Brian Busby’s tour of the seamy side of Canlit brings us to the work of Danny Halperin, who wrote under the name of Neil Perrin.
This was Joanna (1949) begins like Twin Peaks: a beautiful woman, Joanna, is found murdered in water. One of her beaus delves into her life and turns up a sexually dysfunctional husband and a kinky lover:
On the walls of the room were hung all sorts of gadgets of torture; long needles, small, hairy whips, knouts, knives sharp as razors, silken threads of unbelievable length. Over the mantlepiece were afixed two large peacock feathers; the end of one was a rubber stopper, the end of the other a handgrip. I dared not ask the significance of these feathers for fear of being told.
Suspended from the ceiling were two long cords, obviously used to hold a person up from the floor by his (or her) thumbs. On the floor, as if alive, lay the stuffed corpse of a sinuous cobra. The most unspeakably evil paintings adorned the walls and, in one corner of the room under a blue light, sat the grinning statue of Priapus, the phallic symbol of the ages.
Another Perrin work was The Door Between (1950), about a damaged WWII vet who stalks the vamp who lives in the next room in his boarding house.
From another post:
Moving past the well-scrubbed, antiseptic couch romps shared by Bruce and Sheila we find relationships in which sex and violence are invariably entwined.
The first glimpse we’re given comes courtesy of Clara, Bruce’s downstairs neighbour, who gets off on being knocked around by her husband. The morning after Bruce’s arrival, the nightgown-wearing battered wife corners Bruce in the rooming house hallway, teasing: “Bet you’d like to beat the hell out of me, wouldn’t you?”
Jump to Vera, who shares a loveless sex life with Jake, one of the three men in her fawning entourage. “It is zee glandular love”, she sighs. “I suppose it will have to do until zee real love comes along. Some day he vill come to me, zee lover I need. He vill be strong and filty; he vill beat me and kiss me and feel everything – everything!” When one of her lapdogs dares describe her as a masochist, she responds: “I am not to be labelled. You can say I am zee masochist, I am zee sadist, I am zee pervert – anything that pleases you. But all I really am is zee voman. How do you explain zat?”
This novel ends with the hero beating the bad girl in a jealous rage, right in front of the good girl, who persuades him to stop so they can go get married. Charming.
As to viewing this a piece of BDSM history, there’s certainly a lot of sadism and masochism in The Door Between, but it appears to lack the formalism of the interaction that characterizes the dungeon in This Was Joanna. I’d categorized them more as “rough sex” stories than BDSM fiction.
