Last week, Jane sent me some Longarm, by which I mean she attached about six different Longarm covers to an email message and I barely remained upright. These were so bizarre, I asked her to snark them with me. But first, Jane answers the burning question, HOW DID YOU FIND THESE?
Jane: I was searching Berkley published books in an effort to find some deals. I came across these. I think that there are several hundred of them published.
Sarah: Yup. After doing some research, I found this Wikipedia entry which states that there is one Longarm novel published nearly every month. There are nearly 400 in the series – in fact, #400, Longarm and the 400 Blows comes out (snerk) February 28. The series is distinguished “from classical westerns by the inclusion of more explicit sex and violence.” So one per month, with more sex and violence. Yeah. I am going to start Longarming people who sniff at romance.
Sarah: Setting aside the Best Perm Ever, he's chasing his perpetrator through the back door while somehow hiding beneath another woman's skirt. WOW. HOW IS THIS NOT A MOVIE?
Jane: She looks so happy getting rogered up the ass. Like she is being tickled by his “long arm” in her vagina.
Sarah: Longarm is straight up getting to second base on this cover. This guy does not mess around.
Jane: I'm not sure what is going on with Longarm in this picture because neither of his long arms are actually in the clinch. Her dress is falling off which suggests that the Longarm activity took place at some point. Perhaps off scene, just prior to the the curtain drawing up.
Sarah: Does “doomed” mean “bored” where Longarm is from?
Jane: My first read of this cover always is the “Domed Beauty” Like a beauty with a dome head or something. I think the chick is bored because he is smelling her armpit.
Sarah: All these…guns… pointed out. What could they mean? And whoever the model was for Longarm's covers, he must have LOVED his job.
Jane: Are the two women featured in the cover the same? Should it actually be Santa Fe widows? Am so confused.
Sarah: HOW did Harlequin MISS THAT? Not just virgins but paranormal vanishing virgins? What came next, Longarm and the Yelling Lady on 49th Street? Longarm and the Boardroom Mistress? Longarm and the Hosiery Saleswoman?
Jane: I think there was a typo on the cover and a few letters left off. Should have been Longarm and the Vanishing Virginity. My guess is that Longarm knew where the hymen was.
BUT WAIT, there is MORE. With some sort of librarian sixth sense, Rachel Z. scanned some Longarms (how did they fit in the scanner?) as she was shelving them this week, as she had to share the WTFery. Ah, Longarm, the gift that keeps on giving.
Rachel: There are just so many people on that cover. And the old lady just looks creepy.
Sarah: LOOK! Longarm is rogering another girl up the ass with the Druid Sisters! That man is NOT RIGHT. But I guess with one book per month, the rogering images have to be recycled. This will be the best Etsy trend ever: Upcycled Buttsecks!
Jane: Can one's dick become smaller after so much use? Like the vaginas are whittling away at it? Also? He never looks like he is sexxoring up the same female character on the cover. Like there are two women on the cover, one who is featured and the other that is in his bed.
That last collage cover does look like Raquel Welch from “Bandelaro” and the cowboy on the left looks like Tyrone Power to me. I have seen a few of these, but never bothered to open one. I’m not sure if I should be sorry or relieved!
Oh dear God, ladies, thank you. Had to get up obscenely early so I can log in a 14-hour work day today, and this post — most especially the comments — have made me laugh anyway. I wish I could think of something witty to add to the conversation, but my brain has already logged off for the day, and I don’t know that I could compete with you all anyway. However, I must insist upon a review of at least one of these so we can all find out if they’re as awful as they look.
I’m reading through the snippets posted on Twitter and just dying over here. I’m not sure I have words. The covers were one thing, but whoa nelly…
I love this so much… All hail Longarm! Is there a fisting scene too?
I keep wondering why Kathleen Turner is in the middle of the cover of the Bank Robber’s Daughter one….Hmmm- this look sort of familiar. Maybe my Dad wasn’t always reading Louis L’Amour?
I can only presume so. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man used his gun in creative ways. Judging from the cover art, he has several spares.
I believe members of my book club chose Longarm and the Wolf Women.
Book description via Amazon: “In the Rockies, two beauties have been luring in prospectors, so their family can ambush them. First, Longarm has to find the hellcats. Then he’ll have to steel himself against their wild feminine wiles.”
We carry these at our library and they seem to be very popular.
I do resent the fact that the same people who read these classify the romances that we carry as “smutty”. At least the sex in the romances advance the relationship between the hero and heroine – not so for the Longarm books. For example, Longarm will blow into town, straighten it up, have sex with a female in town and leave – onto the next adventure and the next female.
I do try to notify people who have not read the Longarms, but want to try out a new western author, that Tabor Evans is not in the same vein as Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and Elmer Kelton!!!
Another western series you should look at is the Slocum series by Jake Logan – very, very similar to Longarm.
Love the similarity between the two ladies on these front covers:
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/…
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/…
Also, if we think some romance titles are bad, take a gander at some of these:
Slocum and the High-Rails Heiress
Slocum and the Big Timber Belles
Slocum and the Canyon Courtesans
Slocum and the Socorro Saloon Sirens
Slocum’s Four Brides
LMAO. This reminded me of a scifi series by Jarrod Comstock, Lawless Worlds. Marvelous wtfery with a lead female judge and her silver alien bailiff. Ahhh, misspent youth.” rel=“nofollow”>
Wow. A blast from the past. Many moons ago when the library first started buying “adult Westerns,” we had a patron who objected—violently. We would find the books ripped in two, with just the tape on the spine holding it together, or slashed with a knife. We never found out who was doing it (truly we didn’t really WANT to know-he had a knife, y’know), but eventually he quit/moved on/died/whatever. I used to wish he would take out some of the Gor books…
OMG!!! What a blast from the past. I have this book, along with several other sex romps from that era thinly disguised as SF. Now where did I put it?
Casca the Eternal Mercenary were the books I snuck from my Dad’s room for a secret read. He caught me once, and from then on shared all of these cracktastic wonders. Longarm, Lonestar, Gor – I got to read them all. I don’t remember anything winking, but there were enough pulsing peens to make up for it.
The Raider and Doc westerns were more fun to read because you have the bromance, at least, even if the female characters were, for the most part, dreadful creations only there to spice the books up with sex scenes. I don’t remember the covers now, but I’m sure they were just as bad as these. As far as buddy westerns went, though, these books were awesome.
Yes I thought so too! Immediately after seeing it but Hermione would have brown hair. Still its a very similiar face, wrong decade to be Ms. Watson but still …
This reminds I not only have no friends who read Romance but I have no male friends who read genre fiction. No seriously as far as I know I don’t know anyone who reads genre fiction except me. I don;t know anybody who reads this stuff but I might. I don’t care what anybody reads. If a guy wants to read Longarm, more power to him. I refuse to judge him on that.
That being said the captions are uproariously funny. My favorite might be the Bankrobber’s Daughter. “Longarm finds an enemy’s little girl is all grown up.” Squick!
All I can think of is Danny De Vito’s long arm of the law.
Is the name Longarm just a nickname? You know like calling a big, fat guy Tiny or a tall one Shrimp? Who knows,maybe “Longarm” made up the name to fake everyone out. His real name is probably Shortpeter or Smalldick or Tinywang or Inchworm….I could go on. I guess if you’re going to roger a winking anus, a teensy one-eyed caterpiller would be the best thing to do it with.
I first encountered the Longarm books years ago while looking for romance cover art and was amazed at how much the clinches always look like they could be on a romance cover (and, who knows, some of them may have been). And yet, I haven’t heard anybody writing articles on how these books will give men unrealistic expectations about whatever. Yes, sexism rears its ugly head again. I had no idea of the content and thought they were just run-of-the-mill Westerns.
When I looked at the Longarm cover links, that guy looks like a model who is also on romance novels.
Um…there’s also one called “Longarm and the Deadly Dead Man.” The cover isn’t as “exciting” as these, though.
I knew these looked familiar…there are a lot of them at the library where I used to work. It’s funny how you just pass over things sometimes…if I had known they were so smut-tastic, I would have read one—to giggle at like I was twelve, if nothing else.
I have read one of these books. In middle school I was really into Westerns and picked one up because Western. It was the first book I was embarrassed to actually own. I finished it because that’s what I do, but it was horrible.
The plot seemed to be how to get him to sleep with everyone woman he met and not in a ooh sex is fun way, he always seemed kind of bored with it. I gave it to the library but hid it among other books, I didn’t want anyone to know I owned it.
Slo-cum? Really?
Looks like a cross between Richard Boone & Lee van Cleef, having successfully mugged Clint Eastwood for the hat and cheap stogiette. And speaking of that seegar, why isn’t he named Longbutt? Fits in so many ways.
My spouse had a collection of Gor books back in the day, and I, in a fit of moral righteousness, tossed them, possibly because we’d acquired a kid at that point. Now I have cause to regret my humorless outrage, since the disgusting things are apparently quite collectible.
Like I told you on Twitter, I worked at Waldenbooks in college back in the 80s, and we had had a thriving romance section. I remember this older couple who came in every month – she bought the skinny little Candle Lights (??? was that the series? maybe I’m thinking Silhouette. Silhouette Candle Light?) and he bought Longarm. And I always wanted to tell her “Live a little, sweetie! How about a Rogers or a Woodiwiss? He reads his, you read yours, then y’all see what happens?”
But no, always the chaste Candle Lights.
Loved working at that store. It’s where I discovered Mark Helprin and Judith Krantz. And a book with the line, “For they both knew that to be caught in the palace of the Sultan meant death.” (When we were slow, we’d take turns pulling hot romances off the shelf, opening to random pages and reading aloud to one another.)
“Winking Anus” sounds like a grindcore band.
I’m finding this all very interesting in spite of the fact that I haven’t wanted Westerns in the past and even a WTF factor doesn’t up the appeal for me.
I think at least part of it is that I had no idea these things existed. I recall seeing Mack Bolan/The Executioner (not to be mistaken with Marc Bolan, The Slider) series books in the 1980s. Like I’ve heard several times about comic books ‘I didn’t know they still made those’, but per Wikipedia, Mack’s a 20th AND 21st Century Boy. Never read any, but I remember them. Western “men’s adventure” numbered series? I’m drawing a complete blank. Could it really be that I’d never seen one, or did they just not register?
I decided to check the paperback racks at the grocery earlier today and sure enough, they had Longarm, Slocum, The Trailsman, and The Gunsmith.
http://us.penguingroup.com/sta…
In fact, the “400 Blows” book was there even though the release date on Amazon is next week, but that’s probably because this is a rough-and-tumble Western grocery, not some fancy Eastern city-slicker establishment.
All of them were RIGHT next to the the Harlequins—that long arm has probably been slapped a few times. I pass by the book racks almost every shopping trip and I frequently stop to browse, Harlequins included though I don’t read those either. Unless those books just showed up this morning, I guess I have selective genre blindness/amnesia.
I’m curious about these reader demographics, and how folks first connected with the genre. I wonder if Longarm and pals are still attracting new readers, or if the readership is mostly longterm fans.
I don’t seem to have much to say about the covers. I submit a T.Rex cover instead:
These look like the category romance of Deadwood, only I’m guessing the character development isn’t nearly as good…
Thanks SB Sarah and commenters. Really needed the laughs. I stood in line for 4.5 hours yesterday *outside* at a job fair I was *invited* to come to and was never interviewed. Yes, *outside* of an office building on the sidewalk around it. Thank goodness it was warm here yesterday.
Hmm…Druid Sisters in the old West…Bruce Campbell and the Druid Sisters in the Old West…I think I have a plot for a Syfy “Original” Saturday Night Movie.
BTW, if you type “Longarm Books” into a Google Images search, you’ll get a lot more book covers from this series! (Be sure to include the word “Books” or you’ll just get a lot of images of one of the Transformers.)
I remember these and Lonestar, which was a spin off of Longarm, and Spur McCoy and the Gunsmith. My dad read them and I used to sneak them to read the good parts, same with my grandmother’s romance books. I can’t believe they still publish them.
I am honestly surprised that I didn’t find Longarm interspersed between the ‘legitimate’ books in my dads library. That’s how I discovered the first smut I ever read. I’ve been hooked ever since. I’m biting the bullet and am going to get one of these. Pretty sure I’ve read worse. If nothing else it should be good for a laugh.
This one is priceless: Longarm and the Horsewomen of the Apocalypse
But wait, it gets better: “A gang of gorgeous grim reapers has been leaving a trail of bullet-riddled corpses. Longarm needs to bring them in, but they have plans for the lawman. Longarm figures if these wild women are going to try to take him out, he’ll go with a bang”
My local libraries have a few dozen titles between them, but what I find surprising is that they have multiple copies of each title. Are these things really that popular?
Other interesting titles include:
Longarm and the One-armed Bandit
Longarm and the Deadly Flood
Longarm and the Howling Maniac
Longarm and the Monument Valley Manhunt
Oh, the dirty minded inferences!
So I was somewhat pleased to see that my little town’s library has (only) four of these, er, gems. The Doomed Beauty is among them! All are newish, including two published in 2012. But my biggest giggle came (heh) from one the other books listed from my query search: “Mines and Minnie Balls.” Perfect for Longarm! ROTFLMAO!
Yeah … my sense of humor is stuck at about sixth grade.
These covers are bizarre….
That moustache guy looks like a cheesy version of Al Swearingen. Sigh. I still miss Deadwood.
I really can’t figure out who those covers are supposed to appeal to. Women? Can’t imagine other women finding that face appealing. Men? They like to look at women, not at men. I mean, male porn fans follow female porn stars, not male, generally speaking. And I don’t know any men who want to look that sleazy. Expanding my horizons – gay men or women? That sure doesn’t work…
Judging a book by its cover – that’s why you buy the book – can’t imagine anyone buying it but for a morbid curiosity to see if it’s really as bad as it looks – once – for not more than a dollar…
Obviously there are limits to my imagination because these do have a market…old guys imprinted on pulp novels in their youth?…were these all published in the eighties (hair styles) before everyone had the internet and the internet was full of porn? I am NOT up looking the publishing date on Amazon.
The cover artist is killing me. Cutting and Pasting must have been at the top of the job description.
With that skill, we can all make Longarm covers!
And go…! I double dog dare you!
Susan
I’m not sure that “recommend” is the right word, but if you want the most !!!! in your Longarm experience, here are a few options:
Longarm and the Killer Countess (383)
From the cover copy: “U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long’s latest assignment is to escort Countess Lilyana Ivanovna and her Cossack party into the Rocky Mountains to hunt game.” Sounds innocuous enough, right? Nope. She shoots an Indian, because that’s what you hunt here. Then comes this exchange:
That’s right! Longarm’s objection isn’t that she killed a man in cold blood, but that she didn’t shoot the right kind of Indian. (I should add, this was published in 2010.)
Longarm and the Horsewomen of the Apocalypse (394)
This one’s been mentioned already, but what has not been mentioned is the sequence in which the four Horsewomen abduct Longarm, torture him, and force him to strip at gunpoint (“He kicked off the other one more carefully then unbuttoned his pants, becoming aware to his poignant humiliation that he was fully hard, his mast pushing painfully against his underwear.”). They then strip and he decides to try to get a gun and make a break for it, but as he lunges towards one of the women…his mouth falls into her crotch and then he just has to have sex with all of them. He has no choice.
I…I can’t even process this scene.
Longarm Faces a Hangman’s Noose (385)
This one…I just have to let you see for yourself:
That’s chapter one.
Speechless . . . torn between horror, hilarity, and disbelief . . . still speechless . . . ???!!!
I’m not sure there’s a word to describe these excerpts. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing. Such a word is not meant to be.
Ack! When I first saw this picture I thought those legs were the woman’s sticking out behind her.
That which has been read cannot be unread.
“Mother load” is far and away the best classical Freudian slip ever.