A Story of Big Business and Blue Balls

Harry Whittington is one of my favorite novelists, so I’m kind of surprised I’m just now getting around to reviewing one of his books. But better late than never, and this particular book is even somewhat topical, it being about the railroad industry, which is kind of a hot topic in the U.S. now. Although the likelihood of people following the disaster in East Palistine, Ohio, immediately seeking out historical fiction about the expansion of a railroad in Florida during the 1800s is negligible, I figure it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, back to Harry. I first discovered Harry Whittington when I caught the movie adaptation of his 1956 novel Desire in the Dust on the Fox Movie Channel, back when that was a thing. I thought the movie was awesome and immediately sought out the book, which was just as good. Since then, I’ve been going on periodic eBay binges, searching out his work. Luckily, there’s a lot to choose from, and in a wide variety of genres: westerns, crime thrillers, mysteries, sexploitation, soapy potboilers and even queer pulp.

Of course, not all of Whittington’s books were written under his own name. Among his many pseudonyms was the name Blaine Stevens, which he used for a trio of historical epics he published in the very late 1970s and early ’80s, the first of which was 1979’s THE OUTLANDERS.

Set in the late 1800s, The Outlanders is the story of Ward Hamilton, a man with a dream: to own his own railroad. He’s so driven to achieve this goal that he hunts down his older brother Robert, wanted for stealing $100 thou in gold, so he can collect the $20,000 bounty. Also, he wants to know where Robert hid the gold. “I can use that money you stole,” the 19-year-old Ward explains to Robert when he finds him, hiding in a shack in the wilds of Florida with his servant (and recently freed slave) Thetis, “and warrant you a tenfold return you’ll never get with it planted somewhere in the ground.” Robert, out of spite, doesn’t admit to having stolen the gold, let alone divulge where it’s hidden. Ward will just have to make do with the $20 grand reward money.

Twenty-thousand dollars isn’t enough to buy a railroad, but Ward doesn’t let that stop him from bidding on the East Florida & Gulf Central railroad when he learns it’s for sale—information he gets when he beds the frustrated wife of its owner (“It’s been ten years since [my husband has] had an erection. Five since he’s wanted one.”) With some financial sleight of hand and the kind of self-confidence only found in those too young to know better, Ward’s bid for EF&GC is accepted. Now he must cover the full purchase price. So, he heads to Atlanta, where he calls on Lily Harkness, the prettiest of the Harkness daughters and Robert’s fiancée prior to his incarceration. She’s pretty, sure, but what Ward wants as much as access to her pussy is her knowledge of where Robert stashed the hidden loot—surely, he’d have told the person he loved the most. He gets neither, even when they marry. Lily has her own motive for marrying Ward, and that motive ain’t sex, the very concept of which she finds disgusting (the couple only bones two times during their decade-long marriage). Worse, Lily has no clue where Robert stashed the stolen gold (hint: the person Robert loved the most was not a woman). Ward gets more out of a business arrangement with one of Lily’s other suitors, the homely but goodhearted bank vice-president Hobart Bayard, from whose bank Ward secures a generous line of credit.

As the story progresses, Ward’s business success increases while his home life becomes more and more miserable. He and Lily have two children, only one of which is Ward’s: a son, Robin, and daughter, Belle. Lily becomes a religious nut, and then just plain insane. Ward isn’t always the easiest guy to root for — he’s a bastard in many instances — and his reasons for courting Lily were hardly admirable, but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him as he tries to do everything possible to give Lily a happy life, only to see her grow more hostile, poisoning Robin against him and resenting Belle for her closeness to Ward. Lily is also a sad case, but since The Outlanders is told from Ward’s point of view her behavior is often presented as the result of her being a spoiled bitch and not mental illness.

Adding to the tension is Julia Fredrick, the daughter of Dayton Fredrick, a one-time successful developer who was depending on buying EF&GC to transport vacationers to his struggling resort in Port St. Joe, Florida. When the two first meet, Julia is a precocious 13-year-old who develops an immediate crush on the young Ward Hamilton, which, fortunately, Ward doesn’t take advantage of even though the book is set at a time when sex with underage girls wasn’t necessarily frowned upon (“I like to pluck ‘em young, too,” a sleazy EF&CG rail executive tells Ward conspiratorially when he discovers Dayton Fredrick’s teen daughter in Ward’s company). Her feelings change, kind of, when Ward buys EF&GC, and she swears she hates him as much as she loves him, even though Ward and her father continue to be friendly. Ward’s feelings also change, from viewing Julia as a smartass kid to seeing her as a woman and realizing he has romantic feelings for her (mitigating factor: by the time Julia is in her twenties Ward’s balls are the color of Concorde grapes).

Ward’s fortunes begin to turn as the 19th century draws to a close. He is granted a divorce from Lily, but by the time it’s final Julia has married someone else — Hobart Bayard, now a bank president. Ward’s son Robin will have nothing to do with him, while Belle is uncontrollable, having been kicked out of every school she’s been enrolled in. Then Belle marries Laddie, an arrogant aspiring artist and abusive prick who beats Belle as regularly as she cheats on him. 

The stresses aren’t confined to Ward’s personal life, however. Industrialist Henry Flagler needs a railroad to transport guests to his Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, and the railroad he wants to buy is Ward’s. He asks Ward to name his price, but Ward is too proud to sell. But Flagler’s not the type of man to take no for an answer. If Ward isn’t going to sell willingly, Flagler will use his power and influence to make sure he’ll have to sell. Still, Ward holds out, until a hurricane forces his hand.

Harry Whittington by Any Other Name is Just as Good

I’ll admit that I was wary of this one before I started reading it. Several years ago, I read Whittington’s second Blaine Stevens novel, Embrace the Wind, which was marketed as a bodice-ripping romance, and found it tough going for its first fifty pages or so, when Whittington really leans into the romance genre, adopting an uncharacteristically florid prose style (the book picks up when it becomes more of an adventure story). Thankfully, Whittington keeps the flowery descriptions to a minimum in The Outlanders, the novel being more discount John Jakes than Johanna Lindsey rip-off, though the eBay seller I bought it from categorized it as a western, probably because of the cover.

The Harry Whittington copyright
was enough to sell me on this book.

Essentially a rags-to-riches story, The Outlanders doesn’t necessarily offer a lot of surprises—you’ll realize early on that Dayton Frederick’s story foreshadows Ward’s, that Ward and Julia are destined to end up together—but that doesn’t diminish its entertainment value. Whittington’s writing keeps the story moving, and he cleverly weaves in real people (Flagler, Dr. Lue Gim Gong) and events (e.g., using prison labor to build railroads), as well as a few Easter eggs. One character that I thought was a real person in history was Marve Pooser, leader of a homesteader uprising against Ward’s ever-expanding railroad. I was sure I’d read about him somewhere before. And I had: that was the name of the villain in Whittington’s 1959 novel, A Moment to Prey (a.k.a. Backwoods Tramp).

If I have one quibble with the book, it’s that while Whittington successfully keeps us in the world of the late 1870s, a few of his characters behave as if they stepped out of the 1970s, specifically Julia. Yes, she’s supposed to be wise beyond her years, but sometimes she’s a little too sexually blunt for the time. The likelihood of a young woman in this time period declaring, in her father’s company, that she would like to go to bed with a man, and that her father would not rebuke her for doing so, strains credulity. Less anachronistic, though still behavior more closely associated with our time, is when Ward’s sister-in-law Lavinia seduces him (hey, Ward was bound to stray sooner or later), immediately giving him a BJ (He felt her face pressed against him, her breath across her parted lips hot and moist upon his glans). I realize blowjobs were discovered long before the Summer of Love, but I don’t think one would be so freely given by a young woman with limited sexual experience and raised in the Antebellum South. But considering that readers of the 1970s expected at least a dash of smut in their pop fiction, this can be written off as fan service. The sex scenes, BTW, aren’t all that frequent and are just explicit enough to make it clear what’s going on without straying too far into raunch.

I find Harry Whittington to be a safe bet, no matter what the genre. Even his lesser books are, if nothing else, entertaining. The Outlanders, while no classic, is a satisfying read, well worth checking out if you should happen upon a reasonably-priced copy.

He Should’ve Let It Ring

The 1984 paperback edition of Eyes
teases a different novel than the
one Felice Picano wrote.

Though it’s difficult to believe now, there was a time—before smartphones, before voicemail, and when answering machines were still priced as a luxury item—when people felt obligated to answer a ringing telephone. To just let it ring was simply never considered. It’s true: the past was fucking awful. So is the present, but at least we can block unwanted callers. 

It’s during that barbaric time when we blindly answered our landlines, with no caller I.D. to warn us of who was on the other end, that Felice Picano’s 1975 novel EYES is set.

That impulse to answer a ringing phone is what kicks off the story proper, when Stu Waehner, a twenty-something, New York City social worker, returns from his workday, after a shittier-than-usual subway commute, and hears his phone ringing on the other side of his locked apartment door. Thinking it might be his semi-estranged girlfriend Jennifer, Stu is positively desperate to get inside to take the call, yet he has as much difficulty unlocking his apartment door as a teen-aged girl has trying to start a car in a slasher movie:

“Coming,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket for his key chain.

The phone kept on ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet, Jenny. I’m coming…”

He had to switch everything to under the other arm—these locks had to be opened left-handed.

The phone was still ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet.” One lock. Now for the top one. It squealed, then seemed to be stuck. There it was. Now the long key for the police lock. There! The door swung inward, then abruptly stopped short after opening a few inches.

With the impact, everything under Stu’s arm fell to the hallway floor.

The police lock was stuck.

The phone kept ringing.

And the phone keeps ringing, until Stu finally makes it inside his apartment to answer it. It’s not Jennifer, but a woman asking for Bill. A fucking wrong number. Yet the woman calling doesn’t just apologize and end the call. Instead, she belligerently asks if Stu is sure no Bill lives in his apartment. Stu insists she has the wrong number, and then the woman takes issue with his justifiable annoyance. Remarkably, Stu does not just hang up, but continues arguing with the woman, who calls him a paranoiac and recommends a stay in Bellevue. The conversation just as quickly de-escalates, with Stu apologizing for yelling and the woman apologizing for having the wrong number, and readers just wondering why the hell didn’t either of them hang up the moment it was realized the woman misdialed.

But the woman hadn’t misdialed. Her whole plan was to get Stu on the phone and keep him on it. That woman is Johanna, a freelance editor, also in her twenties, who lives in the tenement across from Stu’s building, and who has a perfect view into Stu’s apartment from hers, and, with opera glasses in hand, has been watching him intently. She’s also struck up a casual friendship with Gladys, the retiree who lives in the unit below Stu’s, to get some insight and gossip about Gladys’ upstairs neighbor, and even encourages the old woman to badger Stu into adopting a stray cat/plot contrivance. She keeps a journal as well, detailing facts she’s learned about Stu—including his previous address and current employer—and her observations gleaned from spying on him (“He seems to have no close friends of ether gender.”)

For all Johanna’s learned about Stu, she is unprepared for him to have a girlfriend, and is dismayed when Jennifer, who had been touring with her dance company since before Stu moved into the apartment across the street, returns. Stu is a little disappointed, too, but for different reasons. Jennifer’s affections for Stu have cooled significantly in the time she’s been away, while her love for her career has intensified. Women’s Lib may have been in full swing when this book was written, but Stu still has a chauvinistic mindset, viewing Jennifer’s dancing more as a hobby than a career, not to mention he’s suspicious of her constantly praising her choreographer Caspar (he dismisses Caspar as a romantic rival, however, later referring to him as looking like “the Fairy Godmother”).

In Stu’s defense, Jennifer is a bit of a pretentious twat, always bitching about how small the apartment is and often taking shots at Stu for his lack of ambition. No wonder he’s receptive when Johanna, now using a voice changer and adopting a British accent, calls back. Stu pushes for a name (“You know my name, why not tell me yours?”) Johanna tells him to call her by any name he wants, horrified when he settles on Joan (Joan was so close to her own name, so uncannily close. As if… he’d intuited it or somehow knew and was teasing her.) Still, she endures the moniker as long as Stu keeps taking her calls.

Inevitably, Stu and Jennifer break up, leaving Stu’s evenings free to take Joan’s calls. “Does she get real dirty? You know, breathy and hot, all that kind of stuff?” asks Bill, Stu’s coincidentally named co-worker, after Stu tells him of his mysterious caller. Alas, she does not, and Stu never pushes their conversations in that direction, either. Though Johanna is romantically fixated on Stu, she’s not overtly horny for him. In fact, the one other time she’s done this phone-stalking thing—with the previous occupant of Stu’s apartment, a Texas dude named Colin—she presented herself in person shortly after establishing a rapport over the phone, appalled to discover that the guy immediately wanted pussy. Because of that unpleasant experience, Johanna wants to keep Stu at a safe distance, determined to establish not just an emotional connection, but a co-dependence as well.

That distance is jeopardized when a Joan slips up during one of their phone conversations and remarks on the whereabouts of Stu’s cat, revealing that she is, in fact, watching him. Stu, predictably, wonders from which of the many windows across the street Joan is spying on him.

Stu later brings home a young hippie chick he met a nearby park and doesn’t bother to pull down the shades before they do the nasty. He senses Joan is watching and is briefly troubled by the possibility before deciding, hey, if she wants to watch, he’ll give her a show (regretfully, said show is not explicitly described). Joan/Johanna is not pleased. “I’m very disappointed in Stu,” Johanna writes in her stalker journal. She later laments that she can’t even complain: Did she expect him to be faithful to strange woman on the telephone whom he never even met? It was her fault. She was the one who set the limits.

That all changes when Johanna accompanies her horny best friend Alice to the Hungry Hat, a restaurant/singles bar, to meet-up with Alice’s coke dealer, Bill, who’s sitting at the bar with his friend from work...Stu! Alice, who’s made Johanna her project (she’s already goaded Johanna into getting new clothes, updating her hairstyle and accepting a full-time job with a book publisher), sends Stu over to chat with her reclusive friend while she and Bill take care of their transaction. A mortified Johanna says she must leave, but neither Alice nor Stu will let her escape that easily. Ultimately, Johanna thaws enough to give Stu her work phone number.

To Johanna’s amazement, Stu is genuinely attracted to her, and a real, in-the-flesh romance blossoms. It’s a fantasy come true, but it’s also a problem. What to do with Joan? Things get especially awkward when Stu wants to discuss with Joan the wonderful new woman in his life: Johanna. Johanna decides the best way to dissolve this phone friendship—as well as find out what Stu’s true feelings are— is for Joan to become a jealous bitch, shit talking Stu’s new flame at every opportunity (“She didn’t strike me as being the picture of glowing femininity, but, after all, she’s probably just fine for a little therapeutic sex.”)

Joan’s snarky comments about his new girlfriend aren’t enough to drive Stu away, nor are they enough to kill his curiosity about her identity. It’s that curiosity—with help from a horny tomcat and one of Johanna’s neighbors—that’s going to get one of them killed.

Not the Book It’s Marketed As

Though it drags here and there, I found Eyes to be a fairly engaging read (I’ll forgive Picano’s inclusion of a feline ex machina). However, I was also mildly disappointed and for that I blame the book’s marketing, which teases a much different novel. “There are many ways to satisfy desire,” reads Dell Publishing’s teaser copy on the front cover of the 1984 paperback. “Some people dream. Some people watch. Some people kill.” My expectations were further manipulated by the ellipses-heavy synopsis on the back cover:

Day and night, a mysterious woman called, a voice from the darkness telling him she was all alone… that she wanted to talk to him… needed him…desired him…

Day and night, the eyes followed him, no matter what he did, whom he held, whom he kissed. And what the eyes saw would lead to love…and fear—and then to terror.

Because of the cover text, I was expecting something much more salacious: Joan/Johanna would be a dangerous psychopath. Her calls to Stu would be unsettling, even threatening, not to mention obscene. Stu would be more of a player, and all the women he brought home would ultimately end up dead. And when Stu discovers his new girlfriend Johanna is not just his harassing caller but the one who’s killed all the other women in his life, it would lead to a more intense confrontation.

Also, while the model used for the book cover suggests that
Stu looks like Frank Stallone (left), going by Stu’s description
in the book, he more closely resembles the
1979 Playgirl model on the right.

Instead, Eyes is much more subdued, barely qualifying as a thriller. The body count is low—a mere two deaths, one from natural causes—and the calls Stu receives from Joan, while at times testy and irritating, are far from threatening. Johanna is not a psychopath, she’s just a sad, lonely woman with some serious self-esteem issues. She does not, as some other reviewers claim, have dissociative identity disorder; she’s well aware of the persona she’s creating when she calls Stu, hence the voice changer and fake accent. Joan is the confident woman Johanna wants to be. What she’s doing is the phone-based equivalent of catfishing, except the real person is as desirable as the fake one she’s presenting herself as, she just doesn’t realize it.

Stu, though mildly chauvinistic and a bit of a homophobe, is also more nuanced than expected. He’s good at his job but not entirely sure he wants to make it his life’s work. When he and Jennifer break up, he doesn’t immediately hit the bars looking for sex (his sole hookup prior to meeting Johanna happens when that hippie chick casually offers herself, no strings attached, because 1970s). What Stu wants more than sex is someone to talk to, someone to be in his corner, and Joan fulfills that need.

Felice Picano wrote a few more mainstream thrillers after Eyes, his second novel, before becoming a prominent name in gay literature, publishing the queer-centric novels Late in the Season and Like People in History, as well as the memoirs Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel and Nights at Rizzoli. He even co-authored The New Joy of Gay Sex. Nearly twenty years ago I heard Picano speak at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, and among other topics he talked about the trap of writing genre fiction solely for commercial viability. Interestingly, I don’t recall him bringing up any of his work in genre fiction. I learned about that through the Too Much Horror Fiction blog. I haven’t read any of Picano’s gay books (well, I did skim through The New Joy of Gay Sex a few times at various bookstores when I thought no one was looking, but I was too deep in the closet at the time to even consider doing something so brave as buying it), but I was immensely curious about his early horror and thriller novels. Does the fact that I bypassed Picano’s acclaimed LGBTQ books in favor of what I thought (hoped) were his stabs at tawdry mainstream horror make me a self-loathing homo? No, just taste impaired.

I don’t think Picano is ashamed of his earlier books, nor should he be, but he clearly didn’t want to risk becoming a hack horror writer, and for a CisHet audience no less. Not that anyone would mistake Eyes as the work of a hack. Rather than the trashy erotic thriller Dell was hyping, Eyes is a more thoughtful story about loneliness, restlessness and alienation. That’s to the novel’s credit, but it’s also its biggest letdown.

BTW: According to his Wikipedia page, Picano wrote a screenplay adaptation for Eyes in 1985. The movie was never produced (1978-81 would’ve been the ideal time to have made the pitch), and now, thanks to technology rendering its primary device irrelevant, it likely never will be.

A Kennedy Era ‘Melrose Place’

For all the racy passages in L.A. 46, what
got me hard was the revelation that the
luxury building at the center of the book’s
action had rents as low as $275*.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t seek out books set in expensive hotels or apartment buildings, but they always seem to find me. I was hunting for a vintage paperback copy of Day Keene’s Joy House on eBay (OK, another book that has a piece of real estate in the title, but it’s a single-family residence, not a multi-family), despairing that I couldn’t find any copies under $150, when I found two other Day Keene titles that looked wonderfully lurid, and for the combined price of $15. One of those novels was 1964’s L.A. 46.

The title refers to the postal zone for West Hollywood (this book was written ahead of the introduction of the ZIP code), specifically the stretch of Melrose between Doheny and La Brea. And in that area is the Casa del Sol, a luxury apartment building open to anyone who can afford it, be they psychiatrists to the stars, high class call girls, or small-town hicks with big city dreams—all are welcome so long as they don’t have pets or children.

Casa del Sol’s no children policy means the newly pregnant Eva Mazeric and her husband Paul, both WWII refugees, will have to find a more child-friendly place to live, but this is the least of Eva’s troubles. And Eva, though beautiful and seemingly happy, has had a lot of troubles in her young life, from losing her family during the Soviet occupation of Hungary to enduring (and, sometimes, guiltily enjoying) sexual abuse while in displaced persons camps and with a foster family. What’s got her so despondent that she seeks out the help of psychiatrist—or “sickey-ackey”—Dr. Jack Gam, who resides in the Casa del Sol’s penthouse, is learning that her older brother, whom she never knew, is still alive and living much, much closer than she’d like.

Dr. Gam has problems of his own. One of his patients, movie goddess (and Marilyn Monroe analog) Gloria Ames, has died of a drug overdose, putting Dr. Gam on the radar of police looking for answers and news media hungry for Hollywood scandal. So, he’s a bit preoccupied when Eva shows up for her appointment, and easily irritated when Eva can’t bring herself to discuss what’s got her so upset (“So, what’s your problem, Eva?”) Eva cuts the appointment short, apologizing for wasting the doctor’s time. Dr. Gam’s failure to gain Eva’s confidence, not to mention the suicide of his high-profile patient, has him wondering if he’s in the right line of work. The reader will also come to wonder about Dr. Gam’s aptitude for his profession as he comes across less a compassionate healer than a professional mansplainer.

Another Casa del Sol resident having a shitty day is “second-rate fighter” Marty Romero, a.k.a. Marty the Wonder Boy. When he’s not in the ring, Marty spends his days sexually harassing all the women in the building, including plump matron Mrs. Katz. Even his own mother can’t stand him. Finally sick of Marty’s shit—and taking care of Marty’s neglected wife Alicia and son Pepe —Mama Romero informs her son during one of his visits that he won’t be leaving alone; he’ll be taking Alicia and Pepe with him. And if he doesn’t? Well, maybe the boxing commission would be interested in hearing about how Marty threw his last fight. Then, just to make it clear she’s out of fucks to give, Mama Romero tells her son she wished she’d aborted him (“A goose quill I should have used before I brought such a son into the world.”)

As the book progresses, Eva falls apart, Dr. Gam falls for Eva, and Marty flips the fuck out. But while the bulk of L.A. 46 revolves around Eva, Dr. Gam and Marty, there are a host of other characters residing at Casa del Sol, far too many to be developed properly in a 250-page book. Those other characters include Lili Marlene, a one-time child star now earning a living as a stripper; Ernie Katz, a retiree whose business in New York didn’t always operate within the law; Colette, a high-priced call girl; has-been film director Mike Melkha, who spends his days drinking on the lanai and blaming his flops on a public too dumb to understand his work (sounds familiar); and Grace Arness, a model who, per the back cover copy, “pursued a strange kind of love.” Only Ruby Morgan, a rebellious teenager (exempted from the apartment complex's no child policy, evidently) living with—and desperately trying to get away from—her older sister and brother-in-law, gets a full-fledged story arc. 

A Banker Going Down on Mama and
Other Unsettling Childhood Memories

Day Keene (née Gunard Hjertstedt), better known for his hard-boiled crime thrillers like So Dead My Lovely and Home is the Sailor, is not an author you’d expect to write a melodramatic potboiler. Then again, he was the head writer for a few radio soap operas, so maybe it’s not that unexpected. He certainly had the talent to write this “Peyton Place of the West Coast,” to quote the cover’s ill-fitting teaser copy. (Peyton Place was notorious for exposing the sleazy underbelly of a genteel New England town, while Los Angeles’ trashy side was never much of a secret. Adultery, rape, incest and abortion in 1950s small town America? Shocking! In Los Angeles? That’s a slow Tuesday, even in the 1950s.)

And Keene goes for it, peppering L.A. 46 with several scenes of sexual debauchery, like Ruby’s sister Vera recalling a moment from their childhood, after their father had died and her mother faced foreclosure from the bank. To save the family farm, the girls’ mother gives in to banker Mr. Cronkite’s sexual advances, telling him she won’t enjoy it. Unbeknownst to Mama, her daughters are spying on the action through a crack in the window shutters.

[Vera had] seen animals serviced. She’d listened to her father and mother for years. But this was the first time she’d seen a man and a woman close coupled and the sight of Mr. Cronkite’s rigid protruding flesh, huge out of all proportion to the rest of him, first disappearing into then emerging briefly from the hairy patch between her mother’s thighs, had at the same time so excited and disgusted her that despite Ruby’s protests she’d had to leave the window and be sick.

It had gone on like that all afternoon. Every time she stood barefooted in the hot dust outside the window, the man from the bank had been beating his lean flanks and scrawny buttock even leaner. Then toward the late afternoon when she peered through the crack in the shutter, she thought Mr. Cronkite had gone. At first all she’d been able to see was her mother laying with her back arched and her head thrown back and her eyes closed and her lips drawn away from her teeth as she made small, animal sounds in her throat. Then looking on down between the massive breasts and equally massive thighs and drawn-up knees, she’d seen the top of Mr. Cronkite’s bald head rising and falling industriously, like a banty rooster pecking corn.

It’s not exactly spank-bank material, but still fairly explicit for a book penned in the early 1960s. Keene is just as detailed in his writing of Eva’s childhood sexual abuse, which had me wondering if these scenes were meant to be titillating or just shocking? It’s also interesting to note that it’s only when the sex is coerced or transactional that Keene provides more graphic descriptions. Good, clean romantic —or at least consensual—sex usually happens off page.

I don’t know if Keene was judging readers looking for smut by making the more explicit sex scenes the novel’s more unsettling situations, but he definitely judges some of his characters. As much as I’d like to say he’s surprisingly progressive, many of Keene’s depictions are very much in alignment with people of his generation. So, expect plenty of sexism and homophobia, with just a soupçon of casual racism. Though he writes of Grace, the “lesb” model, with some empathy, she is presented as someone who is broken and therefore needs to be “fixed.” More disheartening is that Grace also thinks there’s something wrong with her. When Ernie Katz comes to her aid after she’s been raped, Grace says: “I’d almost wished I enjoyed it. You don’t think I want to be the way I am, do you?” This attitude is mitigated, somewhat, by Katz, who tells Grace that she should be able to live with her “problem.” “People have lived with worse,” he says, later adding: “What can you expect from a world that was made in six days?” Grace’s rape, BTW, goes unreported because she fears it could cost her her job should it get in the papers. So, yeah, there are some fucked-up attitudes here.

But Keene also skewers some of the attitudes of his (and our) time, particularly regarding the media, represented in L.A. 46 by one of its residents, John Johns, a TV pundit whose name telegraphs that he's not meant to be taken seriously. Though Johns regularly spouts his “liberal” views on air (his editorials are only mildly progressive; readers today would be forgiven for mistaking him for a moderate Republican), his only deeply held belief is that the more controversial his positions, the greater the ratings. He’s nothing more than a rabble rouser. He even conspires with his wife to invite Marty’s poor wife and son over to their apartment for brunch, not out of genuine kindness but because it builds up his own image as the compassionate liberal, not to mention there’s the added kick of pissing off the neighbors. (“Are you certain you don’t believe some of that stuff you broadcast?” Johns’ wife asks.)

Overall, L.A. 46 is better-than-average trash fiction, with Keene steering this Kennedy era Melrose Place toward a violent conclusion worthy of the crime thrillers he’s more famous for. And it’s Keene’s crime fiction that I’ll continue seeking out, though I think I’ll just have to make peace with the fact that if I want to read Joy House and still be able to afford groceries I’ll have to settle on the more reasonably priced (and decidedly less cool looking) Stark House edition. What else can I expect from a world made in six days?

*That’s a boner-killing $2,411 in 2022 dollars, but possibly still worth wanking over depending on where you live.

A Woman of (Four) Letters

Jackie Collins was the Lady Boss of
trash fiction in the 1970s and ’80s.

One of the many depressing aspects about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey was that it highlighted how adult fiction had become so tame by 2011 that E.L. James’ rape-y Twilight fan fic could not only became a pop culture phenomenon but also be discussed by the amnesiac media as if smut had never before dirtied the New York Times Best Seller list.

The NYT Best Sellers had been sullied long before James came along, and on a monthly basis, too. Among those regularly defiling popular literature in the 1970s and ’80s were Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins. Though Rosemary Rogers and Judith Krantz gave them a run for their money, Robbins and Collins had succeeded in making their names synonymous with raunch. Rogers and Krantz wrote racy romances; Robbins and Collins wrote trash.

I was more of a fan of Harold Robbins’ books, but Jackie always seemed a far more likable person, and watching the 2021 documentary LADY BOSS: THE JACKIE COLLINS STORY, currently streaming on Netflix in the U.S., confirmed the late author’s likability. She’s so likable, in fact, that no fewer than four women interviewed identify themselves as Jackie’s best friend.

Jackie’s story is told through interviews with her older sister (you know who), her three daughters, Tracy, Tiffany and Rory, and numerous friends and business associates. Director Laura Fairrie’s best source, however, is Jackie herself, not only from archive footage but from a treasure trove of diary entries, journals and an unfinished autobiography, Reform School or Hollywood.

Teen-aged Joan and Jackie Collins.

Jackie failed to make a
splash in the 1957
movie All at Sea.

Of course, much of Jackie’s story has likely already found its way into her novels in one way or another as her life could be the basis of a Jackie Collins book. It’s a life that includes a domineering father (Joe Collins was temperamental theater agent prone to flying into rages at the dinner table), sibling rivalry (Jackie struggled to establish an identity beyond “Joan Collins’ little sister”), an ugly duckling-to-swan transformation (Jackie matured into a shapely young woman, helping things along with a nose job in 1959), wild times in Hollywood (including a fling with Marlon Brando, whom Jackie describes in a diary entry as “kind of fat”), an acting career that goes nowhere (appearing in the Alec Guinness film All at Sea and a guest spot on TV show The Saint are her more notable credits), and an unhappy marriage (Jackie’s first husband Wallace Austin was a bipolar drug addict who committed suicide a year after their divorce in 1964).

Look back in leopard print: Jackie with her first born, Tracy,
and Jackie’s mother, Elsa Collins.

It’s not until Jackie’s second husband, nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, encourages Jackie to finish a novel she’s all but given up on that Jackie pursues writing with any real ambition. “I’d been writing all my life,” Jackie recalls. “I’d written a lot of half-books that I never finished, and he was the first person that said to me, ‘It’s absolutely terrific and you can do it’.”

That book was The World is Full of Married Men, and Jackie sold it to a publisher for £400 ($536 U.S.). To say that the publisher got a huge return on its investment is an understatement. The book’s mix of strong women and sizzling sex made it an instant—and controversial—best seller in 1968.

Jackie at work, exactly as you imagine.

As the documentary details Jackie’s ascension on the best seller lists, it focuses more on Jackie as a celebrity than a writer. Even her former agent Morton Janklow puts more stock in Jackie’s TV appearances than her prose: “It was one of the reasons she was so successful. She could go out there and promote those books and not be embarrassed.” Her Mob Wives aesthetic—big hair, big shoulder pads, lots of leopard print—was just another aspect of her branding. She looked like a character from one of her books, making her their ideal spokesperson. Lady Boss is peppered with clips of Jackie promoting her work, including a 1980s TV ad in which Jackie urges readers to “get Lucky.” (The voice heard at the end of the clip below is Jackie’s oldest daughter, Tracy.)

Two aspects where I feel Lady Boss drops the ball is that it fails to give viewers a sense of the book market of the 1970s and ’80s (timing plays a role in Jackie’s success as much as her storytelling talent) or acknowledge those who came before her. It’s admirable that Jackie was an active participant in the marketing of her books, but she was hardly the first author—or the first Jackie—to do so. That the documentary fails to pick up on the many similarities between Jackie’s and Jacqueline Susann’s lives and careers is Lady Boss’s biggest oversight. 

Jackie looms over Hollywood.

Lady Boss makes it abundantly clear that Jackie took a lot of shit for her books. The documentary tries to attribute this as mere sexism, i.e., people disapproved of a woman writing bluntly described sex scenes (Fairrie includes plenty of footage of Jackie being scolded and/or belittled by male talk show hosts). Lady Boss even tries to frame Jackie as some sort of feminist icon. Though the author did self-identify as a feminist, her brand of feminism didn’t seem to go beyond speaking out against the double standard. Women should be permitted to be as shitty as men, while true, is not the sort of rallying cry that would land her on the cover of Ms. magazine. 

The 1980s, when Jackie ruled trash fiction and Joan ruled
Prime Time.

The documentary also touches on the rivalry between Jackie and her older sister. Joan says that Jackie hated a couple men in her life (she doesn’t name names), and that these men also hated Jackie, and so things were a bit chilly between the sisters during these relationships. Though they teamed up to adapt one of Jackie’s bestsellers, The Stud, into a movie vehicle for Joan in 1978, and its sequel The Bitch in 1979, things were again reportedly tense in the 1980s when Joan, at the peak of her Dynasty career revival, tried her hand at trash fiction, starting with her 1988 debut novel Prime Time. Jackie was none too happy that Joan was trespassing in her territory, so it’s not surprising she felt some schadenfreude when Joan’s subsequent books for Random House were deemed “unpublishable.” 

On the subject of Joan—excuse me, Dame Joan—I did not always believe she was speaking candidly. Though she doesn’t appear to view her and Jackie’s relationship through rose-colored glasses, she’s careful to present herself as the ever-supportive older sister. (People without siblings might believe that, but rest of us aren’t buying it, Joan.) I also got the idea—through tone of voice and body language—that a few people interviewed didn’t have particularly high opinions of Jackie’s famous sibling. When Joan’s anecdote about Jackie’s spirit inhabiting a persistent fruit fly (seriously) is referenced, Jackie’s former assistant all but rolls her eyes and says her former boss's sister is full of shit.

From the Lost Years: A Supplemental Book Review

Jackie’s 2009 novel Poor Little Bitch
Girl. Love the title, hate the book.

Jackie’s life wasn’t as rosy during the 1990s and 2000s. In 1992 her husband Oscar died of prostate cancer. And though it’s only briefly touched on, Jackie was also losing her mojo as an author. Her books in the latter half of her career, while still best sellers, weren’t selling as well as they once had. “We changed as a world,” says Jackie’s publicist Melody Korenbrot, adding that Jackie tried to change with it. “She sat down and wrote, but eventually she became completely confused and lost.”

Judging by her 2009 novel, POOR LITTLE BITCH GIRL, Jackie was still lost in the late 2000s.

I’ve enjoyed a few of Jackie’s books, including The Hollywood Zoo, the 1975 a.k.a. of Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick (the title later changed again to Sinners) and her 1983 mega-hit Hollywood Wives, perhaps the best thing she’s ever written (but still trash). Unlike grump Harold Robbins, Jackie didn’t take herself too seriously, her writing giving the impression she was chuckling right along with the reader.

Reading Poor Little Bitch Girl, you still get the impression she’s not taking herself too seriously, only this time the tone is less a conspiratorial chuckle and more of a “Whatever,” sighed under her breath.   

Poor Little Bitch Girl is the ninth installment in the Lucky Santangelo series, but the story pretty much stands on its own. Lucky herself is hardly in the thing. Instead, the novel revolves around four separate main characters: Annabelle Maestro, the estranged daughter of movie star parents, now running an escort service in New York with her cokehead boyfriend Frankie; Denver Jones (these names...), a one-time classmate of Annabelle’s, now a lawyer for an elite L.A. firm; Carolyn Henderson, a longtime friend of Denver’s, working in Washington, D.C. as Sen. Stoneman’s assistant (and his mistress); and Lucky’s son Bobby Santangelo Stanislopoulos, who runs a successful NYC nightclub and who was also once a classmate of Annabelle’s and Denver’s. None of these characters are older than 26, all of them are hot, and they all have the emotional maturity of junior high students.

The murder of Annabelle’s mother, Gemma Summer, is what sets the book’s story in motion, with Denver—whose firm is representing Annabelle’s father, the prime suspect—sent to New York to retrieve the titular poor little bitch girl. Denver hates the assignment, until she runs into Bobby. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Carolyn is kidnapped just days after telling Sen. Stoneman that she’s pregnant with his baby. It’s a good thing Bobby, who is just as smitten with Denver, has a private plane and thinks nothing of using it to fly her to D.C. to look for her missing friend.

If you read the above paragraph and asked yourself, Wait, shouldn’t the driver of the story be Denver trying to solve Gemma Summer’s murder? then you clearly aren’t in the right headspace for a Jackie Collins novel. That murder is merely incidental. What matters is that Denver bangs a hunky journalist in L.A., then a sensitive screenwriter in New York, and then falls for Bobby Santangelo Stanislopoulos (though she has trouble forgiving him getting a b.j. from pop singer Zeena, a Cher/Madonna hybrid who speaks of herself in the third person). Even Carolyn’s disappearance is secondary to Denver finding a man. Why waste time cutting into the meat of the story when you can eat Reddi-Wip directly from the can?

Worse than the book’s mishandled plot is its one-note characterizations. Annabelle is selfish and bitchy; Frankie is an asshole; Bobby is charming; Denver is headstrong and kind of kooky (and evidently meant to be a Julia Roberts-type character as Denver is compared to Julia in more than once instance); Carolyn is a hopeless romantic. Jackie, preferring to tell rather than show, often assigns labels for her characters, declaring that Denver and Carolyn are independent and smart, yet Denver is always getting rescued by men and Carolyn just wants Sen. Stoneman to leave his wife for her, and the idea that either of these women have more than a high school education strains credulity. You’d have an easier time believing Denver, whose chapters are written in the first person, is a 16-year-old inhabiting the body of her attorney older sister, Freaky Friday-style, than buy her as a member of the bar. 

Why waste time cutting into the meat of the story when you can eat Reddi-Wip directly from the can?

But, hey, at least there’s all that graphic sex Jackie is known for, except, nope, not in Poor Little Bitch Girl. Sex may be at the forefront of every character’s mind—second only to money—but Jackie backs away from detailing any bedroom activity, preferring to just have her characters give generalized postmortems instead (“I liked that he took his time, kissing me everywhere—and I do mean everywhere”). Considering the first Lucky Santangelo novel, 1981’s Chances, includes a scene in which Lucky’s father, Gino, slurps his spooge out of the pussy he’s freshly plowed—and described about as delicately—Poor Little Bitch Girl is practically PG-13. But then, we didn’t have PornHub in 1981, so maybe by the 2000s Jackie figured she’d just let the Internet fuel the horny imaginations of her readers.

In the book’s defense, it does have an awesome title. Also, it’s fairly well-paced and I was invested in the story enough to want to keep reading. Except, by the time I reached the end I regretted wasting my time with it. Jackie never pretended to be a great writer, but she wasn’t even trying here. This wasn’t the work of an author trying to push herself to be better than her last book; this was a brand name trying to fill enough pages to get a new hardcover on shelves before her previous best-seller landed in the remainder bin. It’s not a novel, it’s product.

Admire Her Spirit if Not Her Books

After her husband’s death Jackie eventually took up with businessman Frank Calcagnini for a very long engagement (the pair never married). If Lady Boss interviewees can’t say enough good things about Oscar Lerman, they struggle to say anything nice about Calcagnini. The way Tita Cahn, one of Jackie’s many best friends, describes him, he could well have been the inspiration for the character of Frankie in Poor Little Bitch Girl: “He was a gambler, a drugger [sic], an alcoholic and an abuser.” About the kindest words anyone can muster for Calcagnini is that he could be charming. When Calcagnini died of a brain tumor in 1998 few people—other than Jackie—mourned his passing.

Jackie Collins in a British TV appearance
shortly before her death.

Unlike her late fiancée, Jackie’s passing was deeply felt by all who knew her. Jackie had been diagnosed with breast cancer years before her death, but like her mother before her, she kept her illness a secret, and like her late-husband Oscar, chose to keep working until the very end. Lady Boss includes a clip of Jackie on the British talk show Loose Women made during her final days and her appearance is startling. She looks gaunt, frail, a good ten years older than her older sister. Still, she never lets on that she’s sick. Nine days after this TV appearance, on Sept. 15, 2015, Jackie Collins died. She was 77.

In watching Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story I came to see Jackie as an entertainer, just one who wrote tawdry beach reads instead of performing live at Caesar’s Palace. The documentary also strengthened my appreciation of her as a person. I just wish I could like her books as much as I like her. Still, I’d read Jackie over E.L. James any day.

Hot, Horny and Depressingly Relevant

The 1984 edition of Miami Golden
Boy from British publisher
Granada Publishing.

Though my review of The Movie Maker went a whole year and a half without a single view, I am going to try once again to gin up interest in author Herbert Kastle, this time reviewing his 1969 novel MIAMI GOLDEN BOY.

While The Movie Maker was Kastle’s take on the Harold Robbins/Jacqueline Susann-style showbiz potboiler, Miami Golden Boy has more in common with the works of Arthur (Hotel; Airport) Hailey and Burt Hirschfeld, with multiple characters and their parallel narratives converging at a single location.

In the case of Miami Golden Boy, that single location is the Bal Metropole, a swanky Miami Beach hotel that out-Fontainebleaus the Fontainebleau (the Beach’s three main themes, Kastle writes, are “BIG—ORNATE—MORE.”) Not only is the hotel able to accommodate a thousand(!) guests around its pool, it also features two nightclubs, a bar or three, a variety of restaurants and snack shops, and, on the Arcade Level, a veritable shopping mall.

The Bal Metropole (or the BM, as I’ll refer to it only once) also leases office space to the ad agency Andrew Stein Associates, which is why ad exec Bruce Golden, the titular Golden Boy, is frequently roaming the hotel’s giant halls. Bruce is young and hot, with a smooth confidence that makes panties dissolve almost instantly (“That’s what this hotel’s needed. A work of art,” remarks a horny socialite upon spotting Bruce in the lobby.) But while Bruce isn’t above indulging in some recreational sex, he has ambitions beyond just scoring pussy. He’s on the hunt for rich pussy, and the Bal Metropole is the perfect hunting ground: Where a Golden Boy might wilt and die outside the magic circle in Palm Beach, he could flower and triumph in Miami. The money was arriving. The women with money were arriving. Somewhere among them would be his bride.

The woman he sets his sights on is Ellie DeWyant, a waifish beauty with an even more attractive bank account. What Bruce doesn’t realize when he first hits on her is she’s also the daughter of the Bal Metropole’s owner, and she’s not charmed by Bruce’s come-ons. She’s also a bit of basket case, given to bouts of depression and easily panicked, especially when someone at the hotel begins blackmailing her. Ellie’s vulnerability ultimately works to Bruce’s advantage, allowing him to become, if not her Golden Boy, then at least her perceived White Knight, but he may have gotten himself more than he bargained for. Ellie, in turn, has gotten less than she’s hoped. But, hey, the sex is fantastic!

Avon’s 1971 paperback gives the
impression that Miami Golden
Boy is a romance novel.

Besides Bruce and Ellie, we meet Marjory Fine, the aforementioned horny socialite, who, when her fat husband leaves for business, hosts parties primarily so she can spy on her guests’ sexual dalliances. She even has a two-way mirror installed in her private bathroom so she can watch her guests fuck in the adjoining bedroom (voyeurism sure was a lot of work before the Internet). Among the guests she sees in action are hunky lifeguard Jerry Leech and the wife of men’s shirts magnate Max Prager, Ruthie, who’s got plenty of cushion for pushin’. Marjory sees more than she wants to, however, when swishy decorator Marco brings Democratic up n’ comer Sen. Richard Christopher into that bedroom and things get weird.

Fortunately for the senator, what happens in Marjory’s suite stays in Marjory’s suite. Were people to find out, the scandal would not only ruin Dick Christopher’s presidential aspirations, but it would also positively destroy him in the eyes of his father-in-law, former President—and father-in-law of the book’s current President Jonathan Standers—Michael Wheeler (did you get all that?) The former President is also at the hotel, and though he’s recovering from a stroke his iron grip on his political dynasty is as strong as ever. When Christopher remarks to his father-in-law’s nurse, Eve, that he’d want her as his nurse if he ever needs one, Wheeler says, “You seem to need one right now. Nurse…or nursemaid.” 

Wheeler might also be touchy about anyone eyeing Eve, a shy, sheltered young woman, as he hopes to groom her to be his mistress when he fully recovers. And he recovers quickly, thanks to Eve’s therapeutic hand- and blowjobs. But as awed as Eve is by Wheeler’s money and power, it’s manwhore Jerry Leech who moistens the crotch of her cotton panties.

Other characters include May Krasmer, owner of a successful chain of Chicago jewelry stores, who is in Miami to get some strange since her manipulative, impotent husband has given up even trying to get her off; Dan Berner, Sen. Christopher’s speechwriter, who gets a diagnosis that forces him to choose between the sex he lives for and just living, period; John McKensil, manager of the Bal Metropole, who has a weakness for underage girls and just might not be able to control himself once he discovers his new secretary, Violetta, is much younger than the 18 years she claims to be; and Wally Jones, an entertainer in the Sammy Davis, Jr. vein, whose celebrity provides little protection against America’s racism, especially when he accidentally punches the girlfriend of rival entertainer—and avowed racist—Benny Barker.

Some of these characters aren’t who they present themselves as, however. Some are actually involved in Cuban ex-pat Ivan Cesar Lamas’ plot to kidnap Sen. Christopher. Too bad some of Lamas’ henchmen are only in it for the money, not revolution.

Trash, But Not Disposable

Avon gave Miami Golden Boy a sexy
makeover “in the Harold Robbins
tradition” for its 1976 edition.

 

Miami Golden Boy is the type of novel that gets dismissed by intellectuals as popular fiction, the type of people who say the word “popular” in the same tone of voice one says, “You’re wearing that?” To that end, I’d like to say: fuck them. However, I sometimes wonder if Kastle might not have had a similar opinion of pop lit as those sneering intellectuals. His books may be written to appeal to the unwashed masses (or “deodorized masses,” as Sen. Christopher terms them), but he’s critiquing them, too. In Herbert Kastle’s world, there are no saints. Millionaires, politicians and criminals are all one and the same, they just get what they want through different means.

Beneath all the sex and sleaze in Miami Golden Boy is a scathing social commentary that, depressingly, is as applicable in 2021 as it was in 1969, especially in matters regarding race. There’s even a scene in which Wally Jones is stopped by police for “walking while Black,” though unlike in recent real-life incidents, the cops don’t shoot Jones, content to just humiliate him instead.

Then there’s Sen. Christopher’s speech, which originally includes these passages about America addressing its history of slavery and its continued practice of systemic racism. (A heads up, I’m quoting these passages as written and, as the book was written in the late 1960s, they use a dated term for African Americans.)

“What we must do is expand our understanding in terms of history, and also in terms of the human heart, sadly deficient when dealing with our Negro compatriots. These people who were kidnapped from their homes, packed into the bowels of ships like no intelligent cattle shipper would pack his stock, sold like any domestic animal, and bred in the same way. Now, overnight as it were, we expect the recent descendants of these tormented people to accept all middle-class virtues at face value, even when they have no part in middle-class benefits. We expect them to leap into the mainstream of American life, and we speak of our poor-folks’ childhoods to show it can be done easily enough. But our grandparents were not Black and were not slaves, and we are not Black and are not saddled with the malaise of recent slavery.

“Answers, you say, not questions, are what we need. Answers, I’m afraid, are not easily come by. And when offered, not easily accepted. Germany has dug into its pocket to indemnify, massively, the remnants and descendants of those killed in the Nazi holocaust. Not all Germans were Nazis. Not all Germans are, strictly speaking, responsible for what happened to the Jews. Yet all are paying.

“Not all Americans are responsible for what happened to the Negro people. Yet all Americans must dig into their pockets and then into their minds and hearts.”

Considering that the concept of critical race theory currently has the right wing’s collective catheters in a knot, I could imagine the above speech causing Scanners-style explosions of the talking heads at Fox News and NewsMax if delivered by a politician today. (The Internet, always quick to miss the forest for the tweets, would just focus on the use of the word “Negro.”)  But then, no real politician would risk saying these words, and neither does the fictional Sen. Christopher, who cuts them from his speech because to utter them in front of a largely white crowd on live TV would destroy his chances at securing the presidential nomination.

So, yeah, Miami Golden Boy may have all the elements of trash fiction, including a scantily clad woman on its cover, but it’s too well written and has too many pointed observations to be disposable. 

 

Not to be Outdone: Burt Hirschfeld’s ‘Key West’

Burt Hirschfeld wrote his
own Florida-set sex, scandal
and (overthrowing) Castro
novel in 1979, but his heart
just wasn’t in it.

I have no idea if Burt Hirschfeld wrote Key West in response to Miami Golden Boy, or if he in fact ever read Herbert Kastle’s novel. Regardless, his 1979 novel has a lot in common with the novel Kastle published a decade earlier, including a plot to overthrow Fidel Castro as one of its main narrative drivers. 

Unlike Kastle’s novel, however, Hirschfeld’s politics in Key West are more conservative — the man planning an assassination of Castro is an ex-CIA agent who frequently laments the weakening of America’s moral fiber — and his plotting less disciplined. The only instance where the majority of characters cross paths is during a party thrown by that stuffy ex-CIA man. I could believe the described bacchanal, which includes people doing drugs and having gay trysts in the bathroom, taking place at a party thrown by a staunch Republican, but that that said Republican’s guest list includes middle class slobs as well as the town’s elite strained credulity.

As a whole the book reads like the novelization of a Prime Time soap that got canceled after its eighth episode. Narratives are either wrapped up quickly or just dropped, resulting in the book simply petering out without a satisfying conclusion. Key West isn’t a total waste of time — Hirschfeld’s writing is as engaging as always — but only Hirschfeld completists need bother seeking this one out.

Queer and Loathing in the San Joaquin Valley

The original cover of Lost on Twilight
Road is as misleading as it is tacky.

I really intended this to be my second Pride Month post, but work, life and shit got in the way of me meeting my self-imposed deadline. But then, shouldn't Pride be celebrated all year long?

With that in mind, let’s get back in the closet! Let’s get LOST ON TWILIGHT ROAD.

I first learned of this 1964 novel, written by the late Joseph Hansen under the pseudonym James Colton, in the early 2000s when I read about it in Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback. While there were many titles discussed in Queer Pulp that piqued my interest, only Styker’s overview of Lost on Twilight Road, which she described as a “white trash epic,” sparked an obsession. I didn’t just want to read Lost on Twilight Road, I had to. 

Of course, Twilight Road was long out of print and difficult to find. I discovered a copy on Alibris shortly after reading about it in Queer Pulp but was put off by the nearly $60 price tag. Turned out, $60 was a bargain. The next time I found the book for sale online, the price was over $200, and it just went up from there. I gave up when I saw it listed for over $450 on Amazon. But then, in the mid-2010s, it popped up on eBay with a relatively modest opening bid. The price didn’t stay modest for long, but I managed to stay one step ahead of the escalating bids, until I finally got the news I’d hoped for: I had won Lost on Twilight Road! I won’t reveal how much I paid for it, but it was worth every penny.

The protagonist of Lost on Twilight Road is Lonny Harms, who, contrary to what the cover illustration would have readers believe, is a cute, blond 16-year-old boy, not a 38-year-old alcoholic man.

The cover painting appears to be modeled on B-movie
actor Sonny Tufts.

For Lonny, home is wherever his drunken slut of a mother parks their trailer. At the book’s opening, said trailer is parked in a dusty trailer camp in California’s San Joaquin Valley, baking in April sun, turning its interior into an oven. No wonder Lonny gets naked the moment he returns from school. If only his own nakedness didn’t awaken all these confusing urges.

It was crazy to get this way when you took your clothes off. Did it happen to everybody? … Did the rest of it happen, too — the part of you that was supposed to ride quiet and harmless in your pants — did that do this, stretch out, stand hard like this, for other guys? And was there no controlling what you did about it, what your hands did, how your body shouted to be released out of itself, and nothing you could do to stop it?

No sooner has Lonny shot his load than his mother comes home, drunk after having spent her day at “some cheap bar” rather than at work. The mortified teenager waits for the full force of her rage. Instead, she grins and says, “My God, little Lonny’s growing up.” 

A couple days later Lonny returns from school to discover Mildred, a friend of his mother’s, waiting for him inside the trailer. Mildred is described as dark (“maybe part Mexican or something”), younger than Lonny’s mother (“maybe somewhere around twenty-five”) and dressed in a halter top and flimsy gingham shorts. Mildred claims she’s just stopped by for a friendly visit, but it’s clear she’s not there to just to chat. After serving Lonny spiked lemonade, Mildred’s undoing the buttons of his Levi’s (“Don’t you know that’s what a woman’s for?”) Only when Mildred is in a post-orgasmic haze is Lonny able to get away “from her [... ] and from his mother, from the men with big cars, from the constant drunks, the early morning escapes, the old Chevy, the dirty trailer, all of it. Forever.” 

So begins Lonny’s journey down “Twilight Road.” He’s first taken in by Linus and Martha Brucker, helping the elderly couple on their small farm. The Bruckers are the family Lonny always wished he had, but his happiness is threatened by a visiting nephew, Hal. Though the boys are around the same age, Hal has little interest in being Lonny’s friend — except at night, when he and Lonny are alone in the guest room. But Hal is no queer, as he makes clear the next day. Lonny can suck Hal’s dick (or jerk him off or whatever — the sex isn’t graphically described), but during daylight hours he’d better keep his faggot ass away from him. This doesn’t sit too well with Lonny, though he doesn’t put his foot down until the last night of Hal’s visit. As revenge for being denied a farewell nut, Hal outs Lonny to Uncle Linus, and the old man sends Lonny packing.

He attempts to settle down in another town, taking a job as a dishwasher at a drive-in restaurant, but loses that gig when he refuses to be kept by Mr. Porter, the fat queen who owns the restaurant—and half the other businesses in town. Time for Lonny to hit the road again.

Things improve for Lonny considerably in Lordsburg, where he lands a job as an assistant at the town’s weekly paper, the Standard, owned and edited by handsome, 35-year-old Gene Styles. Lonny throws himself into his work, thankful to have Gene as a mentor and relieved to have such a demanding job to distract him from his homo desires.

An emergency at work returns Lonny’s thoughts to his sexuality. A local judge and the sheriff barge into the Standard office when Gene’s away, demanding an unflattering story about the pair being cruel to out-of-work migrants be pulled (this was over five decades before “being cruel to out-of-work migrants” would be a GOP flex). Lonny calls Gene as soon as the two men leave, surprised when another man answers. The man tells Lonny to come over to Gene’s house, instructing him to come around to the side patio instead of the front door. Lonny does as he’s told, and discovers what most readers will have already guessed:

French doors stood open, and beyond them, inside the room, Lonny saw a rumpled white bed, its blankets fallen to the floor. And on the bed sprawled two naked figures. The back of one was turned, but Lonny recognized Gene Styles. And tangled with his lean, brown arms and legs were paler ones. But not those of any woman, of any wife.

It was a man that was with Gene, another man. What went on? For a crazy instant, Lonny thought it was a fight he saw, a beating, an attempt to choke, to kill. He almost yelled. Then he realized what was happening. His knees went weak. He felt dizzy. He turned and ran.

What I love about the above passage is how Lonny, who, though bit confused about sex, is clearly sexually aware, thinks Gene and his lover are fighting, like he’s an 8-year-old walking in on his parents fucking. (Then again, over half the content on RFC looks like assault to me, so maybe Lonny’s confusion stems from Gene liking it rough.) Lonny’s innocence is further belied when, after getting caught by Gene and assuring the editor he’s not repulsed by his homosexuality and has no intention of quitting, he goes to a diner, cruises a sexy Mexican teen named Pablo and takes him back to his place. Seeing Gene in flagrante-delicto may have made Lonny’s knees go weak, but it also made his cock rock hard.

Anyway, Gene refuses to pull the story, putting him on the sheriff’s and judge’s respective shit lists. But unhappy local officials are nothing compared to his scheming bitch of a boyfriend, Max. Max had set Lonny up to discover the two men fucking in hopes of scaring away Gene’s cute assistant. When that plan backfires, Max just becomes more vicious and pettier. 

Though Lonny has assured Gene he’s accepting of the older man’s queerness, he is tight-lipped about his own sexuality — and his relationship with Pablo.When Lonny does finally come out to Gene, the older man’s response is fear that he’s unduly influenced his fair-haired employee (“This is not hero-worship, surely?”) Perhaps most telling of the time this book is written is Gene’s response to Lonny asking if it’s OK to be gay:

“I don’t know,” Styles sighed wearily. “It’s complicated, Lonny. But even if I believed it’s all right, I don’t think I’d tell you. A decent man has obligations, especially to younger men who trust him and look up to him.”

So, in the name of “decency” Lonny must deal with his sexuality in his own way, and secretly. That secret gets out amongst Pablo’s peers, however, and they jump him and stab him several times for being a joto. Pablo’s mother is also aware of her son’s relationship with Lonny and she makes no attempt to hide her contempt when Lonny appears in Pablo’s hospital room. But the sight of his boyfriend brings a smile to Pablo’s face, so of course Pablo’s family and his confessor, Padre Guzman, must do all they can to wipe it off. Pablo, powerless against the relentless Catholic guilt, agrees to move to Mexico, where he’ll finish his education and become a priest.   

A heartbroken Lonny later visits Gene Styles at his home. Max has left for the evening — taking all the fuses from the fuse box with him. Once Gene and Lonny restore the power, Gene discovers that Max has gouged deep scratches across all the albums in his collection, rendering them unplayable. Gene’s record collection may be ruined, but the evening isn’t. 

Yep, in a turn that’s as surprising as the revelation that Gene’s “family,” the 35-year-old newspaperman and his assistant, now 18, end up spiriting away to a coastal motel for a weekend-long fuck-a-thon. Some might argue that Gene — who has been schooling Lonny on art, literature, and music — has been grooming Lonny all along, but it doesn’t really read that way. Also, Lonny seems to be genuinely in love with Gene (so, fuck off Pablo). They’re more Chris & Don: A Love Story than a SayUncle.com video.

It’s easier to accept Gene and Lonny together if you imagine
them looking like a pre-car wreck Montgomery Clift
and a young Tab Hunter.

But blowing a teenager (presumably) isn’t the worst thing Gene does with his mouth. When Gene isn’t teaching Lonny the many ways to love a man, he’s sharing some more questionable thoughts on what it means to be gay in the early 1960s, such as this tidbit:

“Maybe we always come with the dying of a civilization. I don’t think anybody who took a hard look at the past would tell you differently. When civilizations start to decline, homosexuality not only booms, but gets tolerated.”

He then adds: 

“I only know what I like. And I also feel pretty sure you can’t make a crusade out of it, start clubs, wave banners, or lobby for legislation. When tolerance comes, it comes spontaneously. It’s coming now, by the way. Which now I don’t think bodes well for western civilization.” 

And finally:

“Being born queer is like being born with any other handicap. You have to make the best of it. But as you get around, you’ll notice a lot of boys and men who seem out to make a show, who wave it in everybody’s face, and then feel hurt when the normal world calls them dirty names. These guys are asking for it—camping it up, flouncing around in drag[.]”

Author Joseph Hansen, in addition to being a trailblazer in gay fiction with his series of mystery novels featuring gay private investigator Dave Brandstetter, helped found the Hollywood Gay Pride Parade, so I don’t think Gene represented Hansen’s views so much as the internalized homophobia of men in his generation. Then again, Hansen was married to a woman for 51 years, so what do I know about his real views?

Mad Max and the Search for El Fumador

Gene and Lonny’s weekend of hot sex is short-lived. When they return to Lordsburg, Gene buys Max off, paying the evil queen a total of $5,000 to get out of his life. Max, however, costs Gene significantly more, tipping off local law enforcement about Gene possessing illicit drugs and pornography, then planting plenty of evidence for the sheriff and his deputies to find when they execute a search warrant on Gene’s house. 

Gene is arrested, but, to Lonny’s dismay, doesn’t really try to defend himself during his preliminary hearing (presided over by the same judge featured in the news story Gene refused to pull). It’s better to be convicted on trumped-up drug and pornography charges than reveal the truth about him and Max, whom the prosecuting attorney has already declared “a proven and notorious degenerate. A homosexual.” Worse, the true nature of Gene’s relationship with Lonny could get exposed in open court.

Lonny makes it his mission to prove Gene’s innocence. Max is long gone, so while his daddy boyfriend awaits trial, Lonny goes searching for the only other man who could clear Gene’s name, the ridiculously named El Fumador, a notorious area drug dealer known for his small stature, wearing wide-striped suits, and driving a pink Cadillac. So during the two weeks before Gene goes to trial, Lonny takes the editor’s car and embarks on a search of the San Joaquin Valley for the pink Cadillac.

His search is a failure. At the end of the two weeks Lonny winds up back in the motel suite of Mr. Porter, the predatory queen who propositioned him a year earlier. Broke, defeated, and desperate, Lonny offers himself to Porter, and the hefty homo happily seizes the opportunity (Hansen describes their coupling as a “sad, flabby business”). Yet Porter already has a full-time fluffer, and he’s not about to share his sugar daddy, ordering Lonny to leave or he’ll “cut [his] precious cock off!”

Lost on Twilight Road’s
alternate cover design, which
is...better?

Just when it looks like Lonny’s story is about to end as it began, with him wandering aimlessly down “Twilight Road,” he spots El Fumador’s pink Cadillac in Lordsburg. He confronts the drug dealing runt, and though he gets El Fumador to admit he planted the pills and porn in Gene’s house, Lonny also gets the shit beaten out of him, then shot at, the bullet grazing his skull. El Fumador runs away as Lonny’s begins slipping toward the downer ending that was required of so many queer pulps.

But not Lost on Twilight Road! Lonny’s skirmish with El Fumador occurred right outside the rectory of the Santa Teresa church, and Padre Guzman, of all people, overhead the whole thing and called the sheriff. El Fumador is arrested, and Gene Styles is released into Lonny’s arms. “I want you whole and with me, now,” Gene says while visiting Lonny in the hospital. “I’ve got so very much to learn from you.”

When I first got this book, I expected it to be campy fun. I mean, you saw the cover. How could anyone expect to take this book seriously? Yet Hansen took it seriously when he wrote it under its original title, Valley Boy. (He didn’t care for the publisher’s re-titling, and he described the cover as the “world’s worst cover illustration.” I disagree with him about the publisher’s title, which I find wonderfully lurid, but he’s right about the cover, though I don’t think the boring cover painting of the second edition, which Hansen preferred, was much of an improvement).

Bad cover images seem to have plagued Mr. Hansen
throughout his writing career.

Though there are plenty of moments in the book that make it read like a novelization of a sweaty sexploitation movie, and the name “Lonny Harms” sounds like a character in a John Waters film, Lost on Twilight Road is more heartfelt than campy. Beneath the titillation of Lonny stumbling from one sexual misadventure to the next is a is an honest exposé of what gay men endure just to get along in the world. Lonny’s transformation from wide-eyed innocent to proud — but not quite out — homosexual may be far-fetched, but it’s also revolutionary for the pre-Stonewall ’60s. Gene Styles’ self-loathing is an unhealthy, hetero-normative way of thinking; Lonny’s self-acceptance is the ideal. Gene Styles is right: he does have so much to learn from his barely legal lover.

Goddamn, this was a long one. (Reader: You’re telling me!) But I really do adore this book, despite its problematic passages. Unfortunately, a more-detailed-than-necessary synopsis might be the closest most readers will get to actually experiencing it. Though Hansen went on to be a successful and acclaimed novelist, his early “James Colton” pulps never got reprinted. I hold out hope that one day these books will find their way into digital markets, like some of Hansen’s mystery novels, but until that day happens, my obsessive review will have to suffice. If that doesn’t get the Hansen estate’s ass in gear to re-release the author’s early pulps, I don’t know what will.