a tour in Vietnam. She was found by a family and brought to him because he has experience pathcing up the wounded from Vietnam.

Dan is crass, a hick, eyes her body, but she evntually warms up to him. He knows she is pregnant and he was afraid she would lose the baby.

After expericing backwoods white trash life, she returns home and reveals her shame, since she is showing. Her fokks are nit happily. Surprisingly, there are men who want to marry her: Mott, who changes his mind, and an old boyfriend of hers, who doesn’t seem to care she is carrying another man’s child. She says no to both, says no to her upper middle class life, and runs back to Dan to live a poor hick life and raise her baby in sin.

This was a fun read and seems like ol’ Harry Whittington had fun with it, probably mining material from old books I have not seen yet.  It is a rare find, this one, but  good find if you can find it. This is also a good contender for a reprint.

BAYOU SINNERS by J.X. Williams aka Earl Kemp (Idle Hour Book 401, 1964)

J.X. Williams was the original pen name for John Jakes, and then later used as a house name by many, from Harry Whittington to George Smith and David Case.

And editor Earl Kemp…Kemp, when not running the Cornith/Greenleaf imprints, wrote a few titles himself, such as this one (with its nifty Robert Bonfils cover)  and Seance Sinners (which we have yet to find).

Editors as writers is always tricky — are they as good behind the typewriter as they are with the red pen?  There are some former editors who have proven themselves good writers: E.L. Doctorow (used to edit Dial Press), Gordon Lish (Knopf). Harlan Ellison (Nightstand/Rogue/Regency) come to mind…

Kemp is cocky about his role in paperback sleaze and First Amendment cases.

So is this just as good as any Silverberg, Block, Westlake, Knoles, James? No, but it is a good read with a swampy, hot atmosphere. The back cover copy:

SWAMP OF SHAME! Harold Weyman, an ambitious young executive, is assigned an almost impossible task . . . he has to locate Reginald Carminada, the fabulously wealthy sugar heir who has been missing for some time. His new assignment tears him from the arms of Margo, his fiery redhead who likes to sunbathe in the nude [obviously the cover’s inspiration] . . . and tosses him headlong into a world of wild improbability. First he encounters the sinister Hache, the serpentine wanton who cavorts through degradation with Harold in the seclusion of a motel room. Then the lovely young blonde, Rosiemae . . . whose innocence is rapidly sacrificed before the altar of shame, while her pets, the beasts of the swamp, shout their guttural encouragements. Finally, Harold finds himself caught by the swirl of the most ribald voodoo ritual that ever degraded the bayou as the fires of hell flicker toward the gloating moon and the tortures pierce the night like the cruel snap of a whip or the hiss of a devil snake . . .

Harold’s journey from New Orleans to the swampy southern marshlands, where people have old ‘gators for pets, his search for the missing millionaire, is an obvious nod toward Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a decade before Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (and Robert Parker did one with his Spencer novels). His journey down the river with Roisemae reflects Marlowe’s journey through the heart of the African Congo, full of strange encounters along the way, like Old Cuddles, a grandpappy of alligators, that Rosiemae has known all her life — she knows Old Cuddles won’t eat her, he only likes to eat dogs.

Kemp, being a southern boy, writes his southern characters with flair and authenticity.

There are the sounds of distant drums (a funny nod to Block/Shaw) that bring him to a voodoo ritual where he finds the man. “Reginald Carminada, I prsume?” says Harold, a nod to Kipling.

Sex? There’s plenty of sex in Harold’s adventure into the Swamp of Shame, the Sin Swamp, among the Swamp Lusters,  with all the cautious language we expect from a Cornith — in fact, there is so much use of “Now! Now” and “faster! faster!” that it gives credence that Kemp added these things into the manuscripts of other writers, because they all seem to cookie-cutter.  Silbverberg has said something about Kemp writing in extra stuff to the books.

A fun read. If you come across a copy, get it.

An autograph from Kemp:

The Many Faces of John Dexter #1: Sin Festival penned by Robert Silverberg

Just about every Cornith/Greenleaf/Nightstand/Hamling writer was John Dexter and J.X. Williams at one time or another, the two main house names.  John Jakes was the first Williams, it’s unknown who was the first Dexter but there is some rumor it was Lawrence Block, who didn’t want to hone up to it.

Robert Silverberg did a few as Dexter, such as this one, Sin Festival (NB # 1572) and The Bra Peddlers, reviewed here. As Dexter, he also wrote Stripper! and Sex Thieves.

Like Snavely’s The Big Flick (reviewed below)  this is a film industry novel, but about the process of getting a movie out there after it’s done.  The movie here is Helen of Troy, and the production company is at Cannes to sell it to European distributors.  At Cannes are Cal Warner, the publicist for Jupiter Films, Elayne, an actress in the film, and Mr. Ronwieser, the studio mogul.

Warner’s job is to drum up buzz — a fake romance between Elayne and a French actor, Elayne’s swimming nude, etc.  She’s a nympho and needs sex often and sometime she keeps her happy, sometimes he doesn’t.

Warner meets a French actress, Jeanette, desperate to go to Hollywood.  To get a contract, she has to have an “interview” with Mr. Ronweiser — that is, have sex with him.  He’s a short, elderly, disgusting man who liked “kinky” sex (it’s never said what) and Jeanette feels dirty for doing this for her dream, as many actresses wind up feeling.

Elayne is jealous of Jeanette because something is developing between Warner and the French actress.  In one day, though, she has sex with three men — Ronwiser, an old flame she meets at the festival, and Warner.

Part of Warner’s job is to also find women for her boss to fuck.  He’s a $35K  a year yes man (about $350K back then) and he’s starting to hate it.

The novel is set in the first week of the Cannes Film Festival, with colorful French Riviera settings. Silverberg catches the atmosphere and the reality of film distribution, publicity, and what it takes well — there’s more to just writing a screenplay and making a movie; once it’s done, you need to get people to see it, buy it, review it, want it.

But something falls short here…I have not yet read a Silverberg softcore I did ‘t finish or like, but this one falls into the average category, with a somewhat sappy romantic ending after an explosion of seedy, drunken violence.

On a personal note, I had a short documentary (“Life in Zona Norte”) screen at Cannes, at the Palace K Theatre on May 16, 2009, and later exhibited in the Short Film Corner.  Cannes is the tops, with Sundance and Tribeca, but never what you expect.

I’ve been to many other film festivals and they are a lot like how Sin Festival depicts — no art, it’s all about commerce and publicity,  with a lot of parties, drinking, sex, and sex for favors going on at night.

Want to get laid by hopeful actors at a film festival? If you’re a director or producer, it helps…as a writer, who knows, maybe if your film is in pre-production and you can get them a part…

Harry Whittington’s Softcores

The great thing with the Greenleaf/Cornith books, is you never know what you might get, especially with house pen names, since you don’t know who wrote it, and the covers and blurbs often do not match the story…there will be sex, sure, but you may get a detective noir, a murer mystery, a mob story, a romance…Lynn Munroe talks about Harry Whitting’s 38 softcores here.  This is what he says about the above, Passion Burned, which is

…about loneliness. Lots of other things happen, including the shooting pictured on the cover, but at its core it is a tale of two lonely, heartsick people. Don’s wife has died in childbirth, and he drifts from town to town trying to fill up that huge emptiness in his heart. He meets Ginny, who reminds him of his late wife. Ginny’s husband Paul is one of the first men drafted in the Vietnam War (“a war nobody wanted” is how Whittington describes it here.) He is gone after only three blissful months of marriage, leaving Ginny alone and despondent, aching to be held. Don wants to hold her. We learn from David Wilson that this story was also sold to DARING ROMANCES, and PASSION BURNED is a romance, spiced up a just a little and passed off as a sleazy paperback. Don may be screwed up emotionally, but all the women in the book want him. The way he is described we imagine he has a manly voice as deep as Cal Meacham in THIS ISLAND EARTH…

Or Taste of Desire:

Using the same logic that states that a great writer churning out a novel a month for three years is bound to write some clunkers, it follows that he should write some great books too. Several of the hardboiled stories on this list approach that designation, but THE TASTE OF DESIRE is a surprise because it is not a mystery, not a hardboiled murder yarn. But it is a fine story. On our previous catalog, writing about a book called FIRES OF YOUTH, I proposed a theory that certain “sleazy” paperback originals, if reprinted by a prestige publisher with a different title, would be hailed as great literature and win awards. THE TASTE OF DESIRE is one of those paperbacks. Involving and professionally written, this is a story about a country high school boy named Calder Fenton and his beloved hound dog Fanny. Calder’s Dad is a no-account drunk. Calder falls for the rich landowner’s daughter Lu Ann, who spends winters in Cottonseed County. Whittington never names the state this takes place in, but the nearest big city is Jacksonville.

And this:

guy drops his girlfriend off for some shopping at a department store. He waits in the car. She never comes back out. Cornell Woolrich wrote stories like this called “All at Once, No Alice” and “You’ll Never See Me Again.” Harry Whittington wrote one too, but this is like Woolrich on crank. Harry wrote the tense mystery story called “The Crooked Window”, published by SHELL SCOTT MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1965. That same year – apparently no one noticed this in 1965, and never noticed it until now – he expanded it as a fast-paced John Dexter Nightstand. The editors there retitled it BLOOD LUST ORGY, a very intriguing title until you read the book and notice there are no lust orgies and very little blood. But there is a gripping story, well told by a fine writer, and to tell you all the surprises and twists would only spoil your fun.

Affairs of Gloria by Victor Jay (Victor Banis) Brandon House 806

Victor Jay was/is Victor Banis, better known for his gay titles such as The Why Not and The Gay Haunt, and his involvement with the boom of gay pulp paperbacks in the mid-60s, with Greenleaf/Cornith, where he published as J.X. Williams and John Dexter, and later Chris Davidson…he a

But his fist novel was somewhat hetero, The Affairs of Gloria, published by Brandon House, and part of the resaon for his indictment, along with Brandon House publisher Milt Luro, in Los Angeles by the Postal Inspector and Justice Department.

Banis talks about the legal problems in his great memoir, Spine Instact, Some Creases (reprinted by one of my publishers, Borgo Press); he also explains that he wrte Gloria after reading a handful of sleaze.  Gloria doe shave lesbian action.  He says he was paid either $500 or700 for this novel, which as the norm back then — keep in mind, in then-time cash that was $5-7,000.

With The Why Not, he convinced Earl Kemp and Greeleaf that there was a market for gay male books, just as there was a market for lesbiana and straight sex.  The Why Not was a huge bestseller, and Greenleaf went full force into the gay market, followed by Suree, PEC, and others.

He also assembled a group of young men to produce en masse gay novels for Greenleaf, taking a cut and making a modest furtune similar to the way Lawrnce Block and Hal Dresner farmed out work to ghost writers, paying them $500-800 and keeping the reest (usually $200-300, not bad for doing no work).

He wrote one book for Marice Girodas’ New York version of Olympia Press, The Gay Haunt,but seems ol’ maurice ripped him off, not reporting actual sales for royalties (he got a $1500 advance and maybe a few hundred bucks in roys, expecting thousands since Olympia’s first print run was 50K and went through several editions after.)

Banis is still alive, but not really writing anymore from what I can tell, and has had Borgo and some ebook places reprint his old work.

Another maker of sleaze paperback history, and caught up in the battle against censorship in the 1960s. But more, he helped pave the way for modern gay publishing, proving there were more queers in the reading public than the publishers realized back then (Iafter all, lesbian novels were really marketed for men).