Slightly Tragic Update!

I just found out my new favourite author - Big Bob Tralins - recently died. About two weeks ago in fact. I'm reposting his obituary here, because it's a nice and funny tribute to an interesting guy. I'm also going to intersperse these factlets with some classic covers because they are OUT THERE.

Thirty-five years before Heidi Fleiss, the FBI raided a Miami bordello fashioned after a Moorish castle and frequented by wealthy and famous clients.


The owner, a woman who called herself Madame Sherry, spent a year in jail. Upon her release, she crafted her revenge: a tell-all memoir with author Robert Tralins. The Florida attorney general banned the book as obscene, which was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964.

Mr. Tralins enjoyed the controversy created by his book, Pleasure Is My Business. The author of at least 251 titles had accomplished daring feats through his James Bond-like hero, Jack Lund, defeating terrorists, drug lords and leaders of occult groups.

He had sowed vicarious wild oats with 1960s titles like Win With Sin, Operation Boudoir and Invasion of the Nymphomaniacs under the pen name Sean O'Shea and with racy illustrations on the covers.

"He wrote a lot of things that were considered smut or very trashy and are now considered kitsch," said grandson Keith Tralins, including "a lot of early lesbian pornography."

Mr. Tralins was already a well-known local figure in Miami when Pleasure Is My Business came out in 1961. The state had seen nothing like it. Its revelations included voyeurism through one-way mirrors; the patronage of the king of Egypt; and a demure socialite the book calls "Miss Greenaway," who, after a few stiff drinks in the "castle," engaged in hours of sex with multiple men.

The Florida attorney general banned the book, which he called "obscene, lewd … degrading, sadistic, masochistic and disgusting" — among other things.

Each of his interests usually resulted in a string of books, often with suggestive subplots. His admiration for African-Americans undergoing civil rights struggles, for example, inspired titles like Black Stud, Black Pirate and Slave's Revenge.

His interest in unsolved crimes, piqued by an uncle's murder in a grocery store, gave birth to a magazine in the late 1970s, the National Crime Reporter, which encouraged readers to submit tips — an idea well ahead of television shows like America's Most Wanted.