After promising a hiatus, I’m coming back with a bonanza. Here begins a several-part series. Just the way things work sometimes.
I’ve been sitting on a goldmine of information about Donald Westlake’s early sleaze novels, lots of it put together by paperback historian Lynn Munroe, for a couple of years now. I had planned a big series of posts about these books, but never quite had the time for a project that ambitious.
Recently, Paul Westlake has been going through his father’s bookshelves. DEW seems to have kept one copy of every edition of his books in chronological order, so, thanks to Paul’s work, we suddenly know a lot more.
Between the great information that Lynn sent to me and the gusher of great stuff that Paul is releasing, now is the time for that series of posts, although it won’t include the reviews I originally intended to feature. I’ll have to get to those later.
Lots of great writers from the late fifties and early sixties got their start writing sleaze under house names, and lots of them weren’t real proud of that. Donald Westlake was one who wasn’t, and so was Lawrence Block, co-author with Westlake on a few. Decades later, both had a change of heart and came clean about some of their early material. The right decision, I think.
Unfortunately, DEW left us before he could confess to his entire catalog of sleaze books. Thanks to the diligent work of researchers like Lynn Munroe, and the work Paul Westlake is doing with his father’s library, we can now nail down most early DEW sleaze titles. I’m confident that the ones still in question will be confirmed or denied over the next few months. And since the non-sleaze DEW books are not under dispute, getting the sleaze books nailed down should give us a complete bibliography of DEW novels.
So, at least while writing the first post, here is how I conceive the series:
- The first posts will cover sleaze books that are confirmed Westlake.
- Following that I’ll cover books that are probably Westlake, that we should get confirmation on as Paul continues his project.
- The final post or posts will be about books that people online and elsewhere have attributed to Westlake, but are either definitely not or probably not his work.
These posts will be static, but will serve as the first draft of a separate Westlake sleaze page that will be updated as new information becomes available.
I have updated my bibliography to include all confirmed titles.
Special thanks to Lynn Munroe for his hard work and great research on these titles and many others, and to Paul Westlake for his work in preserving his father’s legacy.
All right! Let’s get started! These are all 100% confirmed.
The Midwood books, part I
All My Lovers, by Alan Marshall (1959)
Pictured above. This was Donald Westlake’s first published novel. (More pics)
Backstage Love by Alan Marshall (also published as Apprentice Virgin) (1959)
The first book in the Phil Crawford trilogy. Second book published and Westlake was already writing about summer stock. He would do so many more times. (More pics)
Sally by Alan Marshall (1959)
Man Hungry by Alan Marshall (1959)
All the Girls Were Willing by Alan Marshall (also published as What Girls Will Do) (1960)
Second book in the Phil Crawford trilogy. (More pics)
More to come!
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What exactly was Westlake’s link to summer stock theater? He wrote a lot about it. We have Grofield running a theater company, one of the Dortmunder short stories involved it, and now we find out his first novel is the The Shocking Expose Of What Goes On Behind The Scenes At A Summer Stock Theater.
He spent a short time working in summer stock (described himself as a ‘spear carrier’), and his second wife was an actress he presumably met during that period. My guess is that she was the model for Mary Deegan and a fair few other of Westlake’s women. But boy, do you have to do a lot of guessing about that, since he didn’t leave us anything in the way of a memoir.
Maybe he was just a fan of good theater?
It probably says something about me that I’m more excited about this post than I am the Parker movie poster one. Nice work, Trent, Lynn and Paul; I for one am looking forward to subsequent posts. I’m also pretty excited to learn that not only is Backstage Love definitely by Westlake, but that it’s his second published novel – especially as I found a copy of it in Essex two years ago. And I’ve hopefully just secured another very early Westlake/Marshall novel, which I’ll no doubt be blogging about in due course.
But have you ever found an affordable copy of “Adios Scheherezade”? :)
Yes. I bought my pb copy for around 50 cents ten or so years ago, and my lovely HC 1st was purchased at a garage sale for $2 about 8 years ago, along with my extremely tasty copy of Block’s Ronald Rabbit Is A Dirty Old Man for the same price from the same seller! I think I paid a little more for my copy of Hal Dresner’s The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books (with the double dust jacket) at a library sale sometime in the 90’s. I consider those the trifecta of fictional memoirs about the sleaze trade, and I have them all in HC and PB just because…. Picked up my copy of Sally, as listed above, at Wondercon a year and a half ago for $3.50 in nice shape from a comic dealer who had a box of vintage pbs at his table and said he never bothered to do any research on them as they weren’t really his thing….would like to find more of his ilk!!!
Lucky you–I rarely find much Westlake at used bookstores and such, and it’s mainly stuff that’s easy to find online for low prices. I often get the feeling the collectors have swooped in before me.
Adios is a bit easier to find these days, if you’re not fussed about which edition you plump for. The Signet paperback can usually be had for not far north of $20 in the US. But you’re quite correct in that it’s rather trickier to secure an affordable first edition!
I’m not all that picky. I just want to read the damn books. I do like nice cover art, but that’s not always an option to begin with. You certainly wouldn’t want to read a sleazy sex book that didn’t have a sleazy sex cover. That just wouldn’t be right.
I’m with you, Chris, but millions might beg to differ.
Be interesting to trace the literary lineages leading from Mid-20th century smut books to today’s far more mainstream efforts–that today are mainly aimed at women. Guys mainly get their smut fix from online porn these days.
Which begs a question–who was reading all these steamy novels Mr. Westlake and his contemporaries were cranking out? The answers are not always obvious–there was a whole subgenre devoted to lesbian romances, that was aimed at both gay women and straight men.
Much as Westlake felt embarrassed–and limited–by his work in this genre, I’m guessing there are some insights into his later work to be found in them.
You have to remember back in the days these softcore books were printed, this was considered hot stuff. It was easily more available than Stag films, dirty magazines, and I guess it appealed to the perv who wanted a little literary tittilation with his smut.;-) lol
I remember seeing sleaze paperbacks in, probably, the late ’70s, in junk shops around where I grew up in south London. I wasn’t old enough to buy any, but I do recall them. But yeah, I don’t think it was just men reading this stuff, or indeed writing it: Patricia Highsmith penned a pseudonymous lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, which, while not sleaze per se, was issued as a Bantam paperback after its initial HB edition with a cover and strapline similar to those deployed by the outright sleaze publishers.
Sigh. I suppose I’d better go look at that Parker trailer now…
I owned quite a number of MIDWOOD Titles – Some of which I can’t recall
but CAN visualize, Eg.: “That Other Hunger”; “Connie” Lesbian, not Rape;
“The Sensuous Nurse”; “Sorority Sin”; “The Strange Cult”;