Saturday, April 19, 2025

Peter Stafford’s The Wild White Witch

If historical fiction is fun and sleaze fiction is fun then if you combine the two you’ll get double the enjoyment. It’s not surprising that historical sleaze enjoyed quite a vogue for a while. Peter Stafford’s 1973 novel The Wild White Witch is a satisfyingly outrageous representative of the breed.

And it’s not just historical sleaze - this is a story of madness and lust in the tropics where the hot sun unleashes forbidden passions.

Peter Stafford was a pen name used by the fairly prolific Hungarian-born writer Paul Tabori (1908-1974). There was another author named Peter Stafford active at the same (who wrote books on psychedelics) so there is some potential for the two to get confused.

In 1830 Jeremy Radlett, the 22-year-old youngest son of a Scottish laird, receives an invitation to join his uncle Richard at his estate in Jamaica. No member of the family has seen nor heard anything of Richard Radlett for decades but he has apparently prospered in the West Indies and being childless he intends to make young Jeremy his heir. Jeremy takes ship for Jamaica.

Jeremy is in for some surprises when he reaches Rosehall, his uncle’s sugar plantation. His uncle is dead but has left a beautiful young widow, Melissa. Melissa has inherited the estate.

Jeremy is obviously disappointed but is persuaded to stay on as a guest. Jeremy is rather an innocent and the brutal realities of planation life shock him.

Jeremy is an innocent in other ways as well. He is a virgin. He knows little of sex but he does know that no decent woman enjoys it. He is in for quite an awakening when Melissa takes him to her bed. Her sexual appetites are voracious. Jeremy had no idea that such pleasures were possible.

There are a few problems. It’s fairly clear that the brutal overseer Arkell had been accustomed to sharing Melissa’s bed. Arkell is not at all happy about relinquishing his position as Melissa’s bed partner. He will make a dangerous enemy. And the slave population may be planning to revolt.

Then Jeremy discovers the secret door, which leads to an underground cavern. He witnesses rites so depraved that he is scarcely able to believe them. Surely Melissa could not be connected in any way with such things.

Given the setting you might expect voodoo to figure in this tale, but this is essentially a witchcraft story.

The setting is a society based on slavery but the book goes out of its way to make its abhorrence for slavery obvious so don’t make the mistake of having a knee-jerk reaction to the subject matter.

There is plenty of graphic sex and assorted debaucheries and depravities. Jeremy’s bedroom romps with Melissa are steamy to say the least. This is one of those sleaze novels that promises all manner of lurid delights and thrills and this one delivers the goods.

There’s a memorably depraved villain (or villainess - I’m not going to tell you which it is).

You can’t really go wrong with an overcooked extra-sleazy tropical gothic melodrama. It’s a formula that works for me. And this one is nicely scuzzy and it’s done with a reasonable amount of style and energy.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wild White Witch. Highly recommended.

1 comment:

  1. Based on a Jamaican legend (or libel). I don't know if Tabori was influenced by it, but there's an earlier novel, The White Witch of Rosehall, by H. G. de Lisser published in 1929.

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