Harlequin Goes Soft On Hard-Boiled

Those who know Harlequin Books only as a major publisher of romance novels will be startled to learn that it has a shady past: It once issued pulp-noir in the murky post-WWII era.

Last October they reissued six titles from their Top Secret vault as their Mini-Series Vintage Collection. Hats off.


The series’ genesis was as a hip art project in celebration of Harlequin’s 60th Anniversary. The assignment, according to Executive Editor Marsha Zinberg in Harlequin's blog, was to piggy-back onto the success of a recent a 60th Anniversary art exhibition featuring vintage paperback covers from Harlequin's origins and “choose six books and reprint them, EXACTLY AS THEY WERE THEN, as a small collection to celebrate our sixty years in business. We wanted books whose cover art appealed to us, and we had to be in physical possession of the book.”


A hip art project gone bad.

“But in some cases,” Zinberg continued, "once we started reading the text, we simply couldn’t see publishing the story, for a host of reasons….content, language, political correctness, etc. Several were eliminated, no matter how striking the cover!"

Hats back on.

A hip art project gone very bad. Hats back on, tight.


“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.”

In short, they put the text through a strainer, saved the sweet and tossed the pulp. This is, after all, Harlequin Books.


Gushing, Ms. Zinberg summed up the experience.

“Everyone in-house has taken such interest and pride in this project, and we're delighted that the collection is now out in the marketplace. We hope they will also accomplish what the cover art exhibition attempted to do: "offer a unique insight into the profound changes that have occurred in women’s lives over the past six decades — from shifts in private desires to shifts in the politics of gender."

With “small adjustments” made to the historical and literary record in the service of Harlequin’s reputation in defense of its readers' tender 2009 sensibilities.

You've come a long way, baby. Aren't you glad you have a big sister to hold your hand? It's tough out there in the world of hard-boiled dicks.


Let's take this to it's logical conclusion. Jim Thompson, Charles Williford, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Hammett, Chandler - these writers have been getting away with murder for years. Time to pasteurize these bums.

So say ai, ai, ai the jury!
__________

Thanks to Brian Busby at The Dusty Bookcase for the lead.

Will the Real N.R. De Mexico Please Stand Up?

Madman on a Drum (Cavalcade Books, 1944)

In 1944, a noir suspense novel, a paperback original, was issued by a small paperback publisher out of New York. Madman on a Drum would be the first full-length book written by one N.R. De Mexico. In 1951, De Mexico wrote a book that would put his name into the Congressional Record, front and center in a debate about the negative effect of paperback literature on American culture. That book, Marijuana Girl, would become Exhibit A in Rep. Ezekiel C. Gathings' Congressional Sub-Committee's mini-crusade against drug use in popular literature.

Marijuana Girl (Uni Books 19, 1951)

Who was this N. R. De Mexico and why should we care?

Until recently, the true identity of this author was uncertain. In my book, Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975, I credit Marijuana Girl to either pulp writer Dallas McCord Reyblds or Lawrence Taylor Show, based upon the most reliable info available at the time. In an unrelated footnote, however, I mention "Bob De Mexico" in relation to another book, note the similarity to "N.R. De Mexico," but, as I could not at that time firmly connect the two as one and the same person, I erred on the side of caution and resisted the temptation to do so.

"Bob de Mexico" had been firmly identified as Robert Bragg by sexual folklorist Gershon Legman in his introduction to Patrick J. Kearney's The Private Case (1981), the definitive bibliography of the British Library's collection of erotica. In Legman's monograph Bawdy Monologues and Rhymed Recitations (1976) Robert Bragg is noted as N.R. De Mexico.

"The most extreme statement of this kind is a recitation called variously "A Girl's Prayer," "The Yeomanette," and other titles, first recorded in the scarce erotic miscellany, Cleopatra's Scrapbook ('Blue Grass, Kentucky' [Wheeling, W.Va.?] 1928: copy, Kinsey Library) p. 53. This begins romantically, "Put your arms around me, darling," and so forth, each stanza becoming more and more passionate, though never omitting the "darling" — in deference to the presumed female character of the speaker — until it ends in a blaze of castratory (vagina dentata) passion, after the orgasm: "Break it off and let it stay!" Other texts of this recitation are longer and much heightened in their eroticism, in one case by a man known to me. The pornography and "fantasy"-fiction writer, N. R. de Mexico (Robert Bragg, who is not the man just referred to, and who was born in New Jersey), was accustomed to deliver this piece at mixed parties. Although he did not change the already-supercharged text, he would attempt to heighten still further its tone of female erotic acceptance and passion by reciting, or rather crooning it, in a special dialect accent" (page 111).

The Bragg-N.R. De Mexico connection was recently cemented for all time when a fellow named Fender Tucker, one of the yeoman, blue-collar fan-bibliographers who've taken it upon themselves to do the messy and difficult work of investigating the world of vintage paperbacks to bring to light the stories behind these books and their authors (and without whom I would not be able to do my work in the field) ran with the question.

Fender Tucker found Robert Bragg's son, corresponded with him, and definitively nailed Bragg as N.R. De Mexico.

Private Chauffeur (Intimate Novels #15, 1952)

Writing it up for Paperback Parade (Gryphon Books), Brooklyn-based novelist and vintage paperback dealer Gary Lovisi's magazine for paperback collectors, Tucker wrote:

"According to his son, Kim, 'the pen name N.R. de Mexico means 'N' for nee (born), 'R' for Robert of Mexico. I think the Mexico was a gag because at one point he had taught himself to speak Spanish well enough for him to translate for some additional income. During the war he worked for military intelligence. In the years just after WWII he was an editor for an architectural magazine, and only began writing novels after that period'" (Paperback Parade #69, pp 95-97).

Robert Campbell Bragg (1918-1954), aka Bob De Mexico and N. R. De Mexico, holds a very special - if obscure - place in American letters. From the late 1930s through the early 1940s he wrote clandestine erotic manuscripts for a wealthy private collector in Oklahoma. A bohemian in the literary and art scene of Greenwich Village, he did so as one of Anais Nin's circle of friends enlisted by her to crank out erotica for this collector. Legman was the intermediary.

I've written about this collector and the writers who supplied him with erotic manuscripts elsewhere in a Part One and Part Two feature. I'm pleased to finally be able to report that the mystery of "Who is N.R. De Maxico" is solved, case closed.

__________

Books by Robert Campbell Bragg: Madman on a Drum (1944), a noir suspense thriller; Color TV, Now or Later?: A Comparative Survey and Analysis of the Several Color Systems and Their Impact on the Industry (1950); Marijuana Girl (1951); Strange Pursuit (1951); Designs (1951), a book about crime, gambling, prostitution; and Private Chauffeur (1952), an aviation thriller.

Images of Madman on a Drum and Private Chauffuer courtesy of Fender Tucker, who has reissued the novels of "N.R. De Mexico" through his Ramble House imprint.