Sheldon Lord was a pseudonym used by Block for the many sleaze novels he wrote before finding fame as a crime writer. The book was published by Beacon Books who published a lot of sleaze fiction, but it’s not really sleaze fiction. You could call it beatnik noir.
When the subject of beatniks was approached by writers of film-makers in the late 50s or early 60s it was usually done either in a mockingly humorous way or treated as a kind of social disease. Block’s approach was much darker and much more interesting.
Even in his late 1950s and early 1960s sleaze books, churned out very quickly, it was obvious that Block was a very fine writer. It takes a while for the noirness to become evident in A Diet of Treacle but when it does it has a real kick to it.
It’s obvious that Block was not exactly an unabashed admirer of the beatnik subculture.
Shank and Joe live in a squalid apartment in Greenwich Village. Shank supports them both by selling pot. Shank is a 27-year-old Korean War vet and his experiences in that conflict left him drifting hopelessly and aimlessly. He is filled with self-hatred. He knows his lifestyle is pointless and empty but he doesn’t think he can do anything about it. Shank is much younger (about 20) and quite a bit meaner. He ran with a teenage gang for a while. He carries a switchblade and enjoys terrorising women with it.
Joe meets Anita Carbone in a coffee shop. They don’t seem likely to be compatible. Joe is Hip while Anita is strictly squaresville. They sleep together and Anita decides to move in.
Anita is both fascinated and repelled, and a bit frightened, by the beat culture. It takes her a while to become Hip. At first she’s so square she won’t even smoke pot but that soon changes.
Shank knows he has a narcotics cop after him but he thinks he can handle the situation. He is wrong of course.
Shank is just a nasty little punk although in the book’s later stages he doesn’t behave in quite the way you might be expecting.
Anita tries hard to be Hip but it never quite works. She had been a nice Italian girl destined to marry a nice Italian boy and she can quite shake off her guilt about her new sex and drugs lifestyle. She would probably have soon drifted away from the whole beatnik scene had she not started to fall in love with Joe.
Joe is the most interesting character. He thinks he’s having an existential crisis but really it’s mostly self-pity and self-loathing. His problems also stem to a large extent from a basically weak personality. He’s quite a few years older than Shank but he allows himself to be dominated by the young punk. It’s not that he’s scared of Shank. He just doesn’t like the idea of making decisions for himself.
You expect a novel about beatniks to focus heavily on coffee shops, beat poetry readings and adolescent existentialist philosophising. You expect lots of characters who think they’re poets or artists. Block however focuses on the seamy squalid miserable side of the subculture. Weak aimless people drifting through life in a drug haze.
There is a decent enough crime plot here which eventually becomes the novel’s primary focus.
As always Block writes extremely well. He had spent some time in the late 50s on the fringes of the Greenwich Village Hip subculture so his portrayal of that subculture is probably a bit more brutally accurate than the portrayals offered by most writers. It’s also mercifully free of the pretentiousness of the work of actual Beat writers.
In his Sheldon Lord books Block treats emotional complications in quite a sensitive way, something that is evident in this novel.
There is something about the ending that throws a lot of readers but I’ll let you find out about it on your own.
A Diet of Treacle is an offbeat kind of book but it works and it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.
I’ve reviewed a couple of Block’s other Sheldon Lord books, Born To Be Bad and Kept both of which I liked a great deal), as well as another early book he wrote using the pseudonym Don Holliday, Borderline (AKA Border Lust).
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