Category: Adult Content

Friday the 13th

Hack wrote this spy thriller with high hopes of selling the movie rights, starting a franchise that would spring to the collective mind every time a Friday the 13th appeared on the calendar. When he learned that there was already a series of horror films based on that strategy, he made another of his many failed suicide attempts by jumping out a window but broke his fall by landing on the woman who would become his sixth wife. After they were divorced three months later, Hack said that he wished that he’d stuck with his original title of “Goldfinger.”

The Dog was on the Bed

Hack’s output was so great by 1970 (often finishing a dozen novels a week) that his publisher John Kane suggested that he write under a pseudoym for the “romance novel” division of his company, Pierrot Romances. Hack wrote 17 titles under the pen name “Helen Bedd” until Kane finally determined that there was no market amongst his female readership for Hack’s angry depiction of anal sex.

Ménage á Trois

This was originally written in 1965 when two waitresses at the Shakey’s pizza parlor he was the night janitor at conned him into believing that they wanted a 3-way with him when all they really wanted was the use of his van in the pizzeria parking lot to engage in illicit lesbian sex. They locked Hack out of the van as soon as they got inside and while it rocked violently back and forth, he wrote this novel in his head.

The two waitresses spent twenty years as Catholic nuns and are now married to each other and run a feminist bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

A Better Man

Hack was a huge fan of the TV sitcom “Yes, Dear” and fell madly in love with the character Kim Warner. He ultimately became obsessed that Greg Warner, her husband on the show, wasn’t worthy of her and he wrote this novel in an attempt to win Kim Warner’s heart. When he received a letter from network attorneys explaining that Kim Warner was a fictional character and that Jeanne Louisa Kelly (the actress who played her) was happily married in real life to a different man, Hack had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for six months.