Yarns Without Threads 

Unfulfilled Promise
or all-too-fleeting glimpses

1. Books with “Naked”, “Nude” or similar in the title

The following books might be expected to have at least some naturist or naturism-related content. They don’t. Well, I know some of them don’t – the rest probably don’t. Where I am sure there is no naturist nudity, the entry is in bold.

• Tim Allen - Don’t Stand Too Close To A Naked Man

• Penelope Ashe - Naked Came The Stranger

• J G Ballard - The Great American Nude

• Lawrence Barker - Basketball With The Naked Man

• M Shayne Bell - Naked Asylum

• John D F Black - The Naked Time

• James Blish - The Naked Time

• Bruce Boston - Clothed And Naked In The Mutant Rain Forest

• John Boston - Naked Came The Sasquatch

• Russell Braddon - The Naked Island

• Brian de Breffny - My First Naked Lady

• Jacqueline Briskin - The Naked Heart

• Jerome Brooks - Naked In Winter

• Kerri Brostrom - Naked On A Stage

• William Burroughs - The Naked Lunch

• Michael Cadnum - Naked Little Men

• Angela Carter - The Naked Lawrence

• Barbara Cartland - The Naked Battle

• Kira Cochrane - The Naked Season A mention of a magazine cover featuring women capering naked round a fire, and a scene where a female artist sketches a nude man, are the only instances of non-sexual nudity.

• Michael R Collings - Naked To The Sun: Dark Visions Of Apocalypse

• Jacquie d’Allessandro - Naked in New England is a standard romance (soulmates take a whole book to get together). A woman takes a shower naked. Wow.

• Eileen Dewhurst - Naked Witness, a weak detective story, without nudity.

• Gordon R Dickson - Naked To The Stars. SF, metaphorical nudity.

• John Escott - Naked Nancy and Other Stories In the first of this 1970s collection of tales for teenagers, Nancy is a shop-window dummy.

• Daniel Fader - The Naked Children

• Philip José Farmer - Naked Came The Farmer

• Charles W Ferguson - Naked To Mine Enemies

• Sheila Finch - The Naked Face Of God

• Robert Finnegan (pen-name of journalist Paul Ryan) - The Bandaged Nude The only nudes here are in paintings. An amateur-detective murder mystery set in California and first published in 1946. One of three books featuring Dan Banion.

• Robert Flanagan - Naked To Naked Goes (Short Stories)

• John Flanders - Nude With A Dagger

• Jason Frowley - Billy The Kid, Quite Naked

• Charles Garofalo - Baked Naked

• Scott E Green - Naked Through Red Dust Winds

• John Gribbin - The Naked Chimp

• I’ve no idea what the title of Naked Brunch has to do with what’s inside. Sparkle Hayter’s 2002 tale is of werewolves in a major US city, where love, lust, greed, ambition and corruption clash and collide. There is some nudity, but only in connection with the werewolves’ transformations or with sex.

• Amy Herrick - At The Sign Of The Naked Waiter

• Carl Hiaasen - Skinny Dip Although one of the characters swims nude, this is not something she wants anyone else to see.

• Brian Hodge - Naked Lunchmeat

• Ron Hoff - I Can See You Naked

• Nick Hornby - Juliet Naked A very good book, but, apart from one private artwork, the nudity is only metaphorical.

• Wendy Hornsby - The Naked Giant

• Robert E Howard - A Song Of The Naked Lands

• Maxim Jakubowski - The Case Of The Locked-Room Nude

• Janet Kagan - Naked Wish-Fulfillment

• Chris Kenworthy - One More Time Naked

• Rudyard Kipling - The Knife And The Naked Chalk

• Joe R Lansdale - The Events Concerning A Nude Fold-Out Found In A Harlequin Romance

• Jel D Lewis (or, possibly, Jel D Lewis-Jones) - The Naked Girl, A Collection Of Short Romantic Stories

• Barry B Longyear - Naked Came The Robot

• Richard A Lupoff - God Of The Naked Unicorn

• Paul Magrs - Nude On The Moon

• Norman Mailer - The Naked And The Dead

• Bernard Malamud - Naked Nude

There’s oodles of nudity in the first of these late-sixties tales, in which a small-town girl tries to make it in the nearest big town. But no naturism. The opening scene is almost word-for-word a duplicate of an early scene in another book I’ve read in the last couple of years, but I just cannot track down this example of blatant literary plagiarism!

The sequel has less nudity but no less sex. At times, Ted Mark seems to be trying to emulate the witty banter produced by Thorne Smith and many others, but he’s not in the same class, and his attempts at social commentary generally fall flat. But the tales are reasonable, light-hearted and undemanding entertainment.

“Ted Mark” was one pen-name of Theodore Mark Gottfried, others being Harry Gregory and Katherine Tobias. He wrote a lot of “men’s” books, including the Man from O.R.G.Y. series. I’m keeping an eye out for the third and fourth “Nude” books, This Nude For Hire and The Nude Who Did.

• Sarah May - The Nudist Colony

• Kary Mullis - Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

• Sigrid Nunez - Naked Sleeper

• Mei Ng - Eating Chinese Food Naked

Aimed at teenagers, this thriller series has as its heroine Gaia Moore. There’s a very brief scene of non-sexual nudity in this book. Unfortunately, despite one character pointing out that it’s no big deal, another is in total shock as a result – I got the impression that the author’s sympathies were with the latter.

• Peter Dennis Pautz - And The Spirit That Stands By The Naked Man

Despite the title, and the (rather nice) cover, there is no nudity of any sort in this amateur detective novel. As the heroine asserts on p47: “there’s a cynical old saying in publising that the word ‘naked’ in a book title will sell an additional fifty thousand copies”. (This is probably derived from “If you want big sales, you need bosoms and bottoms on the covers” – Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books.) “Elizabeth Peters” is the pen name of Barbara Mertz, who also writes as “Barabara Michaels”.

• Michael Paul Peter Philbin - Vixen-Naked Ultra-Luncheon

• Virgilio Piñera - A Saving Nakedness

• The Odd Squad Butt Naked by Allan Plenderleith is sub-Viz cartoon vulgarity and crudity. Toilet and sexual humour for teens and adults. I don’t qualify under either category, having found the whole book totally unfunny.

• Joyce Rebeta-Burditt (aka Joyce Burditt) - Buck Naked

• William J Reynolds - The Naked Eye: A Nebraska Mystery

• Mark Rich - Naked Planet

• J D Robb - Naked In Death

• Lenora K Rogers - Naked Muse

• James J Rush - Naked In The Streets

• Mario J Sagola - The Naked Bishop

• Wayne Allen Sallee - Zelda 1925 Nude

• Pamela Sargent - Dead And Naked

• Andre Scheluchin - Naked Dawn

Unexpectedly called on to act out his alleged profession of private eye, Pete Amsterdam does indeed appear naked in this book. And some of the nudity is non-sexual – he spends time in his hot tub. Even though there are sometimes others around at these times, there’s no social nudity as such. Shames does make reference to naturist use of a beach near Key West, and of Key West’s Fantasy Fest extravaganza, which includes quite a lot of public nudity and near-nudity. This is a fun book – enjoy.

• Sidney Sheldon - The Naked Face

• Joan Smith - The Polka Dot Nude - romance spiced with crime

• A J Sobczak - Naked Came The Aliens

• Andrew Taylor - Naked to the Hangman First published in 2006, this is the eighth of Taylor’s “Lydmouth” detective novels. There is a very brief mention of naturist magazines, but the title is taken from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, and there is no nudity in the text.

• David Weiss - Naked Came I: A Novel Of Rodin

• J N Williamson - The Naked Flesh Of Feeling

• Terri Willits - Nude Descending Reality

• Mary Winters - Naked Truth

• Jerry M Wolfe - The Naked Truth

• Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder - A Wondrous Oriental Tale Of A Naked Saint

If it wasn’t for the (justifiable) inclusion of Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves in the main lists, I would have listed his The Naked Sun here – even though it includes social nudity which is almost non-sexual. Instead you’ll find comments on the latter included with those about the former.

Some of the above may contain naturist nudity, and corrections are always welcome. The list was compiled primarily by using the search facility of LocusMag.

2. Unfulfilled Expectations

or unrealised hopes

Books in this category have plots or subplots which might be expected to involve naturism or naturist nudity, explicitly or implicitly. Often, the blurb promises naturism or nudism. Sometimes, the cover art suggests nudity. If there is any nudity, it is almost invariably sexual. Also in this section are books which could - or should - have featured naturism, but chose not to.

Decent Exposure is a 2006 “Little Black Dress” book by Phillipa Ashley, and follows the standard formula of a modern romance. In Chapter 1, a bright and beautiful young woman meets a wealthy and ruggedly handsome young man. Both are instantly attracted to the other, but it takes most of the book for them to become an item. It is listed here because PR wizard Emma, newly arrived in the Lake District, persuades her local mountain rescue team to strip off for a nude calendar, in which (inevitably) all penises are hidden behind by cairns, ropes, rucksacks and the like. Conventional attitudes to this sort of thing get an airing, but there‘s nothing which Calendar Girls didn’t cover far better, and nobody seems to have the slightest interest in or inclination towards more general social nudity.

The first of Jean M Auel’s “Earth’s Children” series, The Clan of the Cave Bear, appeared in 1980. This doorstop of a book was succeeded by ever longer tomes, at ever-greater intervals, setting out in detail the story of Ayla. Around 30,000 years ago, this wonder-woman travels across southern Europe, providing ample opportunity for Auel to suggest how early humans (and the last Neanderthals) lived in the lands bordering the enormous ice sheet across the north of the continent at the end of the last Ice Age. Ayla (and, to a lesser extent, her eventual consort Jondalar) learn, invent and discover numerous techniques, materials, medicines and skills. There is also a lot of love, sex (except in the first book), strife and achievement. For me, the quality of story-telling drops off as the series progresses, and, like many others, I became irritated by the paragon which Ayla becomes, along with her obsessions (particularly washing and hygeine - I simply cannot believe that daily baths, with soap and shampoo, were standard at that time). I would believe in casual nudity being common, but Auel only offers sexual and ritual nudity - anything else would, presumably, be indecorous. An episode in The Plains of Passage (fourth in the series) describes a ritual sauna and pampering session, after which the ladies wander naked. Everyone else pretends not to be able to see them, as otherwise their nudity would flout convention. To get that far, you’ll need to read well over 2500 pages if you begin at the beginning! Enjoy - huge numbers do.

Passion’s Mistral, by Charlotte Boyett-Compo (aka “Dawn”) is, according to the publisher, how: “private investigator Silkie Trevor has been assigned to find a man with a distinguished birth mark on a certain part of his anatomy not seen in public unless one prefers jail time. She learns that her mark may be found at the exclusive Caribbean nudist colony Mistral Cay, a place for female guests only. So Silkie heads there knowing she will enjoy inspecting male body parts of the staff.” Charlotte Boyett-Compo (or ‘Charlee’ as she is known to her fans) clearly has a grasp of the law on public nudity as profound as her blurb-writer has on what constitutes a “nudist colony”. However, Boyett-Compo doesn’t really pretend that Mistral Cay, its owner, staff and guests, are anything other than pure fiction. Or, as her fans may see them, delightful fantasy. I found it all rubbish. Some folk apparently find Passion’s Mistral and the like erotic and enjoyable, but I’m not sure why. Definitely not recommended.

According to the blurb for Yoland Celbridge’s Skin Slave, the heroine is a “nudist genetics student”. Her nudism mostly consists of al-fresco sex. The book is supposed to be erotic, but will only succeed in this aim where the reader is heavily into spanking/caning sado-masochism. This dominates the tale, and both the ludicrous plot and most of the characters are overloaded with secretions and excretions. The author apparently doesn’t care to write convincingly, and can’t even remember from one page to the next whether or not someone is wearing knickers. The pseudo-SF (genetic engineering, eugenics) is an abysmal failure.

Sue Civil Brown’s The Prince Next Door is a romance caper from 2005. The heroine allegedly planned a holiday, a clothes-optional cruise, but this has been cancelled. There is absolutely no indication at any time that she is a naturist. Instead there are many indications that she would not have taken advantage of the cruise’s option of social nudity. Fine if you want a romance caper, rubbish if you want a book featuring social nudity.

Yet another misleading blurb. On the back of the Penguin paperback of Isabel Colegate’s News from the City of the Sun, one character is said to be a naturist. Yet all this person does is to go top-free, very briefly. (The cover is nice, but Penguin scanned the commissioned illustration at extra-low resolution, then mis-spelled the artist’s name in the credit.)

The Supernaturalists, first published in 2004, is one of Eoin Colfer’s brilliantly-written SF children’s books. Colfer loves the sort of jokes which arise from realistic conversations. Twice in this book characters confuse the Supernaturalists (a team of heros) with naturists, presuming they will be “running around with no clothes on”. Like all Colfer’s work, this is an excellent book - sadly he has yet to introduce real naturism to his army of enthusisastic readers.

The blurb on the back of Petra Christian’s The Sexploiters (1973) says heroine Sally Deene’s “investigations led her to a nudist colony run by a weird family called Whancus”. What it doesn’t say is that the ‘nudist colony’ is a sort of walking talking hands-on peep-show. All the ‘guests’ are men, virtually all the (very limited) staff are busty babes. Allegedly written by Peter Cave and Christopher Priest, this book shows its age, and in a bad way. Most of the sex isn’t very sexy, the plotting is almost at the level of fantasy found in readers’ letters to soft porn mags of the time, and only the heroine’s character rises significantly above that of a cardboard cutout.

Attention All Shipping, by Charlie Connelly comes with a blurb claiming that Connelly “encounters ... German nudists” as he visits a coastal location for each of the areas of the BBC Shipping Forecast. But he doesn’t come across any nudity. When he visits Sylt (not his intended destination for sea area German Bight – despite being a travel writer he seems to have a knack of lousy travel planning which upsets several of the trips in this book), he discovers that: “Sylt is one of Germany’s most popular destinations for naturists, hence you can often see the wobbly flesh panniers of ageing Germans darting between some of the most expensive cars in the world.” That’s it, folks. Misleading blurb syndrome strikes again. I found the book reasonably interesting, if less than brilliantly written – I’m still puzzling over the bizarre phrase “sheer whiteness reflected by the sun”.

The Naughty Diary of an Edwardian Lady, by “Ethel Hordle”, is a spoof of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. This is allegedly “a facsimile reproduction of a naturist’s diary for the year 1906”. Vulgar, sometimes amusing. No social nudity at all, not even as a pretext for sexual goings-on or innuendo. An opportunity for numerous jokes confusing ‘naturist’ with ‘naturalist’ has been passed by. Does anyone care?

The blurb on the back of Susan Howatch’s The Devil on Lammas Night, begins: “When Tristan Poole moved into Colwyn Court, in a remote Welsh seaside village, was it to form a nudist group?” On page 20, we read “Colwyn Village was intrigued by Mr Poole and his society [for the Propagation of Nature Foods]. One rumour, inspired by the word ‘nature’ in the society’s title, hinted darkly that Colwyn Court was about to be turned into a nudist colony.” The locals need not have worried. Charming Mr Poole is merely heading a coven, and the only nudity in the book takes place during a Satanic rite: “The congregation forsook their enrapt immobility and began to strip off their clothes. ... Jane, who was not prudish but thought that human beings usually looked better with clothes than without them, found herself rivited to the spot with an appalled fascination. But even before she could ask herself incredulously how the elderly, the obese and the ugly could reveal themselves in such a way without a qualm, her attention was caught by Poole ...” With this attitude to nudity, it’s probably as well Miss Howatch didn’t allow her daring use of “nudist” in the book to expand into anything more substantial.

After Midnight, by Richard Laymon, is an out-and-out horror tale. The blurb says “When Alice’s friend Serena goes away she stays in her house, with its sunken bathtub and big-screen TV. Best of all is the outdoor swimming pool. But one night a stranger walks out of the woods and jumps naked into the pool.” This is far from the end of the nudity in this book. However, nakedness is always sexual, except where it is for the purpose of washing off various nasty substances, or for preventing a character’s clothing being soiled by said substances. The sex is often violent, the violence often sexual. Clearly a popular author, but not one I enjoyed.

Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too is the sixth “Blackbird Sisters” murder mystery by Nancy Martin. Most online reviews refer to narrator Nora Blackbird’s sister Libby as a “nudist-yoga enthusiast” Although the early chapters introduce a sub-plot where Libby tries to get her sisters to join her in being photographed nude for a fund-raising calendar, this topic soon vanishes without trace, and there’s no mention of or reference to social nudity anywhere. As amateur-sleuth books go, the Blackbird books are fine – providing the reader can cope with a cast drawn primarily from the upper reaches of Pennsylvannian society (ie most trace their families back to the Founding Fathers, most are wealthy and/or privileged). Just don’t expect anything to do with naturism.

The cover art of Shane Martin’s 1957 tale Twelve Girls in the Garden is a pointer to part of the content. The story does involve twelve statues of female nudes, but no flesh-and-blood nudity. “Shane Martin” is a pen name of George Henry Johnston.

Olivia Ryan’s 2009 Tales from a Honeymooon Hotel is a well-written tale of three couples on honeymoon, staying at a hotel in Korčula Town, Croatia. One couple go for a day trip to the island of Badija, and are “warned that the far side is a naturist reserve ... on other beaches here also, some people like to take off all their clothes”. The honeymooners are OK with this, on the assumption that “I hope we’re not expected to join in”. Amazingly, the publisher’s blurb does not say anything along the lines of “among the traps for the newly-weds to negotiate is a naturist beach”. Congratulations to author and publisher for taking a realistic and adult attitude to the significant degree of beach naturism in Croatia, even if they do think naturists need to be kept in a “reserve”.

The Gates of Eden by Brian Stableford is perfectly respectable SF tale of early exploration of an alien world, with some nice twists and elements, but there are none of the nude characters implied by the cover of the UK edition.

If you use on-line bookseller Amazon, and either buy a book with extensive naturist content or search for “naturism” or “nudism”, you will probably be recommended High Wall of Spring, by Julian Stamper (Fithian Press, 2001). While there is some nudity in this book, none of the many forms seem to me to be naturist nudity. Not being particularly experienced or educated in reading high-art literature, I have almost certainly missed much of the book’s message. I was not helped by the author’s use of several distinct styles and voices, nor by the (deliberately?) erratic (fluid?) sense of time. Various characters get naked fairly often. This is usually for sexual reasons, but sometimes for swimming or sunning – although even there I encountered overtones of exhibitionism, voyeurism, flaunting and contrariness which stopped the clotheslessness being enjoyed for and of itself, or occuring simply because it was the most natural or comfortable thing to do.

Frances Thomas’s The Fall of Man has a nice cover echoing “Eve and the Apple”. There is some nudity in the book, but it is solitary, not social.

Providence Island by Calder Willingham is awful, dreadfully long and over-written. A man and two women (eventually) get stranded on a deserted Caribbean island. Skinny-dipping and nude sunbathing only happen after a great deal of sex - prudery gone mad. The narrative style is to jump forwards, witter about stuff that happened in between, then (at serious length) proceed to fill in most of the gaps. I cannot believe the author is the same person who co-wrote the screenplay for The Graduate, which was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and won a BAFTA - perhaps Buck Henry should have helped write this book?

From the tone of the comments above, some might say that I should not have included Guy Bellamy’s The Nudists in the main section. That is a reasonable point of view, but the explicitly naturist title, coupled with at least some non-sexual social nudity, encouraged me to keep it in. Furthermore, it was one of the first pages I produced, and I didn’t want to feel the effort had been wasted.

Suggestions for additional material to be included in any section of Yarns Without Threads are most welcome, as are your own views and reviews. Please email these to me.

Last updated 2009 December 29.
 
Illustrations copyright various publishers and illustrators. Text copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Tim Forcer