Back in the early 1970s, as a teenager in East Kilbride, I discovered horror.

This is not a reflection on the town, you understand, merely a statement that I commenced what was then seen as an unhealthy interest in all things dark and grisly.

I read Robert Bloch, and Edgar Allan Poe and the black magic novels of Dennis Wheatley. I discovered the technicolour gore of Hammer, thanks to TV (remember Don’t Watch Alone?) I was a fan of Vincent Price, particularly the films he made with Roger Corman.

And one afternoon in the local library I chanced upon a book called The Disorientated Man.

It dealt with a series of murders committed by a seemingly superhuman killer. Yes, the victims were nubile young women, for the book was written in 1967 and I was reading it in the early 70s, when the only thing that was PC was the guy walking the beat. There was also an athlete (male) in hospital, periodically losing limbs and, ultimately, other organs. Something sinister was going on, or the NHS back then wasn’t what it should have been.

My memory tells me that I read the book in an afternoon. It may have taken longer, though. It was summer and those days never seemed to end back then.

The author was Peter Saxon and I searched the library shelves for other titles but found none. Either they were always on loan, they didn’t exist or they were deemed too racy for the gentle folk of East Kilbride.

Then, in the bargain bin at the local Woolworths, I struck the mother lode. There, for five pence, was a host of other titles by Peter Saxon, cheap paperbacks, garish covers, dramatic titles like The Torturer, Vampire’s Moon and Satan’s Child.

I thought I had died and gone to….well, given the subject matter, perhaps not heaven.

I lapped them up.

One in particular – Scream and Scream Again – had special interest for me, because it had been filmed, with Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and none other than Vincent Price. At that time I hadn’t seen the film, I wouldn’t see it for a few years, but I knew of it.

What I didn’t know was that it was, in fact, The Disorientated Man under a new, more poster worthy, title.

But who was Peter Saxon?

Actually, the correct question should be, who were Peter Saxon? For a number of different authors used the by-line. It was a house name, if not a household one, and the books are all copyright Press Editorial Services.

And here’s the connection to Sexton Blake I hinted at in the previous blog, which of course you have all read and committed to memory.

The pen name was first used by W. Howard Baker to write Blake stories.

Baker was then one of a string of authors to use the name for the cheap and, it has to be said, trashy horror and occult novels of the late 60s and 70s.

Scream and Scream Again was actually the work of Stephen D. Frances. Other writers included Rex Dolphin, Scots born Wilfrid McNeilly, Ross Richard and Martin Thomas. They were all jobbing writers, some wrote Sexton Blake stories and novelisations of TV series and films.

They were hacks – and I don’t use that in a disparaging way. They wrote for money and they wrote to entertain. I imagine them being given a title and told to have to done by next Tuesday. The books don’t pretend to be anything more than they are.

Viewed from the lofty position of adulthood, I find the quality of the Saxon books vary from bad to not so bad. They have the benefit of being short – there was no messing about with these things, often being little more than 150 pages before they were done and the vampires dusted. Nowadays authors can take that long to clear their throat.

Peter Saxon was used for one novelisation, of a dreadful British film called Corruption.

Starring Peter Cushing, it’s an unpleasant little number about a mad surgeon who turns to murder to help maintain the beauty of his disfigured wife. It’s a rip-off of the 1959 film Eyes Without a Face, or, to give it the actual French, Les Yeux Sans Visage. Marred by an intrusive jazz score, the film is laughable now thanks to the swinging London setting and indifferent direction, although like many indifferent films it has become a minor cult entry. Cushing was not terribly fond of the movie and reportedly only did it to garner some readies to help treat his seriously ill wife.

But the Saxon clan didn’t need to raid a film script for nastiness. The books are peppered with sexual violence, incest, under age sex, murder, flagellation, dismemberment and castration. A scene in the Scottish-set Satan’s Child in which a man finds himself inhabiting the body of a cow about to be mated with an immensely endowed bull is particularly eye-watering.

The subject matter included vampires, the Indian Thugee cult (the book The Darkest Night was where I first learned of the Thugs), ghosts and black magic.

It was the latter which featured in the series of novels about the Guardians, a group of four men and one woman who fought Satanism and the forces of darkness.

I always felt they were a rip off Dennis Wheatley’s Duke de Richleau occult stories.

Would I recommend the books of Peter Saxon? No, for to modern eyes they are seen as misogynist, abhorrent, sadistic, occasionally racist. They are of their time and I’d like to think that time is gone, although the past couple of years have tested that belief.

But I still have my cheap little Five Star paperbacks, tucked away on my shelves.