The moment we saw these two versions of 1950’s Road Floozie by British author Darcy Glinto, aka Harold Ernest Kelly, we asked one question—why are they so expensive? The sellers were both asking five hundred dollars. That seemingly has to do with the novel being pulled from circulation and republished with certain passages stricken, making the original difficult to find. What was so offensive in 1950? Certainly the idea that a woman would choose life on the road, moving from place to place, sometimes man to man, would have been uncomfortable. But Glinto was probably done in by the double rape of the main character by two truckers, one white, one black. In America, in 1950, black hands on white female flesh was a no-no, in literature and real life. Heck, it’s still a no-no today, in certain backwaters. As his career went on, Glinto/Kelly continued to have legal troubles in both the U.S. and Britain, and eventually he closed Robin Hood Press, which he owned, and sold the rights to the name Darcy Glinto. He moved to the Canary Islands and later died there in 1969.
Darcy Glinto was yet another writer who ran afoul of contemporary morals squads.