Mona by Lawrence Block (Gold Medal, 1961)

An early Block with quite a history. It’s been reprinted twice since its Gold Medal debut in 1961 — as Sweet Slow Death in 1986 from Jove, Mona in 1994 from Carroll & Graf,  and as Grifter’s Game as the the first offering from Hard Case Crime in 2005.  A lot of mileage for an old title that has now become somewhat a classic in 60s noir.

I read somewhere that Block had started this one as a Nightstand title, and $20 Lust as something for Gold Medal or Beacon, but things got switched around, and when his agent Henry Morrison at Scott Meredith read the manuscript, he concluded it was good enough for Gold Medal and under Block’s own name.  Thus, Mona became the first paperback Block had his name on the cover, instead of Lesley Evans, Sheldon Lord, or Andrew Shaw.

There’s a Mona, a dead ex-wife, in $20 Lust (aka Cinderella Sims), talked about earlier, and a number of Monas show up in Block’s Andrew Shaw books.  She’s like Harry Whittington’s Cora, popping up often in different, same soul.

Block’s many Monas are just no good…tramps, cheats, and liars all…

The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books by Hal Dresner

Hal Dresner wrote this novel about a dirty book writer that got him out of the dirty book business. Simon and Schuster bought it, a Broadway produced optioned it, and he was hired by Jack Lemmon to be the actor’s main comedy writer.  Drenser moved to Hollywood and his pen name for Nightstand, Don Holliday, was taken over by others c. 1963 — Art Plotnik, William Coons, etc.

This is an epistle tome, a novel made up of correspondence by a reclsuive author in Virginia, Mason, who wrtites under the name Guy LaDouche, and his editor at Sceptre Books, a few friends, his lawyer, a man suing him and the man’s attorneys.

He is being sued for libel for his Sceptre Books title, The Flogged Flesh, by a retured Naval commander, Dibbs, on behalf of Dibbs wayward daughter, whom Mason apparently used in the book, with a tell-tale birthmark and family history.  Dibbs is also an eccentric Nazi hunter and believes Mason is also an ex-Nazi who stole an American’s identity and is posing as a porn author.  Dibbs manges to get the FBI involved.  We soon discover that Dibbs, through his letters, is an insane paranoid.

A lone FBI agent shows up at his cabin, 10 miles from civilization, in the snow, and Mason befriends him, while “under arrest and surveillance,” they get drunk in Jack Daniels with the local sheriff, and absurd conversations abound — all told in letters to Mason’s lawyer, a nam with a curious name: Michael Westlake.

I can’t held but think that Dresner was making fun of the absurdity of the FBI and Hoover’s surveillance and harassment of Nightstand Books and William Hamling.

This is a crazy fun book, sometimes it does’t make sense, and you wonder: what is the point of all this?  But that’s exactly what Dresner wants you to think.  It was the early 1960s, Kennedy had been killed, postmodernism had rushed in, and little made sense in a crazy nuclear war fearing nation.

In the end, Mason only finishes 22 pages of the novel his editor keeps asking for, and quits the biz.

Highly recommended.

Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks — The Coolness of the Past

Welcome this Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks Blog.  The purpose of this blog is to post some hot, cool paperback covers for the gaze of your eye sockets, and to review and discuss selected titles.

Most of the titles will be from Don Elliott, Lauren Beauchamp, David Challon, Mark Ryan  (all pen names of Robert Silverberg), Gerrold Watkins and Mel Johnson (pen names of Barry N. Malzberg), as “notes” toward the two monographs I am writing, one on Malzberg and one on Silverberg and his pen names.

(But I will discuss others too as I go along — Joan Ellis, March Hastings, Andrew Shaw [aka Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake], Don Bellmore, etc etc.]

I wanted to write a short monograph or essay on the Don Elliott/Laoren Beauchamp books, as they were/are of high quality, compared to many books of the time or even erotica today.  They also exhibit Silverberg’s early style. But I was uncertain where such an essay or book would find a home — best here on the net.

I have discussed Barry Malzber’s US-era Olympia Press titles under his name and Gerrold Watkins in a monograph, Barry N.  Malzberg: Beyond Science Fiction, Toward Psychoanalysis (Borgo Press) due out late 2009, but I do not have 3 of the Watkins and none of the Johnson (Midwood Books) that are hard to find…as I do locate them, I will post a blog here.

French Sin Port by David Challon (Robert Silverberg) – Bedtime Books No. 820 (1959)

Before he was Loren Beauchamp for Midwood and Don Elliott for Nightstand, Robert Silverberg was David Challon and Mark Ryan for Bedtime Books in the late 1950s.  The success of Bedtime sleaze titles on newsstands inspired (by suggestion of Harlan Ellison) William Hamling to start Nightstand, Midnight Readers, etc., as the science-fiction pulp magazine was dying out.  Hamling’s company already publoshed Rogue, a men’s magazine edited by Ellison that was good competition for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy — both were Chicago-based, with quality modeld and good writing (often by Ellison and Silverberg under pen names).  Hamling published books under the Regency imprint (issuring Ellison’s Gentleman Junkie and Memos from Purgatory, and the first edition of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters). (Silverberg also wrote a bio of de Sade for this imprint, which I will discuss in a later post.)

Silverberg welcomed work at Nightstand since Hamling had previusly had him on a $500/month contract for SF stories, and the start pay was $600 with a $250 bonus for sales…later increasing to $800, $1000, $1200, and then $2000 per book as the books sold well and made money.  Bedstand paid $400-500 a book, so Silverberg stopped writing for them when Hamling put him on a two-book a month contract — that was damn good money for a writer back then,  considering that Silverberg was still penning occasional SF, detective and ghost-written stuff, plus his non-fiction books for younger readers.

French Sin Port is an odd, uneven work of suspense and debaunchery.  The first few pages, I wondered if this was Silverberg, as it started rather sappy and superficial about two teenage American girls, Maureen and Naomi, on vacation in Europe for the summer.  First, they spent a month in France, where they find love, sex, and crime.

Maureen’s parents have sent her off abroad to keep her from marrying this geeky accountant (bow tie!) whom she lost her virginity to.  She meets an Ameican artist in Paris and falls in love with him; her friend meets a French guy who invites them down to the French Riveria for a week for fun in the sun and sin a la carte.

Maureen is hot, topless on the beach, and gets noticed by a hunky French guy who is a pimp for a Greek tycoon, his giant 20-cabin party yacht anchored off the shore.  She gets suckered into a big party on the yacht, mingling with countesses and the rich, gambling with money she doesn’t have, and getting the eye of the 62-year-old Greek man, whom she find srepulsive.

She sleeps with the French man, who fucks her like she has never been; she realzies the two men  she’s been with are lousy in bed, inexperienced.  But then the French guy hands her off to the Greek man.  He is willing to pay her money and she refuses.

The Greek man does not like to be rejected, and later he arranges for her kidnapping, where he rapes her.  During the second rape, acting like she is giving in for $25,000, she knocks the Greek over the head with a lamp, runs naked out of the cabin and jumps off the boat.

Returning to Paris, afraid she will be hunted down and killed, she sees the newspaper the next day that states the Greek tycoon died of a massive stroke.  She feels no remorse — she is glad she killed him for the rape.

Maureen acts strange for a rape victim — she sleeps with two other men (one her artist lover) immedately after.  Her accountant boyfriend shows up in Paris, prepared to marry him, ring in hand, but she tells him she’s moving in with the artist.  He tries to rape her too and she bites him and knees him in the nuts — she will not be a victim again.

She’s a bit two-dimensional, though, and this does read like a young writer’s early efforts (Silverberg was 24 at the time).  It’s a fast breezy read; I could picture it as one of those teen sex beach romp movies on the 1980s.

I have not read the other David Challon or Mark Ryan books yet. . . (Note: the number of typos in amazing, as well as a missing Chapter 13, where there is just blank space.)

French Sin Port was reprinted in 1967 by Greenleaf’s Ember Library imprint as Rogue of the Riveria by Don Elliott:

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).

4 Nightstand Books Don Elliott Covers

Don Elliott Nightstand Lust Titles

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:

SIN!