I’ve had a chance, after so many years, to approach the book with a fresh look and have literally done some much desired revamping. The story has not changed, just the telling of it has been smoothed out and become the book I wanted it to be, short of starting fresh and writing a totally dif-ferent book. But then, I’d have two books instead of one. A somewhat confusing detail that would have forced me to release each under a differ-ent title, for each would be, in reality, a different book.
It was easier, and to me far more desirable, to simply redress this one to suit my fancy.
Hopefully it suits the reader’s fancy, too.
It is about a man name Barry and two women by the names of Joan and Ann. Plus a nasty little man who owned them all, body and soul. It is, also, the story of how they found a path out of the tangled mess their lives had become and…well….
They had all taken the easy road to quick money, only to be trapped in the terrible grip of the body merchants. And freedom would involve mur-der!
And here they are:
Barry: who took the job to make fast money, no questions asked—but piloting a hot cargo of call girls proved too much for him—especially when he discovered love in the arms of the wrong woman.
Joan: who was a professional photographer, over-sexed, craving drink and a man’s caresses—any man’s. She had been sucked in by the good life. Then one night she met Barry, the only man she could ever love.
Ann: the lovely blonde innocent. The image belied her role—mistress of a vicious mobster who needed women as toys and then as products to sell at top dollar as high priced call-girls.
Blacky: who was tough, heartless. He owned all of them, crushing their lives in his evil, cruel grip.
And on a wild plane ride they would finally clash in a dramatic climax to claim redemption and freedom—at a terrible price!
Well, that kinda sets things up.
HOLLYWOOD NYMPH
Okay, another tale of the Hollywood type, but with a bit of a different spin and approach. Sure, it relates how a woman climbs from the bottom rung of the success ladder and moves her way up to the top to get the gold ring. That’s how stories are, generally, organized. A character with a strong enough desire to overcome all the hardships and roadblocks that slam down into place to defeat them! One can never tell, for certain, if the author is leading the reader down the road towards a downbeat ending or to a won-derful illustration of success! The not knowing is what keeps everybody struggling through the jungle of words to the last ones.
In this book I offer up a woman who comes to Hollywood and discov-ers a way to beat a system that devours talent like a hungry tiger. It is over-loaded with too many actors seeking the limited roles being offered. It takes more than just talent, or being at the right place at the right time. It is necessary to have the right connections to succeed in such a tough, compet-itive business. And sometimes it is necessary to do desperate things to cre-ate those connections.
Take Ruth:
She was the plaything of any man willing to promote her! But that was the price for Hollywood Stardom!
There are certain elements which make stars. A little guts, a little luck. But more than that. The willingness to do anything to get on top.
Ruth got there—at a price!
She was destined to conquer Hollywood, the hard way, up through the beds of important men. Hers is the story of a brutal woman who used her body; and who used men like most people drove cars—when one wore out, she picked another.
A frank, honest exposé which strips the silver from the silver screen, revealing the tarnished, perverted by-paths that demand full attention on the road to stardom.
That’s the promo-copy, but in reality I was interested in studying some ideas based on a rumor I’d heard.
There is a very famous star of old, now long dead, who apparently made stag films long before her name was big enough to appear over the title of a film. Once on top it was not only desirable, but desperately im-portant to her, to get those films out of circulation and destroy the nega-tives.
At least, that’s the story I was told as a young lad by my father, who had heard it whispered somewhat loudly. It was a rumor circulating in the film industry.
True or not, I wondered: what kind of woman might actually get sucked into this kind of ugly trap, and how would she get from that nasty beginning to stardom?
So, I wrote the following book.
FLUFF
A word of advice. This collection is called Fluff for a very good reason, which will become clear enough after a while. There is nothing really all that serious here. Just short things that got published for one reason or an-other a number of decades ago. They are illustrative of the so-called “adult” field of the mid-twentieth century.
This is a collection of light seductions published in what was in the 1960s considered girlie magazines. A lot of pictures of partly nude (from the waist up, natch) ladies of breasty development, surrounding stories of equally revealing subject matter. The editorial requirements were tales around 3,000 words that involved at least one lady being shown as bare as possible and then ravished in some way or another, to the delight of the he-ro of the story. In some cases there were short articles, serious and other-wise. But this was the pulp field for beginning writers or full time profes-sionals knocking out pages filled with swiftly typed copy.
And Alex Blake, John Davidson, Stu Rivers, Lex Lexington, C. A. Ning, Alexis Charles, are just a few of the pen names offered up as bylines to confuse and confound the massive audience who generally ignored the words in favor of the lovely visions of half-naked vamps of rather voluptu-ous development that stared out from every page in seductive invitation.
This is where I began my writing career. I offer these stories as an ex-ample of the times, and hopefully some very light fluffy reading for the reader. Most were written during my first year as a writer, for later, once I sold my first pocket book novel, I discovered longer stories were more ide-ally suited to my wordy style. I wrote very little short fiction after that, much of which is now being offered as a separate book by Wildside Press.
It was a grand way to learn how to write and at the same time getting paid hard cash for my efforts.
Here we supply a number of such stories, many of them merely pure seductive fluff, a few with a bit more meat to them. I promise little more than a momentary escape into the fantasyland of seductive females being chased after by desperate young men out to discover the thrill they can share together.
Ah, the magic of it all.
But, never the less, pure fluff.
DIMENSIONS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
The following collection of stories is a result of a number of publishing ventures.
My book Images of Tomorrow was released by Powell Sci-Fi way back in the late 1960s; it contained most of my previously published sci-fi, in-cluding The Ersatz in a somewhat different version than is now being of-fered in book form by Wildside Press (this volume also includes an original story, “The Talisman”).
In Dimensions I’m adding tales that take place in the Past, Present and Future, along with a number of never before published sci-fi stories for the section titled New Dimensions.
A casual glace at the titles in all these “dimensions” reveals my main interest as a writer was in the sci-fi world! But there are a number of other stories which are being offered up here as a cross-section of my writing ca-reer—and reflected by longer works offered by Wildside Press.
I started writing shortly after the pulp craze in the science-fiction world had died down. My agent directed me to what was, at that time, the new “pulp” field: the girlie magazines. Well the top of that line was Playboy, of course, which tended to ignore my literary talents. But I managed to sur-vive to get something like more than four million words in print over the following years. A small number of those words appearing in these maga-zines. (Fluff, also being released by Wildside, is a collection of some thirty such “treasures”—as a light-
hearted illustration of how things were way-back-when in that “pulp field”!) I soon learned, in my second year of writ-ing, that I felt far more comfortable in longer lengths and did most of my writing thereafter in short novel from.
Much of my early experiences in writing and publishing are fairly well covered in the interviews on my website, Haldolen.com. In my Egomania page are the following comments concerning my career:
I was lucky enough not only in selling my work to publishers but also ending up packaging books for some of them, and finally becoming a “pub-lisher” much like those who had bought my first novels. From there it was a simple leap to editing not only a sci-fi anthology, but a line of sci-fi books for Powell Publications. Throughout these active professional years I had the chance to design covers and do graphic layouts for pocket books and magazines.
My father, Albert Augustus Nuetzel, was a professional commercial artist all his life, and he ended up selling a number of covers to sci-fi maga-zines such as Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Famous Monsters of Filmland, plus a number of pocket book covers. We became a team, selling art and manuscripts to publishers and finally being able to make our own deals, and package books. I have used his art on much of the work offered the present publisher.
Hopefully something here will be amusing and entertaining to the read-er.
INTROS THAT NEVER WERE
The following are Introductions done especially for the book “Pocket-book Writer: Confessions of a Commercial Hack” – Wildside Press).
In each case this is material which could not be placed in the books themselves, since each contained an fictionalized Introduction, which was part of the storyline.
So here they are, offering the inside storylines concerning the following books.
TORLO HANNIS OF NOOMAS
I need not tell the obvious about this book. The Introduction in the nov-el was, in reality, a part of the fiction. But of course any normal reader would swiftly come to that conclusion after a bit of reading. Introductions of this nature were common for these kinds of books, and still are to some extent. The illusion is to create a fantasy world around the story about to be related. Of course, the fiction is that my Introduction was fiction, after all, could I possibly allow a lie to be published as fact? Hardly. Natch. Of course. Truth is truth and fiction is fiction and never will the two meet ex-cept in fiction.
Or fictional Introductions.
Now to the factual one.
I was always an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, as I’ve evidenced many times in this book. Maybe “always” stretches my point. Fact is, from the moment I picked up A Princess of Mars I was hooked and sucked in for the life of me, and still clingin’ to those fab cliffhangers. Well, hangin’ by my fingernails, anyway. Fingertips? Well, still hangin’!
There is a link between Slaves of Lomooro and the Noomas books. Un-abashedly, I’ll confess all at this time.
The Lomooro novel was my first sci-fi attempt and it hung in limbo for a while. When I decided to allow it to be run to the printing office of Pow-ell Publications it was just after my father’s death and I assigned my late twin-brother’s name as a pen name to it and dedicated the whole thing to my surviving mother. All an inside kind of thing. But, perhaps, of some minor interest.
This all leads to the fact that there are some elements that were expand-ed on in Torlo Hannis of Noomas (originally published as Warriors of Noomas and Raiders of Noomas but was actually intended to be one story about Torlo Hannis and his romantic adventures that won the woman of his life). This story contained implications that at least a couple of additional books were to follow; which were never written at that time. Right now Slavegirl of Noomas is in the process of being polished off, to be presented as an original novel for Wildside Press release, at the publisher’s request. It is the in-between book of what might simply be called “The Noomas Trilo-gy” since a third novel is planned in the near future to round out this series. Both of these latter novels are being done in collaboration with Heidi Gar-rett, a woman who has been a great help in converting many of these newly revamped versions of books lost in time, which Wildside Press has been reprinting. In the development of original material it became a total collab-oration and a delight to write with her.
But I think I’ve gotten off of the track.
The Noomas books took some elements from the Lomooro novel and in effect were a revamping and revision and reworking and out-right stealing of the material that became more fully offered up in this novel.
The desert raiders were a major bit of grabbin’ for greater development. This is not to degrade the Lomooro novel, but merely to point out how a writer can take from the vast universe of literary works by all kinds of writ-ers and genres and even from himself (or herself, depending on the sexual dedication of the author) to be adapted in a new and hopefully fresh way.
I always wanted to finish the Noomas saga and am delighted that Rob-ert Reginald, who originally convinced me to do so, came across an ideal method of doing just that!
So Torlo Hannis of Noomas is now the first of the Noomas Trilogy be-ing offered by Wildside Press, and I think I’m gonna be delighted with the results.
The saga of Torlo was concluded in two books, written recently with Heidi Garrett: “Slavegirl of Noomas” and “Conquest of Noomas” – that latter a 500 page smashing closer to the Noomas Chronicles.
HOLLYWOOD MYSTERIES
Hollywood, oh, Hollywood, that down and dirty city of vice and sin made movie making famous the world over. The mysteries in this book were fashioned out of true-life murders in Hollywood that were never, real-ly fully resolved. The original version, titled Whodunit? Hollywood Style, was done on assignment for the short-lived publisher, Book Company of America.
There is a lot I could say about the book and the publisher, pro and con. It all happened as a result of a woman who knew one of those involved with BCOA and introduced my father to the publisher as a possible cover-artist. An interesting turn of events, as it developed. For Dad recommended his son as a writer! Well, talk about reverse recommendations! I’d literally been responsible for promoting all of his cover work, since the first sci-fi magazine covers right through to the final ones he would do for Powell Publications shortly before his death in 1969, one month, almost to the day, of man’s setting foot on the moon.
I could run the previous Introduction to the Hollywood book here, since it was a true Intro, but figured it would be nicer to simply create this new one, in order to give some background material that is not evident in the book itself.
So, back to the story. The publisher offered me a contract on a book about Hollywood. They set the subject matter and theme. And thus this came about. There’s a short publishing history involved with it.
First it came out as:
Whodunit? Hollywood Style.
Then it was released in Europe as part of a hardcover book (which also contained two fiction novels on Hollywood), in both French and Dutch.
Later, I had it republished here as Hollywood Mysteries, minus the Thelma Todd chapter.
Now it is called:
True Stories of Scandal and Hollywood Mysteries, fully revamped and updated, including once again the Thelma Todd section.
Always fun and games to play with things that were once polished off and now can be viewed with fresh eyes. Not everyone has this delightful opportunity to take advantage of a second (or third or fourth?) rewrite to make much-desired improvements.
And thus it is that one ends up tampering with projects from the past and making them even “better” for the present and future.
Hopefully so. Of course.
But the Hollywood book has a couple of extra little follow-up events after its original publication. I was still living in Hollywood—of all plac-es—at the time of its writing and publication, when I got a phone-call that was somewhat “unnerving” to say the least. The voice on the other end was furious!
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This event related to the following:
I’d mentioned, within the framework of the book, that fans would many times rather have their heroes survive death, even if ending up as basket-cases hidden away from public view and/or awareness of their continued existence in such a terrible physical condition. Heck, even famous long-time surviving actresses, such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, to name just two, who had been famous for their beauty in films tended to, over the years, fade away from public view. They didn’t want the public to see ravages of age that had distorted their images of youth that had made them so famous on film. They wanted to preserve their reputation as young and lovely.
I told the story of Glenn Miller’s reported death during World War II. His big band was famous previous to the war and ultimately its music be-came the very theme that represented those war years in the public mind. He had joined the Army in order to bring his music to the troops, thereby he’d organized a fantastic band of top-flight musicians who had either joined or been drafted into the armed services. This organization had the pick of musicians; many who survived to become famous on their own in later years! Glenn Miller was reported as missing in action. His body was never recovered. And the theories concerning his death have remained just that: a mystery. The generally accepted conclusion was he was shot down over the ocean between London and Paris by enemy or friendly fire—the latter being the most reasonably considered modern theory. But one of the popular theories over the years by fans who were in denial as to his actual fate, suggested the famous band leader was really existing somewhere, a basket case, hidden from public view, claiming death, rather than letting anybody know the truth. I reported this latter as one of those horrid distor-tions and offered it as a prime example of how people simply refused to accept such tragic deaths of their heroes. Instead they came up with these kinds of nightmarish concepts.