Backwoods Teaser by Gil Brewer

Harker wanted to say something, but he couldn't.  He was still carrying on a bitter battle within himself., knowing full well he would lose, but battling anyway.  He loved Zoe.  He knew this.  He didn't know what to do, because so far as he could figure it, he loved Tildy too, and how could you comfortably love two women living in the same house in this day and age without something awful happening?

Recently the wife and I went to Oakland, MD to visit the antique stores and thrift stores there and, perhaps infected by the zeitgeist, I spent a lot of money on stuff I can't really afford, like a reproduction of Demetre Chiparus's sculpture Thais and a gigundo 1977 children's puzzle depicting dinosaurs (rawr.)  One thing I bought that was actually within my means was a bedraggled copy of Gil Brewer's 1960 novel Backwoods Teaser that smells as bad as it looks.  Copies of this work, which features a cover by Robert McGinnis, are on Amazon and ebay for 70 or more dollars, but my copy, which is an absolute wreck, only cost me one buck.

Back when they first started coming out, I read some of those Hard Case Crime reprints, including Brewer's The Vengeful Virgin.  I liked The Vengeful Virgin well enough, so let's give this one a spin.  I fear this warped, brittle and dog-eared volume is going to fall apart as I read it, but, unlike The Vengeful Virgin, Backwoods Teaser is not at the internet archive.  

Harker Brauns, the owner of a general store in his mid-thirties, lives with his wife Zoe on a Florida riverbank in the now half-empty mansion his great-grandfather built.  The Brauns family has fallen pretty far in the world, but ownership of the big house and the store mean that Harker is still one of the most important people in this remote little town.

Zoe is attractive, but she isn't very interested in sex, it seems, perhaps thinking they can't afford any children, and generally repels the horny Harker's advances, no matter how ardent.  Harker spends quite a bit of time hanging around on the porch, looking at the river, recalling the beautiful girl in a blue bathing suit he saw playing down there five years ago; this girl brazenly showed off her body to him, and Harker has never forgotten her.  Big, strong and handsome, Brauns had a lot of women when he was young and lived as a drifter, wandering the country before his father died and left him the store and semi-decrepit mansion, and he hasn't exactly been faithful to Zoe, but he is haunted by the memory of this girl in the blue bathing suit, the sexiest woman he has ever seen.

Harker is drinking huge gulps of whiskey, trying to medicate his obsession with the girl in the blue bathing suit, when Zoe's 16-year-old niece Tildy arrives.  Tildy's mother murdered Tildy's good-for-nothing father with a shotgun, and so she'll be staying with Harker and Zoe for a while.  The first time Harker sees Tildy she is clad in a bikini, and she is so beautiful and so reminiscent of the girl in the blue bathing suit that Harker thinks he is dreaming and jumps up to chase her!  He blames the booze on his behavior after he comes to his senses.

Things proceed more or less as you would expect, with the curvaceous Tildy prancing around in tight clothes, driving the men of the town crazy and scandalizing the town women.  Harker lusts after her, unable to think of anything besides her body, and she eggs Harker on, thinking he has the money that can finance the big city life she covets--besides, she is pretty horny herself.  Immediately after they have sex the first time, Tildy starts insisting Harker divorce Zoe, sell the store and the old mansion, and travel the country with her, showing her all the big cities.  Harker is at wit's end, crazy with an insatiable desire for Tildy's body, guilt ridden over his betrayal of Zoe, and constitutionally unable to sever his ties with his family's mansion and store--he can't satisfy all three of these powerful and conflicting psychological drives, and feels he is plunging headlong into disaster.  Unable to resolve his conundrum, he seeks oblivion in whiskey and in feverish couplings with Tildy.  

Harker returns home from the store one day to find that Tildy has brought the issue to a crisis--she is covered in dirt and blood and says she has killed Zoe and buried the body in the swamp!

Tense hours follow as Harker and Tildy clean up the blood in the kitchen, hide the murder weapon and Tildy's bloody dress, and forge a note from Zoe explaining she was just going on a little vacation.  Then the tense days as people in the town start wondering where Zoe has gone and the corrupt and vulgar sheriff--who wants a piece of Tildy himself--starts investigating.  Tildy keeps badgering Harker to sell his property and run away with her, and introduces to him new pages from her erotic repertoire, performing a striptease for him (and eventually the sheriff!) and finally suggesting they go out into the swamp so he can fuck her while she lays on Zoe's shallow grave!

This particularly macabre suggestion breaks Harker's addiction to Tildy.  I was expecting some kind of explosive and tragic finale to follow, with Tildy slaying Harker or vice versa and then a suicide or maybe a deadly showdown with the police.  Instead, Brewer gives us a cop out of an ending--Zoe returns from vacation, safe and sound!  Zoe simply sneaked away because she knew Harker was banging Tildy and wanted to give her husband time to get his Tildy craving out of his system!  Tildy faked the murder and hid Zoe's note (and used it as the basis for the note she and Harker forged) in hopes it would spur Harker to sell his property and leave town with her in tow.  Zoe forgives Harker his adultery and they send Tildy to live with some other relative and commit themselves to revivifying their marriage, to having children and building a better life together.

I thought Backwoods Teaser was going to be a crime novel about how surrendering to your lusts and abandoning your duty to your wife will lead you to a cataclysm, and it feels that way for like 110 pages of its 20 pages, but then it turns out to be a wish fulfillment fantasy in which a guy has a hot wife who is reluctant to have sex, so has hot sex on the side with another hot chick (a sixteen-year-old at that!) and then his wife not only forgives him, but is more interested in sex than before!  Harker has his cake and eats it too, breaking all the rules (including the rules against being an accessory to murder!) to bang the girl of his dreams until he is satiated, which, instead of earning him a terrible punishment, puts him on the road to achieving the middle-class dream of owning a successful business and coming home every day to his loving wife and a big house full of kids! 

The ending of Backwoods Teaser is pretty disappointing and frustrating, but let's ignore the conclusion and assess the book based on those first 110 pages.  Brewer offers an effective depiction of sexual obsession and sexual frustration; the numerous long and salacious descriptions of women's bodies and the portrayals of Harker's frenzied psychological state--his lust, his guilt, his fear--are compelling and entertaining.  This is exploitation stuff (and every page is an affront to au courant 2022 sensibilities), but Brewer is an able writer and there is nothing shoddy or lazy about his work here, and he keeps the novel short--straightforward and direct, with no filler or fat, it doesn't get monotonous.  The ending is a major let down (you might even call the book a tease!), but if we just consider 90% of the text, it deserves a thumbs up.  As a whole, still acceptable.  

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The last page of my copy of Backwoods Teaser is an ad for other Gold Medal Books of a salacious nature, novels--and even a "collection of case histories"--about sexually active teenagers and corrupt professionals and businessmen.  One of them is by famous comic book creator Gardner F. Fox.  Maybe you recall that in 2015 we read his science fiction novel Escape Across the Cosmos and that in 2018 we read his sword and sorcery novel Kothar and the Wizard Slayer; it seems he also had a hand in the sleazy thriller game.  All you Gardner F. Fox completists out there don't have to wait until you stumble on a copy of Witness This Woman in a thrift store, as you can read a scan for free online at the Gardner Francis Fox Library at the link.