Passion Alley by Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block), Nightstand Book #1611, 1962

Block was (and perhaps still is) at his best when writing in the first-person, whether his narrators are criminals, lost young men, con artists, burglars, hit men or private eyes.

Such is the case with Passion Alley, the story of Jack Edwards’ downward spiral after being kicked out of college (it’s also interesting to read a “sex” book from 1962, after Block started to come into his own, publishing under his own name at Gold Medal, like with Mona and others).

Jack is a little older than your usual undergrad, 23, having served in Korea and hitching onto the G.I. Bill.  Block adds an interesting aside about how the college campuses of the U.S. changed after Korea, when all these battle-hard young men began to mix in with the soft rich kids and intellectuals who were worlds apart from the battlefield.  Jack is also in an upper-crust fraternity, only because he’s a good football player, and the football team is important to the college.  A teammate gets killed one game, and Jack punches out the other player at a frat dance party, which causes a scandal and gets Jack the boot.

Before leaving for New York, Jack talks his girl into giving him her virginity, promising to marry her, and leaving her in the morning a ruined girl, his final act of defiance against the conservative social and political environment that has always treated him like a slug, a guy without a rich family, a grunt on the G.I. Bill.

He heads to New York because he has a notion–like a number of Block’s male characters, such as in Shame Dame–of becoming a writer.  New York is the place to go, right?

Wild Divorcee by Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg), Nightstand Books #1542, 1961

An early Nightstand, their 41st published book, reprinted in 1973 as Nowhere Girl, is about 26-year-old divorcee Carol, who has moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles (a large home in Pacific Palasades) to start her life over, single and confused about the ways of sex — she was virgin when she was 22 and married her older ex-husband.

She’s aware of the image a newly divorced woman her age conjures up — sexually available, lonely, on the rebound.  She does not want to be that; however, she finds herself jumping into all kinds of sexual sitautions the day she moves into her new place…

There’s the painter across the hall, who gets get drunk; he’s short and dark and odd looking but she lets it happen and then feels bad the next day. She later models nude for him and they become casual lovers. He is the second man she has ever been with, and finds him an excellent lover. “I never knew it could be that way,” etc.

She picks up a 19-year-old sailor in the city who first mistakens her for a hooker. She’s lonely and curious…

She wanders to North Beach to check out the beatnik scene.  She goes to a club above a small bookstore. This scene is almost word-for-word a similar scene in a Loren Beauchamp novel, The Fires Within — Silverberg has admitted he re-processed scenes from one book to another in his “My Life as a Pornographer” essay. In both scenes, the wandering lost women get drunk, get picked up by several bearded beatniks and a silent girl, go to a pad, pound on bongos, drink wine, dance, and have an orgy.

Then there is a chamber music composer who lives downstairs — six feet five tall, thin, curious, when he plays his music for her, he wants her to whip him with a riding crop, scatch him, beat him, abuse him…and to her surprise, she does.  She does not feel dirty about it, but is curious why a man would want this.

She gets drunk and meets a lesbian and goes to bed with the woman, and again feels guilty after her twilight experience (a similar scene from several Beauchamp and Elliott books).

So Carol runs the gambit of sexual experiences in the free-lovin’ San Francisco, while her ex-husband feels remorse and wants her back.  he comes to see her, drunk, and asks her to marry him again, and then tries to rape her, but the painter saves her.

She starts to drink more and more, confused with her life; angry with men, she plays with the composer, orders him around, treats him like shit, getting her revenge on the male sex, but the guy likes it…

I’ve never been  disappointed with a Silverberg sleaze novel, whatever pen name he uses; he was/is a craftsman and tells entertaining stories. As noted elsewhere in this blog, most are above average, some average, and some are gems of literature.  This one is average, but worth reading.

Mad for Kicks by Jack Lynn (Novel Books Special, 1960)

This is dubbed a “Novel Books Special” and is one of a number of Lynn;s Tokey Wedge private eye books.  Not sure which one is the first but doesn’t seem you need to start with the first, although there are references to characters and incidents from other books.

Wedge is not your typical tall, dark and handsome gumshoe.  Wedge describes himself as

five-six and one half [tall]. One hundred aned forty-seven pounds. A bundle of nerve and verve. Persuasive. Permissive. When it comes to girls, I love ’em. (p. 19)

The women he connects with often note that he’s “a little guy” or “short man.”  On the cover of Tall and Torrid, we get an idea of what he looks like:

Like the typical 1960s shamus, he gets laid often, he’s tough as rawhide, and he kills the bad guys when necessary. Which has given him somewhat a rep — in Mad for Kicks,  a man offers Wedge $5,000 to track down the man men who kidnapped nd raped his daughter, and wants Wedge to kill them. He’s heard Wedge kills but Wedge tells him he’s not a hired gun, and has only killed ijn self-defense.  Wedge takes the five grand to track the men down, but says he will turn them into the cops. Wedge’s relationship with the local cops is shaky.

Novel Books’ usual hyperbole to make the book seem more than it cam be is employed with this blurb from Men’s Digest (which was owned by Camerarts, that owned Novel):

MAD FOR KICKS outdoes LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER and any book that you care to name for that strong stuff that you men like. Not recommended for women and children.  This NOVEL BOOK powerhouse will make you do a double-take every time you pass a beatnik.

What the book’s connection to Lady Chatterly’s Lover is unclear, as this is a private eye two-fisted tough guy yarn…

Sin Alley by Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block and ?), Lesiure Book #613

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.

Girls Afire by Jan Hudson (Boudoir #103)

Jan Hudson was one of George H. Smith’s nom de plumes (his middle name Hudson) that he did a few books under, most notably the highly collectible Those Sexy Suacer People from Greenleaf Classics.

Smith also wrote many Nightstands as Don Bellmore, and some scince fiction titles.  His stuff tends to be comic, playful, and whacky, such as this one.

This is Boudoir #103.  The first, #101, was The Wife Traders by Loren Beauchamp, reviewed here in July. Boudoir was a short-lived imprint of Imperial Publishing aka American Art Enterprises, a shady Los Angeles outfit.

Girls Afire opens with protagonist Jeremy Fargo at a Venice Beach party that has been going on for three days.  People are drunk, high, having sex, reading poetry aloud — they’re all beatniks too, proto-hippies in L.A., and they see Jeremy as a “sqaure” but he’s there.

Jeremy is a frustrated novelist, once a Madison Avenue commercial artist, following his dream to be a, um, writer of great Ameican literature.  His first novel was published but the critics found it bleak and sales weren’t good, so his publisher has rejected his second novel and Jeremy doesn’t know what to do — maybe write a more commercial, upbeat novel?

He has left rainy San Francisco and move to sunny Los Angeles to write. He has rented a room out in a house. The landlady, a good looking woman whose husband is often away, suggests he might pay his rent in trade — that is, sex.  He thinks it might work.

At the party, he meets a girl named Deirdre and takes her home.  Deidre thinks he may be The One, even if he is a sqaure, but he is a writer.  She’s going with a friend of his but he convinces the friend to dump her, that she’s no good; his friend does, leaving a clear path for him.

Then he meets her sister, Jean, and falls in love with her.  As much as Jean tries to resist, she succumbs to Jeremy, much too Deirdre’s hurt and anger.

Giving in to his landlady’s reqest of sex for rent, the two are at it when her husband walks in and catches them — he wants to kill Jeremy, and so does Jeremy’s friend when the guy learns Jeremy took Deirdre as a lover, and now Deirdre wants to kill him for taking her sister.

So he has three people after his hide…

It’s funny and short.  It’s okay.  I’m not much into comic sleazecore. I prefer the serious and dark stuff.

Sin Professor by Frank Peters (Bedside Books #1225)

Frank Peters is quite an obvious pen name.  As I was reading, the style seemed familar…then a character named Anton Plotnik showed up…but this was not Art Plotnik, it’s Hal Dresner (aka Don Holliday) — it has Dresner’s whacky, playful style throughout.

Makes sense since Nightstand and Hamling purchased Bedstand in 1961, and after book # 1201 (Don Elliott’s Woman Chaser) many Bedstands were penned by Nightstand writers.

The sin prof is Boris Marholt, libertine English teacher, philopsher, and roustabout who has devised the theory of The Whole Man: a man who does as he pleases, takes as he pleases (women, wine, song) without a care for society, decorum, or the law.

He’s been fired from his teaching post for growing his beard long and shaggy.  Seems the university has an anti-beatnik policy, and no men can wear long beards. A student, Anton Plotnik, had previously been expelled.

Boris refuses to shave his beard. He leaves, but before he goes, he whisks off with an 18-year old student, Lydia, who was tormenting him in class with her mini-skirts, flashing him in class.  She falls for him, but can’t go to New York City with him until the semester ends.

Boris heads to Manhattan to look up his ex-girlfriend, Lisa, whom he lived with before.  She’s not home so he breaks in and helps himself to her scotch.  When she comes home with a man, Boris frigtens the man off and Lisa finds this delightful. They rush to bed. She says he can move back in with her.

Boris wreaks havoc across the city, picking fights in bars, picking up women in the streets, sleeping with his friends’ wives, and getting his heart broken by a vixen named Rosemarie.

Then Lydia shows up…he is living with a woman, having several affairs, and now he has this lovelorn teenage hottie to contend with…

A crazy, short and fun novel about a man spiraling downward after losing his job and his way, living in denial and masking his fear in a nutty philosophy of life…when in the end, Boris is just a loser who needs a good woman to steet him right.

Pads are for Passion by Sheldon Lord (Lawrence Block), Beacon Books

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.