Women Hate Till Death Read online

  WOMEN HATE TILL DEATH

  THE CLASSIC HANK JANSON

  The first original Hank Janson book appeared in 1946, and the last in 1971. However, the classic era on which we are focusing in the Telos reissue series lasted from 1946 to 1953. The following is a checklist of those books, which were subdivided into five main series and a number of ‘specials’.

  PRE-SERIES BOOKS

  When Dames Get Tough (1946)

  Scarred Faces (1947)

  SERIES ONE

  1) This Woman Is Death (1948)

  2) Lady, Mind That Corpse (1948)

  3) Gun Moll For Hire (1948)

  4) No Regrets For Clara (194)

  5) Smart Girls Don’t Talk (1949)

  6) Lilies For My Lovely (1949)

  7) Blonde On The Spot (1949)

  8) Honey, Take My Gun (1949)

  9) Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave (1949)

  10) Gunsmoke In Her Eyes (1949)

  11) Angel, Shoot To Kill (1949)

  12) Slay-Ride For Cutie (1949)

  SERIES TWO

  13) Sister, Don’t Hate Me (1949)

  14) Some Look Better Dead (1950)

  15) Sweetie, Hold Me Tight (1950)

  16) Torment For Trixie (1950)

  17) Don’t Dare Me, Sugar (1950)

  18) The Lady Has A Scar (1950)

  19) The Jane With The Green Eyes (1950)

  20) Lola Brought Her Wreath (1950)

  21) Lady, Toll The Bell (1950)

  22) The Bride Wore Weeds (1950)

  23) Don’t Mourn Me Toots (1951)

  24) This Dame Dies Soon (1951)

  SERIES THREE

  25) Baby, Don’t Dare Squeal (1951)

  26) Death Wore A Petticoat (1951)

  27) Hotsy, You’ll Be Chilled (1951)

  28) It’s Always Eve That Weeps (1951)

  29) Frails Can Be So Tough (1951)

  30) Milady Took The Rap (1951)

  31) Women Hate Till Death (1951)

  32) Broads Don’t Scare Easy (1951)

  33) Skirts Bring Me Sorrow (1951)

  34) Sadie Don’t Cry Now (1952)

  35) The Filly Wore A Rod (1952)

  36) Kill Her If You Can (1952)

  SERIES FOUR

  37) Murder (1952)

  38) Conflict (1952)

  39) Tension (1952)

  40) Whiplash (1952)

  41) Accused (1952)

  42) Killer (1952)

  43) Suspense (1952)

  44) Pursuit (1953)

  45) Vengeance (1953)

  46) Torment (1953)

  47) Amok (1953)

  48) Corruption (1953)

  SERIES FIVE

  49) Silken Menace (1953)

  50) Nyloned Avenger (1953)

  SPECIALS

  Auctioned (1952)

  Persian Pride (1952)

  Desert Fury (1953)

  One Man In His Time (1953)

  Unseen Assassin (1953)

  Deadly Mission (1953)

  WOMEN HATE TILL DEATH

  HANK JANSON

  This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Telos Publishing Ltd, 5A Church Road, Shortlands, Bromley, Kent BR2 0HP, United Kingdom.

  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 Ebook edition © 2017, 2020 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Introduction © 2003 Steve Holland

  Novel by Stephen D Frances

  Cover by Reginald Heade

  With thanks to Steve Holland - www.hankjanson.co.uk

  Silhouette device by Philip Mendoza

  ISBN: 978-1-84583-957-4

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

  First published in England by S D Frances, May 1949

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

  This ebook 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.

  This Telos edition is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Allan Tagg, Hank Janson fan

  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, modes of expression and, significantly, morals of the 1940s and 1950s. That is perhaps all the more important with a book like Women Hate Till Death, when one realises that its harrowing descriptions of life in a Nazi concentration camp were written less than six years after the end of World War II. Whereas now such things are the stuff of history books, back then they would have been fresh and immediate in readers’ minds.

  We have therefore endeavoured to make Women Hate Till Death, and all our other Hank Janson reissues, as faithful to the original edition as possible. Unlike some other publishers who, when reissuing vintage fiction, have been known to make editorial changes to remove aspects that might offend present-day sensibilities, we have left the original narrative absolutely intact. So if, in the original edition, Hank made, say, a casually sexist remark to the effect that most women are bad drivers – as he does in Women Hate Till Death – then that is what you will read in the Telos edition as well.

  That’s just the kinda guy Hank was.

  Which brings us to a point about language. 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 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. So, for instance, the Telos edition of Women Hate Till Death has only one chapter headed Chapter Nine, whereas the original had two!

  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. If anyone has any further information that they could provide in this regard, however, we would be very grateful to receive it.

  INTRODUCTION

  The first edition of Women Hate Till Death in 1951 appeared minus a Reginald Heade cover painting, in an attempt by the publishers to avoid further obscenity prosecutions.

  Although he was not created with posterity in mind, Hank Janson has become something of a cultural signifier, remembered along with ration books and powdered eggs as part of British life in the austere years following the end of World War II. His books were bestsellers, 100,000 copies of each new Hank Janson novel rolling off the presses every six to eight weeks to be sold the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Physically slim compared to most paperbacks nowadays, and with beautifully painted covers by (bar a couple of exceptions) Reginald (Heade) Webb, the Janson novels promised a world of excitement and sex in a country still struggling to come to terms with the terrible cost of the war, not just in lives lost but in the need to rebuild itself as a nation and as a
world power.

  It is unlikely that Hank Janson would have become famous (or, rather, infamous) at any other time. Paper supplies from Europe and Africa, cut off during the war, had led to a shortage of reading material in the days before television took the place of literature as the prime source of entertainment. Enterprising publishers had sprung up to take advantage, printing on whatever they could find; as paper became more plentiful, the more successful of these new publishers filled the niche left by import restrictions imposed to help pay off the debts arising from the Lend-Lease agreement with America. These restrictions made importing American books financially unsound, and the cheap paperback publishers found an audience for faux American crime novels in the style of Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase. For a few years the market for these violent, sexually charged novels seemed insatiable, until a series of court cases were instigated by the

  The Heade painting that was used on an ultra-rare reissue of the later Series Three book Sadie,Don’t Cry Now is believed to have been the one originally intended to appear on the first edition of Women Hate Till Death.

  Home Office to shut down the publishers.

  Although he was billed as the ‘Best of Tough Gangster Authors’, and briefly as ‘Britain’s Best Selling American Author’, Hank Janson was home grown, the creation of Stephen Daniel Frances, born in South London in 1917. Frances had begun writing as a way of expressing his political views and highlighting the poor working conditions he saw around him in the 1930s. During the war he was a conscientious objector, self-publishing a duplicated political magazine called Free Expression and living in a converted bus, bought cheaply at a wrecker’s yard, on a plot of land near the Thames at Shepperton. One of his neighbours for a while was Harry Whitby, holidaying with his wife in a caravan; he and Frances struck up a friendship and Whitby, a doctor with a private income and a fascination for gambling, offered to finance a small publishing venture. Pendulum Publications was launched in 1944, with Frances as managing director.

  The cover design was slightly amended for this ‘8th Edition’ reissue, to achieve consistency

  with a range of Janson reissues that appeared in the mid-1950s.

  After struggling with paper and distribution for a couple of years, Harry Whitby decided to move on, and Pendulum was sold; it’s new owners almost immediately went bankrupt, leaving Frances unpaid for his shares but with many contacts in the publishing business. On a limited budget, and knowing that he would need to turn over any publication quickly to make a profit, Frances pounded out a western in a few weeks and printed up 10,000 copies, selling the whole print run to distributor Julius Reiter of Gaywood Press at a knock-down discount. Reiter suggested that rather than publishing the follow-up western he was working on, Frances should make his next book a crime novel.

  Frances had earlier produced three short crime stories to capitalize on some paper that had come his way during his Pendulum days. Reviving their lead character – Hank Janson – he began churning out novel after novel, selling the whole print run to Reiter and ploughing the money back into his business, buying paper and cover artwork, paying for reprints of earlier novels and branching out to launch other lines for other publishers who were becoming aware that there was more to the writing of this new author than the usual hack-work they were printing.

  Not that the early Janson novels were anything more than reasonably good pulp adventures. The America that Janson travelled through was not the world of Big Jim Colosimo, Johnny Torrio, Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone and other prohibition gangsters, but a post-war America drawn mostly from holiday guides; Frances sketched in a background seeded with a few facts about the location and then wrote thrillers that, more often than not, could have been set anywhere.

  In his favour, it must be said that Frances favoured stories that avoided the clichés of his British contemporaries. He soon found the character’s métier when Hank became a reporter on the Chicago Chronicle and Frances was able to begin building a cast of colleagues and social settings for his central character. If you’ve read Janson in the past, you’ll be aware that the novels were published in series of twelve; these significant changes were made with the (lucky) thirteenth novel to carry the Hank Janson byline, Sister, Don’t Hate Me.

  There were more significant changes as the second series came to an end: the opening of the third series was a risky experiment as, for five consecutive novels, Janson, the character, made no appearance at all. During 1949 and 1950, Frances had also produced a steady stream of straightforward gangster thrillers for other publishers under various bylines to finance higher print runs of Janson’s adventures; by late 1950 he was able to stop writing these and concentrate on his own publishing venture. Toward the tail end of the second series of Janson novels, he published No Flowers For The Dead (as by Max Clinten) in the hope that lightning would strike twice and he could launch a new series of novels that would match the popularity of Janson, but it was not to be. Instead, Frances used the selling power of the Janson byline for his non-Janson novels; a significant move in that it showed that Frances had learned that he could not shoehorn Hank into every novel if Hank was to

  The edited reissue published by Alexander Moring Ltd in 1958 appeared under the abbreviated title Hate.

  develop as a consistent character (a problem that had led to some patchy stories in the first two series).

  Women Hate Till Death was the second novel in the third series to feature Janson as a reporter on the Chronicle and the first to capitalize on the earlier experiment, removing Hank from a considerable portion of the book as he listens to the story of Doris and Marion Langham, two cousins who undergo a horrific ordeal in a Nazi women’s camp in Poland. Although war had been an important facet of his first novel, One Man In His Time, and World War II specifically would be the setting for two later Janson novels, Revolt and Invasion, this was the first time that Frances had dealt fully with its atrocities. Although the story of the women’s camp is interwoven with the story of Janson’s investigation of a murder, the book was breaking new ground, written in 1951 when very few novels were so directly concerned with the war, let alone the harrowing trials of women prisoners caught up in the conflict. Certainly few other novels would have had anything like the circulation or the impact of Janson’s two-shilling ‘crime thriller’.

  The novel is not without its faults, but fifty years on it still retains its chilling atmosphere. Starkly told with flashes of disturbing detail, it shows Frances walking the fine line between telling an unsettling story and presenting something too distressing to be comfortably read. To alleviate some of the tension, he introduced into the narrative a rival reporter – Jenny Finton of the Echo – and the book achieves just the right balance between its lighter moments and its graphically told back story; a skill Frances honed swiftly over the course of writing fifty novels in three years.

  If this is your first taste of Hank Janson, welcome to the terse, tense world of the ‘Best of Tough Gangster Authors’. Women Hate Till Death (here restored to its uncut glory1 and published for the first time with a previously unused Heade cover2 ) remains a remarkable, disquieting novel that will leave you begging for more.

  Steve Holland

  Colchester, February 2003

  WOMEN HATE TILL DEATH

  1

  There were maybe a coupla hundred folk at that reception and a lotta them were Brass. Army Brass, Navy Brass and Air Force Brass. The large room had been specially garlanded for the occasion, flags of all nations hung from the walls, stiff-shirted waiters glided obsequiously among the guests with well-loaded trays and you could hear every kind of accent from Texas to Washington. It was a very select reception. You didn’t hear the Brooklyn or Bowery accent.

  I was bored. Maybe this was an event for most of the folk around me. It was a pain in the neck for me. I’ve attended many such functions, learned from experience their news value is nil and the free drinks a bid to buy publicity for the party throwing the reception.

&nbs
p; You could recognise the organisers right off. They were mingling freely, being good fellas, going from group to group saying a few polite words.

  The Brass treated the reception like a reunion dinner, greeted each other effusively, wrung each other’s hands while their wives criticised one another’s tea gowns with glassy smiles.

  Of course, they weren’t all Brass. There were representatives of engineering companies, motor-tyre manufacturers’ representatives, electrical specialists, steel manufacturers from Detroit and guys whose firms made unbreakable glass.

  And, of course, there was … the press!

  There were maybe half-a-dozen of our boys around. They included Jenny Finton of the Echo. In the same way the Brass split itself into groups and talked shop, so the newshounds formed a group. A group around Jenny.

  I’d have been with the group myself except for one thing. Jenny! Not that I have anything against Jenny. She’s one of the best, an attractive brunette, loaded with guts and determination and a first-rate newspaper woman. But the previous week Jenny and I were in competition to get a story. I got the story first. It was my job to get the story first. It so happened that just before I phoned my story to the Editor, Jenny Finton was inexplicably locked in the gentleman’s powder-room. She had the idea I’d double-crossed her. A certain coolness had developed between us. A coolness that could be better described as murderous anger on her part and a guilty feeling inside me that said I’d over-stepped the mark.