Object of Lust - Mark West (Charles Runyon)

Charles Runyon is one of those writers who isn’t very well-known, but his work is quite well-regarded by those who have read it. I think Ed Gorman is the first person I recall who told me how good Runyon’s novels are. Runyon wrote mostly crime and mystery fiction (including ghosting three non-series novels under the Ellery Queen name) and science fiction. In the early Sixties, he also wrote three soft-core novels for Softcover Library (the successor to Beacon Books) under the name Mark West.

The third and final of those novels is OBJECT OF LUST, originally published in 1962 and just reprinted by Black Gat Books for the first time since then. Like many of the soft-core novels from that era, it’s actually a crime/suspense yarn. Set at a lake resort where well-to-do families have vacation cabins, it seems at first that the protagonist of this novel is Lewis Leland, a young ex-GI who teaches waterskiing to the wives and teenage daughters of those wealthy families. He saves one of those wives, beautiful Marian Morgan, from drowning one day and falls for her. He sets out to seduce her and almost succeeds, but they’re caught in the woods by a couple of kids before they can complete the act. Marian panics and won’t have anything more to do with Lewis.

That’s when we realize that Lewis is actually crazy, a sociopath who has killed before—and will again as he starts stalking Marian, determined to have her for his own even if he has to kidnap and rape her.

While this is going on, we also get a look at the affairs of various unhappily married couples, including Marian and her lawyer husband Dee. The people who are staying around the lake are a pretty degenerate bunch in some ways, indulging in plenty of drinking and adultery, but Runyon pulls off the neat trick of getting the reader to sympathize with them. Despite the sordidness of the situations, some of them actually come off as pretty likeable.

Not Lewis Leland, though. He’s easily one of the creepiest villains I’ve encountered in fiction, and that makes the last fifty pages or so of this book race by in breakneck fashion. I couldn’t turn those pages fast enough. OBJECT OF LUST is a slow burn most of the way, except for an occasional shockingly abrupt outbreak of violence, but when it finally takes off, it really takes off.

It occurs to me that what Runyon is doing here is taking a standard Gold Medal type of plot and turning it on its head in many ways. Lewis Leland would be the protagonist of a Gold Medal novel, and Marian Morgan would be the femme fatale. He does a great job of this reversal, too. His writing is top-notch, with excellent characterizations and observations on life reminiscent of John D. MacDonald. Some of it is genuinely unpleasant to read because of how evil Lewis is, but that just raises the stakes. The sex scenes are a little more graphic than in most books from that era but still pretty mild by the standards of what came later. Overall, OBJECT OF LUST is a really good book, a well-written page-turner that deserves a new lease on life. I’m glad Black Gat is reprinting it. You can order the paperback on Amazon.

Forgotten Books: Color Him Dead - Charles Runyon

I don’t think Charles Runyon was ever considered one of the top-tier Gold Medal authors, but his books have plenty of admirers, including the late Ed Gorman, whose interview with Runyon can be found here. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until now. COLOR HIM DEAD is one of Runyon’s early novels, published by Gold Medal in 1963. In a neat bit of plotting, it begins where a lot of other noir novels end: with the protagonist in prison, convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, the real killer being the woman he fell for before the book ever begins. Drew Simmons had an affair with the beautiful younger wife of an older, rich man who wound up dead, and Simmons went away for the murder.

But when he gets a chance to escape, he crashes out and tracks down the woman to get his revenge on her. The trail leads to a small island in the West Indies, where Simmons’ former lover is now married to a wealthy, brutal planter who owns just about everything and everybody on the island. And in another nice twist, there’s a good reason Simmons can’t just kill her and be done with it. Instead he winds up involved with the domestic drama playing out there, as well as some dangerous political intrigue.

It’s a great set-up, Runyon’s prose is very vivid, and all the characters are interesting. My only complaints are that the pace is pretty leisurely and the big finish maybe not slam-bang enough for my taste. But COLOR HIM DEAD is still a pretty compelling yarn and well worth reading. A tip of the hat to Fred Blosser for this one.

Now, as an aside, that bare-breasted native girl cover would never be deemed politically correct enough to publish these days. The art is generally credited to Robert McGinnis. In some ways it looks like his work to me, and in others it doesn’t. But I’m about as far from an art expert as you’ll ever find, so don’t go by me. There’s also some underage sex in the book, treated as no big deal, which might also render it unpublishable today, and plenty of racial content, although the only real racists in the book are villains. Just a heads-up for those of you who like to be aware of such things.