Sat 28 Nov 2009
Steve,
I just ran across a comment from Bill Crider on the rara avis site about Harlequin censoring the six recent mystery vintage paperbacks that they republished. This really annoys me. See this site for more and a link to the Harlequin site where they cheerfully announce the censorship:
I wish I was joking but I’m not.
Best, Walker
Excerpted from the Harlequin blog:
Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.
And of course, the covers: Though we used the original covers, they had to be scanned and touched up.
Here’s the comment I left:
I’m a collector of old vintage paperbacks, and I have been since I bought them new off the circular racks in drugstores and supermarkets when I was growing up.
This business of sheltering our eyes from things you think might offend us now is absolute nonsense. Who do you think we are, a bunch of weak-kneed sissies? Even if it makes us uneasy every once in a while to look at our past, history IS history, and it’s ridiculous to try to cover it up.
Please do us a favor, and keep publishing your X-rated romance novels, and leave the mystery and noir genres well enough alone. You say you’re delighted to have been able to reprint these books. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves, trampling on the work of others, especially when (as far as I can tell) it’s been done without their permission.
[UPDATE] 01-17-10. David Rachels has done us all a great service, and for doing so, I thank him. He’s taken a copy of one the James Hadley Chase books that was one of the six that Harlequin reprinted, and done a line-by-line comparison with the original.
Not too surprisingly, considering Chase’s reputation (which the editors at Harlequin obviously knew nothing about), not only were there words, phrases and the occasional sentence removed, but entire chunks of text.
Needless to say, unless done with really skilled hands, besides the fact that’s tampering with the author’s intentions, it also hardly makes for smooth reading. See David’s blog for full details.
November 28th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
When I went to the Harlequin website and first read their cheerful admission that they were censoring these novels, I thought I was in a PC correct alternate world. Usually publishers and editors quietly make cuts and changes. These people happily announce to all that they have changed the novels.
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.
November 28th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Reminds me of the days when you had to hunt for the words “unexpurigated” or “unabridged” on paperbacks.
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.
November 29th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
There’s been a small but steady voices of dissent that have been appearing on the Harlequin blog over the weekend. (See the link in paragraph one up above.)
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
November 29th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I think my problem with DBC was that they did it under the table. The Readers Digest was clear they were condensing books and and censoring them, but DBC had no reason to condense the Lam books other than censorship.
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.
November 30th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
My take:
http://atthevillarose.blogspot.com/2009/11/happy-as-censor.html
January 16th, 2010 at 1:22 am
You can see examples of what they did here:
http://noirboiled.blogspot.com/2010/01/harlequin-bowdlerizations.html
Best, David