Early Influences I

As a child, I enjoyed sitting quietly in a corner of the living room, carefully examining the wonderfully lurid cover art of the books on the shelves.  Certain imagery drew me back again and again.  A black and white plate illustration in The Hunchback of Notre Dame depicted a cowed Esmeralda dressed in a long white shift, a rope about her neck, holding a candle.  Agatha Christie's Appointment with Death, a typically lurid 1960s paperback, with a sinister looking Arab brandishing a hypodermic syringe and a helpless blonde in a tight red dress stifling a terrified scream.  Did these pictures flip some switch in my impressionable young mind or was I simply drawn to them because of an existing predilection?  Ritualistic submission and humiliation.  Depersonalisation - a fondness for mannequins and masks.  The objectification of the damsel in distress.  All food for my psyche and, much later, for my erotic prose.