Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Erotica Odyssey, Part Three by Greg Dziawer

Another week, another obscure author to ponder.

A Carr-penned paperback

In a previous installment of the Wood Erotica Odyssey, we identified the supposed title Swedish House from Ed's resume as a paperback line and not a paperback title, as has been commonly surmised. We subsequently delved into one author of titles from the Swedish House line, concluding those titles were not written by Ed. This week, we'll take a closer look at Hudson Carr.

Hudson Carr is credited author of (at least) three titles in the Swedish House line, a brief paperback line from 1978 published by Art Publishers, Inc. The company that once began as Pendulum Publishing in the late '60s, where Ed worked as a magazine staff writer (see previous Odysseys et al for more on this) morphed through the '70s into the publisher/producer/distributor of Swedish Erotica loops, magazines and books. Even that megalith, begun modestly a mere decade earlier by Bernie Bloom (a patriarchal figure in Ed's life for well over a decade in his final years) under sponsorship from porn kingpin and later convicted murderer Michael Thevis, would soon be subsumed by an even bigger porn empire: Caballero Control. Corp, run by Bernie's son Noel Bloom.

With no known Swedish House paperback titles credited to Ed or a recognized pseudonym of his, Hudson Carr is worth considering. He was writing adult paperbacks in the Los Angeles/Hollywood area where a cluster of large and small paperback publishers operated in the first half of the '70s. 

The earliest Carr credit I came across is for Nightmare for a Virgin (1971) from Brandon House's imprint Dansk Blue Books (DBB-128). The very next year, Carr penned The Carnal Kiss for Brandon. Although the genre's material had become numbingly graphic by this point, Carr was obviously having fun:

There I'd be, halfway up the hill to glory, and Mitch was pouring his boiling fluids into my hungry, aching womb. And it wasn't like Mitch didn't know any better—he's a college man with three years of business administration under his belt. Maybe he didn't graduate, but in my opinion, he's smarter than any of the guys who went on for their master's degree! 

-The Carnal Kiss, 1972, Brandon Books BB-6233

Told as a first-person series of confessions across the sexual spectrum, with pseudo-scientific wrappers (an intro, and summations at the end of each confession, or in this case, "kiss") citing the usual suspects, from Freud and Jung to Masters and Johnson, The Carnal Kiss is a perfectly representative artifact of its era. That's not something I'd likely find myself saying about a title written by Ed. But that's not a FACT, so we need to dig deeper. 

The Nymph-Stud House followed, again from Brandon (BB-6522) and also with a "scientific" intro. But for the main course, in place of first-person confessions, we here get narrative text, playing to Carr's strengths. The pace never lags, and "Judson Carr" (as the introduction mistakenly introduces him) even aspires to an occasionally breathless literary flair:

Still lying on her back, her feet pointed towards the sea, she opened her legs, exposing her damp thighs to the cooling breeze off the ocean. It felt good and she liked it and just before she fell asleep again she felt the dampness start between her legs and she wished the surf would just once reach her and soothe the heavy heat that felt so good. 

Carr/Rodriguez penned The Making of a Teenage Call-Boy for Barclay House in 1973. We'd go too far afield to dig into all of the details surrounding the relationship of Brandon Books, Brandon House and Barclay House, and where Bernie Bloom and Dansk Blue Books fit into the picture. Suffice to say, at least two of Ed's fellow mag staffers wrote for these publishers. And if you guessed that Hudson Carr is one of them, you win the prize!

But if Hudson Carr is a co-worker of Ed's and not Ed, then who is he?

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Erotica Odyssey, Part Two by Greg Dziawer

Somehow, "Swish Erotica" doesn't have the same ring to it. You gotta have ED.

Constance Waarren's Hot Tub.

In a previous installment of Ed Wood Wednesdays, we surmised that Swedish House (1978), often listed in bibliographies of Ed's work, is in actuality not a book but a book imprint. Specifically, it was a paperback imprint under the multimedia Swedish Erotica umbrella, the porn industry behemoth that Pendulum Publishers morphed into through the '70s. By 1977, Ed was cashing paychecks from Art Publishers, Inc., publisher of Swedish Erotica books and mags, his last steady job in the final two years of his life. 

Since Woodology is never simple, there's not an obvious candidate with Ed's name or a known pseudonym on any of the covers of Swedish House paperbacks I've found thus far. We'll have to get at this from the opposite end, so let's play another round of Eddie or Not? 

The credited author on three of the (very few) Swedish House paperbacks is Constance Warren, and it's worth noting that she is not credited on the covers but only inside. The index numbers of the Warren titles comprise three of the first five of the brief run: Cabin Fever (SH-101), Hot Tub (SH-104) and Campus Lust (SH-105). All were first published in 1978, photo-illustrated with images from the endless Swedish Erotica loop series. For instance, Campus Lust, the tale of a librarian peeper, was adapted from the Swedish Erotica loop title of the same name. These paperbacks, minus the photos, were reprinted as late as 1989 under the same titles and credits and containing the identical texts. The cover price had risen a dollar by then. It's interesting to think that a dusty copy of an unknown Ed Wood book might still have been languishing on a wire rack in a sex shop by the time his legend was cemented by a Hollywood biopic in the mid-'90s.

The cover of Constance Warren's Hot Tub, a Swedish House paperback from 1978, is depicted at right. Notice the company's signature triple-dot insignia in the upper left hand corner.