One Foot in Hell

by Wilene Shaw

One hidden urge darkened Larry Crenshaw's otherwise normal life - an urge so twisted, so utterly monstrous that it threatened to destroy him should he ever lose control of it even for a single moment. Had he ever already lost that control? There was something in his nethermost mind about a red-haired girl child, brutally attacked and slain, that he could not quite rationalize...

Seldom has a novel bared with such uncompromising realism the soul and heart of a man tormented by a desire so repellent to decent society.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

Reviews

[Dave]

Virginia Harrison as Wilene Shaw penned seven Ace novels from 1954 to 1961: The Mating Call (1954); Heat Lightning (1954); The Fear and The Guilt (1954); See How They Run (1957); Out For Kicks (1959); Tame the Wild Flesh (1960); and One Foot in Hell (1961). The Black Gat republication of One Foot in Hell reprises the original 1961 book cover by artist George Ziel, who was born Jerzy Zielezinski and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Dachau concentration camp. He apparently became a book cover artist after being liberated and emigrating to America.

Hannah Arendt once titled a book about Eichman, “The Banality of Evil.” Thompson once gave us a Texas Sheriff named Lou Ford who seemed like an ordinary guy – at least until it was too hard to hide anymore. Shaw gives us Larry Crenshaw, an accountant in a small Kentucky town, who tells us of his five-year marriage to frigid cold Elaine and the five years since he has a good drunk.

Crenshaw is for all intents and purposes an ordinary joe who everybody liked and no one has any trouble with. As Crenshaw narrates the story, we get the world through his eyes and we see his frustrations with Elaine and his drunken pawing of his secretary Dot. He informs us how frustrated he is and how Elaine is just a cold duck despite her outward appearance.

We get hints at first that all is not as it seems, that Crenshaw might not be what he advertises, hints about how his mother screwed him up when she caught him as a teenager with Lola Riggs and whipped them both. Ultimately though the truth about who Crenshaw is cannot be hidden anymore. The question is merely how much if what he tells us is accurate and how much is twisted fantasy.

[L J Field · Rating 4 out of 5]

We have an unreliable narrator here and we don’t know just how psychotic he has become. A Serial Killer book before the aforementioned title had come into use. Very good story with creeping horror slowly building up.

[Bernard · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those Not Quite What I Thought It Would Be - type books.
Expecting a standard sex and sin small town tale, this book had one of fiction's more iffy and unlikeable protagonists. This reader even felt a bit uncomfortable learning about Larry, an accountant in a small Kentucky town who is a respected citizen - and to those around him, a happily married husband and father of one daughter.

But Larry isn't happy in his sexless marriage, he has inner demons that he has difficulty dealing with. He is sex starved and sex obsessed, and deals with his needs mostly when drunk, often in a most appalling way. His hang ups that go back to his more youthful days when his mother was alive still haunt him and could prove to be his undoing one day.

This book is quite well written and a fast read, though this reader had some mixed feelings about it.
The thing I can't overlook is the fact that the lead character is a loathsome figure. His yearnings and actual crimes make one simply wish he pays a big price for his actions. This dude has problems!

The book did make me curious about the author (a female using a pen name), and other books she wrote. As of this writing, I think only of them, an earlier novel is in print. The others are pulp tales selling used at fairly high prices, or with ridiculously high shipping costs, so I won't be reading many of them anytime soon.

Overall, a readable book, maybe quite daring for its time (1961).

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that Larry Crenshaw is a successful accountant, model husband, and a solid citizen of his native burg, fictitious Hadsville, Kentucky, located on the banks of the Ohio River, belies his reliability as a narrator. He juggles a few quirks, but generally hides his massive psychological dysfunction pretty well. He successfully deludes himself as he denudes nearly every female he encounters—her age notwithstanding. Readers witness the slow boil of his undoing as his alternate reality rises into a deadly hallucination of sanity.

Crenshaw is obsessed with sex, and it becomes obvious as pages accumulate that it’s the driving force of his existence; even if he can’t seem to recognize this fatalistic fact himself. His psychosis grew out of a brutal childhood past, fed by early promiscuity-interruptus and a tragic marriage, Crenshaw spirals into a sex-starved, booze-infused frenzy that leads to one crippling consequence after another.

Originally published by Ace in 1961 under Virginia M. Harrison’s pseudonym, Wilene Shaw. Although it was written long after the jazz age, its kilter would seem to fit comfortably within Stark House’s Staccato Crime series. Stark House previously published Shaw’s Heat Lightning in their first collection of Ace paperbacks: Three Aces (May 2023)