Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Now the dozen other girls were taken from the rack, all of them as naked as the day they were born, and some of them modestly tried to cover their nakedness with their arms as they were pushed into the center of the arena. . . .

  The dozen girls were to be made to fight a tug of war, with two living bodies forming the center of the rope! But as the unwilling victims picked up their opposite ends of the rope, I saw that the horror of the thing went even further than that! As the whips slashed down on the girls’ bare backs, and as the ropes grew taut under the sudden strain, I saw the living victims in the center of the rope lifted clear of the floor—and carried sideways so that their bodies were suspended directly above the bed of flesh-shriveling coals in the center of the room! (Italics Graham’s)

  The narrative goes on like that for another several hundred words, getting nastier and more sadistic by the paragraph—the ne plus ultra in sadomasochistic fantasies. It was just such fiction as this that led “public decency” organizations to bring pressure to bear on Culture and other pulp magazine chains (primarily through the U.S. Postal Service, which threatened to revoke the magazines’ second-class mailing privileges), and that eventually killed off, or at least drastically altered the focus of, the weird menace and Spicy titles. During the last ten years or so of the pulp era (1942–1953), sex and/or sadism seldom entered into the story lines of magazine crime fiction except by inference.

  Despite Hammett having opened up the mystery novel to fictional intimacy, surprisingly few of his contemporaries took immediate advantage of the relaxed attitude toward sex in print; and of those that did, nearly all of whom were of the hard-boiled school, the approach was pallid indeed by comparison to Hammett’s. Most publishers seemed disinclined to allow overt sex into their mysteries. There was, however, one notable—and very short-lived— exception.

  That exception was an outfit called Valhalla Press, which published one sexy mystery in 1936: Passion Pulls the Trigger, by Arthur Wallace. (The back jacket panel of this novel announces a second Valhalla mystery, Killer’s Caress by Cary Moran, but this book seems never to have been released.) Valhalla was evidently a pulp-related sexploitation venture, inasmuch as its “Authors’ Committee” (listed on an inside page of Passion Pulls the Trigger) consisted of such names as Robert Leslie Bellem, E. Hoffman Price, Arthur Wallace, and Jerome Severs Perry, all of whom were regular contributors to the Spicy pulps. Further evidence, if any is needed, is the similarity in sexual content and approach of Passion Pulls the Trigger to that being offered in the Spicys.

  The novel features the lurid activities of private eye Val Vernon, which begin with the murder of an attractive heiress on a Manhattan street corner—a girl who just happens to be nude under her tweed coat. The dust jacket blurb gleefully ballyhoos this fact, and goes on to proclaim:

  With probably the most startling opening chapter of any murder-mystery book yet written, Arthur Wallace weaves a plot with threads of seduction, sin and sanguinary murder. Passion not only pulls the trigger to wipe out the voluptuous actors in this drama, but serves as a motive for crime.

  The trail Val Vernon follows leads from the death corner to a Broadway theatre, to a mansion on Long Island, to the haunts of dope fiends, to dingy rooming-houses. Time and again, the lure of flesh almost proves his undoing. Lust is matched against cunning and the thrill battle rages until the last page.

  PASSION PULLS THE TRIGGER is not a book for neurotics.

  No, indeed. On the other hand, neither is it a book for sex-starved, prurint-minded folks looking for a hot time in print. The sex here is pretty mild stuff, really.

  Val stood by while she slipped out of her skirt. A skintight peach silk loin cloth encased her delicately curved hips and the flesh fullness of her upper thighs. Val swallowed hard. Some day, if he ever knocked off a case that had some dough hooked on it, he’d marry Betty Reynolds. Now he had to content himself with playing around.

  He kept his eyes on her exciting figure while she pulled on a grass skirt. It was too much for him just looking at the sleek, litheness of her body. His fingers itched to touch and his lips to caress. He stepped up behind her, slipped his hands under her armpits and clasped them around her. . . .

  The thrill of it all shot down to the pit of Val’s stomach. Her hands covered his and pressed them hard on the coned badges of her femininity. He could feel the throbbing pulse-beat of her flesh and the warmth of her curves against his thighs.

  She drew her mouth away slowly, letting the dampness linger. “I must dress, Val, darling,” she panted. “After the show tonight? Huh?”

  There was no ignoring her red, moist lips. Val mashed his mouth against them. They parted and met his hotly, avidly. Val could feel her breasts soft against his chest. He put his hands on her hips. The warmth of them dampened his palms.

  Before he knew it they were down on the couch. “I went for you the first time I saw you!” Bunny gasped.

  Val’s hand fell on her knee. Bunny’s dress bunched above the rolled tops of her stockings. The smooth skin of her thighs gleamed white.

  “Kiss me!” she panted. “Love me!”

  She slid down further into the confines of the couch. Her long limbs, made more seductive by sheer hose, were columns of alabaster roundness. Val’s mouth went dry. He knew he had to resist the pulsating passion of her. It was going to be hard.

  Those are the two most erotic scenes in the book. Poor Val Vernon never does get laid!

  This big-tease approach may be one reason Valhalla Press failed to last long in the literary marketplace. Another reason—the main one most mysteries published up until the end of World War II are rather sexless affairs, according to Marie Rodell, Duell, Sloan and Pearce’s mystery editor of the period and the author of Mystery Fiction, Theory and Technique (1943)—was that “the morality of the average mystery fan is apparently pretty strait-laced. He will countenance murder, but not sexual transgressions.” Rodell says further in her how-to treatise:

  Sexual perversions, other than sadism, are definitely taboo. And sadism must be presented in its least sexual form. Homosexuality may be hinted at, but never used as an overt and important factor in the story. An author may, in other words, get away with describing a character in such fashion that the reader may conclude the character is homosexual, but he should not so label him. All the other perversions are absolutely beyond the pale.

  Even references to normal sex relationships must be carefully watched. Except in the “tough” school, unmarried heroines are expected to be virgins, and sympathetic wives to be faithful to their husbands. (A tearful and truly repentant Magdalene is sometimes possible.) A certain amount of sexual joking between married characters is permissible, so long as it is not crude and does not use any Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, nor refer too directly to the sexual act. And of course the entire list of possible clues, motives and methods dependent on the natural functions, or on the sexual act, are out of the question.

  My, how times have changed!

  As late as 1942, the attitude of mystery writers toward women and sex could be laughably unsophisticated—even in a so-called hard-boiled novel. Consider the following, for instance, from Britisher John Bentley’s American tough-guy imitation, Mr Marlow Takes to Rye:

  The giant again laid a hand on Hazel Lawes. This time, his enormous fingers came to rest on the front of her dress, near the throat, clutched the material and pulled.

  Her scream drowned the sound of ripping cloth. Next instant, the top of the dress was in rags, exposing bared shoulders, a lace-trimmed satin underslip, held up by thin shoulder straps.

  “You follow the idea, Marlow?” Forbes’s tone was cynically contemptuous. “We just repeat the process until you either reveal the hiding place of those jewels, or Miss Lawes is completely naked. I’m quite sure your innate gallantry will assert itself before many minutes have passed. You’ll never let her suffer the indignity of parading before us in the nude.”

  The swine was right. He knew I’d cave in long b
efore Steve’s greedy, obscene eyes defiled her loveliness.

  When mystery writers did write about sex in those days, their approach could be downright rhapsodic, even when they were dealing with nothing more erotic than a kiss. This is abundantly true of the great alternative writers—our old friends C. E. “Teet” Carle and Dean M. Dorn, for instance, in their first novel as by Michael Morgan, Nine More Lives (1947):

  Our first kiss. It, alone, mattered in my life. For at least a couple of years, we clung to that first kiss, as though the ending of it would be the awakening from a dream. My hands came away from her face. My left slid under the curve of her neck and continued until her head was cupped in my elbow. I began to straighten up, carrying her with me. She lay in my ams, her hands cupping the back of my head, pressing it downward savagely. We were a molded unity and there was no breath for either of us.

  We had to break it. The human body can endure only so much. I let her face drop away from mine a few inches, and her hands relaxed their pressure on my head. We breathed deeply. My eyes opened and fondled her closed eyelids. I kissed her quickly a dozen times, then paused.

  Her eyes opened. “Hi, baby,” I whispered.

  “Hi, you big louse.”

  My hands whipped up from under the bed covers, caught her shoulders, pulled her down on top of me. My arms encircled her body, fingers moving over the fine-weave of a sweater. I pressed her to me, rolled over so that she lay across my hips, her back against the bed. I pulled my shoulders out of the blankets, put my face above hers, kissed her eagerly. She was impassive. Her lips were as unresponsible [sic] as the back of a hand.

  Teet Carle, who did most of the writing in his collaborations with Dorn, was also a master of postcoital dialogue:

  “. . . . I’m cheap, Bill. I’m not a nice person. I wouldn’t have let you if . . .”

  I was across to her side, holding her. “There isn’t a cheap inch on your body.”

  She looked up at me. “Bill, believe me, it never happened before. I’m not a pushover.”

  “Cookie, there’s a thing known as love at first sight.”

  I kissed her. She asked, “Tell me, Bill. You didn’t come to my place just because you knew I’d be easy, because you thought I’d want you so much I’d hide you out, because it was your only chance?”

  I shouted, “Hey, the chops are burning.”

  Two major changes in the approach to sex in crime fiction occurred in the late forties. One was the publication of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, in 1947; the other was the advent of the paperback original.

  There is nothing soft or gentle about Spillane’s approach to fictional sex—indeed, very little that is even pleasurable. The women Mike Hammer encounters and beds are tough—most would just as soon kick him in the balls as they would fondle the same part of his anatomy—and all too often treacherous and deadly. And of course his attitude toward them is equally hard-boiled. When his lover Charlotte turns out to be a murderess at the end of I, the Jury, Hammer deals out the same justice to her as he would to any male thug or crook: he puts a .45 slug in her belly. And when, dying, she asks him how he could have done this to her, he says coldly, “It was easy.”

  This rough-and-tumble attitude toward sex, with its sadomasochistic overtones, was a refinement of the more overt sadism of the weird menace pulps of a decade earlier (and there have been further refinements unto the present). It was so popular with readers that a great many writers imitated it over the next twenty-odd years, especially those who toiled in the area of the paperback original.

  The promise of voyeuristic sex, as much as the cheap cover price (twenty-five cents for most titles throughout the fifties), was what sold millions of originals to a primarily masculine audience. Whether standard-sized paperbacks published by such “legitimate” mass-market houses as Gold Medal, Dell, Avon, Lion, Popular Library, and Ace, or digest-sized books brought out by flash-in-the-pan entrepreneurs under such unsuccessful imprints as Falcon Books, Phantom Books, Original Novels, and Rainbow Books, their cover art was generally as lurid and suggestive as that of the pulps. In the main, they utilized the “peekaboo” approach: women depicted either nude (as seen from the side or rear) or with a great deal of cleavage and/or leg showing, in a variety of provocative poses. Often enough those sexy poses were tempered—or enhanced, if you happened to be of a certain bent—by guns, knives, and other deadly weapons. Their titles, too, were often mixtures of sex and violence: Murder Is My Mistress, My Love Is Violent, Naked Fury, Love Me—And Die!, Strip for Violence, Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart, Whip-Hand, The Sadist, The Raper. The same is true of their cover blurbs: “She screamed—but he just kept coming at her . . .” and “She was young and lovely and evil as hell—and I knew from the moment we met I would never get enough of her” and “There was invitation in every lovely curve of her body—an invitation right to the morgue” and “He was stretched on the rack of a corrupt and alien love.”

  Despite their packaging, however, these and other softcover crime novels published by Gold Medal et al., were primarily standard, if violent mysteries with the sexual content added in varying amounts as spice. And not all of their writers slavishly imitated the Spillane approach to intimacy. Some toned down the sadistic and/or ultramacho aspects; some eliminated them entirely. Others, such as Richard S. Prather, intentionally added elements of ribald humor.

  A few authors, happily enough, added elements of ribald humor that weren’t intentional, and thus fashioned alternative sex-scene classics.

  Nothing seems to move writers to greater eloquence than describing either (1) the female anatomy, in particular the bosom; (2) the various aspects of sexual foreplay, as we’ve already seen demonstrated by Michael Morgan; and (3) the sex act itself. Here are a few nuggets mined from softcover originals published over the past thirty-odd years.

  Her soft flesh rippled up at me. She let it ripple. She uncrossed her legs and the robe fell open still further. Her knees were round and maddeningly pink. The nakedness of her inner thighs graduated enticingly, sensuously slow up to the danger zone. (Michael Avallone, The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse)

  She laughed and the best parts of her jiggled, sort of on a slope. . . . She . . . continued to [laugh] as she slipped into her dressing gown. All sorts of things kept peeping out at me. And believe me, like I said before, she had the things to peep with. (Earl Norman, Kill Me in Shinjuku)

  She urged me closer, the invitation plainer than if engraved on vellum. I grinned, released her hand, and leaned toward her. Her arms circled my neck and drew me down. A moment later hot, wire-tinged lips were giving me the kind of kiss which makes hair sprout on bald-headed men. I leaned into it, enjoying the surge of unexpected wattage. (Milton K. Ozaki, Maid for Murder)

  It was a pass all right. A pass with horns on and no matter what kind of cold fish she was she recognized the big fisherman reeling in her lips. I held her vised and planted her mouth deep into my soul. (Michael Avallone, The Fat Death)

  I put my arms around her and drew her close. She didn’t resist. Then her cool arms were around my neck and her warm breasts were digging into my chest and she was kissing me like a French horn in reverse. (Robert O. Saber, Sucker Bait)

  She was pulverized. As if she had been running all day. Her whole body had that numb tingling feeling that always followed their lovemaking. Slowly, her heartbeat came down to somewhere around normal and the small beads of perspiration stopped excreting with such speed. (Peter C. Herring, The Murder Business)

  She was breathing hard, firm breasts rumba-ing in the field of [her] Kelly Green [sweater]. (Michael Avallone, The Hot Body)

  There was music in her ankles, rhythm in her hips, and melody in her brain. And many fires to be quenched. Carmody could not believe that those wide liquid eyes had ever been reserved, lash-guarded. . . .

  Lydia’s kiss was greedy, mouth to mouth, not lip to lip. . . . Deftly, lightly, he lifted her legs from beneath and at the same time, caught her at the waist. With fine timing, he wafted h
er up and closed in on her as she rose to chest level. (Hamlin Daly, Case of the Cancelled Redhead!)

  I looked at her breasts jutting against the soft fabric of her dress, nipples like split infinitives. (Max Byrd, Fly Away, Jill)

  Of course, not all women in paperback originals were made as lusty or voluptuous as those in the above novels. Nor were all the protagonists portrayed as quite so virile. Some, in fact, are downright unsure of themselves when it comes to sexual matters— unsure, even, of their own body parts. One such refreshingly unvirile character is Kenn Davis’s black San Francisco private eye, Carver Bascombe, as witness the following passage from his most recent case, Melting Point:

  She looked directly into his face, the desk lamp throwing irregular shadows onto his lean brown face. Sharon’s brown eyes were soft, like molten chocolate drops. Carver squirmed under such a direct stare. Did he still have an erection? He closed his eyes. No, not fully erect. Did she notice? He hoped not.

  If the legitimate mass-market paperback houses offered mysteries spiced with sex, the reverse was true of such soft-core porn publishers as Merit Books and Novel Library (both published by Camerarts out of Chicago), Pad Library (Agoura, California), and Vega and Ember (San Diego). Sex was their main commodity, and for the most part the titles and cover blurbs on their criminous (and other) novels made no bones about it.

  Camerarts’s specialty was the dominant-male, Mike Hammerish approach to sex, as some of its mystery titles indicate: Dammit, Don’t Touch My Broad!, Passion Has No Rule Book, Playground of Violence, Unbelievable 3 & 1 Orgy!, Honey Blood, Torture Love-Cage. Their cover copy was even more explicit, as in the following from Glenn Low’s Honey Blood: “Guys—there’s a big illustration on this page [brawny guy, naked to the waist, holding a voluptuous woman in a see-through blouse high over his head] for a big, big man’s book. But remember: the one thing that always guarantees you big, exciting manly shockers is this,” and there follows a big red arrow angling downward, ostensibly at a logo that reads “Novel Book” but in fact at the front of the brawny guy’s pants, where the faintest suggestion of a bulge can be discerned.