The website of the greatest pulp fiction writer who ever lived
Three co-workers (a man, a woman and a pug) return to work after a three-day weekend to find that their office building has become a jungle infested with terrorist guerilla fighters. (Hack doesn’t have a firm grasp of the realities of working a 9-5 job.)
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 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 wrote this immediately after his fifth divorce.
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.”