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  FRAILS CAN BE SO TOUGH

  FRAILS CAN BE SO TOUGH

  HANK JANSON

  This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, LL19 9SH

  www.telos.co.uk

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: [email protected]

  This edition © 2013 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Introduction © 2004 Steve Holland

  Novel by Stephen D Frances

  Cover by Reginald Heade

  With thanks to Steve Holland

  www.hankjanson.co.uk

  Cover design by David J Howe

  This edition prepared for publication by Stephen James Walker

  The Hank Janson name, logo and silhouette device are registered trademarks of Telos Publishing Ltd

  First published in England by New Fiction Press, August 1951

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The appeal of the Hank Janson books to a modern readership lies not only in the quality of the storytelling, which is as powerfully compelling today as it was when they were first published, but also in the fascinating insight they afford into the attitudes, customs and morals of the 1940s and 1950s. We have therefore endeavoured to make Frails Can Be So Tough, and all our other Hank Janson reissues, as faithful to the original editions as possible. Unlike some other publishers, who when reissuing vintage fiction have been known edit it to remove aspects that might offend present-day sensibilities, we have left the original narrative absolutely intact.

  The original editions of these classic Hank Janson titles made quite frequent use of phonetic ‘Americanisms’ such as ‘kinda’, ‘gotta’, ‘wanna’ and so on. Again, we have left these unchanged in the Telos Publishing Ltd reissues, to give readers as genuine as possible a taste of what it was like to read these books when they first came out, even though such devices have since become sorta out of fashion.

  The only way in which we have amended the original text has been to correct obvious lapses in spelling, grammar and punctuation – we have, for instance, added question marks in the not-infrequent cases where they were omitted from the ends of questions in the original – and to remedy clear typesetting errors.

  Lastly, we should mention that we have made every effort to trace and acquire relevant copyrights in the various elements that make up this book. However, if anyone has any further information that they could provide in this regard, we would be very grateful to receive it.

  INTRODUCTION

  Frails Can Be So Tough, the twenty-ninth novel to carry the Hank Janson byline, was published in August 1951, when the business of producing Hank Janson novels was in a period of transition.

  Hank’s creator, Stephen D Frances, was making plans to move abroad, having become enchanted by an isolated village on the Costa Brava that he had discovered whilst holidaying in Spain some years earlier. Rosas (Rhodaes as it was originally known) had been founded by Greek settlers who entered Spain in 630 BC and settled along the east coast; Frances, following the road down towards Barcelona over 2,500 years later, had discovered the village by accident. Nestled under the mountain foothills of northern Spain, some fifty kilometres from the French border, it had captivated Frances with its rugged, volcanic coastline that looked out over bays and coves and a wide expanse of unspoiled beach. ‘Its savage beauty was breathtaking,’ he later recalled. He had driven into Rosas in search of food, but stayed for weeks. Some of the locals he met during that first visit became lifelong friends.

  Back in Britain, Frances had a business to run. As well as writing the Hank Janson novels, he also had to chase down paper supplies, organize the printing and reprinting of novels and arrange deliveries of the finished books. Their success was staggering in the post-war climate of rationing and paper control, and Frances had high hopes that he would be able to retire from the time-consuming, daily grind of publishing and confine himself to writing. In 1949, he had met Reginald Herbert Carter, a sales rep for The Racecourse Press, who had begun printing Hank Janson novels on their rotary presses soon after, pushing the print runs and profits up even further until Frances’s one-man operation had a turnover greater than many small businesses that employed two or three hundred workers.

  By early 1951, Frances had been able to give up freelance writing for other companies and was concentrating solely on Hank and, at Carter’s suggestion, was looking into the possibilities of buying up a bankrupt company with a large trading loss to produce the Janson novels, putting the publishing side of the Hank Janson operation on a more formal business footing as well as benefiting from a quite considerable tax break. Carter also knew where he could buy a rotary press, and was in the process of setting up Arc Press with distributor Julius Reiter. This would vertically integrate the whole operation from writing to distribution and allow Frances, Carter and Reiter to enjoy the profits that Hank Janson generated at each step.

  Once the idea was in place, Frances took the decision to move to Spain permanently, hoping to live an idyllic life overlooking the bay at Rosas, making a substantial living writing new Hank Janson adventures.

  In August 1951, Carter took over Editions Poetry (London) Ltd., and bought the rights to Hank from Frances for a princely £4,000 (worth about £75,000 nowadays). The figure was nonsensically low against the value of books and debts – about £30,000-worth (around £500,000 in today’s currency) – that Frances also passed on, having accumulated this in just two and a half years.

  Frails Can Be So Tough was the first title to be issued by Carter under the New Fiction Press imprint. It was also the first to suffer the indignity of having its intended Reginald Heade cover artwork censored prior to publication, in an attempt by Carter to forestall possible prosecutions for obscenity. In its place appeared a sedate red and yellow silhouette against a plain green background.

  The original intended artwork of a green-eyed blonde with a riding crop is reinstated for the first time on the cover of this Telos Publishing Ltd reissue, although some collectors may have a sneaking suspicion that they’ve seen the girl somewhere before. If you’re lucky enough to have a copy of the earlier Hank Janson novel Honey, Take My Gun, you will recognise the same green-eyed blonde1 . Presumably Heade used the same model on both occasions.

  Despite the lack of Heade’s striking cover, Frails still sold well on first publication: a second edition, primarily red with an orange ‘TV screen’ title panel and green lettering, appeared only four or five months later. With the print runs of new Janson novels running to fifty or sixty thousand copies, we can estimate that sales of new titles around that time were between ten and fifteen thousand a month.

  Frails Can Be So Tough is a typical, solid example of a Hank Janson novel that demonstrates why his fans came back book after book. The third series of novels (they were broken down into groups of twelve) had begun with a run of stories without Hank Janson, the character, as their star. In most cases, this allowed Frances to tell far bleaker stories. They were still recounted in the first person, but by characters with dark pasts and deprived of Hank’s moral code. Readers could experience the moral and physical struggles of the narrator even more intimately than when ne
wspaperman Hank himself was the witness and recorder of events.

  The basic plot of Frails was one that Frances had used previously, but with a twist. In previous books, the narrator was often a man wrongly accused of some crime who now seeks his revenge on the criminals (or, often, the so-called justice system) that put him in jail. In Frails, the narrator, Lee Shelton, has a far more personal reason for plotting retribution against nightclub owner J J Frisk, and a far more terrifying method in mind.

  Some elements of the story were drawn from an earlier novelette written by Frances. In Dead Men Don’t Love (for which Frances used the pseudonym Link Shelton), narrator Joe Manton was jailed for two years for the manslaughter of a man called Penshurst. Manton has been set up, drugged and soused with gin. In Frails, Shelton is similarly drugged and set up as a murderer in a pivotal and ironic twist to the plot – the man he is trying to wreak vengeance upon turns the tables, and for a while it appears that Shelton is in more trouble than ever.

  In escaping the fate prepared for him by Frisk and his bodyguards, Shelton meets Helen Gaskin and is forced by circumstances to hold her captive. The relationship between Shelton and Helen becomes a central part of the novel, and is another example of Frances’s talent for predictive writing. Throughout the ‘relationship’ that develops between Shelton and Helen, Frances creates a tension between the two, where the reader is never sure of Helen’s true feelings. She acts as a counterpoint to Shelton’s irrational, revenge-driven bitterness, and throughout the novel tries to prevent him from sinking wholesale into retributive violence. She tries to make Shelton see the enormity of what he is doing, telling him, ‘You’ve got me on a chain. I guess by now you’ve got Frisk on a chain. Did you want to have her on a chain too? What are you going to do? Chain the whole world?’

  The modern reader may well be aware of what clinical psychologists call the Stockholm Syndrome. It is named after an event that took place in 1973 at the Sveriges Kreditbank in Normalmstorg, Stockholm. On 23 August, Jan Erik Olsson walked into the bank and tried to hold it up. Police were called immediately, and Olsson opened fire with a sub-machine gun, injuring one officer. Olsson then took four hostages and demanded that his friend, a convict named Clark Olofsson, be brought to the bank as well as three million Krona in cash, guns, bulletproof vests, helmets and a fast car.

  Olsson and Olofsson barricaded themselves into the bank’s main vault with their hostages and threatened to kill them if they were not allowed to escape. After a failed attempt by the police to gas the vault, Olsson rigged up snares around the necks of his hostages so that they would be strangled if the same thing was tried again. Later, one of the hostages, Kristin Ehnemark, claimed that she was more terrified by the police than she was of her captors. The police eventually did use tear gas and, after half an hour, the robbers gave themselves up. None of the hostages was injured.

  Apart from being one of the first situations of its kind to be broadcast live on television, the bank robbery was remarkable for the actions of the hostages following their release. Olofsson, claiming that his involvement had helped keep the situation calm, was released at a court of appeal after initially being sentenced to imprisonment. He became a friend of Kristin Ehnemark and her family. Olsson was sentenced to ten years, and his telegenic good looks led to many admiring letters from women. He later became engaged to one of his admirers and ended his criminal career. (Olofsson, on the other hand, was involved in a number of other bank robberies and is currently in jail serving a 14-year sentence.)

  Frank M. Ochberg, an American professor of psychology, is credited with coining the term ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ in 1978 for what has since become a widely recognised phenomenon (most notoriously in the case of Patti Hearst) in which victims surprisingly bonded with their captors. Over the next few years, the principal factors that lead to this reaction were boiled down to four precursors, which have been summarised thus: the presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat; the presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim; isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser; and the perceived inability to escape the situation.

  Initially, a bonding with one’s captor is a defence mechanism: the captive (sometimes unconsciously) will cooperate and even positively support his or her captor as that will lessen the risk of being injured or killed. The greater peril then becomes the would-be rescuers, who might jeopardize this fragile balance, provoking the captor to carry out his threat.

  In Frails, published almost 30 years before this bond of interdependence between victim and abuser was named, Stephen Frances created a situation in which the captive Helen Gaskin was held under the precise conditions that we now recognise might result in the unusual relationship she has with Lee Shelton. Shelton threatens her (‘So I’m a murderer. Being in for one killing or two makes no difference. I only hang once. What’s to stop me bumping you right now?’), imprisons her in a room in an isolated location with a length of chain, foils her attempts to escape until she seemingly becomes aware that her only chance is if Shelton chooses to release her. She becomes penitent and apologetic – ‘I’m sorry. I lost my temper. I didn’t mean to act that way’ – and even helps Shelton when he is ill. As a reward, Shelton fetches her handbag and make-up. She begins to see Shelton as a victim rather than a kidnapper, especially when she learns Shelton’s background.

  Frances had, by instinct and acute observation of human relationships, created and explored the relationship between captive and captor in a way that would have seemed unnatural to most readers, who were more used to their characters being depicted in more black and white terms. Miss Blandish (in No Orchids For Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase) was repulsed by the sexual attentions of psychotic Slim Grisson, and repulsion, pure and simple, is what readers would have expected of Helen Gaskin. What they were given was a far more complex relationship.

  Elsewhere in Frails, Frances offered a harrowing insight into drug addiction, although that is a subject best left for another introduction, as he explored it more deeply in the next book in the Janson series, Milady Took The Rap.

  For now, I shall leave you with Frails Can Be So Tough. It’s a book that, on the surface, has a simple enough plot of revenge. But, like me, I’m sure you will find it a tense thriller that constantly makes you wonder: who exactly is the victim here?

  Certainly not the reader.

  Steve Holland, Colchester,

  March 2004

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a big, gloomy house that made one think of ghosts and clanking chains. It was gaunt, grim and forbidding, the kinda place you’d glance at and pass by quickly, trying to shrug off the inexplicable cold shudder running down your spine.

  The agent didn’t like the look of it any more than me. He nosed his car right up to the wrought iron gates, handed me a sickly grin. ‘I’ll just open up,’ he said.

  Those iron gates had been painted green at one time. Now they were a dusty black colour, except where paint had peeled away and dull rust showed. He opened one gate, wedged it back. It squealed protestingly, putting my teeth on edge. The other gate didn’t move so easy, dug itself into the gravel path and wedged halfway.

  The agent looked at me, grinned reassuringly, like this was all part of his normal letting procedure, wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of his podgy hand, and gave another heave. He meant business this time.

  The gate resisted until the third heave. Then it gave suddenly, tilted crazily as one rusted hinge snapped loose.

  He worked hard at it, tried to hold the gate while he opened it to the fullest extent, balanced it carefully in position, hoping I wouldn’t notice the hinge had snapped. He bustled back to the car, wiping dirt-smeared hands on a starched white handkerchief, and handed me another of his reassuring smiles. ‘Just a little oil will fix those. They’ll be working as good as new.’

  I grunted.

  He got in
to gear, started moving up the winding drive that was over-grown with weeds. The borders, which at one time had been neatly mown, were now a wilderness of nettles that reached out, scraped against the car wings as we passed.

  He braked when we reached the foot of the cracked steps. I climbed out, went around the car, and climbed the steps to the front door. It was a massive door, which once could have been very impressive. Now it was scorched by sun, paint had flaked away, and the woodwork beneath was damp and grimy.

  He came up the steps behind me, fumbling in his pocket for the key and panting slightly with the exertion.

  ‘You don’t want to be put off by appearances,’ he puffed. ‘It’s a good, solid house, well built. Ideal for a man who’s got a little money to spend and ideas on development. Very little needed, though. A dash of paint here and there maybe. Been left too long. That’s the trouble. But that’s in your favour, friend. It means you’re going to get it at the right price. The right price for you, that is.’ He chuckled wryly. ‘The wrong price for me, friend.’

  I grunted, watched as he wrestled with the key. I was interested, wondering whether his strength would give first, or if the key would snap. His perseverance was rewarded. With a grinding protest, the wards of the lock grated across rusted plates, and reluctantly the door swung open.

  You could tell by the smell alone it hadn’t been inhabited for years. A damp, musty, dirty smell. It was dim inside, too. Dim because of windows coated with dust.

  He stepped inside, his shoes creaking so loud it echoed throughout the house, rubbed his hands in satisfaction and chuckled like everything was just as he expected it to be. ‘Just a little soap and water,’ he said, with false satisfaction. ‘It’ll be as good as new. All the rooms are large, you’ll notice. Isn’t this a wonderful reception hall?’