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action against NEL, eventually settling for an undisclosed financial sum and the agreement that Satan's Slaves was withdrawn from circulation.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

The Golden Lady (1977, Jack Ramsay)

 

When it comes to movie novelizations, you grow accustomed to them occasionally diverting from their source movies. However, Jack Ramsay's novelization of The Golden Lady takes this to the extreme, by being a novelization that once in a blue moon has something in common with the movie it is meant to be an adaption of. Going off the book, I suspect The Golden Lady had a very difficult journey to the screen.

The book is based 'on an original idea by Keith Cavele and Chris Hutchins' yet neither of them are credited for that original idea in the movie. Instead, Cavele is only credited as the film's producer, while there's no mention of Hutchins at all in the film. Hutchins was a well known PR man who later became even more famous as a gossip columnist. In his autobiography 'Mr. Confidential', Hutchins briefly touches on The Golden Lady, mentioning that he and Cavele wrote a screenplay for the movie, but that he got cold feet about the movie and sold his half share in it before shooting began. So, I imagine that with Hutchins off the production, his screenplay went the same way, making it necessary for a new script to be written. The filmed screenplay is credited to Joshua Sinclair, who at various points in his life has been a medical doctor specializing in tropical medicine, a screenwriter of spaghetti westerns, an actor in Italian exploitation movies, and a close friend of Mother Teresa. Sinclair's talents weren't however appreciated by the director of the Golden Lady movie, Jose Larraz. Never one to mince words, Larraz later claimed "the script was written by some pretty boy who couldn't write a letter home to his mother".

As Ramsay based the book on an idea by Cavele and Hutchins, rather than the filmed script by Sinclair, this is I suppose how the film was envisioned before Hutchins exited, and Sinclair entered the picture. The book begins in 1945 with, less of a Golden Lady origins story, rather with a Golden Lady conception story, as a young Danish woman makes her way home by train at the end of the war. She takes a shine to a young American soldier, but as he is engrossed in a book, she falls asleep and dreams of the time when, as a child, she was sexually molested by the village idiot. She then wakes up to find the American soldier is similarly trying to get fresh with her. She succumbs to his advances and later discovers she has become pregnant by him. The language barrier prevented her from getting the soldier's name, but she did note that he was reading To Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, so decides to name her daughter after Ernest instead. Thus, Julia Hemingway, the Golden Lady was born.

Cut to London, 1977, and the now grown up Julia Hemingway is a rich, self made career woman who likes the finer things in life, operates out of an office in Regent Street, owns race horses, enjoys being chaperoned around in a chauffeur driven Panther De Ville and giving commoners the royal wave from it. Exactly what Julia does for a living is shrouded in mystery.  At various points in the book she wears the hats of being an arms dealer, a human trafficker, a private detective and a high class prostitute. For the most part though, she is something of a fairy godmother to the rich and powerful, and makes their fantasies -which are invariably of a sexual nature- come true.

The book is very much a bloke's idea of Erica Jong era female sexual empowerment. When we first meet Julia she is picking up a guy who fancies himself as a Robert Redford lookalike and has a zipless fuck with him in a hotel room. From which we also discover that Julia likes to be the dominant one in the bedroom, literally kicking the guy into touch when he tries to get forceful and leaves him pining for her like a lovesick puppy. This is followed by a likely dig at Barbara Cartland, when Julia gets a laugh out of reading a gossip column writing by 'an aging female romantic novelist' that claims 'the days of crazy feminism were over...the pendulum had swung back, what young girls wanted nowadays was the firm hand of a dominant male'. Julia Hemingway begs to differ.

The closest Julia has to a beau is Max Rowlands, a married middle aged businessman, who has been out in the middle east rubbing shoulders with the Arabs. Max comes sniffing around, but Julia's verdict is that he is over the hill and none to great in the bedroom department. In keeping with the fairy godmother theme though, Max hires Julia to befriend his wife Pamela who is 'something of a flump', doesn't know how to dress properly and therefore is a social embarrassment to him. I suspect Pamela Rowlands is the type of person that Jack Ramsay imagined he was writing this book for. She's a bored, unfulfilled housewife who craves excitement, style and sophistication in her life. A wish that comes true when Julia's Panther De Ville pulls up outside Chez Rowlands and whisks her away for a glamorous make over, an expensive shopping trip and a threesome with two young hunks. This turns out to be one of the more honorable assignments that Julia undertakes in the book though.

The book's blurb pushes Bond similarities 'a woman whose mind works faster than the barrel of James Bond's gun' , but aside from a love 'em and leave 'em attitude towards the opposite sex, I'm not really seeing comparisons between James Bond and the book version of Julia. The film version of The Golden Lady makes more of a concerted effort to turn Julia into a female Bond. In the film she's a gun totting mercenary, who kicks ass, has Bond like gadgets and briefly rubs shoulders with Desmond Llewellyn, playing Q in all but name. In the book though, Julia is less a female Bond and more a proto Ghislaine Maxwell. At one point she is assigned to set up a date between a visiting European nobleman, the Count Frederik Kroste, and a child prostitute who has been dressed up like a bride for the occasion "his royal highness is a man of peculiar taste". An incident that forces Julia to slum it in the 'badlands' of North Kensington (the book is horribly elitist by the way) and leads to the only real stab at action in the book. When one of the other customers in the child brothel tries to force himself on Julia. Resulting in her having to fight her way past him, and a few pimps, in order to return to the safety of her Panther De Ville, and away from all the common riff raff. It should also be mentioned that Julia herself is also technically a child molester, and takes on the assignment of deflowering an underage Arab prince, Prince Ahmed of Kubran. The uncomfortable sexualisation of Ahmed 'when he began to writhe and moan, she realized that his voice hadn't yet broken' suggests that as well as a female audience, Jack Ramsay was also trying to appeal to the sort of gent who when not hanging around the Playland Arcade back then, was posting off classified ads to Films and Filming magazine....if you know, you know.

Julia's endgame appears to be to profit from an illegal arms deal taking place between Max Rowlands and the Arabs. This is being blocked by the UK government due to their ties to Israel. So Julia has to dig up some dirt on Foreign Minister Donald Smythe, in order to blackmail him into turning a blind eye to the arms deal. Fortunately for Julia, Smythe regularly visits to the Piccadilly branch of the Jacey sex cinema chain, while Smythe's wife Liz has rape fantasies. After being befriended by Julia, Liz admits "I must have seen the Clockwork Orange movie a dozen times, just for the rape scenes". The Smythes therefore are easy prey for Julia who sends Evette, one of the women who works for her, to pose as an innocent French schoolgirl and seduce Donald. Resulting in him whisking her off to the Piccadilly Jacey for a fumble in the back row, which is photographed by another of Julia's operatives using an infra red camera. I am surprised they got away with setting this scene in a real life cinema and implying that it was a hotbed of underage sex and blackmail. Clearly either this book never came to the attention of the owners of the Jacey cinema chain, or they believed there was no such thing as bad publicity. 

Julia then once again plays fairy godmother, and grants Liz's wish to be raped, Clockwork Orange style. Leading to, what is in fairness, quite a suspenseful section of the book where a paranoid Liz travels around London thinking that every man who approaches her is out to rape her. Only for her to eventually get home and discover that the rapists have been waiting for her all along. As this is a book written by a man in the 1970s though, Liz eventually begins to enjoy the rape...so all's well that ends well.

Despite having written a number of popular paperbacks during the seventies, Jack Ramsay is something of a mystery man. His most well known book is The Rage (1977) about a rabies outbreak in Britain, he also wrote Deathgame (1978) in which left wing terrorists attempt to sabotage the World Cup Tournament. About the only solid fact that is known about Jack Ramsay is that he is not an alias for Ramsey Campbell, who had written a book which he wanted to put out under a pen name, had toyed with the idea of using the name Jack Ramsay, only to be informed that there was already a writer by that name. However, due to that story being inaccurately repeated over the years it has lead many people to believe that Jack Ramsay was a pen name for Ramsey Campbell, which is not the case.

Based on the books of his that I've read, my gut instinct is that Ramsay came from a background in journalism. His books are linked by this insider view of the boozy, cut throat world of Fleet Street and usually feature heroic journalist characters trying to tear through the red tape. I'm detecting an author bringing the mental baggage of a previous or perhaps concurrent occupation with Ramsay. Just as Guy N. Smith's characters tend to be unfulfilled bank employees, Richard Laymon's tend to be High School Teachers and John Halkin's protagonists were refugees from the TV industry, Ramsay gravitates towards journalists. Here that stock character is Bernard Hawkins, a newspaper editor and columnist, who is out to expose Max Rowlands and is about the only character in the book with a moral compass. The Golden Lady also touches on another of Jack Ramsay's themes, the generational conflict between the older, more ethical Fleet Street hacks and the younger, unscrupulous journalists who are happy to destroy the lives of others in order to get that all important headline. This shows up in The Golden Lady when Hawkins forms an uneasy alliance with a guttersnipe journo called Pete in order to dig up dirt on Max, who has been partying hard with tarty models and rich Arabs. I suspect Jack Ramsay favoured the likes of Bernard Hawkins than the Petes of this world. Although Ramsay's books have an eye for attention grabbing subject matter, rabies in The Rage and left wing terrorism in Deathgame, his approach is allot more quiet and non-sensationalist than you might imagine. Anyone seeking out The Rage and expecting an over the top, scare mongering, animals attack novel will likely be left disappointed by Ramsay's realistic and low key approach to the rabies theme. Perhaps because The Golden Lady was more of a commission rather something Ramsay wrote of his own accord, Bernard Hawkins isn't the all important, central figure that Ramsay's other journalist characters were. Indeed, Hawkins just abruptly disappears from the novel, pissing off to Cornwall with a redhead only for us to later find out that he was paid off by Julia. What is striking about The Golden Lady is the absolute moral bankruptcy of the book. Julia, for example, gets a woman raped, profits from arms dealing and child prostitution, yet she's still the heroine of the book, and the character it wants you to get behind. While the characters who stand in her way, like Hawkins and Smythe, are the ones the book wants you to boo and regard as party poopers. In contrast, the movie version of Julia does much to erase these troubling aspects to the character. As depicted in the movie, Julia is more in the tradition of aristocratic female crime fighters like Lady Penelope, the Contessa di Contini from The Protectors or Penelope St. John-Borsini, the heroine of The Baroness series of Men's Adventure books. I do wonder if Jose Larraz signed onto the movie expecting to film something more along the lines of the book, whose steamy sex and scandal contents were in keeping with the softcore dramas he was making at the time like The Violation of the Bitch, Madame Olga's Pupils and Black Candles. Whereas the action oriented, Bond wannabe script that ended up being filmed was much more outside of his comfort zone, and such an out of character film for Larraz to get involved with.

At the risk of being haunted by the ghost of Jose Larraz, I have to admit that I much prefer the movie version, and think Joshua Sinclair's script managed to pull an enjoyable piece of late 1970s fluff out of the noxious mess that was captured in book form here. The film version has grown on me over the years, the book less so, but it is memorably rotten to the core, I will give it that. If you're that rare breed of person who enjoyed the movie- for we are very few- and wish they'd have been further adventures of Julia Hemingway, then this book serves as closest we're likely to get to that. Ramsay's book also feels unexpectedly topical at the moment, what with the Epstein files currently threatening to bring down governments and institutions. All these years later, The Golden Lady proves that the rich and famous have always been a fairly ghastly, depraved bunch. "His Royal highness is a man of peculiar taste".

Sweet Cyanide (1976, Charlie Chester)

 

Note: this review is a little heavy on the spoilers, but given that this book is so obscure and difficult to experience firsthand these days, I felt a deep dive was called for.

Another tale of murder and gender confusion from 'Carl Noone', better known as comedian Charlie Chester. Whereas his later book 'Even the Rainbow's Bent' dealt with a gay man who turned to murder after an ill-fated attempt to live as a woman, here Charlie tells us one about a murderous schoolgirl trying to pass herself off as a choir-boy.

The seemingly sweet and innocent Kristi Marlowe dotes on her diminutive daddy Timothy 'Tiny Tim' Marlowe but despises her new stepmother Brenda. "In little Kristi's mind...there was no peace and no harmony. There was only hate!".

Kristi is in dire need of someone to look up to, which isn't easy when your father is a jockey, and Tiny Tim puts his foot in it when he lets slip that he wishes that Kristi had been born a boy. Due to the fact that she could then have followed him into the manly world of horse racing. Frustrated by this, and overhearing that girls are similarly excluded from singing in the local church choir, young Kristi decides to go undercover as a choir boy, disguising her real gender by cutting her hair, stealing a boy's clothes and infiltrating the boys only church choir.

Chester's gender non-conforming characters never show a great deal of imagination when it comes to their choice of new identity. Whereas Even the Rainbow's Bent's psychopath Adrian merely calls himself Adrienne when he lives as female, Kristi Marlowe comes up with giving her first name a masculine twist and abridging her second one. Thus Kristi Marlowe becomes Chris Lowe. A rather unfortunate choice of name from Chester, since it's now more synonymous with the keyboard player in The Pet Shop Boys, giving you an unwanted mental image of what that Chris Lowe would look like had he been born a west end girl. I fear a young Chris Lowe would have thoroughly had the piss taken out of him, if a copy of Sweet Cyanide had ever been passed around his schoolyard. It might have even caused him to wonder 'what have I done to deserve this?'.

On the surface Sweet Cyanide hardly sounds like it has all the ingredients for an explosive book, the worlds of choir singing and horse racing hardly cry out exciting subject matter. Yet Sweet Cyanide is surprising rich in incident by Charlie Chester's standards, containing few dull stretches. This is perhaps due to the fact that Chester is initially juggling three storylines here. As well as the drama with Kristi/Chris, Sweet Cyanide follows Brenda as she embarks on an affair with her touchy feely boss J.W. Deakin, in order to further her career. Chester lets his comedy credentials slip with the saucy line 'as far as she was concerned lying back in the bedroom, might one day mean sitting up in the boardroom'.
Whereas elsewhere Tiny Tim gets a shot at becoming a big time jockey, only to find there's trouble at the top when he gets threatened by hardmen goons who want him to throw a race on behalf of their guv'nor. There is a noticeable anger in Sweet Cyanide over the diminutive among us being pushed around by taller folk. A recurring theme in both Tiny Tim's dealings with the gangsters and Kristi's experiences with the taller choirboys. Allot of which comes across as quite heartfelt and personal on Chester's behalf. Odd, as Chester looks to have been of average height, and not someone who you'd expect to carry around mental baggage over his height. Its a trait of this book that would have made more sense had 'Carl Noone' been a pen name of say, Arthur Askey or Lynsey De Paul.

Due to the demands of his job, Tiny Tim is largely an absent parent. When he isn't out horse racing he's spending time hanging out with boxers at the local steam baths and impressing them with his poetry. Suggesting that Kristi isn't the only one in her family who is suffering from sexual confusion. 'It surprised Tim too, to learn that many a hard face with a broken nose enjoyed the odd stanza of poetry'. The unexpected male bonding over poetry in Sweet Cyanide is likely the result of Charlie bringing a bit of himself to the material. In real life Chester fancied himself as a poet, and as a result of being in the public eye would regularly receive amateur poetry from members of the public, as well as incarcerated prisoners, examples of which can be found in his 1977 non-fiction book 'Cry Simba'. Fortunately for Tiny Tim his poetry wins him fans like ex-boxers Ernie and Mick the Mountain, who volunteer themselves as protection against the gangsters who are threatening to duff up the jockey. Ernie and Mick the Mountain are the sort of gruff, dim witted, salt of the earth types that you find littered throughout Chester's books. They are the kind of characters who, if this were on film, would have probably been played by Nosher Powell, Ivor Salter or Derek Deadman. Some might feel that Chester was indulging in patronising, working class caricatures here, but I sense genuine warmth and affection in his writing 'they might never win prizes for academic thinking, but they had a classic loyalty, and strange as it may seem there were some soft hearts among the tin ears and resin'.

Sweet Cyanide is a book of mixed messages when it comes to the role of women. On one hand, the Kristi storyline carries with it a sense of injustice at the preferential treatment of boys over girls, the key to Kristi's disturbed behaviour. On the other hand, Chester is contemptuous towards Brenda over her adultery and rejection of the traditional wife and mother roles. Not only does Brenda go out to work and refuses to act as a mother to Kristi, but she has also had herself 'fixed' so that she can't have any children with Tiny Tim. Leading randy toad J.W. Deakin to quip "that means you can have all the fun without any of the risks". To Brenda, sex is a bargaining tool, she largely cuts off Tiny Tim who has nothing to offer in return for her favours, while leading J.W on with the promise of sex, without ever actually putting out for him.
In Chester's book, hold girls back and you'll screw with their heads and cause them to hate their bodies, but let women out of the kitchen and they'll turn into adulterous, power hungry bitches. Ultimately, Sweet Cyanide is a book that is fighting a battle within itself over whether it wants to be a feminist book or an anti-feminist book.

Of course, Charlie Chester being Charlie Chester, his more unsavoury obsessions rise to the surface in Sweet Cyanide. While Chester is rather reserved and dispassionate when it comes to regular sex, his writing comes alive when Sweet Cyanide drifts in the direction of S&M and jailbait themes. Homosexuality threatens to unmask Kristi due to the other choirboys' bullying and sexual curiosity. The choirboys' beating and stripping of one of their own 'in their course juvenile way they would take turns to spit on his penis', gives Kristi both the shock of being exposed to male genitalia for the first time, and the fearful realisation that when her own number comes up, she'll have no penis for them to spit on. Kristi's identity is accidentally discovered by fellow choirboy Ginger Catlin, after a fight between them turns into a grope-a-thon "so little Chris Lowe has got tits like a girl" pervs Ginger. A Charlie Chester book isn't a safe place to be a schoolgirl, they are the subject of a woodlands rape in 'Bannerman', murder in 'Even the Rainbow's Bent' and sexual blackmail in 'Symphony & Psychopath'. Is it any wonder that Kristi wants to opt out of being one?

The torch that Chester carried for S&M predictably rears its head in the Brenda storyline. All but pimped out by J.W. Deakin to a rich and powerful man, Brenda agrees to throw some sex in the direction of one Arnold Laiker, after J.W tells her that Laiker can help advance both their careers. A man with a dirty mind, Laiker had speculated to J.W that Brenda might be a lesbian, only for J.W to jump to her defense "when it comes to sex, she takes some beating". A comment misunderstood by Laiker, leading him to think that Brenda is a severe masochist. The subsequent S&M encounter between the two does little to conceal Chester's own love of this subject matter. "Brenda cried out and tried to cover up, but whichever way she turned she received the leather". It's also the point in the book where Chester's writing is at its most entertainingly tabloidish 'Arnold Laiker wasn't just kinky, he was a bloody depraved monster. A lunatic'.

For all of his sleaze inclinations though, there is something a little out of time and old fashioned about Chester's books. The gangster and later police procedural aspects of Sweet Cyanide feel like a throwback to a second feature, British crime feature from the early 1960s, and when Chester turns the air blue, he tends to favour mild expletives like 'sod' and 'bloody'.

I wouldn't go as far to say Chester just wrote the same book over and over again, but after you've read a few of them, you do become aware that he stuck to a formula while knocking this stuff out for New English Library. Sweet Cyanide apes the structure of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent, by initially being sympathetic to characters who are driven to murder, before turning against them in the second act when their actions trespass into more callous and reprehensible behaviour. At the outset of the book, Kristi isn't the Bad Seed/Midwich Cuckoo type killer kid that you'd quite expect. Instead she is a sensitive introvert and victim of sexual discrimination. Even her first murder -bashing a guy over the head with a metal pole while he's in the process of raping her- seems a quite justifiable act of self defence. Perhaps because of this, Chester's regular trick of turning the reader against his killer in the second act -Kristi tries to commit the 'perfect' murder and frame Brenda for it- doesn't quite come off here. Especially as even Chester himself doesn't seem particularly enamoured with Brenda, leaving the reader conflicted as to whether their allegiance should remain with Kristi or transfer to the never particularly likeable Brenda. It seems not even Chester has a heart of stone when it comes to Kristi. Whereas in Even the Rainbow's Bent, Chester signs off on a contemptuous note towards Adrian/Adrienne by refering to him as a 'warped creature' here his summing up of Kristi shows a much more compassionate side to him 'Sister Florence had tears in her eyes at the dejected little figure who obviously craved affection'.

Unfortunately Sweet Cyanide does follow the path of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent by turning into a police proceederal for its last act. Chester once again sidelines all his main characters and hands the narrative reigns over to a generic police inspector - here called Jack Morley- who shows up to solve the crime and unmask the culprit. The last acts of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent do drag those books down a few notches. After spending two thirds of the book following incredibly strange mixed up characters we suddenly have to wave goodbye to them and spend the remainder of the book waiting for a dullard of a police inspector to solve crimes we've already been privy to. However in Sweet Cyanide there is at least one part of the mystery that the reader is equally in the dark about. Namely the whereabouts of Tiny Tim who has disappeared en route to a horse race in Australia. As this point, Chester does manage to generate some suspense over whether Tiny Tim arrived in Oz safely or fell foul of the gangsters who were on his trail. It's also worth sticking around for the priceless, penny dropping moment when Inspector Morley puts it all together, which suggests Chester should have had a career writing clues for the gameshow 3-2-1. After his pal Detective Sergeant Ed Sayers remarks that choir-boy Chris Lowe deserves a 'dressing down' from 'Pa or Ma Lowe', Morley has his eureka moment. Pointing out that the opposite of dressing down is dressing up, Morley also tells Ed that if you take the 'Pa or' away from 'Pa or Ma Lowe', and bring the two remaining words together you get Ma Lowe, which could be pronounced Marlowe. Therefore Kristi Marlowe dressed up is Chris Lowe, at which point you half expect Ted Rogers to show up and tell Morley that he has just won Dusty Bin.

After teasing the reader over the fate of Tiny Tim, Chester does rather drop the ball at the end of Sweet Cyanide by forgetting to resolve this subplot, forever leaving us unsure over whether Tiny Tim is alive, dead or tiptoeing through the tulips. Given that the book ends with Kristi being lead away by kindly, concerned nun Sister Florence, it does feel like Chester missed a trick by not having Sister Florence turn out to be Tiny Tim, who'd taken a leaf out of his daughter's book by dragging up as a nun in order to rescue Kristi from police custody. Then again, after you're read a few of his books you do come to except sloppiness as part of the whole Charlie Chester experience. There's also evidence that the title Sweet Cyanide was an 11th hour brainwave by him, since Cyanide plays absolutely no part in the actual plot, and Chester clearly felt obliged to write a line that justified using that title "she may be sweet, but she sounds like Cyanide to me".
After the awfulness of 'Bannerman' I came close to throwing in the towel on Charlie Chester books, but I'm glad I stuck around for Sweet Cyanide, which has restored my faith in the comedian turned sleaze writer, and dare I say might actually be the dirty old bugger's best book.