Race, Gender, and Genre: The Baroness Series
as Social and Literary Progression
The pulp fiction of the 1960s and 1970s is easy to dismiss as “throw away”
literature. Some would even argue that the cigarette ads placed in many of the
texts demonstrates that these books were created as a means of producing a new
avenue of marketing and that the novels themselves are just as effortlessly cast
in the role of “product” to be sold, consumed, and disposed of While such texts
may or may not have their place in the literary cannon, they have another much
more enduring role. Pulp fiction is ultimately reflexive of the society which
produces it, and because it is produced so quickly, it can show a culture what it
looks like at that exact moment. For these reasons. The Baroness series by Paul
Kenyon shows the social and literary progression of 1974 and 1975.
Due to the common practice of using house pseudonyms and the large
output by Paul Kenyon at the time, the books of The Baroness series may or
may not share an author. Whether Kenyon was one writer or many is of little
consequence. The texts are best examined as genre fiction of the mid-1970s. The
series follows a spy on many missions. In the first text. The Ecstasy Connection,
the spy must track down a dangerous drug that kills people with an excess of
pleasure. In the second. Diamonds are for Dying, the spy must intercept Nazi
plans to build a nuclear war craft. Death is a Ruby Light, the third installment,
sees the spy foil communist Chinese plans to start a war between Russia and the
United States by framing the US for killing Russian astronauts. In Hard-core
Murder, the spy tracks down a dangerous pornography ring that produces snuff
films and has political connections that may destroy the US. The spy stops the
Russians from opening a lunar capsule which contains a virus deadly enough to
kill everything on Earth within fifty days in Operation Doomsday. The sixth
novel. Sonic Slave, sees our spy defeat an Arab Emir hell-bent on using sonic
technology to control the world’s oil supplies and enslaving the human race.
Flicker o f Doom relays the spy’s success in thwarting the plans of a scientist
with dangerous political backers who has created a means of dominating the
human psyche with light. The last installment. Black Gold, deals with the spy
overthrowing the strategy of an evil conglomeration that has set out to destroy
the world’s oil reserves with oil-eating bacteria. While these plots may seem
campy, they each contain a plot that would lead to an end of the human race and
belie an obvious 1970s fear of a resurgence of the Cold War, anti-communist
sentiment, and obsession with tactics that will cause global doom. What makes
them extraordinary in content and worthy of study is that the spy that the novel
follows is a women.
The Baroness of the title is Penelope St. John-Orsini, an American “model,
millionaires, and international beauty” {Ecstasy 34). Her family was wealthy,
and she gained a large inheritance. Her first husband was killed in a jet crash