The House of Seven Sins by Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block or William Coons?), Nightstand Books #1575

Another good early Andrew Shaw about a neophyte writer in the big city of big sin and lust…

Lou Packer, 25, has come from upper NY state Clarksonsville to chase his dream of being a writer — he rents a two room apartment in a building in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, to sit down and write his first novel, with hopes of selling it to one of the Manhattan publishers.  Not an hour after he arrives, does the super, a sexy woman named Ameila, have sex with him — several times.

Well, this is a sleaze novel…or, in the case of Nightstand Books, a sleaze periodical, that has all the characteristics of early Larry Block….or does it?  According to Lynn Munroe’s Reed Nightstand checklist, this Shaw was penned by William Coons, reprinted in 1973 as The Obsessed.

Coons started ghosting for Block in 1961, the first Passion Slaves (NB 1563), and if he did ghost this one (1961 seemed to be a busy year for Block as he began to publish under his own name at Gold Medal, first with Mona), he did a good job imitating Block’s style — the clipped paragropaghs and the long chapters — there are only nine chapters here, and Block’s usually has nine or ten chapters. (This is easy to see why — each chapter is 5,000 words, and 10 makes a 50,000 word book.  Craftsmanship.)

At least, I thought this was entirely Block after Chapter One, but reading on it is evident this is not entirely Block.  I’m thinking Block wrote Chapter One (and maybe a few others) and Coons took over. This seemed to be the modus operandi for Block back then with his ghosters like Donald Westlake and Bill Coons and whoever else…

A Note on Craft: Nightstand, Bedstand, Midwood

As I have been reading these various books this summer, I have noted the excellent craftsmanship, especially by Robert Silverberg, indelivering books that always reach the 50,000 words mark.

In his seminal essay, “My Life as Pornographer” (from Penthouse Letters, reprinted in Sin-a-Rama on in Kemp’s el), Silverberg states his books for William Hamling were 12 chapters, each chapter 14-16 pages (or 4,000 words); his memory is fauluty, because every Don Elliott and John Dexter he did consist of 14 chapters, 12-13 printed pages, and always reach 192 pages.  Every Nightstand/Ember/Midnight Reader/Idle Hour was 192 pages — if the novel only reached 188-190 pages, they would add in a list of available books to get that 192.  Earl Kemp once told me this was necessary for gang-running books — printing four at a time, all the same length, which saved on money; if books were more or less than 192 pages (later, 224 pages as Reed Nightstands), they would have to be printed separately from the gang-run.

Silverberg’s Beauchamp Midwoods were also the same length, with 12-5 chapters, reaching 158 pages in Midwood’s format and type front.  Bigger font, the books reach 186-188 pages. Ditto on the Bedstand/Bedtime Books.

Other writers kept to the same — it was a matter of craft, of sketching out a story so that it would reach that length with that many chapters.  This is not unlike writing for TV, when scripts need to be 45-50 pages, broken into a teaser and four acts that are 10-15 pages each.

I find this admirable, because I have a hard time writing that way.  My Blue Moons varied from 120 pages to 260 pages, and I never plotted them out for x amount of chapters to reach x amount of words.

Such discipline, Silverg notes in his essay, helped him plot his SF novels in the 1970s-80s better.

Back then, the min. word length for a book was 50,000 words.  The decade before they preferred 40,000 words (like the Ace Doubles).  In the 1970s-80s, it was 60,000 words.  Today, commercial publishers don’t want to see a genre novel less than 80K words, and like them up to 100,000.

Is more better?  The end result, sometimes, is a lot of padding and unneccesary banter dialogue, dreams, or sub-plots.

Lust Damned by Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block) – Midnight Reader

Crime/mystery writer Lawrence Block wrote sleaze as Sheldon Lord for Midwood and Beacon and Andrew Shaw for Nightstand.  Later Shaw books are penned by Donald E. Westlake, William Cons, and Hal Dresner, and possibly others, farmed out by Block when he didn’t have time or desire, cutting the pay with these ghostwriters of a pen name.

Lust Damned seems to be Block, it reads in his early style. It is a dark story of pedophilia.  The crass, wise-ass narrator is a 33-year-old insurance guy with a wife and two kids and a secret desire for girls under 15.  He spends his time in suburbia one summer admiring the young teen girls running around.

This is far different than the Don Elliots or Bellmores or Dexters from Nightstand/Cornith/Greenleaf — darker, with no happy ending, and more realistic.  Obviously following in the footsteps of Lolita, the narrator muses, wax poetic, on the many fine points of the nymphet, in language that is not as graceful as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, but smooth urban prose nontheless.  Half way do we realize the guy is cracking up with the pressures at work and his need to break out of his suburban daddy/husband/breadwinner life.  He has been carrying on with a secretary at the office but she’s too old for him.

First it is all fantasy…but then he meets a 15-year-old at the beach who likes older men…one thing leads to another…then he visits a special brothel in Spanish Harlem and pays for a 12-year-old hooker…then he seduces the 14-year-old daughter of his neighbor, who baby-sits for him, and he decides to kidnap her and run off…

This pushes the envelope of 1960s obscenity for Nightstand — I recall Earl Kemp writing in his online memoirs that Reed Nightstand/Greenleaf never published underage sex fiction like other companies did, but here is proof that they did (other titls like Sexteen and The Teeny-Bopper also)…perhaps Kemp meant they never publshed work that had sex with pre-teens, which in the 1970s, places like Surree House offered, along with beastiality, incest, and other kinks for certain readers.

A disturbing little suburban tale of a fellow gone sex crazy, trapped in the gutter of his mind, making his shameful fantasies into sinful realities!  He is, yes, one of the Lust Damned!

As for a Block/Shaw book, it’s one of the best I’ve read so far, but I have some others I need to read, like Sin Alley, The Wild Ones, Flesh Parade, $20 Lust, and Passion COD.

Sin Servant by Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

One of the best of the Don Elliotts, IMHO, at least this far as I read them.

Consider the opening of Sin Servant (Nightstand Books #3651, 1962): “I don’t know why it is I like to hurt people. I just do. Especially women.  It’s the kind of guy I am, that’s all, and I don’t try to make excuses for it.”

The novel chronicles Jimmy Robinson’s journey into the world of S/M and rough sex, from age sixteen to his 20s.  He loses his virginity to an experienced girl in high school who laughs at his lack of sexual know-how.  He then meets a 26-year-old divorcee who shows him how some women like to be man-handled and roughed around.

A bit of autobiography comes into play — Jimmy decides to become a writer. maybe all the sex is true too, who knows.  Jimmy sells a couople stories, but then stops when he finds a more lucrative business: becoming live-in a gigalo for various rich older women. (His first is 37, so that is not really “older” even for a 23-year-old.)  One of his sugar mommas likes to hire call girls for threesomes — high class call girls who come from good stock, and lo and behold, in all irony, one night Leatrice, the girl who had shot him down when he was 16, walks in, to find that the teenage boy she rejected has become a master lover.

It’s an insightful commentary on the psychological make-up of the sadist, and how one is trained to become one by women who desire such things, and how this man seeks out women who get off on pain. This one goes into more detail than your usual “soft-core” and is well-written.

Genre writers (science fiction, fantasy, mystery, western) wrote soft-core to make money when the genre market for magazinesand books dwindled in the late 1950s-early 1960s.  Silverberg wrote an article in 1992 for Penthouse Letters entitled “My Life as a Pornographer” about the scene at the time, recounting:

I was 24 years old when I stumbled, much to my surprise, into a career of writing sex  novels. In l958, as a result of a behind-the-scenes convulsion in the magazine-distribution business, the whole SF publishing world went belly up. A dozen or so magazines for which I had been writing regularly ceased publication overnight; and as for the tiny market for SF novels […] it suddenly became so tight that unless you were one of the first-magnitude stars like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov you were out of luck.

Silverberg claims he could write a soft-core for Greenleaf/Nightsand/Cornith/William Hamling or Midwood Books and  others in four days, working in the morning to produce 2-4 chapters, taking a lunch break, and then working till evening, where he would switch to writing sf for the rest of the night.  The erotica was paying for his true love, science-fiction that did not pay as much as the market had vanished. It was also paying his rent and dinners at fine restaurants and summer trips to Europe.  Producing 2-3 titles a month, starting with William Hamling paying him $600 for the first Nightsstand tittel, Love Addict, and as the books sold well and made profit,  $1200-2000 each. (Hamling paid Scott Meredith $2000 for each pen name/blinded manuscript, and later found out that Meredith was taking more than a standard 10-15% cut, but more like 40-50%, paying writers $1000-1200.” This was  good money for a writer in the late 1950s-ealy 1960s. Silverberg purchased his first house with this revenue — not just a house, but a 10 room mansion once owned by Mr. La Guardia!  $80,000 back then, translated to a couple million now.  When Silverberg was contracted by Hamling to write a certain amount of stories each month for Imagination Science Fiction at $500/month, that was damn good money for a writer in New York in the mid to late 50s:  most writers could live comfortably on $100-200 month, depending what part of the city they lived and if they had modest or upper crust pedacllos.  Silverberg, with his wife, rented a 4-room upscale apartment in Manhattan for $150 a month.  Imagine that!  But $150 in 1950s money was probbaly around $1000-1500, and a four room apartment in New York City today will run $5000 or more a month, with tiny 200 sq. feet holes in the walls going for $1200 or so a month.  Harlan Ellison, he has n oted, paid $10 a week for a room/apartment.

Imn his essay, Silberbeg claims he made about $1000/week on average, not only from checks from Hamling’s many shell accounts used for the books and magazines, but lesbian novels for Midwood as oren Beauchamop and straight sex as David Challon, non-fiction “sex studies”  for Monarch as L.T. Woodward, and science and archeology books geared for the juvenile market for bigger houses, and the science-fiction too.  He burned out on the sleaze in the mid 1960s, but the SF book market had expanded and he wanted to focus more on that.

Silverberg states that the 150 books he wrote for Hamling, and the others (400 in all) not only helped to hone the  carft of plot and dialougue, but put him in a professional mindset that aided the writing of future books — his doens of novels, stories, and anthologies attest to this.

Much more about all this can be read at Earl Kemp’s online zine, el.

Going back to Sin Servant, it is a well-crafted, well-told story with fairly belivable characters. I can see this as a movie.  Who knows, maybe I will adapt it, as I want to make a screeplay out of Barry Malzberg’s A Bed of Money (next review).

Don Bellmore

Don Bellmore was one of the pen names for George H. White, whio qalso write as Jan Hudson and the Cornith/Greeleaf house name, J.X. Williams.  As Hudon, he wrote the highly collectable Those Sexy Suacer People — like Harlan Ellison’s (as Paul Merchant) Sex Gang, this one will cost a few hundred dollars to a grand to get your hands on.

Bellmore, I take it, was or later became a screenwriter in Hollywood. In fact, on first glance, some of these books are set in the film industry, and are heavy on dialogue.  As I get to them, I will talk about them more, but for now, some images to gaze on:

Andrew Shaw aka Lawrence Block, who started writing sleaze paperbacks when he was 19