The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
Hack didn’t mess with success with the third novel in his Foreign Legion trilogy and once again just took the original manuscript and swapped out the many sex scenes with new perversions. As far as his publisher John Kane was concerned, he could have continued with the formula forever but Hack felt that he had said everything he had to say about sexual deviance on the sands of the Sahara Desert and moved on to write about sexual deviance in other locales.
Public response to “Macho Men of the Foreign Legion” was so great that Hack’s publisher John Kane insisted that he start on a sequel right away. Hack simply took the manuscript of the first book and changed the anal sex scenes to oral sex scenes. No one seemed to notice and the second book sold almost as well as the first.
Hack wrote this French Foreign Legion story the morning his air conditioning conked out. Critics objected to the many anal sex scenes in the middle of the Sahara Desert but Hack’s loyal readers had no problem with them.
Hack wrote this novel as a jab at his cover artists Jonny M., who missed a production meeting with him because he chose to sleep in instead. Jonny screwed Hack over by depicting himself on the cover in bed with Hack’s biggest celebrity crush Linda Ronstadt. As soon as Hack saw the picture, he had an immediate nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for four months where he had to endure a rigorous healing regimen that saw him rise at 4:00 a.m. while Jonny was sleeping in until noon. Hack has never mentioned the book since and if it is offered to him at book signings, he slaps it out of the person’s hand and insists that he never wrote it.
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.
A gorgeous woman has four men vying for her affection and she determines that she will marry the one who is the most skilled at anal sex. College English professors often use this novel as an ideal representation of Hack’s early writing style.
Hack loosely based this novel on his affair with singer Keely Smith, who dated him briefly after her divorce from Louis Prima. Hack always referred to her as “the one that got away” whereas Ms. Smith would later call Hack “that perverted bastard.”
This is a unique title in Hack’s collected works because it’s a wholesome kid’s book in which there is no sex whatsoever. It’s actually a pretty adorable takeoff on “The Arabian Nights” which fell flat on its face because his devoted readership bought Hack Werker novels for scenes of anal sex, not cutesy-poo adventures on a flying carpet. Hack later disowned the book, claiming that he only wrote it to impress a nursery school teacher that he wanted to have anal sex with.
Hack became obsessed with the idea of Amazon warriors watching the old “Wonder Woman” TV show with Lynda Carter. The producers were going to sue Hack for plagiarism (the novel is a blatant rip-off of the show) but they reached a compromise and loosely based the third season two-part episode “Phantom of the Roller Coaster” on the book instead. The TV version is way better than the book.
Hack’s infrequent stabs at the sci-fi genre are surprisingly pretty good. This cover went into more detail than usual because a fan bought the book “Jonny’s Birthday,” the cover of has literally nothing to do with the contents and the guy tried to sue Hack for a billion dollars in damages. They settled on an autographed headshot and one of Hack’s used Kleenex (the guy collected celebrity used Kleenex).