Strange Passions by Florence Stonebraker. Croydon (1953), approx. 128 pp.
I got a few pages into this and came to an abrupt stop. Hadn’t I read this book before? It had the same characters and setup as Sinful Desires, which was published six years later, but the text (at least for the first chapter) was different. I started hoping that Stonebraker had produced two versions of the story which varied from one another in important ways. No such luck. From the second chapter to the end of the book, the texts were identical. The cover of Sinful Desires, which proclaimed “This is an original Bedside Book!”, was fibbing more than a bit. Did the publisher know or even care? And why would Stonebraker, whom I imagine to be an upright person, rewrite only the first chapter if she weren’t planning to deceive? I’ll probably never get the answers to these questions, which I admit are something less than momentous. The book, incidentally, was reprinted under a third title, Who Knows Love, by Lancer in 1962.
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