Robert Silverberg's The Hot Beat

The Hot Beat is a 1960 noir-inflected sleazy hardboiled crime thriller by Robert Silverberg.

Robert Silverberg (born 1935) is best-known as one of the grandmasters of science fiction. He had just started to establish himself in the genre when the science fiction market to which he was selling temporarily collapsed. He turned to other genres such as men’s adventure fiction, sleaze fiction and crime fiction and became a very prolific and very successful writer of pulp paperback originals. The Hot Beat was written (using the pseudonym Stan Vincent) for a short-lived paperback original publisher, Magnet Books.

Bob McKay is a band leader. He’s young and he has the world at his feet. He’s the toast of the town. And then he hits the skids. He’s been pushing himself too hard and when you make a living in nightclubs it’s all too easy to reach for the bottle when you need to relax. McKay reaches for that bottle way too often. He loses everything, including his girl Terry. Terry is a starlet whose career has so far gone nowhere but she’s a swell kid. She just can’t put up with McKay’s drunken unpredictability any longer.

McKay has reached rock bottom. And then things get worse. He’s arrested for the murder of B-girl Doris Blair. He knew Doris but he didn’t kill her. The cops, who in this novel behave like moronic thugs, don’t care. He’s a convenient suspect. They’re happy to railroad him all the way to the gas chamber. They intimidate witnesses into identifying McKay.

Newspaper columnist Ned Lowry covers the seamy side of life but he can’t stand thuggish cops and he can’t ignore such an obvious miscarriage of justice. He gets a hotshot lawyer interested in the case.

And along with Terry, the aforementioned starlet, he starts playing amateur private detective. They really are amateurs but they’re motivated and gradually they start to see a picture emerging that is sharply at variance with the cops’ version.

Silverberg’s knack for pulp fiction is much in evidence - an understanding of the necessity for breakneck pacing, the ability to sketch characters quickly and economically, the ability to capture the right atmosphere of seedy corrupted glamour. He also makes sure to have all the right ingredients - some action, some romance, some suspense, some sleaze.

McKay is a typical noir fiction loser. He’s not such a terrible guy but he has a genius for self-destruction. In most novels of this type he would have to set out to prove his own innocence. In this story McKay does practically nothing. The focus is entirely on the two amateur sleuths.

Terry is the most interesting character here. She’s no Girl Scout, she knows that making it in Hollywood will mean doing a certain amount of wallowing in the gutter, but she has limits. She has tried very hard not to be corrupted. She’s not sure how well she has succeeded. She hasn’t learned to hate herself but she’s also aware that at times she has behaved badly. She’s not a femme fatale, but also not quite a stock-standard Good Girl. To achieve stardom she is prepared to sleep her way to the top but at least she feels bad about it. She’s not a villainess in need of redemption, but she does need to take stock of her life.

There’s a solid enough mystery plot here and I always enjoy mysteries or thrillers with a seedy-glamorous showbiz background.

Hard Case Crime rescued this novel from obscurity in 2022. One thing I have to say about Hard Case Crime - they’re one of the very very few modern publishers who understand the importance of great stylish sexy book covers. The original painting by Claudia Caranfa for the cover of this one gets the tone just right.

To make this paperback edition even more enticing it also includes three late 50s crime short stories by Silverberg.

Drunken Sailor is rather a nothing story about a naïve young sailor on shore leave. It appeared in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in October 1958.

Naked in the Lake was published in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in February 1958. A married man decides it’s time to get rid of his inconvenient mistress but there are some nasty surprises in store for him. It’s an OK story.

Jailbait Girl appeared in Guilty Detective Story Magazine in September 1959. Now this is a terrific little story about a con artist and it has a delicious sting in the tail.

Having now read a couple of Silverberg’s noir novels I’m inclined to think that this genre was not quite his forte. He was better suited to sleaze fiction since he was good at dealing with human relationships and human motivations. He was one of the very best sleaze fiction writers. He doesn’t quite have the gift of a making a more straightforward crime novel come to life. The Hot Beat is still worth a look.

The inclusion of the three short stories, and especially Jailbait Girl, is enough to bump this Hard Case Crime paperback up into the recommended category.

Robert Silverberg's Killer

Killer is a 1965 sleaze/noir novel by Robert Silverberg which has been reissued by Stark House in their Black Gat Books imprint. In the 50s and 60s there were a lot of novels, most of them paperback originals, that straddled the worlds of sleaze fiction and noir fiction. Some were noir with a side order of sleaze. Some were sleaze with a side order of noir. Killer definitely falls into the latter category.

The fact that the novel was originally called Passion Killer and written under the pseudonym Don Elliott (which Silverberg used for his prolific output of sleaze fiction) and that it was published by Corinth Books tends to support this assumption. It was clearly aimed at the sleaze fiction market.

A rich middle-aged man, Howard Gorman, wants his wife killed. He will then marry his much younger and very hot mistress Marie. He hires hitman Lee Floyd to do the job. It should be a straightforward hit but things get complicated. For one thing Marie is having an affair with her friend Dolores. Lee Floyd picks up a girl. There’s a private eye mixed up somewhere in here as well.

You might think there’d be potential here for double-crosses and you’d be right. You might also think there’d be potential here for various emotional and sexual betrayals and again you’d be correct.

Marie certainly doesn’t love Howard but he’s rich and the idea of marrying money appeals to her. Marie likes money. Of course she enjoys her bedroom romps with her gal pal Dolores too much to have any intention of remaining faithful to Howard.

Most of the novel consists of endless sexual encounters. You have to admire Marie’s stamina. Her sexual appetites are prodigious. Lee Floyd has plenty of energy in the bedroom as well. And Dolores is no slouch either. The sex scenes are lengthy but not at all graphic (in fact they’re a bit tame by 1965 standards).

This doesn’t leave much space for the noir plot. There is definitely a noir plot here. It’s not wildly original and it’s not overly complex but it is there.

The major weakness is Lee Floyd. Silverberg does a fine job letting us know what kind of man he is and what makes him tick. Then suddenly halfway though the novel Floyd starts doing things that are totally and wildly out of character, for no good reason. It doesn’t ring true. Given that Lee Floyd is more or less the noir protagonist here that’s a real problem.

You do have to keep in mind that Silverberg churned these sleaze novels out astonishingly quickly. If you wanted to make money from this sort of writing you needed to be prolific. Silverberg was extremely prolific and he made a very comfortable living from his sleaze novels. Given that this novel would have been written very very quickly it’s no surprise that it feels a bit like a first draft. Essentially it is a first draft. You sit down at your typewriter and write and once you’re finished you put the manuscript in an envelope and post it off. You then wait for your cheque to arrive. You don’t bother revising. You won’t get paid any extra if you spend time polishing and revising.

There is for example the subplot involving the private detective. It just doesn’t go anywhere or serve any purpose but I guess Silverberg figured that there should be a private detective in the story.

There are so many sex scenes that the crime plot never has the chance to develop much momentum or sense of urgency.

On the plus side the novel has a fairly decent femme fatale. It also has a scuzzy cynical vibe. All of the characters are worthless human beings. They’re right at home in the noir universe. There’s the right atmosphere of desperation and sordidness. There is just enough here to indicate that, had he really put his mind to it, Silverberg could have written a fine noir novel.

Sadly Killer just isn’t all that good. As noir it doesn’t quite make it although it has a few good moments. As sleaze fiction it’s OK but Silverberg wrote much better sleaze novels, such as his excellent 1959 Gang Girl. Killer is maybe worth a look but don’t set your expectations too high.

Robert Silverberg's Cosmic Kill

Robert Silverberg wrote Cosmic Kill for the April 1957 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. He had been given two days to write the novella and with the aid of handfuls of benzedrine tablets he made the deadline.

Lon Archman has been given a top-secret (and entirely illegal) mission by Earth’s Universal Intelligence Agency. He has to kill Darrien. Darrien is a brilliant renegade Earth scientist who has created a vast and powerful criminal empire on Mars.

In a seedy space bar on Mars Lon sees an opportunity. A blue-shelled Mercurian has just bought a beautiful near-naked human slave girl from two drunken black-tailed Venusians. The Mercurian, named Hendrin, intends to offer the girl as a gift to Darrien. Hendrin has his own sinister reasons to wanting to get close to Darrien and the slave girl, Elissa, is the means by which he intends to achieve that objective. Lon Archman quickly forms a plan by which he will use the girl to achieve his objective. He also hopes he’ll eventually be able to free her. Lon doesn’t like seeing Earth girls sold as slaves.

Getting into Darrien’s palace is just the first step. Even if he finds himself in Darrien’s presence he can’t be sure it will really be Darrien. The renegade scientist has created three robots in his own image. There is no way to tell the real Darrien from the robots. The only person who can do that is Darrien’s mistress Meryola.

Meryola isn’t too happy about Darrien’s pretty new slave girl. Meryola is a very jealous woman. She has already decided to have Elissa executed, on the grounds that the girl is just too pretty. Meryola does not tolerate rivals. Both Lon Archman and Hendrin have devised plans in which both Meryola and Elissa will play parts, not necessarily willingly and not necessarily with any understanding of the ways in which they will be manipulated.

Lon Archman and Hendrin might be able to work together but they cannot trust each other. Hendrin has his own agenda. He is working for the ruler of Mercury who wants Darrien’s scientific secrets. Once those secrets have been obtained he wants Darrien dead.

Neither of then can trust Meryola.

Lon, Hendrin and Elissa all find themselves in Darrien’s dungeon. Plenty of narrow escapes and mayhem follow. And lots of temporary alliances are formed, all practically certain to lead to double-crosses.

Lon Archman is a ruthless hero. He is an assassin and he’s not overly worried about leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. He really does hope to save Elissa but saving himself will be difficult enough. Assassinating Darrien is the priority and the Universal Intelligence Agency doesn’t care what he has to do to achieve that and they don’t care if he comes back alive. You might think that the Universal Intelligence Agency sounds a little bit like the Central Intelligence Agency, and you’d probably be right.

Armchair Fiction have published Cosmic Kill in one of their two-novel paperback editions, paired with John W. Campbell’s Beyond the End of Space. Silverberg provides a brief introduction to Cosmic Kill. He has a very refreshing attitude towards his early work. In the late 50s and early 60s his output was enormous. He wrote sleaze fiction, crime and men’s adventure fiction as well as pulp science fiction, all churned out at breakneck pace. He thoroughly enjoyed that early part of his career, he’s quite unembarrassed by those early stories and in fact has a certain fondness for them. He considers Cosmic Kill to be pulpy fun and he’s right.

As he explains in his introduction by 1957 everybody knew that the idea that the other planets in the solar system were inhabited was scientific nonsense but Cosmic Kill was supposed to be a sequel of sorts to a 1951 novella by Paul W. Fairman and that novella included Martian, Mercurians, Venusians and Plutonians so Cosmic Kill had to have those things as well.

Cosmic Kill is an enjoyable little science fiction action potboiler. It’s very pulpy but it’s supposed to be. Silverberg knew what his editor wanted - fast-paced action with lots of exotic aliens and robots plus naked slave girls. That’s what Silverberg provides and he does it with plenty of energy and the results are satisfying. Recommended.

Robert Silverberg's Lust Queen (AKA The Decadent)

Lust Queen is a 1961 sleaze novel by Robert Silverberg. It has been reprinted by Stark House in a two-novel paperback edition, paired with a slightly later Silverberg sleaze effort, Lust Victim.

Some background is needed to explain how one of the most revered names in science fiction came to be writing sleaze novels.

In the late 50s Silverberg was already attracting notice as an upcoming science fiction writer and then the bottom suddenly (although temporarily) dropped out of the science fiction market. Most of the magazines that published science fiction stories went bust and at that time the market for science fiction novels in hardback and paperback was extremely small. Unless you were one of the big names it became very difficult to earn a living writing science fiction. Silverberg had been making a very decent living and the prospect of giving up a comfortable lifestyle held no appeal to him.

There was however a thriving market for paperback original sleaze novels. That market was about to experience a boom. Like a number of other writers who later became famous and respected genre fiction writers Silverberg jumped on the bandwagon. And became quite rich as a result. To succeed as a sleaze writer you needed to be able to write quickly. Silverberg could write very quickly indeed. He could write a novel in six days. In the space of five years he wrote 150 sleaze novels under a variety of pseudonyms.

Lust Queen was originally published in 1961, under the pseudonym Don Elliott. It was reprinted in 1974, this time with the title The Decadent. The version reprinted by Stark House would seem to be the 1974 version which appears to have included quite a few revisions. Dates have been changed to give the impression that the events take place in the early 70s. There’s a reference to Kennedy Airport. The name of the airport was not changed to Kennedy Airport until 1963. A couple of four-letter words (absolutely verboten in 1961) have been added to try to give it a 70s feel. The overall feel of the book is however pure early 60s sleaze, and that’s what gives it its appeal.

The story concerns a writer, Joey Baldwin (he’s the narrator of the novel). He’s making a reasonable living writing in various genres and he’s just finishing up a detective novel. He’s in need of extra money, what with his impending divorce. When he’s offered a great deal of money to ghost-write the autobiography of faded movie star Mona Thorne he jumps at the chance. He has zero interest in the star in question but he’s very interested in the money on offer. And he has to admit that Mona Thorne’s life story is bestseller material. Alcoholism, multiple marriages, adultery, drug addiction, nymphomania - Mona has covered all the bases. Joey signs on the dotted line.

It will mean leaving New York and moving to LA for a couple of months. Joey doesn’t want to leave his fiancée Lisa but a curious facet of the deal is that he’s not allowed to bring his fiancée with him.

Joey arrives in LA to find out that the deal is not quite what he expected. He hadn’t realised that he’d be living in Mona’s house for the two months while the book is being written. He also hadn’t realised that sharing a bed with Mona would be part of the deal. He’s not sure if he’s being employed as a ghost-writer or a gigolo. At first he’s inclined to pack his bags and return to New York but then he changes his mind. The fact that Mona is really hot stuff in bed might perhaps contribute to his decision. And then there’s the money.

He slowly realises that this book is likely to make him a very great deal of money. He figures he can keep the situation under control. Keeping any situation under control when Mona Thorne is involved is however quite a challenge. He’s not sure exactly what it is that she wants from him. He will eventually find out.

Joey Baldwin is quite an interesting protagonist. He isn’t entirely unethical but his ethics are very flexible. He isn’t immoral. Sure he cheats on Lisa with Mona but at least he feels bad about it every time he has sex with Mona. Then he has sex with her again. He’s not entirely a weak-willed person but he has a bit of a tendency to go with the flow. He does have principles but he doesn’t stick to them very consistently. He’s easy-going. He’s cynical, but not so cynical that he ever totally loses our sympathy. He’s a very flawed hero but he’s not such a bad guy.

And living in Hollywood he finds that his ethical standards are becoming more and more flexible. He soon abandons any idea of making the book even marginally truthful. He’s a realist. The reading public doesn’t want truthful books. They want books that make them feel good about themselves.

I don’t think the sex scenes were tampered with at all in the 1974 revision. They’re very much in the mode of 1961 sleaze fiction, and they’re very much in the mode of sex scenes in Silverberg’s other sleaze novels of that period. In other words they’re very tame by 1970s standards. We know what people are doing together in bed but we don’t have it described to us in clinical detail. This is the softest of softcore erotica.

You may have noticed that the two women in the story are called Mona and Lisa. As in, Mona Lisa. They are in many ways mirror images. Lisa is blonde and she’s uncomplicated. She loves sex but she loves it in a healthy kind of way. Lisa also loves in a straightforward healthy kind of way. Mona is a brunette and she’s very complicated and manipulative and there’s nothing remotely healthy about her approach to either sex or love. It’s not quite a good girl/bad girl dichotomy (Silverberg is not a writer who would be as crude or obvious as that). Mona isn’t truly a bad girl. She’s just seriously messed up. She’s dangerous because she’s messed up, not because she’s evil.

Like a lot of the writers who turned out sleaze novels in the late 50s and early 60s Silverberg is giving us a novel about human relationships and ethical choices, with some mildly risqué sex added in order to make it sell. You can quite reasonably judge this book as a straightforward novel rather than as a work of erotica. And it’s a pretty good little story. Silverberg was churning these books out at a furious pace but the guy was a real writer and a good one and he couldn’t avoid making these novels a lot better than they needed to be in strictly commercial terms.

Lust Queen is pretty good stuff. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Silverberg’s other sleaze novels, Gang Girl and Sex Bum, both of which have distinct noirish tinges. Both are worth reading, with Gang Girl being particularly good.

Robert Silverberg's Meg

Meg is one of the sleaze novels written by Robert Silverberg in the late 50s and early 60s, before he went on to become one of the greats of the science fiction genre. Meg is one of the books he wrote using the pseudonym Loren Beauchamp. It was published in 1960.

This is another tale of the horrors that lie in wait for small-town girls who try to make it in Hollywood.

Meg lives in a very small town in Idaho. She is twenty when she loses her virginity. She has a sudden glimpse of her future. Her boyfriend Jack is going to be a potato farmer. She is going to be a potato farmer’s wife. By the time she’s thirty she’ll have a tribe of kids underfoot. This is not a future that appeals to Meg. Meg is going to be a movie star.

Meg decides it would be smarter to go to New York first, rather than Hollywood. Once she has established herself in show business in New York the Hollywood studio will come courting her. So she goes to New York and she finds an agent, Max Bonaventura. Max knows immediately that Meg is going to be a star. She has no talent but she has a stunning body and she has the right attitude. Meg is prepared to do anything, anything at all, to become a star. Max knows that that is the magic ingredient that separates those who make in in Hollywood from the losers.

The first step is for Meg to win a minor beauty contest. Then she will go on to win the Miss Galaxy crown. That will win her a screen test. Winning the contests will be no problem. They’ll be rigged. Max knows how these things work.

The screen test is a disaster but Meg gets a contract anyway. Max has created so much publicity for her that the studio doesn’t care if she can’t act.

Meg’s rise is rapid. Before she’s twenty-two she is the new Queen of Hollywood.

But is she happy? No, she isn’t. 

And this is the major weakness of the novel. We know that Meg wants success at any price. Max explained to her just how sleazy her road to the top was going to be, and how many sleazy guys she’d have to sleep with. Meg wasn’t worried at all. But now suddenly she doesn’t care about success. Certainly her experience in Hollywood have been humiliating, but she knew she’d have to humiliate herself and whore herself to become a star. Her experiences haven’t really been traumatic enough to explain her sudden change of heart. Her disillusionment sets in too early to be totally convincing.

A couple of years pass and now we can see that she really does have reason to be disillusioned. It’s not so much the things that she’s had to do to reach the top. The disillusionment comes from the fact that she can’t find love. She can find sex. She can have as much sex as she wants, and she has a great deal of it. But she always has the feeling that the men who bed her are doing so for the thrill of sleeping with a famous movie star. She fears she’ll never find a man who loves her for herself. It’s not that she’s grown tired of the money. It’s just that she’d like to have love as well.

If you enjoy exposés of the seamy side of Hollywood with lots of sleaze then you’ll find plenty to enjoy here. The sex is not the least bit explicit but there’s a lot of it and the atmosphere as sleazy as your heart could desire. This is a book that really goes for Hollywood’s jugular.

You never know how these sleaze noels will end, whether the bad girl will get punished or find salvation. I’m not going to tell you how this one ends, but I found the ending quite satisfying.

We do get some insight into Meg’s inner world. However the most memorable character in the novel is Max Bonaventura. Max has zero ethics. He is entirely corrupt. He will do anything to boost Meg’s career, and he gets twenty-five percent of everything she makes. He comes up with some breathtakingly cynical publicity stunts. And yet, in spite of all that, he’s a really nice guy. He’s likeable because he’s so open about his cynicism and his unscrupulousness. He never tries to cheat Meg, he never tries to hurt her, he never tries to sleep with her. He never made her any promises he didn’t keep. He told her he’d make her a star and he told her the methods he’d use and he told the truth on both counts. You just can’t help liking the guy.

Meg is a fun novel about the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood and it’s a novel about a woman’s search for love and for some reason to keep going. It works quite well on both levels. Recommended.

This novel has been re-issued by Stark House Noir in a two-novel paperback paired with Silverberg’s slightly earlier novel Connie. Meg’s claims to being noir fiction are a bit thin, but I guess it has some slight noir flavour.

Lust Victim (AKA No Lust Tonight)

Lust Victim (AKA No Lust Tonight) was written by Robert Silverberg under the name Don Elliott and was published in 1962. It’s one of the countless sleaze novels churned out by Silverberg at a time when the bottom had temporarily fallen out of the science fiction market.

These sleaze novels were interesting in that on the one hand they were written to a rigid formula and on the other hand they offered writers almost complete artistic freedom. The formula was that the novels had to be short and had to contain frequent sexual encounters. Apart from that a writer could do pretty much what he wanted. In this case Silverberg chose to write a marital melodrama but with a crime and a mystery of sorts to add spice. And since he happened to be a very fine writer Silverberg managed to write a reasonably interesting story.

Dave Lamson has everything a man could want. He’s in his mid thirties. He runs a very successful electronics company. He has plenty of money. He lives in a very comfortable house in a very comfortable neighbourhood. His wife Moira is not just a loving faithful wife. She’s also extremely hot and they have a great mutually satisfying sex life.

And then it all comes crashing down. A burglar breaks into the house, ties up Dave and rapes Moira in front of him.

Dave is a decent guy and a good husband but his life has been utterly conventional, and his outlook is utterly conventional. He cannot deal with the fact that everything has now changed. He thinks they should just forget the unpleasant incident and everything will go back to normal. It’s not that he’s insensitive. He knows it will take Moira a while to get over the trauma. He’s prepared to give her all the time she needs. If it takes her a couple of days, maybe even three days, to get over her trauma he’ll be patient.

But when things are not back to normal after a few days Dave gets frustrated. Moira doesn’t want to have sex and more. Dave thinks this is a crazy silly over-reaction to such a minor incident. But after five days he can’t wait any longer. He makes it clear that he expects sex. Moira agrees, but she’s unresponsive. This is just too much for Dave. It’s not enjoyable having sex with her if she just lies there passively.

Dave is pretty disturbed by all this and he he now finds himself pretty disturbed by his tall blonde very pretty secretary Ruthie. He’d never really noticed her breasts before but now he notices them all the time. And he notices the interesting things her posterior does when she walks. Pretty soon they’re having an affair. Dave figures he’s doing Moira a favour. This way he won’t keep pressuring Moira for sex, and that will give Moira some time to get herself back to normal. Dave has quite a way of rationalising things.

Dave persuades Moira to see a psychoanalyst and the analyst has an intriguing theory. It has to do with the fact that the rapist looked a lot like Dave. Maybe it would be helpful to track down this rapist. Dave starts playing amateur detective, and his investigations invariably lead him into bed with various women. It’s one way of following up leads. Eventually, after bedding a lot of women, he finds the lead he’s looking for but whether it will lead to the result he hoped for is another matter.

There’s a lot of sex in this book. By sleaze fiction standards it’s reasonably explicit. It’s all described in terms of euphemisms but you have no doubt who is doing what to whom. The fact that sleaze authors had to avoid the cruder sexual terms makes the sex seem rather sexier.

Dave is an odd character. On the surface he seems to be presented as a pretty good guy but I can’t help feeling that Silverberg is being heavily ironic at times, especially with the amusing rationalisations Dave comes up with for jumping into bed with every female he encounters. The book doesn’t seem quite sure whether it approves of the Sexual Revolution or not. That Sexual Revolution was just starting to take off in 1962. Of course at that time authors (and publishers) had to tread carefully. They couldn’t come out in favour of promiscuity, but Silverberg isn’t anxious to condemn promiscuity either. One of the nicest characters in the book is a whore.

You never know with these sleaze novels whether they’ll turn out to be sleazy noir fiction with downbeat endings, or sleazy romantic fiction with upbeat endings, or turn out to be just unclassifiable so you could get any kind of ending. I’m not going to give you any hints as to which category this one occupies.

Lust Victim is entertaining (Silverberg could never write dull prose even if he tried), it's often amusingly ironic and I rather liked it. Recommended.

Stark House have reprinted this title in paperback, paired with another Silverberg sleaze novel, Lust Queen.

Robert Silverberg's Connie

Connie is one of the sleaze novels that science fiction grandmaster Robert Silverberg wrote in the late 50s and early 60s. This one was written under the pseudonym Loren Beauchamp and published in 1959.

Connie Barrett is an ordinary teenaged girl living in Brooklyn. She lives in what used to be a nice neighbourhood but now it’s not quite so nice.

Connie has her future all mapped out. She has a really nice boyfriend named John. They’re going steady. Eventually they will get engaged. Then will come college. And, in the fullness of time, marriage. She has already decided that they will have three children. Connie figures they’ll be able to get married in about four years time. In the meantime Connie intends to hang on to her virginity. She’s sure that John won’t mind waiting for four years to have sex with her. If he really loves her he won’t mind at all. John is at college now but Connie is confident he won’t be going out with any other girls. Why would he need when he only has four years to wait?

Then one night Connie heads off to post a letter. And gets gang-raped on her way home.

That changes everything. All that trouble she want to to preserve her virginity now seems to have been rather silly.

Connie knows that from now on she will be That Unfortunate Girl and everybody will feel sorry for her. She doesn’t like that idea.

She gets packed off to her grandparents’ home in Arizona to rest and recover. She does a lot of thinking. Marriage to John now seems like an unreal prospect. And in fact a few days later she gets a letter from him. John now thinks that maybe they should stop going steady for a while. And maybe marriage isn’t such a great idea. Connie sends him a reply, telling him that he can do whatever he likes. She doesn’t care any more.

Connie is going to have to make a new life for herself. She wants to make that new life as far away as possible from everybody she knows. San Francisco sounds interesting.

She will have to find a job, but Connie has that all figured out. Connie likes to have her future mapped out. She will spend five or six years as a high-class call-girl, then retire and maybe become a rich man’s mistress.

She doesn’t mind the idea of being a call-girl. After all, it’s too late now to worry about her virginity. And Connie has discovered that she rather enjoys sex.

Connie is very successful as a prostitute but then she makes a mistake. She falls in love.

This is a book that deals with what were hot-button issues at the time, and are still hot-button issues today. The subject of prostitution upsets people just as much today as it did in 1959. Especially if the author decides to write about a prostitute who is actually a very sympathetic character.

The core of the book is not the rape, but the responses of various characters to it. John’s reaction, deciding he no longer wants to marry Connie, would probably have been common enough in an era obsessed with puritanism. Her parents’ response, their total inability to deal with the situation, would probably have also been common.

What’s more interesting is Connie’s response. She decides that everything in her life is now changed, but she is determined to create a new life for herself. She is adamant that that means starting afresh in a new city. Connie is a practical girl. She has absolutely no desire to be poor. Becoming a call-girl seems to her to be an entirely rational sensible decision. Looking at things in a totally hard-headed way it has to be admitted that her decision makes sense. It makes sense if you can cope with it emotionally, and Connie is confident that she can. And she does. It’s not her career as a prostitute that brings her life to a new crisis.

This is typical of sleaze novels of the era. There’s lots of sex, but none of it is even the slightest bit graphic. The sleaze factor (which was of course the selling point for these books) comes from the sexual situations rather than explicit textbook descriptions of sexual acts. The most shocking element in this novel would have been the sadomasochistic episodes (which still shock some people today).

Silverberg varied his approach to sleaze fiction somewhat. Sometimes his endings were upbeat, sometimes downbeat. Some were harder-edged than others. Some of his novels were sleazier than others, and some were more romantic.

These sleaze novels were in many cases essentially sexy romances. They dealt with love as well as sex. And this book certainly has some romance angles.

Like all Silverberg’s sleaze fiction Connie is well-written (Silverberg had mastered the art of writing very quickly but still writing well) and entertaining. Recommended.

Exotic Adventures of Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg would become one of the grand masters of science fiction but he had an interesting and colourful second career as a pulp sleaze writer. In 1958 he was making a name for himself in science fiction when the market suddenly dried up. The science fiction magazines for which he wrote creased publication. The market for paperback sci-fi was extremely small at that time. In order to survive Silverberg wrote huge numbers of sleaze novels but before that he wrote stories for men’s adventure magazines. Specifically for one called Exotic Adventures. The men’s adventure magazines were known for their glossy slick presentation but Exotic Adventures was one of the more low-rent examples. Silverberg ended up writing almost all of the content.

Exotic Adventures of Robert Silverberg, edited by Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle, contains all of Silverberg’s stories for this magazine.

A lot of these are article non-fiction articles, although one suspects that Silverberg had no time whatsoever for research so they’re probably mainly fiction.

Silverberg was one of the best writers of sleaze novels. The much shorter format in which he had to work for Exotic Adventures didn’t really suit him. Silverberg liked us to get to know what made his characters tick, and what inner demons they had to face. He just can’t do that in these very short stories.

Most of the stories hardly even qualify as fully developed short stories. They’re just vignettes, with some sleaze content.

That’s not to say that there’s no entertainment value to be found here. Some of these tales are amusing and the best of them are pleasingly outrageous. It is however a good idea not to set your expectations too high for this collection.

The men’s adventure genre that started to take off in a big way at the end of the 50s has its own disreputable shameless charm. It’s a genre that can be lots of fun.

I don’t think there’s a single story in this collection that you would get away with today. Some modern readers will be heading for the fainting couches. But if you’re a fan of the men’s adventure genre you probably know what to expect and you’ll enjoy yourself.

The Stories

The first story, Campus Hellcat, is the odd man out. It’s just a sex story with no adventure but it does have an amusing twist.

Safari of Death takes the reader to Equatorial Africa where a man discovers that while lions are dangerous women are much more dangerous.

I Was a Tangier’s Smuggler is the tale of a man’s introduction to the smuggling racket. He’s not smuggling narcotics or anything like that. He’s smuggling cigarettes, a very lucrative proposition at the time. He also has an extra item of cargo, a Moroccan girl.

In the case of Attacked by Monster Crabs the title says it all. A naked romp on a beach does indeed lead to an attack by monster crabs.

Trapped by Mau Mau Terror is a blood-drenched tale of Kenya in the days of the Mau Mau Rebellion. Lots of terror, and of course there’s time for sex as well.

Bride of the Jaguar God is better, with a nasty twist to it. A secret cult of jaguar god worshippers is discovered deep in the jungles of southern Mexico. There is a terrible price to pay for anyone who witnesses their secret rites.

Nudist Paradise on the French Riviera is an account of a visit to an island nudist camp, with some sex thrown in.

Tahiti, Lusty Island of Untamed Women, is about an American ex-serviceman who has adopted the life of a beachcomber in Tahiti. It’s a life that suits him - no work and plenty of play with a succession of willing Tahitian girls (who don’t believe in long-term commitments but do believe in free love).

Egypt’s City of Prostitutes is non-fiction (or claims to be) and the title pretty much tells you what it’s all about. It’s a shock-horror exposé.

Radiant Jade: The Chinese Mata Hari obviously concerns a Chinese lady spy who uses sex as a tool of espionage and serves whichever masters seem to her to be most advantageous. It’s a tale of sex, cruelty, torture and betrayal.

Saba, Land of Love-Starved Women takes place on an island in the Caribbean. On this island the women outnumber the men by two to one, so naturally the women are all man-hungry. They’re all available, which sounds like a paradise for men. But there are unexpected hazards for men. This is one of the best stories in the collection.

Opium Den in Vietnam is a surprisingly non-hysterical account of opium usage in Saigon. A young American finds opium to be surprisingly pleasant if used in moderation and finds to his delighted surprise that the best opium dens offer women as well.

Island of Exiled Women is amusingly outrageous. A man is shipwrecked on the island of Luanape in the Pacific. This is (so we are assured) a prison island. It’s a prison island for young women who have committed one of any number of sexual offences. There are no guards because there’s no way off the island. Just the female prisoners. Two or three hundred of them, all young and beautiful and stark naked. And since there are no men on the island all these women are incredibly man-hungry. The shipwrecked mariner thinks he’s found Paradise, until he finds out what it’s like being one man having to satisfy a couple of hundred sex-starved girls.

The Arabian Slave Girl Racket is an article about an American working for six weeks in Saudi Arabia. He is offered a slave girl and it’s an attractive deal. He can buy her for $2,000 and the slave trader will buy her back in six weeks for $1,500. She’s expensive because she’s a virgin but the slave-trader assumes that when he buys her back she will be minus her virginity. The American of course knows that slavery is wrong but the girl is so beautiful and surely there’s no harm in it if he refrains from touching her. The trouble is that the girl is very upset when he doesn’t want to sleep with her and he can’t stand seeing a pretty girl upset, so the upshot is that after six weeks her virginity is indeed merely a dim memory.

In A Temporary Husband in Ladakh an American finds himself in a remote Himalayan country in which all the women have at least three husbands. And sometimes they’re happy to have a fourth husband on a temporary basis.

Wolf Children of India is a rather grim article about children raised by wolves.

I Watched the Secret Sex Rites of Uganda is pretty self-explanatory and doesn’t have any real twists to keep things interesting.

A Drinking Man’s Guide to Europe is just an article about where to buy cheap booze.

In Love Hungry Girls of Japan two Americans are kept as sex slaves by the ama, the Japanese naked girl pearl divers. It’s not as much fun as they’d expected it to be.

Juaraz, Sin City Across the Border article is just an article about sex and sin across the border.

I Escaped from the Soviet Slave Camp is a nothing story about a political prisoner in Hungary.

Final Thoughts

A wildly uneven collection of oddities, but fun if you’re in the mood for the literary equivalent of a beer and popcorn movie.

Robert Silverberg's Sex Bum

Robert Silverberg is one of the revered grand masters of American science fiction but his science fiction output is dwarfed by the immense numbers of erotic novels he wrote in the late 50s and early 60s. Sex Bum, published in 1963, is one of the sleaze fiction titles he wrote under the name Don Elliott. This is sleaze, but it's noir fiction as well.

Johnny Price is nineteen and he’s big and muscly although perhaps not too bright. He is however sly and cunning. And he’s ambitious. He makes fifty dollars a week as a delivery boy for a grocery store but he intends to become a big shot. He wants to work for the Syndicate. That way he’ll get to drive around in a Cadillac with tail fins and have lots of sophisticated big city women throwing themselves at him. He figures his chance has come when he manages to help out a couple of mobsters.

They take him on as a chauffeur. He moves out of his aunt’s house and dumps his girlfriend Beth. The job with the mobsters is a live-in job.

They offer him ninety a week plus fringe benefits. He gets a taste of the fringe benefits right away - he gets a free tumble with Marilyn, a gorgeous and very expensive high-class whore.

He manages to impress Marilyn. One thing Johnny is good at is sex.

Johnny is a young man rising fast in the Syndicate, and he intends to rise even faster. He has money in the bank and a fancy car. And he has women. They’re high-class prostitutes, and they’re the types of women Johnny likes. They’re very imaginative in bed. There are two in particular, Ellie and Marie. Marie is Mike Rizzo’s girl. Mike Rizzo is a Syndicate king pin. Sleeping with Mike Rizzo’s girl is a bit foolish but Johnny is supremely confident that he can get away with anything, and Marie assures him there’s no risk.

Johnny works for Lurton and Kloss, who run the Syndicate’s operation in his area. He’s their protégé. To Johnny they’re an obstacle. He figures he can handle their job. He just has to find a way to get them out of the way and he has a plan to do just that.

This is a noir gangster novel but with lots and lots and lots of sex. As a noir novel it works quite well, with a good plot twist at the end and plenty of hardboiled atmosphere. These are ruthless gangsters and the incident with the state senator’s daughter has some real shock value.

But mostly it’s about the sex. Johnny is almost as obsessed by sex as he is with climbing to the top. And the girls, especially Ellie and Marie, provide him with every sexual thrill a nineteen-year-old could imagine and some he hadn’t even thought of. By 1963 standards the sex is described slightly more graphically than you might expect.

Johnny is interesting as a noir protagonist because of his extraordinary self-centredness. He has zero ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes. He gives no thought at all to the effect his actions might have on others. In his line of work this is a dangerous character flaw because it leads him to assume that other people will react the way he wants them to. And he has no capacity for reading other people’s emotions. If you want to survive in his industry you need to be keenly aware of how your actions affect others. You need to be able to anticipate when your actions are going to cause jealousy or bitterness or resentment because in the world of organised crime other people’s jealousy or bitterness or resentment can get you killed. If you want to manipulate people successfully you need to at least have some vague understanding of the concept of loyalty, so that you can at least pretend to be loyal to people. Johnny lacks these abilities.

He also makes assumptions about the women in his life. If Ellie and Marie tell him he’s terrific in bed he assumes that they will therefore do exactly what he wants them to do. The fact that they might have their own agendas or their own ambitions doesn’t occur to him.

This is what makes the book work as a noir thriller. Johnny is such an extreme narcissist and probably a psychopath.

But it’s the sleaze that was always going to be the book’s selling point and it delivers on that count. Silverberg’s sleaze fiction was, for its time, very sleazy. If you want sex and noir Sex Bum is recommended. The effective noirness means you don’t have to be too embarrassed about enjoying it.

Silverberg’s earlier Gang Girl is even better and is highly recommended.

Robert Silverberg's Gang Girl

In 1958 there was a major convulsion in the science fiction world and most of the magazines on which writers relied to publish their stories ceased publication. This was a particular problem for younger writers. Writers like Robert Silverberg, who although only in his early twenties was already making a name for himself. Fortunately his pal Harlan Ellison came to the rescue, offering him a contract to write cheap paperback erotic novels for Nightstand Books. He’d have to write a couple of such novels a month which sounds daunting but Silverberg was sure he’d have no problems. And he was correct - in the next five years he churned out 150 sleaze paperbacks under the name Don Elliott.

Gang Girl was one of the earliest, appearing in 1959. It’s a juvenile delinquent potboiler and it’s violent and it’s sleazy. Of course by later standards it is in some ways incredibly tame. There’s a lot sex and it’s graphic enough to ensure the reader knows exactly what is going on, but the language is toned down enough to avoid any inconveniences, like being prosecuted for obscenity. In that respect it’s tame but in other ways it’s still quite startling in its depiction of the mindless brutality, the crazed obsession with sex and the sheer stupidity, boredom, viciousness and futility of New York juvenile gangs in the late ’50s. It’s a lot more open about the sex and violence than any mainstream novels or movies dealing with the subject.

Lora Menotti is sixteen and she’s the deb of the leader of the Scarlet Sinners but now her parents have moved to a new housing estate (all tower blocks) in an effort to get their daughter away from gang life. It doesn’t work. Lora immediately joins the gang in her new neighbourhood, the Cougars. But Lora has no intention of just joining the gang. She intends to run it. That means she’ll have to persuade the gang President, Whitey, to dump his current deb and make her his deb. As Whitey’s deb she’ll be number one girl in the gang, and he has no doubts that she’ll be the one calling the shots.

With her 39-inch bust and her body like a sex goddess she has no trouble getting men to do what she wants them to do. Getting Whitey to dump his current deb, Donna, isn’t going to be a challenge. There is however a minor problem. Whitey always likes to mark his debs to establish his ownership of them, which he does by carving his initials (with a lighted cigarette or a knife) into one of their breasts. Lora has no intention of letting any man carve his initials into one of her spectacular breasts. They’re going to be her meal ticket in the future (she has ambitions to be a call girl). So now her challenge is to maintain her position in the gang without submitting to such treatment.

Lora isn’t too worried. She is utterly ruthless and her mastery of the art of manipulation is something to behold.

Lora’s machinations aren’t just for the purposes of gaining advantages for herself. She is very turned on by violence - nothing gets her more excited than seeing someone being beaten up, except perhaps seeing someone killed. If the victim is subjected to humiliation that’s even better. And it’s best of all if the victim is another woman who might be a rival. Her response to what happens to Mae (one of the debs who happens to be in Lora’s way) is incredibly chilling. Not surprisingly Lora’s arrival among the Cougars triggers a great many outbreaks of violence.

While I said earlier that this book is tame by later standards that’s not really entirely true. You won’t encounter any crude terms for male or female body parts but some of the sexual violence is hair-raising to say the least (such as a truly chilling gang rape). Some of it you just wouldn’t get away with today.

Gang Girl is obviously unashamedly trash fiction. Much of its appeal comes from that. There is however a bit more to it than that. Robert Silverberg was after all a fine writer and even when consciously churning out pulp sleaze he was unable to avoid offering some insights into some of the dark corners of the human psyche, particularly relating to sex and violence. He does try to get inside Lora’s head and what he finds there is deeply unsettling. Lora is not a good girl gone bad, she’s not a victim of circumstances, she’s not a product of a broken home or of childhood trauma. Her evil comes from within. For her the gang life simply has the effect of removing the normal social inhibitions that prevent people from acting on their most primal selfish instincts. It allowed her to shed all her sexual inhibitions very early on and she’s gradually shed all her moral inhibitions.

Perhaps if she had never joined a gang she might have been a nice girl but it seems unlikely. Being selfish and manipulative seems to be an inherent part of her personality. Her prodigious sexual appetites always seem to be inherent. Even without the gangs she would probably have been trouble.

Gang Girl delivers plenty of cheap violent sleazy pulp entertainment but there’s just enough substance there that you don’t have to feel too guilty about enjoying it. OK, you might feel a little bit guilty. There’s also enough dark subject matter to almost qualify it for noir fiction status.

Highly recommended.