I haven’t taken a bite out of my copy yet, but if I ever do I’m sure I’ll find that the blurbster wasn’t exaggerating.
Another approach in the fabrication of jacket copy is the one which focuses on the book’s cast of characters rather than on the plot itself. This approach works well when the cast is composed of colorful and unusual folk—alternatively well in this sparkler for Boss of the Rafter C, a 1937 Western mystery by Jay Lucas (Green Circle):
Greg Lawson thought that the man who had never traveled didn’t amount to much. He left Montana for the Mexican border, which he had heard was the wildest country left—his partner, Slim Hammond, had some sort of cow outfit down there. It took Greg about ten minutes to find that things were far too wild and tough to suit him. He had meant to be a spectator, and not the central figure expected to tame the whole countryside single-handed.
That was just the job that big, quiet, handsome Greg found on his hands. His nerve—and cleverness—in doing it surprised nobody more than himself: no one had expected it of him but Rose, Slim’s sister, to whom he promptly became engaged. Even that had its complications: There was Faquita, the fiery mexican dancer of the Purple Cactus, and also Six-Shooter Nan, the wild, redheaded little Mormon gunwoman who seemed to hate him worse than sin.
And through it all, like an evil mist, looms the strange, cultured, mysterious killer known as English Dick. . . .
Some publishers had better alternative blurb writers than others, of course. Two, as we’ve seen, were the lending-library houses, Phoenix Press and Hillman-Curl. But for consistently fresh, inventive, and zany jacket copy, the best by far was Macaulay. Somewhere in the bowels of 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City, in the early to mid-thirties, there was a man or woman of rare talent who toiled in obscurity and who will—sadly—forever remain anonymous. But this super-blurbster’s work lives on, each of his/her writings bearing the unmistakable stamp of one person’s genius; and it is only fitting and proper that some of these minimasterpieces be enshrined here, where they can be fully appreciated.
For Calamity Comes of Age by Gregory Baxter (1935):
The young lady whose twenty-first birthday fell on April 9th and who received an unexpected present of a Balkan doll came of age at a calamitous moment. At the center of a nest of furious intrigues, she stands dazed and mystified by the crossfire of plots, to a heavy accompaniment of violence and murder.
According to the notice in the agony column of the Times, she would learn something to her advantage by communicating with Box 801. The advantages seemed extremely dubious and remote. If not imminently fatal. According to Scotland Yard’s Inspector Daniels the doll’s potent political ramifications are vital in European chanceries. And according to Peter Osborne the young lady’s birthday is being abused by these distressing affairs, since she is more precious and important than the doll. The first calamity interrupted Peter’s serious golf, and it was he who accidentally broke the doll and proved its emptiness. The aid and protection needed by the lady at the age of calamity, Peter was anxious to provide.
A thick mystery stirred by many clever, malevolent hands makes a sharp-clicking story, tense from the descent of the first murder victim to the suicide and confession wind-up. A piece of sound workmanship in the pursuit of the happiness of trembling panics and alarms, with the proper density of mystery, and with smart sleuthing, romantic undercurrent, and urbane interludes of amusement.
For The Laughing Peril by H. L. Gates (1933):
The little yellow Chinese image with a laughing face, when it first appeared on John Farley’s desk, robbed him of his memory of years of narcotic investigation in the Far East. It lured Sylvia, his fiancee, into the doll house of Hong Fong, merchant of best grade almond-eyed beauty. It shocked her mother into paroxysms of mental torture. It made a demon out of the beautiful Chinese girl, Chia Sung, except that its powers were dead where they crossed the power of her own hopeless love.
The laughing peril is a symbol of murder, but more especially of subtle terrors that robbed victims of their wills. Behind it is a master mind that is going insane, working with diabolical ingenuity to avenge the wrong he fancies has been done to his ancestors. He would marry a white girl to a half-human monster, he would treat a Chinese girl with obscene, inhuman tortures, he would work for the destruction of the whole white race by his gigantic international scheme for the use of kiff and hashish. With such an oriental demon John Farley fights at close quarters, and the cold sweat runs in torrents. Be prepared for horror in full strength, as the laughing peril drives strong men and women to maniacal madness.
For Silent Terror by T.C.H. Jacobs (1937):
The terror surrounding the murder of a well-known daughter of joy is of the ominously quiet kind. Inspector Ruggles Radford, summoned from his favorite cocktail bar, could find no marks on the body. Possibly the woman was hypnotized and ingeniously strangled.
Collaborating with Ruggles on this case is his friend, Dr. Dick Shannon, a lively, enterprising young man. Dick somehow had the notion that the queer looking anthropologist and the young lady whom they saw in the bar, as well as the counterfeit bill Dick received, could be linked up with the murder. The underworld angles indicate traffic in drugs, women, and illegal forms of engraving. The dance hall girl whom Dick tries to pump yielded no information, but she also came in under the reign of terror. The tracing of evidence and the capture of the entire gang provide action and sheer fright, up to the maximum of a thrill fan’s capacity.
For Murder Could Not Kill by Gregory Baxter (1934):
If there is a man whom murder could not kill, he must bear a charmed life, have miraculous powers, or play into phenomenal luck. If there ever was a man whom murder wanted to kill, that man was Robin Foster. He blundered right into a murder, and then with almost unpardonable audacity, persisted in butting in on the plans of the high command in sumptuously profitable murder.
Robin Foster witnessed a murder accidentally and, rushing to the aid of a terrified lady, received a memorable poke in the face. It sent him in a dizzy spin from a running board and allowed the murderer to escape, but it fixed in his vision the image of a knotted fist and a forearm with a curious scar. And it was only the beginning of even more memorable blows to come.
Probably he would have dropped the affair if the distressed lady had not proved so alluring, gracious, sympathetic, and distinguishedly beautiful. She quite broke up his customary nonchalance. But if he had dismissed the matter, he would have missed a string of the biggest gasps of his life and an exceedingly curious knot of mystery surrounding the private affairs of Miss Laurette Dexter, her murdered father, her father’s avowed enemy, and the suave, distinguished Mr. Peter Lessing to whom Laurette is affianced. Moreover, he would have missed murder that could kill one who once gave death the slip and thereupon became presumptuous in his special advantage. If Robin Foster had turned down his chance to embroil himself in these jeopardies and to bid for the affections of the delicious Laurette, the reader would have been deprived of a magnificent bout with all the chilly emotions.
And finally, this anonymous blurbster’s crowning achievement— and the greatest of all the alternative blurbs—this one for The Rum Row Murders by Charles Reed Jones (1931):
This is an up-to-the-minute mystery. Not only does it take all your spinal nerves over the jumps, but it also makes you feel that you are wire-tapping in one of the latest politics-cum-gangster scandals. And it gives, in the grand manner, an indelible picture of life and piratical warfare on board a rum boat anchored on the high seas off the stern and rockbound coast.
A Congressman is put on the spot. A new weapon of murder is invented. The police catch the wrong man and interrupt a charming romance. A young detective pays with his life for learning too much. A police inspector hustles cans of “alky” on a rum boat. A hairy ape is reported prowling through the halls of a Boston hotel near the dreaded death room. The survivors of a band of hijackers hang from a yard arm, and ultimately the mutilated bodies of their e
xecutioners are washed ashore.
Inspector Jimmy Conway is the one who has to dodge miraculously through the maze of danger to get the dope on the rum row murders. He is the one who finally escapes death in the hotel death room, plugs the killer, and reveals the weapon that worked through a keyhole and other fabulous mechanisms.
Loaded to the gunwale with superpowered quake-stuff to make your withers quiver.
7
Sex, Sex, And More Sex!
She shut me up. The best way a woman can. Rainwater smell got in my nostrils and her full, sweet mouth was mashing down on mine, sending electricity running through all my wires. I got my arms around her and meshed her with my arms. We melted like a molten rivet into an I-beam.
In the dim light of the room, we pulled apart. But we were still as close as consecutive weekdays.
—Michael Avallone,
Meanwhile, Back at the Morgue, 1960
Firmer than a handshake, more sensuous than a lust-crazed python, softer than melted marshmallow, hotter than original sin, suggestive as the mind of a censor, Andromeda’s muscles talked to me in body English, and I listened and responded, with every red-blooded hormone in my body. . . .
It was peristaltic pleasure personified, it was hot and happy and wild and wanton, it was the most, the ultimate, the living end, the far cry, the distant dream, the turbulent terminal of all mortal experience.
—Clyde Allison
Agent 0008 Meets Modesta Blaze, 1966
Sex first reared its pretty head in crime fiction in the twenties. Until that time, detective stories—indeed, nearly all mass-circulated fiction—was squeaky clean. Boy met girl, boy sometimes kissed girl, but that was as far as personal relationships were allowed to go in print. Fictional marriages were consummated, fictional babies were conceived in such strict privacy that even the most prurient-minded reader was given nothing whatsoever to pique his imagination.
The advent of Prohibition and the flapper era changed all that. The twenties was the decade of the first sexual revolution. Men and women threw off the shackles of the Puritan ethic and set out to prove that, the bluenoses notwithstanding, sex could be interesting if not downright pleasurable.
Writers, naturally, took advantage of the relaxed attitudes toward sex (though not without considerable hassles from self-styled moral crusaders in Boston and other parts of the country). Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and many others among the prevailing literati seized the opportunity to deal frankly and honestly with sexual matters. So it was only natural that progressive crime writers of the period did the same, if in a somewhat more restrained manner when it came to the intimate details of the mating game.
It was Dashiell Hammett, that great innovator, who first brought sex to the attention of mystery readers. The relationship between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1930) is nothing if not sexual—and a highly charged sexuality at that. Early on in the novel Brigid says to him, “I’ve thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost. What else is there? Can I buy you with my body?” Whereupon Spade “kisse[s] her mouth roughly and contemptuously,” and then sits back and says, “I’ll think it over.” And later, in a scene full of intense if understated passion:
Her eyelids drooped. “Oh, I’m so tired,” she said tremulously, “so tired of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and of not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth. I wish I—”
She put her hands up to Spade’s cheeks, put her open mouth hard against his mouth, her body flat against his body.
Spade’s arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging his blue sleeves, a hand cradling her head, its fingers half lost among red hair, a hand moving groping fingers over her slim back. His eyes burned yellowly.
End of chapter. Even by today’s standards that’s fairly warm stuff, the more so for what it implies rather than what it states. The clinically graphic sex scene has yet to be written that can stir the reader’s biological juices more thoroughly than any he can conjure up in his own imagination.
Hammett also pioneered risqué dialogue in crime fiction. When The Thin Man was published in 1934, its publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, cleverly enticed new readers by stating in a New York Times ad: “I don’t believe the question on page 192 of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man has had the slightest influence upon the sale of the book. It takes more than that to make a best seller these days. Twenty thousand people don’t buy a book within three weeks to read a five-word question.” Which of course had another ten thousand or so wanting to know just what that five-word question was. The following exchange of dialogue between Nick and Nora Charles incorporates it:
“. . . Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?”
“Oh, a little.”
She laughed and got up from the floor. “If you aren’t a disgusting old lecher,” she said.
Very bold and sophisticated for its time, this repartee; nobody had ever mentioned an erection in popular fiction before, except in reference to a tall building. Equally daring and titillating was such other Thin Man dialogue as a wife referring to her philandering husband as “chasing everything that’s hot and hollow.” Despite Knopf’s disclaimer, the sexual content of the novel was a major factor in its success. (Risqué dialogue of a somewhat cruder nature enhanced the film version as well and contributed to the ongoing popularity of Nick and Nora at the box office. At one point in the film, when a team of police detectives is searching the Charles’ hotel suite, looking for evidence they think Nick might be witholding, Nora [Myrna Loy] points at one of the cops and says to Nick [William Powell], “What’s that man doing in my drawers?” Nick’s response is an open-mouthed gawk at the camera.)
While Hammett was introducing sex to the readers of mystery novels, pulp publishers were busily displaying it to readers of popular magazine fiction. Gaudy, full-color pulp covers (and black-and-white interior illustrations) depicted women in various stages of undress, often tied up and/or being terrorized by bug-eyed monsters, slavering fiends with whips and chains, or tough-looking mugs brandishing guns, knives, hatchets, clubs, hypodermic needles, garrotes, jars of acid and poison, and any number of other lethal weapons. Until the mid-thirties, the package promised more than the stories themselves delivered—although in the twenties Weird Tales did occasionally offer stories dealing with such topics as necrophilia. From 1934 to the advent of World War II, some pulps delivered exactly what their cover and interior art promised—and then some.
One such group of magazines was the “Spicys,” the offspring of a Delaware-based outfit that rather hilariously called itself Culture Publications, Inc. Beginning in June 1934, Culture introduced Spicy Detective, Spicy Mystery, Spicy Adventure, even Spicy Western. In addition to standard pulp fare—fast action, wildly imaginative plots—the Spicys featured as much sexual innuendo, voyeurism, and heavy breathing as the law of the time would allow. Male-female encounters (and euphemism-laced prose) of the following sort were de rigueur in each story.
My arm looped around her waist. I drew her close, slid my hand up her body to the swelling sheen of her breasts. “You can’t say ‘no’!” I panted. “I must have you!” Frantically, I glued my mouth to her lips. For a moment they remained tight shut and cold. Then, as though some movement of my hand over her melting curves had given the spark to her emotional tinder, her lips parted and she went limp against me. Immediately I was caught and lifted to exotic heights of whose existence I had never dreamed. Her mouth became a writhing well-spring, fused to mine by its own searing heat; a sweet, soul-destroying succuba. (Arthur Wallace, “Passion Before Death,” Spicy Mystery)
Then I got a surprise. She swayed toward me, wrapped her gorgeous arms around my brisket, fed me a succulent sample of labial fireworks. I could feel her firm breasts cushioning against my chest, throbby, pulsating. “Dan . . . dearest!” she moaned.
/> My instincts took a long lead off third base. I lifted her, carried her toward the divan on the other side of my living room. . . . As soon as I got my kisser unsucked from hers I panted, “You can dish it out, sweet stuff. Can you take it?” And I caught her in a bear hug, got my mitt fastened on a shoulder strap of the swim suit. . . . Then I let my kisses stray southward along her sleek shoulders. She quivered, locked her arms around me. “Lover . . . !” (Robert Leslie Bellem, “Death Dance,” Spicy Detective)
This sort of thing had a great many red-blooded males under the age of twenty-five panting, fantasizing, and locking themselves in bathrooms all over America. It was both tame and innocent, however, compared to the kind of jaded sex the “weird menace” or “shudder” pulps were dishing out during the same period. The stories in such magazines as Terror Tales, Horror Stories, Dime Mystery, and Uncanny Tales were the sort the Marquis de Sade might have relished—stories bearing such titles as “Love Comes from the Grave,” “Bodies Born for Slaughter,” “The Pain Master’s Bride,” “Dead Mates for the Devil’s Devotees,” and “Bride of the Stone-Age Ripper.” The contents of the stories reflected both the titles and illustrations, often to stomach-churning proportions, as in these passages from “Where Beauty Dwelt in Terror” by one Donald Graham (Uncanny Tales, March 1940):
Then I saw the fiends begin to caress the girls’ bodies with bestially roving hands, committing incredible indecencies on the innocent young maidens, salaciously pawing those twisting, protesting young forms. . . . Several of them were busy lighting a large fire in the center of the dirt floor, heaping buckets of coal over the kerosene-soaked wood that had been piled there. Meantime, others had stripped down two of the prettiest girls hanging by the wall. With whips these two youngsters were forced to get on all fours, then lie flat on their stomachs, head to head. . . .
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