Alan Mac Clyde — also spelled Alan McClyde — is the name Paris publishers put on English-language erotica in the 1950s. Patrick Garnot of Pall Mall Press and Bronislaw Kaminsky, better known as Bruno Durocher, of Week End Books both worked from 5, rue Gît-le-Cœur. The same byline had already been used in the 1930s by a different writer of French flagellation novels. For collectors of lash-and-slave paperbacks, the 1950s Mac Clyde is a house name on books such as The Passionate Lash and S.O.S.O.: Society of Slave Owners, not a single identifiable novelist sitting for a portrait.
A borrowed name on the Left Bank
The 1930s Alan Mac Clyde wrote French pornography for Paul Brenet’s flagellation imprints. In the 1950s the name came back in English, issued by two small Paris houses sharing an address on rue Gît-le-Cœur, the same street that later housed the Beat Hotel. Pall Mall Press and Week End Books were in the postwar trade of English dirty books printed in France for export and under-the-counter sale. Using an already-known flagellation byline was a catalog trick: buyers who had seen Mac Clyde on a 1930s birch novel would recognize the scent.
The Passionate Lash and the slave-owner shelf
The title that turns up most often is The Passionate Lash or The Revenge of Sir Hilary Garner, first from Pall Mall Press (209 pages; Bibliothèque nationale de France 8-Y2-90000(1036)) and again in 1958 in a shorter 160-page Pall Mall edition in gray and red wrappers (British Library YA.1996.a.13379; Library of Congress PZ4.M1267 Pas (Delta)). 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 (Paris, about 1958, 160 pages, light yellow wrappers with canary interiors) and S.O.S.O.: Society of Slave Owners (no publisher or date, about 1950–60, 125 pages, plain white card in blue wraps). The titles do the advertising: lash, slaves, a society of owners. That is the 1950s English Mac Clyde line — dominance and captivity sold as paperback revenge and cruise.
American reprints, Gargoyle, Grove
Gargoyle Press reprinted The Slaves of Elizabeth Fale in 1968 (218 pages) as a reprint of The Passionate Lash, 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 (Delta)). Collector’s Publications in Industry, California, put out another Cruise in 1968 as series no. 21223 (161 pages plus ads). Grove Press’s Venus Library listed The Calamities of Jane around 1971 (155 pages; LoC PR6063.A1636 C3; LCCN 73163558). The Kinsey Institute catalog numbers attached to several of these copies are how researchers still find them. 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 later American reprint trail that kept Sir Hilary Garner’s revenge in print into the Grove years.
