Title: In a Dark Garden
Author: Frank G. Slaughter
Cover artist: Uncredited
Yours for: $5
Best things about this cover:
- The problem with doing this blog regularly over a period of many years is that it's gotten to the point where every title looks like a porn title. My first thought on this one: "So... he's about to discover that she's not a real blonde."
- Is that his "trying to sell myself" pose? "Hey, lady, you like this? You like what you see? How about ... this pose? Huh? Nice, right? Thirty bucks."
- Somehow the burnt-out hellscape in the background doesn't quite mesh with the dopey Easter-time flirtery of the foreground. "I got your painted eggs right here, sweetie . . . twenty-five bucks."
- She is comically over-dressed. How many ways do you need to block out the sun, Vampirella?
Best things about this back cover:
- This book should've been titled "This Jane Anderson"
- "Wanton" = "Civil-War Slutty"
- So ... it's a romcom about people in a fake marriage. I'm assuming wackiness ensues. I think this is essentially the plot of at least one Adam Sandler movie and at least one Sandra Bullock movie and probably thousands more filmic atrocities. And now I know whom to blame for this tired conceit: Frank G. Slaughter.
The runner had stayed snug in this anchorage since yesterday's dawn, while the crew had swarmed along the water line to make doubly sure that their long job of caulking had left the hull bone-dry.
OK, if that's not porn, I don't know what is. Come on!
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter or Tumblr]
7 comments:
Five'll get you ten the women are actually the same person.
I don't know much about sailing ships, so maybe I'm completely wrong, but I'm having problems imagining a Civil War-era clipper ship big enough that it has adjoining staterooms with a door between them--as though that was the really improbable aspect of the book....
Rex: 'every title looks like a porn title. My first thought on this one: "So... he's about to discover that she's not a real blonde."'
Ooer! Rexie, I must be losing my grip, because as soon as I saw the title, I felt deflated at the seeming complete lack of porno possibilities.
But you being a genius, you've revitalized my (lack of) imagination, and suddenly I see a potential anal porno theme starting to emerge, with Jane reaming Julian's Deep South with her cute little brolly.
That explains why it tell us on the back, "He needed passage money."
It also explains why she was so overdressed.
Then again, I'm starting to get the hang of these books now, and the usual dead give away whether there's go'n'o be any raunch is the presence or absence of 'shame'; and this book, I fear, is utterly shameless.
Yet just when I feel my antennae for smut-filled possibilities beginning to droop, I suddenly stumble on the reason the garden's truly dark.
Aye, aye, says I, that's a rather suspicious pose from Julian - what's he try'n'o hide from Jane?
And there in the tree to his right, (our left), is a vagina: thus's revealed Julian's terrible secret - he's an arbosexual!
Talk about your morning wood!
And now we know why he's so desperate to offer his services to the Confederacy as a surgeon - he's a TREE surgeon!
As I learned from a book on puberty we have at the library where I work, it's completely possible for curtains and carpet to not match naturally.
Also it's not just a rom-com but a rom-com told from the POV of two Southerners. Can't wait to see the jokes that abound when they talk about how much they love slavery and want to be separated from the rest of the US!
As an avid reader of historical romances, I can tell you the "convenient marriage" plot gets played to death, even today (although generally now, the setting for historicals is Regency England; the Civil War romance novel seems to be played out--as Jamie notes above, it sort of, ya know, trivializes the whole slavery thing).
Frank G. Slaughter wrote a lot of novels about doctors and medicine, including the very soapy DOCTORS' WIVES which was made into an even soapier movie in the 1970s.
Aye, aye, Rexie: I've only just noticed, you've gone up from 44th to 31st!
Well done!
I foudn this long ago in a stack of books. The spine read "Slaughter In a Dark Garden" Imagine my disappointment when I figured out it wasn't a murder mystery.
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