Guts for Garters (2015, Linda Regan)

 

Watching Linda Regan in an old episode of Minder, reminded me I needed to jump back down the rabbit hole that is her later career as a crime writer. Whereas Regan's acting career generally played out in light comedy -she's probably best remembered in that capacity for the sitcom Hi-De-Hi- her writing career walks a different path, one that veers towards heavy duty exploitation. Full of bad language, degrading sex and brutal violence, Guts for Garters is about as removed from Hi-De-Hi as you can get, unless I've missed an episode of Hi-De-Hi that opens with Ted Bovis torturing someone with a machete for selling crack at Maplins.

Guts for Garters sees Regan tackle the subject of girl gangs, although she wasn't the first female author to walk that beat. Back in the heyday of New English Library, Maisie Mosco wrote Gang Girls (1978) but as that book is now rare and commands high prices, Regan here is on hand to provide a more modern and less prohibitively expensive alternative.

Guts for Garters centers around female hard cases 'The Alley Cats' who've decided to take the law into their own hands, after rival gang the SLR (South London Rulers) try to seize control over the Aviary estate. Queen of the Alley Cats, Alysha Achter, ain't standing for that on her patch, and immediately proves herself to be a force to be reckoned with by torturing SLR member Burak Kaya for selling drugs in the community. When Burak is later found murdered, the SLR vow revenge on the Alley Cats, who in turn try to place blame for the killing on in fighting within the SLR. Another killing on the estate -a girl is beaten over the head with a hammer, falls in unfortunately close proximity to some dog shit, then is set on fire- further exacerbates the gang fighting, as well as opening up the possibility that a serial killer is loose on the estate.

Guts for Garters was meant to be the first Regan book to elevate Georgia Johnson to main character status, having previously appeared as a supporting character in Regan's earlier books Brotherhood of Blades (2011) and Street Girls (2012). A black Detective Inspector, Johnson's career in the police force is motivated by her having been raped as a teenager, giving her an affinity with The Alley Cats, whose members have similarly been dealt a bad hand in life. It has to be said though that Johnson doesn't leave much of an impression here, and gets overshadowed by both the antics of the Girl Gang and her sex mad colleague DI Stephanie Green who proudly boasts to having slept with most of the men on the force. Stephanie was so named by her parents in tribute to their cockney background, Stephanie Green being a play on Stepney Green. As an adult, her name has taken on a saucy double meaning, since like Stepney Green Tube Station, Stephanie Green is easily accessible to most Londoners (Regan's joke, not mine). I suspect Regan was trying to subvert gender roles by giving Stephanie the type of characteristics that you'd more associate with the alpha male cops of yesteryear. That is to say, that when Stephanie isn't bedding members of the opposite sex, she's drinking heavily and stuffing her face with junk food.

Guts for Garters is also part of an expanded universe, the Reganverse if you will, and works in two characters from her DCI Banham book series. Namely the aforementioned DCI Paul Banham and his colleague/lover DI Alison Grainger. I must admit that my heart sank when those two were introduced, since they are the dullest elements of their own books, and don't exactly add much here. Banham's most notable characteristic is his habit of vomiting at violent crime scenes, the result of his wife and child being killed by a mad axeman 14 years earlier. It appears that his PTSD issues are catching, since in this book Alison Grainger starts fainting at crime scenes, due to having seen a work colleague being burnt to death. Alison also has trouble unscrewing the tops off bottled water, and manages to trap her hand in her own car door at one point, apart from that she is perfectly competent at her job. What with Banham vomiting all over the place, Alison fainting and Stephanie more concerned with her horizontal pleasures, its no wonder the residents of the Aviary estate have no faith in the police force. Even Georgia comes across as a bit of a mug, paying out cash to Alysha for information that generally turns out to be useless and of course always exonerates The Alley Cats from any wrongdoing.

Guts for Garters has the mentality of a Kray Twins apologist. In the same way that certain people jump to the defense of Ronnie and Reggie, and eulogize them as good lads who loved their mum, did allot for their own community and never hurt their own, Guts for Garters fully subscribes to idea of the noble criminal with a social conscience. Good girls at heart, The Alley Cats care about the old folk on the estate, want to keep kids away from drugs, only sell firearms and machetes outside of South London and have their hearts set on rebuilding the children's playground. This book does have an unfortunate tendency to reiterate the same plot points, if I had a pound for every time I had to read about the Alley Cats' plans for the playground, I'd have enough money to pay to fix the sodding playground myself.

The contractions of The Alley Cats is something to behold. The Alley Cats sell drugs, but only to people who already use drugs, and always encourage them to stop using drugs. Alysha's goal is to open a community centre, a hair and nail salon, and lest we forget rebuild the children's playground. All of which she hopes will keep the kids away from drugs and prostitution, even though she plans to fund these schemes from the proceeds of drugs and prostitution. "I love that we're together an 'ave got plans to make the estate a good place an 'elp the kids to 'ave a chance wiv life" claims one of the Alley Cats, yet when it comes to society's ills, they seem to be spreading the disease in order to come up with the cure. Despite that, The Alley Cats believe that one day people will build statues honouring them, and they'll be as revered as Winston Churchill.

In contrast their male equivalent, the SLR are utterly without conscious, want to get all the kids hooked on crack, mug old ladies and demean their girlfriends by punching them in the face and making them pull a train. They can't be faulted when it comes to inclusivity though. While the hierarchy, like SLR leader Harisha Celik are all young Turks, the rest of the gang includes Pakistanis, mixed race kids, whitey and even the Chinese. Harisha believing that the Chinese are naturally superior to everyone else when it comes to growing cannabis and wielding samurai swords, even though those are actually Japanese weapons. Regan largely avoids race hate elements, although we do get some rather random anti-Chinese racism towards the end. One of the Alley Cats contemplates whether or not to "beat the shit out" of a Chinese rival, and the gang vow to start setting fire to Chinese restaurants in the East End if the Chinese vandalize the Alley Cats' community centre. This presumably is setting up another Johnson and the Alley Cats novel... hopefully the Chinese won’t attack the Children's playground with their Japanese swords.

Make no mistake this is a proper exploitation novel, regardless of its typically uninspired 2010s book cover and the relatively mainstream acting career of its author. Had Regan been a regular in British gangster movies or Pete Walker films -the hammer murder here brings to mind Walker's Schizo- then Guts for Garters would make sense. As it is there is nothing in Regan's career to suggest it was building up to books like this. She's isn't totally unique in this respect. Candy Davis -who also pops up in an early Minder episode - was another actress who reinvented herself as a crime novelist. Maybe there is a case for having appeared in Minder warping the minds of these bubbly blonde comedy actresses, which manifested itself years later by them writing crime books for those with strong stomachs. Regan certainly doesn't shy away from violence against women here. There are graphically described rapes and a gangbang, as well as a rebellious Muslim girl being burnt with an iron for being seen in public without her Hijab. At the same time Regan doesn't let men off the hook, with males depicted as an abusive or creepy bunch within these pages. Even DCI Banham, who is usually sympathetically portrayed in his own books (he did after all lose his wife and child to an axe murderer) gets pulled up a few times for his chauvinism. At one point, Banham makes derogatory comments about women drivers, annoying Stephanie, not of course to the extent that it puts her off wanting to have sex with him 'she watched him aiming his key at his car door and wondered what he would say if she offered him a blowjob'.

As much as Guts for Garters is in many ways the heir apparent to the nasty NEL youthspoitation paperbacks of the 1970s, Regan does self consciously try to make it a product of the 2010s. There is an influx of pop culture references that probably made this book seem hip and topical for a few months in 2015, but aren't aging well. One character is compared to Amy Winehouse, DI Johnson guesses the password on a deceased girl's laptop by typing in the names of One Direction band members and Alysha wonders 'what it was like to be famous, be someone like Rihanna, and have everything you wanted in life'. Winehouse's early death might mean that she still resonates in the public conscious, but many of the other pop culture references here now just provoke a response of 'who' or 'I haven't thought about them in years'. Such is the fickle nature of fame.

I can't fault Regan's choice of name for her head gang girl though. Since I did actually go to school with someone called Alysha, who years later resurfaced in the papers having been sent to prison for running a drugs den, and was last heard of opening a hair and nails salon. So, for an ex school chum of mine at least it seems that life really does imitate Linda Regan novel.

The Naughty World of Stanley Long

 

 

Very honoured to have contributed to this upcoming Melusine release, which exclusively features the XXX footage shot for Groupie Girl, Naughty and On the Game, with the additional option of hearing yours truly talk all over the top of it!!!

From nudies to roughies to ultra weird regional curiosities, the sexploitation world welcomed any filmmaker working in any genre, so long as the limits of nudity and sex on screen were pushed as far as they could go - but never all the way. DISTRIBPIX, one of the legendary names in the genre (and whose extensive library will be the backbone of this line), will offer single, double, and even triple feature Blu-rays highlighting works from every corner and crevice of softcore smut, from the dawn of nudie cuties to the all-but-hard 70s, with plentiful lost and never on disc films along the way.

Few names are more synonymous with the British sexploitation business than Stanley Long. For close to two decades, Long produced nearly two dozen blockbuster nudies, often working with notorious filmmaker Derek Ford, while pushing the limits of the British Board of Film Censors. Presented here are a quartet of his most ribald and rebellious efforts, all newly restored in 4K by Distribpix, from their best surviving film elements.

In THE WIFE SWAPPERS, a stern-faced doctor hosts a series of case studies focused on the often unsettling world of swingers. Director Derek Ford and producer Long’s first international hit played British cinemas for months, and helped to usher in a more permissive era in the country’s film industry. Featuring James Donnelly (Scum, Crown Court).
A small-time rock band and their young female admirers-cum-lovers embark on a cross-Britain tour in GROUPIE GIRL, and the girls discover the darker side of the musicians they adore. An earnest and sobering examination of groupie culture, director Derek Ford works from a strong screenplay co-authored by regular Long collaborator, Suzanne Mercer. What happens when a man isn’t satisfied with only his wife for a lover?
A series of light-hearted vignettes expose SEX AND THE OTHER WOMAN. Long takes on directing duties in this more farcical, upbeat comedy which piles on both high jinks and non-stop nudity. Featuring Maggie Wright (Twins of Evil) and Jane Cardew (The Flesh and Blood Show).
ESKIMO NELL tells the tale of a first time director trying to make a “serious” art film, who finds himself in over his head as each of his financial backers demands a very different, and far sexier, final product. A hilarious meta-comedy about the state of the British exploitation film industry directed by Martin Campbell (GoldenEye), co-scripted by and starring Michael Armstrong (Mark of the Devil), and starring veteran comedian/actor Roy Kinnear (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory).
directed by: Stanley Long
starring: James Donnelly, Suzanne Mercer, Maggie Wright, Jane Cardew, Michael Armstrong
1969, 1970, 1972, 1974 / 87 min, 87 min, 88 min, 86 min / 1.37:1; 1.66:1 / English DTS-HD MA 1.0
Additional info:
•2-Disc Region Free Blu-ray
•THE WIFE SWAPPERS (87min), GROUPIE GIRL (87 min), SEX AND THE OTHER WOMAN (88 min) and ESKIMO NELL (86 min) are newly restored in 4K from their best surviving film elements
•Never before seen “Continental Sequences” for The Wife Swappers and Groupie Girl
•Bonus “Continental Sequences” for Stanley Long’s films Naughty and On The Game
•Audio commentary tracks for all four “Continental Sequences” by British film historian Gavin Whitaker
•Original theatrical trailer for Groupie Girl
•Archival image gallery
•Double-sided artwork
•English SDH subtitles

The Naked Light (1970, James Moffatt)

 

One of the unintended effects of the Manson family murders at the end of the 1960s was to bring together the Canadian writer James Moffatt and British publisher New English Library. NEL wanted a quickie cash-in on the Manson phenomenon, and the fast writing hack Moffatt delivered 'Satan's Slaves'. A book so hastily written that Manson and his followers were still on trial by the time Moffatt completed it. Since Moffatt didn't really have enough material on Manson to fill an entire book, he padded Satan's Slaves out with exposés of other phoney gurus and religious conmen operating out of California. Moffatt also made several stabs in the dark about Manson's then unclear motivations. Something which managed to get Moffatt's publisher in hot water, when Moffatt used Satan's Slaves to link Manson with the Church of Scientology "Will it confirm that Manson got his start with them?". This resulted in the Scientologists taking legal action against NEL, eventually settling for an undisclosed financial sum and the agreement that Satan's Slaves was withdrawn from circulation.

Perhaps wisely, for their next Manson inspired book 'The Naked Light' Moffatt and NEL decided to drop the factual approach of Satan's Slaves and go the semi-fictional route. The Naked Light offers the unique spectacle of seeing the murder of Sharon Tate used as fodder for a Canadian author who was playing to a readership of conservative, bigoted Brits.

Our initial protagonist, greek drug dealer Stefanos Nikasnos is 'sweaty, hot and irritable' (a mood Moffatt may himself have been in when he wrote this book) as he navigates the LA traffic. In the first of many attempts to play to a patriotic British audience, Moffatt has Stefanos take pride in cutting in front of two German made cars "he had no love for the Teutonic bastards...he remembered what they had done to Greece during the war". Stefanos insists on only driving a superior, British made car.

Stefanos' client is Chloe Young, a hedonistic, heavily pregnant Hollywood actress...who in no way, shape or form is meant to remind you of Sharon Tate. Currently out of the country is Chloe's husband, Americo Batelli, a European filmmaker who is obsessed with witchcraft...who in no way, shape or form is meant to remind you of Rosemary's Baby director Roman Polanski. Stefanos just wants to deliver some drugs to Chloe's party, but gets talked into participating in a black mass and ends up porking the heavily pregnant actress on an altar while jaded Hollywood types gather round to chant the praises of Lucifer.

In yet another attempt to endear himself to a British audience, Moffatt then introduces us to Richard Boston, a darn decent British actor who has come up against a wall of xenophobia in Hollywood. Boston is regarded as a 'work stealing limey' and with his British reserve, struggles to fit in with new Hollywood what with all its stoned, rebellious, long haired, method actors. Hoping to make the swinging scene, Richard shows up at Chloe's party only to find that the only thing swinging is Chloe herself, hung from a rope with satanic symbols adorning her naked body. Five of her friends have met a similar fate, leading the cops to the conclusion 'a sick mind had been at work here. A mind tortured by witchcraft. A pornographic mentality twisted out of all reason on a bender of violent death'.

There are moments in The Naked Light where I wondered if Moffatt's inspiration for Richard Boston may have been Edmund Purdom. Although Purdom was long gone from Hollywood by the late sixties, there are quite a few similarities there. Both had come to Hollywood with the idea of appearing in big budget, biblical epics, only to suffer career setbacks due to an antagonistic relationship with the American press. Moffatt even gives Boston's love interest the name Lucy Christian, near identical to the woman Purdom effectively gave up Hollywood for... Linda Christian.

Having had their fingers burnt with Satan's Slaves, Moffatt and NEL discovered with The Naked Light that you can be as libelous and offensive about famous people as you like, as long as you write about them as if they were fictional characters. In that respect, The Naked Light leans more towards an example of Tate-spoitation, rather than Manson-spoitation. Moffatt could be a cold blooded bastard in his writing, but The Naked Light is exceptionally callous even by his standards. Keeping in mind that his main focus of hate here was a pregnant woman who had just been killed in a horrendous fashion and would have barely been cold in her grave when Moffatt cranked this out in 1970.

The Naked Light adopts a similar format as Moffatt's 'J.J. More' sex paperbacks like The Massage Girls and The Walk-On Girls, in which a character embarks on an investigation into a salacious topic. Eventually settling on the aforementioned Lucy Christian as his main protagonist, the bulk of The Naked Light is taken up by Lucy -a publicist for a movie company -talking to various Hollywood oddballs who knew the Sharon Tate proxy character and receiving an overwhelmingly damning verdict. Some of the opinions including "that girl was a bitch from the word 'Go'. She reeked sex and evil" as well as "Chloe deserved to die. I feel sorry for Americo. He's got to live with the disgrace she's left behind". I'm not sure if even the people who actually killed Sharon Tate hated her as much as Jim Moffatt does in the pages of The Naked Light.

Geographically, the Hollywood setting of this book might be thousands of miles away from the working class London of Moffatt's skinhead novels but his bitter, hateful tone is as distinct as ever. Moffatt might have inadvertently nailed his own writing style when he claims of one character 'every sentence held it's venomous poison'.

Lucy acts as both Moffatt's conservative mouthpiece -our girl hates draft dodgers, pornographers and homosexuals, but loves her Governor Reagan- while at the same time being the object of Moffatt's less conservative lust 'when she was naked under the sheets, she would perform with the agility of a snake, the passion of the demented and the urgency of a spinster'. In her attempts to uncover the truth about Chloe, Lucy's gets the dirt from Mrs. Wilmott, Chloe's devoutly catholic housekeeper who got fed up with cleaning up the used contraceptives and dead cats (sacrificed to satan). While Axel Sturm, a Swedish playboy shocks the Victorian minded Miss Christian with his open bisexuality (classic line: "Do I seem like a man who would permit buggery?"). Lucy also chats with Mala, a lesbian and Anglophile who dines out at a mock English pub. A setting that allows Moffatt to work in his obligatory plug for the Seagram's company...it seems no Hollywood lesbian would be seen dead without a glass of 'Seagram's V.O.' in her hand. As with the lesbian character in Skinhead Girl, Moffatt appears, if not exactly tolerant, then a little more relaxed with gay female characters than a gay male ones.

Speaking of which, by far the most explosive of Lucy's encounters is with 'Mish-Mash' a gay radio DJ who has jumped on the hippie bandwagon and encourages his listeners to appose the Vietnam war and call for Governor Reagan's resignation. For a homophobic author Moffatt sure could write like an old bitch at times, of poor Mish-Mash, Moffatt has this to say 'his listeners could not see his face. Nor his flabby body. Nor his feminine features and the balding head'. While Lucy can tolerate all manner of trash talk about Chloe from straights, Mish-Mash's homosexual misogyny "Chloe Young was an immoral bitch...she used her cunt..to gain fame" proves to be the straw that breaks the Christian's back "remember I'm a woman with one of those things between my legs" she barks back.

At one point, Moffatt just decides to start writing what appears to be a completely different book and indulges in his passion for 1930s Hollywood gangster movies. Suddenly we get Mafia goons trying to smuggle Chloe's killer to Canada, and the secondary character Captain Jim Herschfeld transformed into a Dick Tracy type figure. Right down to Herschfeld acquiring a young boy as a sidekick -akin to Tracy's 'The Kid' character- who Herschfeld decides to adopt on the spot and take into his home. This despite the fact that the boy isn't even an orphan. Herschfeld's rationale there being that since the boy's father beats his mother, the mother makes loud noises during sex, and the boy's sister is a prostitute, the boy is therefore the ideal choice for helping him solve sex murders. Life experiences having given the boy 'relatively advanced knowledge of manly affairs'.

Never shy of voicing his opinions, Moffatt is like Mount Vesuvius here, spilling all that hot lava on decadent, soulless Hollywood, permissive actors, non-virgin actresses, police corruption, kitchen sink dramas, sex clubs, the type of Fish and Chips that is served in LA (inferior to the British version of Fish and Chips, of course) and just about everything else under the evening sun. Oddly the same soapboxing about Hollywood being the new Sodom and Gomorrah that renders Satan's Slaves such a pontificating bore, is what makes The Naked Light such a wild ride. Wallowing in sex, drugs and witchcraft almost as much as he does warning about the dangers of sex, drugs and witchcraft. Here an angered Mr. Moffatt makes for an entertaining Mr. Moffatt for a change...and I'm sure NEL raised a glass of Seagram's V.O. to the fact that at least he didn't manage to piss the Scientologists off this time.

 

Casting Debbie (1991, Joel M. Reed)

 

 

There has been, not one, but two biographies of New York exploitation filmmaker Joel M. Reed. 'Blood Sucking Freak: the life and films of the incredible Joel M. Reed' by a writer who was clearly fond of the old reprobate, and the 'Special Issue' of Bill Landis' Sleazoid Express, which was all about Joel (or 'Jowl' as Landis' thick NYC accent would often mangle Reed's first name into). The latter was a nonstop tirade of hatred against Reed by Landis, who once described his effort to me as 'a revealing biography of a venal, lying, non-human'.

Neither biography spends much time on Reed's career as a novelist (none at all in the case of the Landis one) and after reading Casting Debbie I can understand why. Whatever charm Reed's movies possessed didn't extend to his books. For the record Joel's lit career included forays into horror (Zombie Wall, Book of the Dead), conspiracy theory (Outrage: Hitler Didn't Die) and pseudonymously written porn... under the name Phillipa Iananacker he was the author of 'Private School Girls Go Hollywood'. An action thriller called 'The Shanghai Jew', adverted as 'coming soon' on Reed's now long gone website, appears though to have gone unpublished. Joel's only book to have had mass appeal was 'Trump: The Man, The Myth, The Scandal' Reed's 1990 attempt to air the dirty laundry of the future POTUS.

Casting Debbie was published two years after Joel's death, billed as 'a grindhouse classic novel' with claims to be set in the 1970s porno chic era, it is neither. In fact this is a retitling of 'The Story of Hollywood O' a book Reed anonymously wrote in 1991, then adopted the pen name Elena Smythe when it was republished in 2012. As the original title implies this is Joel's attempt to update The Story of O to an early 1990s Hollywood setting, where wannabe actress Debbie Edwards humiliatingly agrees to become a sex slave to powerful casting agent Chana Wellington in return for a chance of fame. That's basically it, plot wise, the bulk of the book consisting of Debbie crawling about on all fours, sucking toes, eating dog food and honing her oral sex techniques on Chana's smelly, grotesquely stereotyped Filipino gardener ("lick, lick, good lick").

The slave training theme inevitably echoes Reed's most famous film Bloodsucking Freaks, but played straight and bereft of that movie's gore and horror elements, Casting Debbie adds up to little much more than the rancid fantasies of a dirty old man with delusions of being a font of all Hollywood gossip. The book is pure Joel, the tall tales about famous people, the yammering about nailing virgins, the careless misogyny and suspect closeted homosexually. For a man who always came across as vocally heterosexual in interviews, Joel sure writes a heck of allot here about guy's dicks and giving blowjobs. In his Reed biography, Landis floated the idea that Reed was gay but that over the years Reed's sex drive had been replaced by a greater desire to scam people. A sentiment curiously echoed in Casting Debbie when Reed has Chana admit "I really have no interest in sex of any kind, I use it only as a means to bolster the bottom line".

In fairness, based on my minor interactions with him, Reed was never the monsterious, venal, lying, non-human that Bill Landis made him out to be. Joel just seemed to be a fairly harmless old sleazemonger, full of stories about a long gone New York that he epitomized...and he was remembered with genuine affection by people when he died...the same couldn't be said of Bill Landis. Even so, I don't think Reed did himself any favours with Casting Debbie, a book in which the main female character is repeatedly forced to say "I'm just a cunt to be used by my master. I'll spread my legs on command" isn't the greatest evidence of an author's good character.

However if you are looking revolting material on a par with Bloodsucking Freaks, Joel occasionally delivers the goods here. At one point Debbie has her virginity restored by having sheep's flesh grafted onto her private parts, all in order to please a TV executive who wants to screw her whilst imagining she is his virgin daughter. Later the sheep's flesh comes loose in the mouth of an oriental lady while she is eating Debbie's pussy. Suffice to say, Joel's ability to gross people out, far exceeded his ability to turn people on. For the most part here though, Joel just manages to make even BDSM look boring, and I suspect even Jeffrey Epstein would have dozed off reading this.

By far the best thing about the current incarnation of this book is the retro cover, whoever designed that did a superb job of making Casting Debbie look like something you'd see in a NYC dirty bookshop in the 1960s, raising expectations that this will be the literary equivalent of Joel's sexploitation movies 'Career Bed' and 'SEX by Advertisement', pity then that this book is instead like Joel posthumously mailed you one of his turds.

The Rapist (1994, Walter E. Adams)

 

I'm starting to lose count of the times I thought I'd found the most gross and deranged book of all time, only to be proven wrong when a new competitor for that crown came along. I genuinely once thought that honour should be bestowed on Bamboo Guerillas by Guy N. Smith, then Eat Them Alive came into my life, then that was challenged for the upchuck cup by Shaun Huston's Chainsaw Terror, followed by The Cellar by the rump loving Richard Laymon. Now all of those have to potentially stand aside, because Walter E. Adams' The Rapist is in town, and the valuable life lesson I've learned here is that Walt can write the type of extreme book that would probably cause Guy N. Smith to choke on his pipe, cause Richard Laymon's scrotum to shrivel and cause Shaun Hutson to lose control of his sphincter muscle.

When people talk about Pierce Nace's Eat Them Alive, they have a tendency to claim that book feels like it was written by Travis Bickle...well listen you screwheads because HERE IS a book that truly feels like it was written by God's lonely man. HERE IS a book written by a man who would not take it anymore. HERE IS a book by a man who stood up against the scum. HERE IS a book by a man who has some bad ideas in his head. HERE IS a book by a man who just wants to go out, and you know, do something.

The Rapist was written in 1994, and despite the lurid cover- featuring a gun and a pair of panties- my expectations were that it would be all sizzle and no steak. After all the general consensus is that the heyday of the badly behaved, morally reprehensible sleaze novel was in the 1970s and early the 1980s, and that by the 1990s a degree of politically correct thinking had come into play. That memo clearly didn't reach Walter E. Adams, down in Casselberry, Florida.

The first sign that we're in for something exceptional here, comes even before the book begins. Since right at the start of The Rapist there are full page adverts for other Walter E. Adams tomes. The kind of blurbs that are usually trotted out at the end of books, where the hope is that you've been sufficiently impressed by writer's work to check out further books by the same author. Unconventionally placing these ads at the start, does at least prep you, as much as anyone can be prepped, for what's in store with The Rapist. Other books in the Adams oeuvre include THE BLACK HOODS ('Sharon Gray didn't think the shame and terror of her ordeal would ever end..and it never did') and the futuristic, scare novel AMERICA 2005 ('obsessed with sex and filled with Christian hatred, America 2005 is the story that is rocking the nation').

The Rapist initially focuses on Jerry Graff, a newspaper journalist who a few years prior had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, possibly for swearing. Chicago is currently being terrorized by a serial rapist and killer. Dubbed 'The Laughing Rapist' by the press, the giggling, egotistical sex offender embarks on a letter writing campaign to politicians, journalists and clergymen. He also takes to the airwaves, bragging about his exploits on late night phone in shows, claiming "his victims had loved it when he had stuck his dick up their ass. And how they had screamed in delight as he screwed them, and screwed them, repeatedly, until they had literally begged for more". Newspaper editor Sandy Lavelle wants Jerry to write a scathing piece condemning The Laughing Rapist and the soft, do-gooding system that is allowing a tidal wave of rape and murder to engulf America. Trouble is, it's Jerry's day off, and he's woken up in a bad mood. 'He was truly sorry another victim, another body has popped up, but the paper had a staff qualified to handle this weekend shit'. Sandy is one determined newspaper editor, but she's up against a brick wall of resistance when it comes to the stubborn Jerry. "He was flat assed tired of covering this grotesque shit. Particularly since the public kept voting liberal shitheads into office whose highest level of intelligence was to coddle the bastards who raped'.

Incredibly the initial forty odd pages of The Rapist just consists of Jerry and Sandy screaming at each other in her office. In theory it should be terribly boring, and yet it's utterly captivating as these two hotheads go at it in a relentless, expletive ridden avalanche of anger. Who is to blame for the likes of The Laughing Rapist? Just about everyone according to Jerry and Sandy's verbal boxing match. One which firmly aims its wrecking ball at liberal shitheads (the book really loves that term) and the members of the public who vote for liberal shitheads. In fact in Jerry's book the only thing worse than a rapist is a liberal shithead. However, according to Jerry, the gutless church must also shoulder the blame, as should psychiatrists. Not to mention the women's liberation movement, who Jerry accuses of not doing enough to safeguard women from rapists "if women are too lazy, apathetical or stupid to fight for their own safety, legally or judicially, then women will indeed be left to suffer the consequences of their own folly". Sandy, for her part, thinks that foreign aid spending is to blame. "Let Japan, China, Mexico and Russia take care of themselves. Let's force these bastards to put some fucking anti-rape laws on the books that mean something. Either that, or I will be a rape victim". All Jerry wants to do though is quit the paper, run off to a tropical island and sell out by writing "some torrid piece of trash on the secret sex dreams of the modern housewife".

The catalyst for this heated debate is the abduction, rape and murder of Leslie Stoner, daughter of powerful Senator Dan Stoner. Sandy thinks that the killing of one of Chicago's elite will act as a wakeup call for those in power to do something about the rape epidemic. Despite being a friend of Senator Stoner, and having known Leslie since she was a baby, Jerry however remains desensitized, especially since Stoner 'voted liberal on crime legislation' therefore is now paying the price. As for Leslie, Jerry is slightly more compassionate, even though she was the daughter of a liberal shithead "sure I feel sorry for Leslie. She was such a lovely girl. But shit. Piss on Washington".

There are so many times in The Rapist where you swear this book has to have been written in the 1970s and only got published in the 1990s. It is so deeply in tune with that 1970s, Dirty Harry and Death Wish era, conservative backlash against street crime and liberalism. The only elements that pull you out of thinking this a 1970s book, and instead firmly timestamp it as a product of the 1990s are references to AIDS (handled with all the sensitivity you'd expect) and Calvin Klein Jeans. Somehow everything bad that happens in this book turns out to be the fault of the Calvin Klein Jeans Company. No spoilers from me as to why, but trust me it's absolutely priceless.

Jerry isn't for turning ("he was sick of this shit. So tired of it. So distraught by it. What the fuck did Sandy think another editorial would accomplish") especially since his prior put downs of the Laughing Rapist had drawn the rapist's ire. Something which resulted in the sex offender putting pen to paper 'I ought to blow your ass away. Now you've fucked with me. Piss me off again and I damn well might just strip your wife, fuck your daughter and make your mother suck on my cock'. His wife and daughter's safety aren't however among Jerry's concerns. Since the Laughing Rapist only seeks out sexually attractive women, Jerry considers his wife too old for that sort of thing, while his daughter isn't 'the slim hipped type' therefore is judged not feminine enough for the rapist to bother with!
After a gargantuan struggle to convince Jerry to give a damn, Sandy finally persuades him to pick up the pen, and do it for all the women in America who aren't affiliated with liberal shitheads. "Jerry, I'm not a stab of meat. I'm not a worthless bitch. I do not want to be raped. But the way things exist now, I'm scared shitless to walk the city streets".

Adams then makes the peculiar decision to go backwards on the narrative, by depicting Leslie's ordeal at the hands of The Laughing Rapist. Something which by rights should have been at the start of the book. Its placement here nullifying any suspense Adams tries to generate over whether she'll survive, since we know Leslie is a dead woman from the outset. Earlier in the book there had been some crude, insensitive references to rape. Even so, Adams had whipped up such a hurricane of fury over rapists in this book, that you'd been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and chalk that up as an attempt to rub the reader's nose in the abhorrent nature of The Laughing Rapist. Once you get to the rape itself though, his motivations become more questionable, especially when you realize that of the book's 207 pages, 96 of those are set aside to depict Leslie's humiliation, rape and murder. In keeping with the book's out of time- more 1970s than 90s- quality, the mercilessly explicit depiction of sexual assault quickly turns this into the literary equivalent of the ugliest hardcore XXX roughies of the 1970s. We're talking nastiness here on the level of Hot Summer in the City, Appointment with Agony and On the Street.

Adams writes page after page of sexual abuse. This section of the book largely taking place from Leslie's perspective, with the exception of a handful of insights from the rapist himself, which are the open sewer that you'd expect ('the thrill of beating a bitch like this always gave him a hard-on. A couple of times he'd actually creamed his pants while doing it'). Adams provides a harrowing, blow by blow account of Leslie's thoughts. How the rapist makes her feel dirty, the shame of knowing her parents will read all the details of her rape in the papers, her concerns that her fiancée won't love her anymore, her fear of ending up 'stuffed in a garbage bag where stray dogs and snakes would feast on her flesh'. She also wishes that she'd never been born, that she could die, but then shamefully realizes that not even death will allow her any dignity 'the autopsy would show she had sucked his dick in the hope that she might yet live'. In spite of her body reacting otherwise 'in her agonizing stew she cursed herself for the pointed hardness of her nipples', Leslie though still has some fighting talk left in her "who the fuck did he think he was? To threaten her this way? To scare her shitless?...She loathed him without compare. Twice now she had nearly puked in his face".

A problem with Adams' writing, which is apparent from the outset and grows even more as the book progresses, is that all his characters speak with the same voice...and it's a voice that terrifying in its intensity. All of his characters behave like Klaus Kinski yelling at an audience for refusing to believe he is Jesus, everyone rides the merry-go-round of hatred, this book is like a banshee screaming into your ear for 48 hours straight.
Later on in the book we get a new character, Detective Lieutenant Matty Lyle, a friend of Jerry's who is also pretty much a clone of him, and ‘natch also hates liberals. Matty's stand out characteristic though is that he still carries a hard-on for Jerry's wife Mary, who was his childhood sweetheart. Mary was the source of his earliest wet dreams, Matty even got to feel her up when they were both 14, allowing him 'to finally be, as it was known around the neighborhood, a Tit Man'. Matty is a class act.

Just as it is difficult to reconcile the fact that Eat Them Alive was written by an elderly lady, The Rapist is another example of a book's author going against expectations. Walter E. Adams was born on May 7th 1943 in Philadelphia. Relocating to Florida in 1972, Adams founded Gospel Ministries International, a non-profit Christian outreach charity and remained a minister until he went to meet his lord and savior in 2006, at the age of 63. Adams' bibliography alone reveals a man of interesting contradictions, he authored Christian books, an anti psychiatry book, Pro-Life books, then a series of books about how to win at Blackjack. The earliest book of his I've been able to find a trace of is 'Infant Joe' a Pro-Life tearjerker from 1982, told from the point of view of an unborn fetus. 

Adams appears to have sporadically published books during the 1980s, before returning with a vengeance in the 1990s with a succession of rape obsessed crime novels. The Rapist isn't exactly the kind of book you expect a Christian minister to write, to put it mildly. In contrast I recently picked up a second hand horror novel called The Oath (1995), which upon further examination turned out to be the work of a Christian author, Frank Peretti. The Oath certainly wasn't a bad novel, by any means, but it did behave as you'd expect for a book written by a man of religious conviction, it was light on sex and bad language, very anti adultery and very faith based. On the other hand, The Rapist is what I suppose you could call an undercover Christian book. Subtlety isn't a word that could ever be used within a hundred mile radius of this book, but The Rapist does slyly conceal the Christian side of its personality till the eleventh hour. For the most part there is little evidence of a Christian agenda at work here. Jerry is an atheist, Matty lusts after his best friend's wife, various victims ask for God's help, and get no answer. At one point, Leslie even compares the booming, controlling voice of the rapist to that of God "as though it were God himself who was reaching down from heaven to blister her heart and mind with His anger". A surprisingly blasphemous comparison for a Christian minister to make in print. If you are alert, I suppose you could just about detect the hand of a Christian author, by how vehemently anti-Christian Adams makes the despicable rapist. In a book full of quotably offensive lines, Adams might well hit his zenith, when he has The Laughing Rapist recall the violation of a Christian woman "She had tried to talk to him about God's love. He'd nearly shit in her fucking face". Evidently, Walt could give Anthony Perkin's character in Crimes of Passion a run for his money when it came to potty mouthed clergymen.

I'm always suspected that Pierce Nace's Eat Them Alive was an example of accidental extremism, and that Nace assumed that all horror novels were just nonstop gore, and therefore wrote accordingly. My gut instinct is that something similar was at play here, and that The Rapist represents a straight laced, anti-porn, Christian minister's idea of what dirty paperbacks were all about... demeaning sex, dirty talk and off the scale bad language. I don't for a minute think that this was aimed at the same crowd as Walt's Christian and Pro-Life books, who'd probably only last a few pages into The Rapist before throwing it in the trash. Here Walt appears to be preaching to the perverted, rather than the converted. Tellingly, while his Pro-Life books make his religious career a selling point, there's no mention of that side of his life in his rape books. Instead these books look to have been his way of reaching out to sinners and sleazehounds, hooking them in with all this roughie sex and lewd language, then throwing a come to jesus moment their way. The Rapist only revealing its true motivation at the end of the book, when a major character accepts Christ into his life, plunging another character into a spot of soul searching over whether they are leading the kind of life they can claim to be proud of when they one day come before God. A question Walt obviously wanted to also directly address to the reader. Although even without this Christian coda, I think that The Rapist is the kind of book that would leave the average reader wondering just what they were doing with their life anyway. The abrupt move from violent, sleazy porn to bible thumping is such a wild, tonal shift though, it would be like Estus Pirkle showing up at the end of Waterpower, addressing the audience head on, and asking them to accept Christ into their lives, otherwise all their loved ones will likely suffer the fate of being hunted down and given enemas. If Rapists Tire You, What Will Horses Do?
The ending of The Rapist is an absolute doozy, somehow managing to be both spirituality uplifting and utterly nihilistic in the same breath, and would appeal equally to Christians and misogynists alike. If you like Jesus, and hate women, you're gonna love The Rapist.

Walt then was here writing sleaze for God's sake, I shudder to imagine the dark places he had to go to in order to pull this book off. He was, in the words of the song, The Impossible Dream, "willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause". It is such an inherently filthy read though, that you do fear he got a little bit contaminated by the slime he was writing about along the way. Whatever the cost to Walt himself, this is a book that literally wants to bring the reader to their knees. Just make sure that The Laughing Rapist isn't around before you assume that position.

 

Expose and The Golden Lady brought to book

Now up on YouTube: Clive, Nick and myself discuss the novelization of 'Video Nasty' Expose, and I try and live with the guilt that I also made them read the novelization of The Golden Lady as well.

Inseminoid and The Terminator brought to book

Just three guys with nothing better to do on a Friday night than discuss the novelizations of Inseminoid and The Terminator