Alan Mac Clyde (1950s): Paris House Name on The Passionate Lash

Alan Mac Clyde — also spelled Alan McClyde — is not a novelist you can sit for a portrait. It is the name Paris publishers put on English-language erotica in the 1950s. In the 1930s a different writer had already used the byline for French pornography issued by Paul Brenet’s flagellation imprints. After the war, Patrick Garnot’s Pall Mall Press and Bronislaw Kaminsky’s Week End Books — Kaminsky better known as Bruno Durocher — shared 5, rue Gît-le-Cœur in Paris, and the name came back in English. The same street later housed the Beat Hotel. The two small houses printed English dirty books in France for export and under-the-counter sale. Reusing a flagellation byline buyers already knew from 1930s birch novels was a catalog trick: the scent was familiar even when the person behind the name was not.

Lash, slaves, and the cruise shelf

The title that turns up most often is The Passionate Lash or The Revenge of Sir Hilary Garner, from Pall Mall Press — a 209-page edition (Bibliothèque nationale de France 8-Y2-90000(1036)) and a shorter 160-page 1958 Pall Mall in gray and red wrappers (British Library YA.1996.a.13379; Library of Congress PZ4.M1267 Pas). The title does the advertising: dominance, revenge, captivity. Week End Books issued The Cruise of “The Bizarre” around 1958 (185 pages, pale green wrappers printed in black; BL P.C.13.h.26). Around the same years came The Slaves of Elizabeth Fale (about 160 pages, light yellow wrappers with canary interiors) and S.O.S.O.: Society of Slave Owners (no publisher or date, about 125 pages, plain white card in blue wraps). That is the 1950s English Mac Clyde line — the whip and a society of owners sold as paperback revenge and cruise.

American reprints into the Grove years

The Paris texts did not stay in Europe. In 1968 Gargoyle Press reprinted The Slaves of Elizabeth Fale as The Passionate Lash (218 pages) and issued Susan, or the Ravaged Innocent Unveiled (219 pages) as a reprint of The Cruise of “The Bizarre.” Bizarre Pub. Co., possibly in Montreal, also did The Cruise of “The Bizarre” (185 pages; LoC PZ4.M1267 Cr). Collector’s Publications in Industry, California, put out another Cruise in 1968 as series no. 21223 (161 pages plus ads). Around 1971 Grove Press’s Venus Library listed The Calamities of Jane (155 pages; LoC PR6063.A1636 C3; LCCN 73163558). Kinsey Institute catalog numbers on several copies are how researchers still track the trail. The person behind the 1950s byline is not identified in the source. What is identified is the shop, the street, the lash titles, and the American reprint path that kept Sir Hilary Garner’s revenge in print into the Grove years.