> A new (old?) range of Hank Janson pulps are being
released this year by a
UK
> publisher in hardback form.
>
> The link to the publisher is:
>
>
http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/telos/crime/crime.htm
>
> They sure look like an interesting collection to me,
but I've never read
or
> heard of Hank Janson. Can anyone give me their views
on whether he's well
> worth the read?
Steve: Ah, Hank Janson ...
'Brings back memories to me of well-thumbed paperbacks passed
eagerly but surreptitiously hand to hand in UK barracks-rooms
long ago ... Hank Janson [Stephen D. Francis] was a British
writer of pulp paperbacks that were simply soft-porn tales
under the guise of gangster novels. He wrote a couple of
dozen of them, in a ludicrous "American" style that was even
then seen as hilariously off-key. (Jansen shared this
laughable ineptitude with American accents and slang as did
James Hadley Chase [Rene Raymond] another British wannbe-Yank
author of the time.] In his hey-day - 1946-1956 - Janson
enjoyed large sales in the UK despite his corn-ball writing
style, entirely because of their lipsmacking descriptions of
female bodies and sex scenes that went as far as a British
writer dared to in those days of strict censorship. Finally,
Jansen just managed to avoid criminal prosecution on
pornography charges, by skipping off to live in Spain. I
think his publisher did serve a couple of years in jail on
similar charges. It was amusing to me to see Jansen's name
pop up again half a century after I last read one his
paperbacks. It'll be interesting to see how reprints of his
books sell now. What was considered pretty raunchy in the
'40s would seem tame today compared with the almost
obligatory obscenity in most books nowadays, regardless of
genre. Here's a website about Hank Jansen:
http://www.cuttingsarchive.org.uk/telos/crime/janson.htm
-- Sidney.
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