Stable Boy

by Tom Roan, Adam Rebel (Pseudonym)

285 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Bill Plott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Adam Rebel (A dam rebel) is a pseudonym for Tom Roan, a prolific pulp fiction writer from 1923-58. He wrote some detective stories, but mostly westerns. Storylines were formulaic and characters were shallow. He is a native Alabamian and his two autobiographical novels, Stormy Road and Black Earth, were well done, set in the steel and mining industry around Birmingham. Stable Boy was published by a company that produced a lot of soft porn titles. I was curious to see how it compared to his other writing. It is very tame stuff by today's standards. No clinical descriptions, just suggestions of lust. Aside from that, it is actually a fairly interesting story of a prominent white family and its interactions with black servants in the early 20th century. A dysfunctional daughter's affair with a black employee is the genesis for the title.

[Jack Webb · Rating 1 out of 5]

As tediously overwritten and unevenly paced as it is patently racist, "Stable Boy" (published in 1954 by a publishing house that has a different name from the entity holding the actual copyright) is a perfectly representative specimen of pulp fiction, for better or for worse. (That is: worse.) The teaser excerpts printed on the back cover and inside the first page imply SCANDALOUS INTERRACIAL RELATIONS between a hot trashy white lady who is the city-spoiled wayward daughter of a wealthy southern property owner and the household's lusty black stable hand. Like a lot of pulp fiction, it attempts to stumble along a muddled line between cautionary moral tale and overt titillation, and it handily fails at both. The titillation never materializes fully (the stable hand actually has very little to do with the story) and the heavy-handed moralizing is still not potent enough to resuscitate the plot (the household struggles to get over an unexpected death) or inject any drama into the endless descriptions of what the house looks like and what the weather is doing outside and play-by-plays of the characters making coffee or whatever. And then there's the dialog and descriptions of "the three house Negroes". Dare you create a bingo card of horrifying racial stereotypes from 1950s America about black people and read this book with it at the ready? Dare you wade through interminable passages about the setting that the author clearly stuffed in there solely to reach a minimum word count? Buckle up, buttercup.

The original 1954 price on this piece of literature as printed on the cover is 35 cents, which is 15 cents less than I paid for it at a local Goodwill and 30 cents more than this book is actually worth. If you enjoy reading terrible pulp fiction (but not for any longer than 200 pages), this may be for you.