http://atthevillarose.blogspot.com/2009/11/happy-as-censor.html

In the scene in question Donald is lured into a motel room where the girl partially disrobes and then tears her clothes and screams rape at which point her co-horts enter and Donald ends up arrested.

In the DBC version the scene is so truncated and changed it’s hard to figure out exactly what Donald has been set up for, or why he was arrested. Neither scene is the least bit explicit though. Why they felt the need to change it so radically is hard to understand. Even for the time it was a pretty tame scene.

There is another slightly more explicit scene of Donald and the girl out in the desert in another of the Lam books that was changed more radically, but at least in that one it didn’t effect the actual plot of the book.

And of course there is the famous John Stanley cover of Fools Die On Friday that suffered a major change as a result of censorship.

But as you say at least they didn’t brag about it. The sad thing with Harlequin is their obvious pride in emasculating these books and authors without any guilt about it. At least DBC had enough sense to be circumspect about what they were doing.

It will be interesting to see if (and how) the editors at Harlequin defend their position, once they come in tomorrow morning and see what’s developed since last Wednesday.

In the overall scheme of things, it’s a small matter, but censorship is an insidious beast, and to my may of thinking, the light of day is the best weapon against it.

David

Yes, I know the Detective Book Club spent a lot of energy cleaning up rather mild scenes in the books they reprinted. I wrote a letter to TAD sometime in the 70s, I imagine, complaining that several chunks of text, well over a page long in a case or two, were missing from one of the James Bond novels they did.

I knew they worked on the A. A. Fair books, too, but not to the extent that you describe. The only changes that come to mind now are in the category of replacing the word “bitch” to “witch.”

I think there have been many more instances of editorial meddling that has taken place than we know about. What’s curious here, in the case of the Harlequin books, is that they seem so proud to tell us about it — even though the books are described elsewhere as having the original text and covers.

— Steve

The first time I ran into this was with the Donald Lam books published by the people at Detective Book Club. I was fairly shocked the first time I read the paperback and realized how much DBC had changed the original — there is a scene in one of the books where a girl tries to frame Donald for rape that DBC so changed that it made virtually no sense, it wasn’t until I read the paperback that the plot actually worked and the scene made sense.

Of course this is nothing new. When some of Jonathan Latimer’s Bill Crane books were reprinted in paperback in the sixties the racial references and even some of the sex was toned down or cut out.

The irony is that as has been stated above some of the Harlequin romances are probably as close to hard core porn as you can get and still refer to sexual organs by purple euphemisims.

Hopefully this will not become a trend. Or can we look forward to James Bond being reduced to a ‘license to hit people really hard’, Mike Hammer telling us “it was easy — but totally wrong,” or Philo Vance assisting the killer to go to therapy instead of committing suicide?

Still, one of my favorite censor stories is the when the Lambs tried to make Shakespeare politically correct for the Victorians. When it came to Hamlet they toned things down quite a bit, but left one of the most ‘offensive’ lines in, when Hamlet tells Ophelia to ‘get thee to a nunnery.’ The Lambs just assumed a ‘nunnery’ was a convent, when actually it was 16th century slang for a whorehouse. Censorship is a tricky business at best.

I encourage all readers and collectors of vintage paperbacks to comment on the Harlequin site and make your feelings known. At the very least, maybe they will forget about digging up the past and changing it for our innocent eyes.