Best three spankings in Mainstream non-spanking novels

I'm with you on this, Alef, and the reason is that it was never designed to be erotic. I understand that it was written to make the point that pornography is seldom erotic. He strips the story down to it's basic elements and then runs it on a loop with only the smallest of changes between each scene, a change of implement perhaps or a different fetishistic item found in the bed.

There is little plot, no characterisation and no sense of place (other than perhaps a mental stage set) and only the spankings have any description. In short it lacks any sense of fleshing out which, I think, is essential for eroticism. This is entirely deliberate from Coover and it is very accomplished writing but it just isn't sexy.

In other Coover works, spankings are mentioned in asides, (Gerald's Party, Pinnochio in Venice) and these have more eroticism than the whole of Spanking the Maid.

I liked Gerald's Party (at least the first part)but agree Spanking the Maid doesn't live up to its excellent title. Its rather disjointed and far too arty for my taste. The spankings, floggings etc have no build up so no tension is created. Having said all that I have two copies of the book.

I would imagine children's fiction leads the way when it comes to spankings and canings. The Greyfriars stories have literally hundreds of canings. Up until the mid 1920s in the weekly Magnet, boys were always caned on the hands and then it suddenly changed. Bunter and the other boys were, up until 1940, when the Magnet finished, caned on their backsides. I suppose it was much funnier. I have always thought caning on the hands a brutal punishment. Enid Blyton stories also had their fair share of spankings, although there were as far as I remember more threats than actual spankings.

There is a good Leslie Thomas novel, His Lordship. Its a long time since I read it but the main character is a PE teacher at a girls school and he tells a rather pretty sixth form girl that has misbehaved that she would have got six of the best at a boys school. I can't remember her reply exactly but I seem to recall she called his bluff.

Amen to that fine sentiment, NJ!

Strangely enough, "King Rat" by James Clavell also has a pretty hot M/f scene. Interesting he was able to fit that in in a novel about male POWs. I suspect the man would have fit in very well here.
There is a book named "The Crime of the Century (and other Misdemeanors)" by a well known author whose name completely escapes me. F/m on a public beach. Long time ago, and I dont remember it all that well, but I checked the book out multiple times, so...

John Godey, "The Crime of the Century (and Other Misdemeanors)".

Definitely not in the best 3 spankings in literature. But it sticks in my mind that in The Tripods by John Christopher - the TV series based on the book had a cane hanging in the schoolroom and when the 2 main characters run away they mention they would get a beating if they were were caught going back.

Can't remember if that was in the book or not.

I don't remember that particular detail in the book, but I do remember one character talking about being beaten by his tripod master and he was whipped with the alien's tentacles, so it was probably their version of a spanking.

Blimp is correct about UK children's and boys fiction.
The earliest reference was in a Noddy book when Creep Noddy offered to fetch the slipper for a boy who didn't want to fetch it only to be told that the person getting the had to fetch slipper it, unfortunately they were both let off! Enid Blyton had many references to Cp in many books but many descriptions if any.
Rachmel Crompton occasionally had William clothes brushed but many passing allusions to CP.
However as Blimp says the very popular schoolboy stories of the post -war period indulged in a particular type of "homo-erotic" writing when the canings were described in considerable detail for instance, Greyfriars, I saw the Billy Bunter and he was caned on the stage but of course the actor was wearing a fat suit and the padding wouldhave meant it wasn't felt. In the Jennings stories, Jennings once used the delightful expression that the headmaster had sharpened his cane to describe a particularly incident, and the story comics like Hotspur and Wizard that I really liked that had a mixture of war stories, adventure stories and school stories often with quite salalagious descriptions of canings and slipperings.
One of the earliest erotic spankings I read was in Return to Peyton Place which I borrowed from my sister, I thought it garbage apart from the one incident that if I remember after a row the man took the woman forcibly over his knee and spanked her hard, but they made up. However this certainly wasn't literature just pap-fiction.
A very early description of a flogging occurs in Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress btw, but not at all erotic.
Of course in the fifties and early sixties British TV was dire and a weekly visit to the public library was part of my Saturday routine

George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books mention Spanking every so often. In Royal Flash his lover Lola Montez used to hit him with a hairbrush during sex to exhort him on to greater heights and in Flashman at the Charge another lover birches him in a spa prior to sex. He also occasionally mentions the idea of caning ladies who displease him in one way or another.

The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth has a good M/F spanking near the beginning. I remember masturbating to it when I was about 12.

My grandmother used to read lots of Mills and Boon romance novels (when I was a child) and in the 60s/70s a number of them had pictures of M/F spankings on the front cover. Never tried reading them though.

Lots of spanking references in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels but no actual spankings unfortunately. One I remember in Thunderball James Bond threatens to spank Miss Moneypenny so she will have sit on dunlopillo. She replies "on carrot juice". James Bond is being sent to a health farm. A similar conversation is also in the film I believe.