Showing posts with label Tracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tracy. Show all posts

22 April 2025

The Man with the Midas Touch



Sword of Desire
Robert W. Tracy [Alvin Schwartz]
New York: Arco, 1952
176 pages

As far as I can tell, "Fort Crime!" is the first Alvin Schwartz story I ever read. It concerns a criminal organization that uses heavy artillery in committing crimes. Superman, Batman, and Robin figure.


"Fort Crime!" first appeared in published in World's Finest Comics #71 (September-October, 1954). I read the story when it was reprinted twenty years later in World's Finest Comics #224 (August 1974).


Alvin Schwartz had long since walked away from comics by the time I caught up with him, but in 1954, when "Fort Crime!" first appeared he was still very active in writing for the comics. He was just as active in 1952, the year Sword of Desire saw print, churning out stories for Batman, SuperboySuperman, and the Superman daily comic strip.

Sword of Desire is not for children. It opens on the meeting of a senate committee looking into a "white slave" syndicate. The most recent witness, a woman who wore a clinging black silk dress and "gracile lizard skin pumps" – much is made of this – has been found naked and dead in a vacant lot. Senator Kingarden, who heads the committee, has had enough:
"Let's stop acting like a collection of sanctimonious old women poking Puritanically around the outer edges of wickedness. Let's be realistic and recognize that you don't investigate a crime by turning up your noses at the smell. If it's our business to legislate, then we can't afford to be so refined that we regard our noses as mere facial ornamentation. We've got, if I may say so, a genuine stink on our hands and the sooner we use the natural organs that God gave us for dealing with it, the sooner we'll get results."
Tough talk, though it is clear that Kingarden has no intention of bringing fellow senators' noses or other organs an inch closer than need be. Instead, he proposes that psychoanalyst Dr Genorius Veresi be brought in to help with the investigation by going undercover as a john. There is some pushback from committee members, though not nearly so much as one might expect.

"One of those rare geniuses of healing that has come out of the new schools of psychology which regard sex as the basis of all man's inner desires," Veresi is a controversial figure who employs unorthodox methods. Schwartz hints that the doctor restricts his practice to married women who have little or no sexual desire. The doctor's treatment, which comes from years of intense study, involves a fleeting touch that unleashes sexual desire.

It's not what you think, nor is it wear you think. In the first case, Veresi grazes the underside of a patient's wrist.  

Consider it a superpower. The doctor uses it to induce women in the syndicate to reveal all.

There were many points at which I nearly gave up on this novel. The whole thing seemed so silly and, to be completely honest, the sex scenes were mild in the extreme. Still, I'm glad I made the effort.

It was, I think, in "Contact Two," the sixth chapter of sixteen, that something twigged. I recalled something about Wilhelm Reich, "orgone energy," and "orgone theory," which were all the rage in the post-war years. I'm fairly certain I skimmed over something about it all in university. I next came upon a 2005 online response to a query in which Schwartz describes Sword of Desire as a "take-off on Reichian Orgone psychology." That he seemingly felt the need to explain suggests limited appeal for today's reader, Reichians excluded. 

I will say that after "Contact Two" things really begin to pick up, even for those who know little of Reichian theory. It's here that Sword of Desire becomes a true detective story.

As might be expected, a woman proves to be both Veresi's Kryptonite and his Lois Lane.


Sword of Desire was read for the 1952 Club, co-hosted by Kaggsy and SimonOther books from 1952 I've read and reviewed here over the years include:

Of these, the one I most recommend is Vanish in an Instant, which is one of my very favourite Margaret Millar novels. She wrote so many!


I would be remiss in not also praising Murder Over Dorval by the mysterious David Montrose (Charles Ross Graham), which I helped return to print as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. Coincidentally, I'm now involved in reissuing another of the titles listed above.


More to come! 

Object:
A red hardcover wrapped in a jacket with uncredited illustration. The novel itself is followed by  several pages of Arco promo material, six of which flog "ARCO SOPHISTICATES." The first title listed is Touchable, Schwartz's 1951 Arco collaboration with Lee Scott. It's the first Alvin Schwartz novel I ever read.

Access: Published once, then never again, McMaster and the University of Toronto have it in their holdings.

I purchased my copy two years ago as part of a lot of twelve Arco books. There were only two I wanted, the other being Alvin Schwartz's Man Maid (New York: Arco, 1952), but the price was right at an even US$100. At the time, two copies of Sword of Desire were listed online, the cheaper being US$100!

Never mind! As I write this, just one copy of Sword of Desire is listed for sale online. The price is a mere seven quid! Get it while you can!

Related posts:

20 November 2023

An Alvin Schwartz Cover Cavalcade



Alvin Schwartz's debut novel, The Blowtop, was published in 1946 by Dial Press. It followed dozens of shorter works, including: "His Lordship's Double" (Batman #21), "Superman's Search for Clark Kent" (Superman #32), "The Toughest School in the World" (Superboy #10), and at least eight comic romance stories titled "A Date With Judy" (A Date With Judy #1-3).

I've not read The Blowtop, but it sounds right up my alley:


Le Cinglé, its French translation, was a bestseller overseas.

Le Cinglé
Paris: L'élan, 1950

Schwartz wrote or co-wrote six other novels, all of which were issued as "Sophisticates" by Arco, a publisher previously known for The Handy Manual of House Care and Repair (1949) and How to Win Prize Contests (1950). I've read and written about a couple of Schwartz's Sophisticates, Touchable and Hot Star, but I'm not sure I'll bother with the others. They're becoming increasingly rare, increasingly expensive, and... well, truth be told, those I have tackled haven't been terribly interesting. To be frank, I'd much rather read "The Superwoman of Metropolis!", which Schwartz wrote for Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #8.  

Do not be fooled by the publisher's descriptions, Arco Sophisticates promise much more than they deliver: 

Sinful Daughter
New York: Arco, 1951
SINFUL DAUGHTER is different, unlike any book Jack Woodford has ever written. Sabra is the daughter who tries to tear herself away from her mother's wickedness because she fears her own weakness and voluptuous nature. Reared amid scenes of splendor and debauchery, she has never succumbed to temptation. To avoid trouble she submerges herself in mediocrity and through error finally discovers the right way of life for her. A very exciting book.
Touchable
New York: Arco, 1951
From young Arch Rader, Ruth learned of passion. From Blackie Dawson she learned of love. From Mike, the bartender, she learned of bestial lust, and its unexplainable allure. From Tony, the lesbian, she learned of the strange, exotic, frightening fasination of abnormal relations. From Bruno she learned the utter depths of degradation. And from Clare, she learned the terror, the hopeless despair of dope. And at the last, out of this inferno, which had her helpess in its grip, she learned the possibility of redemption... from herself.
City Girl
New York: Arco, 1951
You may know a number of girls in the city, but you've never met anyone like Clio Haven. Never, that is, unless you travelled with the bootlegging set of Prohibition Chicago. Clio was a bootlegger's girl; bootlegging was Clio's security. Then in walked Bob, Logan, and half the Chicago police force to help her change her mind. it would make any girl wonder if it's safe to be desirable.

Sword of Desire
New York: Arco, 1952
Big City corruption and gambling successfully withstand a Senate Committee investigation, until psychiatrist Dr. Varesi's mysterious power works to reveal the secrets of the women involved. The ironic result is as unusual as it is intriguing.
Hot Star
New York: Arco, 1952
Maybe the thing that happened to Betty Frenck could happen to any young actress. She became a star of illegitimate pictures; became, too, a creature of desire and passion, caught in the magical spell of Director Perepoint's talent, and a victim of Producer Kern's contempt for all women. Whatever your opinion of her, you're sure to agree that there's never been a HOT STAR like Betty, either in or out of pictures. 
Man Made
New York: Arco, 1952
Man Maid is a bit of a mystery; all I've ever seen is its cover. 

I like to think that Alvin Schwartz made good money with Arco, but have my doubts. Late in life, he wrote two memoirs, of a kind, which may or may not support my skepticism. The first, An Unlikely Prophet, went through two editions. Originally self-published, the second edition replaces the subtitle and cover to emphasise his work with DC.

An Unlikely Prophet: Revelations on the Path Without Form
[np]: Divina, 1997
An Unlikely Prophet:
A Metaphysical Memoir by the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman

Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006

A Gathering of Selves: The Spiritual Journey of the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006) was his last published work.


Alvin Schwartz died five years later. By all accounts, he left this world from his Chesterville home, roughly fifty kilometres southeast of downtown Ottawa. 

Alvin Schwartz
17 November 1919, New York, New York
28 October 2011, Chesterville, Ontario
RIP
Who am I kidding.

Researching this piece, I happened upon a Minnesota bookseller who was selling a lot of twelve "erotic" books at a price that amounts to fifteen dollars apiece. Sword of Desire and Man Maid were two of the twelve.

I bought the twelve for those two.

You knew I would.

Related posts:

13 November 2023

Dick Tricks Chicks Into Hot Pix!


Hot Star
Robert W. Tracy [Alvin Schwartz]
New York: Arco, 1952
179 pages


Betty and Bob's honeymoon was a disaster, but don't blame the bride. Bob had been burned – their nuptial room didn't even feature a bath – yet he couldn't bring himself to complain to the front desk. The clerk had spotted him as a virgin, and Bob wasn't about to subject himself to further humiliation. Betty too had been a virgin. She'd imagined their wedding night as one of romance, sensuality, and tender passion, only to have her groom become a pouty, demanding man-child:

"I thought when we talked it over you understood – that a man's got to... Oh why can't you be sensible about it, Betty? You – you act as though I'm not your husband. Haven't I got a right after all this waiting? What are you trying to do – torture me more?
There would be no dinner, no dancing, and no time to change into something more comfortable.

Flash forward two weeks. The couple are still married, if not entirely happily. Bob works the assembly line at the Ross Machinery Company, while Betty spends her days keeping their tiny rented home. Her nights are spent warding off Bob's advances – often unsuccessfully – "wondering if that was all sex was; something for a man to enjoy."

Betty's dreams of becoming a professional actress make life somewhat bearable – what's more, it gets her out of the house. Cast as the lead in a community theatre production of Anna, a drama about a boozy floozy, she researches the role by pulling up a stool at a local bar. Lest anything go wrong, Bob sits in the adjoining dining room.

A handsome man in brown gaberdine topcoat buys Betty a highball. Betty is certain he's trying to pick her up, until he introduces himself as Carl Perepoint, a director at Experimental Motion Picture Studios: "You don't mean you are interested in me as-as – Oh, no! I can't believe it."

In fact, Perepoint was trying to pick her up, but Betty's mention of nearby Bob put an end to that.

And what of Bob? What is his dream? Well, he hopes to one day leave the assembly line for a career as a comic strip artist. If anything, this is an even more uncommon occupation than professional actress, but it would've been familiar to Alvin Schwartz, who between 1942 and 1959 wrote for DC Comics. Bizarro Superman was one of his creations.

I make a point in mentioning this because the introduction of Perepoint propels Hot Star along a path in which we find tropes belonging to comics' Golden Age. Consider Experimental Motion Picture Studios, which is located in a failed amusement park and is owned by a mysterious crime syndicate.

Perepoint would have Betty believe that Experimental is just that – experimental – and is the latest venture of an unnamed Hollywood studio. He takes advantage of the newlywed's naïveté to score footage of her in the flesh, assuring the actress that that this "professional screen test" is an industry standard: "It's very simple Betty... Before we invest money in a girl, we must know her figure as an artist would know it."

Hot Star isn't exactly hot stuff, but then no Arco Sophisticate is. Ellipses serve to suggest.

Perepoint provides Betty with coffee and cigarettes spiked with a drug that promotes sexual arousal. As the it takes effect, he puts on a record, Festival of Aphrodite, and Betty strips.

The girl can't help it.

From this point on, Betty acts as a Pavlovian bitch, becoming aroused whenever the music plays. 

Remove the sex and drugs from these dance scenes and you have an ideal tale for Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane. A better story, buried within the early chapters, involves Frank Legault, who works the assembly line beside Bob: "He was a powerfully built, blond young man of thirty-one and, despite he handicap of his artificial legs, could stand up at a bench or drilling press for hours."

Frank lost his lower limbs in the war. He peddles pornographic photos  on the side and has started screening spicy films at the local union hall with the goal of earning enough money to open a small novelty store. His wife wants to help, but her vision is failing. She's learning Braille.

Frank's is not as sophisticated a story as Betty and Bob's, but isn't it the one you'd rather read? Is it not more real?

I've always preferred Earth-One to Bizarro World.


Favourite passage: Questions regarding punctuation, capitalization, and more are best left addressed to the Arco editor. 

He told her that he was going to star her in an adaptation of the Madame Bovary classic, with emphasis on nude love scenes. "especially that scene in the garden where Madame Bovary keeps a tryst with her new lover, while her husband is asleep inside. How does that appeal to you Betty?"
     "I've always wanted to play Madame Bovary," she said.

Trivia: Though Hot Star was published sixteen years before Alvin Schwartz left the United States for Canada, there is Canadian content. The second night of Betty and Bob's honeymoon takes place in Montreal: 

Their so awfully disappointing second night, when they drank wine, and Bob, instead of becoming an exciting lover under its influence, only became silly and had burst out laughing even while he... until what might have been glorious fulfillment to their romance had become a joke... on her. This stranger, or that Frenchman, she felt sure, would have made her feel... feel.... 

Object: Cheap paper bound in sturdy yellow boards. The novel proper is followed by nine pages of adverts for other Arco titles, beginning with Touchable (1951), co-written by Schwartz and 

Access: One copy is listed for sale online; at US$15.00, it's a steal. Evidence suggests that not even Library and Archives Canada has a copy.

Go get it!

Related post:

02 January 2018

10 Best Book Buys of 2017 (one of which was a gift)



Last year was meant to be one of great austerity. By rights, the 2017 edition of this annual list should be the weakest yet. There were few trips to used bookstores, and mere minutes – not hours – were spent panning for gold at outdoor dollar carts. And yet, comparing the year's haul to those of  2014, 2015, and 2016, I think 2017 was the best ever. The riches were such that the copy of Frank L. Packard's The Big Shot above failed to make the cut. Hell, I couldn't even settle on the list until after the the year was over. Here be the shiniest nuggets:

The Shapes that Creep
Margerie Bonner
New York: Scribners,
   1946

The debut novel by Hollywood actress and BC beach squatter Mrs Malcolm Lowry. The jacket describes it as a "combination of murder, astrology, hidden-treasure, and cryptography – with the wild and romantic coast of Vancouver as its colourful background."

The House of Temptation
Veros Carleton [pseud.
   Amy Cox]
Ottawa: Graphic, 1931

A roman à clef set amongst Ottawa's wealthy and powerful. If it is anything like Madge Macbeth's The Land of Afternoon, also published by Graphic, I'm in for a real treat.

A Social Departure
Sara Jeanette Duncan
New York: Appleton,
   1903

It says nothing good about this country that I was able to buy a Very Fine first edition of this novel for $12.50.





The Cannon's Mouth
Wilfred Heighington
Toronto: Forward, 1943

One of the few Canadian Great War novels by a veteran of the conflict.  This was a birthday gift from my friend James Calhoun, the foremost historian of Canadian military literature, I didn't know The Cannon's Mouth existed until it arrived in the post.
Maria Chapdelaine
Louis Hémon [trans.
   W.H. Blake]
New York: Macmillan,
   1929

My fifth copy of Hémon's big book, I uncovered this on one of Attic Books' dollar carts. Inscribed by American college prof Carl Y. Connor, who provided an intro and notes, it serves as a reminder of the popularity this novel once enjoyed south of the border.
.
Wives and Lovers
Margaret Millar
New York: Random
   House, 1954

I'd long been interested in Millar non-mysteries, but could never afford them. Syndicate Books' Complete Millar finally granted me access. Wives and Lovers ended up being the best novel I read in 2017. Researching my review, I stumbled upon this first edition offered online at US$3.98.

A Voice is Calling
Eric Cecil Morris
Montreal: B.D. Simpson,
   1945

A clerk living a mundane life in mid-20th-century Gaspé finds himself transported through time and space when playing the organ of his local church. J.S. Bach serves as tour guide to 18th-century Leipzig!

Lust Planet
Olin Ross [pseud. W.E.D.
     Ross]
Hollywood: International
     Publications, 1962

Canada's most prolific novelist, Ross made most of his money writing romances and Dark Shadows TV tie-ins. Lust Planet is his second and last "adults only" novel. Ribald, it's the subject of my column in the next issue of Canadian Notes & Queries.


Hot Star
Robert W. Tracy [pseud.
   Alvin Schwartz]
New York: Arco, 1952

Following Touchable, further titillation from a writer who seems destined to be remembered as the creator of Bizarro Superman. I'm guessing Hot Star wouldn't have passed the Comics Code Authority.


Undine
Phyllis Brett Young
London: W.H. Allen, 1964

I've been meaning to read Phyllis Brett Young for some time, and everything I know about this novel tells me that it is the place to start. "The jacket reminds me of Hitchcock," says my wife. I agree.

Note: Author of Psyche, not Psycho.



A year of austerity? Who am I kidding? That edition of Packard's The Big Shot was the second of two bought in 2017.


Related posts:

05 December 2011

Sexy Stuff from Bizarro Superman's Creator



Touchable
Les Scott and Robert W. Tracy [pseud. Alvin Schwartz]
New York: Arco, 1951
184 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through