My book Pulpografia 2 out

I was finally able to finish and publish the sequel to my first book, Pulpografia, called simply Pulpografia 2. The earlier book came out in 2000, and I wrote the first articles for the new book already two or three years later, so the book has been over twenty years in the making! 

The old book was more about private eye books, and hardboiled and noir writing, with some older spy novels thrown in. There were also Don Pendleton and some other writers of the men's adventure genre. 

This new book concentrates on the newer paperbacks, mainly from the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's, but there are also a scattering of older writers, like Seymour Shubin, whose delightful Anyone's My Name I read only some few years back. (It's not actually a paperback in a strict sense, but I couldn't but add the book, and I also found a true adventure story by Shubin in a Finnish men's magazine, which makes him more pulpish.) 

There are lots of keywords for the men's adventure writers, and I must say I'm really not fond of the genre. Many books are written poorly and there's simply not enough action. Many of the series focus on a group of men, and they all talk before the action commences. What's the thing with that? There are also many Nick Carter writers, and man, do they vary! Some are very good, and some are very bad. I also had a chance to talk with some authors (for example the poets Henry Rasof and Stephen Williamson, whose The Dubrovnik Massacre must be the worst in the Nick Carter saga - but they shared some funny anecdotes). I got to thinking that someone could make some money reprinting some of the better Nick Carters. For example, Martin Cruz Smith did some fantastic work with the books. But I guess the owner of the rights is an obstacle, and maybe contracts prohibit reprints. One author stood out in my opinion: Ralph Hayes, whose Taggart books seem very good in their genre. I found Con Sellers' career also very interesting, and he was an intriguing writer. 

The new book isn't the only or the first sequel to the earlier Pulpografia, since I've also published a book on Western paperbacks (called Kuudestilaukeavat, "Six-Guns") and books on British crime paperbacks and American sleaze paperbacks. They were called, respectively, Pulpografia Britannica and Pulpografia Erotica. (There's also a small volume on Western short stories published in Finnish in different fictionmags, called "Five-Guns".) I call the new book a direct sequel to Pulpografia, and the others are thematic sequels. 

Alas, the book is only in Finnish. My attempts to publish in English (look here) haven't been very successful, but of course I do know that the glory days of my blog have been long gone. If I had published the book, say, fifteen years ago, someone would've probably recognized me as the author of Pulpetti. Then again, for some reason or another, I didn't get the e-book in Amazon, and Dark Places and Little Tramps is only available in print, which makes the book pricey. 

Here are some links to the reviews of the books I write about in my book: Don Smith, Lee Raintree aka Con Sellers, Michael Brett, George Snyder. 

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!)

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. 

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). 

Sixties' sleaze twofer: Mark Clements's The Boss's Daughter & Ken Kane's Racket Babe

Hello again, it's been a while, huh? I got back to doing my book on American sleaze paperbacks translated in Finnish and read these two old paperbacks, both written in the mid-sixties and published in Finland in the early seventies. Neither one was very good, and not much is known about the authors, but here goes nevertheless. I realize both of the translations are possibly abridged, but I have no reasonable way to check it.  

Mark Clements's The Boss's Daughter (Midwood, 1965) is about Brad Kirby, a well-to-do newspaper man, whose wife is beautiful, but frigid at times. The wife also happens to be Kirby's employer, a wealthy and influential business tycoon. Kirby finds out his wife might possibly have an affair, and in a jealous rage he has sex with the neighbor's wife. After this his wife's good-looking bombshell of a little sister is coming to visit. She is a nymphomaniac and has decided to have sex with as many men as possible, so he starts immediately to hit on Kirby. The kid sister's own escapades are also described. The climax should be a thrilling foursome, but for some reason it all boils down to a short ending chapter, where it's just stated some of the folks were arrested. Brad Kirby's marriage also didn't cease. It's all somewhat interesting, but not very intriguing. The crime element of many other sleaze novels is missing completely. The description of class differences between Brad Kirby and his wife and father-in-law are dealt with, but not in detail. The scene between Kirby and his employer seems to be missing, so the book leaves much to be desired. 

Ken Kane's Racket Babe (Bell-Ringer 1965) is a less interesting book, though it has some merit as a lesbian prison novel. The episode which is mentioned in the original cover (see below) is very short, though. Racket Babe is like two different authors wrote it: the beginning and the ending are intolerably sweet and romantic, while the middle part is dark and relentless, with all its violent depictions  of swindles, the chaste system of the women's prison and the difficulties to get work while in parole. 

The racket babe of the title is Connie, who falls in love with a young soldier named Derek. They are separated (because of a stupid scheme to meet in three weeks' time) and Connie is running on empty. He falls in with a guy called Duke, who plays poker for money and sets up Connie with married men to strongarm them. Connie and Duke get arrested, and Connie is sent to prison, where she keeps company to a butch called Timmy and gets protection in return. After the prison, she's on parole, but the only job she gets is a lousy diner where she doesn't get enough pay and is told to lie about the money to the parole officer. Then she gets the proposition to become the diner's owner's paid lover. Connie flees, but notices soon she can't hold up on her own and is ready to become the lover, but - then she suddenly meets Derek again! Derek is now handsome and wealthy and bears absolutely no grudges. Happy end. You hear what I'm saying? No way this is a one-man job! 

One other thing that bothered me: there's a mention of the Korean war like it happened just some years ago. And yet this

was published in 1965, 12 years after the war! Is this really a reprint of a fifties' book that no one edited for its second edition? 

One thing that keeps me from blogging is how lousy Blogger's photo editor is nowadays! It was perfectly okay, but then they messed it up this Fall. I've uploaded some of the photos in this post for four or five times already, and now I just can't do it anymore, so let the chips fall where they may. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Gardner F. Fox: Barbary Slave

We did a week-long trip to Chania and Gerani in Crete, and I took, as usual with our trips, my Kindle along. I didn't get to read much (who can do that with a three-year old kid on a same trip?), but I managed to get through one novel. I think that's pretty good given the circumstances. And hey, I also wanted to the beach!

The book in question was Barbary Slave that I'd loaded free on my Kindle. It was written by Gardner F. Fox who's best known as one of the more prolific writers for DC Comics and the creator of the DC Multiverse, alongside with several DC characters. I'm not really into superheroes, but Fox interests me as a contributor to pulp magazines (westerns, sports, science fiction) and as a paperback writer. His reputation hasn't been very good, seems like he could be a sloppy writer with cardboard characters. I thought, though, I might be entertained for a short while reading Barbary Slave. I'd started earlier a new thriller with an interesting premise, but given up after some pages, since there was just too much disposition and not enough action. I'd also started one of Gardner Fox's science fiction novels, but that seemed only ridiculous.

But Barbary Slave proved to be pretty entertaining. Sure, it was racist and chauvinistic as all hell, but I still enjoyed the heck out of it. The action starts from page one and almost never slows down. Barbary Slave is a fast-moving swashbuckler set in the early 19th century Tunis, during First Barbary War (war I knew almost nothing about until now), and the hero is an American navy lieutenant called Fletcher. In the beginning of the book he's already been a slave for several months and been digging food from ditches. He manages to rise from the gutter only to find himself a guardian of a harem. The queen lusts for Fletcher and tries to conquer him with all her might. The book has all the plot twists of several Game of Thrones episodes, with all the violence depicted in an old-fashioned, at times almost ecliptic style, and without the rapes. I actually thought this could've been a Conan novel, set in a fantastic setting, instead of a historically accurate (or at least one pretending to be) setting. Many of the chapters end in a cliffhanger, which kept me turning the pages, though Fox's writing style is florid. This is strictly purple prose, but it's almost never too purple. I also know next to nothing about ships or fencing, but Fox seems to have known was he was writing about.

The racism, though... almost all the Arabs and Moslems in the book are either stupid or cruel and sadistic - or both. The only heroic Arab is an armless man who's been tortured wildly by rulers. There's also no way Fletcher could fall in love with the harem's queen or another Arab woman, there has to be a white American woman who he can fall in love with safely. But given the book's age, this all is somewhat understandable.

The book was originally published as by Kevin Matthews by Popular Library in 1955, but it's been reprinted as Gardner F. Fox for quite a few times now. I noticed the e-book was free through illustrator Kurt Brugel's newsletter (for a limited time, it's not free anymore); he's bringing all of Fox's novels out as e-books. There were some formatting errors throughout the book, but not too many. Here's another review if you don't believe me.

More Forgotten Books at Patricia Abbott's blog here.

Swedish paperback cover for Edward Aarons

I found this book in a trash bin and decided I should at least salvage its illustrated cover.

The book, originally Assignment - Treason is the second one to come out in Edward S. Aarons' Assignment series that took its protagonist, Sam Durell all over the world. The books are at least serviceable, if nothing great to my mind. The Swedish edition came out in 1959 from Wennerbergs Förlag, translated into Swedish by Margareta Sahlström. The illustration is by Mitchell Hooks. It wasn't originally meant for this book. "Förräderi" means "treason" in English.

Swedish paperback covers

I found some Swedish paperbacks and other books in our house's trash bin. Took them out, but decided that I had no use for them, so tossed them back. I scanned the covers, included are some tidbits on the books and writers.

Two crime covers for American paperbacks.
The right one is by the great Bertil Hegland. 

James Morris was, if I recall, the pseudonym of Niels Meyn (in the other photo),
under which he wrote a series of Tarzan copies with Jukan.
I don't know who Jack Morris was.
Alibi-magazinet was a Swedish digest-sized fictionmag,
devoted to crime stories. Each issue had one story.

Niels Meyn was a Danish author, mainly of children's books.
This scifi title means "Around the World in 80 Hours".
See his Wikipedia page here.

Vernon Warren wrote pseudo-American private eye books
in the fifties, his hero was called Brandon. Not quite bad, actually,
I've read one and would possibly read another.

Frank Castle: Lovely and Lethal

After Brian Evenson's weird and effective The Open Curtain I thought I'd be in the mood for something lighter, maybe something old, maybe something pulpy (or paperbacky). I have tons of old paperbacks in my shelves, but not enough to time for them. So I thought I'd read one.

I read two or three westerns by Frank Castle when I was doing my book on American westerns paperbackers called Kuudestilaukeavat ("Six Guns" in English) and liked them well enough to try one of his crime novels. I picked up Lovely and Lethal, a Gold Medal paperback from 1957, and started it - and pretty soon dropped it and moved on to something else.

Lovely and Lethal is a bit like a private eye novel, but the hero of the book, one Jeff Normand, is actually a lawyer moving to a small town and getting acquainted with both the high society and the low-life of the place pretty quickly. He meets a beautiful dame, whose sister had possibly killed herself, but in odd circumstances. Normand starts to unravel the mystery behind the sister's death.

Castle's prose style is flat and not very interesting, not even very hardboiled, though I remember his westerns were pretty tough. The characters in Lovely and Lethal are pretty much stock. There's too much talk, not enough action. So Lovely and Lethal proved a bit boring and thought I'd read something else instead. And the book has a boring cover. Where's Robert McGinnis when you need him? There are enough sultry babies in the book to warrant a nice GGA cover!

Here's my earlier post on Frank Castle and his later crime novel "Sowers of the Doom" that seems to have been published only in Finland, and here's Castle on Steve Lewis's MysteryFile blog. I'm beginning to think that the book published in Finland only was the last one on Castle's career, unless he moved on to markets where he used only pseudonyms, writing porn or some such, and the pseudonyms have never come to light.

I'm now reading Michael Marshall's The Straw Men and enjoying it more.

Paul Denver: The Deadly Chance (1973)

Okay, I'm cheating here a bit. This is one of the books I'm including in my forth-coming book on British paperback crime fiction. I only browsed through the book while cycling at the gym. I think that's enough for this book, which isn't exactly quality stuff.

Paul Denver was one of the pseudonyms used by the British writer Douglas Enefer. He has no Wikipedia entry, but there's always Goodreads. I've read some of his books starring private eye Michael Power, they are mildly ok, mediocre but still entertaining enough. (Actually I first thought, over ten years ago when I was writing my first book, Pulpografia, that Denver was American.) Enefer also wrote some Cannon novelizations as by Paul Denver, and the titular The Deadly Chance is one of them. I believe the story went like this: when the bona fide American Cannon novelizations (written by Richard Gallagher) ran out, the British publisher World Distributors asked Denver to write more of them. And that's just what he did. I don't know whether Denver wrote on an outline or a screenplay of an episode or whether he just made it all up. I'll have to check that out.

The first problem is that Denver/Enefer can't write like an American. There's always a feeling someone's cheating. Denver/Enefer is clever enough though to keep descriptions at minimum. The dialogue also gives the Britishness of the author away, but that doesn't happen all that often in the Finnish translation (though it at times adds layers of its own). The story is a bit silly with its depiction of a small town drug scene, but there's a twist that might keep the reader interested. I say "might", because I skipped lots that went on interim. There's something tired about the book.

There are good British paperback crime novels out there, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. Included is the Finnish edition from 1976, published in a series that consisted only of TV novelizations.

Edit: I changed the publisher from Consul to World Distributors. They put out the Cannon novelizations written by Paul Denver. Consul published earlier paperbacks by Denver.

Gil Brewer: The Brat

I meant to do this for the Friday's Forgotten Book series, but I didn't have enough time on my hands. I've been rather tired lately - frustrated even - and am already on some sort of a Christmas vacation (which the tax refund, paid to me by the state of Finland, makes possible). I've been doing too much work for the past couple of years and it's starting to show.

Sorry, didn't mean to vent. Gil Brewer's The Brat (1957) is a prime example of Brewer's mix of white-collar noir and backwoods exoticism: "the brat" of the title is a sultry babe living somewhere in the Florida swamps whom the lead man takes away to the civilization to live with her - only to notice that "the brat" has something in her mind.

I'm sure The Brat was the publisher's title, since this babe sure is no brat, she's an evil liar and a scumbag. You might call Brewer - or at least his books - misogynistic and you'd well be right. But there's no denying the simple, yet forceful narrative drive in the best of his works. An important issue is also his handling of the bourgeoisie despair: there's not much living beyond the boundaries of the family and work. And when these boundaries break, the nightmare awaits.

I don't really like the cover of the book. It looks like the femme fatale of the book is wearing diapers.

The book is readily available from Prologue Books as an e-book. (I read this from my Kindle and I'm not complaining any about it.)

Friday's Forgotten Book: Robert Colby: The Captain Must Die

Thanks to Kindle and Prologue Books, I was finally able to read this magnificent crime paperback by Robert Colby that has been getting praise from the likes of Ed Gorman for some years now. I've earlier read some very good short stories by Colby and his paperback novel Beautiful but Bad (Monarch 1962), but this one has eluded me. Not anymore, of which I'm very glad.

The Captain Must Die (Gold Medal 1959) is one of those late fifties to early sixties noir paperbacks that tell about paranoia, broken dreams and people's hatred towards each other. This is firmly set in the world of well-being suburbs and tells about what's going behind the happy facade. This is also about the effects of war and the frustration that it breeds. Colby weaves his plot smoothly, albeit he has also fragmented it in a way that seems way ahead of its time - at least for a 50-year old crime paperback! Some scenes are very exciting and suspenseful. The ending may a be a bit too happy, though. (The cover lets us suppose it's a war novel. It's not - the war is in the background all the time.)

Here's Cullen Callagher on Colby's novel, and here's Ed Gorman, calling it a masterpiece. Here's Peter Enfantino's essay on Colby. Load the novel here. (And congrats to Prologue Books for doing this. There were some formatting and scanning errors in the Kindle version, but not so many that I'd actually complain.)

More Forgotten Books here.

Axel Kilgore: The Terror Contract

For some days now I've been reading Six Seconds by Rick Mofina which is only remotely interesting, though it got off to a good start. After a while I got bored with Mofina's over-anxious way to make his humans alive and four-dimensional and his a bit too obvious story about Muslim terrorists, and as I was going through some boxes here at my study I came across a copy of  men's adventure paperback from 1987: The Terror Contract as by "Axel Kilgore". (The Finnish title of the paperback is Tappava enkeli that means "The Deadly Angel". The series title was translated literally as "Palkkasoturi".) I thought: "What the heck!", and as there was some leisurely time at my hands at the moment I started to read the book. It was way better than Mofina's.

Axel Kilgore was really Jerry Ahern, who's better known for his science fiction series called The Survivalist. I've pretty much avoided them, but The Terror Contract seemed so well-built that I might try one or two Survivalists one day. The hero of The Terror Contract and the whole Mercenary series is Hank Frost, one-eyed freelance spy, a tough guy who really knows his way in a battle. The book is about helping a Leftist terrorist to elope the Eastern Europe - there are lots of complications, though, and plenty of shoot-outs. The book is very fast, with no empty holes in it, and the action scenes are crisp and not overtly long, though they can go on for pages. Seems like this type of thing was something I missed.

There are many differences between The Terror Contract and Mofina's Six Seconds, even though they are aimed at similar markets (of course in totally different times). Mofina tries very hard to be convincing and make his people feel personal to the reader whereas Jerry Ahern couldn't care less, but with this gesture I care more about Hank Frost than anybody in Six Seconds. There's a longer story arc in The Mercenary books in which Frost seeks his girlfriend who was killed in a terrorist bombing, which makes for some melodramatic reading, but then again it's pretty nice compared to the lukewarm and forced emotionalism of Mofina. The Terror Contract is honest in its crudeness and simplicity, while Six Seconds is a mediocre attempt to bring depth into a simple spy thriller.

Having said all that I must add that I'd never share Ahern's political views. But then again he doesn't go on and on about them in The Terror Contract. There's also lots of gun porn, which seems like Ahern's trademark, but I can live with that. At least the action usually starts from the next page after Frost has described his weaponry.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Max Brand: Jim Silver, hjälten från Arizona

Don't have time to do a proper Forgotten Book entry, so a photo of a Max Brand translated in Finland, but published in Swedish will have to do.

The book was published by Schildts (still in business, after all these years, but doing mainly books in Finnish) in 1949. It was a part of their Pocket-serie series that had 23 books in it. It was one of the first real paperback series published in Finland. They had also one other Jim Silver book in the line. I don't know who the cover illustrator is, but the art is pretty nice.

The title of the book means "Jim Silver, the hero from Arizona" and the book belongs to the Silvertip series. I have no way of knowing if the Swedish translation is abridged or done from a condensed version of the original magazine version, as I don't really read Swedish. Actually I'm going to throw the book away (if no one comes to rescue), since, well, we are moving and something needs to be thrown away. I already started from a book club edition of a Tess Gerritsen novel.

More Forgotten Books here, at George Kelley's blog!

Friday's Forgotten Books: Operation Sex by Kimberly Kemp and an unknown sleaze book by Gerald Kramer

For just the fun of it, I picked up recently two old sex paperbacks (in Finnish translation) and read them. The first one of them I actually said to my wife was research, since I'm writing a sex novel set in a roadside motel, and the Finnish title of the book I read was Seksimotelli/Sex Motel (the original title is said to be Swap Motel, though). If I could pick up an obscure reference to use, I'd be more than happy!

The other book I read was Operation: Sex by "Kimberly Kemp" (Operaatio seksi in Finnish), who was really Gilbert Fox. He used this pseudonym in other novels as well. I find this information on him at the Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collective site: "Gilbert Fox (b. 1917) was a friend of Harry Shorten, the founder of Midwood Books, and the author of over 100 titles for the line using the pseudonyms Kimberley Kemp and Dallas Mayo for his lesbian novels and Paul Russo for his heterosexual novels." The book was published originally by Midwood in 1962 and features actually quite a nice cover. The prices for the book seem to be quite high! The Finnish translation should go for less than five euros.

Operation: Sex is a fast read. It's a spy novel, in which a beautiful dancer Colleen Mead is asked to act as an undercover agent and take part in a mysterious flight. There's a mystery man in the plane as well, and also a very beautiful woman who starts to flirt with Colleen, but also takes something out of the mystery man's pockets when the plane crashes down in the sea. The women are rescued by a famous playboy cruising around in his orgy-filled yacht. There's a bit of everything in this: some spy action, some lesbian scenes, some mild domination, a near-rape scene in the end... As I said, it's a quick read, but there's really nothing much to think about.

For some reason I found Gerald Kramer's Seksimotelli more interesting. It's bibliographically challenging, since I can't find any publishing info for it. Gerald Kramer, whoever he was, did write porn and sleaze for publishers like Midwood, as this blog proves. I took a look at Abebooks and was able to come up with this short bibliography. Anyone know more about Kramer?

Seksimotelli/Swap Motel is a loosely narrated tale of a young man who owns a small roadside motel. He gets into weird escapades: in the beginning of the book, there's a young couple coming into the hotel, with the man being obnoxious and abrasive while flirting and the girl resisting. The young man peeks into their room and witnesses bad sex after which the couple falls into sleep. As the motel owner has the gift of hypnotism, he goes in and hypnotizes the woman and starts to caress her tits. The young guy is then lured into a strange plot: the husband comes in several days later and says that if he won't come to a party with him to hypnotize more people to have sex, he goes public with the hypnotism stuff. Some even more weird escapades follow. This is a picaresque novel for the free-wheelin' sixties. There's not much sense in it, but it's fun in a sort of depraved way. The motel owner is a heel, but he's a sympathetic heel, who feels sorry for the cruel jokes his victims are inflicted upon. One of the weird details in the book is the code word the guy uses trying to get the girl of his dreams: Kropotkin, the name of the famous Russian anarchist. This goes on to prove that there's more than meets the eye in the American sleaze literature of the sixties.

One detail for my Finnish readers: as an euphemism for "penis/dick/kyrpä/kikkeli" the Finnish translator (the pseudonymous Kaino V.T. Sievänen) uses quite often the humorous and not so exciting word "kikuli".

The Finnish books were published in the sleazy Cocktail paperback series in the early seventies. The publisher came from Turku where I live and they also published the porn magazine with the same name.

Other Forgotten Book entries collected in Todd Mason's blog here.

John Quinn's Terminator novel

I finished Justin Cronin's massive vampire novel The Passage (Ensimmäinen siirtokunta in Finnish) yesterday and wrote a review of it for the local newspaper. I enjoyed the novel quite a bit and can recommend it; now, suffice to say that any friend of long, epic western novel should try The Passage.

After finishing the 850-page The Passage I wanted to read something quick. I had recently found a free copy of an eighties' men's adventure paperback, John Quinn's The Kill Squad (1983) - or actually the Finnish translation of it, called Nitistäjä ja salamurhaajat (1985). Since Quinn's hero Rod Gavin is called Terminator after the "best" men's adventure fashion, calling him Nitistäjä in Finnish doesn't really work, since it sounds like he's hiding in the bushes and shoots in the back. The other two Quinn translations, Silicon Valley Laughter/Kamikazemurhaaja and Mercenary Kill/Viimeinen isku, don't carry the Nitistäjä label. The author behind the John Quinn pseudonym is presumably Dennis Rodriguez, who's probably written lots of these kind of books.

Okay, back to the book. I read the book in one hour or so, which is a virtue in itself. As for the other virtues in the book...

The book's kinda episodic and there's not much plot, basically just scenes put together. The premise is kinda interesting: a group of terrorists hides behind the survivalist group working somewhere in Arkansas, seemingly scheming to kill president Reagan (why in Arkansas of all places is never clear) and seemingly getting instructions from someone in the US federal state organization. The book's also kinda erotic or even pornographic, as almost every baddie in the book seems to get sexual satisfaction from beating up and killing women. In the end, the book's kinda clichéd. Kinda?

I started to think about Rod Gavin, the Terminator of the title. What right does he have to use the Terminator label? He doesn't do anything in the book. If he really were the Terminator, he'd be able to prevent at least some of the killings and slayings in the book, don't you think? Instead he's hit in the head and while he's unconscious, two thugs torture and kill a nice young lady. (Okay, he does kill them later, but that doesn't much help the young lady.) Similar thing happens also later in the book. Only in the end, he gets to shoot some of the baddies, but it comes all too late after several innocents have been maimed. To my surprise, I began to hope Mike Hammer would step in and start hitting some teeth with his gun. Rod Gavin is a wimp, if you ask me!

Here's another review of the book at Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot. He seems to basically agree with me.

The Finnish cover of the paperback seems to be an exact copy of the original one, which is kinda rare in the history of the Finnish paperback publishing.

Floyd Smith's Action Girls

Remember? Well, it wasn't that long ago. Last Summer I wrote a Forgotten Book entry about an obscure sex paperback called Action Girls, by one Floyd Smith. I couldn't find any bibliographic info for the book.

Just now I got a comment from a used-book seller, called Rags & Bones Antiquarian Books:

I am a bookseller and I do have a paperback copy in English of Action Girls by Floyd Smith. It was published by Midwood Publications, New York 1977.

To which I replied:

It must've been a reprint in 1977, since it was published in Finnish as early as 1974. It could've been a trunk novel that sold in English only in 1977, but somehow I don't think that was the case here.

It's possible we never know. It's also possible that no one really cares. I'd like to know, though. Maybe it's another Harry Whittington looming... maybe not.

Harlequin's vintage collection

Someone pointed out earlier today at the Rara-Avis e-mail list (which is focused on hardboiled and noir crime writing) that Harlequin is bringing back into print some old crime novels. Here's a link. There are two titles by James Hadley Chase - I think those were reprints already back in the day. The other three novels are pretty obscure. The Dale Bogard one, Pardon My Body (gotta love these titles!), was first published by Harlequin in 1951 - so it was one of their early original crime paperbacks, before they started concentrating on romance. "Dale Bogard" was a pseudonym for a British paperback hack Douglas Enefer, who wrote lots of other stuff, too, like some Cannon TV tie-ins in the seventies.

I can't find any info on Perry Lindsay's No Nice Girl, but Alan Handley's Kiss Your Elbow (Kiss Your Elbow?) was originally published by McKay in 1948. The reprint came from Pyramid in 1950, under the pretty different-sounding title Terror in Times Square, but there must've been a Harlequin one.

The fact that Harlequin is doing these under the original illustrated covers must have something to with Hard Case Crime. You see, they created a fashion! (Or, actually, recreated.)

Okay, I couldn't leave this unchecked: Perry Lindsay was the same writer as Peggy Gaddis, who started out back in the 1920's and continued penning cheap romance and sleaze way into the sixties. No Nice Girl was a Phoenix Press title in 1946 and the Harlequin reprint came in 1949. This information comes from Abebooks and is highly suspectible, but I'd like to hear otherwise.

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.

I don't really know why I read this..

..but I was entertained by the idea. Just a basic novelization fodder which wouldn't work if it were not for the movie. Arnold's character, Eraser, isn't really described in any sense and you'll have to picture him in your head while you're reading the book. The love angle is pretty blandly narrated.

Some of the scenes containing violence border on sadism - this makes me think whether there's a difference between a written word and a piece of action cinema: the things that on screen only make me laugh (or sigh...) make me cringe when I'm reading them. Is this because we take the written word more seriously? Or is it because we have to picture the torture in our own mind? Or are we only accustomed to action movies being more and more violent - when the same things are described on page, we wake up to the notion: "Hey, this is pretty friggin' sick sadism!"

There's not much on Robert Tine in the web. He seems to be born in 1954 (or in 1955) and he's written mainly novelizations and tie-ins. Here's a list. In his early career in the mid-eighties, he wrote the postapocalyptic Outrider series as by Robert Harding, which I believe is a house pseudonym, shared also by other writers. If I'm wrong about this, please correct me.

Here's a link to the original cover.