Filling in the Life of Hank Janson

As you might expect, I must exercise some caution in asking that books be given to me at Christmastime. I have enough trouble finding room in my house for those I already own, much less new ones! But a title sure to appear prominently on my holiday wish list is Steve Holland’s recent biography, The Trials of Hank Janson.

I first got word of this in a post that Australian novelist and pop culture critic Andrew Nette wrote earlier in the month, in which he reviewed a trio of works about vintage books and the art that decorated them (one of those releases being The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, to which I contributed an extensive interview with the artist). For anyone who doesn’t know, Hank Janson was both a pseudonym employed by English author/publisher Stephen Daniel Frances (1917-1989) and the name of his protagonist, “a tough Chicago reporter who faced down various malevolent criminal threats across the breadth of America,” to quote Nette. Those novels—“gritty gangster tales” with deliberately suggestive covers painted by Reginald Heade, Samuel “Peff” Peffer, Paul Rader, Harry Barton, and Robert Maguire—were wildly successful during the 1940s and early ’50s, despite paper shortages of the time, and continued to be published for years afterward.

But in 1954, Nette recalls, “his work was dubbed obscene by the powers that be, in no small part [due] to their incredibly lurid, sexualised covers. His publisher and distributor were hauled before the courts and a warrant was issue for the author’s arrest. … While Janson was eventually found not guilty of peddling obscene material, he was attacked in the British parliament, banned in Northern Ireland, and newsagents that stocked his books were persecuted by the police. Although it did not stop him writing … the experience left him incredibly bitter.” Frances ceased penning the Janson tales in 1959, and other authors were left to continue the series.

Steve Holland is a UK author and recognized authority on comics as well as pulp fiction. The Trials of Hank Janson—part biography, part study of Frances’ fiction and the changes the Janson scandal brought to laws surrounding supposedly obscene publications—is an expanded version of a book Holland published originally back in 2004. In this half-hour YouTube interview conducted by memorabilia and book collector Jules Burt, Holland looks back on Frances’ history, his enviable ascent to fame, the preposterous censorship he faced, and subsequent efforts to keep the Janson novels in print.

It sounds like a book I should somehow squeeze onto my shelves.