Forgotten Books: Lust Grave - John Dexter

You never know what you’re going to get when you start one of these books, especially when it was published under a house-name. There’s no telling who “John Dexter” was on this book. It hasn’t been attributed to any of the usual stable: Block, Westlake, Silverberg, etc. And based on the quality of the prose, it wasn’t any of those guys. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Also with these books, you could get almost any sort of story, from the darkest noir to screwball comedies (although most of them lean toward the hardboiled/noir side). All you can really count on is that there’ll be a number of lengthy, highly euphemistic sex scenes.

LUST GRAVE, published in 1964, is one of the dark, noirish books. Corrupt, sociopathic Bull Chapman, who works as a cop in the small city of Adamsville, Missouri, prowls the local Lover’s Lane looking for couples he can prey on. He intimidates the young men into abandoning their dates, then rapes the girls and frightens them into keeping quiet about it. He sniffs out cheating wives and blackmails them into having sex with him. It’s a good life for a monster like Bull, but then he makes the mistake of targeting the wrong couple: pre-med student Richard Bristol, who just wants to settle down and marry his high school sweetheart Laura Dale. Although they intend to wait for marriage to sleep together, they get carried away one night in the woods, but before they can finish, Bull catches them and proceeds with his usual brutal assault. He figures he’ll get away with it the way he always has.

But in this case, Richard and Laura decide to get even with him. And the best way to do that is to kill him . . .

Of course, being a couple of typical small-town, mid-century American youth, planning and committing a murder isn’t necessarily easy for them. And in this type of novel, things always go wrong.

Whoever John Dexter was in this case, LUST GRAVE really moves. Like most of the books from this publisher, it has the narrative drive of a rocket. I was really flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen. The prose is kind of unpolished at times, and the author drags in some sub-plots that are there mostly to pad out the wordage and provide an excuse for more sex scenes, but there are long stretches of the book that read like a second-or-third tier Gold Medal novel. The plot doesn’t play out exactly like I thought it would, either, which is always a bonus. And as is also usual with books like this, LUST GRAVE provides a nice window into everyday life for the middle and lower class in the late Fifties/early Sixties era. You can almost imagine a slightly older Wally Cleaver or Bud Anderson getting into the sort of trouble that Richard Bristol does.

As I often say about books like this, LUST GRAVE is no lost masterpiece, but it is a highly readable, entertaining yarn that I raced through in a day. If you ever come across a copy for a reasonable price, it’s worth reading.