PEC, aka Publishers Export Company, was about a low rent as it got for mid-century fiction, and the company left no stone unturned to get at the sleaze underneath. Fred Haley’s Black Heat is one of those books designed to get all the characters laid in taboo breaking fashion. The main character, sort of a local kingpin, is shocked when his blonde daughter gets involved with an exotic “negress,” and his son has an affair with another man. He then cheats, a blackmailer sends his wife a home movie of it, and so forth and so on.
Haley is actually a bit of a legend in this field, because he wrote Satan Was a Lesbian, beyond doubt one of the most posted and reposted sleaze covers ever. But Haley was a pseudonym—in that case for Monica Roberts. We can’t be sure Roberts wrote Black Heat, though, since pen names were often shared. All these books—even the many that try to be progressive about the subject matter—are racist, sexist, homophobic, and all the rest, but they’re also fascinating windows onto attitudes of the day. Black Heat is 1966 with an unknown cover artist.
