AC-DC Lover, Victor Jay, Private Edition Books #PE 346, (1965); (Love’s Pawn, Borgo Press 2012). This is one of Victor’s earliest books and probably my least favorite so far. It is a good example of the pulp books being published before The Why Not; before Earl Kemp and Greenleaf Classics. It’s a really dark story and was really hard for me to read. I don’t know who the artist was but, my favorite part of the book is the cover art. Up to this point, I’ve stuck with the happier, fun stories like the C.A.M.P. series, Three on a Broomstick, his gothic romances, etc. While many of them had disturbing moments, AC-DC Lover was all about disturbing moments. The main character, Lenny, is an unredeemable asshole. I tried to find some redeeming quality in him…but I could not! I was not sad at the end. I just felt sorry for his “victims.”
I’m surprised it was republished by Wildside/Borgo Press in 2012 with the title Love’s Pawn. It’s an interesting title change. While I think Love’s Pawn is a little more accurate, there is no love or lovers involved in this story. I’m not sure who would buy this book and enjoy it (though I recently purchased the first edition for $50 on ebay). With that being said, this book is not without some “redeeming social value.” This book has historical significance and gives the reader a better understanding of the history of pulp fiction. If you are curious and want to read it, you can purchase Love’s Pawn from Wildside Press.
To take a deeper dive into this book, I encourage you to read Ori’s post.
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 2 which sets the stage for Lenny’s spiteful existence.
Chapter 2
Things were never right for Lenny Adams. For as long as he could remember, life had never been anything but a contest to see who could screw who the first and the roughest.
Some kids could look back on their childhood with pleasure and remember it, or at least imagine it, as a time of pleasure hours and happy fun. Not so with Lenny. He remembered his mother, a nagging selfish woman who hadn’t cared in the least for anybody but herself, whose only concern was her own comfort.
He couldn’t remember his father too clearly, although he hadn’t been all that young when his father had gone. From what he did remember, his father had been a nice enough guy, quiet, never angry, patient as anything. He had to be patient to live with the woman he had for a wife. Lenny couldn’t bring his father to mind without picturing his mother too, following the little man around, nagging him, telling him how worthless he was, and yelling that she needed more money to keep the house. The last must have been a real joke—the house was never kept. As a very small child, Lenny had been made to take care of the dishes and keep things picked up, and the house-cleaning that he did daily under his mother’s supervision was about all that ever got done.
Lenny might have liked his father, but there was never much opportunity for the two of them to get to know each other without the presence of the nagging, shrewish woman who turned everything into an ordeal. And then one day Lenny’s father left. There wasn’t any explanation of it so far as Lenny was concerned. His father didn’t come home for dinner one night, and when Lenny mentioned it, his mother told him bitterly that he wouldn’t be coming home again ever.
When he got a little older, Lenny gradually understood that they had separated, and that they were divorced. For a full year, he waited hopefully for his father to come back, not to stay, but to take him away also. He could not believe that a man as gentle and calm as his father could leave him there to suffer alone. But his father never came back for him, and after a time Lenny’s fervent desire dimmed and became instead a deep seated bitterness toward the man who had abandoned him, and eventually toward all men. Men, it seemed to him, were a weak and worthless lot, not fit for anyone’s affection. As for women, they were a race of vicious, bitter animals to be dealt with by whatever means.
He knew that his mother saw men, plenty of them, and he had acquired enough knowledge in the alleys of their dreary neighborhood and from the conversation of other boys to know exactly why she was seeing them and what was going on behind the closed doors of her bedroom. He avoided all men like the plague, hating them all with the same intense hatred he felt for his mother. That one of them might become a permanent fixture in the household never entered his mind until his mother introduced him to Carl.
“Kid, I want you to meet Carl,” she announced one afternoon, placing herself in the doorway to block Lenny’s intended departure from the house. “You’d better be nice to him, he’s gonna be your old man.”
