MIDWOOD MELODRAMAS by Dave Goode

 

Back in junoir high school I was introduced to " adult paperbacks " by way of Midwood Books. A neighbor's older sister had a collection of these books from the 60s and he would lend them to me.Of course any teenage boy would be attracted to these books with their titillating covers of sexy women in various stages of undress in sexual situations. But I imagined it was the back cover copy with their lurid come ons that got the readers to purchase the books.

 

 

Later I would find out the publisher of Midwood Books was Harry Shorten. Shorten had been a collegiate and professional football star who had become a writer. Working at MLJ Comics as an editor and writer he helped to create such Golden Age characters as the Shield and the Black Hood. The Shield who predated Captain America is regarded as the first patriotic comic book hero. He would also create the award winning syndicated single panel comic There Ought To Be A Law. The Midwood Publishing House was active for over a decade from 1957 to 1968.

 

 

But back to the books themselves. By no means were they pornographic. A guilty pleasure of mine was the television miniseries SCRUPLES starring Lindsay Wagner. I liked it so much I bought a copy of the novel by Judith Krantz that the series was based on. I'm here to tell you that book was closer to porn than anything I ever read from Midwood. The stories inside were titillating. But not dirty. They were lurid melodramas along the lines of Hollywood potboilers like The Chapman Report (1962) and The Carpetbaggers ( 1964 ). They also had a series of lesbian books. Strangely enough they seemed to be written for straight men.The covers of course featured two or more half - dressed women. And the stories usually ended with the heroine in love with a man. So maybe it wasn't so strange straight men were a huge part of the audience for these books. A lesbian friend once told me she and her girl friends stopped reading these books before they got to the last ten pages when the heroine was " converted ".

 

 

Reading these books as a teenager I imagined some of these books being made into Hollywood movies after being cleaned up a little. If it could be done with The Carpetbaggers it could be done with the Midwood Books. On the other hand they could  probably have been more easily turned into grind house flicks.

 

 

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