Mind Blown: A Kink SciFi Connection
My mind is blown.
When I was a dirty-minded adolescent, I read pretty much every volume of science fiction and fantasy that fell under my hand. I soon noticed that books by Andrew J. Offutt could with great reliability be counted on to contain one or more wank-worthy kinky scenes: spanking, dungeon interrogation, bondage peril, or amusing combinations of all three. It’s actually been on my Spanking Blog to-do list for a long time to dig up some of those spanking scenes to republish on the blog.
Well, today I learned that Offutt was a prolific writer of erotica under numerous pen names:
Offutt wrote at least 420 pornographic/erotic works under seventeen different pen-names and house-names, including Opal Andrews, “Anonymous,” Joe Brown, John Cleve, Camille Colben, Jack Cory, Jeremy Crebb, P. N. Dedeaux, John Denis, Jeff Douglas, Farrah Fawkes, Baxter Giles, Alan Marshall, Jeff Morehead, J. (John) X. Williams, Turk Winter, and Jeff Woodson. The first was Bondage Babes, published under the name Alan Marshall by Greenleaf in 1968; the first appearance of his principal pen name, John Cleve, was on Slave of the Sudan in 1969.
According to his son Chris Offutt he came to regard Cleve as more a separate persona than a pen name, and his other aliases as Cleve’s pen names, not his own. As “Cleve” he published more than 130 works of erotica before the market for erotica dried up about 1985; afterwards, turning to self-publishing, he issued 260 more as Turk Winter (an early “Cleve” pen name) over the next twenty-five years. Thirty more remained unpublished at the time of his death. So prolific was Offutt in this area that in summing up his writing career his son Chris wrote that he “came to understand that my father had passed as a science-fiction writer while actually pursuing a 50-year career as a pornographer.”
Spanking fans will probably recognize the P. N. Dedeaux name, but the pen name that made me completely lose my shit was Turk Winter. Turk Winter is the writer of the Blunder Broad comic strip drawn by Eric Stanton in his Stantoons magazine. The long-running Blunder Broad strip is incredibly raunchy, though you haven’t seen much of it here since spanking is just one dish on a very large menu of kinks that sometimes appear therein. (It’s also more violent and scatalogical than most of what appears here.) It’s no wonder that, as a very young kinky boy, I recognized Offutt as a reliable source of kink in a world that didn’t have much kink to offer. The man was so kinky, it oozed into everything he did!
See Also:
Interesting!
Yes, interesting. But it’s my understanding that P.N. Dedeaux was actually Geoffrey Atheling Wagner (1927-?) an English born American translator and writer of novels, essays and criticism? Best information I have seen about Dedeaux and his works is: https://cpbiblio.wordpress.com/p-n-dedeaux-2/
The whole topic of attributing erotica authorship when it was written under pen names by people who didn’t want to be identified is fascinating. And Wikipedia certainly isn’t an authoritative source of anything. The attribution there turns out to be a link to the P.N. Dedaeaux author page on Amazon.com, which currently has no references to Offutt or, for that matter, any author information about Dedeaux. I can only imagine that when the Wikipedia article was written, somebody had put information linking Dedeaux and Offutt (true? false? speculative? spurious?) in the author page on Amazon. I did run the Amazon link through Wayback machine, but the only captured entry dates to 2016 and is similarly devoid of anything useful.
The comments on the cpbiblio page for Dedeaux go into some detail about the ways in which different authors or publishers sometimes recycle the same pen name, lie about attribution, make up spurious backstories for notional authors, and so forth. I will note that the main authority on the cpbiblio page that “research has confirmed” the link between Dedeaux and Wagner is an html footnote link to a footnote that does not actually exist. I don’t have any reason to disbelieve the page, and it certainly gestures at a no-longer-present source that sounds more plausible than the no-longer-present source relied on by the Wikipedia article, but we’ve got nothing really solid to go by.
Yes, I agree with everything you say about the elusive nature of erotica writers’ pen names, SpankBoss.
As another case in point, consider how long it took for the world to learn that Pauline Réage, the pseudonymous author of L’Histoire d’O, The Story of O, was in reality Anne Cécile Desclos, a member of the French literary establishment. (She also published under the name Dominique Aury.) For many many years, the speculation was that Réage was a man. BTW, there is an interesting piece about Desclos titled: “Name upon Name: Encountering Pauline Réage / Dominique Aury / Anne Desclos” by Gregory Stephenson here: http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2014spring/NameUponName.pdf Stephenson notes: “In old French, the word “desclos” was the past participle of the verb desclore, meaning to open, unlock or reveal, and thus “desclos” meant open, exposed, plain, explicit.”
I am not familiar with Offutt’s works, but I will certainly look into them, now that you have put up this nice posting and told of your interest as a youngster in Sci-Fi. That is an early reading passion I shared while growing up. I remember being intrigued, at a tender age, by the many spanking/sex scenes in Robert Heinlein’s books. And then the Gor books by John Norman. According to Wikipedia, John Norman is the pen name of “John Frederick Lange, Jr., who is the author of the Gor series of fantasy novels, and a professor of philosophy.” :)
That Geoffrey Atheling Wagner was the “real” P.N. Dedeaux has a certain plausibility, as Wagner was a true literary type, and the Dedeaux books show evidence of considerable erudition. Apparently some of his other books hint at an interest in chastisement? See some further discussion about Wagner as Dedeaux here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/187271
Fun and games. Keep up the sleuthing.
Yours,
W. G-ames
https://www.amazon.com/W-G-Ames/e/B00KD254FG?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1577048157&sr=8-1
Just noticed this reference to P.N. Dedeaux. Andrew Offutt was not Dedeaux as the above website will demonstrate. Whether he actually borrowed that name for some of his later works is uncertain – I have never found any. But he was certainly not the original
Hey, John. I appreciate your comment but if by “the above website” you mean the one linked via your name, that’s discussed a few comments above. All I can find there is the sentence “research has confirmed that the author behind Dedeaux is Geoffrey Atheling Wagner (1927-?) an English born American translator and writer of novels, essays and criticism.” There is a linked footnote but it doesn’t go anywhere. So what we’ve got is an assertion, not a demonstration. I’d love to know what research is being referenced!
The research that links Geoffrey Wagner to P N Dedeaux is largely intuitive in that is not possible to point to a verifiable source. Wagner made no secret of his authorship in his later years in conversations with friends who then passed on his remarks to others. But this is only hearsay and I can’t point to an actual individual who claimed he heard from the horse’s mouth. There are some pointers. The index to the Syracuse University archive of Barney Rosset’s papers, indicates that correspondence from Wagner is in the same box as the manuscripts of the flagellation works by Dedeaux. If anyone cared to apply to Syracuse to examine the collection I think that would settle the matter. Some of Wagner’s fiction published under his own name e.g “Sands of Valour” alludes to corporal punishment with a distinct Dedeaux flavour. As I point out in my blog the first three Dedeaux works were originally published by Greenleaf under the pseudonym Chaucer Cartwright. It is not a big leap to connect “Geoffrey” to “Chaucer” and “Wagner” (German for wagon-maker) and “Cartwright”
Thank you! I really appreciate the explanation.