= Wrappers slightly worn/ creased along extremities; backwrapper slightly soiled. Bookplate on inside frontwrapper. A rare survival of an infamous work of pulp fiction.
On November 21 1946, a cheap paperback by the name of J’ irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall Spit on Your Graves) appeared in bookshops in France. An ultra-violent, sexually explicit piece of pulp fiction set in the smalltown United States, it tells the story of Lee Anderson, a black man who is able to pass as white. After the lynching of his brother, he hatches a plan for revenge. The lurid plot careers from one - often violent - sex scene to the next, building up to the murders of two white heiresses and Anderson’s crazed flight from the police. The novel ends with the lynching of its antihero, and remains provocative till the very last. The final sentence describes the hanged man’s bottom mooning mockingly at the world through his torn trousers.
J’irai cracher immediately drew fire from reviewers. Over the next few months, the disgust began to translate into sales. When, the following March, a travelling salesman strangled his mistress in a hotel room in Montparnasse and left a copy of the book - with some of its violent passages underlined - at the bedside, J’irai cracher became news. While sales went through the roof - it would be the year’s best-selling novel in France - the press accused its author of murder by proxy. But who was responsible for this “assassination par procuration”? J’irai cracher’s cover declares it to be the work of Vernon Sullivan, “traduit de l’Américain” by Boris Vian. In fact, Vernon Sullivan never existed - it was just a name dreamt up to sound authentically American. The novel was solely the work of Vian, at that stage known as a fringe writer and musician on the Left Bank scene. Written for a bet with a publisher, J’irai cracher was bashed out in the space of a fortnight while Vian was on holiday.
In the wake of the copycat killing, however, with the novel coming under increasing heat from the censor, Vian’s strategy was to diminish his own involvement by maintaining that J’irai cracher truly was the work of the mysterious, untraceable Sullivan. He even produced a hastily translated English “original”, which his publisher rushed out. Few were fooled. In 1950, Vian and his publisher were fined 100,000 francs each; all unsold copies of the work were destroyed and in the summer of 1950 the French government banned further sales of the book.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the book basically ended up killing Vian at the age of 39 - he died, ironically enough, at a 1959 screening of the movie adaptation of I Shall Spit On Your Graves. He had already disowned the film, and asked to have his name removed from it. Ten minutes into the film, Vian is reputed to have sneered, “These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!” before collapsing back into his seat, suffering a fatal heart attack.