The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
Hack’s cover artist Jonny M.’s success with women has caused Hack to despise him, but it has inspired some of Hack’s best work. Hack wrote this after Jonny told him of the dozens of women who expected him to be with them sexually on Valentine’s Day.
Because of his obsession with Frances Fisher, Hack has written many sequels to her movies. This is one of the better ones in which Strawberry Alice, the stern brothel madam in “Unforgiven,” hooks up with a dashing outlaw and his loyal pug.
This novel was inspired by Hack’s honeymoon for his disastrous first marriage in 1958. Hack took his new bride to Niagara Falls but they were followed by a small-time hood that Hack owed money to who was furious that Hack spent his last few dollars on his honeymoon instead of paying him back. The hood attempted to shoot Hack but he hit his new bride instead before being gunned down by local law enforcement. The girl went into a coma and Hack had the marriage annulled before putting her in a bargain-basement hospital where she remains in a comatose state to this day. The book sold well and served loosely as the basis for the 1966 Tony Curtis comedy “Not with my Wife, You Don’t.”
Hack was surprised to discover that his books sold well south of the border, so he wrote this one in Spanish using Google Translate with his musical crush Linda Ronstadt as the heroine. Sadly it sold poorly in Mexico (where it was considered incomprehensible) but it was an unexpected hit in Thailand.
When filmmaker Gary Marshall directed a series of romantic comedies with holiday themes like “Valentine’s Day,” “New Year’s Eve” and “Mother’s Day,” Hack wrote a spec script titled “Labor Day” and sent it to Mr. Marshall’s office. They passed on the project, objecting to the grimmer aspects of the story where a woman invites a man to a holiday barbeque and then locks him in her basement BDSM dungeon, subjecting him to various genital tortures until he admits his love for him. Hack refashioned the story into this novel about young love although he admitted that he didn’t consider it his best work, saying that it was “too sappy.”
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.