Bride of Pendorric by Victoria Holt (Fontana, 1974)

Another paperback from the Green Shed.

 

Till Death us do Part...

Favel Farrington and her new husband were almost strangers.  In Capri the dashing young heir to Pendorric had swept the lovely English girl into marriage with the sudden fierceness of a summer storm.

Favel was dazed with happiness--until she discovered that someone was planning a very special place for her in the family--in the vault with the other legendary "Brides of Pendorric" who all dies so mysteriously, and so tragically...

"To Death us do Part" took on a new and ominous meaning.

 On the cover our heroine flees a burning building--but she doesn't seem to be in too much of a hurry, given she took time to don the elaborate whatever-it-is she's wearing and do her makeup.   She has also taken the time to stop and pose dramatically, with one arm flung up to shield her forehead.  (There's something wrong with that arm, by the way, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is!)

The novel itself is much less interesting than its cover--nothing much happens to the heroine in the first two hundred or so pages of the book except suspicions, forebodings and the occasional Grim Warning.  As in most gothic romances, the actual star of the story is "Pendorric", the house in which it takes place.  Here's a question: why do the heroines of gothic romances never find themselves menaced in flats or suburban bungalows, and "swept" into marriage with dashing yet sinister actuaries or accountants?

A History of Courting by E.S. Turner (Pan, 1958)

Down deep in hell there let them dwell
and bundle on that bed
Then turn and roll without control
Till all their lusts are fed.

That was how they did it in America in the 18th century.  Bundling it was called.  Not as naughty as it sounds.

In Moscow in 1952 they courted quite differently.  It went like this: The boy was a collective farmer, and the girl a tractor driver working on the same night-shift.  Sighed the girl: 'How wonderful it is to work on such a beautiful night under the full moon and do one's utmost to save petrol!'  Exclaimed the boy: 'The night inspires me to over-fulfill my quota by a higher and still higher percentage.'  Later he admitted: 'I fell in love with your working achievement from the very first moment.

There's no end to the different methods employed in this enchanting game, practised by nearly all of us some time or another.

You'll love this book.  It's instructive.  It's fascinating!

Here we have a very decorous couple from the 1950s looking at a picture of a not-so-decorous couple from an earlier era.  It all seems a bit too clean-cut and peachy keen to be true: surely the 1950s was the era of making out in drive-ins and in the back seats of cinemas?

The answer is, it was, and this book is happy to record it.  It also discusses--yes!--bundling, along with valentines, chaperones, flappers and a thousand and one other elements of courtship in days gone by.  And of course it also has fun with the thoughts of various "experts" on love, marriage and morals through the centuries.

Timeliner by Charles Eric Maine (Corgi, 1955)

TIMELINER!

The fascinating and provocative story of Hugh Macklin--an alien lost in endless futures--fighting desperately to return to his own era.

 Here we have a late fifties cover adorned with abstract art--the sort of art that doesn't really tell us much about the story inside the book.   There's a man--presumably the protagonist--fractured into six tiny squares.  There's a hazily-rendered back view of a naked woman.  And the background is a mix of random lines and swirls in a fetching shade of grey.  It's all rather bleh.  Give me a science fiction cover depicting rockets, doughty astronauts and scantily clad space amazons in metallic bras any day!

 For the record, the book is about a man whose consciousness travels through time, jumping from host to host like the hero of "Quantum Leap".   It's a well-written, if not particularly great book, with a nice twist at the end.

Skye Cameron by Phyllis Whitney (Coronet, 1974)

One of my "Green Shed" finds!

'No woman could ever be indifferent to such a man'

'A great brute of a man' they called him... 'uncouth, rude'.  They said he had been in prison, that he was a murderer ... and worse.  But the moment Skye Cameron caught her first glimpse of Justin Law, her heart beat uncontrollably.  She knew herself to be irrevocably drawn to the big, intense man with the mysterious past.

Skye Cameron was a redhead, strong-willed and impetuous.  But when she challenged respectable New Orleans society she was forced to defy the world she knew for a love she could not admit.

'A story ripe with the adventures of a flaming-haired heroine who is at leas kissing-kin to Scarlett O'Hara'

New York Times

Well the cover gets one thing right anyway--the heroine's hair is read.  Sort of.

But that is the only thing that appears to be right about the cover.  The novel takes place in genteel New Orleans in the late nineteenth century--the heroine is apparently wandering around a burning plantation looking disheveled and wearing nothing but her shift.  She looks a bit jaundiced, too, with that yellow complexion, and her expression says "Night of the Living Dead" to me more than "defying the world for love".

Also the hero, that "great brute of a man" is missing from the cover.  Make of that what you will...

"The Art of Romance"

This book is not my usual kind of blog-fodder, but I found it remaindered on the weekend and I couldn't resist:

 

An entire book full of book covers! 

Though Mills and Boon and Harlequin are best known for their romances, it would appear that they published other genres--at least in their earlier days.  From 1950:

Though of course the romances do predominate in every era--as shown by this couple in a steamy clinch in 1976:

There's a fair amount of social history to be gleaned from these covers--from changing standards of what what was acceptable (the covers get steadily raunchier from the 1960s on) to changing fashions in clothes, hair and makeup.  (Could the couple above belong to any decade other than the seventies?)

Solomon and Sheba by Jay Williams (Corgi, 1960)

Another one from the Green Shed, source of many things strange and wonderful.  Judging from the creases on the cover, it's been well read:

 

SOLOMON AND SHEBA

Great king, and beautiful, barbaric queen--the most passionate and sensuous love story of all time.

Does anyone else think Sheba there looks kind of masculine?  Or maybe the dancing girl is Solomon in drag.

Anyway, they don't write 'em like this anymore.  Solomon and Sheba is the sort of historical epic where the characters talk with a twisted Ye Olde Englishe syntax and vocabulary in order to show that they're... well, historical.  Strictly speaking, given the setting, they should be talking in Ancient Hebrew:

"Call me not 'king' this morning, I pray you," he said.  "I have set aside that heavy mantle for these few days.  I will not think of cares; there will be time enough for that when..."  He paused.  And when she looked at him he went on, "When my sister, Balkis, feels that she must return to her own place.  I would that day might be put off forever."

(Page 123)

But as a bonus, this book was turned into a movie, so it comes complete with... stills from the picture!    There are eight pages of plates in the centre of the book.  And look, Yul Brynner has hair!

The Golden Hades by Edgar Wallace (Hodder, 1962)

Another book acquired during my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree.  This one I definitely bought for its cover:

 

The banknotes marked with the sinister little yellow sign of the Golden Hades were not just state money. 

Wilbur Smith of the F.B.I. had seen the sign twice before--

The first time they involved a masked gang; the second time, they meant murder.

Edgar Wallace is one of those authors whose life is more interesting than his books.  Born into poverty as the illegitimate child of actors, he became a war correspondent during the Boer War, then took to writing thrillers to make money.  In the 1920s his publishers Hodder and Stoughton began promoting him aggressively, and he pretty much became a one-man fiction factory, eventually churning out around 170 novels:

Needless to say, the quality was NOT high.  This particular example of his work concerns a Satanic cult in New York.  To be fair, a book on a similar theme today would probably have more graphic violence and a lot more sex, but the characters might be equally cardboard.

Wallace eventually died in 1933 of untreated diabetes, and few of his books are in print today.