Baby Face by J.X. Williams aka Harry Whittington (Idle Hour Books, 1965)

Another one of “the missing 38,” this is actually one of those “backwoods” tales Whittington liked to write (Cracker Girl, Backwoods Shack, Backwoods Hussy, Backwoods Tramp, Desire in the Dust,  etc).

Well, there are hillbillies and white trash backwoods types in Baby Face…it starts off with college life among the Ivy League upper crust, on a campus of a small elite college like Dartmouth or William and Mary. Lois is a sorority girl on a date with stud Mott and he wants some backseat action. She says she is not that kind of girl, maybe even a virgin, and he laughs and says he knows all about her…one fellow she bedded told Mott where she had a mole in an intimate place…and he knows about a tryst she had with an elderly professor…He blackmails her, says he will tell the school admins about the professor if she does not put out for him. Still she fights but he rapes her, three times he rapes her all night in the car, letting her go at dusk.

Two months later, she gets doctor confirmtion that she’s pregnant. She will be kicked out of the college and the sorority for such an immoral scandal. She tells Mott but he denies the baby could be his. She says she won’t get an abortion; she will simply go home and tell her parents the shame.

Driving home in the dark, it is raining hard. She is taking backroads. She is upset and driving fast.  She loses control of the car and slides off a hill, not caring if she dies.

She wakes up in a strange bed, bandaged up, and a hillbilly type guy staring at her. His name is Dan, an ex-Marine just off a tour in Vietnam. She was found by a family and brought to him because he has experience pathcing up the wounded from Vietnam.

Dan is crass, a hick, eyes her body, but she evntually warms up to him. He knows she is pregnant and he was afraid she would lose the baby.

After expericing backwoods white trash life, she returns home and reveals her shame, since she is showing. Her fokks are nit happily. Surprisingly, there are men who want to marry her: Mott, who changes his mind, and an old boyfriend of hers, who doesn’t seem to care she is carrying another man’s child. She says no to both, says no to her upper middle class life, and runs back to Dan to live a poor hick life and raise her baby in sin.

This was a fun read and seems like ol’ Harry Whittington had fun with it, probably mining material from old books I have not seen yet.  It is a rare find, this one, but  good find if you can find it. This is also a good contender for a reprint.

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:

Party Girl by Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg) Nightstand #1509)

One of the early books Silverberg wrote, as it is the ninth one of the line: 1509 — he wrote the first one, Love Addict: 1501.

A novel about heroin and sex and what a woman will do for her dope.

There are no drugs in Party Girl, except booze, but it’s about what women will do for money, small money, large money — women come to New York in the late 50s looking to dance or sing or act on Broadway, and get suckered by shady sleazy agents and promoters. Money becomes a drug later on…

In Party Girl, all sex leads to tragedy. There is no love — there is only desperation, fear, loneliness, loss of hope, loss of humanity.

Laura Haynes is a gorgeous Kansas farm girl who comes to the Big Apple looking for her chance on Broadway.  She’s 22, full-figured, a virgin and naive. That all goes away when the first agent she has a meeting with has her get into a skimpy outfit and then rapes her.

Shocked, Laura wanders around NY, in pain from the rape, and collaspses. A girl helps her. The girl, Marilyn, is a streetwalker.  Laura roomates with Marilyn.  After a week of looking for work, Laura decideds to become a streetwalker.

But she’s too good-looking for $10 tricks.  She soon gets the attention of a powerful, high class pimp who runs an upscale call girl service. He puts her up in a Westside apartament, buys her clothes and jewrely, gives her a $500 advance.  He promises her $500 a week (about $5K in 1959 money) plus whatever tips she makes;  and she has to work every night, with four days a month off; each afteroon she gets a call where to meet a cleint — bankers, lawyers, businessmen in town.

Within months, she is wealthy, putting money away…with tips, she is making $30K a year, and figures she can retire by 27.

Of course, she meets a fella whom she falls in love with — not a client, just a guy…typical call girl story falling for a common joe who falls for her too…

…and he finds out the truth about her and kills himself over the pain of it all…

…and Laura has a gun…

It’s a damn fine story — professionally paced, with a few illogical parts that the writer didn’t think out right, but that’s okay.  The sex is cold and sad, even the drunken lesbian sex between Laura and Marilyn.  I would nto say this novel is not “erotica” but a morality play on the sins of the flesh, a la 1950s morals.

The dialogue reads like a 1950s black and white movie too, with the sweeping soundtrack, but an ending akin to Sunset Boulevard.