Campus Hellcat – David Challon aka Robert Silverberg (Bedside Books #973, 1960)

This is the last of the David Challon books Robert Silverberg did for Bedstand. The others:

Suburban Sin Club (#803, also The Wife Traders by Loren Beauchamp)

Campus Love Club (#808, also Campus Sex Club by Loren Beauchamp, and plagarized as Slaves to Sin by S.N. Burton).

French Sin Port (#820, also Rouge of the Riviera by Don Elliott)

Thirst for Love (#802, also Wayward Wife by Loren Beauchamp and Free Sample by Loren Beauchamp)

Suburban Affair (#961), unknown if ever reprinted/pirated.

Like Illicit Affair by Mark Ryan, this is a short story collection, mainly culled from men’s digests and pulps like Trapped and Manhunt, etc.

The cover states “eleven short novels and stories.”  There are no short novels in the 186 page book.  The title story is a 3,000-word tale about men dating the campus slut; most of the other stories have a crime element with twist endings, but they’re not as good as the stories in Illicit Affair. Many of the male protagonists have to deal with the aftermath of a mistress — in “Hit and Run,” a man married to a rich woman (with shades of Loren Beauchamp’s Love Nest) kills his pregnant mistress, but he’s being set up by his wife and their financial adviser; “One Girl Too Many” and “Clinging Vine” deal with females scorned by cheating men; “Spoiled Brat” is about what a rich girl with a sports car does to her rapists.  “Jailbait” is about a con sex game, later expanded in Don Elliott’s Flesh Pawns.

One must remember that Silverberg was spinning these formula yarns for a quick buck, much like all the books.

It’s not that bad a read, but if you’re looking for early Silverberg non-SF short stories, I would recommend Illicit Affair.

Silverberg and Juvies: Gang Girl by Don Elliott (Nightstand #1504) and Streets of Sin by Mark Ryan (Bedstand #813)

In the 1950s, juvenile delinquents and gangs were hot stuff, the fodder for evening news, rumor, tabloids, fear, and pulp fiction.  Publications like Manhunt featured juvie stories of all kinds.  Hal Ellson’s Tomboy was a bestseller, as was Evan Hunter’s The Blackboard Jungle.  Harlan Ellison joined a street gang so he could write about juvie gangs with an authentic voice in his books The Juvies, The Deadly Streets, Gentleman Junkie, Memos from Purgatory, and his first novel, Rumble (aka Web of the City).

Gang Girl was Robert Silverberg’s second title for Nightstand, after Love Addict and before Naked Holiday.  It came after Ellison’s Sex Gang by Paul Merchant, which featured some juvie gang stories and a cover of a woman about to be raped by a man with a switchblade.

Writing about teenage hellion hoodlums on the urban prowl in the city’s gutter streets, raping and mugging and rumbling and sinning and lusting, was an art form of genre, much like the Western or the P.I. tale.

And like the Western and gumshoe yarn, full of romance and fiction.

Who knows what was truly true and what was good story-tellin’.

Gang Girl is about Lora Menotti, 16, deb in the Scarlet Sinners in the Bronx.  Her family has moved to a Manhattan lower east side project, so she needs to roll with a new gang: the Cougars.  She knows the moves.  She dresses in a tight sweater and tight jeans and goes to the soda fountain where the Cougars hang, finds the leader of the pack, seduces him, has his deb kicked out, and is instantly the No. 1 girl.  The Prez wants to carve his initails in her flesh so she seduces another Courgar to fight him for leadership — it ends in death.

Lora doesn’t have much ambition but to get high on reefer, drink cheap wine, have sex, and get into fights. Her goal at 17 is to quit igh school and at 18 to become a syndicate call girl, where former debs she knew can help set her up.  She will live the good life then: she figures why not get paid well for what she gives out for free and likes?

She feels she can manipulate the Cougars into anything — from gang raping (“lining up”) a girl she doesn’t like to getting into a big rumble for no reason other than to inflict violence.  She secretly enjoys her power, which she uses her body and looks to wield.

But she doesn’t know the other debs, and the deb that was kicked out and the deb that was gang raped, have plans for her — to make sure she is never pretty again…the book ends in horrble violence.

In fact, the book skirts some tricky ground for a softcore: underage sex.  Not only is Lora 16 and screws a bunch of guys, there is a detailed flashback of her losing her virginity at age 11, something she instigates just to get it over with.  Other debs talk about losing their virginity at 10-13, at the hands of uncles or rape; there are stories of girls getting pregnant by their brothers or step-fathers.  Some heavy stuff for softcores that couldn’t even use words to describes genitals or swear words.

Earky that same year as Gang Girl, 1959, Silverberg also published Streets of Sin as Mark Ryan with Bedtime Books.  It has a similar set-up as Gang Girl: Frankie Alfono is a NYC hood whose family moves to Brewsterville, Ohio.  He’s new and seeks out the area gang: the Barons. at their soda fountain (funny how these tough kids like to kick it at candy shops and soda joints, whereas today it’s liquor stores and crack houses).  He challenges the Baron’s Prez, they get into a knife fight, and Frankie kills (“cooled”) the guy…suddenly, this outsider is running the gang, he claims the dead leader’s deb, and plans some crimes: a gang rape of a girl who turned him down for a date, destroying a bar that wouldn’t serve him beer, and rumbling with the town’s other gang.

The copy I have and paid $15 for, the six page gang rape scene was missing.  Someone took it out for other uses, I guess.  The girl winds up dead by walking into the river…either accident or suicide.

Frankie is tough and good with a blade, and he has short man syndrome: he’s only five foot three inches and gets dog mean mad at anyone who calls him short and midget (why do I have a feeling that Harlan Ellison was a model for this character?).  Like Lora, he pushes people too far, taking other members’ debs or kicking members out, so that they eventually turn against him.  Plus, the boyfriend of the gang raped girl has it in for him.

Most of Slverberg’s vintage sleaze protagonists are characters we like, even with their lusty and sinful flaws: we identify with them, from the lovelorn fool  in Love Addict to the wayward hooker in Party Girl…Lora and Frankie, however, are both soulless, violent kids who are sadistic and manipulative, so when they come to horrble ends, you cheer for their pain, for they had it coming.

Apparently, Silverberg published a Don Elliott book as Streets of Sin in 1961 but was different, and this one was reprinted in 1966 by Nightstand as The Passion Barons.

Both are intetestng books as representative of the juvenile crime genre, but also a look as how the public perceived juvie gangs, and how the gangs of the 1950s-60s differ from the gangs of the 1970s, 1980s, and today.  Yet, they are the same as well:  they are just kids looking for a sense of cmmunity and beloinging to something greater than they are, with gang codes, and gang girls, that have not changed much over the decades.

Juvie fiction comes along way from the sociological study The Jack Roller, and so has gang fiction and movies like The Warriors.

The 1973 reprint of Gang Girl has an updated cover:

Lesbian Sins: Twisted Loves by Mark Ryan (Robert Silverberg, Bedside Books, 1959)

Robert Silverberg wrote a handful of Bedtime/Bedstand Books as “Mark Ryan” — Twisted Loves, Company Girl, Suburban Affair, Suburban Sin Club.  All seemed to be published in 1959, so he wrote them in 1958-9, before moving to Midwood and Nightsand in 1959-60 (for better money no doubt, as Bedstand paid $400-500 per mss., but still decent money for the time, the equivalent to $5K).

Twisted Loves is one of those late-50s taboo lesbian novels.  Connie Chapin is a secretary in New York, a hopeful actress whose never even gotten an audition; the novel opens with her in a bar getting drunk, drowing her pain in booze, fighting off men who try to “make” her.  She hates men: her four relationships and encounters have been bad and heart-breaking.

After fighting off a fat drunk, she stumbles out of the bar.  She falls on the ground and is recued by an older woman who sees her — “Lee.”  Lee is 40, a successful lawyer with an Upper West Side home, mannish and flat-chested (all of Silvberg’s lesbians seem to be flat-chested and mannish).  She brings Connie back, bathes her, seduces her…and the sex, for Connie, is much better than with any man.

Sober the next day, Connie is shamed by her “Lesbian” act of depravity, though moved by Lee’s generosity and skill in bed.  Lee chases her but Connie backs off, and then when she decides all men are pugs, she goes back to Lee and they start a love affair.  It is much like Laura Duchamp’s Duet: the older, successful rich lesbian secuding the pretty young trollop.

Lee introduces Connie to Manhattan’s underground elite gay crowd: women who dress like men and take men’s names (Steve, Mike), artty-farty lesbians, gay men, etc.  In the 1950s, this was a taboo society, but a strong undercurrent in culture.

When Lee is away in Beverly Hills for a big case for a month, Connie is lonely and needs a woman, and one night makes a move on her roommate, a nympho but straight.  The roommates freaks out, finds lesbians disgusting, and moves out.

All during her lesbian romp, Connie is being pursued by a man, Ted.  She keeps putting him off but eventually gets together with him, falls in love, plans to marry…

This is typical of lesbian novels wrtten by men: the heroines eventually find the error of their ways and find a nice man to have a nice heterosexual relattionship with.  I just read in Susan Stryker’sQueer Pulp (Chronicle Books, 2001) that publishers required unhappy endings in lesbiana and gay male stories, or that the protagonist end up in the arms of the opposite sex — this way the books acted as “morality” and “cautionary tales”, seeminly anti-gay, otherwise they could be prosecuted for obscene materal, especially if the books were sent through the mail.  As the laws changed in the 1960s, and with women wrting lesbian pulps, endings were different, such as the books of Ann Bannon or March Hastings.

Not Silberberg’s best, but a good read, humorous at times — such as the girl fight scene: Connie and a former lover of Lee’s lock in a deadly battle, ripping all their clothes off, and in the middle of the cat fight they start to fuck.  Classic male fantasy!

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An annoying aside: I just paid $25 for Strange Delights by Lauren Beauchamp and it’s the same damn book as Twisted Loves!  Except, Connie is re-named Lonnie (maybe because of the novel Connie) and Lee is Vee.  Seems Silverberg reprinted a number of his Bedstand Ryan and Challon books as “original” Beauchamps, or even Elliotts.  Cahllon’s Campus Sin Club becomes Beauchamp’s Campus Sex Club; Challon’s French Sin Port becomes Elliott’s Rogue of the Riviera; Ryan’s Thirsty for Love becomes Beauchamp’s Wayward Widow…I am pretty sure that Beauchamp’s The Wife Traders is  reprint of Challon’s Suburban Sin Club, and Elliott’s Hot Rod Sinners is reprinted as Beauchamp’s Lez Floozies.  And seems Beuchamp’s Nurse Carolyn became Elliott’s Registered Nympho, and Beauchamp’s Sin on Wheels to Elliott’s Orgy on Wheels.

I still need to get Ryan’s Illict Affair and Streets of Sin, and Challon’s Suburban Affair and Campus Hellion, and see what Beauchamps or Elliotts they become.