Naked Lust (1985)Director: Marc Curtis Country: US produced and published, 1985 File Type: aviScene Breakdown: Scene 1. Jessica Wylde, Amanda Jane Adams and Marc WalliceScene 2. Stacy Donovan and Marc WalliceScene 3. Jessica Wylde, Amanda Jane Adams and Sasha GaborScene 4. Cheri Janvier and Blake PalmerScene 5. Tami Lee Curtis and Ted WilsonScene 6. Tami Lee Curtis and Sasha GaborScene 7. Kimberly Carson and Dick HowardScene 8. Amanda Jane Adams, Tami Lee Curtis and Ted Wilson
When I read Ellery Queen's FACE TO FACE for FFB a while ago, I thought I detected some of Jack Vance's stylistic flourishes. If you read enough of a writer, you Just Know. You and Bill Crider have read enough of Harry Whittington to make a valid assessment of NAKED LUST.
NAKED LUST was originally published by Bedside Books in 1959 and reprinted ten years later by Macfadden Books, which is the edition I read. It’s the story of Jane Smith, who is, for want of a better term, a middle-class prostitute. She’s not an expensive, high-class call girl, or a lowly, drug-addicted streetwalker, either. She travels from town to town with another prostitute and their pimp, a guy who has Syndicate connections. Not a great life, but Jane copes with it pretty well.
Having read it, I can say I’m 99.9% sure that NAKED LUST is NOT Harry Whittington’s work. The plot is certainly noirish enough, but nothing in the style reminds me of Whittington’s writing at all. If someone were to come up with something in Whittington’s records saying he wrote this novel, I’d accept it, but I’d sure be surprised, too. I think the copyright notice in the original edition was just a mistake on the part of the publisher.
That said, is NAKED LUST worth reading? Well, yeah. It’s not all that well-written for the most part, although there are some really nice lines here and there, but the author does a good job of creating an atmosphere of bleak inevitability that hangs over the novel. And the ending, in which everything doesn’t work out exactly like I expected it to (always a plus) is very powerful. I have no idea who Shep Shepard really was, but a year or two later this could have easily been a Nightstand Book and held its own with the entries by Block, Silverberg, Ramirez, etc. I imagine the original edition is pretty scarce, but if you ever come across a copy of it or the Macfadden reprint for a decent price, my advice is to grab it. This one’s well worth reading.
