I was very fascinated by what Steve Lewis wrote at the Mystery*File blog about Con Sellers, a paperback hack who wrote lots of pornography, some crime and adventure, some soapish saga, some science fiction. I noted in Steve's posting that Sellers has been credited with writing, under the pseudonym Lee Raintree, the official novelization of the Dallas TV series which I'm sure you remember so well that I don't have to find a link for it. I've been wondering about the book for some years now and been fiddling it in thrift stores and such. Now I found out who really wrote it - and as it happens, we were today on a flea market trip to Salo with Elina and I found a nice copy of the book with a dustjacket!
What? A dustjacket? You'd think the book would've been published as a paperback, but no. We take things seriously here in Finland. Con Sellers/Lee Raintree's Dallas came out here as a hardback and with a very artful cover by Pekka Loiri (who's one of the most important illustrators that has been working in Finland for some 30 years now). The book looks more like a piece of Polish poster art than a TV tie-in paperback!
Nevertheless, I've been interested in Con Sellers's career for reasons other than Dallas. The book that Steve Lewis was reading - one of the three paperbacks taking place in the Korean war - has been translated and I will be including them in the sequel of Pulpografia I'm slowly (that should read: "slooooooooooowly") putting together. Pieces like this are always very encouraging and I'd really much like to see more reviews of forgotten paperbacks of yesteryear. Maybe I could do a list of what I need and people around the world could participate in this? Right?
Here's a link discussing Sellers's a must-be-rare paperback Red Rape and here's a link seemingly containing a men's mag story by Sellers!
PS. The Finnish private eye writer I promised earlier is coming next. Unless I decide to write about Lucio Fulci first.
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