WRITING FROM THE SHADOWS

How do you publish novels when millions of people want to see you hanged? Very carefully.

Interesting cover here from Jef de Wulf for the 1954 Georges Brass erotic novel Le plaisir est plus chaud dans l’ombre, aka, Pleasure Is Hotter in the Shade. De Wulf has a unique style, and we like his use of color, especially on this woman that registers to us as part sleepy-eyed temptress, part hungry spider in her lair. We’ll get back to de Wulf later. Today we’re focused on author Georges Brass, who was in actuality René Bonnefoy. Bonnefoy wrote as Brass, Roger Blondell, Roger Fairelle, Marcel Castilian, and published about fifty science fiction novels as B.R. Bruss. French pulp authors often wrote under pen names, so Bonnefoy’s collection of alter egos is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that the false identities were a matter of life and death.

Beginning in 1942, Bonnefoy served as Secretary-General for Information in France’s nazi-collaborating Vichy government, and after the war was forced to go into hiding. He was tried and sentenced to death in absentia, but still managed to write and publish under his pseudonyms, including his first and most famous sci-fi novel, 1946’s Et la planète sauta… (And the World Jumped…). He finally surrendered to authorities in 1955 during a period of amnesty designed to convince fugitive collaborators to comeforward. His death sentence was communted to d’indignite nationale, a form of shunning coupled with the loss of voting rights, exclusion from public office, and a ban from holding any management positions in corporations, banks, media, unions, and educational institutions. Sounds like a punishment that should be adopted in the U.S. for a lot of people, don’t you think?

Anyway, Bonnefoy became extremely prolific, publishing the bulk of his sci-fi novels within the next two decades, sometimes three or four a year, and if you visit French websites they tend consider his literary output with a surprising amount of objectivity. Later some of Bonnefoy’s personal writings from his fugitive years came to light, and in them he had outlined his defense should he ever stand trial for his wartime activities. Basically, he claimed that while he had held an important position, and in that role had overseen the censorship of countless publications, he never made any policy decisions. Pretty safe to say that defense would not have worked. René Bonnefot died in Paris in 1980, aged 84 years old. 

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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