Swamp Sister

Robert Edmond Alter (1925-1966) sold dozens of short stories to crime-fiction digests including Manhunt and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in addition to authoring several children’s books. However, his long-form fiction for Fawcett Gold Medal consisted of only two novels, Swamp Sister and Carny Kill, both of which were published in the year of his death, 1966. America’s fascination with noir fiction involving sexy and unsophisticated women from the backwoods continues to fascinate me, so I decided to try my luck with Swamp Sister.

The paperback opens with a two-person plane - a Piper Cub - destined for Jacksonville, Florida crashing in the remote swampland due to an engine failure. The crash kills two men including a passenger carrying a briefcase filled with a $80,000 in cash.

Four-years later, “The Money Plane, ” as the locals call it, is a thing of legends among swamp people. 20 year-old Shad Hark has been searching the swamp for years looking for any sign of the downed aircraft with no luck. A New York insurance investigator tickled the town’s imagination after the crash with the news that there is wreckage somewhere out there containing $80,000 among the alligators and Spanish moss. Most locals have long since given up the hunt and some have died trying to find it on their own.

Persistence pays off for Shad one day when he finds the Money Plane deep in the watery woods protected by aggressive gators and cottonmouth snakes. He crawls into the tiny cabin, and recovers the briefcase. Because he’s a moron, he uses his Bowie knife to slice the briefcase to ribbons to get at the money. Because of this bad idea, Shad has $80,000 but no way to carry the cash back home. He decides to stash the majority of the cash in the jungle with the plane and fills his pockets with what he could carry.

The author makes the unfortunate literary choice to write the dialogue in the patois of dipshits from swamp county. This makes for a condescending and cumbersome read filled with sentences like, “Shaddy, you ain’t forgit you’n me is going gator-grabbing?” This crappy writing bogs down the plot considerably. To be honest, it’s a fairly lousy plot to begin with, but Alter’s tin ear for dialogue certainly doesn’t help.

Shad’s in love with a swamp girl named Margy with a heart of gold, and he takes her into his confidence about his plan to recover the stashed funds. Meanwhile, Shad’s spending of $10 bills recovered from the wreckage attracts the attention of a different group of shotgun-toting dipshits from town - as well as a trap set by the man from the insurance company who alerted the locals to the existence of the money plane four years earlier.

This book mostly sucks. Some of the jungle scenes with the characters dodging gators and cottonmouth snakes were somewhat exciting, but overall Swamp Sister should have been left to rot among the fetid, torpid waters of history. It’s been reprinted a couple times over the years, but new cover art failed to put a glossy sheen on this turd of a book. It’s still early, but this is the worst book I’ve read in 2020 thus far. To the Hall of Shame with thee!

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Path to Savagery

According to Mystery File, Robert Edmond Alter authored over 40 stories for magazines and digests like Mike Shayne, Man from UNCLE, Argosy, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and Manhunt. He wrote two novels that were published by Fawcett Gold Medal, Swamp Sister in 1961 and Carny Kill in 1966. Both of those were reprinted by Black Lizard in 1993. We reviewed Swamp Sister in 2020 and it failed to impress us, but we went back to the well again with Alter’s novel Path to Savagery. It was published posthumously by Avon in 1969, three years after Alter's death. The post-apocalyptic novel was adapted into the 1979 Sony Pictures film The Ravagers starring Ernest Borgnine and Richard Harris. 

The book is set about 20 years after a global nuclear war. What's left are large swaths of wilderness, packs of wild dogs, and large cities that have mostly been ransacked. On the coasts, some of these cities are now marshy islands due to excessive flooding from broken seawalls. Civilization now exists in three classes. Flockers guard their food, water, and weapons and exist in packs. Neanderthalers are your common savages that use barbarism on a quest for dominance. The Loners are guys like Falk, the book's protagonist, that simply exist as troubadours scouring the countryside for supplies in an effort to live a peaceful existence. But, Falk packs a .45 and a Thompson submachine gun in case things get hairy. 

The first thing you need to know is that Path to Savagery is nearly awesome. It begins and ends with total awesomeness. What's in the middle is just plain 'ole great. Alter's pace is sometimes sluggish, but at 174 pages he spends productive time on characterization, something that was not afforded to him writing shorts. His descriptions were so vivid and real. For example, in the book's opening pages, Falk finds a dark, cavernous mansion that's been ransacked and abandoned. Bad guys follow him inside, hoping for a quick and quiet kill. Alter's descriptions of Falk fighting the enemy in the dark mansion's bedrooms and hallway were exhilarating. I loved that Falk couldn't see his attacker's faces until they were illuminated by his gun's muzzle flashes. 

Falk moves through the bogs and brambles and stumbles upon a woman named Faina, which he buys for the night using spare tobacco. Faina becomes a supporting character and surprises Falk when he reaches a flooded coastal city. In what becomes the book's central location, Falk and Faina find a large, multilevel department store. The store has different sections like sporting goods, housewares, furniture, camping, clothing, etc. This large department store becomes a hunting ground when Falk and Faina discover it is occupied by a large band of Flockers. 

Without spoiling too much of the story, Falk and the leader of the Flockers, a strong, combative man named Rann, enter a contest of survival. Each of them enters the department store naked without weapons. Once inside the enormous store, they can use anything they find as a weapon to hunt and kill their opponent. Falk and Rann's battle will determine the winner of the tribe's sexiest woman. Falk has a prior connection with the lady, so his efforts to kill Rann are elevated. Rann is fighting to hold his place as tribal leader. 

Needless to say, the idea of living in an abandoned shopping mall is a neat one. Alter makes fun use of this combat arena and adds in some surprising elements that add a dose of horror to the narrative. There is a crime-fiction ingredient as well when Rann conspires with another Flocker to secretly murder someone. The book's premise borders on both science-fiction and post-apocalyptic, making this alternate version of Earth a pretty scary place. 

Despite reading tons of doomsday fiction, and viewing an equal assortment of genre films, I was thoroughly pleased with the book's innovation and ideas. Alter really had a great thing going and I can't help but think this would have been a series if he would have lived long enough to tell it. Unfortunately, Path to Savagery is all we have of this great concept. 

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Like Wild

Eric Allen (1916-1986) was a travel writer whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers - mostly in Oklahoma and Arkansas - during the 1960s. He also wrote upwards of 30 books - mostly westerns - and served as the president of the Western Writers of America in 1969 and 1970. His fourth novel was a Florida-based hardboiled swamp noir paperback called Like Wild originally published in 1963 by Monarch Books and currently available as a $3 ebook.

Quint is a soldier returning from overseas to resume his life in the Florida swamp town of Chadd City. His intention is to start a business selling wholesale lumber and marry Trudy, the sweetheart he left behind before his deployment. While on the bus ride home through the mangrove thickets and gator bogs, a sultry seatmate with swelling breasts is being super-flirtatious with Quint.

Before Quint joined the Army and left Chadd City, he was a pathetic cracker from the swamp, but Uncle Sam matured him into a man with ambition and a plan to make something of himself. His home is run by a powerful and corrupt town boss, and we quickly learn that the flirty dame on the bus is the boss’ wife returning from the beach. Quint has a particular axe to grind with the powerful local who was responsible for sending Quint’s father to prison where the old man eventually died.

However, the core drama here is about land. Quint owns many acres of cypress wilderness swampland that he wants to harvest for his lumber business. Meanwhile, the town boss has his eyes on that land for his own purposes, and his lusty wife is caught in the middle with her own agenda. The struggle between the men is a tense powder keg leading to an inevitable explosion of winner-take-all violence.

As if one femme fatale isn’t enough, Like Wild gives us a second: Trudy’s 17 year-old kid sister Lorrie, a saloon waitress who is hot to trot for Quint since his return. In the swamplands, 17 is practically an old maid, and Lorrie is not a woman who intends to let her best years go to waste.

Allen is an amazingly good writer, and I marvel that this compelling crime novel was once packaged as a low-end sleaze paperback. The author’s descriptions of hand-to-hand fistfights are among the best I’ve ever read, and the characters are vivid and fully-formed. Most swamp noir is pure dreck, but Like Wild is a definite winner.

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Satan's Mate

There was at least three George Smith's writing fiction that we like in the mid 20th century. The G.H. Smith I'm referring to in this review is George Henry Smith, a prolific author that produced a number of novels across multiple genres including sleaze. My first experience with Smith is Satan's Mate, a 1960 paperback originally published by Newsstand Library.

Satan's Mate is set in a small backwoods town in the swamps of Louisiana. A guy named Robert once lived here with his brother, but due to a combination of things he left, became married, and started a new life. However, months ago his wife left him and Robert became a vagabond drifter. He is now back in town to make amends with his brother, the town's longstanding Baptish preacher.

The town is operated by a wealthy, sleazy, land baron named Guy. Guy runs the show and controls the sheriff and deputies. As the book begins he has just finished leading a pack of vigilantes into the swamp to lynch an African-American man. This is a stark warning to the reader that there are no trials in this town, just executions. However, the lynched victim leaves behind a sister that begins planning her revenge. 

When Robert gets to town he meets Guy's wife Velma, a very attractive sexpod that is begging for a romp. Robert is happy to give it to her. Velma latches on to her new lover and sees him as her meal ticket to get out of this town and away from Guy. Robert just wants away from Velma. 

Guy sees the arrival of Robert as the perfect opportunity to kill his political rival, which coincidentally is Robert's brother, and to kill a few other people he doesn't care much for. To make it a bit more tidy - just in case the FBI comes knocking about all the lynching - he will kill his enemies and blame the massacre on the newcomer Robert. Smart plan. Along the way there are more murders and soon Robert, Velma, and another tramp are in the swamp trying to avoid Guy and a posse of vigilantes. Thus, the narrative's second half features the chaser and chased across the swamp to avoid death.

At 127, pages Satan's Mate is an easy breezy read that was quite enjoyable. If you are familiar with swamp noir as well as the Gothic Plantation or Slave books written during this time then you will totally enjoy it. Beware there are plenty of racial slurs against African-Americans and Hispanics. This is unfortunately a part of vintage 20th century fiction that we have to navigate through. 

I will state further that if you go online and search for this book it comes up as lesbian-fiction. I'm not sure where that stigma came from, but it isn't this novel. It is your typical crime-noir that just happened to published by a company with a reputation for sleaze. 

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God's Back was Turned

Here at Paperback Warrior, we continue to delve into the literary works of Harry Whittington. While some of his books have been reprinted by the likes of Stark House Press, Black Lizard and Prologue Crime, many of his published works remain completely out of print decades after their original publication date. I recently acquired God's Back was Turned, a 1961 Fawcett Gold Medal paperback written under Whittington's real name (not one of his many pseudonyms). The paperback has yet to be reprinted, so I needed to know if it’s a lost treasure. I quickly tugged the book out of it's sleeved home and began reading.

The book's setting should be a familiar one to Harry Whittington fans – central Florida. It's in this rural stretch of farm country where the backwoods, uneducated family of Cooks live. The father is a stern redneck farmer named Shack. His bone-headed family is a myriad of assorted personalities, each of them remaining close to a neanderthal state of grace.

There's the obese Sister Helen, a character that is described as the “fattest woman ever seen outside of a circus.” She plays the part of cook, maid and mother-figure to the family. Brother Calvin is a replica of his father Shack, a stubborn farm-hand who possesses the most rudimentary approach to life. Brother Jaime is mute, a disability that theoretically stems from his mother dying during his delivery. His inability to speak is linked to his guilt of “killing her by being born.” And then there's Brother Walter.

Brother Walter left home 12-years ago to become a traveling preacher. At the pinnacle of his success, Walter's various congregations reached into the tens of thousands. His pulpit soapbox testimony was the proud voice of a sinner who's reached a state of immortality (and immense wealth) due to God's good graces. To reinforce that Holy stature, Walter uses the old poisonous snake-handling trick. In doing so, he “faith heals” thousands of afflicted attendees. However, with every well-funded ministry crusade, there's a deep rooted scandal. After a Miami newspaper, backed by a committee on evangelical validity, condemns Walter's mission as a scam, the once wealthy religious superstar returns home. That's where the novel begins.

Brother Walter's reunion with the family doesn't go as expected. Instead, the newspaper declaring Walter's fall from grace is shown to his  father and siblings. Caught up in the joy of having Walter home in his shiny Cadillac, the family is awe-struck by Walter's picture in the paper. They are oblivious (or illiterate) to the fact that the entire article has waylaid their Brother Walter into financial distress and forced obscurity. Instead, they throw a grand party and declare that Walter has returned home to heal Jaime the mute. That's right, sham artist Walter is going to make his brother speak using the devout word of God. Walter, who fails to convince the family that his road show was a ruse for rubes, is forced to watch hundreds of cars descend onto the farm to witness the Greatest Miracle of their Lifetime.

While all of this is happening with the Cook family, Whittington also introduces two other characters that consume large portions of the narrative. The first is Tom Balscom, an old farmer who’s close friends with the Cooks. In fact, Tom's prior wife (wife number two for the box-score) was Sister Hazel, the oldest Cook daughter who ran away from Tom and disappeared forever. After frequenting a truck stop diner, Tom falls in love with a young waitress named Willie Ruth. In layman terms: Old farmer Tom falls in love with the hot, apron-wearing, very young waitress vixen named Willie Ruth. He brings Willie Ruth to the Cooks to show her off and is immediately scolded by Shack for marrying this sultry Goddess. While Willie Ruth prepares for her inevitable date with destiny – a marriage consummation on a creaky old bed with Old Farmer Tom – she starts making eyes with Jaime.

The other character is a black sharecropper named Lucian Henry. He's married with eight kids and is the proverbial “white hat good guy” of the story. Lucian just wants to whistle and plow fields with his best friend, a mule named Lisse. But, there's Miss Lovely, a gorgeous red-blooded, very white nymph that has a hankering for the help - a theme that Whittington explored later in his plantation sagas. Despite her father's scolding, Miss Lovely refuses to leave the help alone. The author's narrative is like a vice-grip, slowly sucking Lucian into a sexual vortex controlled by Miss Lovely. His path is simple: ignore her advances and keep working or give into his desires and then consequently face the obligatory torture and death by a very white lynch mob.

You can probably tell by this point that God's Back was Turned is a really fun book. It's clear that Harry Whittington's imagination was running buck-wild. The novel combines the author's love for a good love story, his sensual writing style, his experience with the Plantation Gothic genre and his forte of utilizing crime-noir tropes to tell a good story. I want to emphasize that this isn't a traditional crime-noir novel. Nor is it a romance novel. It's an unusual hybrid of styles that made Whittington so unique. Like a good Charles Williams swamp-nymph novel, Whittington's use of the rural landscape and its host of flavorful characters is a winning formula that is just so enjoyable. Harry Whittington was the king of the paperbacks for a reason. While this novel is expensive, it may be worth pursuing as a special treat for yourself. Don't turn your back on this one.

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Death Must Wait

Former NFL player Don Kingery had only four published novels during his short literary career – Death Must Wait (1956), Swamp Fire (1957), Paula (1959) and Good Time Girl (1960). The rest of his writing was dedicated to print journalism, a career that spanned over 50 years in and around Southwest Louisiana. His novels were of the Erskine Caldwell variety, centering around strong southern roots and a penchant for poverty-ridden family dynamics that make up the blue collar highways of rural America. Nothing expresses that literary sense more than Kingery's Death Must Wait.

Like Caldwell's superior Tobacco Road, Kingery explores criminal behavior, immorality and mental issues throughout the thick narrative of Death Must Wait. Arguably, the book's only protagonist is Jed, a poor working man who hunts and traps in a dense section of Louisiana Bayou called Morganzas Pass. His father is complacent in his family's rags-to-more-rags lifestyle, never rising above the lowest tier of low class. Often Jed's parents lament their decision to marry, breed or even rise to exist. Jed's sister is a prostitute and his brother a drunk. A sense of escapism feeds Jed's desire to flourish in the outdoors, a trade that provides the only honest wage for the family.

Kingery's narrative expands once Jed is provoked into a fistfight with a belligerent bar patron. Jed's social inadequacies, short-temper and neanderthal strength leads to his undoing. When the man Jed scuffles with seemingly dies on the bar’s sawdust floor, Jed runs to the swamps to avoid a demented, corrupt small-town sheriff who wants to secure his bid for reelection. Eventually Jed is captured and arrested, but it is his love for a young woman named Nila that stirs a cause for action. Jed must either escape or prove his innocence before the backwoods lawyer and sheriff condemns him.

Death Must Wait was an intriguing story that displays crime-noir tendencies despite the abstract approach. Jed is the common-man placed into extreme circumstances, but the author's description of this small-town existence – failures, poverty, corruption, greed, despair – is the focal point. While still retaining a crime-fiction element, the book works more as a cynical look at this era of American history and the social degradation that formed so many of the southeastern cities. If you need more crime in your fiction, Death Must Wait may not spin your wheels. But for a solid, intriguing testament about rural America and it's deficiencies, look no further than this.

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