Suburban Sin Club by David Challon and The Wife Traders by Loren Beauchamp (Robert Silverberg)

Suburban Sin Club by Silverberg pen name David Challon was published in 1959 by Bedside Books, and reprinted in truncated form as The Wife Traders in 1962 by Boudoir Books, as a Loren Beauchamp novel.

Suburban Sin Club is 192 pages and Wife Traders 160, in a smaller digest form and larger type, with about 15,000 words edited out.  The edit seems to be have done for budget reasons, to get the book down to 160 pages.

The other Boudoirs I have seen are 144-160 pages, small trim in Nightstand-like digests.  Boudoir was a short lived imprint (1962-64) from Imperial Publishing, in Los Angeles, from American Art Enterprises, a company that issued out thousands of books in the 60s under many imprints, most of them reprints from a decade earlier.

The edits in Wife Traders mostly removes 2-3 pages from the end of chapters in Suburban, and taking out a lot of banter that is really padding for Silverberg to meet his page quota.

Raplh and Betty Holland are in their early 30s and have moved to the Long Island suburbs to get out of Manhattan.  Ralph works in publishing. They have two boys.  They move into an apartment/condo complex, Court K.  Seems Court K is a swingers haven, where each Saturday the denizens engage in the pick-a-key, get-that-wife game.

The two go for it.  They seem to be a little too easy in trying out the swinger lifestyle…and then Betty gets pregnant, and the father could be any one of eight men she has been sleeping with.

A morality tales — as with 1950s wages of sin, it all culminates in murder, suicide, tragedy, morals charges, and scandal.

A fun read.