Between 1975 and 1976, John Cleve wrote four books in “The
Crusader” series, about a young man from Cyprus who saves Richard the Lionheart’s
life and then accompanies the great king on his crusade to the Holy Land. Guy “Kingsaver”
becomes a great hero of the crusades, admired or feared by men, and desired by
every woman he meets. The four books are: I: The Accursed Tower, II. The
Passionate Princess, III. Julanar the
Lioness, and IV. My Lady Queen. In
1986, Cleve apparently returned to this series for one more book, V. Saladin’s Spy. I’ve read the first four
but not the last.
John Cleve is actually a pseudonym for andrew j. offutt, who
also wrote fantasy fiction under his own name, most famously a number of
pastiches of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Cormac Mac Art characters. Offutt did
his own original Sword & Sorcery fantasy series as well, and branched out
into Sword & Planet fiction with such books as Messenger of Zhuvastou and Chieftain
of Andor. Offutt also edited a highly acclaimed, and deservedly so, series
of Sword & Sorcery anthologies called the Swords Against Darkness series. That series was my introduction to
offutt, and when I first started fooling around with writing it was my dream to
one day have a story in it. The series ended before I ever had a chance to
submit anything.
Around the same time as offutt was editing Swords Against Darkness, I began reading
his Howard pastiches, particularly his Conan ones, and although they were
somewhat workmanlike I enjoyed them well enough to seek out more of his fantasy
stuff. I have generally enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far, and still have a
number to go.
I didn’t discover that offutt was also John Cleve until
after I started reading the first two “Crusader” books. I then tried one of his
“Spaceways” books, which was an adult SF series that he wrote in the 1980s. I liked
the first Crusader book all right but really disliked the Spaceways book and never
read another. It wasn’t until recently, when I stumbled upon a piece written by
offutt’s son, that I found out that offutt wrote more books as Cleve than he
did under his own name, and that most of his output was “adult” fiction, which
I believe we can simply refer to here as pornography. Apparently, offutt
considered Cleve a kind of alter ego, and spoke as if some of the other
pseudonyms he used for pornography were alternate names for Cleve rather than
offutt. If you are interested in learning more about that aspect of this
writer, the link to his son’s post is here.
But what about the Crusader books, which is the major
consideration for this post. Well, the first book I bought in this series was
an omnibus of the first two volumes, and I thought it was historical fiction set in the Crusades, a time period that I'd often read and enjoyed stories about. The first book, The Accursed Tower, had quite a lot of graphic sex in it, but also
a lot of historical adventure that I thought was decently done. Since the
second book was part of the omnibus, I read it immediately after the first.
This was The Passionate Princess, and
it had more sex and less adventure. I knew there were more in the series but completely
lost interest after the second volume and gave the books no further thought.
Fast forward a number of years and I’m in a bookstore and
find an omnibus collection of the third and fourth books in the Crusader
series, Julanar the Lioness, and My Lady Queen. On impulse, and hoping
for a return to a more “adventure” format, I picked them up. The “Lioness” book
started out with a bit of adventure, a kidnapping of the series hero, “Guy,”
and that led to an interlude with the Julanar character, a warrior woman in
command of a band of warrior women, and quite an interesting character. Although
this was promising, the book never carried through with the promise and instead
focused on the sex. The fourth book, My
Lady Queen, made only a token effort to create any sense of adventure at
all. Sex was clearly its only focus. I pretty much just scanned it.
Here's the
thing. The sex in these books is extremely graphic, and it sometimes descends
into brutality. There are rapes, sexual torture, and even an event where a
villain strangles a women to death while having sex with her. Such scenes were
highly distasteful and too common, and would lead me to recommend against anyone reading these books. However, such scenes did not, at least, make up the bulk
of the sexual content, which most often involved the hero, Guy, showing off his
incredible prowess as a lover with a wide variety of willing women, most of
them noble born. Strangely, given the clearly pornographic intent of these
works, almost none of the abundant sexual activity seemed at all exciting to
me.
So why did I
keep reading these books, particularly the last two? Well, I found many of the
non-brutal sexual descriptions to be absolutely hilarious. I frequently read
some of the more extreme examples of pornographic prose to my wife, and we had
quite a good time laughing at them. The descriptions are so over the top and so
egregiously graphic that they boggle the mind. Cleve employs every possible
term that you can imagine for the sexual organs, and many of these sentences
are also long and convoluted. Imagine William Faulkner writing the most turgid
pornography possible and you have a glimpse of Cleve’s literary style. Since I
consider this blog to be no more than “R” rated, I’m not going to quote the
most extreme examples. But let me give you a taste of some fun phrasing from
the Crusader series. This stuff is still pretty graphic in some cases so
readers beware!
1. "He
poled it to her, good."
2. “‘Ahhh’ she
breathed, staring like a serpent-fascinated bird at the snake she had
uncovered, still limber and sinuous looking, emerging lazily from the bushy
shelter of his loins.”
3. "He stuck her with it in one good swift
lurch, and in an instant her excited and welcoming cleft had taken it all, all
the way to his hairy scrotal pouch."
4.
"Inside, she had become a frenzied well of desire in which he submerged
his virile meatstaff."
5. “And he
slipped it on into her, drilling in and in, straight for her cervix, long and
hard and cramming, filling and feeling the extreme constricting heat of her
buried passion.”
As if this were
not enough, I realized after I sat down to write this blog post that three of
the four novels begin with some variation on: “The moon hung round and white as
a buxom maiden’s breast over the….” And books I and III are almost identical
for the first few pages. So, while I didn't think these books were well written
or entertaining as novels, I did get quite a few laughs. Nuff said?
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