Flesh Avenger is one of the "missing 38" Harry Whittington novels, finally brought back from the depths of obscurity by David Laurence Wilson and Lynn Munroe. You can read all about it here. I haven't completed my collection of Whittington novels, but I'm working on it. I still have four or five of these formerly missing novels to go. All were published under various house names shared by a number of writers. In this case, Whittington was J. X. Williams.
Like so many of the softcore porn novels of the late '50s and '60s, this one's a dark crime story. Jim Devlin has just been released from prison, where he's served 8 years for something he didn't do, something that resulted in the death of his wife. Now he's returned to the small town where it happened, determined to find out why three women lied on the witness stand and got him sent to prison. And why his wife died.
Devlin is relentless in pursuit of the answers, no matter how many people try to stop him and no matter what the consequences are for everyone concerned, including himself. His life no longer means anything to him. Only his revenge matters. Naturally in a book like this, the revenge-taking involves sex. Lots of sex. But it's all integral to the plot. Well, maybe not, but most of it is. Sort of.
Speaking of the plot, it's not going to be a great strain on anyone to figure out pretty much what's going on as soon as the culprits are introduced, but the book is very readable, anyway. Nobody ever depicted raw emotion better than Whittington, and this book is packed with it. And when it came to moving a plot along, Whittington was also tops. I probably won't read all or even most of the missing 38 books that I have, but now and then I can't resist picking up something by Whittington. This time, Flesh Avenger was the one.
Edwina Mark, The Sinful One, Hillman, 1959
Perhaps you've said to yourself at one time or another, "I know Crider's crazy, but how crazy is he?" Well, here's one example. The other day I was cruising eBay, and I ran across this book. The price was $3.95, and there were no bidders. It was an unread copy.
Now I have a copy of this book already. It was given to me years ago by Harry Whittington, who wrote it as "Clay Stuart." I'd never read it, but there is was on the shelf. I didn't need another one. Still, here's one for $3.95, and nobody wants it. Could I let it just go, unloved and unwanted? No, of course I couldn't. So I bid $3.95, fully expecting someone to overbid me and save me the money. Nobody did, so it was mine. I figured that must be a sign that I should read it, which I did almost as soon as it arrived.
The plot's a familiar one. There are two brothers, one of whom leaves the old homestead to seek his fortune, though he remains half owner. He returns to find that his brother is now married and a drunk who's let the place run down to almost nothing. Whit, the returning brother, decides to save the farm and falls for his brother's wife, who's been sleeping with the mortgage holder so she and her husband can stay on the farm when he forecloses. Living there also are the old family retainer and his sexy daughter. And then there's Whit's fiancee who shows up so Whit can rape her. That's right. I guess you have to remember that this is 1964 and the sympathetic protagonist can do that kind of thing, especially in a Beacon book. And of course it turns out that the fiancee loves it, so maybe that made it more acceptable 50 years ago. I have a feeling scenes like this one were fairly common in books of this type. This being 2013, however, it's repugnant any way you look at it. I wouldn't expect anybody to want to read the book, knowing ahead of time what was going to happen.
There's enough plot in this book for an another 100 pages, but Whittington wraps it all up (way too easily and quickly) in 154. As is typical of Whittington's work, the hackneyed plot becomes compulsively readable in his hands, but that one scene is so off-putting that I can't recommend the book.
