The Trials Of Hank Janson — Steve Holland

Short listed for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction In January 1954 twelve jurors sat at the Old Bailey to hear charges of obscenity against seven crime novels written by the immensely popular Hank Janson, whose sexy thrillers had sold five million copies in only six years. Hank's publisher and distributor were found guilty and imprisoned and an arrest warrant put out for the author. The Trials of Hank Janson presents a full biography of that author - in reality, a man named Stephen D Frances - from his early life, through the highs and lows he experienced with the Janson novels, to his eventual decline and death in Spain, cut off from the character he had created. In addition, respected researcher and pulp fiction historian Steve Holland gives, for the first time, a comprehensive account of the early 1950s Home Office crackdown on so called 'obscene' paperbacks - of which the Janson novels were the prime examples - during which some 350,000 books and magazines were destroyed on magistrates' instructions: a true story less notorious but no less remarkable than the controversy surrounding Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Trials of Hank Janson also details the full publishing history of the Janson stories, from 1946 right up to the present day with Telos's reissue series.