During the early days in the Southwest—when women could shoot as accurately as men—the most dangerous nonsense a man could commit was to have a sexual affair with two women—who knew each other.
But Cyrus Bonner did just that!
In addition to his woman-trouble, Bonner had to worry about the Apache Indians who plotted to grab his Laughing Gun.
The Apaches believed that his gun shot “magic bullets.”
A newspaper-woman concocted a story about his gun when she saw it in action, and wrote in her column: “Cyrus Banner’s gun laughs at chance.” The Westerners then began calling it the Laughing Gun—and the article nearly cost him his life.
—Interior blurb for THE FURIOUS PASSION OF THE LAUGHING GUN by Lynton Wright Brent
“Western fiction has traditionally been clean,” C. L. Sonnichsen says in a chapter entitled “Sex on the Lone Prairie” in FROM HOP-ALONG TO HUD: THOUGHTS ON WESTERN FICTION (1978). “Where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free was never a place for promiscuous sex, kinky sex, or perversion.... It is only in recent times that it has been put into a book like chiles or oregano into a sopa, and with just about as much emotional involvement.”
To be sure, as Sonnichsen notes, plenty of romance may be found in the pages of Western novels and magazines throughout the first half of this century. But with a few minor exceptions, stolen kisses was about as far as it went. In the ’20s the king of the Western pulps, Street & Smith’s Western Story, took pains to assure its readers that it was a moral publication: Its cover logo in those days included the advertisement cum disclaimer, “Big, Clean Stories of Outdoor Life.” Even such pulps as Ranch Romances and Romantic Range sold pallid variations on frontier relationships; in their pages you can find a great deal of boy-chasing-girl and vice versa, but once the catch is made the curtain invariably comes down without so much as that old standby, the ellipsis, to suggest consummation.
Intimations of sexual activity lurk in the pages of a few Westerns authored by major names during the century’s early decades, particularly the novels of B. M. (for Bertha Muzzy) Bower, creator of Chip of the Flying U and reputedly an earthy soul herself. Harold Bell Wright’s THE MINE WITH THE IRON DOOR (1925), Zane Grey’s THE VANISHING AMERICAN (1925), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ THE WAR CHIEF (1927) each presents love matches between Indians and whites, with sexuality hinted at in each case.
The one truly daring Western novel of the period is Homer Cray’s WEST OF THE WATER TOWER (1923), in which a small-town Missouri couple engages in out-of-wedlock lovemaking that produces an illegitimate child. The book’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, found it necessary to bring out the first edition anonymously, ostensibly because Croy had theretofore written “light fiction” and his new novel was a serious sociological study of small-town life; readers and book reviewers, the Harper mavens told Croy, might become confused or irritated and give WEST OF THE WATER TOWER poor notices that would harm his career. The real reason for the author anonymity, of course, was concern that Croy’s reputation would be harmed by the novel’s sexual content.
But Harper’s fears were groundless. WEST OF THE WATER TOWER became both a critical success and a bestseller, film rights were bought by Jesse Lasky at Paramount Pictures for a then record sum of $7,500, and Croy—who had never made any secret of his authorship—had the added satisfaction of seeing his publishers relent and issue subsequent editions with his name boldly displayed.
In the ’30s, shudder-pulp magazines such as Horror Stories and Terror Tales—and some detective and adventure pulps as well— began selling a relatively mild form of sadomasochistic sex to readers. Their gaudy, full-color covers (and black-and-white interior illustrations) depicted women in various stages of undress, usually undergoing some form of torture at the hands of slavering fiends; and the stories themselves, which bore such titles as “Virgins of the Stone Death” and “The Pain Master’s Bride,” delivered more of the same, though the menaced virgins were almost always saved before they could be odiously deflowered and the fiends were made to pay in blood for their crimes. Despite the popularity of this type of magazine, the Western pulps—with one exception—remained aloof. Their covers portrayed, as always, galloping mustangs, cowboys brandishing sixguns, and similar action scenes.
The exception was Spicy Western, one of a group of “Spicy” titles published by a Delaware-based outfit that rather amusingly called itself Culture Publications, Inc. From late 1936 until 1942, when pressure brought by “public decency” bluenoses forced Culture Publications to change their group name to Speed (as in Speed Western, Speed Detective, etc.) and to tone down their contents, Spicy authors larded their stories with as much sexual innuendo, voyeurism, and heavy breathing as the law would allow.
Spicy Detective and Spicy Mystery were the “hottest” of the group’s books; Spicy Adventure and Spicy Western were less explicit, perhaps on the theory that readers of adventure and Wild West stories were less horny than readers of blood-and-thunder mysteries. In any case, the euphemistic sex in Spicy Western was pretty much limited to lavish descriptions of “milky white thighs” and “creamy globes straining at their wispy restraints.” Now and then, one of the authors would wax a bit more poetic on the subject of mammary glands—
Her little breasts, pert, like young apples, were peeping forth from their flimsy bondage. Miles thought they were the most fragile fruit he’d ever seen. (Stuart Adams, “The Arizona Kid”)
—but for the most part, the sexual detailing was a mix of the “Golly gee” blush and the “Hot damn” leer. A perfect example is the following excerpt from Francis Steele’s “The Sonora Ghost Rides,” in the magazine’s premier issue; this is about as hot as things ever got in the pages of Spicy Western.
“Your skin’s like the white of the chalk cliffs on the Hopi mesa, ma’am,” he said. “I bet it’s soft an’ warm like, such as them cushions over yonder on the bunk. I mean, ma’am, if a man could kinda touch it.”
She came closer. The fragrance of her was heady, like pampas grass when it’s tender.... Her fingers worked a button loose, another and another. Her dress sagged in front, showing the upper slopes of her satin smooth round breasts reaching out, warm globes of promise that vibrated with her every breath.
The Sonora Ghost’s arms were like any other man’s. He put them around her and jerked her to him. Her pliant body molded to his, her soft breasts throbbing against his chest, and when his hand brushed down her back, to urge her closer still, her body strained to him. Her breath, warm like her flesh through the thin material of her dress, bathed his face. She caught at his hand as if to guide it.
He held her off, suddenly. “You’re no wanton, ma’am,” he said fiercely through the hot rioting of his blood. “I’m thinkin’ you ain’t knowin’ what you’re doin’ or you ain’t sure-enough meanin’.”
“I’m meanin’,” she whispered.
As society became more permissive in the years following World War II, writers, editors, and publishers were quick to capitalize. Elliot Arnold’s 1947 novel, BLOOD BROTHER, contains a fairly explicit (for its time) sexual relationship between an Arizona rancher and a beautiful Apache woman. A 1950 horse opera by Nelson Nye, RIDERS BY NIGHT, was the first traditional Western to feature an actual (and realistic) seduction. In 1953 the digest-size magazine Gunsmoke, published by the same company that produced the hard-boiled crime monthly, Manhunt, printed several stories with strong sexual overtones, among them Evan Hunter’s tale of a brutal rape and its aftermath, “The Killing at Triple Tree.” Western-magazine readers still weren’t quite ready for such graphic goings-on, however; Gunsmoke lasted just two issues.
It wasn’t until the ’60s, when verbal and visual taboos started to unilaterally collapse, that explicit sex began to appear in Western fiction—mainly, at first, in contemporary tales such as Larry Mc-Murtry’s THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1966). “Earlier novelists took us to the bedroom door,” C. L. Sonnichsen laments. “Their successors... removed the door, and sometimes they walk right through the bedroom into the barn.”
The first alternative horse opera in which the door was removed is Glenn Low’s VIRGIN BOUNTY—something of a trailblazer in the soft-core-porn industry, in fact, given that it was published in 1959. Its publisher was Camerarts, a Chicago outfit that specialized in “big, exciting manly shockers.” Their Merit Books and Novel Library lines, which flourished from late 1958 until 1963, for the most part offered hard-boiled crime stories in the Mickey Spillane knock-off mode, with such inspired tittles as DAMMIT, DON’T TOUCH MY BROAD!, UNBELIEVABLE 3 & 1 ORGY, TORTURE LOVE-CAGE, SEDUCTION ON THE RUN, and BRUTE MADNESS.
Now and then they would try something different as a test case. VIRGIN BOUNTY, a Novel Book, was their first Western—and the first paperback original ever to be cover-labeled “An ADULT Western.” Their second oater, Oren Arnold’s SIN TRAIL, appeared as a Merit Book in 1960. Neither was successful, leading Camerarts thereafter to confine its lust-and-sleaze formula to contemporary themes.
Glenn Low, a former contributor to such pulps as Ten Detective Aces in the late ’40s, was one of Camerarts’ stable of prolific and manly hacks. Apparently on the basis of a couple of pulp-Western stories, he was assigned to write the company’s first gunsmoker. Low, however, knew less about the Old West than even John Creasey and the British mushroom-jungle scribblers; VIRGIN BOUNTY fairly creaks from its overload of inaccuracies and anachronisms. Its plot, too, what there is of it, also creaks—the overload in this case being clichés. Its sexual content, and Low’s sometimes eye-poppingly awful prose, is what makes it fodder for the alternative bounty hunter.
The hero is an actual (well, putative) bounty hunter named Rand McKeever, “more man than Earp and Masterson put together, and, when prodded, more animal than man.” Unlike most Western heroes, McKeever has a weakness: Inside he is a mass of “hot, knotting sensations,” the result of an extremely potent virility. “Here lay his strength and his weakness. Here was what he had all his life feared would be his ruin. Not drink, not gambling, not anything but women, beautiful, alluring women. And because of his strength and this weakness, he had shunned them, chosen the life of the manhunter.”
As the story opens, McKeever is on the trail of a mortal enemy, outlaw and gunfighter Trey Boland, and determined to keep his libido in check at least until he captures Boland and delivers him to the marshal in Apache City. But as the front-cover blurb makes plain, “The odds—three hired killers, a sadistic sex maniac, and a pair of greed-ridden prostitutes—were heavy against Rand McKeever. But the stakes were even bigger. Reward. Revenge. And 118 pounds of pulsating, naked Virgin Bounty!”
The first threat to McKeever’s anti-nooky vow is the sadistic sex maniac, who happens to be female: Josie Jewel, a.k.a. the Masked Madam, proprietress of a sporting house full of hookers known as Living Dolls. The mask she wears is a sort of snake-skin hood, and nobody knows what she looks like under it. She, too, seems to be a sexual abstainer, for obscure reasons; in fact, as she tells McKeever when he encounters her on the trail, “I didn’t agree to make the trip [as a kind of chaperone to two of her Living Dolls who have hired out to service Trey Boland and his gang] until he promised that nobody would try to lay me. He swore he’d shoot the doogin-pin off any man who so much as pinched my tit or smacked my fanny.”
One thing McKeever doesn’t have to wonder about is Josie Jewel’s body. She soon reveals it to him, apparently by accident: “Her green cloak parted. Her breasts, large and firm, plumped through, small rosebud points thrusting vigorously upward from halos of velvety pink.” One glimpse is enough to start the hot, knotting sensations somewhere in the vicinity of our hero’s doogin-pin, and to send him into rapturous (and anachronistic) speculation:
Wow! What a figure! What bubbies! What hips! Is she putting out? How much does she get? I’ll bet it’s plenty. She doesn’t put out?... She’s married, huh? No?... Is that so?... What’s the matter with girls like that? They must want to. Cold-natured? Frigidity?... Hummmmm.. .Is that what it’s called?
Despite all of this, McKeever really doesn’t want much to do with the Masked Madam, since she’s “as ornery as cat manure.” His sensations are much more hot-knotted when he meets up with the 118 pounds of pulsating Virgin Bounty: Susie Cartwright (no relation to Ben and the boys on the Ponderosa), “a sweet little chump of a farmer gal” just arrived in Arizona from back east. Her bubbies are much more tempting, especially when it becomes evident that she is anything but cold natured and has no objections to the right man pinching her tit or smacking her fanny. And McKeever is the right man at the right time with the right doogin-pin.
The consummation of their mutual lust, which comes about after a great deal of bloodshed and confused chasing around, is described thusly:
She was pulling him through the darkness...walking backwards and hastily undoing his clothes. He began to tremble. He began to help her with his levis. His hands raced over her, eagerly, as though they had minds and intentions of their own. Her flesh felt cool and hot and soft and hard....
She let go his levis. They fell to the floor. He stepped out of them. She was guiding him, her hands on his neck, his arms, his hips. She sat down on the edge of the bunk, lay back. He lifted her legs over the bunkside.
He was over her on the bunk. She was moaning, murmuring, “I want to live I want to live I want to live I want to live I want to...”
He looked into her eyes and breathed deeply.
Pretty hot stuff. But no hotter than the passionate sex scenes concocted by an alternative phenomenon named Lynton Wright Brent in a mid-’6os series of soft-core-porn Westerns.
Brent was something of a weedy Renaissance man. In addition to writing reams of marvelously terrible popular fiction, he toiled as a rancher, amateur historian, and B-movie actor. Acting was his primary avocation; he was an extra and bit player in silent films in the ’20s, and in programmer talkies and the grand old Republic cliffhanger serials from the ’30s well into the ’50s. He had fifth billing (portraying a character named Matthews) in the 12-episode Ken Maynard serial, Mystery Mountain, in 1934, and a somewhat lesser role in one of the better ’40s serials, The Adventures of Red Ryder, starring Don “Red” Barry and Noah Beery, Sr. You can also catch Brent in the Roy Rogers flick, Red River Valley (1941), and in the Gene Autry saga, Beyond the Purple Hills (1950), among others.
As a writer of fiction, Brent was a whale of an actor. His first novel, THE BIRD CAGE (1945), is so bad he had to pay a vanity publisher to see it in print; this amazing “historical” Western will be accorded its just due in the next chapter. THE BIRD CAGE was his only novel from 1945 to 1964, when either he embarked on an orgy of creativity and produced more than a score of paperback originals over a seven-year period or, more likely, he dredged up and minimally rewrote material that had gathered rejection slips in years past.
In any case, in 1964–65 he published a dozen soft-core-porn Western, crime, fantasy, and love novels under the auspices of the Brentwood Publishing Co. of Hollywood; Brentwood’s name and the fact that it published Lynton Wright Brent novels exclusively during its brief existence leads the trained deductive mind to presume that, with his own money or some poor entrepreneur’s, he had founded his very own vanity publishing company. Masterpieces of the absurd, all, these books carried such inspired titles as LAVENDER LOVE RUMBLE, LESBIAN GANG, THE SEX DEMON OF JANGAL, THE FURIOUS PASSION OF THE LAUGHING GUN, PASSIONATE PERIL AT FORT TOMAHAWK, and LUST GALLOPS INTO THE DESERT.
The last three are Westerns, all of which have plots that might have been culled wholly from the worst of the Rogers and Autry films of the ’40s. They also have numerous sex scenes that more than likely were grafted onto what were originally written as “straight” Western stories. No one could depict the sex act in quite the same nuttily eloquent fashion as Brent. Unfortunately, he had something of a single-track mind and a rather conventional imagination, and probably a lazy streak in his nature as well. All of his sex scenes have similar phrasing, similar grunting-and-groaning dialogue, and similar missionary positioning (“a man’s rightful position is on top”).
Let’s start with PASSIONATE PERIL AT FORT TOMAHAWK, in which Army scout Gary Trader gets it on with Teen-na-ta, a shapely Pawnee whose voice “seemed to carry a soft glow and the scent of honeysuckle.” But it isn’t Teen-na-ta’s voice that interests Gary. “His blood rushed madly through his veins as he feasted his glance upon her delicious curves and the fawn-like movement of her body. A thought ran wildly through his brain: It’s just a short distance up that skirt—to passionate love!”
It isn’t long before Gray has traveled that short distance—
With his free hand, he yanked the buckskin skirt high on her thighs. He glanced at the shapely legs done in brownish-velvet and grew highly excited. Quickly he fumbled with himself, and then made his plunge. The girl whimpered in muffled joy; and Trader struck his pace ruggedly and evenly. Her head was tossing madly from right to left, and her shapely lips were parted in an expression of delighted agony.
“Give it to me, Gary-love,” she purred, “the staff of life and loving—”
Compare this to what happens in LUST GALLOPS INTO THE DESERT, in which Laredo Grant, unjustly branded an outlaw in the mining camp of Tombstone, gets it on with a shapely Indian wench under a sycamore tree. He gets excited when she “slipped her sweet tongue between his teeth and wriggled it frantically, sending lust charging through his veins.” Then—
He slammed his mouth hard against hers. He struck a rhythmic pace, and was delighted when she responded readily. He felt her squirming with her urgent desire; and he drove harder, as though anxious to please.
She began kissing him like the rapid fire of a machine-gun. A glance down at the shapely legs clad in brownish velvet excited him mightily. The girl was whimpering in muffled joy; and Laredo struck his pace more vigorously. Presently the girl commenced tossing her head madly from right to left, and her shapely lips were opening and closing with her passion, like a fish out of water gasping for breath....
Laredo felt the explosion of her passion at the same moment that he was experiencing the same—and he kissed harder than ever before. “Holy cow!” he gasped, unable to restrain the extent of his pleasure.
The best/worst sexy Western by Brent is THE FURIOUS PASSION OF THE LAUGHING GUN, whose plot outline—no doubt written by Brent himself—is quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Cyrus Bonner’s Laughing Gun is, of course, his Colt pistolian, which he uses to blow away numerous Apaches and a couple of gun-galoots, thus overcoming “FEAR, the Creator’s caution-light.” But his Colt isn’t the only gun that gets a heavy-duty workout in this saga of lust and redemption. Janis Janet, the newspaperwoman who wrote the story about his Raucous Rod when she first saw it in action, could have written another one just as apropos after she “rammed her tongue into his mouth and gave his tongue the full treatment” during a moment of furious passion.
But she’s fated never to wed Cyrus or his Hilarious Hogleg, as she realizes with “a tear sliding down her newspaper-calloused cheek.” His true love is reserved for the beautiful and virginal (for one chapter) Avon Morgan, whose “shapely upper lip made him think of a day-old butterfly spreading its wings for the first time.” He knows she’s the only one when they get it on on the tailgate of her father’s Conestoga wagon and “the thought struck him that no longer was she a virgin—and he alone was responsible for that!”
He kept working—steadily, solidly, vigorously.
“Give it to me, my precious darling,” she whispered hoarsely. “I want more of your love staff.”
She raised her hands and began playing them gently along the back of his shirt; and this action gave Bonner pimples he had never known before....
He was thrilled by the looseness, and the wetness, of her lovely lips as she applied them to his mouth and then his neck. When he touched her now with his fingers, around the face, he felt her trembling beneath him. He felt the great quiver which shook her body; and he groaned out to announce another peak-time.
Suddenly he heard voices. “Somebody’s coming,” he said.
As relatively explicit as the sex was in Lynton Wright Brent’s novels, and in those of his paperback brethren in the ’60s and early ’70s, it was tame compared to that which began inflaming the pages of the so-called Adult Westerns in the late ’70s. You couldn’t get much more graphic than Jake Logan (David King) did in his Slocum series for Playboy Press, and its mix of no-holds-barred sex and violence resulted in huge sales and a glut of imitations and offshoots. This combination, as Western novelist and authority Loren D. Estleman wrote in a 1983 article for the WWA Roundup, “because of its built-in sensationalism and controversy has done more to rescue Western fiction from critical and popular dormancy than any number of artistic attempts to transcend genre.” Unfortunately, as he goes on to say—
With few departures...this subgenre bristles with anachronisms— not the least of which is the projection of today’s moral values on the Victorian West—and the hero’s adventures with cardboard baddies and the ubiquitous Colt are little more than an excuse to allow him to recover between bouts in bed. Its enormous readership, so out of proportion with the rest of Western fiction, suggests that the average fan of this new and inevitable form skips over the horses and gunplay, skimming the pages for a mention of feminine undergarments. The dedicated Western reader needn’t fear that this pornographic prairie will swallow the frontier staple, because few dedicated Western fans have set foot in it.
Despite Estleman’s positive prediction, the Adult Western’s pornographic prairie very nearly did swallow the frontier staple. Throughout the ’80s, in fact, it had the staple so far down its generally sleazy throat that the traditional Western was little more than an invisible lump—like a gopher being gobbled by a sidewinder. More than half of all paperback Westerns published during that period carried the “adult” label (and most of the ones that didn’t were the product of a lone hand, Louis L’Amour).
Some series were remarkably successful; the Jake Logan Slocum novels, now being written by a crew of stablehands and published by a different house, have reached the age of legal consent and may soon reach the age of legal majority, with nearly 300 titles out so far. Tabor Evans’ Longarm and J. R. Roberts’ Gunsmith are also still alive and humping, though their age is showing after a couple of hundred titles each, and the last sunset (and last lay) for each draws nigh. (Gunsmith, it should be pointed out, is easily the best of the shoot-and-screw Westerns, with its creator, the amazingly fecund Robert J. Randisi, himself having penned more than 150 titles while maintaining an equally amazing level of energy and readability throughout.) Wesley Ellis’ Lone Star was another long-lived series, lasting through some 140 titles before finally going limp, as it were, and biting the dust in 1994.
Some series came and went: Buck Gentry’s The Scout, Patrick Lee’s Six-Gun Samurai (featuring a Samurai warrior transplanted “from the land of the Shogun” to the American frontier), J. R. Longley’s Angel Eyes (another series authored by Bob Randisi), Tom Cutter’s Tracker, and Lou Cameron’s Stringer.
One projected series failed to thrust beyond its premier volume: Jeff Wallmann’s Bronc, “a lean, chiseled and gunslick bounty hunter” who also happens to be butt-ugly and pint-sized in every way except the one that counts most in an adult Western. Bronc’s only adventure, BRAND OF THE DAMNED (1981), is a stewpot filled with all manner of alternative delights that its author swears were intentionally created as a kind of private spoof of the subgenre. Knowing Jeff as I do, after having collaborated with him on such howlers as “The Raid at Three Rapids,” I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
In any event, just a few of BRAND OF THE DAMNED’S ingredients: a gang leader called Bobtail Kessler, a couple of buxom and super-horny wenches dubbed Prudence (a.k.a. Miss Pru) and Jasmine, a Sheriff named Winkle who is fond of calling Bronc “smartass” and “the l’il fart,” cowhands with such monikers as Muttonballs and Fast-Mail Griswold, some wonderful pseudo-Western vernacular (“You ride with us, amigo, and you’re riding with the top go-getters”), enough anachronisms to stuff a saddlebag, plenty of gunplay, plenty of hot sex, and such distinguished passages of dialogue as:
“You guys are all the same. All you ever care about is getting a girl in the sack.”
“What’s Harry doing out there? And why are his pants at half-mast?”
“I have to piddle.”
“I like Miss Pru; I’d treat her like she deserves. She’s a tolerable romp, and I’d cure her of bangtailing around.”
“So you’re wearing a nightgown. I don’t care if you’re starkers. I’m here on business.”
“It’s okay if you want me. After all, I’m a woman and you’re a man....”
“If I’m getting too loose for you, I can put my legs together. That’ll pinch me up tighter.”
“You like your boobs sucked, don’t you?”
Of all the long-running adult series, the one most likely to provide chuckles is Wesley Ellis’ Lone Star. For some reason its stable of wordsmiths seem to have been less serious-minded than those who regularly produced Longarm and others, and therefore more inclined to take a satirical approach to both plot and sexual content. One reason for this may be that “The Lone Star Legend” did not feature a brawny, lusty WASP male lawman or drifter or bounty hunter, as did most of the other shoot-and-screws; rather, its protagonists were “a magnificent woman of the West, fighting for justice on America’s frontier,” one Jessica Starbuck, and Ki, “the martial arts master sworn to protect her and the code she lived by.” The idea of a beautiful, nymphomaniacal, justice-seeking gun-babe and a handsome, satyriasis-plagued half-Japanese and half-Caucasian companion trained as a Samurai warrior wandering around the Old West tilting at windmills and humping everybody in sight is so ludicrous that even the most humorless of the series’ writers must have had a difficult time keeping matters wholly serious.
Some Lone Star novels reach extremes as ludicrous as the series’ premise, tossing Jessie and Ki into such pickles as the one involving a mad scientist who is using cowboy slaves (some of whom glow in the dark) to mine pitchblende in Idaho, so he can experiment with virilium (radium) in a laboratory straight out of the original Frankenstein movie (#9: LONE STAR AND THE HARDROCK PAYOFF); and another whose elements include a mysterious and murderous rogue cougar (who turns out to be a man slicing up his enemies with fake cougar claws), a ruined hacienda packed with secret passages, and a group of Aztec priests who worship a jewel-encrusted idol to whom they sacrifice virgins in an underground lair (#123: LONE STAR AND THE AZTEC TREASURE). The sex, too, in some Lone Stars suggests that the author might have been cackling evilly when he wrote such passages as:
Errol lunged up over her, and her hands clutched at his hardness, guiding it eagerly to the entrance of her empassioned hollow. His thick goad stabbed into her. Jessie twitched, feeling impaled, an agony of pleasure that grew sharper and tighter the deeper he skewered into her. She could feel his pulse from it. Errol breathed through his mouth, hugging her, forcing his girth into her hot depths, her insides igniting as he buried all of his huge invader. (#63: LONE STAR AND THE PHANTOM GUNMAN)
Another thing that turned a few veteran writers of adult Westerns into satirists, intentional or otherwise, was the strain of having to devise sex scenes with some measure of difference from one another. Loren Estleman again in his Roundup article: “The trouble with graphic sex in any kind of writing is that, literarily speaking, one act is pretty much like all the others, and the writer can describe various parts of the anatomy and their various functions only so many ways without becoming redundant.”
Right. So what was the poor Lone Star or Longarm writer to do for the sake of variety in a single novel requiring up to six separate acts of copulation, and then again in the next book and in the one after that? Why, alter the place of each copulation, of course. That way, the same old clinical descriptions take on the illusion of freshness. Hence, the characters in adult Westerns not only get it on inside buildings, on beds, bunks, cots, couches, chairs, and floors; they also do it in the great outdoors on grass, sand, dirt, rocks, and moving conveyances such as trains, stagecoaches, buckboards, and buggies; and on horses running or standing still; and in lakes and mountain streams; and on fishing boats, river-boats, keelboats, canoes, and rafts; and in caves and those good old subterranean grottos; and in thickets and thistle patches, under waterfalls, in Indian teepees, on rooftops, and in cemeteries. In short, just about anywhere the human mind can conceive of two people (and sometimes more than two) satisfying the biological urge.
And that includes one additional location so audacious that only a skewed mind—or a brilliant satirist—could have envisioned it. In either case, it’s the essence of alternative genius.
In a 1984 novel, TRACKER #5: THE OKLAHOMA SCORE, by Tom Cutter (a house name, naturally), the lawman hero and a buxom female companion are captured by outlaws and tied to the cowcatcher of a locomotive; and while the train is rushing headlong toward what seems to be their eventual doom, they decide they might as well have one last fling and so manage to work loose of their bonds just enough so that...
Yes! On the cowcatcher of a speeding locomotive!
“The Perils of Pauline,” updated and X-rated.
O temporal O mores!
Or to put it another way, in the words of a grizzled old sheriff in LONE STAR AND THE PHANTOM GUNMAN: “Sheer flamboozlin’ horse-shit.”