Flesh Pawns by Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Sundown Reader #525, 1964)

Like Gutter Road, there’s a sexual blackmail con scheme at the center of this little crime noir softcore.

Charley is grifter making his way from New York to Florida for the winter, to pull some jobs.  In a Delaware roadhouse, he spots waitress Janey and knows she has what he needs: she can look fifteen or twenty-five with her looks, lack of make-up or too much make-up…

He picks Janey up in his smooth way, beds her, invites her to come with him Miami.  She has nothing better to do, so why not.

Charley tells her his con game: she dresses up nice, hangs out in hotel bars, acting like a sweet young lady who likes older men, men with money. She does not charge them, she is not hooking.  The men have a great time with a hot young number. The next day, Charley shows up to the mark’s hotel room and Janey is wearing bobby sox, pony tail and no-make up, looking like jailbait. Charley acts like the appalled older brother whose kid sister was seduced; he then says he will go to the cops unless the men pay up, say $500-1000.

Janey thinks it’s a good grift.  She’s hooked before so she’s no stranger to crime.  They make some money in Miami and all is well for the two crooks, but eventually they meet other people who lead them astray — Janey a more suave guy and future real romance, Charley two teen vixens who lead him to a bigger gutter road.

Not the best of the Don Elliotts, but even these lesser titles are often better reads than 75% of the sleaze published back then and even now.

The Baby-Sitter by Vin Fields (Midwood #F342, 1964)

Another ultra sexy Paul Rader cover!

Vin Fields was a pen name used by Irving A. Greenfield, for a handful of Midwoods and Beacons.  Greenfield wrote men’s action and military paperbacks for Zebra, Manor, Signet, Dell, etc.

The Baby-Sitter is an engaging, well-written short novel (about 40K words) about a Madison Avenue ad man, Cliff Morton, who has a lot of troubles and problems: his wife has gone frigid and she knows about his tom-catting around; he’s about to lose some accounts and a large one is uncertain; the boss has moral issues with his providing call girls to potential clients; and he has started to have a thing for his jailbait baby-sitter, Charna,  a little sex kitten that could be the end of him.

Charna is in the background of the novel until the end really; much of the story deals with Cliff’s jumbling business around, and sleeping with a female account exec who is trying to talk him into breaking off and starting a new agency, stealing accounts in the process.  We can feel Cliff’s Mad Man tension and who can blame him for needing a lot of sexual relief, the kind his wife won’t give him but what he can get from a blond, tanned teenage girl.

Then he fucks up and fucks up bad when he talks Charna into sleeping with a man who can get a potential account with a bra company, and the thing is, Charna’s uncle, who raised her, is a cop…

The ending is quite different from your usual sleaze or Midwood fair…

We will definitely read more Vin Fields.

Diane – Max Collier (Midwood #F319, 1963)

A horrible photo cover from Midwood, but a great gem of a little novel tucked away in the bad packaging, akin to Max Collier’s The Mark of a Man.

The sexuality of young girls with older men is a strong staple in erotic fiction, especially after the court case with Lolita, which was quite tame and more suggestion than actuality.  In the 50s-60s sleaze books, the youngest female characters got were 17, though sometimes — such as Don Elliott’s/Silverberg’s Sexteen — they were 16.  In the 1970s, however, with publishers like London Fog and Surree House got into downright pedophilia.

The young girl in Diane, named Diane, is a precocious fifteen-year-old sex kitten that the protagonist, Adam Behr, meets in a bar while his wife is away on vacation.  Since the girl is in a bar and the bartender knows her, he assumes she’s at least 21, though a but young-looking. After some beers and talk, they leave and have sex twice, and later he goes to see her at her house and her mother catches them, informing him that he’s a dirty old man with jailbait.

Adam is stymied.

Then the mother tries to blackmail him, he says forget it, and she calls the cops.  He’s arrested, arraigned, gets bail, gets a lawyer, and waits for his wife to come home.

Meanwhile, despite the statutory rape charge, Adam’s street cred is boosted. He’s a quiet office manager at a paper distributor (The Office?) in Los Angeles and his make co-workers see him in a new light, as do the women…and women find him more sexually interesting — he winds up getting laid out of it, though he may go to jail for one-to-three years for catching some underage action.

Seems Diane has quite a few former lovers and lover, older men and boys alike.  And her mother was investigated for child abandonment.  Diane’s mother is a drunken floozy who goes from one man to another, and sometimes Diane sleeps with her boyfriends. How long the girl has been doing this is unknown.

But Diane says she is in love with Adam — she says no man has ever “turned her on” the way he does.  He finds her giving and better in bed than his wife — which he tells his wife when she kicks him out.

He gets a new apartment and nextdoor is a sexy school teacher and they get to know each other…

Throughout the ordeal and shake-up of his life, Adam takes a sarcastic attitude, as if he were living in absurdism…and a way he is, and finds he needed this disruption of his life and to get out of a marriage that was dull and a job that was killing his soul.

Diane frees him, and he owes her, and even goes back to her for more sex and innocent comfort.

The writing is excellent and the ending sardonic.  Again, a literary novel packaged as sleaze.

This one gets an A-minus and a high recommendation.

Crossroads of Lust by Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block), Midnight Reader, 1962

This Shaw is definitely penned by Lawrence Block — his style is all over it.  It’s essentially a heist crime yarn, in tune with the other crime fiction he was penning for Gold Medal and Beacon at the time.

Interestingly, Crossroads of Lust, another Shaw called Lust Campus, and John Dexter’s Passion Bride, were considered obscene for sado-masochistic imagery, as found in People v. Sikora, 32 Ill. 2d 260, 267-268, 204 N. E. 2d 768, 772-773 (1965), footnoted in a 1977 Supreme Court Case, Ward v. Illinois, appealing a conviction for selling obscene materials.  Justice Brennan noted in footnote 3 of his dissent:

The Illinois Supreme Court described the materials as follows, 32 Ill. 2d, at 267-268, 204 N. E. 2d, at 772-773: “`Lust Campus’ by Andrew Shaw is a story of sexual adventures on a [431 U.S. 767, 772] college campus `where even members of the faculty taught sin and evil.’ The book describes homosexuals `necking’ on a public beach; mutual masturbation; self fondling; a circle of persons engaged in oral-genital contact; rape; intercourse; lesbian intercourse; cunnilingus and flagellation; flagellation with barbed wire; an abortion with red-hot barbed wire; masturbation with a mirror reflection, and a transvestite episode. “`Passion Bride’ by John Dexter described curricular and extracurricular sexual episodes that take place during a honeymoon on the French Riviera. The book describes masturbation; intercourse; a party between an old man and three prostitutes; attempted intercourse in a bath; lesbian foreplay; flagellation; rape ending in the death of the female from a broken back and intercourse ending in the broken back of the male participant. “`Crossroads of Lust’ by Andrew Shaw describes the sexual adventures of various persons in a small town. There are numerous descriptions of intercourse; lesbian intercourse; oral-genital contact; and rape. A woman stabs a man in the course of intercourse, completing the act after he is dead. There are also three voyeurism scenes, two of which involve watching lesbian love play. The third is characterized by sadism and masochism.”

Did/does Lawrence Block know that his pen-named smut became a part of legal history, as a number of Cornith/Nightstand/Greenleaf books did?

Lynn Munroe notes that Crossroads of Lust is

a violent crime novel about an armored truck robbery. The Western movie The Sound of Far-off Tom-toms is on page 27 and, the John Dexter book No Longer a Virgin (NB1513) is mentioned by name on page 72.

Munroe has suggested that No Longer a Virgin, the first John Dexter novel, was penned by Block, or by Block and Westlake…I’ll get to that one soon…