He totally ignores us for her. She can't drive a tractor or slaughter a hog, so what the hell is the attraction?
The hicks keep on coming. Above is another entry in the always fertile farmer sleaze genre, Shanty Road, by Whit Harrison, aka Harry Whittington. A hot hayseed named Amy inspires jealousy and desire among the locals, and things get interesting when a handsome young city doctor comes along and likes what he sees. In order to win Amy he'll have to beat back rivals and earn trust. You may remember Whittington also wrote the rural novels Shack Road and Backwoods Shack, and he authored others we haven't discussed. By now you've probably realized he was the king of this genre, and in fact he gave the niche its name—“backwoods novels.” This one doesn't have a backwoods price, though. Vendors are asking $175 and up for it. 1954 copyright.
Did I tell you he used to sit on my head and fart? Having sex with me could heal some deep psychological scars. Above, a bit of backcountry melodrama written by the ubiquitous Harry Whittington under the pseudonym Clay Stuart. In this one, a man returns to the family farm to find that his brother is a drunk and has let the place fall into ruin. Real trouble starts when he comes across a woman skinny-dipping in a pond and joins in for some fun and games, only to find she's married to his brother. Meanwhile she's also sleeping with the man who holds the note on the farm. What a tangled web Whittington weaves, and so it goes, sleaze neverending. Interestingly, he chose the Stuart pseudonym after using the same name for a major character in the previous year's Don't Speak to Strange Girls. Thereafter he wrote as Stuart whenever he delved into the southern milieu. His Brother's Wife is copyright 1964, and the nice cover art is by Al Rossi.
Go completely unnoticed in any setting with the amazing new Undercover Operative Trench Coat. Well, some products don't work as advertised. We weren't going to buy it, but then we learned it came with a complimentary limited edition newspaper with two eye holes cut in it. But when we wore the coat we got spotted immediately and now we have a restraining order. 1955 copyright on this Ace Double of Harry Whittington's One Got Away (Robert Schulz cover art), bound with Cleve F. Adams' Shady Lady (Harry Barton on the art chores). We'll see you after our probation hearing.
You've changed me, baby. My evil days are done. From here on out I'm going to be forever unpleasant.
Forever Evil is an exceedingly scarce digest style paperback written by Harry Whittington for Original Novels. When we say scarce, we mean triple-digit scarce—like $175 per copy scarce. The story concerns a New York party girl (with the excellent name Billie Parker) who ends up in a hotel room with a corpse and has to flee the police and, possibly, the perpetrators. How far does she run? Well, the cover tells the story. But even in paradise she can't help hooking up with the lowest characters around, and in any case, in mid-century fiction it's impossible to escape one's troubles. The cover art for this is uncredited, but it's amazing. The copyright is 1952.
Hey, Sarge, I'm ready for those nocturnal maneuvers you mentioned. Not long ago we put together a large collection of lesbian paperback covers from the mid-century period. This one—Harry Whittington's Rebel Woman, 1960, from Avon Publications—we held back. It was just too awesome to mix in with the fifty or so we posted earlier. As we mentioned before, since these were mainly written by men, they reflected male fantasies and assumptions, and this one is prototypical anti-lesbian sleaze. An American mercenary gets involved in a Latin American revolution and is captured by a squad of female rebels. When he realizes the leader of the group is an old flame he figures he has nothing to worry about. But when he “saw the way she looked at the girl Dolores [he knew] the twisted path she had taken.” He decides she'll need to be reconverted to the hetero team, but that may be harder than it seems at first glance. Whittington may have gone to hell for writing this one.
What happens in the sticks stays in the sticks. More hicksploitation from Hallam Whitney, aka Harry Whittington—Backwoods Shack, for Carnival Books, digest format with great cover art by Rudy Nappi. A love triangle in the Florida outback is centered on hot-to-trot “backwoods trash” Lora and her two suitors, uptight Roger and proudly countrified Cliff. 1954 copyright.
In your culture girls kill after mating? Hmmph. How strange. What do you kill? Whit Harrison’s Native Girl was first published in 1952 as Savage Love, received a name change later that year, then was reissued four years later in 1956 under the author’s real name Harry Whittington. The book is set on the island of Maui and opens, first sentence, with lead character Coles Cameron seeing his best friend’s Hawaiian wife Lani completely nude. From there it’s just matter of time before he gets himself a little jungle love—and of course only a matter of a little more time before he’s boiled in a pot and eaten. Well, not really, but things go almost that badly. Steamy stuff, if a bit overwrought.
If your life seems too good to be true it probably is. Here’s something we came across that we love. It’s a rare 1959 Red Seal edition of Harry Whittington’s thriller You’ll Die Next!, which originally was published by Ace Books in 1954. It’s the story of a solid everyman who slowly descends into a nightmare of mistaken identity—he’s punched in the face by a thug, fired from work, accused of crimes about which he has no idea, and later framed. But this unremarkable everyman has a wife so beautiful and vivacious even he could never believe she married him, and therein may lay the key to the mystery. This is considered one of Whittington’s best. Cover art is by unknown.
Here’s a pop quiz for you, since you think you’re so damn clever. Is it better to be a live tramp or a dead loudmouth? Harry Whittington’s The Lady Was a Tramp, aka Murder at Midnight, is the story of a man who hires a detective to solve the murder of his angelic daughter only to have the detective discover that the daughter was not such an angel after all. The book features Pat Raffigan, who is a character Whittington used often. 1951 on this, with uncredited art.
Vintage paperback violence gets up close and personal.
We have another collection today as we prepare to jet away on vacation with the girls. Since the place we’re going is known for rowdy British tourists (what place isn’t known for that?), we thought we’d feature some of the numerous paperback covers featuring fights. You’ll notice, as with our last collection, the preponderance of French books. Parisian publishers loved this theme. The difference, as opposed to American publishers, is that you almost never saw women actually being hit on French covers (we’d almost go so far as to say it never happened, but we’ve obviously not seen every French paperback ever printed). The French preferred man-on-man violence, and when women were involved, they were either acquitting themselves nicely, or often winning via the use of sharp or blunt instruments. Violence against women is and has always been a serious problem in the real world, but we’re just looking at products of the imagination here, which themselves represent products of the imagination known as fiction. Content-wise, mid-century authors generally frowned upon violence toward women even if they wrote it into their novels. Conversely, the cover art, stripped of literary context, seemed to glorify it. Since cover art is designed to entice readers, there’s a valid discussion here about why anti-woman violence was deemed attractive on mid-century paperback fronts, and whether its disappearance indicates an understanding of its wrongness, or merely a cynical realization that it can no longer be shown without consequences. We have another fighting cover here, and you may also want to check out our western brawls here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West's considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy. 1971—Manson Sentenced to Death
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed. 1923—Yankee Stadium Opens
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008. 1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.
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