We picked Frank Bonham’s 1961 novel The Skin Game because it was another cheapie with good cover art. That’s it. We knew nothing about its contents. The book is excellent. It’s well written, involvingly and believably plotted, interestingly characterized, and—by chance—topical. Ex-cop Sam Garrett is a parole officer searching for his AWOL parolee Gene Forman, also formerly a cop, now a sex offender, a statutory rapist. Forman evades capture while claiming his jailing was a set-up. He says his framers, who he had been investigating, are a group that lures men seeking sex with under-sixteens, and later blackmails them. Garrett, who worked with Forman when they were both cops, believes the story and decides to help Forman prove his claims—assuming they’re true.
In 1961 part of this book’s believability would have derived from many readers’ assumptions that, even without the existence of concrete evidence, its crimes were probably happening somewhere. In 2026 we know concretely that powerful men raped children, and we even know where somewhere was. The maneuvering on behalf of this cabal of rich monsters reveals the true, servile faces beneath the masks worn by government and law enforcement, and more broadly, is proof of moral vacuity at the very heart of America. It will never be forgotten. We won’t tell you how The Skin Game ends, but we can tell you that, because it’s built around a protagonist in Garrett who wants to bring rich child rapists to justice, it feels like reading speculative fiction.
