Love Camp on Wheels - Tom Harland

The third novel in TRAILER TRAMPS, the great new collection from Stark House, is LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, published originally by Softcover Library (the successor to Beacon Books) in 1963. It’s the story of Stan Barton, a regular guy who manages a trailer park in an agricultural area of California. Many of the camp’s occupants are migratory workers and their families, but there are some full-time residents, too. Stan was in the lettuce business until automation forced him out, but he’s managed to land this nice job taking care of the trailer park.

Things get complicated, though, as they always do in these books, when Stan becomes romantically involved with three married women: his own ex-wife, a newcomer to the park, and a woman who works in the office there. Eventually the husbands of all three women cause trouble for Stan, as does the park’s owner, a lesbian who has fallen for one of the three women herself. Stan not only has to figure out which of the three he really wants, he also has to survive a threat on his life and trouble with the law.

I don’t know anything about Tom Harland and couldn’t find anything on-line about him except that he wrote half a dozen of these softcore novels for Beacon/Softcover Library in the early Sixties. I have a hunch the name is a pseudonym, but that’s all it is, a hunch. Whoever he was, he wasn’t as good a writer as Orrie Hitt and Doug Duperrault, the other two authors in TRAILER TRAMPS. His prose isn’t nearly as smooth. But he keeps the story moving along at a good pace, his depiction of the middle class lifestyle of the era is accurate, and his characters ring true.

Some of the book concerns the expansion of the trailer park, and I’ve been around enough construction projects to recognize that Harland knows what he’s talking about in those scenes. In fact, the writing is stronger in those parts, almost as if Harland was more interested in them than he was in the domestic drama.

That said, Stan Barton is a likable lug of a protagonist, despite his penchant for fooling around with married women, and you can’t help but root for him to figure things out and come up with a happy ending. I enjoyed LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS, and it makes a nice companion piece for the other two novels in this collection. This latest offering from Stark House is well worth reading.

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.