Fri 14 Apr 2023
JACK LEWIS – Blood Money. Headline Books, paperback original, 1960.
Good old-fashioned pornography.
Well, maybe not good, but Blood Money wears the smarmy patina of what once were Dirty Books, before Literature went the way of All Flesh. And it’s the sort of thing they used to call “Gutsy,†sub-Spillane, like the Men’s Magazines in the Barber Shop, with fights, knifings, beatings, shootings, nasty bad guys and naked ladies teeming through its crowded pages like denizens of a Turkish Bazaar.
The story, of sorts, is set in Los Gomez, one of those fictional Latin American nations so beloved of the sweaty men’s pulps, run by a coalition of local fascists, organized crime, and the CIA. It also may be hiding Adolph Hitler, which is the crux of the plot: three ex-GIs hunting der Fuhrer for a million-dollar reward.
I use the word “plot†very loosely, because the story consists of the narrator finding a lead, a clue, or a mysterious “meet me at…†message, then getting sapped, arrested, beat up, or tripping over a dead body and leaving his fingerprints all over it — this duly followed by a naked lady coming on the scene and flinging herself at him, knees akimbo.
But I have to say the prose in Blood Money is serviceable — I’ve read worse in “respectable†books — the characters colorful, if familiar, and the action fast and plentiful. And the Sex… well it’s quite tame by today’s standards, but it’s written with a hard-to-define… what’s the word I’m looking for…. it sounds naughty, like the author thought he was getting away with something, and it reads like it was meant to be read under the covers with a flashlight.
So don’t go out of your way to find a copy of Blood Money, but if you chance across it — enjoy!
April 14th, 2023 at 1:49 pm
Plenty of copies offered for sale online, mo9stly in the $10 to $20 range, but you can pay more. (But why?)
April 14th, 2023 at 1:53 pm
Disclaimer: While I do have a cousin named Jack Lewis, he is not the author of this book.
The Jack Lewis who did write this book has two other entries in Al Hubin’s CRIME FICTION IV, namely
Coffins Come in Three Sizes (Beacon, 1961, pb) [Los Angeles, CA]
A Night for Evil (Challenge, 1967, pb) [Florida]
April 14th, 2023 at 9:02 pm
This pre hard core smut often had surprisingly ambitious plots, but then so did the Men’s Sweats in many cases.
I know what Dan means about the hard to define voice of the writers of many of these, naughty almost nails it.
I always thought that many of these writers handled sex the way a randy fourteen year old would who knew enough to want to see the woman naked and that how she got that way was part of the appeal but was completely clueless what to do once the clothes were off.
Of course, writers like Silverberg, Westlake, Ellison, and Block did know what happens next and managed to suggest what they weren’t allowed to show, but quite a few writers gave the distinct impression of an overheated adolescent drawn up short by the limits of their imagination and experience.
April 15th, 2023 at 5:16 am
Well-put, David!