CAN: Yes. Forry gave me Curtis Harrington’s script and said “Do a novelization of this screenplay.” I did it in ten days. I’d take one page of the script and expand it into three pages of manuscript.
BAE: At the same time Greenleaf Classics published Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead. Wood of course has become a cult figure today as the director of the worst movies ever made. Did you know, or ever work with, Edward D. Wood, Jr.?
CAN: I don’t think so.
BAE: He did a book for Powell, Mama’s Diary by Dick Trent (Powell PP-129).
CAN: I remember the name. Never worked with him. I worked mainly with the publishers like Zentner and Pike and distributor Warner. And then Gershenson at Book Company of America. I did two books for him, the Hollywood book (Whodunit? Hollywood Style, Book Co. of America 008) and an anthology, If This Goes On.
BAE: I noticed the cover of If This Goes On (Book Co. of America 015) lists Ray Bradbury as a contributor, and the acknowledgments page lists a Bradbury story called “Almost the End of the World.” But there’s no Bradbury story in the book.
CAN: I submitted the book with the story in it and to this day I don’t know how they managed not to get it in there. I learned about it the first time I thumbed through the printed book at a newsstand. I didn’t even know it had been published. At that time the publisher was having great financial difficulty. They didn’t want anyone to know about it, but that’s why they weren’t paying up front. So they rushed the book out and I didn’t get the page proofs I was supposed to see. If I had seen those page proofs I would have caught the missing story right away! No one got paid. I have an angry letter here in my files from Asimov about how they treated him. The only writers who got paid were Scott Meredith’s clients, because he screamed bloody murder at the publisher all the way from New York. So Marion Zimmer Bradley and Fredric Brown were the only ones who got their checks before the publisher went out of business. Gershenson was a neat guy when the money was flowing. I got the check for the Hollywood book right away. And Dad did a cover for the van Vogt book for him (Planets for Sale, Book Co. of America 0113).
BAE: Their first book was by Alvin H. Gershenson. Is that the same guy?
CAN: That’s the guy. He was a lawyer, and something of a..... Well, everything he had was leased. He had a home in Beverly Hills, cars, offices, all leased. He didn’t trust anybody. The company went out of business and he suddenly disappeared. It turned out everything he appeared to own had all been leased.
BAE: That was the end of Book Company of America. Did you know any of their other writers? Woodrow Olivetti.
CAN: Didn’t know him but I was told he got his pen name from his typewriter. I knew Bill Stroup. He lived down in Hermosa Beach then. In fact I sold his book to Gershenson.
BAE: Ah yes, The Mark of Pak San Ri (Book Co. of America 010). Charles, even with the Bradbury story missing and even though the compa-ny immediately went under, If This Goes On remains one of your greatest achievements. What a line-up for an anthology: Richard Matheson, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, A. E. van Vogt....
CAN: The van Vogt story was rewritten for this anthology. I asked him to update it and change the theme to prejudice. The idea behind the book being “if this goes on, this is what will happen.” That idea run through eve-ry story.
BAE: In addition to the story under your own byline, you reprinted “A Very Cultured Taste” under one of your pseudonyms, George Frederic.
CAN: Right. First book appearance. Oh, by the way, Heinlein really didn’t like our title. He had written a piece called “If This Goes On…”. His agent wrote back saying the only story Heinlein would even consider sub-mitting was “If This Goes On,” a 70,000-word novel! HE was really angry. There was an awful lot of touchiness ’bout titles then. Nobody seems to care now. I really didn’t steal that one from Heinlein. I liked that concept and couldn’t see any other way of saying it. I thought it could have been developed into a TV series at the time. But the Book Company of America was in the process of going bankrupt.
BAE: None of the other authors got paid?
CAN: I don’t think I was the only one who got shafted. As far as I know. But that was at the end. At the beginning; it was great. It started with Dad. A friend knew Gershenson and contacted Dad to do covers. This one time it was reversed: Dad got me the job. They contracted me to do the Hollywood book. Powell later reprinted it (Hollywood Mysteries, Powell PP-133).
BAE: It was in the late ’60s, after the books for Gershenson and Hamling, that you began doing the Powell Books.
CAN: I was doing a series of case history sex books as Carson Davis for Venice Publishing, and the publisher, Dick Sherwin, sent me over to his partner, the distributor, Bill Trotter. We were talking and I showed him If This Goes On. He wrote my name down and told me he was going to go into publishing on his own. Months later he called me and said he needed books. That time we talked for an hour and I walked out with a packaging deal to edit a series of science fiction books for him to be called Powell Sci-Fi. I was given total control.
BAE: Like the Scorpions, a complete package deal. But how did Trot-ter become Powell Books? Why not just Trotter Books like Bob Pike did with Pike Books?
CAN: Trotter was a direct descendant of the Powell who explored the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell—that Powell. First Trotter was doing sex books he called Tiger Books. He couldn’t match my price for original manuscripts so I said, “Fine, we’ll give you reprints, as long as we agree my Dad’s doing all the covers.” So I would take one of my old books and expand it out a bit. I’d send the book to a typist to be typed out and told her to list any pages that were suited for expansion. I’d get the thing back with the notes and expand those pages. Trotter never saw anything until it was printed.
BAE: You successfully recycled most of your earlier books.
Give us an example of a rewrite for Powell.
CAN: (picking up two books) Well, here’s one: Blowout by Donald Franklyn (Powell PP-111). This is the same book as Red Light Campus (Pillow Book 109) by Fred MacDonald. It was expanded. The market had become more pornographic at that time. More risqué. [That’s French for dir-tay.] So we did a line of these, and I tried to give him some quality books for the science fiction line. The term sci-fi came from Forry, he’d coined it years before, so I thought “Powell Sci-Fi, sounds like a good idea.”
BAE: It was a great idea. Even though most modern SF fans discount the phrase sci-fi, there are many collectors who cherish all of the Powell Books.
CAN: Bill Trotter was a fun guy to work with. He sent me a check eve-ry week and I sent him two books every month. My goal was quality. When Boris Karloff died, I tried to get Trotter to do a book on Karloff. He called up his wholesalers across the country, and they didn’t know who Karloff was. He was just a dead actor. Forry could have had the thing at the printers within one month of Karloff’s death. So Forry sold it to Ace Books and dedicated it to Bill Trotter and me (laughs). Sort of a jab at Trotter.
BAE: One of the quality books you did as packager at Powell was a re-print of Harlan Ellison’s Memos from Purgatory (Powell PP-154).
CAN: I was doing both quality books (the science fiction line) and the sex book reprints for Powell, so I jumped at the chance every time I could do something of quality. I also thought we should reprint Ellison’s Gentle-man Junkie. That was the name of the other one, wasn’t it?
BAE: Yes. Ellison wrote those two books when he was the editor at Regency Books in Evanston, Illinois. His publisher there was William Hamling.
CAN: I had a budget of half his asking price to reprint Gentleman Junk-ie. I remember sitting in his living room while he was finishing his intro-duction to the Powell reprint of Memos from Purgatory. I said, “How about such-and-such a price?” and he said, “NO!!” and that was the end of that negotiation.
BAE: That was a nice touch, having Ellison himself write the new intro.
CAN: That was part of the deal. So was his cover photo. I tried to make him look like the gan
g members in his book, posing him wearing sunglasses and a black leather jacket. So Harlan supplied us with a new introduction for the 1968 audience. I did the same thing with the Bloodstone book (Godman by Stuart Byrne writing as John Bloodstone, Powell PP-205). Byrne said “Why don’t you write the introduction? “and I said, “Why don’t you do it?” So Byrne wrote it, as Byrne, as if Bloodstone was an old friend of his. We had fun doing gags like that. I used to write cover lines for the….
BAE: Donald E. Westlake did the same thing on his book Comfort Sta-tion by J. Morgan Cunningham.
CAN: The cover artist Bill Hughes did something like that on Slaves of Lomooro (Powell PP-189). I wrote that one under the pen name Albert Au-gustus, Jr. That had been my twin brother’s name. Dad’s full name was Al-bert Augustus Nuetzel. I picked that pen name right after Dad died.... Any-way, Bill Hughes came in to do the covers after Dad’s death. On the back covers I’d write all these cover lines. This one has a quote from Morris Chapnick.
BAE: One of Forry Ackerman’s many pseudonyms.
CAN: Right, that was Forry, but I wrote most of these quotes with his OK. So I gave Bill all the lines and when I saw the finished paste-ups, he’d added one!
BAE: There’s a blurb at the bottom of the back cover of Slaves of Lomooro recommending this book by William A. Hughes, who of course also did the great cover art.
CAN: He was a great graphics man as well as an artist. After Jungle Jungle (Powell PP-162) came out, he called me and pointed out that he had put six fingers on one hand of the hero on the cover.
BAE: This is a great cover, but you’re right. He’s holding a gun, pre-sumably with a hidden thumb, but there are five long fingers sticking out as well.
CAN: Bill Hughes also came up with the title. It collects two stories about the jungle, so he said call it Jungle Jungle. He had read that repetitive titles stick in the mind, and he was right. We used to rush these books out, which is why you’ll find a word misspelled on the back of Images of To-morrow (Powell PP-135). “Androids” came out “androids.”
BAE: I notice Images of Tomorrow has an intro by Forrest J Ackerman and a cover blurb by Morris Chapnick.
CAN: A lot of the Powell Sci-Fi series was a two-man effort by Ackerman and Nuetzel. Images also has a cover by my father. Last one he ever did. It’s my favorite, actually.
BAE: He also did covers under the name Albet. Victor Berch thinks he got that name by combining the first two letters of his name with the first three letters of your mother’s.
CAN: Betty. That’s right. Very clever how you guys figure things out. Dad pronounced it Al-bay.
BAE: Blowout takes place in Davidson City and one of your pen names is John Davidson. Does that name have some special meaning?
CAN: I’ve often wondered where I came up with that pen name. John, I know, is for my cousin. Where I got Davidson I don’t know. I was using it before John Davidson, the singer. He stole it from me! When you start creating pen names, you are creating contractions and expansions. Short-ening or turning your own name around. It’s more fun creating a pen name than a book. Because you get to create a new author. After I’d written a million words as Carson Davis, even I had trouble remembering which one I was. Not really, but you do create a whole persona.
BAE: Another prolific writer at that time was Charles E. Fritch. Did you know him?
CAN: Only met him a few times. Very nice man. I packaged his book Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (Powell PP-1967).
BAE: When you say “packager”; is that the same thing as an editor?
CAN: It’s more than that. A packager many times packages books for various distributors. He gets everything together, sends it to the printer and pays everybody. Some packagers refer to themselves as the publisher. I don’t consider Powell my publication, but Powell Sci-Fi was all “mine” that first year. The editor only edits the manuscript. The packager might hire an editor, or do it himself as I did. At one time I did all of the layouts and did a lot of the graphics. I got so good at it that when Leo Margulies came out here he hired me just to do cover graphics. I did Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine for a year, and also Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine.
BAE: Thoris was going to be your next book when Powell went out of business. It was never published but you have the cover proof here. May we reprint it with our interview?
CAN: Sure. It was supposed to be the first in a series. I had already written part of the second book. Actually this first one was a reprint of Swordmen of Vistar (Powell PP-121). Bill Hughes did this cover.
BAE: I notice he signed it in hieroglyphics. Can you translate the hi-eroglyphics on the back cover for us?
CAN: It says “This story has to be read to be believed. I suggest you read it for yourself.—Charles Nuetzel.”
BAE: It would have been Powell 1018N. You also edited Rubicon
Books.
CAN: I only did the last four Rubicon Books. The artist Bill Hughes lined it up. He was doing covers for them. As packager I tried to get relia-ble professionals who had written in other fields but could also write sex books. For example, Stu Byrne did one for me. The publisher wanted a more literary market. It seemed to me the writer who best met all our re-quirements was Philip José Farmer. He had done those kinds of books be-fore: his science-fiction novel The Lovers, and the Essex House books.
BAE: And the Beacons.
CAN: I got his number from Forry and called with an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he did a book for me. There was a pen name on it I’ve forgot-ten. But then Rubicon went out of business. Somehow the book got to Brandon House and they published it, under Farmer’s real name, as Love Song (Brandon House 6134).
BAE: And they put a boring cover on it. No cover art. It’s a shame you didn’t publish it at Rubicon because those books all feature sensational co-vers by Bill Hughes, which we will show with this interview. Do you re-member the authors behind the pseudonyms of the Rubicon Books you packaged?
CAN: The first one, Eroto-Therapy by Lyle Masters (Rubicon 1009) was already contracted when I went to work for them. I don’t know the author. Nymphette by James Z. Muntz (Rubicon 1010) was written by an Englishman named Peter Crowcroft. He was an actor, right at that time he was filming On a Clear Day You Can See Forever with Barbra Streisand. Swapping Singles (Rubicon 1011), “edited by Howard Dare,” was Stu Byr-ne. Sweet Kiss of Youth (Rubicon 1012), “edited by Geoffrey Neil,” was written by Jim Bellah.
BAE: Not James Warner Bellah?
CAN: No, another Jim Bellah. Then we were set to do the Farmer book next.
BAE: I’d like to show these Rubicon covers by Bill Hughes in addition to a sampling of your books. We can’t find any paperbacks with your name on them after 1970. What happened?
CAN: My last book was a hardcover, Last Call for the Stars, published by Lenox Hill in 1971. My title was Adapt or Die [now published by Wildside Press]. They cut 20,000 words. It was also published in England and in Italy. There is no English-language paperback edition. (A later reli-gious book, Now the Time, had been written twenty years earlier.) At that time I stopped writing for the adult market.
BAE: There were a lot of changes in the adult book world
around 1970.
CAN: A lot of changes. There was a recession and several of my pub-lishers went out of business. The sex market also changed drastically. Got a lot more raunchy. The books I wrote are very tame compared to what came out later.
BAE: Why did you stop writing in 1971?
CAN: I dropped dead! No, seriously, there were many reasons that all snowballed. Writing is a brain-bashing process. You have to be obsessed with wanting to sell, and obsessed with wanting to say something. So ob-sessed that you’d pay any price for it. and money’s no longer an issue. Ex-cept that you have to be paid to make the writing legitimate. Vanity press books don’t count. When you find someone who is willing to pay for it. then it counts. Getting it in print is what it’s all about. wanting to say some-thing to the public. How you say it depends on what the market demand
s. In the sex field, you wrote what you had to write. I started writing what I wanted to write about, not for a contract. That was mistake #1. Write what’s commercial. If you can’t, forget it. There’s a difference between an author and a writer between an artist and a hack. Stopping writing is a slow process. I burned out doing so much in 1969. I’d written five million words. When I turned forty I stopped drinking and stopped writing. I had already moved out of Los Angeles. When I had said everything I wanted to say, I stopped.
Charles Nuetzel lives in California with his wife of thirty years, Brigitte. A “self-styled hack writer,” Nuetzel found work in other occupations. He keeps a business card to remind himself. It says “Charles Nuetzel—Retired Author.”
* * * * * * *
The above text was published in a publication for collectors of pocket-books: Books Are Everything, Vol. 6, No.1, Whole Number 25. The pub-lisher used the cover of my Swordmen of Vistar for the cover. At the bot-tom of the Contents page the publisher wrote:
This twenty-fifth issue of Books Are Everything is dedicated to Charles A. Nuetzel. A shy, self-style writer who has certainly left an indelible mark on vintage paperback collection…. Many thanks from all the thousands of collectors of vintage paperbacks.
A very nice tribute, I thought.
2. AN E-MAIL INTERVIEW WITH
CHARLES NUETZEL
by
Charles A. Gramlich
The following text is taken from an interview done over the Internet, via e-mail.
Razored Zen Interview: Charles Nuetzel is the author of numerous books and stories, including a number of Heroic Fantasy novels like War-riors of Noomas, Raiders of Noomas, and Swordmen of Vistar. His The Slaves of Lomooro, another Heroic Fantasy, was published under the byline Albert Augustus, Jr. Mr. Nuetzel wrote under other pen names as well, as many as thirty of them, and says that he has turned out “more or less” a hundred books—depending on how you count major rewrites and/or altered reprints. His career officially started in and around 1960 and ended sometime between 1970+ to 1980 (or never), though most of his published material saw print between 1960-71. His agent was Forrest—Forry—Ackerman, who was, perhaps, best known for Famous Monsters of Filmland. This interview was conducted over the Internet, using e-mail, and will be published in two parts. The first part will deal more with personal issues, and the second will look at Mr. Nuetzel’s professional relationship with Powell Publications and similar topics. I greatly appreciate Mr. Nuetzel’s time in answering my questions, which are indicated by RZ for Razored Zen. Mr. Nuetzel’s answers are signaled by CAN. Any editorial comments or added words are surrounded by brackets.