Mistress of Sin – Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Nightstand Book #1537, 1962)

Like Lust Queen, Elliott/Silverberg takes on the shallow world of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, filmmaking and the pursuit of stardom, and what women will do (or some women) to obtain fame.

Working now and then in Tinsel Town, this one hit some familiar notes with me.

Kevin Lyle, 38, is “story editor” for movie mogul Leo Naumann, an Erich von Stromm-like European filmmaker now Hollywood blockbuster maker.  Lyle used to be a freelance scriptwriter, but makes better money finding properties for his boss — he reads tons of books, recommends which ones to option, and wields large sums of money to get the rights…in this case $300,000 for a novel on Africa, which was three million bucks in 1962 money.

The novel opens with Lyle driving around and giving a woman a ride at Wilshire and La Cienega Boulevards (near the tar pits).  The woman is 22-year-old Lorayne Winnant, aspiring actress, working as a stripper for the moment.  Lyle is in the middle of a heated divorce and custody b battle for his two kids, his lawyer has told him to keep his nose clean, but he simply cannot resist getting Loryane into bed and doing what men and women do, especially after he sees her strip act and gets in a fist fight with a drunk ex-boyfriend of hers.

She has a penchant for the rough stuff:

Pain and sex seemed all mixed up in this girl’s mind.  She was savage. She enjoyed inflicting hurt during the act of love, and she enjoyed being hurt.  For her sex wasn’t simply a stately gavotte with prescribed rules, as it was for a lot of women. It was a knock-down drag-out orgiastic revel, with no holds barred. (p. 69)

Lyle thinks shes the kind of woman his boss will like. He already has a young actress, Audrey, living with him, whom he has promised a great part in his next movie set in Africa. But once he gets a gander of Lorayne, and gets her in bed, he dumps Audrey, asks Lorayne to move in, and offers her the part.  Lorayne jumps for it, grateful to Lyle for the connection.

Audrey, however, does not take this well, and shows up at the hotel room Lyle is staying, drunk, accusing him of ruining her life.  She then jumps off the balcony of his fifth-story room, landing with a splat.

This is not good for Lyle — not for his job, not for his divorce and custody battle.

People seem to commit a lot of suicides in Silverberg’s novels, both erotica and science-fiction (see Thorns).

Silverberg’s send up of how books are optioned and made into movies is right on the, uh, money:

“That was New York,” he [Naumann] said. “The publishers. They’ve just clinched a paperback reprint deal for the book, and they wanted to know when the movie was going to be released. I told them next March at the latest and they blew their stacks.  The paperback people want to put their edition out the day the movie opens. And the hardcover boys figured they had at least fifteen months to peddle their edition first.  Now they’ve only got six or seven.” Naumann spat. “The hell with them. Money-grubbing bastards. They’re getting half the author’s share of the movie money, and half the paperback money, and they’re worried what’s going to happen to their lousy trade edition yet.” (p.98)

A note to any new authors out there: if you give the publisher dramatic (film, tv, net) rights, they will take 50% of the money and won’t pay up on your 50% until the next bi-annual royalty/sales statement, so don’t think you’re going to get a fast paycheck from any film option deal — and you’re fucked if, say, you have a $20,000 advance, and your half of of an option is, say, $15,000, you won’t see a dime because it will be absorbed into paying off your advance.  This is why I never give publishers film rights, unless they are willing to pay for it.

Back to Lyle — his life falls apart more.  When Lorayne finds out about Aundrey’s suicide, she has second thoughts about being Naumann’s mistress, afraid he will dump her the same sometime.  Besides, she is now in love with Lyle, and she moves in with him.  This causes Lyle to lose his well-paying Hollywood job. Can he start over?  Will Naumann blackist him? Can he afford Lorayne?

A damn fine little novel, high recommended.

Anything Goes by Robert Carney (Newsstand Library, 1961) and Lust Farm by J.X. Williams (Harry Whittington) (Ember Books, 1964)

I got this one because Feral House used the Robert Bonfils art for the cover of Sin-A-Rama, so I was curious about the book — as in, was the story as good as the “water baby” theme art (that Bonfils also uses for Don Elliott’s Lust Queen, soon on my reading list).

Boy was I pleasantly surprised.  This is a great little novel, a lost gem in the blackhole of sleaze paperback publishing….take out sleaze, I would not call this novel “sleaze” per se…it is a hardboiled tale of a guy who has gotten himself into a few tangles in Los Angeles and is trying to wiggle out.

I have no idea who Robert Carney is — Sin-A-Rama calls him “Robert H. Carney” who used a pen name, Herbert Roberts, from what I can tell one novel, Mardi (on my list). The only other Robert H. Carney books I can find is a non-fiction title about the Atlanta Times.  There is a Robert H. Carney in Atlanta on Facebook who seems the right age to have written this 1961 novel…maybe it is him and this is not a another pen name who Whomever.

Carney is influenced by Nathaniel West, but there’s also some James Cain and Jim Thompson tossed in there.  The prose is lean, mean, and to the point.

Joey Allen is a used car salesman whose former partner destroyed their business by gambling, then killing himself.  Joey wants to be rich.  He is sleeping with three women and trying to keep them from each other — a former fiance he has dumped, a new fiance whose father owns used car lots all over California, and the bosses new, young, hot wife, who hates her fat rich husband and his spoiled daughter, and has a plan for getting Joey to committ murder, promising him the car business, money, and her sleek slender body.

Like any good hardboiled Los Angeles story, there’s plenty of drinking, sex, violence, colorful characters, Malibu, and Hollywood smog.

Finding these great lost novels is fun — it’s also depressing to think they are lost, and a book like this was not re-discovered by, say, Black Lizard, the way Harry Whittington’s noirs were.

Harry Whittington was a pulp writer who penned in many genres, but is best known for hardboiled crime and nurse romances (I will talk about his The Young Nurses at some point, as well as more of his Greenleafs).  Lynn Munroe recently put together a catalogue and narraitive of his search for Whittington’s softcore:

In 1986, the prolific “king of the paperbacks” Harry Whittington (1915-1989) wrote an essay about his writing career entitled “I Remember It Well” for Black Lizard Books. Black Lizard used it as an introduction to the 1987-88 reprints of six classic hardboiled crime stories, originally published by Gold Medal and others. In that piece, Whittington revealed this:

“ I signed, in 1964, to do a 60,000-word novel a month for a publisher under his house names. I was paid $1000. On the first of each month. I wrote one of these novels a month for 39 months.”

These 39 unknown books became “the missing 39” for Whittington collectors.

These “missing” books were published under house names J.X. Williams and the ever-prolific John Dexter, and Curt Colman later on, ranging from crime, romance, office, and hardboiled themes.  Lynn Munroe notes:

John Dexter and J.X. Williams are well-known house names used by many different authors, but Curt Colman is a more obscure name. No one I’ve talked to, including Colman’s editor Earl Kemp, knew who Curt Colman was. Only eleven of this publisher’s books are credited to Curt Colman, and seven of those were in the box in Whittington’s house. It was a safe bet to look at the remaining four Curt Colman titles, and all four of them proved to be written by Harry Whittington.

Kemp did not know who Colman was since the manuscripts were coming from the Scott Meredith Agency, true identitfies hidden. Plus it seems Whittington’s wife did not approve of these books by her prolific husband, and Whittington kept them secret until after his passing.

The first was Lust Farm, as J.X. Williams, with (again) a Robert Bonfils cover; it is another James Cain/Jim Thompson infuenced story set in the Detroit farmlands.  Cora has escaped her brutal criminal thug boyfriend from Chicago, but he finds her in a small town working as a waitress.  She “accidentally” kills him and goes on the run.  In another town, as a waitress, dodging men, she meets a 50-year-old farmer, Aaron, and marries him.  She’s 22.  She figures she can lead a safe, quiet life as a farmer’s wife.

Here is Lynn Munroe’s review:

We tend to think of “backwoods” stories taking place in some hillbilly hollow or in the deep South, but LUST FARM takes place in Michigan. Not in any city, but out in a rural setting near a little town called Cold River, down the highway from Lansing. There is no such town in Michigan, but there is a real town on that highway called Coldwater, and LUST FARM is certainly set there. Small town waitress Cora Barnes has a secret. She has fled her previous life, killing the Jack Daniels-guzzling sadist Tony and stealing a package of his money. A kind farmer named Aaron Barr marries her and takes her out to the country to live on his farm. When his college-age foster son Caleb comes home from University up the highway at East Lansing, it’s lust at first sight for Cora and Caleb. Then someone disappears and the local sheriff comes out to the farm and starts asking questions. With names like Aaron and Caleb, LUST FARM reminds us of an Old Testament tale like EAST OF EDEN.

The three on the farm are reminiscent of the trio in Jim Thompson’s CROPPER’S CABIN. Even though it is set in Michigan, the farmers behave more like sharecroppers in Whittington’s DESIRE IN THE DUST than like Yankees. This is Whittington country, not Steinbeck’s or Thompson’s.

I will be reading more books by Whittington…