This is a fantastic cover for John Saxon’s, aka James N. Gifford’s, The Tigress, for Novels, Inc, 1952. It’s one of our favorites pulp pieces of all time. This poor guy in the art. Takes abuse at the office all day then comes home and has to take more from his wife. Well, it’s better than when she ignores him, or worse, perches on the kitchen counter and stares unblinkingly at him for minutes at a time. That’s just plain unnerving. The art is uncredited, but some online sources think it’s by Walter Popp. The book was reprinted three times as Passionate Tigress. Generally when a book gets that many reprints something interesting is happening. A reading told the tale.
The Tigress is the story of Drew Grandcastle (what a name) and his beautiful whirlwind bride Belle, who go to the sprawling Grandcastle estate in Maryland to live with Drew’s family. The estate has a fancy name—High Prize—but Belle is surprised to see that the place has fallen into squalor because for generations no Grandcastle has generated income. Belle does not exactly fit in with High Prize’s cultured and aristocratic inhabitants because she’s the worst person imaginable. This comes as a surprise to Drew. Belle is violent toward him, evil to everyone else, and racist toward the staff. How bad is she? In her former life she’d been a nude dancer whose act involved a golden whip. She turns that whip on gentle Drew during their wedding night, leaving him bleeding, crying, and helpless.
The patriarch of High Prize notices this rift with a glint in his eyes. Is he as frail as he seems or is there a scheming old goat behind the cane and glasses? Intersex family acquaintance Billie Bourne likes the looks of Belle too. Meanwhile, over on the neighboring estate, owned by the Chantereys, the matriarch Leila decides Belle would be a suitable wife—and a great producer of grandkids with her strong body—married to her sadistic son Robin. None of them have an idea how crazy Belle is. They’re all likely to find out the hard way.
We expected Belle’s character arc to involve transformation from unholy horror to something resembling human, but she remains an intolerable beast to the end. Everyone else in the book is terrible too, except for High Prize’s two servants, who exist mainly to be racially abused throughout. When Charles, the long lost scion of Grandcastle, returns, he’s awful too—he hates Belle on sight and immediately has murder in mind. You don’t run across large numbers of novels in which none of the major characters are good, but it does happen. The Tigress is consistently weird, and sometimes annoying, but very interesting.
Note: We originally posted this cover in 2019 but didn’t open the book back then. We wish we’d done it sooner.
