The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
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.
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 went through many phases where he thought that playing a musical instrument would make him irresistible to women. The concertina era was probably the most disastrous where he would confront random women frantically pumping the bellows (which he had no concept of how to actually play) and then proposition them sexually, inevitably receiving a brutal beating from their male companions or from the women themselves (often both). He wrote this highly idealized novelization of the experiment in which the fictional version of himself was infinitely more successful with the ladies than he was in real life.
Hack wrote this volume about Linda Ronstadt, whose poster adorned the interior of the van he lives in throughout the 1970’s. Her version of “Desperado” is one of his all-time favorite recordings, and he wrote this novel after once again drunkenly listening to it and dissolving into tears because she didn’t share the obsessive love that he had for her. Hack was interviewed for the 2019 documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of Her Voice” but the footage was unusable when he broke into hysterics and attempted to jump out of a window.
This is a rare Hack Werker romantic novel set in Paris where every goddamned scene is set in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
When Hack learned that his cover artist Jonny M. was having an affair with his celebrity crush Frances Fisher, he wrote this salacious tell-all designed to take them both down. As with all of Hack’s scheme, it backfired spectacularly as the book was an international best seller and Jonny and Ms. Fisher became more popular than ever. As for Hack, his publisher John Kane got all the profits from the novel and Hack was hit with massive libel suits which destroyed him financially.
When Hack discovered that there was a small theater across the street from the Shakey’s where he worked as a janitor, he volunteered as a technician with the expectation that he would meet scatterbrained actresses who believed in Free Love. To his disappointment, they all turned out to be intelligent, mature women who found him as repellent as any other women do.
Since Hack has lived in a van parked in a Shakey’s parking lot for over fifty years, it may surprise you to learn that he once seriously considered buying a houseboat, finding a woman and sailing off into oblivion. But since every woman he asked said she’d rather jump into shark-infested waters than live on a boat with him and the bank he tried to finance the boat through told him that he’d need a lot more assets than the $267.15 he had in savings to qualify for a loan, he just wrote this book instead. It tanked.
This was one of Hack’s infrequent attempts at a conventional romantic love story. As usual, he lost interest halfway through so the last 100 pages are just an angry rant against his abusive father.
When he heard that a young friend of his had proposed to the love of his friend’s life, Hack thought of the effect that his own six failed marriages had on him and wrote this sci-fi classic as a cautionary tale. For the record, his friend and his bride have now been happily married for about a year, surpassing the total of all of Hack’s marriages combined.