All My Lovers – Alan Marshall/Donald E. Westlake (Midwood #15, 1959)

Most Donald E. Westlake fans believe his first novel was The Mercenaries in 1960, when in fact his true first published novel was Midwood #15, All My Lovers, as Alan Marshall, in 1959.

This Midwood concerns the tawdry lives of Manhattan’s uppercrust and the art scene. Martin is a 35-year-old successful stockbroker whose only intimacies is paid sex from his many immigrant maids, cleaning and servicing in his Park Avenue digs.  His wife, Eloise, has her lovers, and calls herself Lou outside their home — she pays for a Greenwich Village pad to house her lovers, who all have to be artists.

The current lover if Jeffrey, 23, whose been a professional gigolo since he was 18 and discovered that lonely widows, divorcees, and married women were willing to support him in exchange of sex.  On the gigolo grape vine, he heard about Lou and that she only wanted artistic lovers, so he pretends to be a would-be writer working on his first novel.  Living in the Village pad and getting money, clothes, and food from Lou, he sits behind a typewriter now and then, acting like he’s hard at work on this grand novel.

The marriage between Martin and Lou is for show; they seem to still love each other, or are pathetically co-dependent, and while he allows her lovers, he’s not very happy about it.  We later learn that they have never slept together once, so it’s a wonder why they are together.  It’s not just the money and status for Lou, because she does at times seem to be genuinely concerned for Martin; she’s just not interested in him sexually.

The reason why Lou demands her lovers to be artists is an attempt to replace the absence of a painter she was madly in love with, a man called “Bastard.”  He left for Europe and asked her to come, but she couldn’t leave Martin.

Martin hires call girls to beat and whip and be mean to, as surrogates for Lou, to express his anger and pain, just as he likes his maids to be submissive to his wants.  He’s a manipulative man; he sets up a weekend jaunt to “the Wood,” up in the Catskills, with Lou and her lover, Jeff, and a  mutual friend, Paula.  There, Martin tries to make Paula, she denies him, and she makes the move on Lou, confessing she’s admired Lou all through high school and college, and that she’s a lesbian.  She tries to convince Lou that men cannot love women the right way, only women can satisfy women.  Lou doesn’t go for it.

Jeff and Martin get in a physical fight and all fall apart but this is what Martin wanted — to get Lou to drop Jeff and to have Paula make the moves on his wife.

Then Bastard shows up, back from Europe, thwarting Martin’s plans.  While Martin takes it in stride about Lou’s various lovers, Bastard is a threat, because he knows Lou still loves him.

It’s a complicated story of a lot of hurt and lost people, people who don’t understand their own drives, needs, and emotions; people who last out at one another when hurt.  They are miserable and unhappy Manhattanites.

For a first novel, it’s not bad. It’s slow at times, then builds up tension, then gets slow again, but the writing is pretty good, and shows how the early Westlake was honing the craft of narrative.

It’s  a rare and pricey book — in fact, since Westlake’s passing in Dec. 2008, many of his early pen name works have shot up in price.  I’ve seen All My Lovers run between $50-70.

Sin on Wheels – Don Elliott/Robert Silverberg (Nightstand Books #1516, 1960)

In 1960, Robert Silverberg published two books titled Sin on Wheels — this one and one as Loren Beauchamp with Midwood.

The Midwood book has a classic Paul Rader cover and is a much sought-after collector’s item, the first edition often going for $70-100, the second in the $50-60 range.  This Nightstand  title also tends to have a high price on it (I got it for $7 on ebay, actually).

This Sin on Wheels is told by 24-year-old Fred Bryan who is working as a driving instructor and enjoying the attentions of the rich older women he teaches how to drive cars — somewhat the same set up at Orrie Hitt’s Hired Lover (as Fred Martin), but not exactly the same; in this one, the driving school is just a front for a gigolo service for society women.

Fred is recently discharged from the army, wondering what to do, when while in New York City he crosses paths with a guy he knew in his unit who is working at the driving school, making good money and having lots of sex.

The same day Fred gets the job, he meets a girl in a diner, Nina, and picks her up — or she picks him up, it’s never quite sure, and they go from a one-nighter to a relationship.

Fred has some sexist, 1950s double-standard ideas when it comes to women, or marriage:

I told myself not to be a damned fool. Nina was a great girl, a looker, vivacious, good in bed. She had been around.  For one thing, I wasn’t interested in settling down and getting married for a long, long time. And, for another, I didn’t want my wife to be some Greenwich Village artist who had probably been laid by half a dozen guys a week before we met […] I knew what kind of wife I would want when I was ready to get married. She would be about nineteen, maybe twenty, demure, a virgin. That was important. I wouldn’t touch her until our wedding night, and then I’d teach her about sex.

I guess I was being hypocritical. I mean, for a guy who had been laying girls since the age of sixteen to want a virgin for a wife. But that was how I sincerely felt.  I wanted to be the first and only man in the girl’s life […] A girl like Nina was swell to pal around with, but not so promising as material for  a wife. (p. 59-60)

This sort of attitude is not only so 1950s but present day in certain religious and puritanical thought.  Ideal, maybe, but the usual double-standard — a guy can learn about sex with harlots and tramps, but the wife has to be pure.  Incidentally., Silvererg wrote, as L.T. Woodward, M.D., a faux “study” called Virgin Wives, about what men go thorugh when marrying a woman who has xero sexual experience.

The novel is really about the two of them, Fred and Nina, and Fred’s sexual adventures on the side.  He doesn’t tell her about the rich older women, he doesn’t ind a need to — he has sex with them during the day, with Nina at night.  Nina days she wants a so-string-attached open relationship — they’re friends who have sex, nothing more.  She’s a painter, a wanna-be bohemian with liberal thoughts.  They even get an apartment together.

But soon she breaks down and tells Fred she’s pregnant, and not by him.  When she met him at the diner, she was already quite along, carrying the baby of a rich playboy who has dumped her. (In an unlikely coincidence, this playboy happens to be the brother-in-law of one of her rich older lady clients.)

Nina is ready to leave but he won’t let her, he has fallen in love with her.  He helps her get an illegal, expensive abortion, and vows to marry her and quit his gigolo job — he seems to have forsaken his initial ideal in a wife, and accept Nina’s past with his love for her.

There’s problems. though, like one of the husbands finds out, and one of his “pupils,” an Amazon-like 44-inch bust six foot heriess nympho becomes possessive and threatens to expose him as a male whore — or is that manwhore?

This is actually, in many ways, a dark novel, a novel about lonely people with basic needs, how money does not buy happiness for the rich, how people make terrible mistakes in the name of lust more than love, how people ind love in the most unusual circumstances…

An excellent one from Silverberg, an A grade for sure, and a good one to be reprinted some day.

The 1973 Reed Nightstand imprint was re-titled The Instructor with pretty much the same cover, except the woman is wearing hot tight pink pants rather than a tight skirt, and she has a halter on, rather than being topless. The car in the background has been updated from a 50s jalopy to a 70s Ford model.  The guy seems to be the same.

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?

Only the Bed by Don Holliday (Hal Dresner), Midwood #19, 1959

UPDATE NOTE (3/8/2011) After looking at one again, we don’t believe Hal Dresner wrote thus, it is not in his  style or that of other Holliday-penned books. This one actually reads more like early Block or a Block/Westlake collaboration. The narrator’s voice is a lot similar to the voice in Grifter’s Game.

The original Don Holliday was Hal Dresner, a Scott Meredith stable writer, who — along with fellow Meredith writers  Robert Silverberg, Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block — provided manuscripts out of Meredith’s “black box” for Midwood, Beacon, and Nightstand, using various interchangeable pen names.

Later, as Dresner got busy with other work, he hired ghost writers to meet his monthly title deadline, such as Art Plotnik…and by the mid-60s, Holliday was a house pen name, turning to gay fiction written by Victor Banis.

(See here for a nifty review of Holliday/Dresner’s Sin Ring.)

Dresner excelled at absurd comedy, as seen in the classic The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books (see also Dresner’s Sin Professor as Frank Peters) and his employment by Jack Lemmon to write material and screenplays.  Only the Bed, and other early work, is serious, or not humorous like later Ninthstands; it’s a crime/sleaze novel with apparent influence from his buddies Block and Westlake (aka Sheldon Lord/Andrew Shaw and Alan Marshall) and their penchant for sleaze novels that were also crime books.

The narrator is Cliff Varner, the cabana manager at the Royal Hotel, a Miami, Florida vacation resort — a combination of Gil Brewer and Orrie Hitt territories  here.  Like Hitt’s hotel managers, Cliff tends to have sex with the guests, often as a gigolo, much like the characters in Loren Beauchamp’s Midwood title, Another Night, Another Love.

Cliff has a big problem, though: he owes his bookie $1600 for bad bets he made, he doesn’t have it, and his bookie is leaning because the local Miami syndiacte mob guys want their dough.  He knows if he doesn’t pay, something bad will happen to him, and a beefy hood who hangs out at Dino’s Pizza Parlor tells him so — Friday.

Cliff has a week.  So the book is all about Cliff’s frantic running around trying to drum up $1600–old loans he made, card game debts owned, fifty here, twenty there; he borrows from several loan companies, using the employment contract of a sous chef at the hotel. He even resorts to blackmailing rich teenage lesbians who came down without their parents knowing…he cheats at card games and sinks low enough to set up the forced sexual experience of a virgin girl staying at the hotel, all for the last $300 he needs.

The set up is a tried and true oldie: put a fellow in a corner with a great trouble and watch him try to squirm out of it.

Cliff’s not a good guy; he’s desperate and scared.  He could always skip town, but his bookie is a friend and he doesn’t want to put his bookie in a bad spot that might get him hurt.  $1600 is nothing to the mob, it’s the principle of the matter: if they let one person get away with not paying a debt, others will; if they make an example out of Cliff, people will know that the mob guys mean business.

Ad for all his sins, Cliff pays the price, espcially when his ex-lover, a nympho stripper named Doris, rolls back into town.

A swift, good read, on the verge of a Gold Medal, and may have been targeted for that market and sold by Meredith to Midwood when/if Gold Medal rejected it and  Midwood was looking for material in 1959, perhaps with some added sex scenes, like this clever, sunbtle-hinting description of cunnilingus:

…my lips left her breast and moved down onto her stomach. It was cold and smooth and still damp […] my tongue licked at the cool wet skin.

“Now!” she said. “Start now!”

There was a swelling pounding at my head and it built as I felt her body vibrating wildly, passionately under my mouth.

“Oh God!” she cried.

Then her hand fell open and I had the money.  (p. 83-84)

For all that licking, he gets a whopping $200.

An 8.5 and recommended read if you like these kind of suspense/crime stories.

Lover by Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block), Nightstand #1551 (1961)

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…