Camerarts’s writers—among others, Jack Lynn (creator of the ultramacho private eye Tokey Wedge), Bob Tralins, Con Sellers, Mike Skinner (who rather interestingly was black), Jack Savage, Glenn Low, Arnold Marmor, Jerry M. Goff, Jr.—were pretty straightforward in their handling of fictional sex. They wrote it the same way their heroes indulged in it: fast, rough, and raw. Every now and then, though, a little of the eloquence of their more legit brethren slipped in for the delight of us connoisseurs.
The hard tips of her breasts shown through the thin pajama top like giant-size pencil erasers. (Jack Lynn, Broad Bait)
Her fingers opened her blouse, then unhooked her brassiere, lifting the warm garment up over the quaking, accentuated ovals. The bra lay up over them, and he felt its fabric touch his forehead in contrast to the smooth breasts that bobbed by his searching mouth. (Bill Anthony, Animals)
Her naked breasts pointed at me like a double dare. (Quint Arnold, Erotic Awakening)
Her mouth opened hungrily and we started a delicious game of tongue tag. This went on for some time, and the ecstasy button on both of us was pushed in all the way. (Steve Lee, Uninhibited Females)
God! I thought. In her dance she incarnates passion by conveying the two halves which compose it. . . . In this instant she is truly a beautiful woman because she looks like womanhood. . . . Indeed, I thought, Dawn spoke with her whole tremulous body undulating to her fingers—all in rhythm, as the sea runs up and down the beach and is never at rest, but seems to obey a general line of curve. (Jerry M. Goff, Jr., Rocco’s Babe)
The blonde stretched flat on her back. Hips bouncing. Thighs quivering. Toes beckoning. And . . . she ferociously massaged her own breasts, and the nipples rose like pink silos bursting with harvested emotions. (Louis Fisher, Wild Party)
Pad Library, on the other hand, went in for sleaze of a milder and more disguised sort. Its books carried such sedate titles as Security Risk and Devil Girls and were a showcase for the literary endeavors of Ed Wood, Jr. Yes, that’s right, the very same Ed Wood, Jr., who gave us such immortal film classics as Glen and Glenda (the heartwarming story of a crack-brained transvestite, whose first incarnation was as a novel called Killer in Drag) and the magnificent Bela Lugosi swan song that some experts consider the single worst film ever produced, Plan Nine from Outer Space. Wood, as you’ll note from the following excerpt, was every bit as alternative a prose stylist as he was a filmmaker.
Without taking her lips from his, she rose from the chair and when she stood facing him, she put her arms around his waist and he around hers, and they locked into an embrace which would not be satisfied until they had searched out each other’s secrets. . . .
They melted to the demand of lust and her blue mohair cardigan fell from her shoulders to lop itself over the chair she had been seated on. When they walked across the stage toward a dressing room there was only one thing in mind—Lust—The domineering factor of life. . . .
And they took each other in the cold dressing room. And when they were finished, there were few secrets left for them to explore. Their eyes met and their mouths met, and they were in tune to each other for that one, brief last gasp as they expounded to each other. (Security Risk)
And finally we have Vega Books and Ember Library, published by Corinth Publications of San Diego. (Corinth, you may remember, was the outfit that got itself sued out of business in the late sixties for reprinting pulp novels featuring such super-heroes as the Phantom, Secret Agent X, Operator 5, and Dusty Ayres without bothering to secure permission from the copyright holders.) Its approach to fictional sex was the graphic one—as euphemistically graphic as the law would allow in the mid-sixties. And what it specialized in was the rather odd combination of “serious” homosexual novels and wild and wacky heterosexual spy spoofs.
The spy spoofs were written by someone calling himself Gene Cross, which is also the name of the narrator (The Wild Mare Affair, The Tigerlily Affair), and by Clyde Allison (William Knowles), the undisputed master of the soft-core porn novel. The Allison titles— eighteen in all, published between 1965 and 1968—are unabashed parodies of James Bond. They feature the outlandish exploits of the otherwise unnamed Agent 0008, mankind’s only hope against the power- (and sex-) mad female operatives of SADISTO and KRUNCH; they bear such titles as Sadisto Royale, Platypussy, Agent 0008 Meets Modesta Blaze, and Agent 0008 Meets Gnatman; and they are the ultimate not only in soft-core porn novels but in goofy satire: by turns raunchy, mad, silly, ingenious, childish, horribly sexist, and very funny.
Allison was nothing if not inventive. Only he could have devised a sex scene which utilizes a trapeze high above a packed circus arena, some incredible aerial acrobatics, a conjoined plunge into a safety net, and certain astonishing trampoline antics. I can’t go into specifics; this is, after all, only a PG-rated book. But you get the idea.
And only he could have devised climactic scenes such as this one from the rather tamely titled Lost Bomb:
Things looked confusing. There was, I decided while sitting astride Elephantra [a gigantic Indian elephant], who was still waving the naked blonde in the air above her, as the five nude KRUNCH girls ravished their way through the crowd, while the machine gun stuttered shatteringly and bullets flew everywhere, as the helicopter continued clattering around above us with its rotors sending ten million in small bills flying in all directions over the berserk crowd, there was, I concluded, clutching the Ming vase under my arm, only one thing to do.
And I did it.
I had Elephantra make an illegal left turn off Fifth Avenue and urged her to flee the scene.
As we crunched through the milling, hysterical crowd, I heard . . . the distant voice of the Village Vice drama critic deride, “Boo! Hiss! Highly derivative!”
Allison, as the above indicates, was fond of puns, literary references, film references, all sorts of satirical asides to the reader, and private jokes which surely escaped the notice, not to mention the comprehension, of ninety-nine percent of his readers. Not only is the following an example of his literate playfulness, it also wins hands-down the Pronzini Award for Crime Fiction’s All-Time Greatest Coitus Interruptus Scene.
The phone rang.
Anha swore shockingly in Swahili [she’s multilingual], rolled over and up, answered her phone.
“All right,” she snarled, “so I’ll close the Venetian blinds, if it bothers you that much. You know, you don’t have to stare out the window. All right, I don’t want my doorbell to ring. I’ll close them!”
She slammed down the phone, strode to the windows, snapped shut the blinds while cursing fluently in Sanskrit.
“Nosey neighbor across the street?” I inquired.
“I’ll say,” snapped Anha. “You’d think he disliked females, the way he carries on every time I throw an orgy with my blinds open. The fat slob. He’s so overweight I honestly don’t know how he manages to climb four stories to his orchid room twice a day.”
“Maybe he has an elevator, whoever he is,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” conceded Anha. “I like everything about living in the West Thirties except that stout jerk who lives across the street.” (The Lost Bomb)
As for Allison on his favorite subject, here are a few representative samples:
“Well,” whispered Modesta, “if sex doesn’t sap your strength—here . . .”
Something tinkled at my feet.
I picked it up. A key.
“It’s the key to my metal bikini,” murmured Modesta. “The metal loin cloth, that is. You don’t need a key for my metal bra, it has combination locks. You just twiddle with my knobs.”
“Any time . . .”I viriled, moving toward her. (Agent 0008 Meets Modesta Blaze)
Her breasts were twin towers of sexual power, dual cupolas of quivering femininity . . . twin rounded peaks of swaying rapture, creamy hemispheres of fun flesh tipped by shell-pink aureoles from which sprouted deep crimson nipples. . . . I sheathed my teeth with my lips and gently bit and chewed her glee globes whi
le my hands stroked the flowing length of her roller-coaster-curved torso. (The Sex-Ray)
“Ahhhhhhh!” she sighed, as I plunged like a ramrod into the glorious gun-barrel of her loaded loins. (Agent 0008 Meets Modesta Blaze)
In the seventies and eighties the depiction of sex in the mystery and suspense novel has become increasingly more clinical—all manner of sex, from the tender to the violent to the depraved. Nothing is left to the imagination these days, which is no doubt the reason fictional intimacy has become something of a bore. Taking all the mystery out of sex is like taking all the mystery out of a detective novel: what you’ve got left is a bunch of clear-cut details leading to an obvious conclusion, and therefore no damn suspense.
Nevertheless, it is precisely because of its graphic and clinical nature that the Alternative Sex Scene To End All Alternative Sex Scenes achieves that lofty distinction. This “erotic” masterpiece was authored in 1972 by Roland Puccetti, an expert in mind-body problems affiliated with the Philosophy Department of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, as part of his novel The Death of the Führer—one of those “Hitler is still alive!” exercises in serious nonsense. In this one, it is postulated that Adolph did not really die in his Berlin bunker in 1945, that through warped Nazi ingenuity and the wonders of modern medical science the Führer’s evil brain was saved from extinction and secretly lives and plots on.
No writer present or future could ever hope to surpass the passages which follow. No writer in his right mind would even hope to try. They are truly the ultimate, shining example of sex rearing its ugly head in crime fiction—a scene so mind-boggling that it must be quoted more or less in its entirety to be fully savored.
Here, then, the Alternative Sex Scene To End All Alternative Sex Scenes:
I forced myself to look at her face. It was twisting and turning too, the eyes closed and her lips parted in a moan. No, it wasn’t a moan. It was a single word murmured over and over again: BITTE, BITTE, BITTE. I began whispering in turn, slowly, to match the strokes of my body, the impact of moist flesh on moist flesh. It became a weird incantation as I plunged on and on.
“Gerda oh my darling Gerda oh can you know what this means to me to have seen you wanted you now to have you like this really it is the greatest day of my life it is as if I came over the castle wall to die and woke up in heaven and you know Gerda it may sound silly but every time I was near you even at the tea party this afternoon and now tonight I felt yes it is silly but I felt in the presence of the Führer my beloved can it be he is somehow still with us and near us oh Gerda I am as certain of this as intuition can make it tell me darling am I right oh Gerda how my happiness would be complete if I could just see him again and hear his voice I don’t care how he has changed Gerda is he not in this castle have I not perhaps even met him and did not know it only you I am sure can tell me yes tell me who he is. . . .”
Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me deep down into a bottomless pit. Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station, gathered speed with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.
Gerda’s eyes opened widely now. The pupils looked dark in the fire glow . . . and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night. Only then, at the instant of our climax, did I see suddenly etched in my brain the dust-laden map in the Führerbunker with arrows slashing into Berlin. . . . Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull. Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry.
“ICH BIN DER FÜHRER.”
8
Big Brother Is Watching
“. . . I say, Fltzhugh, why not go to the club? Nobody could touch you at the club!”
Fitzhugh’s lips twitched queerly.
“I—er—I imagine I’d be asked to resign if a gang of Chinese murderers came into the club after me.”
—Murray Leinster,
Murder Will Out, 1932
When you prospect for alternative gold, as I wrote in Chapter 3, you’re liable to find it just about anywhere. I meant that literally. Look long enough and often enough, and you can unearth not only nuggets but an occasional bonanza hidden away in the mountains of good crime fiction by good writers—the work of some of the best writers in the genre, in fact.
Every author—especially if he or she (1) started young and oh so innocent and (2) has created a large body of work—suffers a blind lapse now and then, when he/she not only constructs something of blush-making dimensions but compounds the felony by allowing it to be published. (I quoted my biggest alternative nugget in the preface to Gun in Cheek; inasmuch as I was born without masochistic tendencies, I am not going to repeat it here. Go look it up if you’re interested.) Still, we ought to know better, even in the early stages of our careers. Eh? Professionalism and all that sort of thing.
This chapter, then, is by way of a small chastisement of each of those nonalternative writers who have slipped a time or two over the years. And a warning to the rest to take extra care with your similes, your metaphors, your descriptive passages, your dialogue. One small misstep could land you in a book of this sort. Big Brother is watching.
We’ll begin with that rarest of alternative strikes, the Hall of Fame classic composed by a writer who has otherwise distinguished himself with a body of good work. Fortunately in this case, the writer is not (or was not) a specialist in mystery and suspense fiction, nor is his distinguished body of work in this field. His speciality, rather, was science fiction, to which genre he contributed such innovative short stories as “First Contact,” “Doomsday Deferred,” and “Exploration Team,” and such novels as Murder of the U.S.A. (1946), an interesting blend of s-f and the deductive mystery in which the protagonist solves the enigma of which country dropped three hundred A-bombs on U.S. cities.
Name: Murray Leinster, a.k.a. Will F Jenkins.
Alternative classic: Murder Will Out (1932).
In the early years of his long and productive career, Leinster wrote several uninspired mysteries (and several rather mediocre Westerns as well). The first and best of his crime novels was Scalps (1930); the second was Murder Madness (1931). Murder Will Out was the third. Unlike the first two, this glittering treasure trove was not published in the United States; only John Hamilton Ltd. in England saw fit to bring it out. What made Hamilton see fit is not clear, unless it was felt that they, like so many others of the period, could cash in on the then-great popularity of Sax Rohmer and Dr. Fu Manchu.
Murder Will Out, you see, is a Yellow Peril novel . . . sort of. It’s not the same type of Fu Manchu pie baked by Tom Roan in The Dragon Strikes Back (see Gun in Cheek) or Anthony Rud in The Stuffed Men; the recipe here is one of Leinster’s own special devising. And an epicurean pie it is, too.
Here are the ingredients:
A fellow named Fitzhugh (rich, white, and terrified) asks his friend Leonard Staunton (rich, white, and heroic) for help. Seems he is being “blackmailed” (actually it’s an extortion plot) by a Chinese secret society that keeps sending him notes signed with elaborate purple hieroglyphs—that is, an “ideogram in the archaic form of Chinese writing, which now is reserved for wall-mottoes, book-titles, and the like.” The notes demand that Fitzhugh fork over one hundred thousand dollars; the latest one says, cryptically, “To-night at Midnight.” Understandably, this has Fitzhugh gabbling a bit. Staunton, in his sympathetic fashion, tells him that he’s “nervous as a Follies girl with clothes on!” According to Leinster, Fitzhugh’s hands “quivered like a tuning fork,” which surely indicates a very high level of agitation.
Staunton says he’ll help and sends his pal off to the protective confines of their mutual club. Then he hies himself out to Long Island, where his fiancée, Jeanne, her naval officer brother, Jack, and her father, Senator Baldwin, just happen to be planning a Chinese garden party at the family
estate. It is at the estate, Wyndale, that things begin to heat up: Staunton receives an anonymous telephone call from a Chinese who says that “Mist’ Fitzhugh will be executed at twelve o’clock to-night,” and immediately leaves for Manhattan, having deemed this personal message much more sinister than the purple-hieroglyph notes and Fitzhugh’s quivering hands. Jeanne and Jack decide to follow when another purple-hieroglyph message is delivered to them. While speeding along toward New York, Jeanne notices that a car is following her little roadster; Jack isn’t too worried at the outset, though: “So it is,” he says. “But since we are ahead of it, it would seem to be necessary that it should be behind us.”
But then the following car speeds up, seems to be trying to overtake them. A frantic chase ensues, during which one of the tires blows out—the result of an assassin’s bullet, Jeanne thinks. She manages to stop the car safely. As she does, “the other car came roaring up, braked wildly, and half-rolled, half-skidded to a stop.” A bunch of Chinese guys pile out of it. And Jack, brave fellow that he is, piles out of the roadster with his trusty revolver in hand.
“Stick ’em up!” he orders. “Put your hands up or I’ll begin to blow holes in some of you!”
Well, the Chinese guys stick ’em up. And one of them says, “Please. We are poor acrobats and have little money for to rob, also being paid by cheque. Please!” See, it was all a mistake; they aren’t really members of the Society of the Purple Hieroglyph, just the entertainers from Senator Baldwin’s Chinese garden party who are miffed at not having been paid in cash so they could cheat the IRS.
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