PDF ACCUSED (Hank Janson Crime Book 6)

About America and its mean streets and hard cases, Frances knew only what he had read or seen in the movies. But his writing skill and intense concentration while writing—actually, while speaking into a dictaphone—breathed life into the secondhand cliches, and made the robust Janson adventures better by far than most of the other ersatz pulp thrillers that would soon swamp the paperback stalls of newsagents across Great Britain.

If he smelled rotting fish I felt nauseated and if he exhausted himself I had to gulp whiskey to revive myself. Because I could identify myself so thoroughly with Hank Janson, my readers were probably also helped to identify with the topics hero, which is what many readers like to do.

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But very few would have the emotional intensity and dimension and overall zing of the Hank Janson novels. Janson varied professions from one series of topics to another, there were continuing characters and plot devices that linked different volumes together, and some of the Jansons were stand-alone efforts with a one-time-only cast and unusual settings, including a trilogy of topics set in the Persian deserts and a volume of science fiction. It was, as it happened, a fortuitous move. Seven Hank Janson titles were entered as evidence of this outrage, including Killer the topic that had supposedly inspired the recent murder , Accused, and three topics about the Persian slave trade.

Prosecutors interpreted for the jury the contents of the topics, including a lengthy discussion of the topic titled Accused, a Postman Always Rings Twice see James M. In what many would later describe as an unfairly tried case, the seven accused were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to fines and six months in prison. Stephen Frances, who denied having written the titles that had caused the trouble for was it not the case that Frances never wrote them, but dictated them into a machine?

Taking a hand from writers like James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney he churned out a quick brutal tale of crime and sex set in the States and with a rough tough hero with an eye for a dame. He named the character Hank Janson pronounced Yanson and took the name as his pseudonym as well. Over the years Janson made some changes, by the time the novels appeared he was a rough tough reporter for the Daily Chronicle he sold ladies stockings in the first story and he operated out of Des Moines which British pulp expert Steve Holland has to remind British readers is pronounced de moyne.

That imagery was what eventually got Frances and Janson in trouble with British obscenity laws. Seven of the Janson books were taken to court as obscene, and the one quoted most often by the prosecution is the little gem we have here, Accused. Accused is one of the books published under the Janson byline, but not featuring Janson as a character.

Instead the hero is a fellow named Farran who works in a diner for a fat obnoxious fellow named Friedman His arms were thick and fleshy, his skin white and clammy, and his grimy, sweaty shirt gaped open down to his navel. His shirt was heavy with the smell of sweat and his face was damp and shiny, glistening with fresh perspiration a few seconds after he wiped the back of his arm across his forehead. Cain might have objected to lifting the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice whole cloth only with more heavy breathing.

We open with a graphic description of the most brutal third degree ever given in fiction as Farran recalls the events that lead up to him murdering Friedman in reveries between the beatings. Even now, it was still hot in that kitchen. During the heat of the afternoon, it musta been an oven. Her face was shiny and damp, sweat patches blotched her armpits, and her youthful breasts seemed weary, sagged heavily against the damp bodice of the worn dress.

Farran lets us know in no uncertain terms Friedman keeps his wife a slave in nothing but that one dress She was wearing the same black dress, and in the light of day I could see more clearly how thin and faded it was. I could see even more.

It clung to her youthful contours faithfully, outlining her youthful breasts and the curves of her flanks with a faithfulness that was strangely stirring, almost as though she wore nothing beneath that dress. I stood there in a cold sweat. It was Freidman who was with his wife. What could I do about it? The real obscenity in the Janson books lies in what he implies but never actually says. The man had a real gift for innuendo in epic proportions. Over the course of about 50, words we get quite a bit of this kind of sweaty damp semi-masturbatory prose as Farran proceeds from victim of the brutal Freidman to his killer and eventually finds himself on trial for murder, his life on the line.

Certainly not obscene, that first paragraph is as far as anything goes, stopping well before the bedroom door. Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane were writing much racier scenes when this was prosecuted, but this was sold as sleaze, replete with those brilliant Reginald Heade covers, and, well, it just felt obscene. Steve Holland has also penned The Trials of Hank Janson about the obscenity trials and of equal interest, but Telos Press has brought these long lost classics of British pulp back into print in paperback and ebook form at low enough prices to indulge your taste for the long lost tales.

Frances wrote under several house names, and as Frances wrote the popular John Gail spy novels from the sixties and seventies, many published here; he also wrote as Dave Steel and Duke Linton, and God knows what else. Like most pulp writers he writes too fast and at times too sloppily, but the stories have great energy and at their best are fun once you get past the more painful attempts at American slang.

A heavily made-up blonde is wearing a strapless, figure-hugging, cleavage-revealing dress. Worse than that, the youth appeal was across classes. Apart from anything else, they were cheap: Vengeance was a paperback retailing at just two shillings.

The publishers — Reg Carter, 34, and Julius Reiter, 46 — were each fined a thousand pounds and given six-months jail sentences, while their companies were fined two thousand pounds apiece. As for Hank Janson himself, he too would have been prosecuted, save for the fact that he had temporarily evaded the Yard.

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But there was a warrant out for his arrest, should he return to Britain from Spain, where he had made his home. Rather he was an Englishman, a year-old named Stephen Daniel Frances, who was born in poverty in south London, within shooting range of Balham itself. It was, he later explained, a fantasy rather than a location: Towards the end of , he did indeed return home and he was duly arrested and charged with publishing seven obscene books, the same seven titles that had seen Carter and Reiter sentenced.

When Frances appeared at the Old Bailey in February , however, there was a very different outcome: Because it turned out that Frances had the perfect defence: He was the man who created both the character and the nom de plume, and who had written the first twenty-five novels, but then he had sold out his entire interest, lock, stock and barrel, to his publishers for four thousand pounds.

They had since employed other writers to continue the series, but that was nothing to do with him. It was all a bizarre case of mistaken identity, and the proceedings collapsed in great embarrassment for the Crown. As is customary in such cases, the publicity that the two trials attracted did no harm to sales.

Hank Janson remained a lucrative franchise, and subsequent titles appeared with even greater frequency: Stephen Frances, meanwhile, returned to Spain, to play chess and to create another hardboiled hero.