Elaine Dorian's The Sex Cure

The Sex Cure is a 1962 sleaze novel by Elaine Dorian, a pseudonym adopted by Isabel Moore. Moore lived in Cooperstown in upstate New York and her sleaze novels were based very closely on that town and its residents. So closely that she was threatened with libel suits and very nearly run out of town. The subsequent court case brought some notoriety to both the book and its author.

I’ve been reading a lot of the sleaze fiction of this era recently and it’s not quite what I expected. These books for the most part are not erotica. They’re either noir fiction that’s slightly sleazier than average, or they’re romantic melodramas with a bit of added sex. Although I always assumed that these books were aimed mostly at men they’re often much closer in feel and spirit to what would later become known as Chick Lit.

The Sex Cure is a case in point. It’s pure melodrama. It’s very similar in both tone and content to Grace Metalious’s 1957 massive bestseller Peyton Place. Both books deal with sex and sin behind the respectable façade of an American small town. Both books take aim at the narrow-mindedness, viciousness and hypocrisy of small town life. Both novels used sex as a major selling point. The Sex Cure is slightly more explicit in its treatment of sex, but only slightly.

The setting is a town named Ridgefield Corners. The town is run by two elderly men, Cy Stevens and Senator John Adams Turner. Both are elderly very nasty men and both are corrupt sleazeball political operators.

Dr Justin Riley comes from a rough deprived background but now he’s a rising thoracic surgeon at the town’s only hospital, with a glittering future in front of him. Or at least he did have a glittering future in front of him. If only Justin could keep his hands off the pretty nurses at the hospital, and off pretty girls in general. Now one of those pretty nurses, Betty Hogan, has been admitted to the hospital. She was bleeding to death after an illegal abortion but before lapsing into a coma she named Justin as the father of the child. And Justin is now implicated in a case of criminal abortion.

Betty may yet survive but the same can’t be said of Dr Justin Riley’s career. He’s in big trouble with his wife Olivia and with his father-in-law, Senator Turner. And the respectable citizens of Ridgefield Corners have turned against him and have decided that there’s no place in their town for such a wicked immoral person. Justin sees considerable irony in this. Whenever the townspeople get sick they run to him to save their lives. He has arranged abortions for lots of the respectable husbands of the town when they’ve gotten their mistresses pregnant, and most of the town’s respectable wives have welcomed Justin into their beds.

Justin’s sin is not adultery. His sin is that he got caught and now there’s a scandal and the respectable citizens of Ridgefield Corners don’t like scandals.

What’s worse is that all of Justin’s woman troubles have come to crisis point at the same time. His marriage was heading for the rocks anyway. He’s been trying to entice his pretty (and married) lab assistant Marge Myles into bed. He’s been sleeping with his old girlfriend Misty Powers again. Misty is sinking further into alcoholism.

Justin knows that his life is falling apart but he has no idea what to do about it. He’s never really thought about the consequences of his actions. He married Olivia for her money. Maybe he loved her at first. Their sex life has become a washout. Justin can’t live without sex. He assumes that the women he beds understand that it’s just harmless fun. But they don’t understand that at all. Misty is in love with him. Betty Hogan didn’t understand it. She was convinced that Justin would divorce his wife and marry her. Justin thought that he could keep his affairs discreet. Everybody knew he was a womaniser but as long as he wasn’t involved in open scandal nobody cared. Now he’s mixed up in what promises to be a very public scandal.

Justin has to figure out what to do about all these women in his life. And the women need to figure out what to do about Justin.

This is pure unalloyed romantic melodrama. There’s plenty of sex but it’s not at all graphic. The book is aiming for sin and sensation rather than mere erotic thrills. It’s also obvious that the author intended this as a poison-pen letter to her hometown. In Ridgefield Corners she’s created an extraordinary world of corruption and hypocrisy.

The characters are on the whole not especially admirable, but apart from the two crooked politicians and the equally corrupt local police chief they’re mostly people who have made a mess of their lives though weakness, short-sightedness, poor judgment and wishful thinking. Although they’re all messed up they could extricate themselves from their predicaments. But they probably won’t.

In these sleaze novels you’re never quite sure whether you’re hoping to get a happy ending or a downbeat ending and in this case the author keeps us guessing. Even Justin is perhaps not beyond saving, if only he could convince himself that Justin Riley was worth saving.

It’s all reasonably entertaining and it certainly offers lurid sensationalism. Recommended.

If you enjoy this sort of thing that I can highly recommend Dallas Mayo’s One Night Stand (1962), another small town sex melodrama. Other sleaze novels that are basically romantic melodramas are Florence Stonebreaker’s excellent Reno Tramp (1950) and Lawrence Block’s Kept (1960).