private, unusual, even perverse individuals, so that his novels are more about encompassing the range of their personalities and motives through introspection rather than through narrative and plot. Stacton frequently refers to life as a "Cosmic Opera House". He wrote three series of thematically related triptychs. In his first triptych, "The Invincible Questions", Stacton chooses protagonists who are more important for their personal inquiries into the nature of reality than anything that they do, despite being a pharaoh, a king, and monk. His second "American" triptych is highly critical of the development of American history and of America's tendencies to both imperialism and isolationism. And in his third triptych, Stacton examines, with considerable irony, the eternally fraught relationship between archetypal Man and Woman, beginning with Hindu myth, then looking comically at a famous period romance, and concluding with sad events at a film festival in the recent past. Stacton's novels are often low in dialogue, and sometimes full of his witty scornful comments on his characters and life. Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th-century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore and Peter Pan). In 1963, Time magazine praised his work as "masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood" and suggested that "something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London". His other literary influences include Walter Pater, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey for his witty attention to history. Several of Stacton's novels feature homosexual characters prominently when this was uncommon. Besides the novels and other literary works published under his name, he published a wide range of pseudonymous novels of the Cowboy, Thriller and Exploitation genres. His pulp novels about juvenile delinquents written under pseudonyms proved very popular, were translated into numerous languages and D for Delinquent was one of Ace’s top sellers for 1958. The Power Gods, about a motorcycle gang, was set in Nevada. Muscle Boy, which features in many histories of gay pulp fiction, was inspired by an actual crime ring based in San Francisco, but Clifton transplanted the action to Muscle Beach and populated it with an assortment of flamboyant party boys