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. 

Ed Wood's sex stories coming your way!?

Ed Wood's erotic prose is getting a collection. Find out more about it here!

I never got around to reading Wood's earlier horror and crime collection Blood Spatters Quickly, though I was tempted, but this intrigues me even more.

EDIT: deleting spam comments I managed to delete also Todd Mason's comment which, for some reason or another, I hadn't noticed before.

The bibliography of science fiction pornography released

The title says it all. This is done very well and exhaustively, it seems, by Kenneth R. Johnson, published via Phil Stephensen-Payne's website. Merits a look, I'm sure.

Erica Jong: Fanny

Been working on another book on erotica and reading said stuff. I just finished Erica Jong's Fanny, a long picaresque novel on Fanny Hackabout-Jones, better known as John Cleland's Fanny Hill. This was an entertaining book, somewhat long-winded and full with anachronistic feminism, but I didn't mind. Here's a contemporaty review from the New York Times.

Robert Silverberg's sleaze novels

Old smut paperbacks have been seeing quite of a renaissance in the last couple years: there have been lots of blog posts about them, there are Facebook groups for them and associated stuff (try this) and what's the most important thing, there have been quite a few reprints. One of the most interesting of them has been the collection of Robert Silverberg's two sleaze paperbacks, called Gang Girl/Sex Bum. It's a very good book which I recommend highly, if you're into noirish and nasty little crime stories.

Gang Girl was first published as a Nightstand book in 1959 and it was one of the first of Silverberg's many sleaze novels. It's a juvie book, about a 16-year old (!) girl trying to break into a new gang and making her way up to the top. Some of the sex scenes are downright nasty, especially the gang rape scene that goes on and on. The ending is very noiry and fits the bill. Sex Bum, from four years later, is a better book in my opinion, though Gang Girl is not bad in any sense of the word. Sex Bum, this time a Bedtime book, tells about a young guy living in a hicksville wanting bad to make it into the mob. There are lots of sex scenes, but coupled with the crupulousness of Johnny Price they make a chilling read - this guy feels like he's stepped out from the pages of Jim Thompson of Jason Starr. The ending is very chilling.

These books were written fast to make fast money (and money Silverberg made: he bought a big house in Greenwich Village with the money he got writing these books!), and it shows somewhat. There are some meaningless characters in Sex Bum, and Gang Girl suffers somewhat from being too episodic, but I don't mind, as both books are also immensely readable. As there's also a foreword by Silverberg himself and an afterword by Michael Hemmingson, plus a 3-page bibliography of Silverberg's smut books, this books comes very highly recommended. Can't wait for this to arrive.

More stuff about Silverberg's sleaze books here.

Italian disco at its very best

I dare you to watch this. Just how can that.. that.. that thing stay on her, even when she's shaking that.. that.. that thing of hers?

Friday's Forgotten Book: Floyd Smith's Action Girls

I can't tell you much about this book, since I can't find any info about it or its writer on-line. It was published in the Finnish sleaze series called Cocktail in 1974 and the original title is given as Action Girls. The Finnish title means "Girls on Desert". The writer is one Floyd Smith, on whom I can't find anything. Can anyone help? It's not very important, but I'd really like to know whether this was really an American paperback originally or is it a fake. You know, the Cocktail series had at least one book masquerading as a translation, while it was written by a Finnish writer. (I've written about that case here.)

Action Girls/Tytöt aavikolla is not much of a book. The narration is disjointed (the translation is probably abridged) and the plot doesn't make much sense. The head character is a young guy bringing dynamite to a archeological site in Arizona. On the site there are only the professor and his beautiful wife and all those beautiful girls working as internees. The young guy gets into a fight with professor just about everything, but he also gets to fuck all the young girls and eventually the professor's wife, too, even though she's a lesbian at first. The young guy (sorry, forgot his name already, and I don't have the book with me as I write) brings a friend of his to the site and there's a gruesome rape scene with the friend, but the attacked girl turns from a virgin into a sexually active omnisexual after the rape and helps the male friend in his further escapades. I can't help but wonder what the readers of this book were thinking. "Hey, that sounds cool, I'll try that one of these days"?

Action Girls/Tytöt aavikolla is also a bit of a crime novel, with the professor's secret being that he killed his cheating wife (an earlier one, that is) and buried her in the desert. Why's he then doing diggings in the site? It seems he can get a kick out of sex only if he's somewhere around the corpse - and he's also looking for the wedding ring that could identify the body. There's some shooting and fistfight in the climax and dynamite is also used, but in the end everyone -except the now dead professor - can indulge in free-wheelin' sex.

This is one weird novel. If it's an original American sleaze paperback and if you can find it, I'll recommend you take a look, but don't try to get a kick out of it and don't treat it as literature.

Here's a link to all the covers of the Cocktail paperbacks.

Vacation; a notice on a post elsewhere

Starting my vacation tomorrow and heading off to a trip longer than a week, so won't be posting. Ottilia's with us for three weeks.

Here's a link to a longer post on an old Finnish sex paperback I just posted on one of my other blogs. In Finnish, that is.

Homo magazines closing in

This is somewhat pulp-related: a chain of homosexual porn magazines is closing in, due to economical crisis.

Thanks for the link to Lawrence Schimel, who remembers having written his first pieces of erotica for some of the publisher's magazines.

Phoebe Kisshagen Redux

Approximately one year ago I was writing about a book that had Jeeves and lord Wimsey have a fucking contest in an obscure paperback published as by Phoebe Kisshagen. I've been receiving comments on it from someone who calls himself "NSH". He's clearly an expert in old pornography, as he can locate the Kisshagen book in its earliest incarnations.

It seems, then, that the Finnish translation of the book (and probably the Swedish or Danish translation before it) has been altered so as to include the reference to Jeeves and Wimsey, two 20th century fictional heroes. The original book must've had some known characters of its own time having the said contest.

Here's the longest of NSH's responses. You can see the others ones in the original post:

Re: The famous Phoebe.

From Patrick J. Kearney’s A HISTORY OF EROTIC LITERATURE (London, Macmillan, 1982):

Talking about Edward Sellon and his works, Kearney writes:

‘...and ‘Phoebe Kissagen; or, the Remarkable Adventures, Schemes, Wiles, and Devilries of Une Maquerelle; being a sequel to the ‘New Epicurean’ (London, ‘1743' (1866); ....
Page 113.

I found no trace of the above in a French edition in Gay’s ‘Bibliographie des ouvrages... Nor in Rose’s Register of Erotic Books.

As far as English editions are concerned, see Rose, 3590:

‘Phoebe Kissagen; or, the Remarkable Adventures, Schemes, Wiles, and Devilries of Une Maquerelle; being a sequel to the ‘New Epicurean’ London 1743 (reprinted 1875) pp. 96, 8vo. Printed by Joseph Longtool, In and Out Lane, London.’

and

Gay, III 732, gives the title ‘Phoebe Kess’ with the same description as above but changing the size from an 8vo to a 16mo.
Note: Gay took a lot of his informatio from catalogues and often made mistakes in rewriting it.

Still on Westlake: his sleaze

Earl Kemp has an article on Westlake's pornography and sleaze and offers also a bibliography.

Erotica out

Erotica, with the subtitle 69 Exciting Book Classics, is out. It's a history of erotic literature told through 69 (more or less) classics of literature, ranging from Sappho to postmodern blog porn à la Belle du Jour, from paperback sleaze to surrealistic avantporn à la Georges Bataille.

Written with my friends and colleagues, Ville Hänninen ja Vesa Sisättö, whose idea it was in the first place. So, thanks, guys!

Kehoitan kaikkia suomenkielisiä lukijoita hankkimaan kirjan. Se on aiheestaan huolimatta tehty hyvällä maulla ja on ennen kaikkea vakavasti otettava teos. Joskin eilen kun selailin sitä ja lueskelin kirjoista poimittuja sitaatteja, alkoi väkisinkin pan... naurattaa. Porno on hauskaa! Enemmän kirjallista pornoa! Alas kuvan ylivalta!

Finished a book, another one came from the printers

Just sent the Mika Waltari book to the publisher. And heard earlier today that the erotica book I talked about here some months back has just come from the printers.

I'm sorry I haven't written about Waltari here as often as I'd like to have, but always something else came up (and I think I'm behind writing about newer books I've received from writers abroad; will have to catch upon those).

Science fiction pornography

Ken Johnson has compiled a bibliography of science fictional and/or fantasy pornography. It's available here. I'm not an expert in this area, but the biblio (or rather, index) sparked some critical comments on the Fictionmags e-mail list. Some books mentioned that are not found in the list are:

QUEEN KONG (James Moffat, Everest 1977)
WEREWOLF VS THEVAMPIRE WOMAN (Arthur N Scarm, Guild-Hartford 1972)
VIRGIN PLANET, Poul Anderson
TIDES OF LUST; EQUINOX, Samuel Delany
TARA OF THE TWILIGHT, Lin Carter
John Norman's Gor books (it's really strange that these are missing)
ARDOR ON AROS, Andrew Offutt

Moorcock and I

Forgot to say (actually forgot all about it myself) that my short piece on an old sleaze film called The Smut Peddler (1965) appeared on Earl Kemp's fanzine here. Should probably point out that this is the first time - and probably will be the last - when I'm in a same publication with Michael Moorcock.

There was a comment on the film by a long-time science fiction fan called Mike Deckinger in the next issue of Earl Kemp's fanzine. I'll quote it in here:

"Of course I remember The Smut Peddler. It was released at a time when the more innocent and carefree nudies (as exemplified by Russ Meyers’ early contributions), were beginning to fade from view, and ushered in the era of the “roughies”; B&W independent films that featured ample flesh displays and undue amounts of violence and misogyny. The key developers of “roughies” included the incredible husband and wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, Barry Mahan (Errol Flynn’s drinking buddy), the delectable Audrey Campbell, star of the “Olga” series. and our very own William Rotsler.

The crusty character, in the still from The Smut Peddler also played the titular lead (adorned in scabby make-up and prosthetics), who, as noted, is only glimpsed in the trailer. The trailer itself was a marvel of manipulative direction. Since one of the shadowy plot elements centered on the production of a girly magazine called Dream Girl, re-enactments of an S&M photo-shoot were presented as if they foreshadowed actual scenes within the final product.

However, the sweaty viewer was not totally deceived. Additional unrelated scenes of European glamour girls rounded out the viewing experience.

Roughies only remained for a few years. Once the envelope was pushed to the limit, with the advent of hard-core, non-simulations, the soft-core genre dwindled and then disappeared.

I can understand that The Smut Peddler has become a rarity, but a sought-after rarity? Truly stunning."

Erotica almost out

My newest book is - almost - orderable. Erotica: 69 Exciting Classics of Literature I've written in collaboration with Ville Hänninen and Vesa Sisättö will be out in September, but you can take a look here. In Finnish, of course.

Beside some bona fide classics à la Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, I wrote about the readers' letters in the Finnish porn mags and the Finnish sleaze paperbacks of the seventies. And lots else - the job was almost crushing. Ville said after finishing his entries that he'll never read erotic literature again.

My first porn book out

The porn collection Asentoja I've edited is out; it's a book of mainly vintage stories from sex mags and such. The release party was on Friday and the book came out of the printers only 1½ hours before. As you may gather, there was lots of media around and I got to read porn aloud in television! I was wondering whether people would start yelling me at street: "There's that lewd monster from the telly, see, granny, I told you he's from around here, you got your rotten tomatoes ready?" But no such luck.

Can't post the cover (by Matti Helenius) right now and neither can I post any other stuff, except some links: here's the local newspaper (if you look closely at the picture, you can see me at the back) and here's the Hömpän helmiä blog. Kansan Uutiset also made a big article about the book (and about me in general, with nice pictures of our study; I'll be posting them soon so there will be books to recognize for Bill Crider).

Okay, then I'll change languages: Olen lueskellut omaa esipuhettani nyt pariin otteeseen ja todennut sen riittämättömäksi. En muistanut sitä kirjoittaessani ollenkaan esimerkiksi Mies-lehteä, joka ilmestyi jo 1960-luvulla, ja jossa muun muassa Kaarlo Nuorvala kirjoitteli pikkutuhmia novelleja. (Ja hänellähän olisi ollut sidos Turkuun (ja elossa oleva leski), joten hän olisi ollut oiva lisä kirjaan.) Mies-lehdessähän ilmestyi myös käännettyjä tosi- tai "tosi"-reportaasijuttuja, joita ryyditettiin aika kovilla eroottisilla kuvilla.

Toinen asia, jonka kokonaan unohdin, oli Annikki Ant-Wuorinen, jonka seksuaalisia tunnustuksia luettiin Hymystä korvat punaisina 60-luvun lopulla ja joka avasi varmasti mahdollisuuksia julkaista seksijuttuja aikakauslehdissä. (Sama varmaan pätee osittain myös Tabe Slioorin muistelmiin (joista olen aina ihmetellyt, miksei kukaan ole julkaissut niitä kirjana; ehkä sen takia, että kukaan ei halunnut asioida rva Slioorin kanssa).) Ant-Wuorisen tarinoista julkaistiin kirjakin, Hymyn kustantama pokkari, jonka ilmeisesti haamukirjoitti Veikko Ennala - mainitsen Ennalan esipuheessa, mutta en sitä, että hänellä oli laajalti luettu palsta Hymyssä, jossa hän ruoti ihmisten seksiä käsitteleviä kirjeitä. Ne avasivat tietä pornolehtien lukijakirjeille. (Ennalahan myös siis kirjoitti seksinovelleja lehtiin.)

Kolmas asia, jonka tajusin vasta jälkeenpäin, että vaikka kirjassa usein ollaankin varsin rivoja ja tuhmia, niin kaikki seksi on aika heteroa. Minulla oli harkinnassa Eino Säisän novelli Rakastaa-kirjasta, jossa on harvinainen lesboaihe (ja vielä ihan asiallisesti käsitelty), mutta novelli itsessään ei ollut kovin kaksinen (siinä on hivenen keinotekoinen intertekstuaalinen viite erääseen Hemingwayn novelliin) ja Rakastaa-kirjasta on teoksessa jo kaksi novellia, joten viime hetkellä ajattelin, että antaa olla. Ehkä ensi kerralla, kyllä minä toisen tämmöisen teen, jos kustantaja löytyy. Ja ne Riku Korhosen ja Tuomas Kyrön lukijakirjeet Erotiikan Maailmasta ehdottomasti mukaan!

Sitäkin mietin, että pornon, erotiikan ja seksin välisiä eroja olisi esipuheessa voinut valaista - sikäli kuin olisin osannut. Kustantaja sanoi julkaisutilaisuudessa, että Asentoja-kirjassa ei ole mukana ollenkaan pornoa, itse en menisi sanomaan ihan noin, mutta en menisi kynällä osoittelemaan, mikä jutuista on pornoa ja mikä "pelkkää" erotiikkaa. Omasta puolestani äänestäisin aina kunnon pornon puolesta, erotiikalla on taipumus luisua tekotaiteelliseksi (sana josta en yleensä pidä) ja pitkästyttäväksi jaaritukseksi, josta on lopulta käyttöä vain Imagen huono seksikuvaus -kilpailuissa. Toisaalta Asennoissa oleva Petra Oinosen eli Susu Petalin pari vuotta sitten Reginassa ilmestynyt "Kolme fantasiaa" on aidosti kiihottava juttu, jossa on ehkä enemmän pelkkää erotiikkaa, eikä pornografiaa. Määrittelyt ovat vaikeita ja niiden puolelle asettuminen on vielä hankalampaa, mutta haluaisin kovasti puolustaa kirjoitettua pornografiaa ja haluaisin, että sitä olisi enemmän (ja että se olisi laadukkaampaa).

PS. The publisher told me afterwards that he'd been in the release party of the Finnish translation of David Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex etc. There was some drunk, too, who wasn't there writing a story or anything. After all the other questions had been proposed by the journalists, the guy got to standing up and said: "The most important question about sex: when can I have some?"

Wooster and Lord Wimsey in bed

This wasn't a joke. There is a book in which P.G. Wodehouse's hero, Bertie Wooster, and Dorothy Sayers's amateur sleuth, Lord Wimsey, are having a fucking contest. The book is a bit of mystery to me, in the vein of the Pietro Aretino book I was talking about before.

The book is called Himon temppeli in Finnish (The Temple of Lust) and it was published here in 1972. It's written by someone called "Phoege Kisshagen". The original title is given as Memoires d'une procureuse anglaise and that book certainly exists. It's a French erotic book published originally anonymously in the late 19th century. The book is supposed to be a memoirs of a madame in the 18th century London. Now, Phoebe Kisshagen is the main character of the book, but her name doesn't really feel like a real 18th or 19th century English name. I can't find enough about the original French book on-line, so I can't check whether the hero of the book is also "Phoebe Kisshagen".

But what about Bertie Wooster and Lord Wimsey? How can they be in a book that was published originally in 1891? I don't have the answer, but here they are. Wooster is a client of Phoebe Kisshagen's brothel and he gets into a fight with young Wimsey. Wimsey claims that Wooster is no longer the lover he once was and Wooster sets out to prove his reputation. He asks Madame Kisshagen to get two virgins - he and Wimsey would compete about which one breaks his girl first. Wooster wins - he seduces the girl and takes her in fourteen minutes and 37 seconds. Wooster dies afterwards, however, from exhaustion.

I believe this book is a hoax, but based loosely on the original Memoires d'une procureuse anglaise, rewritten by a Danish or Swedish porn hack, and no matter what I said earlier, I believe such is also the case with Pietro Aretino's memoirs. Oh the wonders of porn publishing!

Pietro Aretino's memoirs fake?

I have a Finnish paperback, published in 1974, that's said to have been written by Pietro Aretino, the famous satiricist and poet of the 16th century. The book is called Profane Memoirs or some such (Uskallettuja muistelmia in Finnish). No original title is given (or, actually, it's said on the back of the title page that no original title is known). The back cover copy claims that the text of the book was found in Venice after some floods and has never before been printed.

The catalogue of Sweden's Kungliga biblioteket says that the book Skamlösa memoarer was translated from "untitled Italian manuscript". The Swedish book was published in 1968.

Now, this seems like a hoax. The text however is full of stuff that no ordinary porn hack would know, for example an elaborate analysis of Michelangelo's work. And the fight and the duel scenes are quite well-written. This clearly isn't work of a Finnish or a Swedish writer.

I just can't find this book anywhere on-line. No site on Aretino says there's a book of Aretino's memoirs (and certainly not one that was found in Venice after the floods). Only books of Aretino's I find contain his poems, dialogues or plays - no prose.

If this were a hoax and published by some porn imprint, like, say, Olympia Press, you'd think it could be easily found on-line.

I find on Abebooks there's a book by "Aretino, Jr.", called Roman Hookers, Happy Hookers (Curtis 1973), but since that's later than the Swedish Skamlösa memoarer I don't think that has anything to do with the book here.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Is there a book that's claimed to be by Aretino containing his memoirs?

The porn anthology

My newest book is soon out. It's an anthology of porn and sex short stories, most of them having been published previously in porn mags or other venues of that sort. The stuff is mostly from the seventies, but there are also some stories from the sixties, one or two from the nineties. There are also some previously unpublished stories, an excerpt of a coming novel and a story written for this book (the one by Kirsti Ellilä).

The eighties were left out unintentionally. I had a short story by a renowned Finnish author in mind, but his widow refused the reprint rights - for totally understandable reasons, which I'm not at liberty to discuss; so I won't even name the author, even though he'd signed the story under his own name. I also thought at first that the frenzied story by Kari Nenonen (who's best known for his horror) came out in the eighties, but it's from 1992 (which represents the end of the eighties to me, in many ways).

The book will be out later this month. I'll keep you posted. Here's the table of contents (in Finnish):

Hannu Salama: Sovinistisika, Hymy 1/1976
Jorma Etto: Iloinen tarina tohtorista ja Lapista, teoksesta Rakastaa (1965)
Hans Selo: Minun ensilempeni, Jallu 5/1973
M. A. Numminen: Mies, Hymy 5/1976
Jorma Ojaharju: Tahallinen hengenvaaraan saattaminen, Kalle 9/1976
Harri Erkki: Juhlapäivälliset, Cocktail 20/1972 (ilmestynyt alun perin salanimellä Harry B. Erichs)
Kirsti Ellilä: Tärkeimmät asiat, aiemmin julkaisematon
Kari Nenonen: Tarina Mumle Isomunasta, norjalainen kansansatu, teoksesta Hulkkonen: Tulen viemää (1992)
Veikko Pietilä: Kolme monologia vanhasta aiheesta, teoksesta Rakastaa (1965)
Riku Korhonen: Mökkipano, katkelma tulevasta romaanista
Petra Oinonen: Kolme fantasiaani, Regina 5/2006
Tuomas Kyrö: Toimitusjohtaja, Image 5-6/2007