Z is for Zane Grey

Some authors write mainstream fiction which sometimes carries one or more hints of a strong interest in spanking.   Zane Grey neatly fits into this bill.   His genre was Westerns - indeed some of his work is considered to be pot-boiler Westerns.   But sometimes his keen interest in all things spanking would shine through.   Usually to ambiguous references:  one of his heroines complained that after meeting the hero she had gotten black and blue mark in places she could not show.    The reader was left to draw their own conclusions - and if the reader was you or me, we would get it in one,

In his book "The Water Hole", his heroine actually goes across someone's knee for a spanking:  a scene that was the major publicity shot for a movie made out of the work.   (She hated being spanked, but found that it deepened her feelings towards the man:  a bit lame, but Zane was pretending that he was vanilla).

Robert Heinlein was foremost a sci-fi author but his works are so peppered with spanking references that he was clearly one of us.   He confused his vanilla readership by having a lady have an unexpected orgasm during her spanking, without giving any hint of why it had happened - or, more to the point, why he had included it as an unexpected element to the scene.

Enid Blyton was famous in England for her children's stories which had naughty fairies and naughty children often on the receiving end of more than one painful whack.    At the time, virtually all kid's reading material was built around kids who could and would get whacked from time to time:  so it was not so surprising that she followed suit.   What is a little disturbing are the accounts that she took her relish over into real life, and routinely took a hairbrush to the backsides of her two teenage step-daughters.

But for some reason, the heyday of fiction which also had one or more (unexpected) spankings is over.   In the 1970's and 1980's, even the alpha male heroes of Harlequin romances routine walloped the rumps of their true loves.    And then the mother lode ran dry.    There is probably a PhD for the person who can adequately explain why spankings turned from mainstream to suppressed quirk in such a short space of time.

But with out help, we can perhaps push the pendulum back.   All we have to do is write best sellers in which spankings are not the only purpose of the book.    Hmmm.    Put like that, it might not be such an easy task, after all.