Introduction
It has been said that the average man (or woman) leads a life of "quiet desperation," that modern civilization and especially the large urban areas are merely trapped enclosures behind which the basically free souls of men are caged and preyed upon.
In our society there are traps within traps; traps set by the stronger to capture the weaker. The Young Librarian is a story of one weak woman preyed upon by a gang of young hoodlums who are no better than animals. Unsuspecting, naive, inexperienced, Linda is caught by forces stronger, more cruel, than steel jaws, and her struggles-although valiant-are fruitless. Indeed, like the small fish caught on the cruel barb of the hook, her struggles only attract the larger predators.
The Publishers of Dansk Blue Books, in an effort to seek the very best for their readers, contacted one of America's leading suspense writers early last summer and commissioned him to do a novel for this new series. Intrigued by the possibilities of this type of project, the author closed his palatial resort home in Michigan and moved into the near-ghetto slum areas of New York and, later, San Francisco. Under the pseudonym of Rod Waleman, he became one of the hopeless and forgotten street people; he was one of them in clothes, in manner, and in thought. For a man whose work has appeared on television and has been printed in almost every country and language of the world, the Dansk Blue Books assignment was a revelation. Posing as a handicapped retired seaman with only a meager income, he moved into a shoddy hotel near the heart of the city. During the next three months he was mugged at least three times, threatened with death by a member of a Black militant organization, a victim several times of extortion and petty robberies, a witness to several knifings, and-from his third floor hotel window-saw half a dozen gang rapes of drunken female bar patrons take place in the alley beneath his window.
After his experiences, our author will never again be quite so sure of anything, never again be the same complacent person, and never again will feel the same way about the captives and the predators of our urban jungles.
And, after your reading of The Young Librarian, we feel that you can never again feel the same way about them.
This is a brutal story. Some critics, reading the advance copies of this important novel, have already categorized it as "pornography." Its scenes of unparalleled sexual candor and depravity obviously will, and do, offend many people who prefer to believe that such things do not happen.
Other critics, however, are hailing this as a classic in its genre. Linda, the main character, is a person that both the Marquis de Sade and Franz Kafka would recognize and enjoy. She is more, too; for in spite of everything that happens to her, she is a tribute to the unquenchable human spirit. She adapts. She will survive. There is even a moment when her impulses to love overcome her revulsion at being treated as the lowest and most contemptible of the lowly love slaves.
The Young Librarian is, in essence, a story of life as it is lived today in some quarters. Its characters are honestly drawn and all, without exception, have their counterparts somewhere in the darker shadows of the jungle of our cities. For that reason, we at Dansk Blue Books feel we must publish this important novel.
The Publishers