What a great idea for a themed anthology! TRAILER TRAMPS, coming out from Stark House later this month, collects three soft-core novels originally published by Beacon Books concerning love and lust in the trailer parks. For reasons I’ll explain later, I decided to start with the middle book in the trio, TRAILER CAMP WOMAN by Doug Duperrault, originally published in 1959.
The protagonist of this novel is Arlene Ford, a beautiful blonde who lives with
her salesman husband Buddy in a trailer park on the outskirts of Norfolk,
Virginia, where a lot of the population and business comes from the nearby
naval base. Buddy travels a lot in his job, and it’s not a very happy marriage
to start with since he’s considerably older than Arlene and doesn’t treat her
well, so she’s lonely and resentful. Despite that, she tries to remain faithful
to Buddy . . . until she meets a young sailor. And until she gets curious about
the lifestyle of the two lesbians who live in the trailer next door. While
Arlene is wrestling with those temptations, who should show up but her vengeful
ex-fiancee, who begins stalking and threatening her. Now Arlene has to figure
out not only what she wants to do with her life, but also has to survive that
psychotic threat out of her past.
TRAILER CAMP WOMAN really races along. Duperrault’s writing is very smooth and
fast-paced, and he does a good job with the characters. Arlene, her sailor, and
her lesbian friends are all sympathetic and very likable. The bad guys are
suitably despicable. Most Beacon Books had happy endings, but sometimes they
feel forced. Not so here, as the outcome of everything develops naturally and
believably. It’s just a good story where you keep reading because you want to
know what’s going to happen.
I’ve been familiar with Doug Duperrault’s name for many years and had a few of
his books before the Fire of ’08, but I never read anything by him until now. I
looked him up to find out more about him before I dug into this collection and
found his biography interesting enough that I wanted to read his book first.
Born in Massachusetts in 1929, he grew up in various places in New England. As
a young man he worked as an actor in children’s theater in New York, then moved
to California in 1950 where he took on a number of different jobs: typist (at
MGM Studios), aircraft parts worker, private detective, insurance investigator,
and ice cream truck driver. A varied background, to say the least! In the
mid-Fifties, he got into television and began a long career as a programming
director and promotions manager in Arkansas, Louisiana, and finally Florida,
where he wound up spending most of his life. He died in Tampa, where he was
active in civic affairs, in 2005. Sounds like a pretty solid, decent guy.
And while he was doing all that in the Fifties and Sixties, he wrote 24
soft-core novels for assorted publishers, all of them under his real name.
Based on TRAILER CAMP WOMAN, I suspect that most if not all of them are worth
reading. I intend to seek out more of them, if I can get around to it.
2 comments:
Whenever I see something like this, it makes me think of Bill Crider, who would have been all over this one.
Yep, it's hard to read anything from this era without thinking about Bill. All these years later, I still catch myself thinking that I'm going to ask him about something or tell him something.
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