Harry Hobson and the Hank Janson series

I just posted the bibliography of Harry Hobson's outings in the British Hank Janson series on my bibliography blog here. Anyone know anything about Hobson? Nothing much seems to be available.

Herschell Gordon Lewis's third novel?

A friend of mine here in Finland is going to interview the notorious horror/camp director Herschell Gordon Lewis. I mentioned to him that Lewis also wrote novelizations of some of his films and that there were reprints of two of them, Two Thousand Maniacs and Blood Feast. Both came originally from Novel Books in 1963 and 1964, retrospectively, and the reprints came from Fantaco in the late eighties (the cover of the other one on the left).

But I seem to remember there was a third one. I've seen the cover for it somwhere in the web, but can't find it again anywhere. The copies of the original editions seem to be very rare (none in Abebooks at least), but I'm sure there was a third one. Now, can anyone confirm this and tell me what the title of the third HGL novelization was? For some reason I seem to remember it was Monster A-Go-Go, but my friend tells me Lewis has discredited the film so that there wouldn't be much point in him having written a novelization of it. The Wikipedia article on Lewis doesn't mention any of the novels.

Why am I interested in this? I asked my friend to ask Lewis if he would allow doing translations of his novels in Finnish!

EDIT: another friend of mine located the book. It's Color Me Blood Red (Novel Books 1964); see the cover on the left. It's mentioned in this thread of horror movie novelizations and tie-ins. The photo of the book isn't very good, I'm sorry to say.

Unknown pulp heroes, perhaps?

Here's a list I want everyone to look at very hard. They are names of some characters appearing in the Finnish pulp, Seikkailujen Maailma. I believe they are all from translated, American-origin stories. But the stories appeared with no author's names, so I'm at loss here. Can anyone help with these? The stories are hardboiled crime from the 1930's up to the fifties. I know this can be solved, since I already solved one such name: Mike Blair who also appeared in Seikkailujen Maailma without the author's name, but I know now that he was Hank Searls's hero.

Carrhart
Art Casey
Hap Collins [yeah, the same name Lansdale has!]
Matt Devon
Jones
Streak McShea
Pat Muldoon
Joe Portugal
Bulldog Ryan
Stevenson (detective for an airline)
Bill Thorne
Bart Trevor
Jeff Dixon
Sidney Gordon

Glorican, anyone?

I'm writing a little piece on Mika Waltari's obscure poem which contains a word "Glorican". It plays an important part in the poem, but I can't find any reference to a substance called "Glorican". Does anyone know what it is? It's said in the poem that a room is filled with its scent and that the narrator of the poem can smell it for several days afterwards on his skin.

The poem was written in the mid-1920's. It's entirely possible that Waltari has typed the word wrong. (Or the typesetter.)

Can anyone help me out with this?

Pietro Aretino's memoirs fake?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For all you bullies out there

I don't remember whether I've mentioned it here, but I'm editing a book on sex and porn short stories that have been previously published in skin mags or books of the same kind. I've got quite an impressive list of well-known Finnish authors for this, but I'll get back to the book later, I just want to say something about an affair that I found about while digging for rights to use a story by a writer who died not ten years ago.

I got hold of the writer's widow and asked her for a permission to use a story his late husband had written for a porn mag in the mid-eighties. She said she'd think about it and then she got back and said she'd decided no. It turned out that the writer's teenage daughter had been bullied in school because of his father's sometimes quite controversial novels and other writings. The girl had swapped school and seemed much better now and got new friends. It was only understandable that her mother didn't want to see the porn story getting any publicity. And so it won't be in the anthology, which is a shame in itself, but what's more important is that a young girl's identity has been crushed.

Which makes me want to speak out.

So, all you fucking stupid morons: STOP BULLYING! I mean NOW!

RIGHT FUCKING NOW!