Reno Tramp

Reno Tramp is one of those salacious sensational American sex and sin pulp novels that were so popular in the 1950s (this one was published in 1950). At the time they were considered to be very racy indeed although today they obviously seem very tame and it’s hard to imagine just how disreputable they were considered to be at the time. One of the leading writers of such fiction was Florence Stonebreaker (1896-1977). She wrote a lot of them (she wrote eleven novels in 1952 alone) and wrote slightly more respectable romance novels as well.

Brenda is in trouble. She’s in Reno and she’s been living with a guy called Charley. Which has been nice since he’s spent lots of money on her. Now Charley has lost all his dough on the roulette tables so naturally she’s told him that she’s through with him. And Charley is not being sensible about it. Surely he must understand that if he now has no money  then it’s all over. What use is he to her with no money? He’s even been unreasonable enough to have sex with her before telling her he’s lost all his money, which means she’s just had sex with him for no reason. And now he’s waving a gun about and talking about shooting himself, which is incredibly inconsiderate of him. When she packs her bag and closes the door behind her she hears the shot and now she’s in an awkward spot. What if the police think she shot him?

The only one she can think of to turn to for help is gambling racketeer Carter Kemp, owner of the Blue Jug Club. That means she’ll have to become one of Carter’s girls. That means being a whore and Brenda might be a tramp and a tart but she’s not actually a whore. Well maybe once or twice but that doesn’t count. Those were emergencies and when a girl needs money urgently what is she to do?

Carter claims his girls are not technically prostitutes. If one of the patrons at the club wants a girl for an evening, or even just for an hour or two, Carter introduces him to one of his girls. He’ll even arrange a private room for them, so they can get to know each other better. But once they enter the private room if money then changes hands how is Carter supposed to know that is going on? If he knew such things were going on that would mean that he was running a house of prostitution. Perish the thought. In fact Carter makes his money from the suckers at the gambling tables, not from his girls. The girls are just free entertainment for the suckers.

Carter can indeed help her out of her jam and offer her a job as one of his girls, but she will need to do a couple of favours for him. The first favour is obvious - Carter always likes to sample the merchandise he provides for his customers. The second favour is more complicated and is likely to lead Brenda into all sorts of even further complications.

Sex is a deadly weapon but for Brenda it’s as dangerous to herself as it is to the men whose paths she crosses. Love is a deadly weapon too but she doesn’t need to worry about that. Love is for suckers. It’s so tiresome when guys fall in love with her. She always knows when it’s happening.  Like with Johnny. When he slaps her real hard she knows he’s in love with her. She doesn’t actually want to hurt him but if he gets hurt that’s his problem. Still, the sex with Johnny is kinda nice. But guys with no money have no right to fall for her.

The story is told entirely from Brenda’s point of view and what makes her interesting as a character is her extraordinary lack of awareness of the situations she’s getting into and even of her own nature. She is ambitious. She knows what she wants. She wants money. Lots of it. Unfortunately she has no coherent plan for achieving this. She has a breathtaking body and she should be able to use it to make big money, either by marrying a rich sucker or as a high-class prostitute. Instead she’s wasted her efforts on snaring small-timers and she’s allowed lust to cloud her judgment - she’s gone for good-looking guys who have some money but not enough to give her the big buck she craves.

When Carter Kemp tells her to take her clothes off so he can inspect the merchandise she  is shocked and horrified. He’s not even good-looking. At the same time, as Carter runs his eyes approvingly across her naked body she finds herself really enjoying the experience. Especially when he gives her the sort of look that a master gives to his slave. That really excites her. She uses sex to get things out of men but she has no understanding of her own sexual feelings. She thinks she only has sex to get money and for the life of her she can’t figure out why sometimes she just wants to give herself to some men. She is 23 but she hasn’t grown up at all since she gave away her virginity (to a boy who didn’t even have money - she was so dumb in those days).

There’s an immense amount of sex in this novel, and not a single instance of it between people who are married to each other. This was 1950 so of course none of it is in any way graphic but it still manages to be plenty sleazy. It’s the feelings evoked rather than the actual acts that provides the sleaze content - things like naked girls being inspected like slabs of meat and beatings as foreplay (which Brenda finds very arousing). It’s very open about things like prostitution, and even about the male prostitutes who service rich women who get bored and lonely waiting for their divorces in Reno (and they’re out-and-out prostitutes rather than mere gigolos).

This is of course an incredibly trashy novel, a representative of an incredibly trashy genre. But it’s surprisingly well-crafted entertaining trash. And Brenda is in her own way more interesting than you might expect - she’s too scheming and selfish to be a heroine and too ruthless to be a victim but at the same time she’s too vulnerable to be a femme fatale. She doesn’t even know if she is really a whore, or if she really wants to be a whore. She hasn’t thought any of it through. It’s not just that she doesn’t understand love. She doesn’t even understand sex. She’s selfish in the way a child is selfish but she’s not evil - you have to know that what you’re doing is wrong to be evil.

Will this bad girl get what she deserves? You’ll have to read it to find out.

Reno Tramp is obviously most interesting as an example of the disreputable side of 50s pop culture. Like exploitation movies these books practised a balancing act, offering as many sleazy sexy thrills as they could without going far enough to get the publishers closed down. It’s often forgotten that there was more to 50s pop culture than Leave It To Beaver or Doris Day movies. Under the resectable surface of that decade there was plenty of interest in sex, including illicit sex (or maybe especially illicit sex).

It’s interesting to compare Reno Tramp to Ward Miller’s Kitten With a Whip, from a few years later and from a different but closely related genre. Both deal with young women whose sexual power is more dangerous than nitro-glycerine and just as unpredictable. And both dealing with young women who are deadly because they themselves don’t really understand what sex can do to them, or to men.

And Reno Tramp is definitely sleazy fun. Recommended.

The Castle of Wolfenbach

At one point in Jane Austen’s celebrated satire on gothic fiction, Northanger Abbey, one of the characters gives her friend some recommendations for “horrid novels” that she simply must read. At one time it was thought that Austen made up the names of these seven horrid novels but in fact they were real. One of them was Eliza Parsons’ 1793 novel The Castle of Wolfenbach, which I’ve just finished reading.

Reading this novel it’s easy to see why Austen had so much fun sending up the gothic genre. While I personally love Ann Radcliffe’s novels and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk the sad truth is that the bulk of the gothic fiction written at that time was not in the same league (which of course is true of any genre). 

And The Castle of Wolfenbach has plenty of elements that just invite satire. There are the preposterous coincidences, the fairly clumsy use of supernatural trappings in what is really a non-supernatural tale, the overheated and highly improbable plot, the sentimentality, the heroines who faint at regular intervals, and worst of all the contrived ending that seeks to wrap everything up much too neatly. And added to that are a couple of ingredients that are present in most gothic fiction but are very much magnified in this one - an outrageous English chauvinism and a very annoying conventional piety. Hardly a page goes by without the reader’s being assured that the hand of Providence will ensure that virtue will be rewarded. 

Of course these flaws were fairly common in many novels of that period, not just gothic fictions. And despite its flaws The Castle of Wolfenbach is entertaining enough if you can approach it as a kind of 18th century high camp melodrama. It’s an intriguing example of late 18th century trash fiction. 

At the time of its original publication in 1793 it was a considerable commercial success. Like so much trash fiction (and trash movies) it provides a fascinating window into the prejudices and anxieties of its era. Quite often the less exalted cultural products of an era, being less concerned with universal themes, reveal more about the period in question than does high art. The Castle of Wolfenbach is absolutely overflowing with cultural, religious and class prejudices and anxieties.

It’s worth checking out as long as you don’t set your expectations too high. Also worth a look is another of Austen's horrid novels, The Necromancer.

Ed Wood's Devil Girls

Ed Wood Jr was a film-maker of legendary status, notorious for being often voted (quite unfairly) as the worst film-maker of all time, the man responsible for such schlock classics as Plan 9 from Outer Space. What is less well-known is that he was also a prolific novelist.

His novels were lurid pulpy shockers and were regarded at the time as being pornographic (although such a description seems absurd today).

Devil Girls was published in 1967, and lurid it most certainly is. The front cover assures us that it is a tale of “Hot Rod Harlots on the Highway to Hell” and the description is entirely accurate.

A small town in Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, has a major problem with juvenile delinquents (always a favourite subject for Wood who wrote the screenplay for the delightfully outrageous juvenile delinquent movie The Violent Years). In particular, the town is menaced by a girl gang known as the Chicks. This gang is involved in an uneasy partnership with an equally unpleasant gang of young males.

A teacher at the local school has been brutally murdered, and these teenage tearaways are the prime suspects. Both the male and female juvenile delinquents are dopers. Not just marijuana, which would be bad enough, but many are also hooked on heroin or on the even more dangerous combination of heroin and cocaine. The Chicks have been recruited by a local drug dealer to act as drug couriers. This dealer, an objectionable individual known as Lark, brings the drugs in by boat but he needs the girls to carry the drugs from the boat to the dockside. His plan is that the girls will conceal the drugs about their persons, mostly in their bras.

And here we find one of the many touches that mark this book as unmistakably the work of Ed Wood - an interest in female undergarments that is both keen and slightly odd. There will be plenty of other such touches.

Battling these youthful miscreants is the overworked but indefatigable Sheriff Buck Rhodes, ably assisted in his crusade against youth crime by the handsome and dedicated young Reverend Steele. The sheriff will have to find a way to stop a major drug shipment from coming ashore and he has few leads to work with.

The leader of the Chicks is Dee, but as her heroin habit grows her control over the gang is starting to slip. She has even bigger problems when the former leader of the Chicks, Lila, breaks out of prison and returns to town, seeking vengeance on those she considers to be responsible for her misfortunes (which means pretty much the whole population of the town but especially her mother). Lila is doing a life sentence for a murder rap. Lila’s kid sister Rhoda is one of the Chicks.

The book is rather like Ed Wood’s movies - it’s both incompetent and entertaining. Although it has to be said that by the standards of pulp fiction it’s by no means as badly written as you might expect. It has a coherent plot and some memorable characters. It builds to a reasonably exciting climax. And it has a deliciously sleazy atmosphere.

Wood’s unconventional sexual tastes are certainly on full display. There is of course a concern for women’s clothing - none of the girls is ever described as simply taking off her sweater. The sweater is lovingly described, especially if it is a pink angora sweater (one of Ed’s favourite garments). There is also a rather disturbing interest in bodily functions.

If you’re a fan of Ed Wood’s movies (and I can’t imagine any right-thinking person not being a fan of his movies) then it’s certainly worth checking out his literary output as well, even if it’s only for their curiosity value and the light they shed on this distinctive icon of American pop culture.

Once is not Enough, by Jacqueline Susann

I’ve always loved trash cinema but in the past year I’ve discovered that trash fiction holds just as many delights. And fiction doesn’t get much trashier than Jacqueline Susann. Once is not Enough, published in 1973, was the third of her blockbuster bestsellers.

While it didn’t quite equal the success of Valley of the Dolls (which has sold around 30 million copies and has been claimed to be the biggest selling novel of all time) it did reach Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Susann didn’t quite invent the literary blockbuster, but she did take the blockbuster formula to new heights. Her critics would have said she took it to new depths, but when you can sell 30 million copies of one novel you can afford not to worry too much about the critics.

Once is not Enough includes the basic ingredients that had made Valley of the Dolls so successful - a show business background, glamour, celebrities, sex, drugs, tragedy and self-destructiveness. And it adds a very large helping of kinkiness.

The heroine this time is January Wayne, the daughter of a big-time Broadway producer who had tried to repeat his success in Hollywood and come badly unstuck. January is fond of her father. Very fond of him. Very very fond of him. And not in the way 20-year-old women are supposed to be fond of their dads. He’s the only man she really wants, but she tries desperately to find someone else as similar to him as possible. And ends up with a 58-year-old alcoholic author who has grown tired of writing books that are admired by the critics but don’t sell and has decided to try his hand at writing bestsellers.

January’s stepmother (the incredibly wealthy Dee Milford) has been trying to line her up with a suitable young man, but unfortunately the suitable young man is having an affair with a middle-aged movie star. And this same middle-aged movie star is having a lesbian affair with Dee Milford! January also develops a rather worrying drug habit.

Every element that could possibly have outraged mainstream literary critics and self-appointed moral guardians of society makes an appearance at some stage in the outlandish soap-opera plot. Susann’s great strength as a writer is that she had absolutely no shame and was completely untroubled by irrelevant concerns such as good taste. She believed in excess, and that excess works best if you have a very large amount of it. Truckloads of it.

Part of the success of Valley of the Dolls was due to the fact that Susann knew the world depicted in the novel extremely well, having been an actress on Broadway in the 50s. With Once is not Enough she moves into a 1970s setting, and she was not quite as familiar with the world of early 70s youth culture. But it doesn’t really matter since her occasional misunderstandings of this world just add to the book’s already enormous camp appeal.

The novel is of course complete trash, but it celebrates its own trashiness. Susann’s great insight into the literary world was that if you’re going to write trash, do it with style and energy and don’t apologise for it. Revel in it. She pushes trashiness so far that it becomes an art form. And like so much trash art, it ends up reflecting more of the truth about the society that produced it than the tedious tomes churned out by Serious Writers who write Literature.

Susann’s novels are also, as Camille Paglia has so rightly pointed out, absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to understand American popular culture today. Susann was one of the people who created modern popular culture. And her books are fun.

Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place

If you’re one of those people (like myself) with a deep and abiding love for trash culture than Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place is certainly a book you must read.

Metalious was born in New Hampshire, and that’s where her first and most famous novel is set. But this is not exactly a love letter to the place of her birth. It’s a merciless expose of hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, viciousness, sexual repression, corruption and general all-round nastiness. Peyton Place is a picturesque little town, but behind the neatly curtained windows you’ll find murder, incest, abortion, rape, bizarre sexual deviance, alcoholism and all the other joys of small-town life.

If there are two things the residents of Peyton Place fear more than anything else those things are scandal and facing the truth. Constance Mackenzie is more afraid than most. She isn’t really a widow raising a daughter on her own. She was never married, and her daughter Allison was the result of a liaison with a married man. Evelyn Page’s fear is sex, especially in regard to her teenage son Norman. She deals with this by giving him constant enemas, this being the only pleasure the two of them get out of life. Yes, this is fairly outrageous stuff for a novel published in 1957.

Leslie Harrington’s fear is that his dictatorial power over the town may one day be loosened. His son Rodney’s fear is that one day people will realise he’s not merely a bully but a coward as well. Selena Cross’s fear is her stepfather, who gets her pregnant at the age of 14. The town’s loveable doctor Matt Swain is afraid of the shack-dwellers. The novel begins in the late 1930s, and the shack-dwellers living in filth and squalor on the outskirts of town are a legacy of the Depression, but they’re also a result of inbreeding, alcoholism and ignorance. Doc Swain regards them with with horror and loathing, apart from Selena Cross. Selena has brains and ambition, she has a chance to escape, but being a teenage mother will destroy that chance forever. Doc Swain performs an illegal abortion on her, which gives him one more thing to torture himself about.

The town is also trying to adapt to the presence of the high school’s new headmaster. He’s an object of suspicion for three reasons - he’s from New York, he has a Greek name, and he’s an intellectual. He’s particularly disturbing to Constance Mackenzie, awakening sexual desires that she’d successfully repressed for almost two decades. She won’t marry him, because that might cause talk, but she’s willing to share her bed with him.On the other hand she’s determined that if she’s going to sleep with him at least she’ll make sure she doesn’t enjoy it.

In 1957 this book had something to offend just about everybody. And it wasn’t just the content. It was the gloriously trashy style of the writing. There was no way of excusing this book as Serious Literature, but there was also no way of keeping it from becoming a massive bestseller. The combination of sex, sin and trash was much too seductive. For better or worse, this book changed the face of American publishing. It sold eight million copies, and it taught American publishers that sex and scandal sells.

It was made into a delightfully campy film in the late 50s, but the movie is a very very sanitised version of the novel. The novel is not just more sleazy, it’s also much more cynical. It’s even cynical about war heroes, which was pretty daring in 1957. Peyton Place’s only actual war hero is a fake, but that’s conveniently covered up. It also tackles the issues of wartime profiteering and and the town elite using their control of the draft board to make sure that their sons don’t have to go off to war.

While it might not have a great deal of literary merit it did have something that American readers at the time were craving. It was honest about sex. Not sex as part of a romantic ideal of married love, but down-and-dirty lust. And it was honest in dealing with female lust, and with the reality that teenagers are interested in sex and no amount of denial is going to change that.

This novel is trash culture at its finest. I Ioved it.