Paperback Flashback: One For Hell by Jada M. Davis

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.
But mostly the cheesy.

Let's start with the cover, shall we?  A laughing pinup in a negligee stands over a salt-and-pepper-haired man who looks suspiciously like a wayward Mitt Romney clutching his chest as he's crumpled to the floor beside a bed (and is that a spot of blood coming from under his hand?).  One for Hell by Jada M. Davis screams political sex scandal to me.

But, after some careful and thorough internet detective work this morning, I find that One For Hell has been hailed as a classic noir novel on the order of Jim Thompson, one of my favorites of the hard-boiled typewriter.  In a nutshell, the story is about Willa Ree, a boxcar hobo who hops off the train in a small town, determined to pick it clean in a one-man crime spree, but who ends up become chief of police.  It's an easy plot to mock...but, frankly, when I turned to page 100, I found some pretty decent writing:

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What's easier to lampoon is the back cover of the Red Seal paperback (which I picked up in some now-forgotten antique store here in western Montana earlier this year):

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Jada who?  According to this website, Mr. Davis seemed to suffer from a life of hard luck and bad choices.  Brutal poverty in his Depression-era childhood, tuberculosis while serving with the Army in World War Two, volunteering (!) for "atomic medical experiments" after the war, and turning his back on a writing career to take a job with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, "where he worked as a PR executive until his retirement."  That's the stuff novels are made of, my friend.

Paperback Flashback: Grizzly by Will Collins

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.

But mostly the cheesy.

 

Movie novelizations are what I would call drugstore fiction.  They're the kind of books you'd pick up off the carousel wire-frame rack while waiting to for your prescription to be filled.  At least that's how it was for me in the 1970s.  I remember standing in Jackson Drug leafing through paperbacks of Grease and Welcome Back, Kotter, looking for clues about character and motivation.  Movie tie-ins were also a way to "see" the movie on the page if you couldn't sit in the dark theater and watch the real thing.  I lived in a small town and movies were slow to reach the screens there.  I remember my Dad making a joke about going to see that "new release" The Sound of Music.  This was in 1980.

But I digress.  Movie novelizations have been around since D. W. Griffith first started cranking a camera (I have several novels in my collection from the 1920s as proof that Saturday Night Fever: the Novel was not so unique).  With very few exceptions (Alan Dean Foster, for one), movie tie-in authors toil at a scorned art.  As Joe Queenan notes: "Authors of film novelisations, not unlike pornographers, rarely get the respect they deserve."  These books are odd literary artifacts where, essentially, the "author" is assigned to write the book months before the movie is released (sometimes before shooting has wrapped).  And so, armed with just the screenplay and very rarely actually seeing the finished film, the writer sits down at his typewriter (I think of tie-ins as curiosities from the 1970s, before the age of personal computers) and cranks out a novel in about 18 hours, lifting dialogue straight from the script and throwing in little arty flourishes of description and exposition whenever possible--like writing "There are still many who believe that the insolent chariots sold by Detroit can go anywhere and surmount any terrain" instead of "The drunk teenager drove up the side of Mount Insurmountable in his Jeep."

Which brings us to Grizzly, where you can find that aforementioned "insolent chariots" sentence.  I never saw the 1976 movie--hell, I wasn't even allowed to go see Jaws back then--but my 13-year-old spidey sense tingled enough to convince me Grizzly was just one big ball of crap.  Like any number of rogue-animal movies in the wake of Jaws, it was designed to make us stay out of the woods (or water or desert or field of daisies harboring rabid grasshoppers).  This, I think, was a nefarious plot on the part of urban planners who wanted us all to live in cities and avoid Nature at all costs.  Whatever its cinematic merits, I can tell you that Grizzly: the Novel is a prime candidate for celebration here at Paperback Flashback.

For starters, who in the world has guts that crunch?  Second, don't you think little Miss Bambi Perkychest would feel that saliva dripping on her hair?  Finally, that bear on the cover looks just like the one which used to be on display in the corner clothing store in my hometown.  Before you got to the tables with their stacks of Wrangler jeans, you had to walk by the stuffed bear, the one with the threadbare belly where all the local kids liked to rub the fur despite the admonitory signs DO NOT TOUCH THE BEAR.

By the same token, I think it only fair to warn you: DON'T PET THE NOVEL.



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Page 100:

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Paperback Flashback: The Great Smith by Edison Marshall

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.

But mostly the cheesy.

And now, Captain John Smith as you've never seen him before...

Colonial porn star!

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This 1943 novel about the legendary explorer and Jamestown chopping-block hero is one of many historical novels penned by Marshall, an author who fancied himself a big-game hunter and once claimed to have written "the most widely-read story in English written in this century."  He had Hemingway choking on his whiskey with that one.

I grabbed The Great Smith at a recent estate sale somewhere here in Montana, lured by the incredibly irrelevant pecs of the title character on the cover of the Dell paperback.  Notice how he's the background character, but yet our eyes are immediately drawn to that stiff, awkward pose and the bizarre head which looks like it belongs on a Swedish actor in a movie whose primary soundtrack goes wakka-wakka-bow-bow.  We even look right past that demure hint of exposed boob thrust in Smith's direction by the resident of the Turkish harem.  And no, you're not dreaming--that really is a topless Pocahontas on the back cover.

Ye gods!

Opening lines:  "A fig for the first seventeen years of my life.  They were no more notable than the first two years of a stallion's eating, and running, exploring the pasture, and sniffing the mares to windward.  I was busy growing up, and made a fair enough job of it, too, as you would have seen had you met me in Boston town, on our waterish Lincolnshire coast, on the night my man's life began."

Page 100:

Paperback Flashback: Combat by Van Van Praag

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.

But mostly the cheesy.

Men.  War.  Killing.

Post-war pulp fiction like this either brought back fond memories of gunning down Germans or it triggered horrific flashbacks to those maelstroms of screaming bombardments.  I don't know much about this book by the man with the stuttering name, other than it's about KILLING.  The Wikipedia page for the movie based on the book (1957's Men in War, starring Aldo Ray and Robert Ryan, changes the setting from World War II Normandy to the Korean War) offers a more intriguing plot summary--assuming the movie was faithful to the book, which is hardly ever the case.

Opening Lines:  Through the ground mist dawn began to light the battered fields.  Shafts of gray appeared between the leaves of the gnarled trees, and night shadows faded.  Some miles to the south, scattered flashes tore open the hovering day, baring the skies in brief nakedness.  Following the flashes came solemn rumbles which echoed from hill to hill, bounded off house and barn and shed doors, and reached down into holes in the ground with mournful promise.

Page 100:

I captured this one about a year ago while browsing an antique store in Bigfork, Montana.  Okay, that's a bit of a lie--I never just browse an antique store, I power-shop!  I haven't read Combat, and seriously doubt I ever will, based on the adjective-heavy, plodding sentences quoted above.  BUT....

I seriously love that cover: the Sgt. Rock crouch, the blood-red box behind the title, and the perfect silhouette of the falling German and his weapon.  If I lean close to the cover, I can even hear the "Aiiii-yeeeee" of the falling/dying sniper.  Perfect in all regards.

But that back-cover prose.  Oh me, oh my!  It's about as turgid as what's between the covers.  I picture the copy-man writing that "Kill"-filled crap as some flat-footed adenoid who never made it past the Fort Dix, N.J. typing pool during the war.

Apart from the interesting Dutch-y name, the only thing I know about the author comes from this brief bio inside the front cover:  "The simplicity and natural power of Van Van Praag's writing can be partly explained by the fact that he has led an informal life.  Born in New York City in 1920, he has been a truck salesman, a World's Fair lecturer, a tentative and temporary hobo, and a soldier.  Mr. Van Praag spent five years in the army.  After enlisting he was promoted through the ranks until he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant.  He fought in France as a platoon leader, was wounded and returned home a casualty."

My only question is: what th' hell's a "tentative and temporary hobo"?

Paperback Flashback: Ward 20 by James Warner Bellah

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.

But mostly the cheesy.

Twenty-four hours in a World War Two military hospital surgical ward.  From the sounds of it, there's lots of PTSD, head bandages and shirt-straining bosoms.

Opening Lines:  It was still dark when Miss Mahon came into the Ward with the early medicine tray.  Warm with the sleep of men and quiet, freshening with the first early air of morning that breathed through the screened windows and stirred bed curtains, rattling the rings of one of them faintly against its chromium bar.

Page 100:

This one came to me by way of eBay.  There's something about the cover that really appeals to me: the lime-green wall, the off-kilter title that bisects that deep longing look between the two of them, the way she's taking his pulse with her right hand, and the mystery of where her left hand is and what it's doing (I assume she's turning the hand-crank which will raise his bed to bring him closer for that inevitable kiss).

I don't know much about James Warner Bellah (1899-1976), beyond what this website tells us: "In World War I he joined the Canadian Army and served as a pilot overseas in the Royal Air Corps.  Just before World War II he enlisted in the U.S. Army, rising from the rank of lieutenant to colonel and serving on several general staffs in Southeast Asia."  Bellah also had a pretty successful Hollywood career:  he wrote the screenplays for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and several popular movies were made from his stories, including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Dancing Lady.