Punish Me With Kisses

Title: Punish Me With Kisses

Author: William Bayer

Year of publication: 1980, Severn House edition 1981

Inner cover blurb: '"Someone rushed from the poolhouse, then paused just in front.  Penny blinked and in that moment the figure disappeared into the shadows of the trees..."
   For Penny Berring that was also the moment that would change her life forever.  Obsessed by Suzie, her elder sister by three years, by Suzie's beauty and by her flamboyant sexuality, she had been an envious onlooker on her sister's insatiable love-life.  Now suddenly all that was over, for Suzie had gone - murdered, almost certainly by that dimly-seen figure at the pool side.
   But who had that been?  Who was the killer?  Jared Evans, dark-haired, sensitive, loved by Penny and by Suzie?  The dour gardener, Tucker, whose shears had been the instrument of death?  Or... someone else?
   As the novel draws us closer and closer to the truth, so it develops an increasingly profound insight into Penny's mind.  Fascinated, we watch her delve further into the mystery of her sister's death to find the murderer.  In doing so, she encounters a multitude of unsavoury scandals involving herself, her parents and her boyfriend.  Penny appears to crack under the strain, and seeks comfort from a sinister psychiatrist with a passion for cats.
   William Bayer's is an astonishing achievement - at one level dazzling entertainment, at another an illumination of the darker places of the soul.  A major success in the USA, this novel is stimulating and passionate.  Its descriptions of New York and its life are vivid and exciting; its conclusions eye-opening and convincing.'

Quick flick reveals: You had me at 'sinister psychiatrist with a passion for cats'.

Random paragraph: 'After Penny read this passage she felt filled with sadness and shame.  There were many pages like it, tales of orgies and self-debasements, scornful references to inadequate lovers, shrieks of discontent.  The diary upset her, but not because of sex.  It was the pathos of it, Suzie's misery, that filled with despair.'


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The Killing Gift

Title: The Killing Gift

Author: Bari Wood

Year of publication: 1975, Heinemann edition 1976

Inner cover blurb: 'This is more than a novel about a lonely woman with a deadly power who becomes the quarry of an obsessed detective.  It is more than a gripping psychic suspense story that holds the reader right down to the last sentence.  THE KILLING GIFT reaches into one of the most telling areas of the subconscious: the core of violence and aggression in all of us.  It explores the question that sooner or later most civilized people ask themselves: What would I do if I had the power to kill just by thinking about it?
   A man dies violently.  Stavitsky, the police chief in charge of the investigation, finds himself face to face with a real mystery - an 'impossible' killing.  All the evidence points to the quietly withdrawn research physician Dr Jennifer List Gilbert, yet how could this fragile woman kill a heavily armed man without leaving a mark on his body?
   Stavitsky pursues Jennifer, his initial curiosity turning into an obsession.  Nothing can stop him from finding out everything he can about her.  And everything he uncovers deepens his confusion.  Jennifer has almost no friends.  Although she is married her husband seems remote, and despite her vast wealth, she lives modestly - somehow unreached and unreachable.  But Stavitsky begins to sense her aloneness, and he finds himself beginning to love this strange woman almost as much as he fears her.  Ultimately Stavitsky's compulsion to unravel her dangerous secret leads to a final confrontation in which hunter and hunted meet as lover-antagonists in a harrowing struggle for survival.  THE KILLING GIFT is a bizarre love story with a unique psychic twist.

Quick flick reveals: An efficient-looking supernatural thriller from the editor of Drug Therapy Magazine.  Answers the questions most civilized people ask themselves about killing someone just by thinking about it.

Random paragraph: 'Kate jumped out of bed and almost ran to Jennifer's room.  She was still asleep, not heavily, but peacefully, her breathing light and easy.  But today in the morning light her face looked ghastly.'


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Lost Book Library Reading Round-Up no. 5

Another update on my attempts to actually read these damn things.  Not a bumper crop this time round, unfortunately.

The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood

Status: Completed

Another book that I read before I started the library.  How this book initially pleased, but ultimately failed me has already been documented.

The Girls by John Bowen

Status: Completed

This tale of a lesbian couple who engage in a spot of murder has a number of things in common with The Fate of Mary Rose.  They both are set in a genteel English village.  They both are initially driven by a quiet control that draws the reader in and directs them towards their inexorable conclusion.  And they both dodge their inexorable conclusions at the last minute, and instead deliver piss-poor endings that seem like the author has just given up.  This is a shame, because The Girls was full of nice touches, such as a conversation between the main characters where they debate whether they have been visited by the Greek god Pan or just a bloke on a horse, and a flash-forward where a supporting figure's life after the story's end is documented.  Come on, authors of short, quiet, novels set in genteel English villages written in the mid-eighties with pastel-shaded Modigliani-influenced covers, buck your ideas up!

Prehistoric Germ Warfare by Robin Collyns

Status: Abandoned, p. 40

Author Collyns is convinced that humanity originated in outer space, and absolutely anything appears to him to be proof of this.  What a human hair looks like under a microscope, alleged Bigfoot prints, satsumas, anything.  It all points to his central thesis that we were part of some extraterrestrial genetically-manipulated breeding programme.  I think I read enough to get the gist, and while I could have gone all the way through looking for LULZ, the ultimate point of this blog is not to make fun of bad books (that's what Robin Ince is for), but to dig up good books that have been forgotten.  So I moved on to...

The Searing by John Coyne

Status: Abandoned, p. 59

I was hoping this would turn out to be an enjoyable slice of second division horror, but it wasn't quite good enough to be good, or trashy enough to be trash.  There was a clue that Coyne wasn't exactly pushing the imaginative boat out in the first few pages when an old Indian burial ground makes a menacing appearance.  That and the fact he uses my least favourite phrase in the English language, 'fetal position', over and over again (what's wrong with saying someone's legs are tucked up under their chin?) turned me off.  The story seemed to be firing into all sorts of different directions involving mysterious orgasms and baby killing, none of which interested me greatly, so I bailed.

The Injured Party by Elaine Dundy

Status: Abandoned, p. 122

Dundy hit big with her first novel The Dud Avocado, but this final one is obscure, and in all honesty it's not hard to see why.  It starts off well enough with a screwball comedy feel as two magazine employees attempt to uncover a conspiracy in their own office, but then gets derailed by a bad marriage storyline that feels suspiciously like the author unloading baggage.  By the time I gave up the protagonist was a faux-naive caricature of the person we started off with and it felt like pretty much anything could happen.  Which means, of course, that it didn't matter what did happen.  A case of a good author losing control of their story.

Disappointing, but I have a feeling the next batch will contain some gems, so stay tuned!

The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker

Title: The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker

Author: Charles Webb

Year of publication: 1970, Penguin edition 1972

Back cover blurb: 'The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker is much like other young American marriages.  After eighteen months of it, Lisa leaves Bill during their summer holiday by the sea.  Not that both parties wouldn't like to make their marriage work according to the ideal American formula.  But what is that formula?  If they could only discover why they got together in the first place, they might make a start, though Lisa's sister, Nan, would be determined to foil them...'

Quick flick reveals: I'm not a fan of Webb's The Graduate.  To me it reads like the treatment for a film, which is perhaps why the film based on it is so good.  Having said that, I am more than happy to give this a go because it has Richard Benjamin's face on the cover, and I like looking at Richard Benjamin's face.  Depressingly, in the author biog, written five years after The Graduate movie was a hit, can be found the line 'he is employed as a stockroom help at a department store in California.'  What has a writer got to do to actually make some money round here?

Random paragraphs: '"Would you say I'm not fun to be with?  Would that express it?"
   Lisa nodded.  "That's as close as I could come to expressing it."  She walked past him and into the kitchen.'


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Seventeen Part One

Title: Seventeen Part One

Author: Soya

Year of publication: 1953, Sphere edition 1969

Back cover blurb: 'Jacob wanted to learn about sex.
   He knew the theory all right but he wanted some practical experience.  Fortunately his attractive cousin, Vibeke, was only too willing to help him end his virginity.
   And once initiated in the mysteries  of sex, Jacob couldn't practice enough.  But Hansigne, the buxom maid, and Miss Rosegod, the housekeeper, were both eager to further the young man's education.
   With a Rabelaisian sense of humour and a wealth of erotic detail, SEVENTEEN describes the sexual awakening of a teenage boy, and his encounters with the women who teach him the delights of love.
   Anneliese Meineche's film SEVENTEEN is one of the most sensational box-office successes ever.  Granted an 'X' certificate by the Greater London Council, the film has been playing in London continuously for over 50 weeks.'

Quick flick reveals: Yet another perfectly sensible novel packaged as borderline porn, as was the fashion at the time.  Soya was an acclaimed Danish writer of the post-war period, although the film version kick-started the Danish sex comedy genre.  Originally published in three parts, part one is is a slim volume.  Why they couldn't have just put all of it in one volume for the English edition, I'm not sure.  I expect the spine would have just about taken it.

Random paragraph: ' Should you tickle the girl under the chin?  Should you put your hands on her cheeks and give her a kiss?  Or should you slide a hand under her dress and try to get it up between her legs?  What would Maupassant have done?'


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The Bender

Title: The Bender

Author: Paul Scott

Year of publication: 1963, Panther edition 1975

Back cover blurb: 'Money and love
   George Spruce is suddenly faced with an urgent demand for the repayment of a debt which rocks his entire modest existence, especially since the claimant is his successful brother Tim.  But why is Tim so desperate for money?  Is it because his daughter Gillian, 17, is pregnant by a plumber's mate?  Will George's other brother, the dramatist, Guy, help?  Unlikely.  Guy is too busy satisfying the critics on the one hand and Anina, his houri in a sari, on the other.  In the resolution of George's dilemma, Paul Scott digs deep, intimately and unsparingly into the mind, manners and morals of the metropolis.'

Quick flick reveals:  Scott is best known, of course, for The Jewel in the Crown, but this is an earlier, much different type of novel. Appears to be a kitchen sink novel revolving around a middle-class sink and drinks cabinet.

Random paragraph: '"I'm going to order more coffee," George said, "and then we can take all you've just said more slowly and point by point.  Would you like another cream bun?"'


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Harris in Wonderland

Title: Harris in Wonderland

Author: Philip Reid

Year of publication: 1973, Penguin edition 1976

Back cover blurb: '"Harris is a chirpy freelance journalist who seems likely to dig up the dirt on a business swindle in which the probable future leader of the (Labour) Opposition was involved.
   Harris finds himself very nearly framed with a drug-smuggling charge, takes accidentally a fearsome acid trip and is nearly murdered before he realizes the kidn of plot that has been laid for him.  Very deft this.  As a bonus, many of the characters have teasing resemblances to 'You-know-who' and 'Whatshisname'" - Daily Telegraph'

Quick flick reveals:  This satirical detective novel is actually written by Andrew Osmond and Richard Ingrams under a pseudonym.  I'm hoping it isn't laced with that somewhat snearing small c conservatism that puts me off Private Eye so much.

Random paragraph: '"Well, you weren't going to look very good explaining to some Welsh copper what you were up to sniffing round a dead hippie on a Welsh mountain top.  Here, have some of this."  He took a quarter bottle of Scotch out of his pocket and passed it to me.  "Make you feel better."'


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Game in Heaven With Tussy Marx

Title: Game in Heaven With Tussy Marx

Author: Piers Paul Read

Year of publication: 1966, Panther edition 1968

Back cover blurb: 'ROLL UP!  ROLL UP!
   Stand alongside Karl's daughter TUSSY MARX and a Dowager Duchess and a Bright Young Man and Peep down on Earth from the Safety of Heaven
   Enjoy the REVOLUTIONARY Antics in London, South America, Iceland, Purgatory, on the Swiss ski-slopes
   See with your own eyes the PROVOCATIVE Behaviour of the Little-Rich Girl
   REVEL in the Hopes of Hereward the Idealist, and Lover of Other Men's Wives
   CHUCKLE at Watkinson the Marxist, Corrupting Capitalism with his own Dissoluteness
   RELISH the GAME IN HEAVEN WITH TUSSY MARX a bizarre, riotous, sexily serious Novel which points a Witty Finger at You and Your Revolution'

Quick flick reveals:  I couldn't get on with Read's later novel The Upstart, but this swingin' Marxism tale looks crazy enough to give him another go.

Random paragraph: 'Hereward might have saved himself at this point if he had said, then and there, "I am a revolutionary and your father is Europe's number one enemy of the peole, latest and I hope last in a long line of industrial barons of unequalled villainy," but the moment passed and the opportunity was lost.'


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See the Kid Run

Title: See the Kid Run

Author: Bob Ottum

Year of publication: 1978, Arrow edition 1981

Back cover blurb: 'The Kid is a child of the city.  He never thinks about violence, cruelty or horror.  He just lives them.
   The Kid lives down there, in the metropolis rubbish heap.  The Kid and his friends - Cat Man, Angel, Jewel - are not just big city children.  They are parasites, hustlers, thieves and killers.  They have to run to survive, cutting down everything and anyone who gets in the way.
   SEE THE KID RUN...
   WATCH HIM NEARLY MAKE IT...'

Quick flick reveals: Author Bob Ottum (try saying that fast) seemed to specialize in novels about knife-wielding kids who lived in rubbish dumps, and this is the follow-up to the slightly better-remembered The Tuesday Blade.  Has a bit of a Warriors vibe, which is no bad thing.

Random paragraph: '"I broke your teeth?  I did?  I think you've got it all wrong, my boy.  What you mean to say is, you accidentally walked into the wall and broke your teeth.  Isn't that what you mean?"'


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Revelations

Title: Revelations

Author: Phyllis Naylor

Year of publication: 1979, Sphere edition 1981

Back cover blurb:' MARY
   is unmarried, the secretary of the Faith Holiness congregation, and for thirty-four years has led a model life.  She has nursed her crippled mother, stood by her family when her wild, beloved brother defied the church and fled to California.  And she is resigned to the prospect that life has passed her by... forever.
   Until the sudden arrival of her free-thinking, young nephew throws her world into turmoil.  Bright, affectionate and vulnerable, thirteen-year-old Jake joins forces with Mary's outspoken girlfriend in opposing the gospel according to Faith Holiness.  And sets Mary on the path of deliciously sinful libearation that reveals a funny, feminine personality whose search for fulfilment is strewn with...
   REVELATIONS'

Quick flick reveals: Phyllis Naylor is best known as a children's author, notably for the 'Alice' series as novels, and neither her own website or Wikipedia mentions Revelations.  It's almost as if everyone were keeping deliberately quiet about it.  But I am here to tell you that Phyllis Naylor wrote a rude novel in which a man puts his thingy in a lady's thingy and no one can stop me!  Anyway, it all looks rather thoughtful and decent, and probably doesn't deserve being kept in a basement on a chain, living on slop from a bucket.

Random paragraph: 'For a man of Murray's size, she had expected a monstrous phallus.  But the penis was thick and short and stuck out at a perfect right angle to his body.  She could, she mused, hang her dress on it.'


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