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Hank Janson

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Hank Janson
Pseudonym of Stephen D. Frances

“I had to kinda peel her off me. Her pointed nails seared across my back, tore skin through my thin shirt. A piece of my lip went with her and, as I gripped her bare shoulders, she was panting uncontrollably, eyes swimmy and semi-conscious. A little trickle of blood ran down from her parted lips . . .”
— Shocking! Somebody call the thought police!

HANK JANSON wasn’t so much a “tough Chicago reporter” (or even, later in his career, a hard-boiled private eye)  as a publishing phenomenon.

In the years following World War II, there were over thirteen million Hank Janson paperbacks sold, mostly in the U.K. They were American-style crime fiction, what the Britsh called “tough gangster thrillers,” a swirl of hard-boiled patter, brutal violence and shockingly raw–for the times–sex, presenting a romanticized version of a mobster-ridden America that post-war England just couldn’t seem to get enough of, and very much reminiscent of the work of fellow Brits James Hadley Chase, Carter Brown and Peter Cheyney, who had all become very successful, cranking out the same sort of stuff, despite the fact that not one of them, at least in the beginning, had ever been to the States. Of course, the gorgeous covers by Reginald Heade, featuring drop-dead gorgeous women in some of the most erotic poses imaginable, didn’t hurt, and it’s easy to imagine hordes of horny English schoolboys never getting much beyond the covers.

The first Janson book (more a novelette than a novel, actually) was a rush job, cranked out by Stephen Frances over a frantic weekend in 1946. Seems Frances, the owner of Pendulum, a small publishing house circling the drain, had a windfall of sorts: a printer had enough paper for a 20,000 run of a 24-page book, if he was interested. Paper being in very short supply (war rationing, etc.), Frances jumped at the chance.

The only catch? The call came on a Friday morning, and the book had to go to press on Monday. And Frances didn’t have anything ready to go. So he and his secretary, Muriel, worked over the weekend, him dictating and her typing what would become Hank Janson’s first adventure, the 15,000 worder, When Dames Get Tough, published as by “Hank Janson,” for an extra dash of versimultude.

The book didn’t seem particularly promising–at this point, Hank wasn’t a two-fisted reporter or private eye–he was a two-fisted traveling salesman based in New York City, selling ladies cosmetics. And yet this fast-paced, ripsnorting tale, narrated by Janson in an approximation of American tough guy patter, full of dime store cynicism and snark, wrapped around enough pulpy action to keep things moving, was just what male readers apparently wanted. There’s a beautiful damsel in distress, assorted thugs, black market goods, a switcheroo or two, another blonde babe, and a whole lot of people more than willing to wipe Hank off the face of the earth.

But the book sold like crazy, and a sequel, Scarred Faces, comprising two short stories, soon followed. Clocking in at a whopping sixty-four pages, this one also flew off the shelves. But it was too late to save struggling Pendulum Publishing, and when the plug was finally pulled, Frances decided to keep the nascent series going, acting initially as both writer and publisher.

Within a few books, perhaps realizing lipstick salesman wasn’t the best gig for a six-foot three, 200 pound bruiser series hero, Hank became a reporter for the Chicago Chronicle. And so, for ten years he churned out a book a month, over three hundred of the suckers altogether. “I felt more like a factory than an author,” he said. Sales, meanwhile, climbed to an astonishing 100,000 a month.

The demand proved insatiable, and “Hank Hanson” became, for a while, the bestselling author in the U.K. Soon the books were being divided into series, with the ever-evolving hero of the series taking on different occupations (A P.I.! A spy!), assignments, settings and even themes with each series. To their credit, and despite the fluid nature of the books, Frances and the various writers of the series did try to instill some continuity into the books–a true rarity in the “mushroom jungle,” the name given by author Steve Holland to the post-war British pulp fiction boom.

Naturally, with all that success, those covers and all those lovingly described “creamy breasts and glistening thighs,” somebody was bound to disapprove, and in the fifties, the powers-that-be decided to crack down on the Janson books, citing the Obscene Publications Act, which resulted in seven of the titles being banned, with two of the books’ publishers receiving hefty fines, and two of the owners, Reginald Carter and Julius Reiter, being sentenced to six months in jail. Frances himself, by then living in Spain, narrowly escaped joining them when he was acquitted of all charges, after claiming that he did not actually write the Janson books–it was this Janson guy! (Wise guys all over the web are fond of pointing out that Frances in fact did not write the Hank Janson books–he dictated them).

No, the Hank Janson books were never great literature (something even their creator would admit), and by the end, the books had degenerated into borderline pornography, but at the height of their overwhelming popularity they were just what the British reading public wanted–some smart, savvy and steamy pulp fiction, delivered hot and fresh on a monthly basis.

There are worse crimes.

WOULD THE REAL HANK JANSON PLEASE STAND UP?

Stephen D. France, Hanson’s creator and the first to use the house pen name, was the sole author of the books from 1946 to 1953, and occasionally contributed to the canon until 1959, but by then the public demand was so great that other writers were soon invited onboard the gravy train, including D. F. Crawley, Harry Hobson, Victor George Charles Norwood and James Moffatt.

UNDER OATH

  • “… the titles alone drove my blood wild—Torment for Trixy—Hotsy, You’ll be Chilled—and on the cover a vivid blonde, blouse ripped, skirt hitched up to her thighs, struggling sweetly against chains, ropes and a gag—and in the top right hand corner, set in a small circle, like a medallion, the silhouette presumably of Hank himself, trench coat open, trilby tilted back, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.”
    — Simon Gray (British playwright )
  • “They are cracking, hard-boiled crime yarns that still stand up as thrilling tales. But more than that, they give a fascinating insight into the attitudes, customs and morals — particularly sexual morals — of the Fifties. The un-PC nature of  Hank’s exploits certainly comes as a shock to modern sensibilities.”
    — Stephen James Walker (British film director)
  • “The first hard-boiled crime novels I read were written by an Englishman pretending to be American: Stephen Daniel Frances, using the pseudonym Hank Janson, which was also the name of his hero. With titles like Smart Girls Don’t Talk and Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, the Janson books, dolled up in suitably tantalizing covers, made their way, hand to hand, around the school playground, falling open at any passage that, to our young minds, seemed sexy and daring. This was a Catholic boys’ grammar school after all, and any reference to parts of the body below the waist, other than foot or knee, was thought to merit, if not excommunication, at least three Our Fathers and a dozen Hail Marys.”
    — John Harvey
  • “When Dames Get Tough, Hotsy, You’ll Be Chilled and Blonde On The Spot, not forgetting that classic, Broads Don’t Scare Easy, are being released as e-books. Even my favourite Skirts Bring Me Sorrow, which is—since you ask—a personal confession as well as a book title, is there. Across Britain, Kindles are about to burst into flames.”
    — Colin Dunne on the imminent release of long-out-of-print Janson paperbacks as ebooks (January 2014, The Daily Mail)
  • “A two-fisted hero for one-fisted readers!”
    — Duke Seabrook

NOVELS & NOVELETTES

 

SHORT STORIES

COLLECTIONS & OMNIBUS EDITIONS

ALSO OF INTEREST

RELATED LINKS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
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