Swamp Lust – George H. Smith (Novel Books, 1960)

In Paperback Parade #32, there is a letter from George H. Smith, who wrote for Cornith as Don Bellmore and elsewhere as Jan Hudson, and also wrote some science-fiction, that the George H. Smith who published “country and swamp girl books” was a different GHS.  This explains for the difference in styles.

Swamp Lust tells the story of Chad Cain (Cain?!), a simple southern fellow who one day catches his wife, Claudette, in the arms of a sleazy Frenchman, Henri.  In an O.J. Simpson-esque rage, he kills them both and tosses their bodies into the marshy swamp of the backwoods.

The novel deals with Chad deflecting any suspicion of the murders — Henri’s brother comes looking around, wanting revenge, but had kills him too.  And his new lover, Maria, thinks something is — fishy.

And Chad seems to be losing his mind, or is haunting — believing that his dead wife’s decayed body is wandering the swamplands, just to torment.

A fast and cheesy book, nothing great, decent entertainment with a great cover.

Vice Town by Ennis Willie (Vega Books, 1962)

I wasn’t blown away by the two Sand Shocker novels I read of Willie’s, but I did like the writing style; Vice Town is more to my liking.  Willie creates an ultra-violent reality, an alternate universe of the real, comic-book like in many ways — I’m thinking Frank Miller read Willie in the ’60s and there’s some influence Willie had over Sin City, or that whole genre of dark crime fiction.

Gator is like Sand in some ways — the single name, the cryptic past of being “in the war,” and a sense of loyalty to avenge the murder of old friends.  Gator, 29, has returned to a mythic southern city on the edges of the swamp, called Labanion, to find out who murdered an old girlfriend, Castine.  The town has grown, is a “wet county” (booze served all the time), and gambling is legal, “a town that made its living in a darkness that hid its promiscuities, and decent people put up with it as the price of prosperity” (p. 56).  He is not welcome back in Labanion but he doesn’t care — he’s on a mission to find a killer, and exact vengeance, and come to terms with his past.  “All a man has is home,” he says, “and when he has nowhere else to go, he goes home.”

He also has a missing leg, and moves around on a crutch –but he uses the crutch as a weapon, and can take on multiple big thugs in dark bac alleys sans a leg…