Expense Account Sinners by Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Nightstand #1558, 1961)

Some of Silverberg’s best softsores are set in the corporate workplace and all the sexual shenanigans that happen there, found in Savage Love and Company Girl (Mark Ryan), The Bra Peddlers (John Dexter) Convention Girl and Woman Chaser(Elliott)…

In Expense Account Sinnes, Llyod Burks is Vice President and Public Relations Manager for an electronic firm…but he is more VP of Cal Girls and Good Times.  His job is to entertain VIPs from the government and other companies that are potential clients for electronics parts, meaing millions of dollars of contracts. 

Burks job is to show these buyers a good time, which means getting them call girls and partying it up.  To show the buyers he too is having a good time, Burks often has to sleep with one of the call girls too.

Burks makes 26 grand a year, good money for the early 1960s, a top exec job.  He lives in the suburbs with his wife, Miriam, and their two children.  He likes to see himself as a good husband, nine years of devotion, and he only sins for the good of the company…he never spends the night with a hooker, he always comes home.

Then he finds out one of the owners of the company has been phoning his wife Miraim and trying to get her to have an affair (similar to Company Girl).  This bothers him.  This bos even tells Miriam about the call girls and she doesnt believe him…until Burks secretary, Jean, tells her the same…seems Jean has harbored a secret love for Burks for a while, and when he rejects her and has her transferred, she decides to get revenge…

Here Burks is ready to call it quits with call girls and be a monogumous husband, and all his birds come home to roost…

He is indeed an expense account sinner…aprops title.

Tis is one of the best of the Don Elliotts, a great read about cause and effect and redemption.  The back cover copy, penned by Harlan Ellison in Ellisonesque flamboyant manner, is spot on…

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.

The Many Faces of John Dexter #5: No Longer a Virgin penned by Lawrence Block/Donald Westlake (Nightstand #1513, 1960)

Lynn Munroe  suspected that either Block or Westlake or both penned the very first John Dexter novel, the 12th book William Hamling published, edited by Harlan Ellison, No Longer a Virgin:

Lawrence Block says he never wrote as John Dexter, and while I wanted to note that first, we should remember that he is the author of a book called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. He also told me he never wrote as Sheldon Lord, etc. So this one is just conjecture on my behalf. One thing I noticed in my research of the Nightstand writers was that every single one of them told me that sometimes their books would come out under a house name like John Dexter. The only authors who claim not to be Dexter are Block, Westlake, and Dresner. The Alan Marshall books are full of references to Dexter. One of them mentions a playwright named Dexter St. John. Nightstand editor Earl Kemp told me that whenever they had two manuscripts by the same writer, they would stick a house name like Dexter or J.X. Williams [after that pseudonym was abandoned by John Jakes] on the second one. It is obvious when reading Dexters that they are the work of a wide variety of writers.

Everybody, at one time or another, was John Dexter, so we can deduce that Block was probably Dexter too. Then there’s High School Sex Club (NB1517) […] which lists [Andrew] Shaw as author on the cover but Dexter on the title page. Is this a typo, or were Shaw and Dexter linked somehow?

Block later admitted to one Dexter: Shame Dame, that I discussed here.

After reading No Longer a Virgin, I can confidently say this is another early Lawrence Block with the aid of Donald Westlake — published the same year as A Girl Called Honey, the narrative voice is the same and the female protagonists are somewhat alike…the breaks in style and dialogue are obvious, just as they were in Honey...

In Crossroads of Lust, the character Beth remembers reading No Longer a Virgin and how by chapter three, the girl in the story loses her virginity in a motel room with an older man; variations on the name “John Dexter” pop up now and then in Andrew Shaw and Alan Marshall books.

The heroine of the tale, Ann,  discovered the wonders of physical contact with boys youug…

She liked the feeling of men’s hands on [her breasts]. She liked it from the beginning, when she was twelve years old and they were already strongly building, and the boys used to rub them in the darkness of the neighborhood movie theater during the Saturday matinee.  Even then, she liked the touch of their hands on her breasts, and she liked to be kissed.  But she never let any of them touch her below the waist. (pp. 5-6)

Ann was determined to remain a virgin until her marriage. Even with her high school beau, Dan, “sex” was mutual masturbation.

That changes when she heads to New York City after graduating high school, with some stenography classes under her belt, and a typing certificate of 50-words-a-minute.  On the bus she meets 35-year-old Roger, an ad guy coming back from St. Louis. She lies and says she’s 20, and they share a motel room at a stopover.  She doesn’t want to seem inexperienced so she goes to bed with him and, as the title states, she’s no longer a virgin.

The innocent girl seduced my the men of New York is a common story in sleazy books of the 1950s-60s — sometimes they become prostitutes, sometimes they become tramps, sometimes they meet bad ends, and sometimes they seek redemption after months or years of sin.

She soon finds that men try to make her every way she turns — there’s the Broadway producer, Barry, and he has her strip to her underpants during a job interview; and a fat slob of a building manager who talks her into a quick bout of sex in exchange for a one year lease on a nice Brooklyn apartment.

Women, too.  She first stays with a girl from back home, Janet; one day she comes home drunk and lets her know she’s a lesbian and has designs.  What happens is basically a lesbian rape scene, but Roger arrives in time to save her, punching the lesbian out after a boxing match between the two.

She likes Roger a lot — why not, he took her cherry and was her knight in armor, saving her from forced twilight perversions.  But Roger is a “forever bachelor” at 35; he doesn’t want to get married or share an apartment with her.  Still, she refers to him as her “boyfriend” to others.

Then she learns he has  wife and kids, the hard way…

She learns that men are liars.  But is she. When Dan shows up out of the blue, missing her badly, she does everthing she can to keep Dan from finding out about Roger, from knowing the truth — she even has sex with Dan and makes him believe he just took her virginity, but it all backfires her and she loses both men in her life.

But she knows the city is full of men to sleep with; there may not be love or commitment or even truth,

but I won’t be alone, she thought. Never that.  At least I won’t be alone. (p. 191)

Not a remarkable story, and very little “story” at that, but it does end on a bleak note, rather than the typical romantic ending where the wanton girl finds true love and is happy. This one is more, well, realistic.

One thing is certain: Block, with Westlake, were the first faces of the prolific sleazemeister  John Dexter.