Exposé brought to book

In it's day, Exposé (1976) was a movie sold on the basis of being a star vehicle for 1970s sex symbol Fiona Richmond, but it's lasting notoriety rests on being banned in Britain as a Video Nasty in the mid 1980s.

Unusually this novelisation of Exposé appeared in 1978, two years after the release of the movie. Breaking the mould for movie novelisations, which tended to be released concurrent to the movies they were promoting, serving as a pre-VHS way of keeping taking a movie home with you. I can only think that the novelisations of subsequent Fiona Richmond vehicles Hardcore and Let's Get Laid sold enough copies to warrant going back to her first star vehicle and also novelising Exposé.

Rather than merely transcribe the movie, the book chooses to expand on it, adding back-story and presenting a version of Exposé that is free of the budgetary and censorship constraints that the movie was shackled by. The reason why the book isn't just your standard hack-job novelisation is that it was written by the film's own writer/director James Kenelm Clarke, under the pen name Philip Massinger. The novelisations of Hardcore and Let's Get Laid were also credited to Philip Massinger. However those two books were in fact written by a scriptwriter, whose career was mainly played out on British television, using the Massinger name. When he declined to novelise Exposé, Kenelm Clarke himself stepped in to adapt his own work, and inherited the Philip Massinger name. In later life Kenelm Clarke was critical of his own Exposé screenplay, feeling it needed a few months more worth work, and presumably the novelisation was his way of having a second stab at it. His additions to the plot are a mixed bag of positives and negatives, some add extra dimensions to the story, others are questionable choices. As Exposé is at its core a murder mystery in which various unfortunate characters are stabbed to death at the isolated country home of novelist Paul Martin, was it really wise to include an early scene in the book in which Martin's new secretary Linda Hindstatt packs a knife into her suitcase while en route to Martin's country home. Saying that, I suppose you could counter argue that since the book came out two years after the movie, Kenelm Clarke would have been writing it in the knowledge that the majority of his readership would have seen the movie by this point and therefore there wasn't as much point in concealing the killer's identity. As the book's target audience would have been Fiona Richmond's fanbase -she is on the cover and was still very much the selling point- it is no surprise that the book is geared towards the sexploitation market and seizes the opportunity to be more pornographic than the movie was able to be. However what is surprising is that the additional sexed up content here doesn't really relate to Richmond's character Suzanne -Paul's girlfriend referred to at one point as 'darkly lovely, brainless Suzanne' - and is instead allocated to Paul Martin and his secretary Linda, played by Linda Hayden in the movie. In the first major diversion from the movie, we learn that a few years prior to becoming Paul's secretary, young Linda had visited her aunt and uncle in Saint-Tropez to learn the French language. Only to receive a lesson in the language of love, when she is seduced by an older Frenchman. Curiously one of the most well remembered sexual kinks from the film, Paul wearing plastic gloves during sex, isn't in the book. The Exposé novelisation forgoing plastic gloves in favour of muff shaving, with a graphic description of Linda shaving her genitals prior to her date with the French smoothie, Jacques de Chaumont. The film version of Exposé was partly financed by Paul Raymond, renowned publisher of erotica, owner of the Raymond Revuebar and Richmond's wealthy enabler. Raymond's shadowy influence stretches to the novelisation, which adheres to a very Paul Raymond view of the world, with Linda favouring her older, sophisticated French lover, a Marquis no less, over her inexperienced, uncultured boyfriend Colin. As with Raymond's top shelf publications of the time, the Exposé novelisation prides itself on its open minded, sexual libertine stance. Offering a relaxed attitude towards male bisexuality -Linda's sexual limits are tested when she finds Jacques in bed with his male lover Roger Erskine- and enlightened acknowledgement of female sexual frustration, masturbation and orgasm. In fact the book is practically falling over itself to 'acknowledge' those last three topics 'that night, like no other, Roger and Jacques made Linda come several times, each in a different manner'. The novelisation is also very fond of fellatio, and in another show of sexual frankness has no qualms about depicting male homosexually ('Roger's cock had gently slid itself into the mouth of de Chaumont and the Marquis was sucking on it with lazy passion') with all the same enthusiasm as heterosexuality ('and so it came to pass that the first blow job that Linda ever gave was to the Marquis de Chaumont, and as his sperm spurted into her mouth, she loved every minute of it').
Characters in the book also share Paul Raymond's love of wealth, status symbols and the finer things in life. Paul Martin's Rolls Royce agitating two lower class yobbos who sneeringly refer to Linda as a 'Toffee Nosed Git' and 'Hoity Toity', leading to the witty observation 'if they had been in a Cortina Estate, no one would have afforded them a second glance'. Poor Karl Howman, who in the film suffered the indignity of playing a character called 'small youth', here suffers the further indignity of having his character continuously described as having a pumpkin like head. Talk about giving a man a complex! So rather than being called Small Youth in the book he is instead referred to as ‘Pumpkin-head’.  A name that now conjures up images of the Pumpkinhead creature from the horror movie series, rather than the bloke from Brush Strokes.

Just when you think the book is starting to align with the plot of the movie, we then go off on another tangent, as the Roger Erskine story resumes with him trying to make a career for himself as a writer in the cut throat world of Hollywood. Struggling to make ends meet and living in a seedy Sunset Boulevard motel, Roger finds himself having to throw some sex in the direction of Miss Cavendish, a rich, older, married TV executive with the power to make or break the young writer's career. At which point the novelisation resembles a hybrid of Paul Morrissey's Heat and a book by Jackie Collins, right down to some Collins-esque name dropping 'she reminded him of a more wanton Angie Dickinson'. Anyone familiar with the movie version of Exposé will be royally baffled at this point as to why the book is diverting so strongly from it, in order to focus on a seemingly minor and insignificant character as Roger Erskine. Just when it appears the book has lost its way, Kenelm Clarke pulls a blinder and steers it strongly back on course by dropping the bombshell that Roger Erskine is in fact Paul Martin. Erskine having adopted the Paul Martin name when the deal with Cavendish went south and desperation lead him to steal another writer's work. It is tempting to speculate whether the experience of directing a gay actor, Udo Kier, in the role of Paul Martin for the movie, motivated Kenelm Clarke to make the character bi-sexual in the book. Whereas in the film, Paul's heterosexuality is never called into question, in the book even the straight sex that Paul gets up to has homoerotic connotations. After being fellated by Suzanne, Paul notes 'the strange sensation as, now, when kissing her mouth, he tasted the unmistakable memory of his own sex'. Whilst having to put out to Miss Cavendish, Paul consoles himself with the observation that she possesses 'firm, almost boyish buttocks'.

The problem with the extended back stories of Paul and Linda is that, perplexingly, Kenelm Clarke makes little of the incident that pits one of these characters against the other: the suicide of Linda's husband Simon Hindstatt, due to Roger/Paul stealing Simon's novel and passing it off as his own. We learn much about Linda's life in New York, becoming accustomed to the big apple, finding work as a secretary, mixing with the New York elite, none of which is terribly interesting. However, the more significant part of Linda's story....her marriage to Simon, his alcoholism, his work being stolen and his suicide ...is all over in about five sentences. By glossing over the death of her husband, Kenelm Clarke misses the chance to really explore Linda's descent into depression and insanity that would have explained her transformation from easy going English rose to revenge fuelled, cold blooded murderess. Paul's back-story in Hollywood and his relationship with Miss Cavendish feels equally superfluous, other than as an early example of the themes of sex and power that is more strongly conveyed in the novelisation than the film. Cavendish uses her position in the TV world to demand sex from Paul, when he tries to dominate her during sex, she turns on him, dashing his chances of a Hollywood career. After he becomes rich and famous, Paul begins to cruelly treat women as he was once treated by Miss Cavendish, using them for sex then wanting little else to do with them. An attitude that comes back to haunt him in the form of Linda, who he views a potential conquest that he'll eventually become bored with. When she refuses his advances, an ego hurt Paul becomes the weak one, sinking into alcoholism and paranoia. Linda's seduction of his girlfriend Suzanne, which comes across as rather random and gratuitous in the film, takes on greater significance when you're privy to the knowledge that she is essentially doing unto him what he once did unto her. Just as he once posed a homosexual threat to her relationship with Jacques, she now poses a homosexual threat to his relationship to Suzanne. Paul attempts to reassert his power and masculinity by dragging Suzanne away "he would complete this rape with bestial urgency''. Only for Linda to match his actions by later getting rough with the much abused Suzanne, taking on Paul's role by violating her with a strap on...Linda really did think to pack everything. In the ultimate reversal of the power dynamic, Paul dictates his lousy paperback to Linda, only for her to refuse to transcribe his words and humiliates him by instead typing out her own, superior text. Having emasculated him as a man, by stealing his girlfriend away from him, Linda then further emasculates him as an author, by stealing his book away from him.

There is a meta aspect to the Exposé novelisation in that it is a pornographically minded book about an author attempting to write a pornographically minded book, only for the blue prose to refuse to flow. Where I think Kenelm Clarke tries to have his cake and eat it is by parodying bad sex in literature within a book that itself aims to titillate. In that respect, the Exposé novelisation runs the risk of being an example of what it sets out to make fun of. Truth be told there is an extremely blurry line between the cringe worthy nonsense that Paul dictates to Linda ('Then Angus' tongue started it's slow exploration, comma, darting there, comma, playing Anna like a virtuoso with a Stradivarius') and the book's own genuine attempts at arousing material ('She climbed up into a sitting position and sat, gently on his face. He was aware of her scented loins, descending on to his mouth and nose, of how good they smelt, her vagina, her anus').

The film version of Exposé has always been something of a square peg in the round hole of British sexploitation, walking against the crowd by being a straight thriller that wasn't afraid to mix sex with violence in an era when smutty comedy was the norm. If anything the novelisation is even more of a greater abnormality, the additional graphic sex, scenes of male homosexually and decadent globetrotting making it seem more like an adaptation of a nonexistent Radley Metzger film than anything from British sexploitation cinema. For sure the novel is a different beast from the movie, but while this might have caused confusion at the time from people expecting a straightforward, no frills novelisation, in the long term Kenelm Clarke going the extra mile works in its benefit. In book form Exposé now contains everything that people seeking out novelisations tend to look for these days, additional characterization; backstory and answers to questions that the film doesn't provide...just don't go expecting to find out why Paul wears plastic gloves during sex. If you've any interest in the movie, the novelisation is well worth seeking out, since if you've only seen Exposé in movie form, then you've only really seen half of the story Kenelm Clarke wanted to tell, the other half is in this book. Chances are though that the only way you'll be able to experience the book these days is as a PDF which can be found in the shady corners of the internet...if you know, you know... physical copies have been known to fetch the kind of prices that only those with a Paul Raymond sized bank balance could justify paying. The now prohibitively expensive price of the book likely due to the fact that it belongs to that rare breed of novels based on films that ended up on the 'final 39' Video Nasty list. An exclusive club that includes Herschell Gordon Lewis' novelisation of Blood Feast, recent novelisations of Night of the Demon and Mardi Gras Massacre by Brad Carter, and Love Camp 7, which was novelised in 1970 by Harry Burns as Sex Camp 7. Presumably the original title of that movie being too subtle for the sex paperback market.

Speaking of re-titlings, one of the main giveaways that Kenelm Clarke was the author of this book is the constant references to the main location as 'The House on Straw Hill'. Which if you didn't know, was Kenelm Clarke's original and preferred title for the movie, Exposé being a title that was forced on it by a distributor. All these years later, history has favoured Kenelm Clarke. What with The House on Straw Hill becoming the more common and popular title for the film, with few ever referring to it as Exposé anymore. Given that the novelisation breaks with the claustrophobic, singular setting of the movie and whisks characters off to Saint Tropez, New York and Hollywood, it could perhaps be dubbed...Beyond the Valley of The House on Straw Hill.

The Bornless Keeper (1974, Gordon Williams)

 

In-between writing The Siege of Trencher's Farm -the source novel for Straw Dogs- and teaming up with footballer Terry Venables to write the Hazell series of private detective novels, author Gordon Williams made a one-shot stab at folk horror with 1974's The Bornless Keeper.

Peacock Island, owned by the rich, reclusive Bennett Family, is the subject of a curse that has kept the residents of the nearby village of Mundham at bay for decades. "Tread ye on this sacred dell, The Bornless Keeper ye shall see, pointing the road to hell". When Lady Bennett, the last of her line, dies of natural causes, and her corpse is cannibalized by rats, the authorities discover that the Bornless Keeper, a part man, part bird creature protecting the island from intruders, might be more than just an urban myth. Looking for a scoop, a crass TV crew trespasses onto the island, intent on making a documentary about the Bornless Keeper, only to be picked off one by one by the feathered fiend, who has a penchant for slashing throats and plucking out eyeballs.

If you think the horror novels of John Halkin had an axe to grind with the TV industry, then Gordon Williams wants you to hold his beer. Williams' TV crew are a cutthroat, backstabbing bunch. Cameraman Puggy Elder, might be the closest thing to a decent member of the team, but even he is willing to potentially lose his wife and children over his silly infatuation with Victoria Dryden-Chambers, an emotionally frigid career woman with a cruel streak. Victoria has been recently made executive producer of the TV company, and is very much flying the flag for women's lib, bringing her into conflict with underling producer Julian Maltravers, an acid tongued, chauvinistic dandy who thinks her job should have been his. Williams' characters are unlikable, but never uninteresting; conflicts between Victoria and Julian drive the narrative, while their bitchy, verbal punching matches animate it. Puggy might be a 'love-sick, middle aged dope' when it comes to Victoria, but she has her eyes wickedly set on Julian, if only because seducing him would give her power over him. 'You'll weaken Julian, oh yes you will' she tells herself whilst admiring her own nude body in a mirror 'then we'll see who does the mocking'. When Victoria successfully stirs the long dormant heterosexuality in the camp Julian, it leads to the hilarious line "it was a long time since he had thought about breasts".

Nearly all the major characters in the book have their guards up, emotionally speaking, provoking hostility in others, who resent what they can't understand. Victor Daniels, a detective inspector who has moved to Mundham from London, is viewed with suspicion by locals and even co-workers who speculate amongst themselves that his decampment was the result of police corruption, cowardliness or loss of nerve. While Maltravers' aversion to women, and apparent homosexually, turns out to have been the result of a childhood sexual assault by a predatory woman. Leading Julian to confront Victoria with "what do women's libbers say about the possibility of rape by a woman? By a much older woman on a frightened boy?". Sexual trauma is something of a reoccurring theme here, Victoria's lack of interest in men, and unwillingness to jump into bed with them is born out of being sexually abused by her uncle. Daniels' investigation also leads him to an uncouth old lag called Sidney Marley who narrowly survived an attack by the Bornless Keeper in the 1950s, and is now rumoured to be in an incestuous relationship with his own daughter 'Daniels found himself making a mental note of the man's interest in children'. While reading this part of the book, I couldn't help think of Arthur Mullard playing this role in a film version of The Bornless Keeper, but can't decide if this was down to Mullard matching Williams' description of the character, or whether disturbing, posthumous rumours about Mullard were the reason for that imaginary piece of casting. When it comes to this book, you don't have to be sexually messed up to be a character in it...but it helps. Somehow also figuring within it's pages is an Irish dwarf, whose schizophrenia sometimes causes him to believe he is own, dead, puritanical mother...a subject matter handled with all the sensitivity you'd expect from the 1970s.

The Bornless Keeper is the type of book that gives off a Wicker Man type vibe upon approaching it, although after reading it, and knowing all it's secrets, you'd be more inclined to cite 'Tower of Evil' as a more accurate British horror film comparison. Like Tower of Evil, The Bornless Keeper could lay the slightest of claim for providing the blueprint for the slasher genre to come.
The spectre of The Siege of Trencher's Farm, and Straw Dogs, also looms over The Bornless Keeper. There's conflict arising from the new world intruding on the old one. Daniels is very much the David Sumner of the book, an outsider, disliked and distrusted by the locals who call his masculinity into question. Daniels attempts to bury himself away in a 'peaceful' setting, only to find himself having to confront the violent side of his nature that he thought he'd left behind in the big city. The Bornless Keeper, when he is eventually revealed, is akin to the Henry Niles character in The Siege of Trencher's Farm/Straw Dogs.... a confused, pitiful figure, without the capacity to understand his own violent actions. There seems to have been little love loss between Williams and Straw Dogs' director Sam Peckinpah. The latter referred to The Siege of Trencher's Farm as a 'rotten book' and Williams publically denounced Peckinpah's film of his novel, particularly the rape scene, which isn't in the original book. Surprisingly then that Williams provides an almost identical rape scene in The Bornless Keeper which begins with "oh no, please don't, please, oh no" and ends with "don't stop, don't stop". If anything the rape in The Bornless Keeper is even more troubling than the one in Straw Dogs. What with the victim initially play acting consent out of self-preservation 'telling herself over and over again she was doing this to save her life, she began to coil her legs round his hard body' only to then begin to get authentically turned on by it, and ending with her feeling physically, and possibly even emotionally, attracted to her rapist. There's also the implication that the rape helps the victim overcome the trauma of an earlier sexual assault, according to this book, two rapes do make a right.

Perhaps because of this graphic scene, or perhaps because it invites comparisons with the Peckinpah adaptation of his earlier work, Williams used the pen name 'P.B. Yuill' for the The Bornless Keeper. The author biography in the hardback edition merely stating 'P.B. Yuill is a pseudonym. The author doesn't want his real identity disclosed'. A few years later, Williams would resurrect the Yuill name, using it as a joint pseudonym for himself and Terry Venables, when they were co-writing the Hazell novels. Much as I like the idea of Terry Venables co-writing a folk horror novel, all evidence however points to The Bornless Keeper being entirely written by Williams.

For an author whose work- the Siege of Trencher's Farm excepted- was mainly played out in an urban environment, Williams has a real talent, and seemingly affection, for a location that has truly been taken back by nature. Peacock Island is a dark fairy tale land of brambles, thorns, spider’s webs, decaying cottages and harsh woodlands. There is possibly an overkill when it comes to descriptions of the great, but sinister outdoors in the book, you feel like you should be getting green fingers from turning the pages over, but it's a wonderfully atmospheric read, of that there can be no doubt. Inadvertently adding to the experience is the fact that my copy, an ex-library one last hired out in February 1979, has this old, damp smell to it, with a slight aroma of sea air, as if it's been locked in an attic like a mad relative for the last forty years. Which feels exactly how a book such as this should smell, whenever I open it, that smell hits me, immersing me in all things folk horror and what I like to call 'odour de Bornless Keeper'.

 

An Iowa Inferno (1975)

Now on YouTube, we discuss 'An Iowa Inferno: An Erotic Story of Forbidden Lust' (1975) a charming book about incest, bikers, sex with Cthulhu and a woman's unhealthy obsession with Richard Nixon. Clive and Nick talk about the book, I mostly cry with laughter.