Alan Mac Clyde: 1930s French Flagellation Novels under Four Pseudonyms

In 1930s Paris, Alan Mac Clyde, Edith Kindler, Joan Spanking, and Jean de La Beuque fils were not four separate novelists. They were masks on one French-language flagellation factory run by Paul Brenet, a publisher who specialized in whipping, leather, and BDSM. The imprint began as Librairie Générale at 84 Boulevard Diderot and later in the decade became Librairie Artistique et Édition Parisienne Réunies. For kink readers the shelf still matters: one of the densest interwar catalogs of the riding crop, patent leather, female despotism, and slave-island fantasy, drawn by Carlo, René Giffey, and Ely Costes — the artists who taught French flagellation how to look on the page.

Brenet’s shops were dedicated flagellation imprints, not general bookstores with a dirty back room. The Mac Clyde name sat at the center — sometimes as original author, sometimes as the voice introducing Kindler’s supposed English originals, prefacing La Beuque, or filing Joan Spanking into the Collection Alan Mac Clyde. One workshop could flood the market without repeating the same byline on every cover. The 1950s English reuse of Alan Mac Clyde is a different person. The 1930s French run is the one tied to Brenet, the Diderot address, and the Carlo/Giffey plates.

Who sat at the desk remains unproven. Robert Mérodack has argued the mask hides Maurice Renard (1875–1939), the science-fiction novelist of Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu and related titles. The evidence is a planted allusion inside Edith Kindler’s La Reine cravache — a line about fantasies a talented French author gives his hero docteur Lerne, whom he calls a sous-dieu — not a publisher’s ledger. Treat it as a serious hypothesis with a textual hook, not a settled identity. Whether or not Renard wrote the books, the titles are blunt: women’s prisons, dressage, the cravache, bloody idols, patent-leather madonnas, feminine despotism, slave islands.

The artists who fixed the look

Carlo’s covers and plates dominate the mid-1930s run. René Giffey handles several leather and “educatrice” volumes. Ely Costes and Jéo — a credit that folds in J.B., Ely Costes, and Carlo — open the 1931 books. Maurice Millière draws the crop-and-frippery volume. Sao Chang signs the Slave Island plates. The artists’ names are part of how collectors still sort the catalog.

1931–1934: octavos and the Collection A.M.C.

The first Mac Clyde books landed in 1931 at Librairie Générale as finished octavos, not chapbooks. Bagne de femmes (women’s penal colony, Carlo interiors, Ely Costes color cover) and Dressage (Jéo illustrations and cover) sold at the Diderot address the same year.

In 1932 the Kindler mask appeared: La Reine cravache ou La Batteuse d’hommes (218 pages), presented as Edith Kindler, “traduction de Alan Mac Clyde,” with Carlo plates and the Docteur Lerne aside inside the text. Around 1933 came Cravache et fanfreluches (294 pages, plus an errata leaf and two pages of the Librairie Générale catalogue), with Maurice Millière’s sixteen black-and-white hors-texte on coated paper — one a double plate — and a suite of five color hors-texte on loose leaves. The same year Mac Clyde issued La Cité de l’horreur “d’après Jean de La Beuque” (294 pages), illustrated by René Giffey (one color plate and eleven black-and-white drawings, including a double page). The La Beuque name would return the next year as a supposed author rather than a source.

1934 was the flood year. Kindler’s Esclavage ou L’Agonie sous le fouet (247 pages) carried a Mac Clyde preface and translation credit, Carlo interiors and cover. Jean de La Beuque fils appeared as author of L’Idole sanglante (135 pages) in the Collection A.M.C. — the house series that put the Mac Clyde initials on the spine. Mac Clyde signed Cuir & peau (280 pages), with twenty illustrations and ten hors-texte by René Giffey. Carlo then took a cluster of octavos: Le Cuir triomphant, Despotisme féminin, Dolorès amazone, and Servitude. Under Joan Spanking, Librairie Générale issued Educatrice (306 pages, nine plates) with Giffey illustrations, filed in the Collection Alan Mac Clyde.

1935–1937: Slave Island and the patent-leather madonna

In 1935 the Collection A.M.C. published Les Asservies de Slave Island (316 pages), with illustrations and hors-texte by Sao Chang — the English phrase in the French title aimed at readers who already knew the Brenet address. In 1936 the imprint moved: Dolly, esclave (281 pages) appeared from Librairie Artistique et Édition Parisienne Réunies, Carlo interiors and cover. 1937 closed the first-edition run with La Madone du cuir verni, again from Librairie Artistique, Carlo plates and cover. Patent leather as a madonna is as close as this catalog comes to a house theology: shine, hide, and worship arranged as a novel.

Clandestine reprints and the Dominique Leroy revival

After the war the books did not stay in the 1930s. Around 1950 Eric Losfeld’s Éditions “Le chinois” reprinted Dressage (182 pages) in a grey-green cover. In the mid-1950s — imprints dated 1956 and 1957, bibliographically closer to about 1965 — Pierre Delalu’s Éditions de l’Amazone, giving a London address that was probably Paris, reissued Kindler’s La Reine cravache and Esclavage ou L’Agonie sous le fouet. Le Cuir triomphant came back from Edition Fantastiques in Toulouse. These clandestine reprints kept the Mac Clyde and Kindler names in circulation through the same years when another writer was using Alan Mac Clyde in English.

From 1979 to 1989, Éditions Dominique Leroy in Paris put the core shelf back into legal illustrated trade paper and restored the original artists: Esclavage (1979), Despotisme féminin, Dolorès amazone, and Le Cuir triomphant (1980), Bagne de femmes, Servitude, and Dressage (1981), Dolly, esclave (1982), La Reine cravache (1987), and La Madone du cuir verni (1989). The Mac Clyde problem is not trivia about a “real name.” It is a 1930s Paris machine — Brenet, 84 Boulevard Diderot, then Librairie Artistique — that used four pseudonyms to flood the flagellation market. Mérodack’s Renard theory, anchored in the Docteur Lerne line inside La Reine cravache, is the only identity claim with a sentence to stand on. The record is the books: first editions from 1931 to 1937, Losfeld and Delalu reprints, and the Leroy revival that put Carlo’s plates back in print.