Sex Substitute by Eve Linkletter (Playtime Books #770, 1966)

This one came in the mail without a front or back cover.  It’s a lesbian novel by Linkletter. I happened to also catch on cable the movie, Monster, as I was reading this, and they are oddly similar: about butch lesbians searching for love in a prejudiced world.

Sex Substitute is the diary of a 35-year-old woman named Peggy, a “butch” lesbian who has a thing for young lipstick lesbians, who keeps getting hurt and betrayed, often when a lover turns to a man, as we see in the first chapter. She’s worried about being one of those old lonely dykes who chase young tail.  Her rival and friend, a woman named Johnny who hooks on the side for money, tells Peggy that true love and ever-lasting lesbian relationships are impossible for women like them, and she should take the “love them and leave them” route.

Peggy still believes she may one day meet a woman she can be with forever, even marry.  She picks up a young girl walking down the road named Sheila.  Sheila has just jumped out of a car of a man who tried to rape her.  Peggy expounds on the evils of the penis and how women don’t need it. Sheila is naive, a virgin, and has no idea Peggy is a lesbian.

They become friends, and Peggy has her designs on the heterosexual Sheila: she will turn the girl to the joys of the third sex.  Over the course of months, Peggy falls desperately in love and dares not make an overt move for fear she will lose Sheila.

Peggy shares a house with her younger brother, Ray; their parents died and left them some money and a home, which is why Peggy can afford to help Sheila and spend her time drinking and hanging out at lesbian bars.  When Ray and Sheila meet, it is love at first sight, and as much as Peggy tries to keep them apart, Ray winds up asking Sheila to marry him and she accepts.

In a drunken rage, Peggy attacks Sheila and tries to rape the girl, but Sheila fights her off, and agrees to forget the incident if Peggy mainatins herself.  Ray has no idea his sister is gay and would disown her if he knew — which he eventually does.

Having the love of her life marry her brother send Peggy into an alcoholic, suicidal downfall; she gets into a car accident and later tries to kill herself.  But no fear — she does find some love at the end, when she goes to see an old flame she broke up with because the woman wasn’t young anymore.  Peggy realizes if she is going to have gay love in her life, she can’t be picky about age, and the young lipsticks are no longer for her.

At times trite, this is a pretty mature novel about butch lesbian lifestyles, and I’m surprised not to see it on the lesbian classical pulp lists, perhaps an oversight for having been published by schlock house Neva/Playtime, which had an address in Vegas but was really run out of Florida.

There’s a powerful section where Peggy remembers her father visiting a mulatto hooker he was in love with, and the atmosphere of bigotry at the time (and still exists).

If you can find a copy, this is recommended along with Linkletter’s others recently read: Taxi Dancers, Our Flesh was Cheap, and The Gay Ones.

There are about five or so other Linkletter books we will look at soon as well…

Atomic Blonde – Monte Steele (Playtime Book #639, 1963)

So my first Monte Steele read wasn’t a bad one — it’s a quick 35,000 word read of tongue-in-cheek tough guy, murder, and lots of sex.

The narrator of Atomic Blonde is Johnny Stone, an insurance fraud investigator in Desert City, Nevada, who happens upon a platinum blonde bombshell with a flat tire and a pink Caddy.  He offers to help fix the flat but she keeps telling him no but, being the ladies man and gentleman he is, with the possibility of getting some blonde pussy, Johnny doesn’t listen to her — and when he opens her trunk to get the jack, he finds the stuff dead body of a man and a diamond head rattlesnake.

The blonde takes off in his car.

Then two thugs try to kill him — they keep trying to kill him throughout the book, which takes place in 48 hours.

In that 48 hours, Johnny has sex with half a dozen women, from maids to whores to the blonde and his own girlfriend, Carol, who has no idea what a pussyhound he is — or does she?  She does get him to marry her in the end.

Atomic Blonde is  mindless entertainment but well-written, you can tell whoever is behind this pen name knows his stuff so I am going to assume it was/is a name writer.  It falls into some genre cliches but now and then are gems of sentences scattered about the prolonged sex scenes and moments of hardboiled violence.

Hotel Hustler by Jerry Lane/aka Jerry M. Goff, Jr. (Playtime Books #670, 1964)

The first Jerry Goff book I read, a few months back, was Thrill Crazy, a Merit title, and here I thought: Wow, another cool find. Then I read Wanton Wench! which was better and Tropic of Carla which was an okay men’s adventure style yarn.

A reader of this blog mentioned that Goff had been sued by Richard Prather for plagarizing from a Shell Scott novel, and then bookseller and vintage paperback scholar Lynn Munroe told me the case just wasn’t one book, but a whole lot of them.  In fact, Munroe’s Fall 1997 auction catalogue was for Goff books that were hard to find because the U.S. Court ordered all offending copies destroyed.

Munroe was kind enough to send me a copy of that old catalgue for research’s sake, that gives the whole nitty-gritty.

Basically, it began with Hotel Hustler, the novel I will discuss in this blog entry. Someone told Richard Prather there were plagarized sections from three of Prather’s Shell Scotts: Find This Woman, Strip for Murder, and The Wailing Frail.

Prather read Hotel Hustler, got wide-eyed and angry, and called his lawyer.  Tracking down info wasn’t easy — Playtime Books was an imprint of Neva Books out of Las Vegas — but the address was a mail drop for an outfit actually in Florida (they had learned from the mistakes made by Nightstand and Faber about addresses and the feds); plus Jerry Lane was not a real person, but the pen name of Merit Books/Camerarts author Jerry M. Goff, Jr., a real name.  A ceased and desist letter was sent to Neva and ignored — the novel remained in print and two more Lane books were issued, also with plagarized sections.  Munroe writes:

Prather, who now lives in Arizona and is still writing, told me he never met Jerry Goff. When Prather’s lawyers tracked him down, he was in prison, a three-time convicted felon.  In his sworn deposition, Goff admitted to being such a huge “fan” of Prather’s books that yes, he would on occasion borrow ideas and dialog from Parther’s books. And then, to Prather’s lawyer’s shock and surprise, Goff proceeded to name for them some 30 books he had done so in, most of them published by a company neither Prather [n]or his lawyers had ever heard of, Merit Books of Chicago.  This led to a second, larger lawsuit in The US District Court for Northern Illinois in 1972 […] the Judge in the trial would later say that Prather v. Camerarts Publishing was the largest case of plagarism he had ever heard about. (Lynn Munroe Books List 37, p. 3)

In some cases, Goff only “borrowed” phrases and paragraphs, but, with many of Goff’s books in hand, many reprinted with new titles a year after first publication, as Camerarts was known to do,

Prather and his wife spent hours at home with a box of Goff’s paperbacks, reading them and highlighting familiar passages. To their amazement they found not just phrases but entire paragraphs, entire chapters, entire plotlines, lifted in whole from Prather’s books, with only the character’s names changed.  Prather found one Goff book about a lusty  French female spy named Julie Odlie.  Something about Julie was so familiar to him, but what was it?  Prather had never created such a character.  Finally, as he read on, it hit him — Julie was Shell Scott, and Goff had only changed the character’s sex. (ibid)

In the end, after appeals, both Neva and Camerarts had to pay damages — about $17, 500K for Neva and $40K for Merit Books (plagarism cases have set amounts these days, I think the ceiling s now $120K per cause of action).

I have no information on Goff, other than his demise in the late 1990s.  What was he in prison for?  Did Camerarts, with its mob connections, go after him to pay that $40K back?  Did they, like Neva, know he was lifting from Prather?  Did Goff publish other books later under a different name?

And does this mean the Goff books I liked were really Prather novels I liked?  According to Munroe’s catalogue, Thrill Crazy (reprinted as Lisa) stole from Strip for Murder, Way of a Wanton, and Three’s A Shroud.  Wanton Wench! and Tropic of Carla are not listed — but if not taken from Prather, were they lifting from other books?  Did Goff do any original material at all; were the Prather liftings done when the well was dry?

And does this change my mind about Goff being a nice vintage find?  Well, he is still a find — but in a much different light.  When Munroe was auctioning some Goff/Lane books, they seemed to be rarities because the court ordered all remaining copies destroyed.  Now, however, you can find most of these books in the $5-20 price range, ad I have about 20 of them, which I will get to all eventually.

Hotel Hustler is a short novel, about 35,000 words, about a card shark on the run from both the mob and the feds.  He travels around the world, steals a new identity, then someone inherits an old hotel, the Dorado Oasis, from a long lost uncle on the small West Indies island, Callerie — a fictional place, it seems, where the natives speak Creole and were once ruled by Napoleon, just like Haiti.

He thinks this is the perfect place to hide from those who either want to murder him or put him in federal lock up for tax evasion — fix the hotel up, make it profitable, live his days out on the small island as a small businessman.

Not so easy.  A fellow named Ahogary (allegory?) has been using every means he can to push out and buy up all the small storefrnts, fishing boats, and eateries in center town, to build his own little business and crime empire.  Ahogary wants the hotel — which seems worthless since it seldom has guests — and the land it’s on.  The plot becomes a cat and mouse game between the narrator and Ahogary, who did not count on his competition having street smarts and knowing how to bluff and con.

Toss in some islander native sex and you got an “adult” novel.

While this one is not as good as, say, Wanton Wench!, the writing is smoother more confident — but is this Prather’s doing or Goff’s?  The novel reads like a cross-between wanting to imitate the atmosphere of Casablanca and the intrigue of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

I’d give it a C-plus overall, but a B-minus for being a part of vintage paperback history, the impetus for the court system’s biggest copyright infringement case at the time.

Also: Goff as criminal. A real hood, or crook, writing books about hoods and crooks, even if all the prose ain’t his — Goff was no pale weasel writer pretending at tough men’s fiction…in some way he was living it, even as he stole from Shell Scott.