Thundercrack!

With the same people I saw the stupendous Hard Ticket to Hawaii I recently watched another cult classic, Thundercrack! It's - umm, what can I say? - stupendous. It's a hilarious spoof of old silent film melodramas and the liberated porn of the seventies. It's shot in black & white and the action takes place in a house that looks like it's haunted, but the people inside the house seem to be only interested in getting each other to bed. Some problems arise from a love-sick gorilla seeking someone to hold hands with. And a locked door behind which there's a man with huge testicles... (The DVD we watched seemed to slightly cut from these scenes, so I can't really say what was behind this subplot.)

Thundercrack! is surely not for everyone, as there's lots and lots of rough sex of many kinds (this must be the only film in the annals of cinema in which a gorilla jerks off another man), and it surely is not necessarily for those who take their films seriously, as it is not very well made or acted. There are occasional moments of genius at work, bits here and there in dialogue (which is absurdly hilarious at times) and in cinematography and editing. At times Thundercrack! looks like a Soviet silent film, something made by Lev Kuleshov or Vsevolod Pudovkin. I'm not sure if this is intentional.

Thundercrack! was directed by one Curt McDowell and written by George Kuchar, better known as one of the Kuchar brothers, the famous underground movie makers of the sixties. This was Kuchar's attempt at mainstream cinema - looks like he couldn't have made a proper mainstream film even if he had tried very, very hard. (Kuchar also plays one of the leads.)

Thundercrack! is pretty hard to describe. It is a bit too long (well, not only a bit - it's almost 30 minutes too long) and it's best to see with some beer and good friends with whom you can laugh your ass off. Yet it's worth tracking down - if you're into this kind of thing, that is.

It's interesting to note, though, that while Thundercrack! is strictly an underground movie, it's totally free of any political content. I wrote recently about John Carpenter's They Live, a so-so horror-cum-action movie from the late eighties. It is much more political than Thundercrack!, and for some reason or another I find this, well, interesting. Is it often that there's more politics in the marginals of popular culture than there is in subversive underground culture?

One extra point: I'm sure David Lynch picked something up from this movie, especially the way Isabella Rossellini looks like in Wild at Heart. The woman living in the haunted-looking house looks exactly like her - and even the way she acts, mumbling to herself, throwing up over her wig that falls down the toilet, could be from a Lynch movie.

Marton Taiga's SF stories

Posted a little bibliographic piece on a Finnish pulp writer, Marton Taiga, and his science fiction stories on another blog of mine here.

My daughter

I haven't been blogging much - that's mainly because my daughter (now 10 years old, 11 later this year) is spending her Winter holiday in Finland and has been mainly staying with us for this week. She's going to her mother in a couple of hours and they are leaving back abroad early tomorrow morning. These are always difficult moments. My daughter is shy and doesn't really seem interested in getting melodramatic, so it's just normal life before we part again - she's playing with Kauto, I'm sitting at the computer, Elina is tidying up places, we're talking casually about lunch. And then it's all over again for five weeks.

John Carpenter's They Live

Okay, back to normal after The Great Jimi Ellroy Experience. Haven't really felt like working (even though I've done some editing*) and I've been watching movies. On an old VHS tape I watched John Carpenter's They Live. I've never really felt easy with Carpenter - he's at the same time skillful and pedestrian. His direction is sometimes good, but his scripts are blah. They Live is more interesting, though, than many of his films.

I was wondering why a writer in a video guide (from 1993, I use this frequently while I'm on sofa watching telly, but can't tell who's behind the book) says that the two thirds of the film are "harebrained fun", while the same two thirds are also very serious and almost subversive! How many films have you seen from the late eighties in which the US police attacks a slum village populated with homeless and unemployed people? And how many in which there's a large conspiracy to get people to obey and just consume happily? I just gotta give Carpenter credit for being so bold in his satire. He also has some nice male-bonding touches that are reminiscent of classic Western films.

But then everything changes. The film becomes a mediocre action-fest, with lots of shotguns and not much tension. The satire is almost lost. But then again, the idea of the yuppies of the late eighties as aliens... there's something in there.

The actors are not very good, especially wrestler Roddy Piper in the lead hasn't got much of a charisma. (And he has a very stupid hair.) And his character does so many mind-boggling things it's a wonder he stays alive.

* I did the final edits for my translation of Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde. It will be out in June as Vaaleaverikkö. I also edited a Finnish crime novel manuscript that will be published next Fall. More on that later.

A Google translation

Okay, here's a Google translation of my Ellroy interview if you want to take a look. It's pretty bad and awkward and there are some Finnish words in there, but take a look anyway. I've never done this before and don't know how long the link will work.

Ellroy and me: The Final Countdown

Some things you need to know about James Ellroy:

1. he doesn't like journalists or interviewers
2. he likes women more than men
3. he doesn't like fans
4. he wants to control the interviewing process (I believe he controls those made by women reporters by flirting)

Okay, I know I'm not necessarily the world's best interviewer, even when I conduct them in Finnish, but you'd think the interviewee would want to take some of the responsibility. Apparently not, when we talk about James Ellroy. Just before me he talked with a young female reporter who asked what Ellroy's first impression of Finland was and such pretty light-fare stuff. Ellroy seemed relaxed and talked with his feet up on the coffee table. Okay, I can handle this, I told myself - being of course very, very nervous about the whole thing.

But when I walked up to Ellroy and told him I'm a fan and have been reading his novels for over 15 years, I noticed instantly he stiffened up and went into a defensive mood. What gives here? You don't want to hear someone likes your novels? That shouldn't be my problem, should it? I can understand there are fans who are pains in the ass, but I wouldn't call myself that.

We started off pretty well, though, with me speaking in rather clumsy English - I don't know why this sometimes happens, but it just did. Then I made a mistake in my questions: I asked Ellroy about Haiti. "Haiti?! What have I got to say about Haiti?!" Well, I tried to reason, you write about Haiti in Blood's a Rover, CIA and the mob are taking it over... "Wait, wait, it's not Haiti, it's the Dominican Republic, they are two different things." Oops! I had got fixated on Haiti for some reason and honestly thought it's Haiti they are invading with casinos and all and hadn't bothered to check my copy of Blood's a Rover. My bad, totally. Apparently after that I was nobody in Ellroy's books: total moron who hasn't even read the books. I said I was sorry about my mistake, but it was all downhill from there.

Especially when I wanted to talk about politics. I think Ellroy's books are hugely political - they are mostly about how politics and the negative feelings (anger, jealousy, lust, aggression) intertwine in national and global level -, but clearly he doesn't want to talk about that. I know he's said that he doesn't want to write about later times, i.e. Nixon, Carter, the Bushes, Reagan etc., but I still wanted to ask about that, especially the Reagan era. "Don't you think there would be many fascinating characters, like Oliver North..." At this point, Ellroy gets mad, waves a finger at me and yells: "Don't! Stop right there! Reagan is one of my heroes. I'm sure history will prove him right. He defeated Communism." This, of course, made its way into my article and has, perhaps deservedly, become somewhat of a cult item, alongside with Ellroy's rant that he hates Communism, since he doesn't want to pay more taxes. "Look at Sweden! They pay fucking huge taxes and they are still all drunks." I seriously don't know what Ellroy meant with this.

But as I said, I got a great article about this. I had to write it on spot, in two hours and send it along right away, the article of 5000 characters. I knew instantly that I had to write it from the viewpoint of the author getting angry at the interviewer. It worked miraculously well. This is one of the best pieces I'll ever write, period. Someone said to me that it was better than the interview published in Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland. Don't know about that, but at least it was different from any other interview Ellroy made during his three-day visit in Finland.

Any new info from Ellroy himself? Well, he'll have a new book out next Fall: The Hilliker Curse is about the women in his life. And he'll be writing another quartet set longer back in time. He'll abandon the stylistic excess (he didn't want to elaborate). He's not going to write the Warren Harding novel.

I'll post the interview here. Use Google to try to make sense out of it. Hope it works. And here's, with a Google translation, a short news item about how Ellroy got mad at a Swedish reporter, mainly for similar reasons.

Ellroy and me

How did it go? HOW DID IT GO? Oh boy, how it went. Ellroy pretty much went to his defensive mood and started attacking me and I got too clumsy and made some stupid mistakes and it didn't really go very well. He got sore, very sore, and got mad at me at one point. (Not sure, of course, whether he was just fucking with me.)

But: I got a great story. James Ellroy pissed off in Finland? You can't have better stuff than that!

More details later! But not the recording of the interview! I'll destroy it the first minute I can.

James Ellroy and me: on Sunday

I'll be interviewing none other than James Ellroy on coming Sunday - he's on PR tour and will be in Finland for two days, with at least two public performances. I'm wildly excited and very, very, VERY nervous about this and I'm pretty much afraid I'll screw up something.

Any hints, folks? Is there someone who's interviewed Ellroy? How can one stop his panty-sniffin' act and get to the point? I've got only half an hour for this and I'm afraid we'll spend it listening to him howling.

Seppo Huunonen's exploitation flick from the seventies

Finland has nearly never produced a good share of trashy exploitation flicks. Teuvo Tulio's noir films from the fourties and fifties had some of that quality, as did some of Veikko Itkonen's films, but the only real entrepreneur in that category has been Visa Mäkinen whose indie-produced films have been very poor indeed, almost up to the so-bad-it's-good point.

There's a serious contender, however, lurking in the early seventies. Seppo Huunonen's Karvat (Hair - don't get this mixed up with, well, Hair) from 1974 is just that: trashy exploitation flick. I think it purports to be something else, since there's a good dose of parody, irony and metafictional narrative in the film. There are many things in the film that make it a forgotten classic (it was released in video in the early eighties, but otherwise it has disappeared completely, it has never been shown on television, for example): Paroni Paakkunainen's great funky music (which I'll steal when I make my feature film debut), some very bloody violence (this was X-rated, which is very rare for a Finnish film), lots of sex and nudity plus all-encompassing sleaziness. The most exciting fact is that this was based on Lionel White's Obsession (1962), American paperback original classic that was earlier filmed as Pierrot le fou by Jean-Luc Godard! I don't know whether Seppo Huunonen knew about Godard's film, but it's still amazing. And this must be the only film made in Finland that's based on an American crime novel. (White's first name is written as "Lionell" in the credits.)

The film is a mixed bag. As I said, there are some self-parodic moments, and several leave with a strong WTF sensation, especially the scene in which a couple making love is photographed with animated handkerchiefs! There's also a weird allusion to an European Disney character, Super-Goofy (Superhessu) and one friggin' weird resurrection. This makes the film pretty awkward to watch at times, but it also makes it wild and unpredictable. What also makes the film pretty awkward is that the actors are all pretty bad, without charisma or even good looks. You'd think that with this kind of noir story the femme fatale should be a knock-out, but not in this one, no sir! The film isn't a total turkey, though, as this review says it is.

The film is coming - on my suggestion, even though I watched it only now - to the festival of Finnish film in Turku in the beginning of April, but I'll be posting details later. Strongly recommended, if you're anywhere near Turku. Determined to be a cult classic!

Ah, by the way: there's a scene in the film in which the protagonist reads Shakespeare's condensed plays. There's another book on the sofa. It's upside down, but the cover up. I recognized it immediately, but had to go to the shelf to verify: it was the Finnish translation of Margaret Millar's noir classic A Stranger in My Grave/Muukalainen haudassani.

Sorry, no pictures!

Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep

I've written about Megan Abbott's earlier novels here and here. I found some extra time to read her latest, Bury Me Deep, that's been praised quite a lot in different media. It's worthy of the praise, but it's more literary and slow-paced than many of the new noir novels that have been getting attention lately. I think it's the most literary novel of Megan Abbott's works, even though Queenpin came very close to being a good example of postmodern historical novel.

Bury Me Deep is a story about a young woman who gets mixed up in foul play, usually conducted by men, just like in other novels by Megan Abbott. There are also other women, who are not what they first seem to be. Bury Me Deep takes place in 1931 and it is full of historical details, but they are quite nicely worked into the narrative flow. Especially tuberculosis plays a pretty big part in the novel.

I had some trouble getting into the rhythm of the narrative and the seemingly very accurate early thirties' vocabulary and slang, but after the things get rough, I noticed I was able to read faster. There's lots of irony and ambiguity in the ending. Abbott also has a good afterword in which she tells about the true story behind the book - which is interesting in its own right.

The cover illustration by Richie Fahey is very nice, but I don't think I'm the only one wishing there wouldn't be so much text: it hides the gun in the girl's hand totally! Someone might mistake this for a romantic novel. Couldn't be farther from that.

John Hillcoat's The Road

For once I had a chance to go to movies last Sunday. I picked John Hillcoat's The Road, thinking it was by the Coen brothers - perhaps they'd've made another Cormac McCarthy film? But no, I remembered the real director when I got to the movie theatre.

I didn't mind, since the film was excellent. The postapocalyptic scenes were so overwhelmingly desolate and grey, almost without colours, I was on the verge of bursting into tears almost throughout the movie. I also thought the usual problem with road movies - there's not enough tension in what happens with everything just taking place one scene after another - was largely gone. This was a very exciting movie.

There were some scenes that were a bit too sentimental, and I didn't find the ending totally satisfying, but there was also a twist that set everything seen before it in a new light and gave it another level of meaning. I was worried for a minute, though, that this might become a cult classic for some extremists who think a new nation can be built upon total destruction (à la The Turner Diaries), but then again they would be idiots. (Has never stopped anyone before, has it, though?)

This got worse reviews than it really deserved. I'm sure it will be recognized as an American classic in ten or twenty years.

And would someone please publish a Finnish translation of McCarthy's Blood Meridian?

A book Tapani Bagge was supposed to be in

Here's a review from Bookgasm for a book my friend Tapani Bagge was supposed to be in. Maxim Jakubowski had picked up Tapani's story "The Face in the Concrete" for the book, but it was dropped out at last minute - the book was getting too thick! But you can still read the story from Thrilling Detective. And you should, too.

Tapani wrote to me just a minute ago that his story should be in part two, if such a book gets made. Here's hoping it will!

Robert B. Parker

Can I go on living my life without saying anything about Robert B. Parker and his sudden death? The guy who's said to have kept the private eye genre alive during the seventies and eighties? (What about James Crumley, Stephen Greenleaf, Marcia Muller, Arthur Lyons, Jonathan Valin, Loren Estleman, Pete Hamill..? They did nothing of the sort?)

I'm one of those who never got into Parker and his Spenser books. Admittedly, I've read only two (Looking for Rachel Wallace and some other, the name of which I can't recall) and both were translations. There just might be something in Parker's style that doesn't come out well in translation. In Finnish it's pretty flat. But what's certain is that Spenser feels like a bore even when translated. It tells something that the two of his books I read are the only Spensers translated in Finnish (his Chandler books got into Finnish, though, but I don't think I've read them). There's just something that doesn't resonate with Finnish readers, me included (and believe you me, there's lots of stuff that resonates with me and leaves many of Finns cold).

Okay, the books are easily read, they run along smoothly, but you never - well, I didn't - get a real sense of anything important happening. Well, okay, some of the classic private eye heroes got too mixed up in their cases, the cases changed them (Lew Archer, Mike Hammer, many of the later ones), but Spenser might be more realistic in that he just does his job, and that's that. Yet his macho attitude feels forced and artificial. I hate when someone makes gourmet meals in books and yaps about it (or pretends not to yap about it, but yaps about it inside, like machos do). It's boring. Parker was one of the reasons I have said that private eyes are no longer interesting - even though it's a genre I very dearly love.

The lack of Finnish translations may be due to the fact the Robert Urich TV series got here under a very bad title: Tough Game in Boston / Kovaa peliä Bostonissa. Even the first novel was translated under that title, with Urich in the cover. No wonder not many took him seriously. I'm sure the sales of the book were poor. I didn't much watch the show and can't remember anything about it. (I watched one of the Jesse Stone movies with Tom Selleck and I thought it was very poor indeed. It was the one with the happy couple suddenly deciding they'll kill some people.)

I do have quite a bunch of Spensers waiting for me in English, so I'll let you really know what I think of him. And oh, I checked: the other Spenser I read is called Ceremony. It was much more annoying than Looking for Rachel Wallace. (Checking the name of the other book I noticed that the other, older Robert Parker, the one reprinted by Hard Case Crime, has had one book published in Finland: Passport to Peril came out in Swedish from a Finnish-Swedish publisher Schildts as På död mans pass in 1952. Man ska göra nånting att hitta det.)

Eino Liekki

I posted some ponderings about a Finnish pulp writer Eino Liekki in another blog of mine here. Eino Liekki wrote for the Isku and Seikkailujen Maailma magazines in the late thirties and early fourties and vanished without a trace. The name is most surely a pseudonym. I'm publishing one of Liekki's stories in the science fiction issue of my crime fiction fanzine, Isku.

The Hell-Bent Kid: Reprise

Sorry, haven't been blogging much lately, but here's a comment that just came to an old post here. It's about Charles Locke's Western novel, The Hell-Bent Kid, which I reviewed over a year ago.

I've just finished this book. Found it in a garage sale and almost didn't read it! So glad I did. Your review is excellent. Locke wrote brilliantly really. I note, from several reviews I've managed to track down, the film altered the ending making to something less tragic. However, in so doing they obviously failed the author by turning what could well have been something quite remarkable into a film some reviewers saw as forgettable. That was also tragic. Though I gather there were some memorable scenes. I would very much like to see the movie, but the chances seem slim as it is very rare. The book, however, I will keep as it is, in my mind, a stand-out Western.

I didn't know the film is rare - maybe it's not available as DVD -, but I think I know at least one person who has it on VHS. I'm not sure if I've seen it myself, probably not.

Hurrah for the Fleischers!

We've been watching quite a lot of old Superman cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer with Kauto. I bought an old VHS cassette some time ago and Kauto was enthusiastic from the word go. He said to me today he's gonna be a film maker when he grows up, and later he said he'll make a movie in which he shows how Superman is born and how the planet Krypton blows up. Didn't know we have Richard Donner living with us.

(Kauto also said that he'll make the world's longest movie that shows someone sleeping for 24 hours... We've been talking about the longest movies and I told him there's a film called Sleep. Kauto also said that it may be even 100 hours long. "No one sleeps that long", I said. "He's not a real man, he's fabricated!")

Those Fleischer Supermans (Supermen?) are fascinating. They are pretty well-made in their own right, but it's interesting to note how noirish they are in their design, with steep camera angles and very shadowy lighting, the use of silhouettes and such. It's at times like watching Citizen Kane.

Here's one that's not on the VHS I bought. I seem to remember my kid brother used to watch these, too, and this was one of his favourites.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Don Tracy's Criss-Cross

Don Tracy is a little-known writer these days, but he had a long and, at times, distinguished career. In his later career he wrote largely movie and TV tie-ins, which isn't always a good sign. His second novel, Criss-Cross, is probably his best-known book and it has served as a basis for two films: Robert Siodmak's film of the same name and Steven Soderbergh's The Underneath (1994; in Finland only on video as Isku vasten kasvoja). Later Tracy wrote many shocking novels, like How Sleeps the Beast? (1938), which was published first only in the UK and Lion could publish it in the fifties as "a paperback original" which it wasn't, and The Big Blackout (1959). Both deal with racism of the South. There's not much on Tracy on-line, but Bill Crider and his commentators don't let us down.

I had recently a chance to read Tracy's novel in English - it's been translated in Finnish, but I've never read the translation, which, I believe, is abridged. (I was going to confirm it for this post, but never got around to it. The same thing happened, by the way, to watching Siodmak's film. I'm not sure if I've ever seen it.) Criss-Cross was first published by Vanguard Press in 1934 as a hardback, and it was later reprinted several times in softcover. The copy I read is a Triangle Book reprint from 1948, in hardcover. (There's a copy of the book in the Finnish Film Archive's library.)

Criss-Cross is quite a good novel. It's told in a very terse, very hardboiled style (that reminded me of Jason Starr's first novels, for some reason or another). Tracy uses ellipsis to a very good effect and he writes good dialogue. Some dated slang words, like "potatoes" for money, don't get much in the way. The story is about a guy who's done some boxing and who now guards money trucks. He's in love with Anna Krebak, a flimsy good-looking babe who goes out also with a guy called Slim, handsome creep. Tracy lets the action develop slowly, but you know how the story goes: this has been rewritten at least hundred times since. Tracy paved way for the Gold Medal and Lion writers, alongside with James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice was published the same year as Criss-Cross, so it's not sure Tracy was influenced by Cain).

There are some problems with the novel, though. There are some twists you don't see coming in the end of the novel, but the drive also slows down a bit. You feel there's no need to read the rest of the novel after, say, page 200, even though Tracy gives hints of the protagonist's descent into madness. The irony in the last, very short chapter is very gripping, though. Truly noir, this one.

This copy of the book belonged to Finnish film scholar Matti Salo who's known for his studies in film noir and the Hollywood black list. He has made some notes and quotes in the behind of the book. "Tracy belongs to the hardboiled Hemingway school of writers, related also to Burnett." (I think this quote comes from The Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, an old anthology of articles.) Salo also makes the note of the reversal of the handsomeness of the leading men: in the book, the protagonist, Johnny is ugly with a broken nose, and Slim is the pretty boy, but in Siodmak's film Slim is played by Dan Duryea and Johnny is played by Burt Lancaster. There's also this quote: "Tracy's novel is rather predictable and thin, not a thriller, really, but related to a gangster novel." My opinion is higher, and I don't much see relation to gangster novels. There's no organized crime in Tracy's novel.

Lee Server offers some other quotes in his The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. The critic Cyril Connolly reviewed the book for the New Statesman: "A fascinating crime story - aesthetically worse than The Postman Always Rings Twice, if that were possible [sic!] - but begin it at any page, nevertheless, and you can't stop till you've read all the other others. It is a mass of fake simplicity, fake intensity, fake slang. Only the sentimentality and bad grammar are genuine. But one has to read it." I should say this is not sentimental in the least! Bad grammar is genuine, because Tracy writes about characters who don't know grammar!

(Lee Server's book has received lots of bad reviews, but his entry on Tracy is very good - check it out! He offers a good rundown of Tracy's career, not forgetting his sequels to Metalious's Peyton Place.)

Steven Soderbergh's The Good German

The Good German is a film about Americans in Berlin just after the Second World War. George Clooney is a reporter who gets mixed up in international intrigue that has to do with concentration camps and the Nazis' attempt to build rocket missiles. The film is based on Joseph Kanon's novel, but I haven't read that one; Kanon is well-respected, though.

I saw a comment somewhere that this just isn't Casablanca. I don't think that's an apt comparison, since this is far more brutal and cynical than Casablanca. True, Soderbergh uses a very stylish technique that brings back images of film noir and the Expressionistic films of the thirties, with their back-projections and dark shadows. But this is still something else than Casablanca, a look into a dark world that almost entirely abandons the romanticism of Casablanca. This is more noir than Casablanca ever was.

That said I must admit that The Good German didn't win me over totally. It's still far more about style than content. Especially the end left me pretty cold, even though the big revelation comes at the last minute. It has something to do with the fact that Cate Blanchett's character never comes as alive as one would like her to be. (There are conflicting opinions in the IMDb I provided above.)

Best in 2009

The best books I read last year. Some of them really were last year's books, some of them are from 2008 or 2007, some are older. I put the latter ones in a separate list. I'm sure there are books I haven't remembered. I may do another list of films later.

Dave Zeltserman: Pariah
James Ellroy: Blood's a Rover/Levoton veri
Peter Leonard: Quiver/Ihmismetsällä
Megan Abbott: Die a Little
Gabriel Hunt, as told to Charles Ardai: Hunt through the Cradle of Fear
Allan Guthrie: Savage Night
Jason Starr: The Follower; Panic Attack (I think I liked Panic Attack more, even though The Follower really has its moments)
Jonathan Maberry: Patient Zero (with some reservations)
Anthony Neil Smith: Yellow Medicine; Psychosomatic
Petri Salin: Toinen nainen/The Other Woman

Books that have come out earlier, but I just read them last year or there was a Finnish translation:

Elmore Leonard: Valdez Is Coming (Finnish translation in 2009 as Valdez)
Michael Moorcock: Behold the Man (Finnish translation in 2009 as Katso ihmistä)
Ross Macdonald: Meet Me at the Morgue, under the UK title Experience With Evil
Ken Bruen: London Boulevard
Jonathan Valin: Day of Wrath
Thomas B. Costain: The Black Rose/Musta ruusu
John Fowles: The Maggot/Ilmestys
Marguerite Yourcenar: The Memoirs of Hadrian/Hadrianuksen muistelmat
Norah Lofts: Madselin/Kohtalokas valloittaja; The Concubine/Kuninkaan jalkavaimo (maybe a bit of an exaggeration to call these one of the best books I read last year, but for some reason they get stuck to my mind, especially Madselin, romantic, but serious historical novel about the Norman conquest)

Finnish vintage sleaze Westlake

Here's a Finnish cover for a sleaze paperback by Donald Westlake, writing as "Alan Marshall", which was one of the pseudonyms he alone used. If I remember correctly. The sleaze pseudonyms are a tricky thing.

The book in question was called originally Virgin's Summer (Midwood 1960), which is also the Finnish title. I haven't read this one, but a friend of mine - who knows his Westlake - has and he said that it's clearly Westlake. The cover copy says: "He [or she?] felt his/her first love experience as a waking dream. [Huh?] And then it wasn't a dream anymore... Roaring tale about what goes on behind the closed doors of American motels!"

The Finnish edition was published by Finnbooks in their Domino series in 1967.