Block was, what, 25-26 years old when he wrote this one, having broken away from his Andrew Shaw persona at Nightstand but still doing books as Sheldon Lord for Beacon and Jill Emerson lesbiana novels for Midwood.

This is young Block truly at his A-game, an excellent con artist caper that looks like a sure thing from the get-go, until–naturally–things go awry, due to a dame, this girl with a long green heart who instigated the grift and has been playing the three men in it, all of whom she’s been sleeping with like some kind of Orrie Hitt whore.

And like Orrie Hitt’s Pushover, the con is a unique one, crossing the same territory as David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: real estate scams, getting people to guy useless property; not in the Florida everglades, but in the Canadian tundra.

It’s too complicated for me to put down in comprensible words, but it’s a complicated con, started in Vegas when Doug, one of the con men, happens to meet Evie, the girl with the long green heart.

She loves money and wants to marry rich, which she thought would happen with the millionaire she works for and has been sleeping with for several years.  He said he’d marry her when his sick wife died; but after the wife died he didn’t marry her and now she wants revenge, by getting two confidence men to pull a land buy game on him, where she will get $17500 from the deal, enough money to move somewhere and mingle with the well-to-do and land a rich hisband.

Right off I hated this broad, and the type of woman she represents, because let me tell ya, these gold diggers are out there: women who come from the wrong side of the track of medicore middle class, and shift their way into a different class in order to marry rich, the man’s bankbook more important than who he is.

And I knew she would pull the twist, that she was up to something; maybe too obvious knowing Block’s work, and 60s crime noir.  The fun was in trying to figure out her angle and what she’d pull — the clues are all there, you realize this later: you go back and see them, but some were obvious too, like when she gets the narrator, Johnny, to touch a gun and put his prints on it.

Johnny admits at the beginning his one weakness, or vice, is women, women always get him in trouble and could ruin a con, and this is the case when Evie plays him.

My only issue with this novel is that it’s abaut 10K words too long (it closks in aboyt 70K) and gets repetitive in the middle, you want things to mobe faster, enough waiting for this con to come to closure.

You also wonder why such a elaborate and months-long con for $100,000, split 40/30/20.  That was abouyt a million in 1965 money, though, and people today murder for far much less.

Hard Case rerpinted this novel in 2005, with a far better cover than the other two editions, featuring a cool orginal Robert McGuire gal:

When pop culture historians and critics write about the lesbian paperback pulp era in the 1950s-60s,  the same names are often use das examples: Vin Packer, Randy Salem, March Hastings, Valerie Taylor, Paula Christiansen, etc., with such classics in lesbian pulp Spring Fire, Three Women, Baby Face, Women’s Barracks,  and so on.  Seldom is the name Sloane Britain mentioned, the pen name of Midwood-Tower editor Elaine Williams, although as both a writer and editor, Williams/Britain etched her own legacy in the history of early commercial lesbian fiction.

Williams started with Midwood in 1959, when the company first formed, acquiring and editing novels by Lawrence Block (Shekdon Lord), Donald Westlake (Alan Marshall), Robert Silverberg (Loren Beauchamp), Orrie Hitt, and Mike Avallone, among others.  It’s not clear when she left Midwood, if she did, but she committed suicide in 1964. Seems her family did not approve of her gay lifestyle and had disowned her, a matter she hinted at in her fiction.  She was 33.

She published her first novel with Newsstand Library in 1959, a paperback house out of Chicago: First Person–Third Sex was a deeply personal account of a third grade teacher’s discovery of her “third sex” passion and desire of a “twilight woman.”  It was reprinted in 1962 by Dollar Double Books as Strumpets’ Jungle (see above pic) , back-to-back with Any Man’s Playmate by James L. Ruebel.

Also in 1959, she published with Beacon Books, The Needle, a story about a bi-sexual heroin addict prostitute.

Her next novels for Midwood were 1960’s Meet Marilyn and Insatiable, like The Needle, written commercially for the market; These Curious Pleasures (1961), however, has the same autobiographical, first-person narrative that her first novel does. In fact, the narrator’s name is “Sloane Britain,” perhaps Williams’ indication that this book is based on her own life, rather than the writer’s imagination. 1961 also saw That Other Hunger. Both books sported cover art by Paul Rader.

Other titles were Ladder of Flesh plus two posthumous short novels published as Midwood Doubles: Summer of Sin and Peep Booth.  Three titles, Ladder of Flesh, That Other Hunger, and Unnatural,  were reissued in the late 1960s with new titles: Taboo and Delicate Vice.

Both First Person–Third Sex and These Curious Pleasures break away from the genre norm of lesbian paperbacks in that they end on a gay-positive note, rather than having the protagonist meet with tragedy for her sins of the flesh or meet a male she falls head over heels with, marries, and lives forever after in heterosexual marital bliss.  Publishers such as Fawcett Gold Medal, Beacon, and Nightstand often required this so the Postal Inspector would not prosecute for mailing obscene material in the U.S. Mails — if the lesbian character meets a horrible end or goes insane over her unnatural lust, or repents from sin and finds true love in the arms of man, then the books were deemed to have social value as morality and cautionary tales; if the books ended on a positive note with women loving women, that, in the 1950s-60s, was considered perverted and sick.  Homosexuality was still considered a mental disease that could be cured with medicine, psychology, or religion…

Lesbian paperbacks were initially marketed to male readership, often written by men under female pen names–the writing was often obvous, with the male point of view, although some men (such a Lawrence Block and Orrie Hitt) wrote so convincingly as women and lesbians that even to this, some readers have misten Block’s Jill Emerson and Hitt’s Kay Addams as being bonafide females.  On the other hand, writers such as Robert Silverberg (Marlene Longman) and Gil Fox (Kimberly Kemp, Dallas Mayo) were not as adept at capturing the lesbian voice and experience — Silverberg has stated he just relied on his fantasies and imagination whereas Fox, in an interview with Lynne Munroe, stated that he would watch romantic scenes in movies and imagine two women doing/saying the same, and would write from there.

In his essay, “How Can You Put Your Name on Books Like That? or Make Mine a Midwood” in Paperback Parade #32, prolific author Mike Avallone reveals that Williams accepted a manuscript from him:

…a lady editor at this very new Midwood snapped up ADAM GREENE  as if Avallone was the new F. Scott Fitzgerald, expediated an advance of five hundred and fifty dollars, and asked for aother novel. (p. 50)

Adam Greene was an attempt at a mainstream literary novel by crime and thriller writer Avallone that he had not been able to sell for its sexual content. It was welcome at Midwood and published as All The Way.  She acquired several more books from Avallone until she suddenly vanished.

I should say here that the first lady editor died under mysterious circumstances — suicide was suggested. I didn’t know, really. She was only a nice, low telephone voice to me named Evelyn [sic]. (p. 54)

While he never met his editor, at an office party he notes meeting “lesbian author Sloane Britain,” an attractive woman who had no interest in men but had exquisite and big “manly hands.”

In an interview with Lynne Munroe, Gil Fox states:

[The] first editor was Elaine Williams, who wrote as Sloane Britain. Her family refused to accept the fact that she was a lesbian, and she committed suicide.

While men certainly purchased and read lesbian paperbacks for twisted entertainment, these books found an unexpected underground audience among the housewives and teen girls across the country: women with secret longings who discovered they were not alone and other “women” had similar feelings and experiences and doubts that they had.

Perhaps some found a kindred soul in Williams/Britain’s First Person–Third Sex. The narrator, Paula, does not discover she’s gay until she’s twenty-one.  Before that, she’d had sexual encounters with men but couldn’t understand why she derived no pleasure from it, figuring she had to fall in love and get married before the true joys of sex were apparent.

Paula does comprehend, at age 15, the allure of her body and how she can manipulate men.  Lying about her age, she gets a waitress job in a diner; the older man is always eying her and she’s aware of it, as well as the looks of customers.  She doesn’t make enough money at the job to buy all the material possessions she craves, so she tells her boss that she will let him have her but it’ll cost $30 (pretty pricey for what would have been the mid-1950s, when your common streetwalker charged $5-10 and call girls went for $20/hour or $100 a night).  Her boss is a miser and won’t do it but she continues to taunt him, not wearing a bra, bending down in front of him, so he finally gives in.  They have sex twice a week and she makes an extra $60 on top of her weekly salary of $40.

She also carries on with the fry cook, a young Hispanic man who can’t afford the $30; she charges him $10 because he at least is young and good-looking.  She cannot, however, reach orgasm with these men, or even find pleasure in the act, as much as she tries.  It’s just a teen girl’s means to afford new clothes and jewelry and goes on for a year until her boss catches her with the cook and things get violent.

After college, Paula roommates with Janet, also a young school teacher. They get hired at the same school and are close friends.  Janet had regular dates but Paula has no interest; she dates no and then but just to do something, not interested in having a relationship. Even when she does have sex with a man, she still feels nothing.

In the summer, the two go off to summer jobs in different states.  Janet has a whirlwind romance while Paula is seduced by another cap counselor, Karen, who sees in Paula what Paula does not know: that she is gay.  Paula discovers orgasmic ecstasy with Karen, and is happy juts to lay in bed and talk as well.  Paula is okay with the realization of her lesbianism — she’s also possessive.  Karen is proiscuous and is carrying on with another girl at the camp, and is open for more lovers, even sharing them with Paula.

Karen tries to subdue her jealousy, tries to act like she is a free-loving dyke, but is doesn’t bode well, and she leaves the camp with a starined ending with Karen.

Back to rooming with Janet, Paula sees Janet in a new light: as an attractive female she’d like to have sex with.  She fights herself from making advances on Janet, afraid it might ruin their friendship.

Later, Paula takes a trip to Manhattan to visit Karen and is introduced to life in Greenwich Village, where gay men and woman openly cavort, there are many shops catering to the lesbian fashion, as well as gay bars and clubs.  Needless to say, Paula realizes she could live here and feel free to express her sexuality in public.

Janet meets Paula’s New York friends and notices something; she confronts Paula and asks if Karen is gay, and this is when Paula admits she is also gay, and she is okay with it, even if it does ruin their friendship.

Janet surprises Paula not by condemning her but by taking Paula’s hand and leading her to the bedroom, saying she feels the same — Janet is more bi-sexual than strictly lesbian, and a new chapter in their relationship opens.

The next weeks were the happiest in my life. No longer did I have to hide my love for Janet as if it were something I should be ashamed of [...] The only thing missing that would have made my happiness complete was the belief that it would last. (p. 142)

This presents a problem:  can they both be roommates and lovers, especially since Janet sees men and Paula has possessive issues?  Such matters of sexual and intimate jealously has been explored in Jill Emerson’s Warm and Willing –although written by a man (Lawrence Block), the novel reveals that the intricate pettiness and fallacies of lesbian relationships are no different than the heterosexual experience. Jealousy is also explored in March Hastings’ The Drifter, which may have been edited by Williams at Midwood. (It is interesting to note that March Hastings, pen name for Sally M. Singer, published a number of novels with Beacon and Newsstand Library, and then went exclusively with Midwood in 1960.  So did Singer’s lover, Randy Salem, pen name of Pat Perdue.  Did Williams, also with Beacon and Newstand, bring these women authors over?)

Yes at first, no later. Janet turns out to be the more possessive one, although it seems to be a ruse, for all of Janet’s insistence that they are one another’s property, Janet turns out to be the one who steps out on the relationship, with both women and men.  The revelation for Karen is deeply painful, yet almost inevitable “in the strumpet’s jungle” of the sexually active of the late 1950s.  Paula bears his soul to Janet:

“…I was in love with Karen but I have a confession to make. I was attracted to you for a long time.

“When we decided to live together I decided that nothing could make me happier than sharing the little details of daily life with you. This summer I realized that I wanted more from our relationship.  It seems strange to say that my relationship with Karen made me love you more.  What I mean is that through her I learned how beautiful a woman could be  when she gave you her love…on all levels.” (p. 148)

Still, Janet’s sexual needs outside their love ruins what they had.  They depart friends, in tears, and Paula has a hardened heart as she awaits the next woman to come into her life.  The next summer, Karen leaves to a camp again but Paula does not; she heads to New York and lives in Karen’s place for three months.

I don’t know if I expected to find someone in New York.  It didn’t matter. I was in no hurry. All I was sure of was that someday, somewhere, I would find the woman who loved me as I loved her [...] I don’t know her name or what she looks like or anything about her. Only that as I write this she, too, is waiting. (p. 191)

Is that woman Allison in These Curious Pleasures?

“Sloane Britain” in These Curious Pleasures works as a secretary in a New York TV producer’s office. She has a room in the Village and a number of part-time lovers; she also likes to cruise the bars, seeking one-night stands with strange women.

She is essentially Paula with a new name as Elaine Williams is Sloane Britain: remade in New York as a dyke in search of good sex and maybe, if the cards are right, love.

Sloane meets an actress that her boss hires for a new TV pilot, Allison.  There is an immediate connection between the two women; Sloane is confused but Allison says she knew Sloane was gay the first second, she has a way of telling.

A note on the boss: Harry “Happy” Broadman seems to be a thinly veiled rendition of Midwood Books publisher Harry Shorten — Shorten, Broadman.  Happy, as Sloane calls her boss, is unpredictable, at one moment yelling incoherently on a tirade, the next moment calm and collected.  She has learned to deal with herboss’ eccentricites.  Was Harry Shorten like this?  Descriptions of him by his authors seem to indicate this is so.

It was three in the afternoon and Happy hadn’t shown up at the office.  What a day it had been.  His numerous lad friends called frst on his private line and then, when they didn’t get an answer, they called back on the office phone. They drve me nuts with their questions. (p. 34)

So how did an editor publish a novel with such a portrait of her boss within the boss’ own publishing company?  It seems that Harry Shorten never read the sex books he published, coming from a background of comics (the money he made in that field was used to start Midwood).

The relationship between Sloane and Allison begins slowly then goes whirlwind — Allison doesn’t want things to get serious until the pilot is shot, so her work will not be affected by romance.  Frustrated, Sloane reacts to this by going to see one of her part-time lovers, including a girl whom she has not seen in three weeks; Sloane just knocks on her apartment door, unannounced, and the girl lets Sloane in to spend the night.  Sloane’s aggressiveness almost seems…manly. She goes on a dark prowl. She is sardonic, too.  While out dancing, Allison asks Sloane why she always speak in clipped, glib sentences like a character out of a detective novel.

She also cruises the lesbian bars in the Village, rejecting women based on hos they dress or their taste in literature.  No one at the production company knows she’s gay — it’s not something she  hides, she just has no need to mix her private life with work, until Allison shows up.  Men — actors, directors, producers — constantly ask her out, but she politely turns them down or suggests she’s in a relationship and not available.  She wishes this were true.  Like Paula, she is searching for that one woman she can love, a woman to love her back, and she sees this future in Allison.

Then something bad happens.  With the pilot finished and ready to market, Happy throws a large party at his Long Island estate.  There’s a lot of drinking and some drug use going on.  An actor and the director of photography, both stoned out of their reasonable minds, corner Allison in a bedroom and rape her.  Sloane hears Allison’s cries for help and goes in the room; she tries to stop the rape but one of the men hold her back as the other assualts the woman Sloane loves. It is a moment of horror for Sloane: she has to watch Allison violated and there’s nothing she can do about it.

After, Sloane holds Allison and soothes her; Allison is shaking, crying, she has never really been with men, she has never experienced forced sex.

Sloane wants her to go to the cops and report this but Allison refuses — she is career ambitious. She’s an unknown actress and this pilot could be a career break; the two rapist are well-known and respected in the field and if she smeared their names, if she put them in jail, she would become blacklisted in the entertainment field, and the tabloids would afford her the wrong kind of publicity.  The best thing, she feels, is to recover and forget — the two men don’t even remember what they did, based on how they act the next day.

Although watching Allison’s rape was horrid for Sloane, it works out for her need for Allison — Allison stays with her for two weeks and Sloane nurtures the actress. Their relationship gets deeper, the sex is tender and loving.

Much like Paula and Janet in First Person–Third Sex, the relationship starts off good as the two live together, but it doesn’t take long for the little green monster to poke its head out of the mist of the lesbian psyche.  As Sloane and Allison interact with other lesbians in the twilight jungle, Sloane becomes jealous of the way other women look and flirt with Allison, and how Allison responds.

Despite all the problems and a short break-up, the novel has a happy ending — Allison gets a job on a TV show in Hollywood and has to move to California. Unable to see her life without Allison, Sloane says goodbye to her job and Greenwich Village life and goes west, young lady, with the gal she loves.

We kissed for a long time. Not one of those kisses where we teased each other. Just a matter of contact that would take the place of words that would say I need you, I love you, you give me strength, I want you near me always. (p. 185)

Both these novels are elegantly written, emotionally charged, and deeply personal — autobiographical revelations that there is a universality of love and lust’s many avenues and streets.  “She died too young,” said Midwood author Joan Ellis, talking to Lynn Munroe.

Indeed she did.

In the lesbian journal Ladder, Marion Zimmer Bradley (who wrote lesbian novels under a variety of names) examined the output of Sloane Britain and both praised and condemned her work, according to Susan Styrker in Queer Pulp (Chronicle Books, 2001).  Williams/Britain’s  First Person–Third Sex was lauded as “one of the best books” of 1959 for its honesty, as was These Curious Pleasures (“excellent writing and characterization”) but The Needle and Woman Doctor were written off as paperback trash that succumbed to genre demands of sleaze fiction.

Woman Doctor is about an unethical shrink who seduces her female patients; MZB viewed this as beneath serious lesbian literature and Britain’s earlier work.

A final note stated:

Sloane M. Britain died, by her own hand, in her New York apartment in early 1964.  In spite of the gradually declining and cynical characters of her later books, we feel that the literary world has lost a promising talent.  She might well have escaped the rut of hackwork, and written something well worthwhile. We’ll never know. (Queer Pulp p. 61)

Talk about cynical!  But true.

Yet how many sleaze paperback writers actually did escape hackwork? Did MZB with her fantasy and SF?  Some will say no.  Did Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg?  They remained genre authors.  Evan Hunter?  The Blackboard Jungle suggests so.  Some, like Gil Brewer and William Knoles, killed themselves because they were unable to make that escape and the literary break-through they hoped for.  Elaine Willaims/Sloane Britain killed herself because of the disapproval of her open twilight sexual identity — the gradual cynicism of her later books reflected such.  Her character Paula and her alter-ego Sloane may have found peace, acceptance, and love on the page, something Elaine Williams could not acquire in life.

I am a Pedestrian.

I prefer the sidewalk under my feet, the wind in my face, the exquisite scents in the air, the sounds rushing past my ears, and the completeness of walking.

I walk everyone. I walk back and forth to work five days a week. This is a thirty minute walk when it’s cold and forty when it’s warmer. I walk the Meewasin Trail for fun. The river is intoxicating every day of the year. I walk to the Farmer’s Market, to nearby shops, to Eighth Street for groceries. Occasionally, I walk far.  It is approximately an hour’s walk from my apartment to the big, Canadian bookstore that I frequent.  I’ve walked there about three times in the last three years. It is somewhere I usually take the bus to.

This time of the year I start to dread walking. It is getting colder. There are days below minus degrees and talk of wind chill. There will be ice and cars will pay even less attention to little, old me as they rush to and fro.

Vehicles don’t pay enough attention to pedestrians now. In the last month, I’ve almost gotten hit twice. The last time I could smell burning rubber after he applied the brakes.

Almost getting run over is a GREAT way to end the day!

The other time the person turning left was not paying attention; good thing I was. I will admit, I don’t always pay attention.

I will admit that I forget the rules sometimes. My generation, a mostly car-less one was “taught to walk on the left, facing traffic, so that we could see cars coming and move onto the shoulder.” (p. 38) There were also less sidewalks then. However, cars went slower, injuries were less serious, and drivers took responsibility for everyone’s enjoyment of the road. Now, there are times when it feels like I’m the only one noticing pedestrians.

I will take responsibility for my own safety but I want the vehicles out there to be aware that they are not the only ones using and enjoying the roadways.

I enjoy relying on my body for my own locomotion. I enjoy walking. There are many benefits to my walking.

“…went out for a walk the following afternoon. I was out for an hour. I walked two hours the next day, an hour the day after that, then three hours a day later. Somewhere in the course of those first several days, I stopped being depressed.” (p. 16)

Since I was a child, I’ve enjoyed walking in the rain. Though, here in the Prairies, that usually means that I am walking in the rain and the wind.

This is not a gentle tropical breeze that I am talking about.

This is updrafts and messy hair and wind tunnels.

How many umbrellas do I go through in a year?

1? 2? 3? Just one umbrella died this summer, at least. It’s a good thing my mom sells Avon. She always has inexpensive umbrellas hanging around for me to commandere.

I suppose, one day, I should buy a high end model. I worry though that our winds would treat such an umbrella the same as the others.  Maybe, I should just go for cute. Oh look, they even have a warranty.  Though, I have a feeling that Mary Poppins had a Burberry.

I know some of you may be wondering why not bike to work? For me, it’s a matter of paying attention. My mind tends to wander here, there, and everywhere. I feel it is safer for everyone if I keep my time behind the wheel to a minimum.

I am a pedestrian.

“I think I can recall a desire to gain knowledge of the city I lived in …. by walking its streets.” (p. 32)

You can live in a city for centuries and never really know it until you walk its streets.

On a recent Sunday morning, I went meandering. I walked back from the university along Temperance, turned a corner, and suddenly had no idea where I was. It took about ten blocks before I could suddenly go, “ah ha, I am here and I know where I must go to get back on track.”

I love that. I love getting lost walking in a city that I supposedly know.

I am a pedestrian.

All quotes are from:

Step By Step: A Pedestrian Memoir
by Lawrence Block
New York: William Morrow, 2009

I love me some hit men. I don’t know what it is about professional assassins that make them so captivating, but there’s nothing like a good hit man story. And Lawrence Block has taken this to almost Seinfeldian levels of hilarity and glory. The humor comes from the mundane and the practical, sharp dialogue exchanges and a desert dry wit, without ever descending into slapstick or over-the-top setups.

In the third installment of the short story collection series starring everyone’s favorite snuff artist, Keller is looking to retire. He’s getting old, and it’s becoming too much trouble to keep killing. His stamp collection still holds his interest, but he wants out of the game. So he teams up with his trusty booking agent Dot, taking practically every job that comes along with reckless disregard for his usual meticulous control, all so he can get that final big score.

Hit Parade is comprised of several short stories that all share a general arc. Think graphic novel series. They all interconnect, some characters in earlier stories paying off in the later pieces, and all framed around the same overall goal of Keller and his big cashout. What fascinated me about this novel is that it dealt primarily with the events of 9/11. Keller lives in New York, and watching the impact of the towers falling adds such a layer of depth and wistful beauty to the stories that I absolutely did not expect. Aside from the concerns for heightened security — Keller can no longer pay cash for flights, getting weapons on the plane is virtually impossible — it has a personal impact on Keller. He ends up volunteering at the food service lines, spooning food to the fireman working at Ground Zero. It’s terrifically honest, and amazingly selfish in it’s portrayal.

The casual back and forth between Dot and Keller is still the bread and butter of this novel. I’m rarely one for asking for novels to be turned into cinema, but this begs for it. It’s beyond the whole Moneypenny/Bond innuendo, as there’s never even the thought of a romantic interaction between Dot and Keller. It’s a business arrangement, but the personal relationship is so strangely intimate without being sexual. Dot cares about Keller, because he makes her money, but because also because he’s her top guy.

There are attempts on Keller’s life, threats, screw-ups, sour deals, and the usual, but it never goes for that ridiculous hyped-up finish: nobody breaks into Dot’s White Plains home to take her hostage to get to Keller. Nobody is hunting Keller for sport. Everything is so casually put together, so matter-of-fact, and yet there are plenty of exquisite twists and plot points. If Garrison Keillor ever decided to write episodes for the Sopranos, this is how they would have turned out.

I’ll probably be reviewing the most recent book, Hit and Run, in the coming months, but you can definitely get copies of the first two books, Hit Man and Hit List. I cannot recommend this series highly enough, as it’s quick, refreshing, and has never disappointed yet.

The cover alone is worth the price of admission.  It’s such a cool cover that, like Midwood’s Sin of Wheels art by Paul Rader or Gil Brewer’s The Bitch, it’s been reprinted on matchbooks, keychains, coffee mugs, and posters.

The cover also reminds me so much of this former dancer at L.A.’s Jumbo’s Clown Room. When I showed her this cover (she no longer dances, but is an esatte chef in Bel Air) her eyes popped and she said, “That’s me!” Really — same body type, same hair, same lips.  Strange.

There’s no date on this, but as a Cornith Leisure Book, it would date between 1965-66.  It is on Lynn Munroe’s list of “are they or are they not” Lawrence Blocks from his article,”The First Andrew Shaw.”  There’s also question as to whether or not Block continued to write for Hamling and Kemp after 1963, when he and his agent split from Scott Meredith — after all, Meredith contracted all titles to Hamling & Kemp via The Black Box.

I think I’ve become adept at spotting Block’s style.  For one, in general, both his and Westlake’s Nightstands and Midwoods are between 9 and eleven chapters, often ten.  It’s a pragmatic thing — to get a 50,000 words manuscript, you do ten 5,000 word chapters, or nine 6,000 word chapters, and at on chapter a day, in less than two weeks you have a finished book. (Robert Silverberg’s were all fourteen chapters, until after 1965 when Greenlead required all books to be an exact 12 chapters).

Block also has a way of writing about Greenwich Village, a section of Manhattan that he obviously loves.  This is how Sin Alley opens, with colorful depictions of the the streets, trees, and builings of the Village, as well as its doomed youth in th streets:

It is a tough neighborhood.

They fourteen they have smoked their first marijuana cigaratte; by age fifteen they have taken their first hit of H; by sixteen they have graduated to sin-popping and by sixteen they are ready to shoot with medical hardware.

They have already had their first love by age twelve. In the basement or boiler room or hallway or on a fat rooftop, with a girl who is a known tramp, someone from the crowded apartment next door or the street. They start early and soon learn all about that. They know how to get their kicks. (pp. 6-7)

That passage is pure early vintage Block, as if taken from the pages of Pads Are for Passion.  In fact, there are a lot of “pads,” man, in early Block, and, like, beatnik lingio, Daddy-O.

In Sin Alley, The Pad is a special place, a cool space, it is “five rooms on the top floor of a four-story brick painted apartment building” (p. 8).  No one lives there and some think it is a myth; only those with a key, or know someone with a key, can get in.  No one knows who pays for it.  But The Pad is a safe place to take a chick and make her, smoke M or shoot H, play jazz and trip and float and ride the reefer wave.

So happens with a girl named Marion in chapter one; she meets a sexy beatnik trumpet player, they have dinner, he gives her booze and speed, and they go up to the pad.  He tells her to never talk about The Pad and to deny being there if ever asked. She’s too high to remeber anyway.

Chapters two and thre are in completely different writing styles which causes me to think this is a collaborative novel.  Chapter two reads like Westlake’s dense early style and I believe chapter three could be William Coons, who was already ghosting Andrew Shaws as of 1962.

This is a multi-character book, almost a collection of stories, a biout various people in the Village finding their way to The Pad and experiencing mind0-blowing sex and drugs and music.  We don’t get back to Marion’s story until chapter six, and back to Block’s writing — in fact, his chaptrs are choppy, stucatto, single word paragraphs that flow like jazz riffs, returning to themes — the way we return to Marion half way through the book.

It’s an okay book, I’m not a fan of multi-character novels or collections disguised as a novel, because you don’t get to know the characters or even care for them.  Plus, the different writing styles throughout make it an nerratic read.  But like I said at the top, the cover is worth the price of admission into this pad, Daddy-O.

An early Block with quite a history. It’s been reprinted twice since its Gold Medal debut in 1961 — as Sweet Slow Death in 1986 from Jove, Mona in 1994 from Carroll & Graf,  and as Grifter’s Game as the the first offering from Hard Case Crime in 2005.  A lot of mileage for an old title that has now become somewhat a classic in 60s noir.

I read somewhere that Block had started this one as a Nightstand title, and $20 Lust as something for Gold Medal or Beacon, but things got switched around, and when his agent Henry Morrison at Scott Meredith read the manuscript, he concluded it was good enough for Gold Medal and under Block’s own name.  Thus, Mona became the first paperback Block had his name on the cover, instead of Lesley Evans, Sheldon Lord, or Andrew Shaw.

There’s a Mona, a dead ex-wife, in $20 Lust (aka Cinderella Sims), talked about earlier, and a number of Monas show up in Block’s Andrew Shaw books.  She’s like Harry Whittington’s Cora, popping up often in different, same soul.

Block’s many Monas are just no good…tramps, cheats, and liars all…

[Side note: he same year, 1961, Block also published with Gold Medal Death Pulls a Double-Cross, also under his own name.  It was here that Block started to move away from the sleazecore and begin his career as a crime noir writer.]

The narrator of Mona/Slow Sweet Death/Grifter’s Game is Joe Marlin: con man, grifter, gigolo, player, crook.  He moves from hotel to hotel under different names, skipping out on the bill.

At the top, we find him in Philadelphia, moving in on a mark, a young woman whom he thinks has money, and she thinks he comes from her high society rich people’s circle.  Talk of love and marriage, and he actually feels something, so when he confesses to her that he’s not a rich man, she freezes at his touch. Then she vanishes, cutting out on two months’ rent, and Joe realizes she was playing him, thinking he was a rich guy she could snag.

The world is full of grifters, full of liars all out for the game, the buck, the payday, he realizes.

At a train station, he lifts another man’s luggage for the clothes and whatever else there is, and checks into a hotel by the beach.  There are a lot of nice clothes in the luggage, that help him fit in among the ritzy.

Lying out on the beach, he meets a young woman, Mona Brossard, who tells him she’s unhappily married to an older man in his 50s.  They make a date. They have sex. The sex is fitting for a Nightstand book, perhaps when Block was still writing this one with Nightstand in mind.

Then he finds a huge chunk of uncut, raw heroin in the luggage, worth tens of thousands, if nit hundreds on the open market after it’s cut and processed.  Then he realizes the name on the luggage matches the name of Mona’s husband…and then she finds his luggage when he’s asleep and she says, “What are you doing with my husband’s luggage?!”

Here we think: okay, how can this be?  A wild coincidence.  Joe should think the same but he figures it crazy luck, and he’s too in lust/love with Mona to think right, to realize, like the other girl, he’s being played.

Only later in the book, when we do find out he’s a patsy, that we can go back and see all the clues, where the heroin and the heroine converge.  Mona saw him take the luggage an she followed him, with a plan in mind, and intentionally met him on the beach…

Oh, Joe gets sucked in, he kills her husband and makes it look like a gangster hit, he plants the raw heroin in the man’s office so the cops will think the murder was over drugs…and then Mona vanishes, she sends Joe $3,000 to his hotel in Miami instead of showing up for love and happiness…

But Joe is crafty. Through the real estate agent selling the widow Mona’s house, he finds out she’s in a hotel in Lake Tahoe.  Joe is good at social engineering, at getting info from people.

In Tahoe, she has a handsome man at her side, a hired lover it seems.

He confronts her…

What can she say?

“Are you going to kill me too, Joe?”

Joe gets away with murder, he isn’t writing his story from a prison cell or before his suicide as some of these crime books.

At the blog Somebody Dies, the reviewer talks about the Hard Case reprint and notes:

A book like this could have ended in any of a dozen ways, all of them somewhat predictable, but Block comes up with one that absolutely knocks you to the floor…

Indeed, the last two chapters are truly dark, sadistic, and cathartic in a twisted way — the revenge every man wants for a woman who lies, double-crosses, cheats or hurts.  Mona has hurt Joe badly with her con game, using her vagina and her words of love and promise of money to turn him into a killer.

So he gets her back — the heroin and the heroine converge.  Should I spoil it for you?  I won’t.  It is indeed a slow sweet death, one he embraces as inevitable for her and later himself.

This little novel wraps up in such a dark way that I was totally surprised, and delighted that this one did not have a patent predictable ending.

And solidifies why I have become a Larry Block fan this year.

Highly recommended, boys and girls and tawdry readers of sleaze.  The Gold Medal edition might be pricey to acquire, but you can find the Hard Case one used for $1 out there.

To add to Westlake’s Adios and Dresner’s Man Who Wrote Dirty Books, Block wrote this send up, substiuting sleaze books with a children’s magazine, but essentially a satire about publishing in general.  I haven’t read this one yet, or found a good copy, but I thought I’d mention its existence.

Donald Westlake, RIP, wrote this funny book around the same time that Hal Dresner wrote his funny book, The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books, both novels about the sleaze publishing racket, both published by Simon and Schuster.  Both wrote for Midwood and Nightstand as young writers needing money experience, both were contracted out by Scott Meredith, both went on to bigger and better careers, both got a funny book out of the experience.

The narrator of Adios is a writer, 25, with a wife and kid and dreams of graduate school someday, knocking out a book a month for a New Orleans paperback house as Dirk Smuff.  The pen name used to belong to his friend Rod, who now has a spy series with a better house at $3,000 advances, pubishes articles in layboy, and has a movie deal in Hollywood.  The smut publisher still thinks they are getting Dirk Smuff novels from him, not knowing he has “a ghost” as they call it.

His cadre of writing friends all have ghosts, collecting part of the $1,200 per book minus the agent’s commisson; they all have better careers and magazine or mainstream book writers. All except the lonly narrator, who is having a hard time getting his monthly books in on time…first two days late, then three, then four, then nine…the agency tells him if he’s late one more time, they will replace him with an eager writer who can do the work.

He’s done 28 of these books, the income has been nice, and he wouldn’t know what else to do.  He’s never submitted anything to a magazine or publisher in his life.  He admires and envies his old college roommate, Rod (possibly Lawrence Block here), because in college the guy would write a new story every week and send them out and collect rejection slips until one day he sels a story to a Playboy-imitator, who later becomes the book publisher. (This is obviously William Hamling’s Rouge, that Harlan Ellison and Algis Budrys edited, and later started the Nightstand line.)

The novel consists of several failed attempts at the first three chapters of the 29th sex novel, Passion Sinner, originally Lust Under the Big Top until he realized he couldn’t write a carnival novel effectively, although the first sentence has been in his mind for a while: “She used to be in show business in New Orleans until the pony’s platform broke” (p. 69 — a coincidence?)

But every time he tries to write fiction, he laspes into stream-of-consciousness ramblings about his marriage, his daughter “Fred” (Elfredna), the other wrters he knows (Block, Drenser and William Coons? Maybe Silverberg?) and how he would like his own pen name instead of ghosting as Dirk Smuff (Westlake did some ghosting as Andrew Shaw, John Dexter, and Don Holliday, but was mostly known as Alan Marshall and Alan Marsh for Midwod and Nightstand.)

The narrator seems to be more Art Plotnik than Westlake — plotnik became Drenser’s ghost as Don Holliday, and wrote under all the other names, never having his own.

He comes up with a great outline that cobbles together many sleaze plots — young Sally from the midwest heads to New York after graduating secretarial school, meets a young would be actor on the bus, has an affair, meets actor’s female cousin who is a lesbian, gets Sally into lesbiana, gets raped by her boss at the ad agency, leaves the lesbian cousion, lesbian cousin tries to hurt her, is saved by a hunky lead actor, seduced by actor, then

walking down the street, Sally meets a couple of sailors who engage her in conversation.  The smuggle her abaord the battleship and when they are on the highs eas she blows the entire Seventh Fleet until, bloated with cum, she is harpooned by a passing whaler and sinks without a trace (p. 83)

In another part, he mentions a ghost who wrote half of a normal sex novel, and suddenly in the middle Martians land on earth and start having sex with earth women in one great global orgy.

And you know, there may be old books out there with these very plots…

This a funny funny book, but also an insider’s view of how the publishing of smut paperbacks worked back then, with he agent acting as middle an. The agent in the book, Lance Pangle, never shows his face in public, and has his assistant do all the grunt work, not unlike Scott Meredith — Meredith did not exit, that was just a name for two brothers who were pulling sme great cons on the publishing industry, as well as being the men behind the curatin for some great literature (Norman Mailer, Arthur C. Clark, Issac Asimov, etc).

The narator keeps writing about his past sex life, how he got a girl in college pregnant and had t marry her, how his marriage is falling apart, how he fears he will lose his sex novel gig, how he lusts for his friends’ wives and has fantasies…

He also snaps and can’t tell reality from fantasy anymore, the pages in the typewriter  from his life…

The title comes from a book Rod is working on and wants to fall Adios, Motherfucker, but his publisher says they’ll never get reviewed if that happens.

Westlake gets to put al kinds of bad words and graphic sex scenes in a 1970 hardback, when he couldn’t ten years eariler.

Not sure when Westlake stopped writing the sleaze — his career as a crime writer seemed to take off around 1966-68. There are some Alan Marshalls published in 1966-7,  but like the Andrew Shaws of the time, were mostly likely penned by ghosts.

May be hard to find a resasnably priced copy of this one. I found a cipy at the library, old and beaten up and falling apart, last checked out in August 22, 1999, fifrst checked out July 3, 1972.  Wow.  Time.

This novel is ripe for posthumous rerpinting in paperback — hey, hard Case, you listenin’?

Actually, what would be really cool is, say, a Stark House edition of this along with one or two of Westlake’s Midwood or Nightstand titles one, Sin Resort, was penned by his wife Neda when he didn’t have time).

Another potent early Lawrence Block, this time as Andrew Shaw; it’s a dark tale with a rather depressing ending, not the usual happy endings we tend to see in sleaze books where the protagonist repents from his/her sinful ways and finds happiness in the arms of a good man or woman.

Lover chronicles the making of a gigolo, how a kid from the slums learns to use lonely rich women for their money, and remakes himself through autodidcactism — similar in a way to Loren Beauchamp’s Connie, reviewed here months back.

Johnny Wells is 17 when the book opens. He’s a good-looking sexy boy in jeans and a leather jacket and long hair. He wanders the streets around 57th and Third in New York until he exchanges looks with older women who find him tasty-looking.

It all started when he was 15…

He was stealing milk from a tenement and then a woman, 30, catches him.  She’s a lonely houswife and invites him in for a glass of milk…and gher body…he’s a virgin.  She tells him he’s beautiful and she will teach him everything he needs to know about sex.  Over the months, she does and tells him he could by in the world with his looks, body, and cock.  When she and her husband suddenly move, he tries his way with women…

He finds out that women in their 30s-50s, widowed, alone, or unhappily married, will pay him for sex.  He charges $5 a lay, or $20 all night.  The women buy him things, too, plus food.  He pays his rent in a crappy apartment building.  On the side, he steals and fences things and occasionally rolls a queer, like the rest of his buddies on the street.

One day he picks up a lonely widow in her late 30s coming out of a store.  He seems to have a way of hypnotizing them — hence the eyes on the cover art.  He has a radar for women who need love and sex.  Only in the 60s and 70s did people do this sort of thing, leave with a stranger they just met on some street, for sex and adventure…things like Looking for Mr. Goodbar has since put the kabosh on such sexual practices. (An actor I knew who was in college in the early 70s told me how easy sex was back then, how girls would knock on his door and walk in half-naked and stoned, saying, “Wanna fuck, baby?” — seems like some weird alternate universe for those of us who grew up in the 1980s-90s.)

This woman feels shameful when it’s done and starts to mock him, calling him a whore, a slut, a prostitute, chiding him so that he beats her up and knocks her out.  Then he steals all the money in her purse — $167, and takes some jewlery and watches that he fences for $350.

He’s never had $500 in his life at one time — about $5K in back-then cash, so he’s rolling.  He sees this as his way to get out of the slums and work the wealthier angle of Manhattan.  He buys a suit, shirts, tues, shoes for $200, gets a haircut, checks into an upscale hotel.

But before he leaves the slums, he has a one-nighter with the girl down the hall, Linda, who has been playing eyes with him for a while. Problem is, she’s only 14. But she comes into his room with a towel and throws himself at her and figures why not, he’s leaving tomorrow.  Despite acting like she knows what to do, he discovers she’s a virgin — she used him to lose her cherry.  Now he really needs to split, because even at 17 he could get busted for statutory rape.

Working the bars near Park Avenue and Lexington, he finds women. There are even specific bars for women to pick up gigolos (I know of such bars in Los Angeles, they used to exist, I don’t know about now).  He makes good money.  He has one steady, an architect named Moira, but during a trip to Vegas, Moira discovers she likes women better than gigolos.

Johnny self-educates himself, too: he checks out books on history and sociology, he subscribes to The Partisan Review and digests The New York Times every morning; this way he can talk smart and intellectually among the high breed when he goes to parties.  He has them all fooled — no one can tell he’s a kid from the slums; he passes off as a young man of culture, an Ivy League graduate who has a way with women.

He also feels quite empty.  He goes back to the old neighborhood. It’s only been four months. Most of his street buddies have split town or are in jail.  He goes to check on Linda…

She dresses sexier now, still 14, and she’s working the streets herself.  She says she only turns one trick a night, enough to pay for her own room and for food and booze.

They are quite the pair, the teen whore and jaded gigolo.  They also fall in love and get an apartment together in Greenwhich Village, Block’s favorite part on New York where he lived and where many of his sleaze books take place, espceially his lesbian novels.

There’s more sex in this Nightstand than usual, and for Block, but it’s still toned down, with a lot of “kissing” here and there for oral sex, and one woman’s creative way of explaining how she took on five men at the same time: “One was in here, as usual, and one here, and one here…” here’s also a strange orgy scene where everyone gets off while watching a silent stag film, even re-enacing the scenes with each other…seems more like a scene from Max Collier’s Mark of a Man than a Larry Block novel.

Another envelope push is all the sex with a 14-year old, especially when Johnny takes her virginity, she has just turned 14.  Today, people would scream kiddie porn in these books — similar to another Andrew Shaw book, Lust Damned, talked about here, about the married man who craved seducing young girls.

Both Johnny and Linda give up the young whore’s life and attempt to enter the normal world, sort of.  Johnny fakes a resume stateing he is 25 with a B.A. in communicaions and gets a job at an ad agency with his colorful writing samples.  He is making $100 a week, which he finds ironic as that’s what he made a night as a hooker.

All seems well, for a while…then the cops are waiting for him one day.  Seems Linda met with some complications from a botched abortion.  SHe was three months gone, so Johnny realizes it must have been from one of her tricks and she didn’t want to tell him and mess up their bliss.  She went to the ER hemmoraging but died.

Johnny goes on a drinking binge of despair and darkness.  He drinks and drinks until his money is gone and because he looks like shit, he sells himself to men insteadof women…but drinks more and more…gets a job as a janitor, drinks cheap stuff…he’s 18 and his life is over: ex-whore, his love dead, no prospects…

It’s refreshing not to have one of those tacked-on sappy happy endings, but those mostly seemed endemic of Beacon Books titles.  Here, Block was firing almost all pistons, save maybe two.  On a scale of 1 to 10, Lovers is an 8,  and aother recommneded read.

Early Lawrence Block is always a mixed bag of good and not-so-good, such as some of the very early Nightstands. Midwood published Block’s first book as a Sheldon Lord, Carla [Midwood #7, 1958]  (later reprinted as Puta), although his first sale was the Lesley Evans lesbian novel, Strange Are the Ways of Love, for Fawcett Crest, 1959.  Seems Midwood had less turnaround time from manuscript sale to publication.

Bock excelled in the lesbian themed novels as Sheldon Lord, some Andrew Shaws, and as Jill Emerson, who went from sleaze paperbacks to several mainstream novels with Putnam in the 1970s.  Many critics were convinced that Jill Emerson was actually a woman, and has been included in some lesbian pulp fiction anthologies without a mention that Emerson is really a man.  Block was more convincing a female writer than Silverberg.

So Block continued to write more books for Midwood, most lesbian themed works, and one he collaborated with Donald Westlake, Of Shame and Joy.

Candy is considered a lesbian novel, or a novel with lesbian sex going on…an instance where the woman, Candy, leaves the narrator for what a wealthy Park Avenue lesbian has to offer a sexy girl from the backwoods of America.

Candy is also one of Block’s finest Sheldon Lord books and early works, better than April North, better than the Sheldon Lords that Hard Case published. His early Nightstands were about college kids and young sexuality, and then he started to move toward crime noir/erotica, like Shame Dame as John Dexter.

In one typical Block line, he has a character reading a book by Alan Marshall (Westlake), with one hand in his pocket…

Jeff Flanders is 34 and works at a finance company that gives personal loans with a high rate of interest.  They are basically legal loan sharks without the leg breakers.

One day a sexpot 19-year-old blonde from the sticks, now in the big city, wanders into the finance company looking to borrow $1000.  She has no job, is new in New York, and no credit or collateral, but she figures her looks and sexuality will get her the loan.  She suggests Jeff co-sign her loan and in exchange he can have sex with her….

She says her name is Candace Cain. Candy Cain. Right.  The “Cain” seems to be a nod to James M. Cain, just as Orrie Hitt names his hero “Kane” in Two of a Kind, also a Midwood. Both books are about what the sexuality of a minx can do to a dumb man’s head.

Jeff has been married for four years to a woman named Lucy but things have dulled. He’s bored with his going-nowhere life, waking up every day to go to the same job, going home the same time to the same wife to the same married sex…

So Candy offers him excitement.  He agrees to loan her $1K from his savings and she can pay him back. He doesn’t expect to see the money back., but he does expect sex and she gives him that, plenty of it.

The novel opens with Lucy confronting him — she knows he’s been seeng another woman, there are all the telltale signs: coming home late, lack of martial sex, the smell of another woman on his body…

But the novel is really a long confession/suicide note from Jeff, as he chronicles what happened…

For several months, he “kept” Candy; being a girl from the mountains, she didn’t know much with her little-girl voice and need for sex and food.  As long as Jeff gave her $70 a week, paid her hotel bill, bought her food and took her to the movies, she was content.  Until one day she wanders up 53rd Street and toward Park Avenue…

There she sees all these women in mink coats and sable shaws, walking little dogs, reeking of money, and she knows what they are: that they too are kept women, but their men have much more money than Jeff.  She knows she is better looking than these women, and better in bed, and that she could find a man worth millions who could give her minks and sables.

Just as Jeff is about to dump her because he’s going broke taking care of, Candy dumps him and that does’t bode well for his ego — nor does her contention that while he’s great in bed, he’ll never have the income that she requires in a man.

Jeff finds that Candy was a drug, and without his drug, he’s in withdrawl and needs her.  But she vanishes, having found her sugar daddy…

A while later he spots her and follows her to a posh West Side building. He later finds out what apartment she’s in, and a way to spy on her from the next building. Playing peeping tom, one day he sees her in the apt.naked — with another woman.

Candy has a sugar momma, “a flat-chested boyish woman with n arrow hips.” The woman is Claire Lipton Christie, of the wealthy Lipton Family (Lipton tea?)

He goes up to the apartment and confronts Candy’s lesbian keeper, to get Candy back — he’s lost his job, lost jis wife, lost his rspect — what does he have to lose?  The millionairess mocks him and he loses control — he punches her, hits her, drags her to the bed and rapes her.

Then Candy calls him…she needs to see him…he does…she wondere why he did it…in an odd way, she is flattered that he would go to such measures for her…

And she says he killed Claire.  Kill her?

They have to run…

Kill her…how did he kill her…and when the news says the woman was killed by a knife after rape, Jeff knows he never used a knife on her…

Block was firing on all pistons here: clear, concise prose, masterful pacing, a few curve balls…

A 9.5 for sure, and a recommedned read for all Lawrnece Block and 60s sleaze and Midwood fans.

Published in 1963 as Midnight Reader #471, Shame Dame is the only John Dexter book that Lawrence Block has admitted to writing, although there are probably others since in the past he has denied writing any Dexter, and denied writing any Sheldon Lords when he wrote many. His general pen name at Nightstand was Andrew Shaw, with one or two Don Hollidays and J.X. Williams tossed in there, maybe a Alan Marshall collaboration, since Dnald Westlake collaborated on some Andrew Shaws.

A better title for this would have been Bad Wife, as there are two of them.  The novel opens with Frank Fisher, 20s, sitting in a bar on Hollywood Blvd. and celebrating a letter he just got from his agent, stating that a publisher wants to buy his first novel.

He had been working on the novel for several years, since getting out of the Marines, and then meeting Helen, a rich woman who has been his sugar momma.  He feels good that he will have an income now.

He meets a girl in the bar and almost has sex with her but backs out, pissing her off. He has to think of his wife.  But when he goes home to surprise her with the good news, he overhears her and another man talking — her lover, and they make fun of him, and she says she used him for sex but now he isn’t enough, and she ridicules his desire to be a novelist.

Frank sees red. He attacks the other man and beats the other man to such a pulp that it’s murder.  Frank takes off, on the run.

The next chapter opens a year or two later in Fort Lauderdale, FL (Gil Brewer and Harry Whittington country, I can’t help but think Block did this on purpose) with Hank making a meager living as a drifter and boat hand.  His novel was published but he has been unable to collect on the money or else the cops would find him.

A series of strange events happen…this is definitely Block’s style here, and by 1963 he had honed his crime fiction pacing well, publishing alternately between Cornith, Gold Medal, Beacon, and Midwood. There’s plenty of sex in this one, sometimes lacking in his Beacon sleaze books as Sheldon Lord.

Frank has a series of encounters with three women — 30 year old Norma, married to a rich older man (again that theme); her 19 year old stepdaughter, a rebellious wildcat; and a revivalist preacher who was a former stripper and still has a body.  He has sex with them all. he’s a stud.  Norma wants him to knock her up and she will pay him $5K, so she will have something to hold onto her husband’s money…the stepdaughter needs sex because her boyfriend won;t do it until they are married…and, drunk, he rapes the preacher but she gets into it, since she once liked rough sex in her sinner years,  and then she falls in love with Frank…

What Norma doesn’t know is that her rich husband will also pay Frank to knock his wife up, because she does not know he had a vasectomy and he will use it as  a surprise on her plan during the divorce…but seems Norma really wants Frank for something else…she has had a private eye do a background, she knows Frank is wanted to murder in Los Angeles, and she puts it this way: shoot her husband dead or she will turn him into the cops.

This is a fast paced and enjoyable read and with some toned down sex, this could have been a Gold Medal crime novel; perhaps Block gave it to Hamling to meet his contractual obligation.  There are some interesting sub-plots: Hank working on another novel, Hank getting caught up in a student street riot, the preacher woman’s sordid past and her own sins and crimes…

Frank is indeed a “fisher” in Florida, fishing for crime noir and trouble everywhere he turns.  Seems he can’t make a move without having strange things happen.

The ending was a little too moralistic and unrealistic for my tastes — Frank is a likable character and who could blame him for killing his wife’s lover on what was supposed to be the greatest day of any young writer, the sale of a first novel…I wanted to see Frank vanish with his love and the money and getting away from jail…

Two thumbs up as both a Dexter and Block book.

Just about every Cornith/Greenleaf/Nightstand/Hamling writer was John Dexter and J.X. Williams at one time or another, the two main house names.  John Jakes was the first Williams, it’s unknown who was the first Dexter but there is some rumor it was Lawrence Block, who didn’t want to hone up to it.

Robert Silverberg did a few as Dexter, such as this one, Sin Festival (NB # 1572) and The Bra Peddlers, reviewed here. As Dexter, he also wrote Stripper! and Sex Thieves.

Like Snavely’s The Big Flick (reviewed below)  this is a film industry novel, but about the process of getting a movie out there after it’s done.  The movie here is Helen of Troy, and the production company is at Cannes to sell it to European distributors.  At Cannes are Cal Warner, the publicist for Jupiter Films, Elayne, an actress in the film, and Mr. Ronwieser, the studio mogul.

Warner’s job is to drum up buzz — a fake romance between Elayne and a French actor, Elayne’s swimming nude, etc.  She’s a nympho and needs sex often and sometime she keeps her happy, sometimes he doesn’t.

Warner meets a French actress, Jeanette, desperate to go to Hollywood.  To get a contract, she has to have an “interview” with Mr. Ronweiser — that is, have sex with him.  He’s a short, elderly, disgusting man who liked “kinky” sex (it’s never said what) and Jeanette feels dirty for doing this for her dream, as many actresses wind up feeling.

Elayne is jealous of Jeanette because something is developing between Warner and the French actress.  In one day, though, she has sex with three men — Ronwiser, an old flame she meets at the festival, and Warner.

Part of Warner’s job is to also find women for her boss to fuck.  He’s a $35K  a year yes man (about $350K back then) and he’s starting to hate it.

The novel is set in the first week of the Cannes Film Festival, with colorful French Riviera settings. Silverberg catches the atmosphere and the reality of film distribution, publicity, and what it takes well — there’s more to just writing a screenplay and making a movie; once it’s done, you need to get people to see it, buy it, review it, want it.

But something falls short here…I have not yet read a Silverberg softcore I did ‘t finish or like, but this one falls into the average category, with a somewhat sappy romantic ending after an explosion of seedy, drunken violence.

On a personal note, I had a short documentary (“Life in Zona Norte”) screen at Cannes, at the Palace K Theatre on May 16, 2009, and later exhibited in the Short Film Corner.  Cannes is the tops, with Sundance and Tribeca, but never what you expect.

I’ve been to many other film festivals and they are a lot like how Sin Festival depicts — no art, it’s all about commerce and publicity,  with a lot of parties, drinking, sex, and sex for favors going on at night.

Want to get laid by hopeful actors at a film festival? If you’re a director or producer, it helps…as a writer, who knows, maybe if your film is in pre-production and you can get them a part…

Whitsunday is another name for the feast day of Pentecost, celebrating when the Holy Spirit came to the disciples of Jesus and granted them tongues of fire, blessing them with the strength to spread the word of God.  I’m having a hard time finding when and where this phrase would be commonly used over Pentecost.  I came across the term in Lawrence Block’s compelling mystery novel, The Sins of the Father.

Whitsunday is obviously a shortening of White Sunday.  The O.A.D. suggests that the name comes from the white robes of the newly baptized.  The O.E.D. points out that the whole week following the holiday was known as Whitweek, with Whitmonday, Whittuesday, and so on and so forth.

Not sure who was the name behind this Sheldon Lord — some parts read like early Lawrence Block, some parts read like Westlake…it could be one of those books where they collaborated.

Older Woman is about the May/December thing, a coming-of-age novel for a young man with no experience and the married older woman in need of love, or sex….or attention.

The young man is Andy McNeil (Andrew Shaw?), who attends a small college the mid-west that is not unlike Antioch College in Ohio (where Block went to school, later to drop out and pursue the life of a writer in New York at age 19).

This was written/published around the same time as April North, but does not include the little in-jokes and clues found in April North and many of the Andrew Shaw books for Nightstand.

It’s a brisk and fun read, as are many Block and Westlake novels.  Andy is awkward among gils.  There is one he likes, but when he findsout she’s an easy tramp, he is hurt, especially when his dorm mate sleeps with her at a party.

Natalie Foster is 39 and married to a 50 year old professor she chased after when she was an undergraduate.  She chased him hard back when she was 19, and she got him; the 20 years of marriage have gone from good to bad. He’s too wrapped up in his research of 18th Century poetry and a monograph and his high brow career to pay attention to her needs…

She and Andy both get cast in a play at the off-campus theater.  She rents a motel room nearby, her excuse is to not disturb her husband when she comes in late, but her real motive is to have somewhere to take lovers — she has her sites on Andy, a good-looking freshman who seems virile.

Andy is terrified — he is attracted to Natalie, he’d like to have sex with her, but he’s a vrigin and doesn’t know what to do.  He goes into Springfield to a brothel to learn, but he’s so nervous he cannot get an erection.

Eventually he tells Natalie this.  She is touched, and says she will teach him all he needs to know.  For the next two months, during rehearsal and the run of the play, they go to the motel each night where he stays and learns to become an excellent cocksman of the campus.

I have had older women in my life, from age 16 to 29, so I identified with this story in certain ways, mainly knowing why it is, psychologically, some women will seek younger males when they know there is no future in it…and especially married woman, where danger lurks.

Her husband never finds out but he does realize he’s been a lousy husband, so he shows up on closing night with roses, and whisks his wife away, much to Andy’s chagrin.

Andy does have confidece in himself to take what he has learned and apply this knowledge to the girls on campus, so we know he will be just fine in the end.  Natalie was a necessary component in the sexual education of a young lad — she reminds him their affair was mutually beneficial: she needed sex and he needed to learn about sex.

Not the best of the Sheldon Lord novels, but not the worst either.

Robert Silverberg wasn’t the only man writing a plethora of lesbian titles under female pseudonyms — Lawrence Block had him beat.

In fact, Block’s first sale, in 1958 (at the age of 19 -20) was the lesbiania novel, Strange Are the Ways of Love by Lesley Evans (again that pun with the first name, like Leslie in Longman/Silverberg’s Sin Girls).  And here you tought Mr. (Ms?) Lawrence Block started off as the great crime fiction writer he is today…

He only used that pen name once — he then went on to be Sheldon Lord at Beacon and Midwood, Andrew Shaw at Nightstand, and then Jill Emerson at Midwood for several titles — one, Enough of Sorrow, is considered a lesbian classic, and has been excerpted in a Cleis Press anthology, Lesbian Pulp, where no mention is made that this is a man writing as a woman — as all the other writers in that book are actual women (and lesbians) it seems Block duped the editor, which attests to his skills as a writer.

He later switched lesbian and bi-sexual novels to Putnam in the 70s, such as the explict The Trouble with Eden, about swingers.

As Dr. Benjamin Morse, he wrote the faux sexology studies The Lesbian and The Sexually Promisciuous Female (discusses lesbianism and bi-sexuality) akin to Silverberg’s L.T. Woodward, M.D.’s Twilight Women, for the same publishers (Monarch and Lancer).

In a funny act of postmodern reflexivity, in the Andrew Shaw novel, Butch, a confused woman sees and buys Morse’s The Lesbian on a newsstand; after reading it, she realzies this is what she is and sets herself on a stange sexual journey (such references to other books is common in the Shaws and Sheldon Lords, plus a continuous ref. to a film/book, The Sound of Distant Drums).

So: a fake gender study influences a fictional character’s life path…this begs a question with moral and ethical undertones: did any actual women read The Lesbian at the time and were influenced by what was fiction masquerading as fact?

Back to Warm and Willing…

This certainly is Block’s style (another one, by Sheldon Lord, The Sisterhood, I’m not sure) and is set in Greenwich Village — so lush is the detail (and in other Block books) we know Block loves this part of New York, and lived there at the time (he may still).

The protagonist is Rhoda, 24, just out of a loveless marriage (usual set-up for many lesbian novels).  Why did she marry?  She thought that’s what young women do by age 22.  But she did not care for sex, did not love her husband.  She was “frigid.”  She let her husband go out and have affairs.

She works in a gift shop in the Village, lives in a small room nerby, lives an uneventful, invisible existence until one day a 28-year-old blonde, Megan, comes in to buy a gift (for the woman she juts broke up with, we later find out).  There is an odd connection.  Megan comes back the next day and asks Rhoda out to lunch.  Rhoda accepts, and she has no idea Megan is gay.

Later, Megan lures Rhoda up to her apartment on the West Side and plies Rhoda with scotch and proceeds to tell her that Rhoda probably doesn’t know, but the reason she could not enjoy sex with her ex-husband is because she’s a dyke, in the closet.  Megan “knows.”  Rhoda is shocked. But Rhoda lets Megan have sex with her and the doors to escstasy com flying open and Rhoda has never felt such “release” before.

She moves in with Megan.  Megan is an interior decorator.  They hang with a group of lesbians at lesbian-only Village bafrs and events.  At a party one night, a tall woman, a trust fund baby, a 19 year old girl named Bobbie, dances with Rhoda all night because Megan does not like to dance.  Megan gets very jealous.

Then Rhoda gets jealous of any woman that pays Megan attention.  Soon the two are living in constant battle of distrust, they fight and argue, etc.  They are like any straight couple: the same issues of insecurity and fear.

Megan turns to Bobbie for love, and moves in with Bobbie, and whioe it seems magical at the start, the two are worse than Rhoda was with Megan: constant fighting and jealousy.

Rhoda sees a lot of “disfunction” among the lesbian crowd: attempted suicides, infidelity, going from one meaningless relationsip to the next, hurt feelings…thinking she may have made a mistake, one week while Bobbie is out of town, Rhoda acceopts a dinner date with a man who comes in to the store.  She decides she will sleep with him and find out if there is passion, if she’s not gay…

Now, this book was published in 1964 — had it been 10 years, five years earlier, the set-up would have been obvious and common: Rhoda would sleep with the guy, stars would fly, she’d fall in love and marry the man, denouncing her lesbian past.  But that was for Beacon and Nightstand books…for Midwood, Block takes a funny turn –

Rhoda stops the man from sex, half way through foreplay.  She admits to him that this was an experiment, but she says she feels nothing and does  ot find the male sex attractive.  She says she will go through with it for leading him on but he says no, he says, “Go away.”

So Rhoda leaves — back to her apartment with Bobbie, back to her lif as a realized, maybe empowered lesbian.

Well-written, well-crafted, maybe a tad slow in parts — I was disappointed that none of the Block/Shaw/Westlake/Marshall/Lord in jokes were absent from the text, but perhaops Jill Emerson, being a lesbian, did not hang with those “guys.”

Lawrence Block is one of the most successful crime fiction writers of his generation. He was a college dropout who began his writing career in the late 1950s churning out pornographic novels. He has managed to write roughly a novel a year for the past fifty years, creating series detectives such as Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, protagonist of the innovative ‘Burglar Who …’ novels. Block’s early books were often written, pseudonymously, in collaboration with Donald Westlake, who died on the last day of 2008. Here is a short video from a talk at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York in which Block talks about his friend and his novel Memory, due for release in 2010.

Each Wednesday, I review my week in reading and look ahead to future reading with a review(s) of (a) book(s) and/or other posts in a feature I call Midweek Review. This week’s second book review (yes, on Thursday morning because I didn’t get to it right away) is:

Author: Lawrence Block
Publication Year: 2009 (original 1961)
Pages: 204
Genre: Crime Thriller
Count for Year: 39

How I discovered

My brother-in-law. He has me hooked on Hard Case Crime novels. It all started with Somebody Owes Me Some Money by Donald E. Westlake and has gone downhill from there. I’ve since read The Cutie, also by Westlake, and this will be my third Hard Case Crime novel. I also have six more waiting on the shelf for me. My brother-in-law has loaned me the other Hard Case Crime novels, but this one, he wouldn’t because it’s Lawrence Block and he has some kind of Lawrence Block obsession. Okay, whatever.

The setup

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro.

– from the Hard Case Crime website

The hook here is that the book was written the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Block having written this under a pen name he never used before or since. Bottom line: Does Block offer us any new insight into Castro? No.

However, he does offer a brief biography of him in between the story of the five men hired to kill him. That alone made the book worth reading to me.

As for the story of the five men, each unsurprisingly come from varied backgrounds: a trained mercenary, a college student set on revenge for his brother who was killed by Castro, an accountant who wants a more exciting life, an ex-Mobster, and a murderer of his girlfriend and lover.

Then as in all pulp fiction, there are the women, whom one or more of the characters lust after and try “to have.” Of course, one knows it’s going to end badly, and it does. To be honest, these parts of the novel were a little too brutal for my tastes. But then again I’m now reading The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson, which has its share of brutality too and I’m not as bothered by it because I know it’s going somewhere. The brutality in this book, however, didn’t seem to advance the plot much.

All this said, it’s still worth checking out of the library, especially for the biographical interludes, and for that reason, I’m giving this one a 3 out of 5.

I’ll leave you with a brief tease that was included in the front pages of the book:

Garrison’s eyes opened. He grinned. He was an American businessman on vacation, a real estate speculator who occasionally took a taxi to look at a piece of property. He stayed in a top hotel, ate at good restaurants, tipped a shade too heavily, drank a little too much, and didn’t speak a damned word of Spanish. Hardly an assassin, or a secret agent, or anything of the sort. They searched his room, of course, but this happened regularly in every Latin American country. It was a matter of form. Actually, it tended to reassure him, since they searched so clumsily that he knew they were not afraid of him. Otherwise they would take pains to be more subtle.

He stood up, naked and hard-muscled, and walked to his window. He’d been careful to get a room with a window facing on the square. The square was La Plaza de Republica, a small park surrounding the Palace of Justice. Parades with Fidel at their head made their way up a broad avenue to the plaza. Then Fidel would speak, orating wildly and magnificently from the steps of the palace. From his window Garrison could see those steps.

With the rifle properly mounted on the window ledge, he could place a bullet in Fidel’s open mouth…

5- Classic, must read
4- Worth owning a copy
3- Worth picking up at library
2- Worth skimming at the bookstore
1- Worth being a doorstop

If you also have reviewed this book and would like a link to be included here, please leave it in the comments or e-mail me at unfinishedperson (at) gmail (dot) com.

This post also can be found on my main blog, an unfinished person (in an unfinished universe)l. If you are interested in a more complete picture of this unfinished person, you can subscribe to that blog, if you so choose.

Each Wednesday, I review my week in reading and look ahead to future reading with a review(s) of (a) book(s) and/or other posts in a feature I call Midweek Review. This week’s second book review (yes, on Thursday morning because I didn’t get to it right away) is:

Author: Lawrence Block
Publication Year: 2009 (original 1961)
Pages: 204
Genre: Crime Thriller
Count for Year: 39

How I discovered

My  brother-in-law. He has me hooked on Hard Case Crime novels. It all started with Somebody Owes Me Some Money by  Donald E. Westlake and has gone downhill from there. I’ve since read The Cutie, also by Westlake, and this will be my third Hard Case Crime novel. I also have six more waiting on the shelf for me. My  brother-in-law has loaned me the other Hard Case Crime novels, but this one, he wouldn’t because it’s Lawrence Block and he has some kind of Lawrence Block obsession. Okay, whatever.

The setup

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro.

– from the Hard Case Crime website

The hook here is that the book was written the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Block having written this under a pen name he never used before or since. Bottom line: Does Block offer us any new insight into Castro? No.

However, he does offer a brief biography of him in between the story of the five men hired to kill him. That alone made the book worth reading to me.

As for the story of the five men, each unsurprisingly come from varied backgrounds: a trained mercenary, a college student set on revenge for his brother who was killed by Castro, an accountant who wants a more exciting life, an ex-Mobster, and a murderer of his girlfriend and lover.

Then as in all pulp fiction, there are the women, whom one or more of the characters lust after and try “to have.” Of course, one knows it’s going to end badly, and it does. To be honest, these parts of the novel were a little too brutal for my tastes. But then again I’m now reading The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson, which has its share of brutality too and I’m not as bothered by it because I know it’s going somewhere. The brutality in this book, however, didn’t seem to advance the plot much.

All this said, it’s still worth checking out of the library, especially for the biographical interludes, and for that reason, I’m giving this one a 3 out of 5.

I’ll leave you with a brief tease that was included in the front pages of the book:

Garrison’s eyes opened. He grinned. He was an American businessman on vacation,  a real estate speculator who occasionally took a taxi to look at a piece of property. He stayed in a top hotel, ate at good restaurants, tipped a shade too heavily, drank a little too much, and didn’t speak a damned word of Spanish. Hardly an assassin, or a secret agent, or anything of the sort. They searched his room, of course, but this happened regularly in every Latin American country. It was a matter of form. Actually, it tended to reassure him, since they searched so clumsily that he knew they were not afraid of him. Otherwise they would take pains to be more subtle.

He stood up, naked and hard-muscled, and walked to his window. He’d been careful to get a room with a window facing on the square. The square was La Plaza de Republica, a small park surrounding the Palace of Justice. Parades with Fidel at their head made their way up a broad avenue to the plaza. Then Fidel would speak, orating wildly and magnificently from the steps of the palace. From his window Garrison could see those steps.

With the rifle properly mounted on the window ledge, he could place a bullet in Fidel’s open mouth…

5- Classic, must read
4- Worth owning a copy
3- Worth picking up at library
2- Worth skimming at the bookstore
1- Worth being a doorstop

If you also have reviewed this book and would like a link to be included here, please leave it in the comments or e-mail me at unfinishedperson (at) gmail (dot) com.

This post also can be found on my book blog, Just A (Reading) Fool. If you only are interested in book-related posts, you can subscribe only to that blog, if you so choose.

Sin Girls is Nightstand #1514, the 13th book William Hamling published in early 1960, written by Robert Silbverberg. Seems Hamling wanted a female pen name.  The second Marlene Longman, however, Lesbian Love, was penned by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and tends to be pricey among colletors, up to $200 as seen here.

Harlan Ellison wrote the purple prose cover copy, and I am sure he had a laugh when composing this:

This is the most powerful novel you will ever read on the subject [lesbian desire], written by a woman who is, hersefl, A TORMENTED LESBIAN!

Robert Silverberg: tormented lesbian!! At the Silverberg Yahoo Fan Group,  Silverberg himself commented: “That blrub is incorrect…I was the happiest of lesbians.”

Sin Girls is the story of Leslie — nice pun there, and one woman says, “Hey, that’s a man’s name!”  It opens with Leslie awakened by a nightmare she has every night, remembering the man who raped her when she was a teenager, taking her virginity violently.  She is in bed with a one-night stand in a hotel that caters to lesbians looking for intimate encounters.  In the morning, the other woman says how much fun she had and hopes they will hook up again, but Leslie informs her that she only has one-nighters: no emotional entanglements, no names if she can help it.

Leslie is cold-hearted, seeking only physical relief. It’s a front.  We find out she was not always that way; she has become distant and aloof  from a scarred heart broken too many times.  First, there was the rape, and her boyfriend’s not wanting anything to do with her after (similar to the set-up of Connie by Silverberg’s Loren Beachamp). The rape left her afraid of men, so she turns to women — the common lesbian element (along with a bad loveless marriage and incest) in lesbian pulp fiction by men, sometimes women (March Hastings).

Her first serious lesbian affair is with Laura, a woman 10 years her senior. They live together in what seems like dyke bliss.  Then Leslie has an affair with another young lesbian in Laura’s gay social cirle (with a lot of bull dykes and beanik queers), they get caught, and Leslie gets tossed out on the street.

She later moves in with three teenage girls who dress in leather jackets and jeans.  They have orgies every night, doing round-robin pussy eating, etc. (although not decribed as crudely, of course).  She finds the girls too cruel and sadistic to other people and leaves.  She has a series of short flings, the crosses paths with an older woman who runs an escort agency that caters to rich lesbian women.  Leslie is a gay call for a year, traveling all over the world with herisess and widowed dykes.

While in the Caribbean with a woman who likes to be whipped and flogged before sex, Leslie meets a young college football hero on vacation and falls in love.  She is “weary” of lesbian sex and wants something different.  She denounces her gayness and goes straight, intending on marriage, ending thus:

All that mattered was that the long nightmare was over, that she lay with a man and that with each move of his body he brought her closer to fulfillment, and that she was forgiven and that the bright sun  now rising overthe Caribbean heralded a bright new day, a brand new life just beginning… (p. 191)

This was typical of lesbian fiction — in order to not face obscenity charges, lesbianism was treated as a deviant disease, and the lesbian could not find happiness in the end with a same-sex partner — she had to either come to a horrible conclusion for her unnatural sins or repent her evil ways and find truth and beauty in the arms of an Alpha Male with a nivce big hard dick that provides “fulfillment.”  The nightmare here is Leslie’s years of lesbiana, and she is “forgiven” of such horrors by going to a man for salvation.

This also happens in Silverberg’s other lesbian novel from 1959, Twisted Loves by Mark Ryan, that I previously discussed.

Let us not cry homophobia today — this was a market demand and condition of the times, when being gay was “strange” (hence “queer” later on), referred to as “twilight women” and “the third sex” engaging in “the third theme” or walking down “the 3rd street.”

There were some other Silverberg lesbiana tales from Cornith/Greenleaf, like Flesh Boarder and The Initiates, with lesbian encounters in many other books, like Party Girl, Fires Within, Wayward Widow, etc.  Silverberg’s lesbians always look the same: mannish,smal breasts, short dark hair.  In two books, the same dyke shows up who writes children’s books as a profession.

There is also Diary of a Dyke, a 1966 title from Cornith’s Pleasure Reader series, from Phenix Publications, one of the many shell companies Hamling used to keep the feds scrambling. (Sorry, no cover scan).  Diary of a Dyke is a journal over 3 months as a woman who likes sex with girls tries to denounce her gayness by sleeping with a lot of men, but she still prefers girls.  It’s a funny book, and at first I did not think Silverberg wrote it — in “My Life as a Pornographer,” he states he stopped writing softcore sleaze in 1964-5, yet there are many 1966-7 Don Elliots, either books that were in a pipeline or Silverberg just stopped his two-novels a month output but still penned the cccasional smut book for money or a need to whip one out.  Silberberg says no other writer used the Don Elliott name the way others did with J.X. Williams, Andrew Shaw, and Don Holliday.

There is also the bogus case study “non-fiction” book Twilight Women by L.T. Woodward, M.D., a pseudonym Silverberg used for a dozen books from Monarch Books, Lancer, and Belmont.  This one, like the other Woowards, is really a collection of short stories made to look like a doctr’s case histories of patients he has treated — in this case, women who are lesbians and need to be cured.  Each story delves into the why and how each woman went gay, or is bi.

I plan to devote a long blog, and a whole acadmeic essay, on the many faux sexology books published in the 60s, riding the tail of the success of the Kisney and Masters and Johnsons Reports, quetsioning the ethics of such, and whether or not such presentations of fiction as fact was “dangerous” or irresponsible — but hey, where there is a market…

…plus, I have done the same with my Dr. Mundinger-Klow titles for Olympia Press, so, er. um…..!

I have a huge stack of lesbian sleaze here that I will blog about over the next two months — Lawrence Block published a lot of lesbiana as Sheldon Lord, Dr. Benjamin Morse, Lesley Evams and Jill Emerson (his first sale was a lesbian book to Beacon in 1958, and many of his Midwoods had lesbian themes).  And I have lez books by real gay women like Randy Salem, March Hastings, Vin Packer, as well as William Coons’ pen name, Barbara Brooks.

Accoridng to Lynn Munroe’s richly informative article on Midwood’s beginnings:

Amazingly, just 5 men wrote almost all of the first 40 numbered Midwoods. This hard-working group (Beauchamp, Lord, Marshall, Orrie Hitt and Don Holliday) carried and established Midwood until [Harry] Shorten was able to build his own stable of regulars –- names like March Hastings, Dallas Mayo, Kimberly Kemp, Joan Ellis, Jason Hytes and Sloane Britain.

Beauchamp was, of course, Robert Silverberg, Lord was Lawrence Block, Marshall was Donad Westlake, Holliday was Hal Drenser, and Orrie Hitt was himself.

Hired Lover is Midwood 13, published in 1959, although there are some early un-numbered Midwoods. Fred Martin was a one shot name for Midwood (and seems to have written one for the short-lived Magnet Books), and the style is easily identifiable: this is an Orrie Hitt book.  You can’t mistake Hitt for anyone else: the set-up, the dialogue, pacing, wrap-up.  Silverberg also did an early one shot, Immoral Wife by Gordon Mitchell (Midwod #11), that I discussed in this blog a while ago.

The question is: why these one-shot names?  Was it Midwood’s idea, to look like they had more than the same writers, or Scott Meredith’s, since the mauscripts came from the agency blinded as to the true writer’s identity. After all, Silverberg did an early Midwood, #7, Love Nest by Loren Beauchamp (see my review), and Beauchamp was his continued name for a dozen more titles from 1960-1963.

Munroe also notes:

Although nobody at Midwood knew it then, most of the books were by the same writers turning out the Nightstands. For example, Loren Beauchamp (Robert Silverberg) would become Don Elliott a year later at Nightstand, Sheldon Lord (Lawrence Block) would become Andrew Shaw. Some of the writers, like Alan Marshall and Clyde Allison and Al James, used the same name for both.

I have another early, un-numbered Midwood, Call Me Mistress by Tomlin Rede, and I wonder who wrote this one.  I haven’t read it yet but on quick glance, the style seems like early Westlake/Alan Marshall.

Call Me Mistress is a crime noir set in Hollywood and among syndicate crime lords, wuth a dash of lesbiana tossed in.  I will be getting to this book soon after I do my reading stint of campus sex books and lesbian titles.

Back to Hired Lover — yes, one of many Orrie Hitt’s novels but the name is not listed among Hitt’s pen names (Nicky Weaver, Kay Addams).  I have two Kozy Books by one “Walter Feldspar” (Loose Women and Squeeze Play) that look like they may be Hitts (there’s also a Beacon Hitt book called Loose Women) — Feldspar only penned two books, and for Kozy, and Hitt wrote many for Kozy as himself, Weaver, and Roger Normandie…like Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg and others, there are pen names used that are not always associated with these writers, either overlooked by bibliographers or not admitted to by the writer (or remembered).

Hired Lover is a first-person tough guy story — Mike has left Los Angeles after a bad incident and is in Chicago, where he has ties.  He’s working as a driving instructor when one day a gorgeous dame in her mid-20s, Kitty, is his student…she takes him to her mansion, gives him booze and fucks him.  She’s married to a rich old man — short fat,bald and ugly — whom she met when she was a nurse and he was in the hospital in diabetic shock.

As luck would have it, the rich man’s chaueffer just quit and he needs a new driver. Kitty suggests her hubby hire Mike — he can live in the apartment above the garage, where she can visit him for illict sin and lust.

While Kitty and hubby are away on a trip, Mike looks up an old business buddy who runs a stripper club.  One of the strippers has her sister, Ruth, with her — new in town, fresh from Ohio farmland, 18, a virgin, and ignorant of the big bad ol’ world of strippers, whores, booze and crime that her sister is involved with.  Mike manages to talk her out of going down that road — he’s no hero, since he also gets her drunk and takes her virginity, being 10 years older than the girl.

Right off, we know that Mike will end up with Ruth as his wife in the end.  This is typical of Hitt’s novels, mostly for Beacon — similar to the set-up of The Promoter, that I talked about last week.

(An aside: Beacon and Softcover seemed to require, as with lesbian novels, that the hero or heroine redeem and depent tgheir sinful ways by book’s end, married and in the arms of someone good, man or woman.  This does not seem to be the case with Hitt’s titles for Sabre and Novel Books — in fact, Novel gave Hitt carte blance to “take the gloves off” and write what he wanted, free of market and genre constraints.  I will be talking about a few of those in the near future.)

The set-up for Hired Lover isn’t new in sleazecore: the wife convinces the lover that they have to murder the old rich husband so they can be together and get rich.  That never works out, of course, and the wayward wife gets hers in the end — in this case, she has set up Mike in cahoots with the head butler/valet of the mansion. And the hero repents and finds love in the arms of a younger, less gutter-drivem woman, in this and other Hitts.  Mike, on the run from the set-up murder, is aided by young Ruth.  The cops wind up arresting the wife and the valet, but Mike is still guilty for the murder, and had helped plan it.  He married Ruth, but is dying from tetnus due to a untreated gun-shot wound.  The novel ends with Mike on his deathbed, confessing the murder to a Catholic priest, and holding his young wife’s hand, whom he has impregnanted so she will have something of his left.  It’s a sad ending, in a way.

Hired Lover is a great read, however, and if you dig Orrie Hitt, you will dig this — and it’s too bad that Hitt fans may miss this one,  so this blog/review will serve as a pointer for anyone doing research on Hitt.

Now that I am an Orrie Hitt fan  (where was he all my life?), and have bought several dozen books now, expect much discussion of his work here.

I have also found another promising sleazecore writer, Brain Black, who wrote a handful of Beacons, pen names for Western pukp writer Robert Trimnell. The books look good on first glance:

Another early Lawrence Block novel from Beacon, with some sex, drugs, and crime to make it a 60s sleaze title.

It’s a hipster tale, baby, about Greenwhich Village beatniks and reefer pushers, daddy-o.  Some of the period language seems funny reading it today, but at the time, had its place and rang true.

Joe and Shank share a little pad. Shank sells marijauna, Joe just hangs out and picks up girls.  One, Anita, is a Hispanic virgin from Harlem who hates that her life is heading toward medicore-ville: marriage to an engineer student, “2.3″ kids — “One a boy, one a girl, and who knows what the fraction will be.”  She lets Joe take her virginity and moves in with the two in their pad.

Joe goes from selling pot to heroin — better money.  He rapes Anita at knife-point.  Anita wants to move out with Joe, 27, who has never held down a real job.

The sex scenes are ho-hum.  The characters are not sympathetic –they’re all rather stupid, in fact, especially Anita, who has no idea what she’s doing half the time.  Perhaps that was the intention: these nowhere people with no goals are as dull on the page as they would be in real life.  There is a sort of existentialist nature about it all.

A cop is on their tail.  Before he can bust them for selling H, Shank kills the cop with his shank.  They go on the run, from Buffalo to Cleveland.

Shank robs a man on the street, kills the man with the dead cop’s stolen gun.

Not the best Block or Sheldon Lord, but better than some of the early Andrew Shaws for Nightstand that are unreadable.

Hard Case Crime reprinted this as A Diet of Treacle.  Neither are good titled.  Shank and Joe or Reefer Pusher might have been better.

An early Lawrence Block writing as Shedon Lord, later republished under his name by Hard Case Crime as Lucky at Cards.

Block would work on a novel and depending on where it was going, would determine the market…for instance, he started Mona for Nightstand, but figured it was good enough for Gold Medal…he started $20 Lust for Gold Medal but decided it was for Nightstand as Andrew Shaw.  Ditto with books for Beacon/softcover as Sheldon Lord or for Midwood as Lord, Jill Emerson, or even Dr. Benjamin Morse for Monarch.

The Sex Shuffle doesn’t have enough sex for Nightstand, but enough nudity and sex for a Softcover Library sleazenoir.  Told in the first person by Bill Maynard, “The Wizard,” a former stage magician turned card shill.  He goes to Chicagio to get his teeth fixed after a bad betaing in New York, when some card players realized he was cheating.  Playing a friendly game at a lawyer’s house in Chicago, he is entranced by the fat old attorney’s young, busty wife…and she knows what he is, having been a grifter herself.

They have an affair and, like these stories go, she wants him to kill her husband, she’ll get the money, they’ll be rich and together. Sound familar?  Robert Carney’s Anything Goes, ames Cain’s The Postman and many other vintage noirs…Maynard has a better idea: to set the guy up for a murder of an imagianry person blackmailing him.

As with these noir tales, things turn against him in odd twists, but it does have a happy ending, oddly.

If you know Block’s work, this is obviously an early work, and has its plotting flaws.  As a 1964 Sheldon Lord, it’s a nifty sleaze title.

Block has allowed some of his old pen name books to reprint: $20 Lust as Cinderalla Sims, Pads Are for Passion as  Diet of Treacle, and Mona as Gifter’s Game…I will be talking about those later on.