But PANDORA'S BOX isn't a Gold Medal by Gil Brewer or
Charles Williams. It's not even a Beacon or a Midwood by Orrie Hitt. Instead it
was written by someone using the pseudonym Jack Pine and published by Pendulum
Books, a small Atlanta-based publisher in the late Sixties that specialized in
sleaze novels. And if any book ever deserved the label "hardboiled
sleaze", it's PANDORA'S BOX.
The Pandora in question is Pandora Lockwood, a beautiful
redhead who seduces hunting guide Mike Dawson into helping her and her husband
Nick recover a treasure buried in a collapsed mine shaft in the Idaho
mountains. The plan is that once they have the loot, Dawson will kill Nick
Lockwood and he and Pandora will share the money. That's just the beginning of
the plot, though. A beautiful underage girl just out of reform school also
figures in, as do a couple of hapless flunkies recruited to help dig out the
treasure. Before you know it, everybody is scheming to kill everybody else and
wind up in sole possession of the money, but before they can do that, they all
have to have sex with each other, too.
This is a somewhat awkward amalgamation of noir novel and
pornography, and the frustrating thing is that there's a pretty good novella
buried among the exceedingly crude and graphic sex scenes. Handled differently,
this could have been a Gold Medal, and a decent one, too, because "Jack
Pine" could write. There are clever lines throughout, some groan-inducing
puns reminiscent of the Western series Edge by George G. Gilman (Terry Harknett),
and a surprising amount of black humor interspersed with all the bleak
nihilism. Plus a twist ending that's not really surprising but is still
effective.
I used to know who Jack Pine really was. I believe his name
was Sherman Smith, or something like that. I can't find anything about him on
the Internet now. But he wrote more than a dozen novels for Pendulum Books, all
of them evidently with crime plots. Any recommendation I give to PANDORA'S BOX
would have to be a qualified one – it certainly won't be to everybody's taste –
but if I ever run across another novel by Jack Pine, I won't hesitate to pick
it up.
