Hal Dresner (born 1937) has worked mostly as a film and television writer although he has written a couple of novels.
Lawrence Block (born 1938) of course became a well-known and successful crime writer. Early in his career he wrote a lot of sleaze fiction, most of it pretty good.
Circle of Sinners is really just a series of episodes strung together very tenuously.
There’s no point in saying anything about the plot because there isn’t one. It’s just a string of sexual encounters involving different people. All the encounters end in violence of some kind. Some of the situations will shock modern readers. It is a pretty nasty mean-spirited book.
There’s no shortage of sleaze. The book covers just about everything that in 1961 would have been considered to be sexual deviance.
Being plotless and lacking a strong viewpoint character Circle of Sinners doesn’t really have much to keep the reader’s attention engaged. It relies mostly on shock value. I enjoy late 50s/early 60s sleaze fiction but shock value is not what I personally am looking for in this type of book.
I’ve read quite a bit of 1950s and early 1960s sleaze fiction and Circle of Sinners is very much an outlier. Most sleaze novels of that era are surprisingly strong on plot, and on characterisation. Many are essentially noir novels or romance novels with added sex. Most of them stand up surprisingly well as novels.
Even the other sleaze novels I’ve read by Lawrence Block and Hal Dresner are not like this one. Kept, which Block wrote under the name Sheldon Lord, is a sensitive grown-up romance novel and if that’s what you’re after it’s pretty good. Sin Hellcat, which he co-wrote with Donald E. Westlake, is also quite good.
Hal Dresner’s Sin School is a very fine sleaze novel.
So both of these guys could write and they both understood the genre. Which makes Circle of Sinners rather disappointing. I can’t really recommend this one.
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