Just this morning I had one of those “Oh my God, I’d forgotten all about those” moments. I’ve had them before, generally concerning the non-payment of bills, but this was more pleasurable.
I was having a clear-out of books and I came across my Peter Saxon collection. They were tucked behind a stack of vinyl albums on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, battered, discoloured by decades of dust, one or two bearing a coffee ring.
I visualise your faces crinkling as you say, ‘Peter Saxon? Who’s he?’
But what you should be asking is, ‘Who are they?’
Writing the brand
Peter Saxon didn’t exist, not in the sense that you could go up to him and shake his hand. Well, you could, but it would be like that line of hand pumping at a wedding.
It was, in fact, a house name, a brand name, if you like, and several authors wrote under it. A bit like Nick Carter, for those of you who know their pulp fiction. And I may well get to Nick Carter in a later blog.
As far as I can tell, writer W. Howard Baker created the pen name Peter Saxon when writing for and editing the long-running Sexton Blake Library. Incidentally, I also read Sexton Blake books when I was young, because I loved the kids TV series so much. If you’re interested, Laurence Payne played the indefatigable sleuth and Roger Foss was his sidekick, Tinker.
Baker also penned another of my teen favourites, ‘Destination Dieppe’. I’ve long since lost my copy, which is a shame.
Others writers who adopted the Saxon name were Scots-born Wilfrid McNeilly, Stephen Frances, Ross Richards, Martin Thomas and Rex Dolphin. They all wrote under other names, too. I wonder if they woke up in the morning not wondering where they were, but who they were?
Discovering the brand
So, it’s the early 1970s, and I’m in East Kilbride Library, a fresh-faced teen looking for something interesting to read. I light upon a book ‘The Disorientated Man’, about a man who wakes up in a mysterious room and as time goes on finds bits of him slowly disappearing. It’s linked with a brutal murder and a seemingly unstoppable killer.
Sounds like one for me.
I read it in an afternoon.
I didn’t just like it, I loved it. (If you’re wondering, it was written by Baker and Frances).
Sometime later it was filmed and underwent a name change. ‘The Disorientated Man’ was out – and ‘Scream and Scream Again’ was in.
The new title fitted like a glove because Saxon’s books were not subtle. They were pulp. They were trash. They were right up my street.
I subsequently managed to collect a number of Saxon’s books, all horror, because that was the phase I was going through at the time. My room was decorated with gory shots from Hammer Horrors and Vincent Price films, interspaced with alluring pictures of scantily clad women, mostly courtesy of Hammer and Photoplay magazine.
My Saxon collection was furnished by Woolworths, where they sold for ten pence each. Cheap paperbacks in the Five Star imprint, with gaudy covers and blurbs replete with prose so purple a cardinal could wear them.
Here are a few samples:
The Torturer: From beyond the grave he worked his evil and began to drive to madness all who ventured into his domain…
Satan’s Child: The folk of Kinskerchan were averse to Elspet Malcom’s tempting beauty. They gloated as he husband lashed her raw. Then they burned her at the stake – mindless, in their godly work, of the son who added his own screams to his mother’s final agonies…
The Darkest Night: A young English girl stripped for sacrifice…blood-maddened, list-crazed worshippers…and the esoteric mysteries of a faith founded on the ultimate Negation…
See what I mean? The writing wasn’t quite as dramatic but there could be plenty of short, stabbing paragraphs and the story moved at breakneck speed. These were not the hefty, doorstop books of today – they were slim, they were fast and they were designed purely to entertain.
Most of the titles are stand alones but some feature a group of occult investigators called The Guardians. I’m not sure if the occult lore they describe is accurate but it was like gold to me back then and led me to the black magic novels of Dennis Wheatley and then to reading non-fiction on the dark arts. Don’t worry, I don’t practice them myself – I can’t even take the packet of giblets out of a frozen chicken, let alone disembowel a live one.
However, I’m not sure if I will re-read them. Sometimes the memory of a book is better than the book itself. But I will keep them because they are part of my twisted youth.
Now, let’s see what else I find…
