Pot of Honey - John Furlough (Glenn Dale Lough)

POT OF HONEY by John Furlough, published by Softcover Library in 1966, has several things going for it that I like. It takes place in a short period of time, a little more than 24 hours, and it has several overlapping storylines that come together, veer apart, and then gradually intertwine even more.

We have a middle-aged, well-off-but-not-exactly rich widower who marries a younger widow with two beautiful daughters. The widower’s brutal jerk of a son lusts after the widow’s daughters and doesn’t care that they’re now his stepsisters. We have a young couple who own a farm and are unhappy in their marriage. We have the hired man on the farm, who’s also a brutal jerk. If you think that’s a plot designed to include a lot of sex scenes, you’re right. But the author also throws in a missing $10,000, a lot of scheming to get hold of that money, and a shooting.

It's well-documented that many, if not most, of the soft-core novels published in the Fifties and early Sixties are actually crime novels with some euphemistic, not too graphic sex scenes added to them. By the mid-Sixties, a gradual trend had set in: there were more sex scenes in the books, they were a little more graphic (although still not what anybody would consider hardcore), and the crime elements weren’t as important. That’s the window in which POT OF HONEY falls. The sex was what sold books like this when they were new; it’s the noirish crime angle that keeps guys like me reading them today.

John Furlough was a pseudonym for Glenn Dale Lough (1906-1991), who used the names Glenn Low and G. Davisson Low to author several dozen Western and detective stories for a variety of pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. By the Sixties, usually as Glenn Low but sometimes as John Furlough, he had become a prolific soft-core novelist specializing in small-town and rural stories, turning out books for Beacon Books, its successor Softcover Library, and Novel Books. The Western stories I’ve read by him have been good. I’m a little surprised he didn’t become a Western novelist. Maybe he tried and just wasn’t able to sell in that market. Maybe he had some luck with the soft-core market and just stuck with it. A lot of writers will do that. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that Lough was a decent writer, able to come up with interesting characters and move his plots along nicely. As a soft-core writer, he never reached the levels of Orrie Hitt or the authors who went on to other things such as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, and Donald Westlake. As a crime/noir author, he was no Harry Whittington, Day Keene, or Charles Williams. But he was a solid craftsman, based on what I’ve read so far, and everything I’ve read by him was entertaining and kept me flipping the pages. If you have any of his books on your shelves, or if you run across any, I think his work is worth reading.