Friday, March 12, 2021

More unidentified sleaze paperbacks


 I've now been reading more of these old sleaze and porn paperbacks that were published in Finland in the late seventies, and I've come up with at least two more books that don't seem to have been published in English at all. Yet the books seem authentically American to me, with all the names of the characters, the plots and the milieus and stuff. Mind you, a foreign writer almost never gets everything right. 

The other one - the more interesting one - is Between All of Us as by Bob Grand. It was published in Finnish in 1978 under the more fitting title Himon orjat (Passion's Slaves or Slaves of Passion), and it fits nicely in the James M. Cain tradition of hardboiled crime writing. Jay Forbes is a young drifter who's left his job after winning $400 in poker. He's somewhere in Florida and runs out of luck with women and gambling. He spots an advertisement for a job at the dog-race trainer. The owner of the place is an old drunk, and his middle-aged wife, who's still good looking, seems frigid. The daughter of the man who does the actual training of the dogs is a teenage nympho. Forbes smells trouble, but doesn't leave, even though he doesn't really know why. You see where this is going to, right? And yes indeed, the wife suggests she and Forbes poison the top dog of the ranch, so the old drunk would commit suicide and they could take his money. And you see where this is leading, right? 

The book is filled with long sex scenes, but beneath them is a solid, if a bit unimaginative noir novel of the Postman Always Rings Twice school. This could've been written by Harry Whittington or Day Keene. Possibly it's an old unsold manuscript peppered with liberal sex and sold to Finland. It's happened before (Bruce Cassiday, Frank Castle, Grover Brinkman and some others), so why not with this one? 


The other one I stumbled on was called Come, Come, My Lover, and it was published as by H. P. Jaye. In Finnish it has a different title: Äitiä, tytärtä ja pikkusiskoa, which translates back as "Mother, Daughter and the Little Sister" or some such. Once again, no record of this book can be found. This is more like a curio, and it's not criminous, though several crimes occur. It's a collection of three short stories, "Sheila", "Gloria", and "Susie". The first one is about the erotic activities of a young girl, the second one is about Gloria Reasoner (sic!), the 30-year-old magazine editor and socialite who gets mixed up with a gang member who's also seen raping a gay man with his gang, and the third one is about a young girl who's gotten pregnant to a guy called Cutler Stark. Cutler is a bit hippieish and a drop-out, and Susie's mother doesn't approve of him. And of course he ends up banging the mother. After this Cutler has sex with Susie's little sister (of course he does, what did you expect?). Then Susie's conservative dad (who's also having an affair) comes home, and after he's found out what's happened he decides to evict Cutler. Instead Susie runs away, now also from Cutler. 

If anyone knows what these books are in English, and when they were originally published, or indeed if they have been published in English at all, please let me know in comments. 

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I've find only a mention to a novel by H.P. Jaye:

"The Go-Down Man" published in 1969 by CAJ, 223 pages.

Best,
Tiziano Agnelli

jurinummelin said...

Hey, thank you, Tiziano! Where did you find that?

Unknown said...

Here under you can find the links related to the book:

https://fi.librarything.com/work/14250430


Jaye, H. P., The Go-Down Man, Cajon (Las Vegas, NV: CAJ), 196952.7.76.162 › archival_objects ·
Jaye, H. P., The Go-Down Man, Cajon (Las Vegas, NV: CAJ), 1969 - 1969 ... The materials are primarily gay men's pulp fiction but lesbian pulp fiction is also ...

Best,
Tiziano Agnelli

jurinummelin said...

Thanks for this! Seems like the book is mentioned also in Amazon, but I don't know why I didn't find it in the first place. It's a different book from what I found, but encouraging nevertheless.

jurinummelin said...

Seems like CAJ is an off-shoot of Publishers Export Center AKA PEC. THE GO-DOWN MAN is the only book they published that's marked for Las Vegas.