Dedeaux's Delightful Discipline

Review: Dedeaux's Delightful Disciplinary Tales

THOSE who delight in sophisticated yet incredibly arousing tales of delicious discipline have long been entranced by the novels of the mysterious P. N. Dedeaux. The eclectic author set his scenes in Europe—both present-day and historically—as well as Canada and sometimes unidentified exotic locales. While many of his admirers have sought out the paperback editions during the past two decades or more, several of the novels are now more readily available now than ever before through Amazon and other online sales sources.

Gaining a clear perception of Dedeaux's style is best done through a rapid overview of the structure of several of his works. Listed below, for reference, are the ones with which I am familiar, a reckoning which does not pretend to be all-inclusive, especially in view of the frequent use of pseudonyms in erotic literature:

Tender Buns, also published asThe Sensualists, by Frank Mace

Transfer Point: Nice, also published asNew at It, by Blake Tremaine

The Tutor

The Prussian Girls

The Nothing Things

Aunt Anna

These novels have appeared in numerous paperback editions by various publishers but the most recently available versions have been produced by Blue Moon Books. A few of Dedeaux's stories have been adapted for audiotape: one spanking scene fromTender Buns, for example, was extracted and imaginatively reshaped on cassette. Clearly, Dedeaux has influenced other writers: most notably, Martin Pyx's erotic novels (also available in Blue Moon editions) derive from both Dedeaux's style and approach, using the sorority setting Dedeaux presented so well inThe Nothing Things—in one, Pyx even includes a chapter employing the master's style that he describes as ahomage to Dedeaux. A chapter fromTender Bunswas included in a compilation of selected chapters from disciplinary literature entitledThe ABC's of Discipline.

This most frequently-adapted work,Tender Buns, exemplifies Dedeaux's method and style. Set in a Canadian suburb presumably near Toronto, it relates the search by suburban wife and clubwoman Janice Stapleton for the severe discipline by cane and even rubber hose she needs and which is administered to her by both confirmed bachelor Marc Merlin and his lover, single mother Suana Becker. Remarkably, neither Marc nor Suana are aware of their shared interest in fustigation; Suana punishes Janice because she suspects that the latter has been having a sexual relationship with Marc, not knowing that Janice merely reports to Marc and his love for imposing humiliating caning when she fails to comply with his demeaning orders to go bra-less or to wear what were then revealingly short skirts.

Those who enjoy their caning and spanking mixed with toilet humiliation will cherish the caning of Marc's Asian secretary, Kim, who, while able to take stentorian doses of the case on her slim backside, urgently needs to urinate when facing correction. Marc offhandedly provides her with a silver bowl to squat over while she shamefacedly pees—and then he adds extra strokes to the sentence for the privilege. (This scene is the one selected for inclusion inThe ABC's of Discipline.)

Another delectable sequence is Suana's revengeful but mistaken application of her rubber hose to Janice's already striped posterior when Sue wrongly believes Janice has been Marc's bed partner rather than submissive recipient of the cane. At the climax, Janice is ordered to perform the "kiss of devotion" by putting her lips to Suana's anal rosebud and deeply thrusting her tongue into her tormentor's rectum.

This theme is reiterated inTransfer Point: Nice when the gloriously bosomy Victoria finds herself satisfying the desires of fellow prefect Helen Elstir for the "scum kiss" between her spread bottom cheeks. This tale begins at the fabulously correction-oriented posh English girls' school Victoria and Joy attend, where the "duty mistress", aided by prefects, canes with high ceremony those girls sent after classes for punishment.

Dedeaux even manages to succeed with the hackneyed plot of desirable white girls—Vicky's massive chest is complemented by fellow traveler Joy's bulging bottom—captured by druglords and white slavers, rather oddly in league with Maoists who subject the girls to severe prison-camp disciplinary "training" presumably to prepare them to be sold to...capitalist fetishists, it would seem, although Dedeaux's politics are always tangential to the strict disciplinary themes he is so delightfully expert at presenting.

Although Vicky takes some serious castigation—from both the diminutive yet savage Chinese guard "Cheeky" (so nicknamed by the prisoners for her form-fitting hiphuggers) as well as her somewhat perverse father, the ignoble Earl, who canes her hard enough to make her bladder burst, she also, as she puts it, is "mostly in the dishing-out department these days." A charming sequence has her caning a female neighbor's teen son at that lady's request while home, in which she even catches him peeking up her skirt on the stairs and duly applies her rod to his bare bum.

Moreover, Joy's mother plays Dedeaux's classically stern maternal role well by applying devilishly nasty nettles to her daughter's anal crack, lovingly described as "the Great Divide." Cheeky brings in more toilet-oriented treatment when she forces the girls to lick one of their comrade's steaming turds.

Whipping to the blood does take some of Dedeaux's scenes past merely delicious disciplinary activities.The Prussian Girls, set in a standard Dedeaux-style horribly strict girls' academy, features imposition after imposition of severe cane and whip on bottoms of both pupils and faculty. The delectable Jacqueline Bellais, the French mistress who excels in administering appropriately severe canings, with refinements such as sponging female bottoms to increase sensitivity, competes with afraulein of equal disciplinary ability in a wonderfully perverse interscholastic competition to see who can take it more and harder. The switchability of even the strictest mistresses is hinted at when the faint lines of a caning can be discerned on Jackie's lovely posterior.

Men are not central to many of Dedeaux's stories but inevitably they overpower the most dominating of dominatrixes. The military head of a boys' school, for example, sodomizes the severe Headmistress of the girls' academy inThe Prussian Girls. The lengthy closing section ofTender Buns features the hired disciplinarian Pedro imposing virtually every kind of chastisement, including sodomy, on needy wife Marge Dale, while all the other characters observe the performance and applaud.

Perhaps the ultimate male dominant is the tutor Pelham, the title character of the now hard-to-findThe Tutor. After Pelham disciplines the narratress, lowly serving girl Wragg, the aristocrat Stephen rather off-handedly demotes his wife, Lady Julia, to the same status and enjoys her being disrobed and whipped before her former peers. Years later, one character seeks out Pelham in old age to once again experience his exhilarating castigation.

Source of Pyx's sorority series, Dedeaux'sThe Nothing Things can serve as the prototype for every sorority initiation tale. The wonderfully and creatively dominant sisters each has her own insidious ways of inducting the submissive pledges. One device that will reappear in other Dedeaux stories is the saddle strap one athletic sorority sister forces her pledge to wear: a stiff leather strap pulled up excruciatingly tight through the crotch so that it spreads and punishes the labia, making any motion painful.

Tender Buns appeals to so many aspects of the disciplinary impulse, both in the range of punishments imposed and the psychologies that motivate the several active characters. Dedeaux even captures the fear of the married or long-connected couples that keeps them from letting their partners know of their "interests"; inevitably, they eventually learn that they have somehow managed to find their perfect life companion who cherishes the cane as much as they do.

In distinguishing Dedeaux from other writers in this genre, we might suggest the subtlety of even the severest discipline in his stories, as contrasted, for example, with the severity that passes into outright cruelty in even the famedThe Story of O. Closest in style may be works such asThe Discipline of Odette, where French governesses apply martinet and nettles to their charges' bottoms and engage in more outright sexually-oriented punishment when their instruments and nettles touch the girls' tender genitalia.

Dedeaux manages, in contrast, however, to lower the sadistic temperature by the offhandedness of the dominant's attitude. A perfect instance, in Tender Buns, is Cornelius's directing the pleasant maid, Barbara, to administer three "screamers, or, we call them, pussies" to his wife Madge. Barbara, her own body bared below the waist, straddles the incredibly masochistic Madge, so she may apply her switch to Madge's vulva, even waiting for Madge to move so that Barbara's switch may strike the wife's open vagina. When Madge whines at the sentence of two, Cornelius almost whimsically adds an extra stroke, and in the bargain, invites Janice's observing husband to sodomize Madge should he be in the mood. He isn't.

Almost all of Dedeaux's novels—which I first encountered more than three decades ago searching through adult bookstores—can now be obtained online, through Amazon among others. I've not found any biographical details of the author, who surely must have written under a pseudonym, and is likely deceased. I do welcome any information about him (or perhaps, her) that anyone might possess or be aware of.