With George McGee’s 1961 novel Desire Under the Sun we were hoping for a hot and heavy set-in-Mexico sleazer with possibly a little gunplay. We didn’t get that, exactly. It mostly has to do with a gold mine in an unnamed state in the western U.S., and one man’s attempt to steal a fortune from another. The man who owns the mine is crazy and at one point even chains up his poor wife Lupe and makes her a gold digging slave. She’s the cover figure in Paul Rader’s art, but in the story she’s not a vampy mama. But this is Rader we’re talking about. All his women were vamps, none more so than this one who’s going to have a very interesting a-shaped tan on her torso.
Lupe is facing a terrible future of working to exhaustion in the mine, then being shot and buried. Unless of course her husband dies somehow. Then the mine and everything in it is hers. Enter an ambitious hunter with dreams of getting rich. He’ll consider rescuing Lupe—at a price. There’s also a repressed incel who wants Lupe for himself—at a price. And there’s a family of hungry mountain lions watching all this, planning a human repast. It sounds weird, we know, but the story isn’t bad. It’s just limply written. But the Rader cover, all on its own, makes Desire Under the Sun a little nugget of gold. It’s another treasured addition to our collection.
