White Squaw 18: Hot Pursuit (1989, E.J. Hunter)

Hot Pursuit is number 18 in the lusty 'White Squaw' adult western series, which chronicled the adventures of Rebecca Caldwell, who is part White, part Sioux and all woman. In previous installments a 14 year old Rebecca had been betrayed by her Uncle Ezekiel and Uncle Virgil who sold the young girl and her mother to the Oglala tribe. Iron Calf, the leader of the tribe, just so happened to be Rebecca's real father, due to the fact that he raped Rebecca's mother 14 years previously. As an adult, Rebecca leaves the tribe and sets out to get revenge on her Uncles. She then sets out to get revenge on Bitter Creek Jake Tully, the leader of the outlaw gang that her Uncle Ezekiel and Uncle Virgil were a part of. She then sets out to get revenge on Roger Styles, the brains behind the the Bitter Creek Jake Tully gang that her uncles were a part of. Rebecca is nothing if not meticulous when it comes to hunting down men with an increasingly tenuous connection to her enslavement.

Pseudonymous author E.J. Hunter managed to get 24 books out of this saga, written between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, while simultaneously penning 13 books in the similar 'Head Hunter' adult western series. As you might expect, given such a heavy workload, the White Squaw series is assembly line in nature and prone to repetition. After you've gone through a few White Squaws, there is the inescapable feeling that once you've read one White Squaw book, you've pretty much read them all. In that sense I'd draw comparisons with the slasher movies from that period, who likewise rarely diverted from a basic formula yet whose audience still seemed happy to keep coming back for more and more of the same.

The White Squaw books are reliably committed to gratuitous sex and violence, rarely a chapter goes by without someone having their brains blown out, a throat being slashed, or a lengthy description of Rebecca's horizontal pleasures. Having entered the series as a dandyish white collar criminal with a greedy eye on power and wealth, Hot Pursuit finds Roger Styles at a low ebb. Having had too many of his money making schemes thwarted by Rebecca, Roger has been reduced to heading a gang of lowly bank robbers. Trouble is that he's not very good at it. Roger's ineptitude at executing bank robberies regularly reducing his men and innocent parties to bloody, bullet ridden messes, providing a chunk of Hot Pursuit's extreme gore content. Further gore highlights of the book include one of Roger's men having his eye gouged out by a snake, and another character being repeatedly shot in the stomach, then squirting liquid faeces out of the holes.

Much less welcome is Hunter's dedication to violence and sexual abuse aimed at children. It is the series' most distinct and uncomfortable characteristic, one that shows no signs of abating in Hot Pursuit. In the opening chapters alone, Hunter has a child shotgunned during a robbery, and another child crushed under the fleeing robbers' horses, followed by two little girls being used as target practice by Roger's men. Somewhere between books 6 and 10, Rebecca got to give Roger an almighty kick in the balls, an injury that turned him off adult women and somehow left him with an attraction to young boys and girls instead. In Hot Pursuit though, Roger shows some slight restraint by excluding himself when one of his men decides to rape a 13 year old girl during a raid on her family home. Leaving Roger to torture himself with regret 'small, young, vulnerable...god, how he wanted her'.

Rebecca herself isn't without an inappropriate side either. Early on in the book she is consumed by thoughts about Joey, who she left behind in her pursuit of Roger. Joey 'would run stark naked if he could get away with it...he had not the least inhibition about his body or it's functions'. Which doesn't sound too bad, until you realise that Joey is her 13 year old stepson. This troubling aspect to the entire White Squaw series could merely have been shock value on E.J. Hunter's part, or an attempt to demystify the old west as a place of chivalry or where the innocence of childhood was sacred. Even so, Hunter's inability to stay away from underage topics means that its hard not to end up thinking ill of him, and wonder if the man's circuits were rather haywire.

As the series progresses Rebecca's initial position as a sworn enemy of wrongdoers tends to take a backseat to Rebecca as a sworn enemy of virginity, with the White Squaw frequently helping young boys ease their way into manhood. Such is the case in Hot Pursuit, which is one of the White Squaw books that focuses more on the carnal side of Rebecca Caldwell...who is a very mucky squaw indeed in this one. Her initial love interest is 17 year old Andrew Purcell, a tongue tied, would be poet, who sets a fire in Rebecca's loins due to him reminding her of 'Four Horns' Rebecca's dead, native American husband. It's anyone's guess how a pail faced, sexually inexperienced, mother dominated wimp reminds Rebecca of a bronzed, muscular brave, who wasn't called Four Horns for nothing. Still Andrew makes for a keen student and an exhausting night with Rebecca leaves him smitten with her, if a little worse for wear "I was stiff all night and now I'm a bit sore" he admits. His enthusiasm to learn the art of lovemaking leads Rebecca to nickname him 'Randy Andy'. Yes, as if this book couldn't be more unsavoury it has a character who shares a nickname with the former Duke of York.

Hunter does at least allow Rebecca the freedom to have the same 'love em and leave em' attitude as male heroes in Men's Adventure books. Rebecca's exploits leaving behind a slew of menfolk who either die tragically at the end of these books, or are destined to get their hearts broken by Rebecca. Poor Randy Andy quickly gets given the push in favour of Robert Russel, an older, more manly, ranch owner. Tellingly even when he is writing sex scenes between consenting adults, Hunter can't help steering things back to his usual deviant territory. Rebecca getting her kicks by forcing Robert to embarrassingly recall his earliest attempts at masturbation and his childhood fumblings with a vaqueros' daughter.

Hot Pursuit does slightly distinguish itself from the White Squaw pack, by the fact that Oscar Wilde, of all people, shows up as a supporting character in it. Although to be honest, his appearance is something of a damp squib. Kept at arms length from the sex and violence, Wilde sticks around to deliver a few quips about America, before walking off in a huff after one too many gay put downs from Rebecca. I do find it hard to believe that a handbags at dawn confrontation between Oscar Wilde and Rebecca Caldwell would result in Rebecca emerging victorious and Wilde being left lost for words. Wilde's tremendous wit is thoroughly lacking in the portrayal of him here. This combined with the fact that Hunter doesn't appear to care much for him ("Sort of an out and out sissy, some folks say"), makes the motivation for dragging dear old Oscar into this one a doubly odd decision.

As you might expect from a later entry in a long running but quicky cranked out paperback series, Hot Pursuit is something of a congealed mess of ideas that don't really go anywhere. Oscar Wilde's appearance is an example of this, as is the Randy Andy subplot. Which sees him moping off in such a bitter, heartbroken mood that you expect Randy Andy to reappear later on in the book as an adversary of Rebecca or seeking a reconciliation, but never does. Maybe he ended up at Pizza Express instead. I suspect its a reflection on Hunter's weariness when it came to writing White Squaw books at this point, that the futility of her never ending quest for revenge is starting to take its toll on Rebecca. By the time of Hot Pursuit she's been on the road, hunting wrongdoers for several years and has lost so many people along the way, that she is starting to crave a way out and an exit into a civilised normality. Like Bronson's Paul Kersey though, all of Rebecca's attempts at a peaceful, pacifistic life seem destined to be shattered by bad guys with an unfortunate tendency to rape and murder all her loved ones. Forcing Rebecca back into Mrs. Vigilante mode and of course necessitating further sequels.

The White Squaw books are never dull, but they are constantly sick and disturbed. What's retrospectively amusing about the series is how- unlike XXX movie westerns such as A Dirty Western and Sweet Savage- on the surface these books could easily have been mistaken for mainstream westerns, rather than pages and pages of written hardcore pornography. Begging the question did anyone ever buy these books for siblings thinking they were innocuous, old fashioned yarns. A decision that would have given any western obsessed kid a treat, and any western obsessed grandparent a coronary. Needless to say, partner, best ya keep that White Squaw collection out of Gramp's reach, unless of course his name happens to be Big Chief Chickenhawk.

 

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone (1982, Charles Panati)

 

Forget what they say, sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover. Such is the case with The Pleasuring of Rory Malone (you can also sometimes judge a book by its title too) in which the titular Rory, a 17 year old virgin, uses a combination of astral projection and telekinesis to undress and have sex with any woman he chooses. It's material that could have easily been fodder for one of the era's R-rated teen sex comedies, Zapped! comes to mind, but instead here is the basis for one of the most perverse horror paperbacks of the 1980s.

Rory is tutored by Dr Liz Hartman, who hopes to use his telekinetic abilities for the greater good and regards herself as a mother figure to the 17 year old boy. A perception not shared by the horny teenager himself 'she bent forward while working and her blouse hung free from her bra, revealing her full breasts and, through the stretched-thin beige fabric, huge brown nipples'. Rory is introduced trailing Kathy Sue Bauer -a popular girl in his school who he has a crush on- into the crowded NYC subway. Only for him to be consumed by guilt when molesting her in his astral form causes Kathy to take a tumble and fall in front of a train, losing a leg in the process. Was Rory's abilities the cause of her amputation?, or was the fact that Kathy was on the verge of a heavy period the reason she lost her balance?

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone is a book steeped in mixed messages and sexual dysfunction. Initially the book points to sexual repression being the source of Rory's problems. The victim of a catholic upbringing -you can always rely on those nuns to instill sexual shame in a young boy- Rory's salvation appears to be Dr Liz, who teaches him that there is nothing wrong with masturbation or looking at pornography. This stance however is countered by the good guy of the book, Thomas Webb, a police captain and psychologist, whose feminist girlfriend Carrie is heavily involved in the Women Against Pornography movement. Webb himself is garnering praise for his upcoming Messe Commission like paper, which aims to prove a definite link between violent pornography and male violence towards women. The Pleasuring of Rory Malone does lend a megaphone to anti-porn rhetoric, in one instance quite literally by including a scene set at a WAP protest. It also sets out to validate the feminist belief that all men are potential rapists by having just about every male character, even the WAP aligned Webb, admit that if they possessed Rory's powers they'd be tempted to use it in an identical fashion. The book poses questions over whether men projecting sexual fantasies onto women represents a form of sexual assault, and further attempts to win feminist favour with its frank and open discussions about female menstruation. The Pleasuring of Rory Malone certainly leaves you questioning which side of the porn wars it is on, with the lingering suspicion that it may be playing both sides off against each other. It's championing of anti-porn feminism seems at odds with a subplot about a constantly masturbating woman, Susan Stiner, whose fantasies are dominated by thoughts of being roughly taken by men. Singling her out as a potential victim for one of Rory's astral sex assaults.

If the author of the book was of the opinion that violent pornography adds to society's ills though, just why then is The Pleasuring of Rory Malone full of graphically described rape scenes perpetrated by an invisible assailant. One memorably depraved incident involves Rory entering a peep booth, jacking off to a stripper from behind glass, only to then astrally project himself so that he can fist the terrified and confused stripper 'the hotter he became, the greater the urge to ram her up to his elbow'. If ever there was a set piece guaranteed to null and void a book's feminist credentials, it was that.

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone also boasts an incriminating and extensive knowledge of the pornography available to New Yorkers at the time, as well as the XXX movie theatres and sex shops in which to find it. To the extent that you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading a later issue in the original run of Sleazoid Express. 'All around him men passed into private booths, inserted quarters, viewed films of any sexual fantasy they desired, and when they left, the attendant mopped the floor. At this peak hour, though, it was impossible to keep pace with the flow of clients, and he'd entered one booth and skidded on the slippery floor, striking his shoulder against the wall'.

Rory himself emerges as a highly sympathetic figure, considered a 'freak' by his abusive father, frustrated by his prudish, strict catholic girlfriend and the victim of a society at war over the pros and cons of pornography. Rory's problems are added to by being marked for death by Lou Bauer, a racist, homophobic police sergeant who happens to be the uncle of the girl who lost her leg under the train. Lou's pursuit of vigilante justice leads him to Christopher Street 'if he found the kid in this fag ghetto, he might be able to kill a few freaks with one ballistic stone'. Lou is the angered epitome of conservative masculinity, who were this to have been on film would have probably been played by either Aldo Ray or Lawrence Tierney, Lou is that kind of guy. The Pleasuring of Rory Malone is the sort of book whose film adaptation would have surely have had to feature Joe Spinell in there somewhere too, the bullying, asshole father being the obvious Spinell casting choice.

As much as the book has Rory's back, it isn't above having some sadistic fun at his expense either. At one point the narrative puts Rory at the mercy of an older, predatory gay guy who grabs Rory's cock in the men's room of a porno theatre. Later, Rory seems on the verge of losing his cherry to a nice, sexually free girl called Jacqueline, only for life to deliver another cruel blow when Jacqueline turns out to be more of a handful than Rory expected. The fact that Rory's torment lies in his out of control heterosexuality, coupled with his violent lashing out at the same sex encounters that comes his way, makes you wonder if there isn't something deeper going on here. Rory's escape from the authorities being driven by a fear that they want to turn him into a woman. The only cure for his abilities seemingly being to fill him full of female hormones.

The Pleasuring of Rory Malone comes across like the paperback equivalent of movies that were around at the time like The Entity, Dressed to Kill and Incubus, whose classy veneer and intellectual pretentions belied an often incredibly crass attitude to sex and sexuality. In his introduction, the author credits several unnamed young men for helping him 'appreciate the attitudes of today's teenagers to the proliferation of easily accessible pornography magazines and films (a rarity in my own youth)'. A sentiment echoed in the book itself by Dr Liz's husband Gerhardt who secretly resents the sexual stimuli on offer to Rory's generation that wasn't available in his own youth 'he selfishly longed for halcyon days of strict morality- if Gerhardt Kiner couldn't have all those tender young things, no guy deserved them'. Making you wonder if envy or concern was the motivation for the book's preoccupation with pornography's effect on young men.

Still, you have to hand it to The Pleasuring of Rory Malone, its mixed messages remain as compelling as they are at times perplexing, and on a sleaze level it is a book that rams it up to the elbow. Making it all the more of a mystery why it has never attained the same level of notoriety as the Richard Laymon stuff. The book perfectly manages to sum up it's own contradictions, when it has Rory berate himself with 'you hypocrite. Before the day's through you'll be lusting after the very things you're condemning'. That, folks, is The Pleasuring of Rory Malone in a nutshell.

Welcome Sherazad (1969, Alfred Mazure)

Something of a legend in his homeland -due to his private detective creation Dick Bos- Dutch comics artist Alfred Mazure spent his final few years living and working in the UK. It was here that his talents turned to the topic of sexy female crime fighters. Lindy Leigh -Mazure's airheaded spy- had her own comic strip in Mayfair magazine and even made it to the big screen as a segment of Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex in 1969. The same year, Mazure brought the Lindy Leigh concept to book, eventually writing three paperbacks centred around the mono named Sherazad, a redheaded, slightly more intelligent, but no less glamorous version of Lindy Leigh.

The toast of fashionable London, Sherazad drives a jaguar, lives in Chelsea -but of course- and gets invited to all the finest LSD parties. She also finds the time to be a member of BOSC (Bureau of Special Cases) a top secret origination with headquarters located underneath a monastery, where her bosses are mock-friars Brother John and Brother Joshua.

It's a premise worthy of The Avengers, which I'd wager Mazure fell in love with during his time in blighty. Welcome Sherazad does pilfer a little blatantly from that show at times. While Emma Peel had an eye-shaped peephole in her door, Sherazad has a faux-donkey's head on hers, pull the donkey's tongue and a braying noise in her pad will alert Sherazad to your presence. Mazure also seems to have an eye in the direction of the ITC shows of the time, both as a source of inspiration and parody. Sherazad's initial assignment being to investigate several actresses who disappeared while starring in an action oriented TV series. In order to get to the bottom of the case, Sherazad has to rub shoulders with handsome toff John Hulme, who is renting out his Hampshire estate as a TV studio "I don't mind making money in vulgar ways, but I insist on enjoying it graciously". Hulme becomes Sherazad's latest squeeze or 'Heigh Ho' as the lady herself likes to call her love interests. Suspicion for the disappearances falls on TV mogul Alwyn Harpinger and King Ibn Fuad, the rich oil baron who Harpinger has been cozying up to. Fortunately as well as jiu-jitsu and being able quote Max Miller, Sherazad's talents include the ability to smell non-white villainy from a mile off "not only was she able to say that somebody had stood in that closet not long ago...but she was able to say the man was not white-skinned".

Even by the standards of the 1960s, Mazure does seem to have had issues with people of the camel travelling persuasion. Fuad is at one point referred to as an 'over sexed baboon', his followers 'ragged desert dwellers' while Fuad's heavies set off Sherazad's acute sense of smell 'they were undoubtedly Arabs, though this was no news to her-her nose had told her already'.

Welcome Sherazad does have an odd structure, the disappearing actresses/white slavery plot concluding very abruptly half way into the book, leaving a secondary storyline to come to the forefront. It is an experience akin to when ITC would combine two episodes of a TV series into a feature film, leaving the tell tale sign of the narrative ending then restarting in the middle of the 'movie'. A change is for the best here though, since while the initial sending up of the TV industry threatens to stagnate at times, Mazure gets his mojo back and goes marvelously nutzoid in the second half of the book. Thoroughly embracing the horror genre and English eccentricity, Mazure throws in a rich misogynist who enjoys cutting women's tongues out, a mad scientist on a Pavlovian kick, a lovesick gorilla and an army of naked part female, part wolf creatures. If anything Welcome Sherazad was even more tailor made for an Antony Balch movie adaptation than Lindy Leigh. Welcome Sherazad is also proof that any novel can be greatly enlivened by the presence of a lovesick gorilla, an army of naked wolf women sure helps as well.

So of the period that you feel as if wearing a cravat and a paisley shirt should be compulsory while reading it. How much passion you have for Swinging London artifacts will dictate whether you want to make Welcome Sherazad your latest Heigh Ho, or give the book the Heave Ho. Still when it comes to dolly birds doing the Bond bit, Miss Sherazad is undoubtedly sexier, wilder and of course groovier than James Moffatt's The Girl from H.A.R.D and Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather books.

Jamie Dodgers (short story)

 

The latest issue of Penicillin magazine contains my short story 'Jamie Dodgers' in which the memory of a sexy sea siren called Jamie threatens to disrupt an amateur dramatics group...a cure for rabies is also involved. Penicillin 222 can be downloaded here, or alternatively you can read the story below.  Don't have nightmares.
 

Jamie Dodgers by Gavin Whitaker.

The Village Hall had seen better days, smelling of the unholy threesome that was damp, dust and digestive biscuits, still no one but Nigel Bagshaw seemed to notice. It was 1974 and amateur dramatics group 'The Players most Priestley' had spent weeks transforming the space into a 1940s airfield: sandbags stacked like graves, a mock Spitfire wing splintered from balsa, and a battered wireless crooning Vera Lynn between scenes. Tonight was the premiere of the play "The Brave who did not Bend” their earnest tribute to those who fought in the second world war, penned and directed by Aubrey Hargreaves, who had never forgiven history for rejecting him before he could even play a role in it. Aubrey had been eighteen in 1940, slender and sharp-featured, with a high voice that commanded second looks. When he presented himself at the recruiting office, full of patriotic fervour and a secret longing to be among men in uniform, the medical officer had taken one look, and said "I'm afraid you're too light on your feet for the service, old chap" sarcastically adding "why don't you try to help the war effort in another way, like taking up knitting".

What an absolute bitch, Aubrey had privately thought, his papers had been marked “unfit" and Aubrey knew why. The army didn’t want men who loved other men, didn't want queens even if they were willing to die for their King. The rejection burned deeper than any wound he might have earned in battle; resulting in a lifetime of directing village plays, mainly about young men in uniform and the heroism Aubrey was never allowed to share.

However Nigel Bagshaw—postman by day, thespian by delusion—carried his own ghosts from a different era. In 1960, during national service his commanding officer, Captain Ivor Dodgers, had made his life a living hell: endless punishments, verbal floggings, and nights scrubbing decks until his hands bled. All these years later Nigel could still hear Dodgers' voice bellowing "get on parade, you great big, useless turd", "dirty sod, you'll go blind doing that or end up in a mental asylum" and "Bagshaw, you're only fit to sweep the bleeding streets". The Captain’s paranoia had grown worse after he began to suspect his young wife, Edna, of infidelity. Dodgers fixated on Nigel, convinced the quiet, watchful rating was secretly rogering Edna. Nigel knew better. He had never had the pleasure of Edna —never even been alone with her—but he had overheard the whispers in the barracks, seen the knowing smirks. Edna was a right goer, a bloody nymphomaniac in fact. She had been entertaining two, sometimes three of the other lads at once, wild, laughing matings in the married quarters while Dodgers was away on exercises. Nigel kept silent, but silence was enough to feed the Captain’s jealousy. That dark, stormy night off the Cornish coast, when Dodgers insisted on he and Nigel setting out to sea in a small boat—just the two of them—Nigel was certain the Captain meant to kill him. He saw murder in Dodgers’ eyes, felt it in the way the man’s hand lingered near his coat pocket. Nigel struck first. As thunder cracked and waves lashed the hull, he seized a rusted fish knife, tackled the Captain from behind and slit Dodgers’ throat in one ragged stroke. Blood sprayed hot across Dodgers' face, black in the lightning flashes—thick arterial ropes that painted the gunwale and dripped into the sea in steaming ribbons. Nigel heaved the twitching body overboard, watching it vanish into the churning foam. He panicked; he hadn't really thought this through at all. Would the sea keep his secret like a trusted mistress? or would Dodgers' corpse incriminate him by washing up on shore a few days later? Suddenly the sea turned red around the small boat, multiple crimson bubbles rising to the surface as something feasted below. Sharks? wondered Nigel...no surely we don't have sharks in Cornwall, perhaps Piranhas...no, don't be such a silly sod, Nigel told himself. He had to know what beast or beasts had come to his aid, then he saw them clearly for the first time, horror set in as shapes rose from the depths. Several sea sirens, their scales iridescent and jagged, swarming around Dodgers' corpse. Blimey, they're starkers, Nigel thought, totally bleeding naked. Sure, he'd seen a girlie magazine before, even copped a feel of Doreen in the back row of the local fleapit, but these birds were something else. Truth be told, Nigel had never seen a woman totally naked before, nor had he seen a woman tear into male flesh with needle teeth, ripping it in bloody chunks. Nor had he seen a woman tear a liver free, shred lungs into pink froth, or pluck out a still-beating heart and devour it in glistening bites.
I clearly still have allot to learn about women, Nigel thought.

A mixture of fear and arousal overcame him, as could only be expected from a man who suddenly found himself surrounded by naked birds who were also bloodthirsty cannibals. He ran to the opposite side of the boat and retched into the sea. Then he saw her—perched on a jagged rock amid the storm. Her pale skin glistening with saltwater sheen, shoulder-length, reddish-brown hair with soft curls framing her face, a strong jaw line, full breasts heaving with each sultry breath, nipples hardened against the cold wind. Her curves were hypnotic, hips flaring wide in invitation, the promise of ecstasy and ruin.
'My name is Jamie'... he could hear her seductively say that in his head, though he wasn't sure if she had actually spoken those words in person. Her eyes like shattered peridot fixed on him, lips curved in a lascivious smile that parted to reveal sharp, pearl-white teeth. She called out in a voice that pierced the gale: “Murderer… Murderer… Murderer…”
Over and over, her laughter mingling with the sirens’ feeding frenzy below. Her throaty, erotic moan stirred unwelcome heat in Nigel’s loins even as terror gripped the rest of him. He rowed away, leaving behind a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions, but the sea siren's accusation haunted him through the decades. He imagined her whispering to him in rain-slicked streets, saw her nude form flickering in steam-fogged pub windows, then there was the odd looks he'd gotten from birds over the years, when, during sex, he cried out the name 'Jamie'. The memory of her full breasts threatened his sanity, thoughts of her hips grinding in slow, teasing circles, mentally branding him anew each time with a mix of lust and dread.

The Village Hall was packed. From behind the stage curtains, Aubrey smiled, peeking at a large crowd, some members of the audience had even travelled from as far away as Scunthorpe to see the play. There were old men in blazers pinned with tarnished medals, their wives in wartime coats frayed at the hems, grandchildren fidgeting about, brought against their will for “a bit of culture.” Aubrey hoped that an encounter with amateur dramatics might steer the younger members of the audience away from watching too much television, mugging old ladies or taking up glue sniffing. Backstage, Nigel tunelessly wailed away in an infuriating and loud fashion, for not only did he fancy himself as a masterful actor, but he also thought he had what it took to be a great singer as well. "Mark my words, one day I'll be as big as Barry Blue and Zenda Jacks" was something told to all of the Players most Priestley, and believed by none of them.
"I bet you didn't know I could sing like what they do in opera, Aubrey" said Nigel as he walked past the fey, limp wristed theatre director, not waiting for a reply.
"Well, I sure knew you weren't a fucking actor" Aubrey muttered to himself.
The lights dimmed. The curtain shuddered upward. The play demanded atmosphere, and Aubrey was determined to give his audience some showbiz razzmatazz. To evoke a battleground, the Players Most Priestley had borrowed a fog machine from a shuttered pantomime troupe. Aubrey had also been delighted when in the basement of the Village Hall they had discovered a sealed military drum, the perfect prop for his play. Unbeknownst to the Players most Priestley was the fact that the sealed drum contained a deadly gas, the discarded result of a long forgotten attempt by the government to find a cure for rabies.

Onstage, Squadron Leader Alistair Thorne (Nigel in a cardboard helmet) built to his big speech about a fallen comrade, which in the context of the play he had come to deliver to the truelove of Thorne's decreased friend. Nigel had rehearsed the words in his head many times over “They found him at first light, expired on the battlefield. Poor Digby. He was killed by a German paratrooper". Nigel's eyes flicked to the audience, anticipating the big dramatic moment in the play when they discovered Digby's tragic fate. Nigel scanned the dim rows. There—third row centre, amid the sea of grey hair and horn rimmed spectacles—a figure that shouldn’t be there. Pale skin glistening like wet kelp, her body arched mockingly in a pose of raw seduction, full breasts thrust forward, nipples erect and begging for his touch, dripping with an otherworldly allure that made Nigel’s pulse throb with forbidden desire. Eyes glowing faintly green. Jamie. Totally bare...the shameless hussy...worse still she was dripping water all over the floor of the Village Hall. Jamie leaned forward, lips parting to deliver the words only he could hear: Murderer… Murderer…Murderer—her voice a husky whisper that caressed his ears like velvet, promising pleasures that would drown him in ecstasy. Nigel’s throat seized. Panic flooded him, the storm’s chill resurfacing in his veins, mingled with a shameful arousal. Then, fighting against what the audience assumed was stage fright, Nigel said the words...“They found him at first light, expired on the battlefield. Poor Digby. He was killed by a German parrot.”

Laughter erupted, sharp and unwelcome from an audience hit directly in the funny bone with the mental image of an evil parrot, driven by Nazi ideology, squawking 'Heil Hitler' before flying kamikaze style at poor Digby. An elderly, former wing commander rose in his seat, shaking his fist at the stage, “What disrespectful rot this is!” But Nigel stared, transfixed, as Jamie’s nude form dissolved into shadow, her whisper lingering: Murderer... Murderer… Murderer—her imagined touch ghosting over his skin, fingers trailing fire down his spine. Nigel stumbled around the stage, accidentally knocking over the sealed drum. Yellow-green vapour billowed from the stage, thick and oily, cascading into the stalls like a tidal wave of rot. At first, the crowd thought it theatrical flair, as they'd come to expect from Aubrey Hargreaves. Then Mrs. Prudence Protheroe in row three convulsed, her spine arching until her vertebrae cracked audibly. She clawed at her throat, nails gouging bloody furrows through wrinkled skin. Her mouth gaped in a silent scream before a geyser of blood-streaked bile erupted, followed by her stomach and intestines—slick, glistening ropes that slithered out in pulsating loops, splattering hot across her neighbours’ laps. Her husband beside her inhaled the gas and his face began to melt: skin bubbling and sliding off in translucent sheets, exposing raw muscle that twitched and wept crimson. In blind agony he dug his fingers into his own cheeks, ripping downward in long strips, peeling his face away to the bone in wet, sucking sounds, teeth clacking as the lower jaw hung by threads of tendon. Panic ignited. The former wing commander clutched his abdomen as his intestines burst through the wall of his belly in a sudden, wet explosion—coils of purple-grey bowel spilling over his medals in steaming heaps, blood pumping in rhythmic spurts from severed vessels. An old woman nearby shrieked as her eyes liquefied and burst, thick yellow fluid mixed with blood spraying in arcs; she raked her nails across her own scalp, tearing away hair and skin in bloody handfuls until skull gleamed white. Children screamed as beloved grandparents disemboweled themselves—fingers plunging into softening abdomens to haul out livers and spleens in quivering masses, arteries severed and fountaining dark red across the seats. Faces disintegrated under frantic claws: eyelids shredded, lips torn to ragged ribbons, tongues lolling in shredded mouths as victims tried to scream through collapsing throats. The floor became a slaughterhouse —gallons of blood, bile, and liquefied organs mingling into a viscous lake that lapped at ankles. Bodies slumped half-eviscerated, ribs cracked open like wet cages, hearts still fluttering weakly amid exposed cavities. Thinking fast, Aubrey made for a cardboard box containing gas masks for the play, distributing them to the Players most Priestley as they scarpered around backstage. Aubrey then yanked the fire alarm; it wailed like a siren’s call. The curtain went down, trapping the audience in a fog-shrouded tomb. By the time the fire brigade breached the doors, forty lay dead, bodies twisted in grotesque tableaux: torsos flayed open, entrails draped like garlands, faces reduced to glistening skulls half-covered in hanging meat, pools of blood and viscera inches deep across the floorboards.

Hours later, amid the flashing lights and the stench of death, Nigel sat on the edge of the stage, gas mask in his lap, nearly catatonic. Over and over he repeated: “German Parrot… German Parrot…Murderer....Murderer...Murderer”.
The siren...her call...Nigel's memory returned to that night, recalling details in more clarity than ever before. Long forgotten, long hidden memories. Captain Dodgers had brought aboard a crate of rusted drums marked with hazard symbols, the leftovers from an attempt to find a cure for rabies. Dodgers had taken a backhander to ensure they met with an illegal, deep-sea disposal.
“Get rid of them, do it bloody well now Bagshaw,” Dodgers had barked. “No bleeding questions. No bleeding records.”
They had heaved most overboard, the heavy drums vanishing into the black water with hollow splashes. Neither man could have suspected that their actions would cause gross offense to a sisterhood of sea sirens. Nigel, convinced the whole exercise was a ruse to isolate and murder him, had waited until only one drum remained. Then he had struck—slitting Dodgers’ throat in one ragged stroke. In the panic of escape, Nigel had forgotten about the final drum. He rowed to shore, hid it in the basement of the Village Hall under a pile of old hymnals, and buried the memory of the drum as deep as the captain’s body. He never thought of the drum again—until tonight. Why tonight, of all nights had Jamie and Dodgers decided to haunt his memories. It was if Dodgers had risen from the grave to thwart Nigel's acting career...aided and abetted by that trollop from the sea.

A young constable named Harris approached cautiously, notebook in one hand, a packet of biscuits in the other—pilfered from the neighbouring tea room where Aubrey and the rest of the Players most Priestley were being comforted.
“Mr. Bagshaw? Nigel? Here, have one of these" he produced a packet of Jammie Dodgers "Might settle the nerves a bit.”
He held out the biscuit, red jam glistening in the middle like fresh blood.
Jammie...Jamie...Dodgers!!!
The names collided in Nigel’s shattered mind, the captain’s bloodied throat flashing before him, the secret he had kept about Edna’s real lovers, Jamie’s naked accusation rising with it—her body writhing in his visions. Murderer… Murderer…With a guttural cry that echoed through the ruined hall, Nigel lunged. His fist drove upward in a savage arc, connecting squarely with the policeman’s groin. Harris doubled over instantly, a high-pitched wheeze escaping him as he crumpled to the floor, knees drawn up in fetal agony, hands clutching protectively over his bollocks. His mind overwhelmed by fears of never being able to achieve fatherhood. Nigel didn’t look back. He vaulted from the Village Hall, shoving past stunned paramedics, and vanished into the fog-shrouded night. The government inquiry predictably covered up the rusted drum and it's deadly contents. Nigel was never found. Three nights later, on a moonless tide, a lone figure walked the shingle at Priestley Cove. Nigel, barefoot and coatless, waded into the black water until it reached his waist, his chest, his throat. The cold no longer bit; it welcomed him like an old friend. Jamie rose first, naked and radiant, her voluptuous form undulating with predatory grace—breasts full and swaying, nipples taut with hunger, drawing him in with a siren’s primal allure. Her sisters circled beneath like pale shadows, their own nude bodies twisting in eager anticipation, tails flicking sprays of foam. She smiled—no longer accusing, but ravenous, her tongue darting out to taste the air, lips plump and parted in a moan of desire. They had waited decades for this meal, patient as the sea itself. Dodgers had been an appetiser, snatched too quickly. Nigel was the main course: guilt-marinated, tenderised by years of torment. He did not struggle as webbed claws raked his clothes away and needle teeth sank into living flesh. Skin tore in long strips from his back and thighs; muscle parted with wet, sucking sounds as chunks were ripped free and devoured. Blood poured into the water in thick clouds as arteries were severed—femoral, brachial, carotid—each bite sending fresh gouts spiraling into the dark. His abdomen was split open, intestines hauled out in steaming ropes and fought over, liver torn free in a hot, slippery mass. Ribs cracked like kindling as they burrowed to the heart, still beating, still trying to pump what little blood remained. Jamie’s mouth latched onto his throat, her breasts pressing hot against his chest in a final, twisted embrace, her body writhing against him in ecstatic feeding, the line between consumption and carnal union blurring in the bloody froth. He was worth the wait.

Sex and the Other Woman (1972)

 

I've always regarded Sex and the Other Woman as one of those second division Stanley Long titles, which like Bread and On the Game, was sandwiched in-between the standout Long productions of Groupie Girl and Eskimo Nell. Revisiting it via Melusine's Stanley Long box set though, I've gotten along allot better with it this time around. Full disclosure, I did have some involvement with that box set so my opinion isn't without bias, but seeing Sex and the Other Woman looking so damned perfect definitely improves things. Previous releases of this film having looked particularly ugly. I think I'm right in saying that this release also marks the first time Long's original version of the film has been seen in America. The Salvation DVD from the 2000s being the American re-edit of the movie, which shuffled the segments around, used an alternative title sequence that chopped down Felicity Devonshire's name to 'Felicity Devon' and replaced most of the DeWolfe music with generic disco tracks.

Sex and the Other Woman comes across like Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex made for more straight-laced punters and by a more straight-laced director. While SOS had an Egyptian mummy telling us tales of woe from the battle of the sexes, in Sex and the Other Woman the rather less scary Richard Wattis is on hand to introduce saucy stories that feel straight out of the Sunday tabloids, as opposed to the horror movie, Burroughs and Scientology influences that fuelled the Balch movie.

I do wonder if Sex and the Other Woman lacks a woman's touch that earlier Long productions had benefited from. The Wife Swappers likely having had input from Derek Ford's wife Valerie, and Groupie Girl having been written by Suzanne Mercer. Sex and the Other Woman feels like male chauvinism has taken over the reins, with female characters here behaving in a way that I'm sure no woman has ever behaved outside of the imagination of sexist men. Exactly how much of Stanley Long's personal life wound up in this movie will likely remain a question mark. I detect some possible autobiographical elements to the first story.  Reggie, the ill fated married man in that segment sharing Long's love of aviation and like Long has his own Penthouse. I assume the light aircraft and the penthouse in the film belonged to Long himself. On the basis that if you were making a low budget film that required an aircraft and a penthouse, why would you pay to use anyone else's if you owned your own. So, it is likely that we're here getting a peek at Long's pad whilst he was living high on the hog, thanks to the proceeds from The Wife Swappers and Groupie Girl.

Speaking of locations, the staircase in the house belonging to Maggie Wright's gold digging character is the same staircase that James Beck makes an appearance on in Groupie Girl. It also pops up in the pad the heroine shares with two other girls in Pete Walker's The Four Dimensions of Greta. Such is the small world of British sex films.
The original soundtrack of the film in this segment also treats us to a couple of blasts of the funky DeWolfe track 'Highway Song' by the marvelously named Herman Bender. Come to think about it, had he not been a real person, Herman Bender would have actually made for a great character name in a British sex comedy. The bewigged photographer in this segment proving that if you're looking for realistic and non-stereotypical portrayals of gay men in 1970s British culture, you might have to look beyond the sex comedies. Those with a keen ear might also detect a brief soundtrack appearance of the DeWolfe track 'Eye Level' at the end of the Felicity Devonshire segment, which soon after would become famous in the UK as the theme tune for the TV series Van Der Valk. Even if you stripped Sex and the Other Woman of the DeWolfe music and replaced it with more modern music, as the American distributor did, on a visual level this film couldn't have come from anywhere other than early 70s Britain. A point emphasized by Melusine's high end transfer, which really does breath unholy new life into those early 70s fashions and interiors.

The leading lady in the first segment, Maggie Wright, wasn't to Long's fancy, and might have been cast at the insistence of co-producer Barry Jacobs, since she'd also featured in his movie The Love Box. The American distributor was evidently in agreement with Long, since the US version switches her segment with the Jane Cardew one. The US version presenting the Jane Cardew segment upfront...as if Jane Cardew wasn't upfront enough. Sex and the Other Woman does see Long and Jacobs offer up something for all straight male tastes. The Cardew segment for men into big bust fetishism, the Wright one for those with a taste for the older woman, while the Felicity Devonshire one is err... possibly for the man who -to quote the song Mr. Iceberg by S. Gainsbourg- "likes his little girls in socks". My history with Sex and the Other Woman began with the Salvation DVD but I do remember reading in an old edition of Elliot's Guide to Films on Video that there had been a UK VHS release of the film in the late 1980s that had suffered 9 minutes and 30 seconds of cuts, which certainly piqued my interest in seeing the film. It could have been a mistake on Elliot's behalf, but odds are that if there was a segment in Sex and the Other Woman that would have provoked such heavy BBFC censorship it would have been the Felicity Devonshire one. Stanley Long at his most 'morally ambiguous' it sees a middle aged man (Raymond Young) fall 'victim' to the sexual desires of his daughter's school friend Sarah, played by Devonshire. The daughter's reaction to discovering about her father's affair with her schoolgirl friend- she basically tells Sarah she can't blame her and admits she'd sleep with him herself if he wasn't her own father- is a prime example of what I was saying about women in this film behaving like no woman ever has outside of the imagination of men. Still it must have done wonders for the ego of actor Raymond Young. While Young was no stranger to British exploitation cinema, he's also in Secrets of a Superstud and The Flesh and Blood Show, he didn't usually get to be the subject of such rock star like adulation.

By the time of Sex and the Other Woman, you're definitely witnessing the bar being raised in terms of the quality of female acting in British sex films, at least compared to the films from just a few years earlier, which mostly had to make do with nude models who could barely get a line out. We're also beginning to see a 'star system' emerging with actresses like Cardew and Devonshire destined to become regulars in these types of film, their fame largely playing out within the genre. Not everyone was happy to be associated with this film though. Actor Paul Greenwood, whose character succumbs to Jane Cardew's seductive charms, goes tellingly uncredited in the film. He returned to British exploitation a few years later to play the boyfriend in the Pete Walker film Frightmare, and allowed them to use his real name on that film...then again he didn't bare his arse in that one.

Sex and the Other Woman ends with the biggest piece of propaganda for triangle relationships you're likely to see outside of Tintorera, as a married couple weather the scandal of moving the husband's mistress in with them. In many ways it feels like a throwback to The Wife Swappers with its swinging themes and largely unknown cast, yet its a reflection of how British sexual mores had moved on that Long got away with a laid back and comedic attitude towards this situation. A far cry from the finger pointing approach he was forced to adopt with the Wife Swappers, where such behavior would no doubt have resulted in blackmail, ruination or a mental breakdown. The ending anticipates where the British sex film was heading with the husband (Max Mason) breaking the fourth wall and giving a blokeish wink to the audience.

Having seen this genre dismissed for years as nostalgia proof and a forgotten embarrassment, it is quite gratifying to see movies like Sex and the Other Woman get the deluxe treatment on disc, as well as the British sex film's unexpected dominance of late night British television at the moment. A phenomenon that began with the relatively obscure TV channel Together TV, who despite apparently being run a hard left collective, hit upon the brainwave of filling their nighttime schedules with 1970s British horror and sex movies till the wee hours. Quite how such movies fit in with their ideology is anyone's guess; I very much doubt their politics align with the politics of Pete Walker and Mary Millington. Still such programming must have done well for them, since other channels have since taken notice and followed suit. Talking Pictures TV has been slipping a few Confessions and Adventures movies into their schedules. More recently, nostalgia channel Rewind TV has also jumped aboard this unlikeliest of bandwagon. 

Just to document the sex mad state of late night TV in Britain in 2026...Rewind TV has recently shown Virgin Witch, Secrets of Sex, For Men Only, Confessions of a Sex Maniac, The Ups and Downs of a Handyman and Sex and the Other Woman. Talking Pictures have shown The Best of the Adventures and Confessions from a Holiday Camp. While Together TV have shown Cruel Passion, Girls Come First, Got in Made, Come Play With Me, Groupie Girl, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, On the Game, I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight and The Playbirds. It's almost as if...y'know...people actually like watching these movies. A turn of events that has left me feeling vindicated for flying the flag for British sexploitation cinema all these years, and smugly ahead of my time...now that the unbelieving scum have come around to my way of thinking.

It would be remiss of me not to also mention Jane Cardew's memorable and highly suggestive usage of a cigar in Sex and the Other Woman. "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar" Freud once claimed, but it sure as hell wasn't in this blooming well case.

The Farm (1984, Laurence James)

 

Laurence James is an author who I'm probably guilty of overlooking. Partly because he was best known for hippie era SF, which isn't really my thing, and partly because he used so many pen names. It's easy to forget that 'Mick Norman' who wrote all those Hells Angels novels, is also 'James Darke' of the Witchfinder General inspired 'The Witches' series, as well as 'Jonathan May' of the rival Confessions book series. Whatever name he was using that week and whatever genre he was working in though, I’ve found that you're always in entertaining hands with Laurence James.

Here James steps into the guise of 'Richard Haigh' and gives the likes of Guy N. Smith and James Herbert a run for their money with this prime piece of 1980s paperback horror in which an isolated farmhouse in Wales comes under attack from carnage loving pigs. Not willing to put all his eggs in the one basket, James expands this from being a mere killer pigs vehicle. Since The Farm also trots out lethal dogs, cannibalistic rabbits, malicious goats, cows seeking martyrdom and suicidal geese. All putting aside their differences to gang up against the human race and seek revenge after their water supply was contaminated by dangerous chemicals.

Speaking of Guy N. Smith, I suspect this book was doing a little bit more than encroaching on his literary territory. In fact there seems to be a fascinating, hidden layer of Guy N. Smith references in this book. The main protagonist Paul is a city boy who was made the dramatic lifestyle change of decamping to a farm in rural Wales- as Guy N. Smith had done in real life. Paul's brother Richard works in a bank- an occupation Smith had held prior to becoming a full time writer. Richard's wife is called Jean- which is the name of Guy N. Smith's wife. Jean and Richard have two children, a boy and a girl who are in their early teens- and did the Smiths (technically they actually had a boy and two girls). Paul is also harbouring the secret that he used to write erotic fiction for top shelf magazines- as did Guy N. Smith back in the 1970s. It's way too much to have been a mere coincidence. Smith did lend a front cover quote to James's horror novel Paradise Lost "mind blowing terror from a talented new horror writer". So I assume those two were mates, and these clandestine GNS references should be interpreted as a good natured poke in the ribs.

Although it has never really attained the iconic status of The Rats, Night of the Crabs or Slugs, in many ways The Farm is the absolute embodiment of the 1980s British horror paperback. It's simplistic, relatively short on page count, delivers crowd pleasing scenes of people falling foul of bloodthirsty animals and is shameless in its perversity. If you think Guy N. Smith was often guilty of inserting troubling sexual elements into his horror books, then Laurence James wants you to hold his beer. Come for the killer pigs, stick around to be disturbed by the behavior of an underage Welsh nympho called Gwyneth, who is anyone's for a top up to her pocket money. I dare say that after meeting a girl like Gwyneth, a Welshman need never look longingly at a sheep again. For some reason James chooses the scene in which Gwyneth and another character break the sexual taboo of incest, to go overboard not only in terms of sexual descriptions but also in terms of product placement. I doubt The Mirror newspaper, Robertson's Marmalade or Toyah Willcox were grateful for having their wares plugged in that context.

It could be argued that back in the morally bankrupt 1980s, books like this were being passed around the playgrounds by boys who would have been roughly the same age as Gwyneth, to whom she'd no doubt have been something of a fantasy figure. Still the Gwyneth aspects to the book are pretty sordid even for that era and don't exactly show James's character in the greatest light, for a while there it really does feel like he's writing jerk off material for Jimmy Savile. In another example of this book time stamping itself to the era, it is such a quintessentially British and 1980s thing for the unnatural relationship in this book to get discovered thanks to a trade union dispute (you'll have to read the book yourself to discover how, it's priceless). Perhaps that was another of James's Guy N. Smith in-jokes, trade union activity being one of Smith's bete noires.

Laurence James always comes across as being a little bit more hip and in touch with popular culture than your average paperback writer back then. I seem to recall his Hells Angels books including Michael Moorcock references, name checking Roger Corman and general having a satirical, underground sensibility to them. As we venture into the 1980s, The Farm proves that James still had his finger on the pulse when it came to what the kids were into. James needle drops songs by Madness, Fun Boy Three and Ian Dury into these pages. I especially liked that when it came to Dury, James didn't go for the obvious 'Reasons to be Cheerful' or 'Hit Me with your Rhythm Stick' and instead has a character listening to 'Spasticus Autisticus' on the radio. Which might be another example of Laurence James pulling our leg, since the BBC ban on that song probably meant that Spasticus Autisticus didn't actually receive much radio airplay back then.
We also get a Famous Five reference, which initially seems quite old fashioned in that company, but I suspect James was actually alluding there to the Comic Strip's 'Five Go Mad in Dorset' parody. Especially as he quotes the famous "lashings of ginger beer" line. Which was echoed throughout playgrounds after Five Go Mad in Dorset went out, along with the heavies' blah-blah-blah speeches. I suppose a blah-blah-blah version of The Farm's plot would go ... blah-blah-blah chemical spillage... blah-blah-blah government cover-up... blah-blah-blah Welsh jailbait... blah-blah-blah killer pigs.

James's approach to horror can at times be as unconventional as his choice of Ian Dury songs. He has an eccentric habit of ending chapters on a cliffhanger then jumping forward at the start of the next chapter and only eventually revealing important plot details anecdotally. Something which takes a bit of getting used to. After a literally explosive opening that sees James gleefully reduce schoolchildren, nuns and a chickenhawk photographer to bloody pulp, the book then teases us with a few false starts, slips into darkness with it's jailbait fixation before pulling it's mind out of the gutter and unleashing the swine. Once it gets going through, the book comes out with all guns blazing and The Farm lives up to it's reputation as a better than average example of the paperback equivalent of the Video Nasties. It's the type of book that thrived during the late 70s and early 80s, only for public to grow tired of this sort of horror novel when an influx of below average books flooded the market at the end of the eighties. My suspicion is that had the Video Nasties been left alone they'd have met with a similar fate and the public would eventually have just gotten bored and jaded with an overkill of cheap horror movies on video. However, because the Video Nasties were taken away from us they've achieved legendary status and enjoyed a healthy cult afterlife. Whereas their book equivalents, lacking the allure of forbidden fruit, have tended to fade into obscurity.

Saying that, The Farm was recently republished by Valancourt's Paperbacks from Hell imprint, followed by the news that James's follow up The City (1986) is being republished by a new company called Cardboard Coffin Press. News that is something to squeal about, since buying original copies of those books at the moment seems impossible without remortgaging your house or taking up bank robbing. I can't help but be amused though that in a recent interview one of the Paperbacks from Hell people ruled out republishing Pierce Nace's Eat Them Alive on account that it "veers on the side of bad, bad taste" and is "super duper rapey" (note: that book contains no rape whatsoever) yet they're perfectly happy to republish Welsh incest porn. Kudos to them for putting The Farm back in circulation, but there's some peculiar double standards going on there.