Morals Charge by Paul Hunter (Midwood F101, 1961)

This one sports one of my favorite Paul Rader covers.  It’s unknown who “Paul Hunter” is/was, a one-shot pen name never used again by Midwood.  It’s well-written.

Like Jodie in The Disciplined Daughter below, Nancy in Morals Charge is a constant victim of circumstance and her own sexual appeal.  The 18-year-old girl lives at home, a horrible home where her alcoholic, lazy mother steals the money she makes at a clerk job, even though she gives her mother half her pay; she’s been saving so she can leave home, maybe go to Hollywood or somewhere.  And then there is her equally alcoholic, fat mother’s boyfriend Frank, who is convinced Nancy is a floozy on the side, the way she dreses sometimes.

One day Nancy crosses paths with an old high school friend, Candy, who has nice clothes and seems to be doing well in New York.  Candy invites Nancy to a party her “boss” is throwing, and tells Nancy to dress sexy. Nancy meets the boss, Howie Mann, who runs illegal gambling parlors out of ritzy hotels — he’s a big powerful man connected to the mob and local politicians, and has girls on his crew…not exactly hookers, they are there as “shills” (playing tables with house money to lure men)…a girl in Howie’s crew can leave with a customer and make extra money, and it’s expected, Howie wants them to come back and blow their money.  Sometimes Howie requires his girls to sleep with VIPs…

Howie seduces Nancy that night and takes her virginity. She thinks there could be a romance but  he was testng her out, breaking her in.  He also gives her $50. She gets home late and her mother and Frank yell at her. They find the $50 and figure she’s hooking, and Frank decides he will pimp her out. Frank knocks out the mother and rapes Nancy, just two hours from her having lost her cherry to Howie.

Nancy leaves home and moves in with Candy and works for Howie. At first she doesn’t like having to be nice and fuck ugly old men with money, and Howie lays down the law. He has a sadistic woman who runs the girls, Jane, and an equally sadistic goon named “Fingers” who knows torture techniques by just using his fingers.  Nancy has a choice of the lesser two evils, at home being raped and pimped by Frank who takes her money, or in the city where she’s pimped out but makes money. She soon falls into the groove of being used for her body, but at least she’s making good money.

Frank tracks her down one day and breaks into her apartment and demands $1000, and that he will be her new pimp.  She gets Howie and his goons to work Frank over. Sweet revenge on the drunk fat fuck.

One night she gets arrested in a hotel with one of Howie’s VIPs. Since she’s not being paid, it’s not an actual “morals charge” for hooking, but the cops frame her with a bogus $50 payment.  Three of the four cops want to gang rape her but the third cop, a straight arrow, intervenes.  This cop also tells her she’s just a pawn to get at someone bigger. Here the cops make her a victim by depriving her of her rights for a phone call and lawyer, by physically  beating her up in interrogation.  But Nancy knows they want Howie so she doesn’t talk. Later, a lawyer tells her that the D.A. is after one of Howie’s friends in political office, and if she keeps mum all is well although she will have to take the fall and do some time to appease the D.A. who is pissed her arrest was botched.

An interesting novel that, while trash pulp fiction, does reflect a time in America where the rights of women, even though prostitutes, were trampled on without repercussion, and where physical force was par for the course during third degree questioning (although some will claim that still goes on, just look at Abu Gahrib).  Poor Nancy is just abused everywhere she goes — at home, at work, by the system. In jail and prison, she meets street hookers as young as nine, heroin addicts, thieves and lesbians.

A good read, and good  to own for the cover alone. In the next week or two, we want to to focus on vintage books with Issac Paul Rader covers…

Roadhouse Girl by Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Midnight Reader #412, 1962)

The first two Corniths I purchased in 2004 were from Don Elliott/Rbt Silverberg: Roadhouse Girl and Expense Account Sinners. I had yet to read these two until now.

22-year-old Roaslie Lyons in Roadhouse Girl is probably the most dull, pathetic-minded Don Elliott heroine I’ve come across.  Usually even an Elliott call girl or stripper has redeeming qualities, but Rosalie is a simpleton who lets things happen to her and is shocked when she discovers she likes rough sex.  In a way, she is Elliott’s Justine, a girl caught up in a sexual world she doesn’tr understand but still enjoys.  And like de Sade, much of the sex that happens to Rosalie is either rape or S/M.

Rosalie takes a job at a Grove City roadside hashhouse, where she makes decent tips, and has free room and board. Along somes the owner’s son, Johnny, a tough guy who has his way with all waitresses. He’s waiting in her room and rapes her…and she responds to the rape with pleasure, which confuses the girl.

His knee was working its way between her legs. She could feel the rough fabric of his trousers grinding into the soft skin of her thighs. Her ankles throbbed with pain. She thought they were going to snap.

Suddenly he brought his right hand around and tapped her on the chin. Her lower lip and upper teeth came together. She winced in pain, and tasted blood trickling out of the little cut, and in her surprise and fear she loosened the grip of her ankles, and the next moment she had her legs apart… (p. 13-14)

The same night of the rape, she accepts a date with the local wise guy, Carlton, who likes to use whips on his female partners…she responds to the whips, and likes the pain.

Carlton offers her a place to live with hm and before she leaves the roadhouse, Johnny tries to rape her again but she knees him in the nuts. Johnny vows revenge.

She soon discovers that Carlton is quite the sadist. To get even with an ex-girlfriend who left him for a Hollywood mogul, Calrton forces the ex- to perform lesbian sex on Rosalie.  Carlton also ups the ante with S/M and the toys…

But Rosalie likes living in comfort with money. One day, driving one of Carlton’s sports cars in town, she is jacked by Johnny who forces her to drive out to the country where he rapes her.

And so Carlton seeks out Johnny, and Johnny seeks out Rosalie again for revenge, and things get messy…

Another Manhunt-style story, and not too bad of a read. I’d give it a B-minus for treading similar ground as in Stripper!

The 1973 Reed Nightstand edition was called No Pleasure Too Painful and is apparently hard to find…

Orgy Maid – Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Pillar Book #838)

Pillar Books (like Ember, Idle Hour, Sundown, Late Library, Leisure, Midnight, et al) was one of William Hamling’s many imprints for Cornith/Greenleaf.  Like the editorially picked titles, and sometimes the pen names, the writers had no idea what imprint the monthly manuscripts would end up with, and what it would be called.

It’s not clear if certain imprints were meant to lean toward the theme and setting of the books — I have noticed that Midnight Books tend to be more crime-noirish, and Embers a little more risque than your average Nightstand.

Pillar often features the slightly altered pen names like Andrew Shole, Dan Eliot, and John Baxter.

Orgy Maid is a bit different than the typical Silverberg Don Elliotts — it’s the first backwoods hillbilly-type tale he’s tackled (usually Silverberg’s are about cheating husbands and wives in the city, crime, the sex lives of urban professionals, young women who find their wanton way to sinful lives as strippers or call girls).  The heroine of the little novel is 12-year-old Lonnie, who becomes a bride and a sex toy for the rich.  The prose style is done in mock southern-porch yarn spinning, with this opening that should b a classic in sleaze fiction:

In the hill country of Tennessee, where Lonnie Garth was born, they have a quaint little folk saying about virginity. “A virgin,” they say, “is a five-year-old girl who can outrun her daddy and her brothers.”

Lonnie was a fast runner. That’s how come her virginity lasted all the way to the age of twelve. (p. 5)

She lives in Holston Mill, population 1,407, and the Holston Family runs all the motels and shops and industry, so all the residents work and rely on the powerful family, who treat them the way nobles treated their serfs: as property.  If a Holston male wanted any girl or woman in town, married, virgin, or wanton, these females have to submit to them or else become ostracized or even killed.

This is why Lonnie’s father has not touched her and his forbade his sons from having sex with her — she’s gorgeous, and he has wanted to keep her a virgin in hopes that one of the Holston boys will take a liking to her and maybe marry her, or keep her as a concubine.

In a town where most girls lose their virginity by age eight from either their fathers, brothers, or a Holston, Lonnie is definitely an oddity.  She feels like she’s missing something since all the girls in her school have been sexually active for several years.

One day, she does catch the eye of a Holston — Tim Holston, the only son sent off to college and who is refined intellectually.  He’s back home on vacation and happens upon young Lonnie swimming naked in the pond.  Mesmerized by her nymphet-allure, he takes her virginity and falls in love with her.

Her father is very pleased she gave herself to a Holston, even more pleased when Tim says he wants to marry her — this means the poor family will have an inn with the Holston Monarchy.

Lonnie and Tim have a two week honeymoon; since she looks seventeen-eighteen rather than twelve, heads don’t turn. Tim’s father had a judge in his pocket who signed a decree that Lonnie could marry as a pre-teen.  They move into the Holston mansion, but soon Lonnie is left alone there when Tim goes back to college. She has a tutor during the day, to finish out her own education, but for the most part her days are idle.  She notices that Tim’s brothers and father sexually abuse the female domestics, like the maid and cook, and these women give in, because they don’t want to lose their good-paying jobs.

It doesn’t take long before the Holston males set their eyes on Tim’s defenseless twelve-year-old bride, alone in her room.  First one brother rapes her, then two of them rape her at the same time — Silverberg makes creative use of evasive words to describe a two-man-one-girl double penetration, and what it feels like for her.

Despite the rape, Lonnie’s body “betrays” her, and she finds she enjoys the forced sex; and wonders if there is something wrong with her for that.

If that isn’t enough, Ted’s sister, her own sister-in-law, makes her lesbian inclinations known to Lonnie.  Lonnie has already been forced to put on a lesbian with one of the maids (hence the title?) and found that she liked the twilight sex, so she gives herself freely to her sister-in-law.

And then one night her father-in-law pays her a visit, so now Lonnie is the sex toy of just about everyone in the house.

To escape the shame and humility, Lonnie hits the bourbon hard, slugging down entire bottles in an hour and passing out.

There is tragedy — at twelve and three months, Lonnie is a bride; at twelve and sex months, she becomes a widow and sexual tigress.

It’s a darn good southern read, and gets an A-minus.

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:

Connie by Loren Beauchamp (Robert Silverberg)

While writing as Don Elliott and John Dexter for Nightstand, Robert Silverberg was also writing as Loren Beauchamp, David Challon, and Mark Ryan for Midwood.  Connie (Midwood No. 18) was a huge bestseller for Midwood, going through four “big printings” and two different covers, both by Paul Rader — above and here:

I have the third printing with this second cover.

Connie is told in the thid-person and through the eyes of an innocent teenage girl in Brooklyn.  True to Silverberg’s format for many of his softcore titles, he presents a character the reader cares about who has tragedy befall on them, something so terrible it ruins their lives and changes their worldview.

Connie is 17 and a senior in high shcool.  Her steady beau is a freshman at Syracuse.  Since 15, she has had her entire future mapped out with this boy: the “pinning” for a year,  a year of engagement, marriage at age 20;  house, career, three kids, vacations in Europe, grandkids, gwoing old and happy without a worry in the world.

She writes her future husband every day.  One night, she walks out to the mailbox to send a letter and is kidnapped by a gang out 11 jevenile thugs (big deviant theme of the 1950s, along with beatniks, alcoholics, and wayward wantons); they take her to an abandoned shack and gang rape her for hours.  She is a virgin; she has been saving herself for marriage.  While the rape is brutal, and she comes in and out of conscioiusness, she is shocked when she feels pleasures and has the occasional orgasm. She does not understand this and the gang takes this as  a sign that she’s into it.

The rape devastates her parents and numbs her boyfriend.  She is sent to Arizona to stay with her grandparents for the summer and let the scandal die down (her rape was in all the papers).  While her boyfriend said her “soiling” would not affect their plans, he eventually mails her a break-up letter.

Connie is angry with the world, with men — the gang kids who defiled her, the boyfriend who abandoned her.  She takes a walk, goes into a bar, lets an older man buy her some drinks, and goes to his motel room and has sex with him. She enjoys it.  When the guy is alseep, she opens his wallet and takes $10 and decides she will become a hooker.  She will get back at the world and at men by becoming the opposite of what society expected of her, and never giving her pussy away for free.  She will make men pay; she will make the world turn in shame for her depravity; she will defy and rebel, all in the same of money and fast sex.

She moves to San Francisco without telling her parents where she’s off to and sets herself up as a freelance call girl, first with a man who helps her with her luggage.  She is hot, claims to be 22, and men want to date her; but after dinners and before sex, she informs the men a fuck will cost $25.

Within months she has a long list of clients and referrals and is being paid $100 a night by wealthy older men.  She’s ineperienced at sex at first but soon learns things as she new client has his various kinks and wants, from slapping to anal.

Connie is a romance novel, really; it has that feel of the lost little girl who just wants to be loved.  She does fall in love with a rich cilent who sets her up in Los Angeles: a room in a Beverly Hills hotel ($40 a night!) , a salary, a promise to leave his wife and marry her.  The client turns out to be a sadist who just wanted a mistress.  Connie’s heart is broken and she attempts to commit suicide at the Beverly Hotel.

Her doctor, who gives her a blood tranfusion,  falls in love with her and she falls for him and…

The keen reader will know that this book is not written by a woman.  There are too many men’s fantasies going on: her orgasms during rape (though many rape victims report this does happen, adding to the shame of the experience), her quick willingness to become a whore, the way she speaks.  But this book was not meant to be marketed to women like regular romances.

It’s an engaging story. I admit to a guilty pleasure: I could not put it down, the way you can get sucked up in watching a soap opera and not realize it.  There are a lot of typos and printer errors, but these are to be expected from quickie books.

Like the Don Elliotts, the Loren Beauchamps are of higher writing quality than most sleaze books of the 50s-60s.

I have all the Beauchamps and will talk more as I read them this summer, slowly writing my Silverberg monograph.