Michael Brett: An Ear for Murder (1967)

I read this old private eye mystery by Michael Brett in a day, which I quite enjoyed, having struggled through a much longer crime novel which took almost a week. The book's protagonist is Pete McGrath, a tough private eye working in New York, but going to Las Vegas in the book. In the beginning, he's hired by a mysterious woman saying her husband has disappeared. She doesn't want to get to touch with the police, which of course makes McGrath suspicious, but a man has to make a living. Soon he stumbles upon a dead man, which is a given in any old school PI novel. McGrath has to find a sadistic killer who works with an axe or a machete, portrayed in the cover. 

I liked the book, though it's nowhere near great. It's a fast read, and everything flows quite smoothly. Brett makes McGrath a likable hero who can work his way out in the mean streets, but there are also bursts of sudden violence. Especially the scene in which McGrath cuts off an ear from a killer is gruesome. There's also lots of old school male chauvinism in the book, but what can you expect? It must be said, though, that McGrath also dates a young woman who works at the UN. 

Here's more about Brett in Mystery*File. 

***

Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres. 

Western novels by female authors

 

My earlier post about western novels was so popular, I decided to pick up this entry I had earlier posted only to the WesternPulps e-mail group (remember those?). It's about western novels (and some short stories) that are written by female authors. I was reading these for an essay I later used in a collection of my western-themed book of articles. This is a bit skimpy at times, but I don't have the time to edit it. Here's hoping it suffices. 

Helen Hunt Jackson: Ramona: very popular in its time, but seems forgotten now. Must admit that I didn't finish the book, as the style and narration felt so dated, but interesting nevertheless in its portrayal of the oppression of Indians.

B. M. Bower: The Chip of the Flying U: I didn't get into Bower's "yuh mangy polecat" style, so I wrote more about her influence and place in the history of western fiction. I found an Elmer Kelton quote that Bower's sales diminished when the audience found out she's a woman.

Dorothy M. Johnson: The Hanging Tree: Johnson is a great short story writer, but for some reason I couldn't get into this, maybe there were too many characters for such a short length (90 pages in a Ballantine pb) or then it was because Johnson couldn't concentrate more fully on the woman in the lead (it seems she stopped writing westerns for a long time after having this frustrating experience with the editors (of Saturday Evening Post, I believe) - or then she just wasn't a novelist. Not bad, though, in any meaning of the word. Haven't seen the film, unfortunately.

Jane Barry: A Time in the Sun: I couldn't find much info on Barry, but seems like she wrote some other historical novels as well, but is largely forgotten today. Her western from 1962 is a Haycox-influenced novel about two women abducted by Indians and attempts to rescue them which have large political consequences. Barry turns the focus at times on the women themselves, not just the heroes trying to save them, and one of them doesn't want to leave his Indian husband. A bit slow, but interesting, and based on what Barry says in her foreword, she really did her homework. You can find this on Kindle, if you're interested. I read this based on her entry in The Twentieth Century Western Writers, which is still a valuable reference work.

Marguerite Noble: Filaree: this was a nice surprise, a very touching portrait of life in early 20th century Arizona, written from a perspective of a woman trying to come up with her indifferent and at times violent husband who tries to make the woman abandon his family, and her large bunch of kids. This really felt real and lived throughout, and I believe Noble based the story on her mother's life. I believe this was also mentioned in TCWW, but I don't think Noble has an entry there of her own.

JoAnn Levy: For California's Gold: a tale of the California Gold Rush told from the viewpoint of a woman whose husband forces them to go searching for gold, with tragic consequences. Suffers from being a bit too nice, though several people die in the course of the book. It's also too literary with some narrative techniques that I found implausible, especially from a diary-like narration. I wouldn't have read this, and possibly not many know about JoAnn Levy, but I received this book from a Finnish professor who had lived in the US and read lots of westerns during his time there and donated the books to the Finnish Western Society. (The books are in my cellar and I don't really know what to do with them. I'll never be able to read so many westerns in my lifetime.)

Kathleen Kent: The Outcasts: a pretty tough novel for a female writer, contains some harsh violence, but for some reason I didn't feel much interest in the characters. This was the newest novel I read for the article.

I also read short stories by Jane Candia Coleman and Peggy Simson Curry. The former's "Moving On" was superb with original characters, highly recommended. This was in the book The Morrow Anthology of Great Western Short Stories, edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. The anthology looks very well done by and large, with lots of forgotten pulp and female writers. Peggy Simson Curry's "Geranium House" was in the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories, edited by John Jakes (at least in name, maybe he had some assistant working on this also). I didn't really care for the humorous story, but I liked reading about Curry in the short introduction. The story came out originally in SEP or Collier's. (I didn't mention Curry in my article.)

I also tried to read Mari Sandoz, but her style wore me down. I understood maybe half of what was going down in The Tom-Walker. I tried Cheyenne Autumn, but as it isn't a novel per se, I didn't try to force my way through it. I understood from an on-line essay that her publishers tried to diminish her use of the old slang, and you can rest assured they should've tried harder.

The preface for my book Dark Places and Little Tramps

Here's the preface I wrote for my book Dark Places and Little Tramps, which is a collection of writings about crime and other genres, taken from this very same blog. The sales have been lacking - I don't know what I expected, but I couldn't foresee that they would stop sending parcels across the Atlantic. There was also a bit of a delay getting the book in Amazon, and I think some of the possible momentum was lost while waiting for the book to appear there. It's now available, but as I already implied, I'm not sure whether it moves across the pond at the moment. (Damn you, Trump, and your tariffs!). But alas, seems like there's no Kindle version, even though I had an electronic version of the book made. Luckily my income isn't dependent on this! I'm not sure if it works, but the e-book version can also be bought here. Here, on another blog, is the table of contents for the book - it's too long to post here!

This book is a collection of book reviews from my blog called Pulpetti (Finnish for pulpit). I set the blog up in 2005 and updated it irregularly into 2022, when I finally stopped. Pulpetti, as the title probably tells you, was mainly about pulp or pulpish fiction, stuff that was published in pulp magazines, paperback novels and other low-end literary venues. I also wrote a lot about obscure films and some classics, and there was also a lot about my family issues and other odds and ends (I even published some poems there!), but sometime around 2010 I decided to concentrate on the reviews of pulp fiction and films and stop talking about my personal life, other than some work-related stuff, i.e. translating crime fiction, writing about it and what have you. I also started other blogs where I could direct my seemingly endless energy. 

Blogs around the world were mainly in English when I started Pulpetti, so it was natural to me that Pulpetti was also in English. I'm not a native speaker, as I live in Finland, but I've always thought my English is pretty fluent. At times I also published in Finnish, and I remember writer J. D. Rhoades saying that those parts in Pulpetti sounded like Elvish to him. 

Pulpetti brought many connections. From 2004 to 2011 I published a crime fiction fanzine called Isku in Finnish, and I got lots of new hardboiled and noir writing in them, stories by Patti Abbott, Bill Crider, Christa Faust, Ed Gorman, Jason Starr and Kevin Wignall, to name just a few. I couldn't have had the same supply of good stories without the blogging. Thanks go also to the Rara-Avis e-mail list which was still going strong during those years. 

Great cover by Ossi Hiekkala.

Largely thanks to Pulpetti, I had also connections to sample new crime novels for a paperback line I was editing for a Finnish publisher, namely Arktinen Banaani. I hand-picked books for the line in 2008–2010. The line went bust after only six books, but what classics they were: Duane Swierczynski's The Wheelman, Kevin Wignall's Who Is Conrad Hirst?, Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye, Scott Phillips's The Ice Harvest, Christa Faust's Money Shot and James Sallis's Drive. How could you not love those books? But it seems the Finnish audience was able to resist their call, and the publisher really didn't know what to do with the books, so the paperback line ceased. After the paperbacks, there came a few books in hardcover (Kevin Wignall's The Dark Flag, which unfortunately still hasn't been published in English and probably never will, Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde, and Ken Bruen's London Boulevard, plus two crime novels by Finnish authors), but they vanished without a trace. A writer friend of mine, Antti Tuomainen, said to me that one day someone's gonna pick up one of these books, decides to become a writer and writes a book that changes the course of history. Here's hoping...

Why then did I stop blogging? I simply couldn't find the time anymore: I was already writing or doing some other writing-related work six, seven or even eight hours every day, so I thought it would be too tiresome to try to come up with something worthwhile to be published in a blog. And then there was social media, namely Facebook, where I could also publish stuff about my writing and pulpish fiction. Sometime around 2020 Facebook stopped showing links to Google-owned Blogger in its newsfeed, so it became quite frustrating to publish something on Blogspot and then find out no one has read it. There are other problems with Facebook that I wholeheartedly recognize, and as I'm writing this introduction, I've been on a Facebook break. I also wanted to have these reviews at hand and in print, just in case of Google deciding to cease all defunct or dormant blogs. 

As I said, Pulpetti was mainly about pulpish fiction, mostly hardboiled and noir writing, but also some westerns, some horror, some fantasy, some sleaze and other erotica and other genres. Many of the reviews in Pulpetti were born out of making a sequel to my original Pulpografia (2000, in Finnish only), a reference book on American crime and mystery writers published mainly in the pulp and paperback format. I also did a book on American western writers, so it was natural to post about that genre as well. 

In the early 2020's I started finishing up the sequel to Pulpografia, and I had to read some men's adventure books, a genre I'm not very much interested in, but which seems quite popular nowadays. When I was writing my first book over 20 years ago, I concentrated on genres that I really cared about, the noir and hardboiled stuff, but the wind has changed, at least according to the sites like Paperback Warrior and Facebook groups like Men's Adventure Paperbacks of the 20th Century, where men's adventure books, like the Mack Bolans by Don Pendleton, are very much a fad.  (As I'm writing this introduction, the sequel is not finished yet, but I'm hoping it will see the light of day in 2025! EDIT: Here's hoping...) 

In this book, there's also a large section on neo-noir, since I was reading (and still am!) new American, British and Irish crime fiction, mainly in the noir or neo-noir subgenre. I think there hasn't been any kind of history of neo-noir fiction, so this could be a start, or at least someone can use this as a source or a reference work. A word of warning: neo-noir is a famously slippery genre, so someone might think that not all the books mentioned here are neo-noir or even noir.

We have also a section on sleaze or sex paperbacks of the 1960's and 1970's (and later ones as well). Many people know that lots of sleaze paperbacks are also crime fiction. Just to name a few: Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Robert Silverberg, Orrie Hitt, Barry Malzberg... I did a book on sleaze paperbacks in 2020, called Pulpografia Erotica. It concentrates on American books that were published also in Finnish, so the scope is pretty limited and haphazard. There were lots of crime-related books that have never before been called to attention of crime fiction aficionados, though, so I think this section should prove interesting to many paperback fans. 

There are also sections on westerns and some other genres as well, with a short segment of non-fiction books and magazines. One of the most important segments in this book focuses on older British crime fiction. There are reviews and articles on British spy books, but also stuff about British private eye books, some of which are very light pastiches of the genuine American stuff. James Hadley Chase has many of his books reviewed, though I really don't find him that appealing. In the end, we have some reviews on crime/noir graphic novels and also some stuff on Finnish literature, mainly Aino Kallas and Mika Waltari, but also a survey of Finnish private eye fiction. "Reviews in brief" is just what it is: very short reviews on hardboiled, noir and other novels. 

The book doesn't contain the blog posts as they were, since I've edited them and taken out stuff that's not relevant anymore, i.e. things about where I was reading the book or some such. I've also combined some of the shorter reviews into longer ones, for example in the case of James Hadley Chase. 

The texts are arranged alphabetically according to the writer's surname. I've also added the publishing info, and you can find the publisher and the year of the first edition in the headers. (In this time of e-books, it's becoming more and more difficult to find the publishing year and the name of the original publisher!) 

I hope you find this mixed-up collection of reviews and essays interesting and entertaining. 

(And I indeed hope you can order the book and get it into your hands, tariffs or not!)

Three westerns from the sixties

Here's a summary of three western novels from the sixties I recently read in quick succession. One of the books was a hardback originally, two others were paperbacks. I read the books in Finnish translation, hence the books in the picture are in Finnish. 

D. B. Newton: On the Dodge (Berkley 1962): Bannister, wanted by law for killing a man in a fight, finds himself in a town getting tangled up in the fight against the railroad contractor and the landgrabbers. One of the books in Newton's Bannister series. Bannister is a flawed man, but he can take care of himself.

Wayne D. Overholser: The Bitter Night (Macmillan 1961): a fine thriller set almost entirely in a stagecoach station.

Reese Sullivan (Giles A. Lutz): The Demanding Land (Ace Double 1966): a man returns to his hometown after having been suspected of a murder and ends up fighting the father and brother of the dead man. At the same time he sets up his own ranch. Not very tight plotwise, but I liked Lutz's angular style and his eye for peculiar details, such as poisoning wolves with strychnine and selling wild horses to the English for the Boer War.

I thought that Newton's book was the best of the bunch, but I noticed I have a hard time remembering what actually happened in the book. All were quite hardboiled, and with the exception of Overholser, there were no real heroes, and with Overholser the main character is just an ordinary man.

There's one thing about westerns, though: they don't really seem personal to me. In noir and hardboiled, you find more books in which the writers reveal themselves, their fears, desires and dreams, but in westerns this is quite rare. H. A. DeRosso is one exception. I haven't yet read Arnold Hano's Flint, which reportedly has the same plot as one of Jim Thompson's novels (and Hano was his editor in Lion Books). There are more literary westerns, such as the books by Max Evans, which have this personal quality.

My book Dark Places and Little Tramps out

I decided to break the silence here, because I have a new book out and it's in English! One day, over a year ago, I got an idea: I'd take all the blog posts here in Pulpetti that are about literature, crime or otherwise, and edit them into a collection of reviews and articles. It took me over a year, but the book finally came out last month. I edited the texts, took out some blogginess (is that a word? I mean stuff like where I was reading the book etc.), organized them in different genres and wrote a foreword. My friend and colleague JT Lindroos, the mastermind behind the now defunct PointBlank, also did the cover and helped with the back cover copy. The book came out under the moniker Pulpetti Books. 

I thought at first I'd publish the book via Amazon, but then I thought I should do it via Books on Demand (BoD), which is situated in Germany. I use it regularly with my own publishing house, Helmivyö, and I thought it would be the best way to make the book available to public, since through them I could also have  the international distribution. Here the book is on Amazon, though not as an eBook. The book is available on many other sites as well, for example in The Australian Booktopia. The book should be out also as an eBook, but I'll have to find out about that. Do check out also this, this and this. (EDIT: I thought at first that Dark Places isn't available in Amazon, but Tony Baer over at Rara-Avis list found it. There must've been a delay, and I didn't check the availability when writing this blog post.) 

Mind you, the title of the book isn't supposed to refer to Charles Chaplin (this didn't occur to me at all, and neither to JT!), it's a reference to Gil Brewer's novel which I mention in the book's list of essential noir. (Dark Places is the title of Gillian Flynn's novel, which I also write about.) (EDIT: In an earlier version of this post, I mentioned I write about Brewer's Little Tramp in the book, but that is not the case after all. But there are two reviews of other novels by Brewer.) 

Here's the back cover copy: 

Dark Places and Little Tramps collects Juri Nummelin's writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other literary genres of yesteryear. The author has written extensively about genre fiction and popular culture for more than four decades, but this new volume is the first publication of his writings in English. Among many other subjects, it features a lengthy section on neo-noir and writers like Gillian Flynn, Allan Guthrie, Jason Starr and Duane Swierczynski. He also investigates British spy and crime fiction, and includes chapters on western and horror. Nummelin shines new light to many of these areas, such as the largely forgotten topic of sleaze paperbacks.

And also little something about me as well: 

Juri Nummelin is a Finnish writer and publisher, who has had a life-long crush on hardboiled and noir. His blog, Pulpetti, was for many years a steady source of news and opinions about pulp and paperback fiction and edgy new crime writing. The texts in this volume are culled from the blog, but they have been newly edited and organized by genre. In the book, Nummelin also reminisces about his experiences in attempting get new neo-noir writers published in the Finnish language.

You can find the whole table of contents here. 

George Snyder: Nick Carter: Jewel of Doom

 

I've been going through my forth-coming book (well, forth-coming maybe next year or in 2024) about American paperback crime and suspense writers published in Finnish, but I haven't found time to actually read any of the books. I managed to squeeze in a Nick Carter by George Snyder, who died in 2018 after self-publishing his new crime books during the recent years. 

The Jewel of Doom came originally out in 1970, when Lyle Kenyon Engel was producing the series for Award. The publishing house forced Engel and his writers to use first person narration, which may not be suitable for Nick Carter (though later efforts by Dennis Lynds and Robert Randisi proved it could be done*), and there's no reason for it in here. Nick Carter is not more alive in The Jewel of Doom than he is in those novels that are narrated in third person. 

The plot of the book deals with the Fabergé eggs. Now, this piqued my interest, since Peter Carl Fabergé lived in the Czarist Russia when Finland was still a part of the empire. He didn't have Finnish roots, but his mentor Peter Pendin was Finnish, and many Finnish smiths worked for the Fabergé family, producing lots of beautiful golden eggs. In Snyder's book, one of the eggs is being used in smuggling the plans for a new US military device out of the country. Nick Carter of course prevents it from happening. He also gets to spend some quality time with different babes throughout the novel.

Sad to say, the book wasn't very good. It's not badly written, from what I can gather from the Finnish translation, but the scenes go on and on. Especially the erotic scenes seem endless, and yet nothing much happens. The action scenes are handled deftly, but even they are too long. I didn't actually finish the book and started another. 

Here's Paul Bishop on Snyder, and here's also a German interview with Snyder.  

The Finnish cover from 1974 above. It has nothing to do with the book, since the lady in the photo seems to hold a copy of Mao's Little Red Book in her hand. 

* At least Lynds did Nick Carters in the first person narration, and I seem to remember Randisi did too. Correct if I'm wrong. 

Robert Crane: Born of Battle

Robert Crane was really Con Sellers, a steady writer of low-grade paperbacks working through the sixties and seventies for the small publishers, and finally finding some mainstream success in the eighties and early nineties. It seems his breakthrough novel was the novelization of the Dallas TV series he did in 1980. He died in 1992. Here's a link to the Finnish translation of the Dallas book - it came out here in hardcover, with a very non-pulp cover! 

I read now one of Sellers's war paperbacks as by Robert Crane. Most of the Robert Crane books are about one Sgt. Ben Corbin fighting in Korea, but this one, called Born of Battle, tells about an Army old hand Ernie Kovacs and a war reporter called Saxon, who must be Sellers's self-portrait, since he started writing for the war papers (I don't know the actual term here) in Korea. The book came out in Finland under the title Sankarit ovat kuolleet ("The Heroes Are Dead"), which doesn't make any sense. The cover is also misleading.  

Born of Battle doesn't contain many action or battle scenes, it's more like a love novel, since Saxon's romance with a South Korean woman takes so much place in the narration, and the book is pretty episodic. But I didn't mind, since Crane/Sellers writes convincingly and effortlessly about his characters and their endeavors. The book came out from Pyramid in 1962, but there's not much pulpiness that was so prevalent in the books Pyramid usually published. 

Axel Kilgore (Jerry Ahern): Death Lust

Jerry Ahern was known mainly for his post-apocalyptic series like The Survivalist and The Takers. I haven't read any of those, but I read one of the books in his other series, about the one-eyed mercenary Hank Frost, written as by Axel Kilgore. I'd read one before, called The Terror Contract (1982). It wasn't bad, straight-up action that has no pretenses of literary merit. Even the gun porn that you hear Ahern having been guilty of is minimal. 

The other Hank Frost I recently read, called Death Lust (also 1982; Cosa Nostra! in Finnish), wasn't as good, though it had its moments. There's even a hint of great adventure in the air, when Hank Frost is posing as a gun dealer somewhere in the Mediterranean, and when the ship he's travelling in gets attacked, he saves a young woman and when it's revealed she's the daughter of a Mafia don, he wins the father's ever-lasting gratitude. The Mafia helps Hank Frost attacking the gun dealers led by Frost's long-time enemy, Eva Chapmann, whose father he's killed in the past. There are lots of attacks and battles in the book, and I got actually kind of lost amongst them, but all in all this was a pretty entertaining men's adventure paperback. The end in which Eva Chapmann is dressed as a nun, was a bit weird, though. 

Elliott Lewis: Two Heads Are Better

This is no men's adventure paperback, instead it's a private eye novel that came out in paperback in 1980. The publisher was Pinnacle that was famous for its men's adventure books in the seventies and early eighties, but seems like they were ready to publish books from different genres. 

Elliott Lewis was a radio actor who sometimes appeared on TV and film. When he retired from acting, he wrote seven private eye books for Pinnacle from 1980 to 1983. The first one is weirdly named Two Heads Are Better. The antihero of the book is one Fred Bennett, an ex-cop leading a lousy life and working as a private eye. The book starts off with a headless corpse being found on the trunk of his car, and Bennett has to flee and solve the case at the same time. 

I really didn't like this book. It seems hasty and the plot is too convoluted. Bennett is not very likable character, though I usually like unsympathetic private eyes. This is not the case here. Bill Crider said it better here. 

David Hagberg: Nick Carter: The Istanbul Decision

I've never read any books by David Hagberg, though he seems to have been prolific and at least somewhat appreciated writer of spy thrillers, mainly in the 21st century. He started out in the mid-seventies, penning Nick Carters and Flash Gordon paperbacks without a byline and several one-off horror/SF paperbacks, such as the cult favourite Croc. He died in 2019. 

I've now read one of his Nick Carters, called The Istanbul Decision. It came out originally in 1983, and Hagberg's titles for his AXE novels are all pretty similar: you have your The Ouster Conspiracy, The Vengeance Game, The Strontium Code... This one is about Nick Carter trying to lure a Soviet spy into a trap by using a double for the spy's daughter who the Americans have kidnapped. It's very complicated, but not very intriguing. The book races on, but I didn't feel much for the characters. The climax takes place in the Orient Express. I don't remember much about the book anymore. 

Someone said that Hagberg was one of the writers who made the Nick Carter series too realistic and humorless in the early eighties. There's lots of action, but none of it is zany or far out. 

I'm still intrigued by his other Nick Carter, Death Island (1984), that was published in Finland as "Blood-Hungry Man-Eaters" (Verta janoavat ihmissyöjät, that is). 

James Fritzhand: Nick Carter: Sign of the Cobra

As I said, I was going to post short reviews of some paperbacks I'll be reading in the coming months as I'm making a sequel to my original Pulpografia (2000, in Finnish only), a reference book on American crime and mystery writers published mainly in the pulp and paperback format. Many of the books I'll be reading are men's adventure, a genre I'm not very much interested in, but which seems quite popular nowadays. When I was writing my first book 20 years ago, it was mainly about noir and hardboiled stuff, but the wind has changed, at least according to the sites like Paperback Warrior and Facebook groups like Men's Adventure Paperbacks of the 20th Century. 

Okay, off to the book I was going to write about. It's a Nick Carter/Killmaster book, written by James Fritzhand. The title is Sign of the Cobra, and it's one of the three Nick Carters Fritzhand wrote in the mid-seventies. All the books take place in Asia, and in them Nick Carter is fluent in taekwondo, which, if I'm not mistaken, he's not in the earlier books. I read on the Glorious Trash blog that the continuity of the Nick Carter series was gone when the series was taken out of Lyle Kenyon Engel's hands, and the writers came up with their own versions of Nick Carter. 

That said, Sign of the Cobra isn't a bad book. It's fluent and readable, and there's just enough old time pulp bravado to keep things interesting, though this isn't as crazy as some of the sixties' installments in the series, for example the books by Manning Lee Stokes. The villain has an artificial arm that looks like a cobra, and it's equipped with poisonous needles! The action scenes are quite good, except when Fritzhand makes someone say something aloud in the middle of a taekwondo strike which makes for a very weird reading. Just how slow is Nick Carter moving? 

Robert Ackworth: Young Doctor in Town

I've been lately writing a sequel to my first non-fiction book that was called Pulpografia. The working title has been "The Shadow of Pulpografia", but it won't probably be the final name. Well, you could call many of my books sequels to Pulpografia, but this one is made with the same premise: it's a reference book on American crime and suspense writers whose books and short stories were published in Finland in a paperback format or in a pulp magazine or similar periodical publication. 

I've been doing this work on an almost daily basis, with digging up some biographical and bibliographic information on the authors, but now I've been browsing the books and writing something about them. The first one happened to be Young Doctor in Town by Robert Ackworth. Who he? I don't know much about Ackworth, but he was born in 1923 and is most possibly dead by now. He wrote some short stories for the digests in the late fifties, and at the same time he published some erotic-cum-romantic paperbacks (i.e. The Moments Between, 1959). He published as late as 1978, when the novel The Takers came out. It seems to be about Hollywood. Ackworth wrote also some Dr. Kildare novelizations for Lancer. There's also a war novel by him in Finnish (called "One Moment from Hell"), but seems like it was never published in the US or UK. 

He penned also this one-off medical romance. As it was not a crime novel, I didn't feel the need to read the book and thought browsing should suffice. It's about a young doctor called Garner coming into a small town and getting mixed up with the possibly mentally ill wife of the town's big man. There's also romance, but also some critique of the state of medical care in the small town. 

The book was published in 1963 by something called Medical Fiction Books. Does anyone know anything about this outfit? 

I have other work to do and other books to read, but I think I'll try to squeeze some vintage paperbacks in and try to write about them here at Pulpetti. Next up a Nick Carter by James Fritzhand, and another one by David Hagberg! 

Sleaze novels that are also crime

Many people know that lots of sleaze paperbacks are also crime fiction. Just to name a few: Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Robert Silverberg, Orrie Hitt, Barry Malzberg... And as many people reading my blog know, I just published a book on sleaze paperbacks. It concentrates on American books that were published also in Finnish, so the scope is pretty limited and haphazard. There were lots of crime-related books that have never before been called to attention of crime fiction aficionados, though. At least not to my knowledge. (The book, called Pulpografia Erotica, is available here. But mind you, it's in Finnish and there's no international sales possibility.) 

So, I think the following books should be included in the next edition (or at least the appendix) of Allen Hubin's crime fiction bibliography (if they already are, I didn't notice and apologize): 

Norman Bligh: The Sisters. Softcover Library 1966. (Includes a killing of a mob boss, though not exactly a crime novel.)

Beth Brown: Man and Wife. Claude Kendall 1933. (Includes a private eye who shakes down clients of a famous prostitute. Not exactly a crime novel.) 

Richard E. Geis: Girlsville. France Books 1963. (Private eye called Vic Kunzer is hired to find a film producer's daughter.) 

Alexander Keith: The Love Gun. Bee-Line Books, the late sixties. (Murder takes place in a hunting cabin where there are some half dozen people. Set in Canada, there's also a French-speaking lieutenant! Can't find the exact year for this.) 

Kimberly Kemp (Paul Russo): Operation Sex. Midwood 1962. (International intrigue and sex.)

Peter Keyes (most possibly Andrew J. Collins): The Love Odds. Brandon House 1967. (Hardboiled crime novel about a private eye like character Steve Wayne who tackles the mobsters running a casino.) 

Lester Lake: So Wild, So Wanton. All Star Books 1962. (Cab driver fights the shakedown ring working in an elite high school.) 

Lester Morris: Savage Lust. Private Editions 1962. (Narcissistic womanizer kills accidentally his ex-mistress and tries to keep it hidden. Great noir novel with a very downbeat ending.) 

Max Nortic: Code Name: The Gypsy Virgin. Midwood 1971. (International intrigue and sadism as two female spies fight each other.) 

Max Nortic: The Real Thing. Midwood 1970. (A classic heist novel taking place in a casino.) 

Eric Sand: The Seduction. Beacon 1965. (Noirish novel about a young woman who comes back to her home town to revenge her father's death.) 

Floyd Smith: Action Girls. Midwood 1977 (there must be an earlier edition, since this was published in Finland in 1974). (An archaeologist tries to find his wife's ring in the desert so he can't be punished for killing her.) 

Gary Tubbs: The Case of the Missing Rubber. Published in 1969, can't find the publisher. (Private eye Charlie Romp gets mixed up in the smuggling of a sex drug.) 

David Warren: Tunnel of Love. Criterion Classics, no date. (Man is in prison for killing his wife's lover, then he finds out the man didn't die after all, and hunts him down. Lots of description of prison life. Maybe Warren was an inmate himself? This is the only book he wrote, at least under this moniker.) 

Then there are also these two books that are heavily crime-related, but I can't find any info on them: 
Jason Brown: Little Girl Lost and Bob Grand: Between All of Us. If anyone has anything on them, I'll be glad to hear it. I've written about these books (and the two published as by "Ralph Hayes") earlier here in Pulpetti. 

Peter Keyes's sleaze / hardboiled novel The Love Odds

Okay, here's still another crime-cum-sleaze paperback from the sixties. I already finished my book on the subject, and I'll write about it more in the near future, but wanted to share this one. 

As I wrote earlier, I think sleaze writer Peter Keyes was really Andrew J. Collins, who'd started out in the crime pulps in the fourties. I read the three books as by Keyes that have been translated in Finnish. They are: By Sex Possessed (Brandon House 1966), The Love Odds (Brandon 1967) and Hardrock Romeo (Brandon 1967). By Sex Possessed was the weakest of the three, but Hardrock Romeo had some interest in it because of its sociopathic country & western singer lead. 

The Love Odds was the most interesting one of the trio, mainly because it seems like it was a write-up of an earlier pulp novellette or a novel. The hero is one Steve Wayne, who is almost like a private eye, clearing up the financial problems of firms and such. He's asked to find out who's taking a casino's money in Las Vegas. He meets two tough mobsters, Al Terry and Manny Zugg, who run the casino, and suspects them from the beginning. The mobsters buy Wayne a girl to make love with, but also to spy on him. Wayne also meets the owner of the casino, who's of course a good-looking dame, and has sex with her as well. The shattering climax takes place in the desert outside Vegas, where Wayne and his partner are told to dig their own graves, while the criminals have their way with the women of the story. The scene is actually quite gruesome and even disturbing.

There's some implausibility to the plot and of course it's all too short and not very memorable, but I thought I was entertained while reading this. If anyone's read Collins's pulp crime stories, I'd be interested to hear if he has one with Steve Wayne and the casino's money. 

Lester Morris: Savage Lust (1962)

Here's another noir novel masquerading as a sleaze paperback! No one has ever heard of Lester Morris, let alone his sole novel Savage Lust that came out from a small paperback house called Private Editions. I thought this was pretty good and solid and could've been written by some better known paperbacker. The ending is devilishly cruel and ironic. 

Savage Lust's anti-hero is Si, a heel and a gigolo who uses and cheats women all the time. He's living in Florida and skimming money from every broad he can get his hands on. One of his lady friends, the wife of a hotel owner, wants to get Si all to herself and kills her husband and tells Si they can get the husband's money. Si doesn't want to get involved in a murder, but manages, almost accidentally, to kill the lady friend. Si buries the bodies and tries to act as the caretaker of the hotel while the owners are on a vacation. You can see this is not going to end well, right? And it sure doesn't! The ending is a punishment you just don't see coming. 

Not altogether plausible, but entertaining nevertheless, and the more noir aspects of the story are worth your while. I seem to enjoy the American sleaze paperbacks where the main guy is a no-good heel, who's getting beaten. No idea who really wrote this, but there were other Lesters writing sleaze at the same time, for example Lester Lake and Lester Arthur. They might be the same guy or,
then again, might not. 

The sleaze paperbacks of Max Nortic

I'm sure you've never heard of Max Nortic. I wouldn't have, if I hadn't set out to do a book on American sleaze paperback writers (it will be out only in Finnish, sorry). There are four translated novels by him, and they rise above the usual hardcore fare of the late sixties and early seventies, which is the time when the porn business and the sleaze paperback industry were being taken over by Mafia. Some critics say this was the turning point of the American sex paperback, and after that the books became worse. 

No one has ever written anything about Max Nortic, though several other sleaze authors, such as Orrie Hitt, and the writers who became later known for another genre, such as Robert Silverberg and Lawrence Block, have received praise and seen reprints of their sleaze work. Max Nortic has seen some of his books being republished as e-books, but none are available in print. 

Should they be? As I said, they are better than many other sex paperbacks of the era, as they have discernable plots and characters in them, and not such some ploy to hang some sex scenes on (I've now read several of those, and they can be pretty dull, though sometimes they have their own goofy charm). Nortic's sleaze books have crime and spy elements, and some of them take place in magazine industry, which sounds like Nortic was a journalist himself. There's also some satire in Nortic's work. 

Nortic published mainly through Midwood, and some of his books are Black Satin (1969), Virgin Wanted (1968), Night Nurse (1968), School for Sin (1969), Possessed (1969) ja Island of Desire (1970). For Brandon House he did The Strange Love of Lady S. (1968), which takes place in the early 19th century, so it's a historical novel. 

I've read these four books by him: The Real Thing (1970), Code Name: The Gypsy Virgin (1971), Total Awareness (1969) and Dirty Secrets (1969). All were published by Midwood. Of these, The Gypsy Virgin and The Real Thing are to my mind the best, though the others also hold some interest. Code Name: The Gypsy Virgin is a book about two female spies, working on the other sides during the Cold War, the one is of course American, and the other one is also a Caucasian, but she works for China. You might think this is a spy parody, which were indeed prevalent in the sixties' paperback sleaze, but this is actually a very grim and disturbing book. The American spy is made lesbian through manipulation in order to catch the Chinese spy, who's been modified into a sadistic killer through beatings and rapes in Chinese camps, starting already from a young age. The actual plot is about an American scientist, who the Chinese spy tries to manipulate to defect to China and start working for the Chinese government. In order to do this, she picks up the scientist's teenage daughter and forces her to make love to her. The ending is very bleak, and the evil China is victorious. (There's a one-word review for this in Amazon: "Rubbish.") 

The Real Thing is a heist novel, of all genres. It's about the robbing of a casino in which several of the characters are working. One of the ex-workers tries to get back to the casino and uses counterfeit cards. Nortic moves the story along with a nice speed, never stopping for too long on sex scenes, which are mostly worked well into the plot. The women in the book are the winners in the game, and the sadism of The Gypsy Virgin is largely missing, so this isn't as disturbing. This could've been written by a more famous paperbacker, like Harry Whittington. 

Dirty Secrets (Salaisuus in Finnish) then again is a funny expose romp in which two rivaling women's magazines are making features of a well-to-do family that's been chosen as "The Family of the Year". Under their facade, there's under-age sex, lesbianism, fetishism and other steamy stuff. Some of the sex scenes are actually quite titillating, but what's more important is that the book moves on quite fast. There's always something happening. Total Awareness is the least of the bunch, but holds some interest as a picture of its age: the middle-class couple gets acquainted with a sex cult and its charismatic leader, so it's about the aftermath of hippie culture. This one is played mainly for the sex scenes, though there are some interesting set pieces here and there, especially the one with the Chaplin comedy that's intertwined with a real couple having sex in front of the screen. 

I've been reading so much smut lately that I'm not really sure whether my judgment is reliable. But Max Nortic's books really stand out among some of the crap I've come across. Some of that crap makes me laugh, some of it makes me only bored. It would be interesting to read other people's comments on Nortic's work. Here's Dirty Secrets for Kindle, and here's The Code Name: Gypsy Virgin. 

But who was Max Nortic? There's a copyright notice from 1968 saying that the pseudonym belongs to one Max Citron (see?), but I can't find any info on him. Is Max Citron a pseudonym? A house name, perhaps? So, if anyone knows anything about Max Citron-Nortic, please, speak up! 

Unidentified sleaze paperback

Here's still another one of those sex papebacks I've been unable to obtain any reliable information about. It's by one Jo Ann Sheer, and it's supposed to be called Alayne's Secret Pleasures. It came out in Finnish with a stupid and irrelevant title "Rinnat kuin revolverit", which means "Breasts like revolvers", which bears no relation to the novel. It came out in 1978. I can't find any book as by Jo Ann Sheer and certainly not "Alayne's Secret Pleasures". 

The book is not crime, as some of the previous examples are. This is a rather loosely narrated story of Evan, who works in a men's mag, and Alayne, who's an ex-ballerina and living with Evan. They have a fight, as Alayne asks for too much sex, and Evan whips her with a belt, which Alayne of course enjoys immensely and says later that at that time he could finally respect Evan. They part their ways, only to meet later in Germany at the launch party of a new sex magazine called European Views. The way Alayne gets her money to travel to Europe is an especially nasty one: she and her lesbian friend fight each other naked in a bar (and when I say fight, I mean it), and when Alayne wins, she has to whip her friend in front of the audience. If she declines, her friend gets thrown in the river. After the whipping the women are raped. It's no pleasure reading this stuff, though there are titillating moments. The ending is a happy one: Evan and Alayne get back together, now that Evan knows how Alayne should be treated.

There are some inside jokes and references in the book: the editing office of European Views, the new sex mag, is described in detail (I'll translate back to English): "The gay photographer, the shabby office hasn't officially been rented, the staff writers are two homeless and rootless guys, who have nowhere else to rest their heads." The publisher of European Views could be modeled after a real person, there's that certain ring to it. In one scene Evan is seen reading a copy of a 0008 book by Clyde Allison. (There's no way a Finnish writer could know this, since they have never been translated.) I believe this a bona fide American sex novel published by an obscure house, and it was written by someone who was in the industry him- or herself. 

A reader of this blog found a book that was written and published as by another writer in one of these posts: H. P. Jaye wrote a gay porn novel The Go-Down Man in 1969, published by CAJ, which could be an off-shoot of Publishers Export Center hailing from El Cajon, California. PEC seems to have ceased in 1971, so these may have been one of their latest books, which might explain why they can't be found. 

One thing more: I noticed there's a character called Joe Sheer in the first Parker novel, The Hunter, but there's no way Westlake would've written this. Is there?

Movie review of No Country for Old Men written by a lousy typewriter

Going through some memorabilia boxes at the cellar, I found this note, written by a plastic Barbie typewriter some years ago. Seems like I intended it for publication, but never got around to doing that. So here goes! I remember struggling with the damn machine and even fixing it (the tape was torn or something like that), though I'm not handy at this kind of thing, not at all. I believe we took the typewriter back to the thrift store soon after this. The picture of the machine is taken from Pinterest. (I never fulfilled my promise of using another typewriter from now on. What is true is that I joined the typewriter group on Yahoo. I never posted there and I don't think I ever read any of the posts, and now Yahoogroups is defunct. Oh, how time flies!)

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. 

Another paperback sleaze problem: Jason Brown: Little Girl Gone

In my previous post, I was asking about two crime-cum-sex paperbacks that were published in Finland as by Ralph Hayes, but didn't actually seem to be Hayes's work. At least he himself denied that, and as I said in the post, I couldn't locate the possible original books via WorldCat, Abebooks or other sites. 

Now here's another one. It's also situated in the sub-genre of crime novels that have lots of explicit sex in them, and it's a pretty good one at that. I can't find anything about the book or the author, and it has come to me that maybe the Finnish publisher came up with non-existent titles so as not to have to pay the author or the original publisher for the work. 

The book in question is by one Jason Brown and the Finnish edition gives the original title as "Little Girl Gone" (the Finnish title Reittä pitkin kuolemaan is impossible to translate back to English). Now, that does sound like a legitimate sleazy crime novel, but I can't find anything to match the time frame (it was published in Finland in 1978) or the description. Jason Brown doesn't seem to have published anything in English language. 

The book takes place somewhere in the South, and in it one Berk Marshall, a young guy in his twenties or thirties, goes back home to find out his grandpa is dead, seemingly by accident, but Berk can't fathom how his grandpa could've shot himself, since he was always so careful with guns. Berk finds out someone's been selling grandpa's forest behind his back all the time. The sex scenes involve Berk's two teenage crushes Sammy and Mary Ellen, between whom he really can't choose. There is also a scene with the forest caretaker's wife that the caretaker ushers on to be able to snatch photos of his wife and Berk making it out together so he can file for divorce. In the end, Berk gathers all the suspects together to reveal the guilty one. 

So Little Girl Gone, whoever wrote it, is a legitimate crime novel, with some gun action, fist fights and car chases, with a healthy dose of X-rated sex thrown in. Who wrote it, who published it and when did this happen? Inquiring minds need to know!

Mind you, this is not the only crime novel I've found in the midst of the American sex paperbacks I've been going through lately. There's also Alexander Keith's The Love Gun (published possibly by Bee-Line Books in the early 1970's) that features a murder of a hunting party's member and even some police work. The book takes place in Canada, and Alexander Keith was the name of a famous Canadian politician and businessman, so I presume the writer is actually Canadian, hiding behind a pseudonym which means something only to other Canadians. The book's not bad, though reading these in a row makes it difficult to judge. (I couldn't find exact publishing date for this, but I was able to buy it on Kindle, and the AdultBookCovers site has two other smut titles by Alexander Keith, and they were published by Bee-Line Books, so I presume it's a real book!)