Collection of Classic Erotica Series

17-year-old Johnny Wells was a very handsome young man, and you’d have called him a babe magnet, but I’m afraid they didn’t have that phrase back in 1961. He decided to capitalize on his looks and the response they earned from women, invested in a haircut and a good wardrobe, moved out of his slum apartment and into a budget hotel, and reinvented himself as a gigolo. The life transformed him. He took up reading, became devoted to it, and educated himself. His new contacts provided him with polish and sophistication. He moved to a good hotel, put money in the bank. And then an out-of-the-blue bout of impotence left him unfit for his profession. Next up, true love—and another transformation. Before you know it he’s an advertising copywriter, a rising star on Madison Avenue. A family man. But fate’s not done dealing, and the next card he draws is down and dirty… Gigolo Johnny Wells was published by Nightstand Books in 1961, and elicited a surprising response from whoever was serving as editor at the time. (Harlan Ellison, I’ve been told, but maybe not. And, really, who cares?) Whoever it was, he loved the book and asked for more. I must have written one, but efforts to find it have failed. And, really, who cares? A note on the name: Several years later, I needed a pen name for a work described as a cross-cultural survey of comparative sex techniques. I’d by then long since forgotten having used the name Johnny Wells in this book (which Nightstand had titled “Lover”) and the name I stuck on Eros & Capricorn was John Warren Wells, a name I was to go on using on almost two dozen books of sexually-oriented nonfiction. Let me assure you that Johnny Wells and John Warren Wells are not related.

When Joyce Kendall arrives in New York, fresh out of Clifton College in Iowa, she has a job and an apartment waiting for her. The job’s as a first reader for Armageddon Publications. The apartment’s at 21 Gay Street, and the small Federal-period house is already home to a lesbian couple, Jean Fitzgerald and Terri Leigh, and an out-of-work newspaperman, Pete Galton. The relationships of these four people under one roof add up to a fast-paced story that is not only satisfying fiction but a rare window on Bohemian life in the late 1950s. A drug-fueled rent-party-turned-orgy at the apartment of one Fred Koans is just link to a world some older readers may recall. Gay Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village, runs for only a single block between Christopher Street and Waverly Place. The 1943 movie A Night to Remember portrays 13 Gay Street as the address of the building where most of the action, including a murder, occurs. In 1996, Sheryl Crow made a video on Gay Street for the song "A Change Would Do You Good." 21 Gay Street, a very early Lawrence Block novel, was originally published under the pen name Sheldon Lord. It was never reprinted after its initial publication in 1960, and this marks its first appearance in 56 years. As such, it seems an ideal choice to lead off Lawrence Block’s Collection of Classic Erotica, and the book's original cover, with a painting by the great Paul Rader, is reproduced here.

Danny Duncan drives his father’s Oldsmobile. It's a nice respectable family sedan, and April North is every bit as respectable as the car. Until he manages to get her into the back seat. Now she's no longer a good girl, but only Danny know it, and he can keep a secret, can’t he? Well, no. He tells half the town of Antrim, Ohio—the male half, and they all come sniffing around, led by Bill Piersall, driving a homemade hot rod cobbled together from spare parts and held together with spit and baling wire. She gives Bill what he wants, but he turns out to be harder to shake than a summer cold, until a Mercedes 300 SL screeches to a stop, with Craig Jeffers at the wheel. He has money and class and sophistication, and just about everything but a functioning moral compass. And, you know, things happen... April North, April North. A friend of mine thought enough of Mae West to write a book with a heroine he called June East, and I gave the compass and the calendar a further spin. Thus April North, and the name does have a certain lilt to it, doesn’t it? Beacon Books thought so, evidently; this was Sheldon Lord’s first book for them, and they liked the title enough to keep it, and the reading public liked the book enough to spark a second and third printing. None of this did much for the author, who got a flat fee of $600 for the book. Or maybe it was $750. It’s hard to remember, after all these years… This ebook edition of April North includes as a bonus the first chapter of the next volume in the Collection of Classic Erotica, CARLA.

I'd no sooner finished CARLA, my first book for Midwood Tower, than Harry Shorten asked for another. I'd just returned to Antioch College, where after two years as an undistinguished student I'd dropped out for a year to hang on to a summer job at Scott Meredith's literary agency and bucket shop. It was wonderful training, but after a year there I decided I should go back to school, where I had a chance to assume the editorship of the school newspaper. So there I was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taking a batch of English courses, and I had a publisher who wanted me to write a book. What'll it be, Larry—a paper on Tobias Smollett and the Great Chain of Being, or 50,000 words of soul-searching and sex for Harry Shorten? 50,000 words for which I'd be paid $600? No contest, really. The story concern a has-been writer trying to get back in the game, and all these years later I find it interesting that this young wannabe was already picturing himself on the way down and out. A fellow named Craig said some nice things in his review, so I'll excerpt it here: "The protagonist Dan Larkin is an aspiring author, like Block himself, and it's downright eerie how many aspects of Dan's fictional life would end up paralleling the arc of Block's own life over the next 25 years: the progression from obscure pulp writer to eventual best-seller stardom, the women, the binge drinking, and the eventual spiral into alcoholism. . . "There are flashes of some really good writing. The narrator's voice resembles shades of Matt Scudde at times. There is a very funny chapter detailing a ten-day drinking binge that presages passages in After the First Death and When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes. There's a memorable scene of frank and unexpected violence during an encounter with an older woman. Above all, the author's young-eyed enthusiasm for the publishing industry and the life of being a professional writer shines through despite an affected veneer of world-weariness." My guess is that some of the writing stuff is interesting. Interesting, too, is the title—which was not my idea, in case you were wondering. I have no idea what title I hung on it, but Harry or one of his elves went for A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE. Meanwhile, my very first novel, a sensitive lesbian coming-of-age effort which I'd called SHADOWS, was in the process of being accepted over at Fawcett Books for their Crest imprint. (They were the first publisher to see it, and in fact had it in hand before I wrote the opening sentence of CARLA, but Harry could commission two books and publish them both in less time than Fawcett could read a manuscript and reach a decision.) And when they did say yes to it, and when I'd revised it to their satisfaction, they changed my pen name (from Rhoda Moore to Lesley Evans, for reasons no one ever explained) and my title from SHADOWS to STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF LOVE. A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE and STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF LOVE? Really? I don't think I've ever used the word "strange" in a title since, and doubt I ever shall. Unless, of course, I were to write a politically incorrect novel of a young gay man's coming out, but I don't think so. Besides, STRANGE FRUIT only works if you can get Billie Holiday to sing it. The cover is by Rudy Nappi (1923-2015), who was for 20 years the principal cover artist for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. The rumor that his cover for A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE was adapted from a rejected Nancy Drew cover strikes me, I have to say, as fanciful. But what do I know? This ebook of A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE includes as a bonus the opening chapter of Book #7 in the Collection of Classic Erotica, CAMPUS TRAMP.

Sheldon Lord began his career with CARLA (#5 in the Collection of Classic Erotica),published by Harry Shorten's Midwood Books in 1958. Just about a year later he wrote CAMPUS TRAMP (CCL #7) for William Hamling's Nightstand Books, for whom he'd morphed into Andrew Shaw. And young Mr. Lord's first book for yet a third publisher, Beacon, was APRIL NORTH (CCL #4). Each publisher wanted more from the guy. Beacon's request was remarkably specific. They had a title in mind—COMMUNITY OF WOMEN—and a theme. Their notion was that no end of interesting and attractive couples lived in the suburbs, and five mornings a week virtually all of the husbands rode into Manhattan on the train, while their wives remained to do presumably wifely things at home. So during daytime hours, Monday through Friday, all of these wives constituted a…Community of Women. Which would make it a hotbed of, um, hot stuff. Well, it was an okay premise. I remember the occasion when it was delivered to me. I was in Buffalo, my ancestral home, on a brief visit. My agent called and recounted what Beacon had asked for. (That agent believed in keeping writers and publishers far apart. I did meet Harry Shorten once, at Harry's insistence, but never had any direct contact with anyone at Nightstand or Beacon.) "They need this as soon as possible," he added. I fell for this, of course. I always did. About a year earlier the same agent told me that Monarch Books had an unfinished novel, the first chapters and outline of which had been written by William Ard, who'd died at what even then seemed like an impossibly young age. So my job was to complete the book, which would put a few dollars in my pocket and a few more in the near-empty purse of Ard's widow. "And they need it right away…" Well, the hell they did. But I bought the notion, moved into a hotel on the corner of Broadway and 69th. I went there every morning and went home every night, and i finished that awful book. Are might have made something of it, he was a pretty good writer, but all I can say for myself is the book got written, and published. And it's not as though Monarch was holding the press for it. They published it whenever they got around to it. Same with Beacon and COMMUNITY OF WOMEN. Nobody there was holding his breath. But I believed what I was told, so I wrote it right there, sitting at a card table in the front room of my mother's house on Starin Avenue. I didn't know much about life in the suburbs, or about people who went to an office every morning and came home every night, but it wasn't hard to come up with characters and find ways for them to interact with one another. If I recall correctly (and how often does that happen?) it took me four or five days. I guess Beacon liked it well enough. They wanted more, and published several more of Sheldon Lord's efforts. And then, when they wanted still more and I had neither time nor inclination to write them, my agent suggested we find writers to ghost the books under Sheldon Lord's name; I'd receive a fee off the top for my involvement, with the balance to go to the actual writers. Consequently there are more than a few Sheldon Lord titles—specifically most of the ones for Beacon—which I neither wrote nor read. And so I've spared you a summary of COMMUNITY OF WOMEN, and gotten off the hook instead by taking this little trip down Memory Lane. It is, after all, one of my favorite thoroughfares, not without potholes and sharp turns, and sometimes confused with the Boulevard of Broken Dreams… This ebook edition of COMMUNITY OF WOMEN includes as a bonus the opening chapter of the next volume in the Collection of Classic Erotica, BORN TO BE BAD.

Well, here’s what the blurb for the audiobook says: “Carla is a beautiful girl. She was plucked from the obscurity of a Polish slum to be the wife of a wealthy man—a man who seemingly gives her everything a wife could want. Except the one thing that she needs most: the pleasure she burns for while he snores beside her, the passion that only a lover can give. “But adultery seems impossible until, suddenly, it happens. When she seduces a filling-station attendant, ruining her clothes in the grease of a mechanic’s floor, she starts to spin out of control. He is the first but not the last, as Carla learns that infidelity is no work at all.” What it doesn’t say, but I will, is that Carla was my first published novel. In the summer of 1958 I came home from a vacation in Mexico to a note from my agent: Did I know what a sex novel was? Could I write one? We both knew I could write a book, I’d sent him one then under consideration at Gold Medal, and now I sat down and wrote a portion and outline of a book to be set in my hometown of Buffalo, where I was spending what remained of the summer before going back to college in the fall. Midway Tower Books, a new publisher founded by Harry Shorten of Archie Comics, lapped up Carla, so to speak. I met Harry some months later, and all he wanted to talk about was the scene in the grease put at the gas station. I guess it really worked for him. One other thing perhaps worth noting. After my portion and outline had been okayed, I completed the book. Then my agent let me know that it was a little too short. Could I please write another chapter to be inserted anywhere in the book? That was a poser, as the plot—such as it was—didn’t have a lot of leftover space in it. But I figured out what to write, and sent along a chapter with the notation that it could indeed be inserted anywhere in the book. My good buddy Don Westlake, who also labored some in the Shorten vineyard, thought this was a remarkable tour de force, but I’m not so sure. I mean, what else was I supposed to do? You can probably spot the chapter in question. As I said, Carla was my first published book, and that’s reason enough for me to be pleased by its renewed availability. It may even be reason enough for you to read it. I’d hope, though, that it’s not your very first exposure to my work. Still, if it is, there’s a bright side. From here on, they get better. And I'm delighted we've been able to reproduce the original Midwood cover, with a painting by the great Paul Rader.

When I decided to reissue my early books in the Collection of Classic Erotica, I did so without realizing what I was getting myself into. I would have to read them again. Or, as in the case of BORN TO BE BAD, I'd have to read them for the first time. I remembered just three things about the book. (1) The title, BORN TO BE BAD. (My mother, on hearing about the novel, suggested that BORN TO BE BANGED might have been a superior choice.) (2) The name of the heroine, Rita Morales. (My mother, bless her heart, thought Rita Immorales might better suit the character.) (3) The circumstances of the writing—that it was the fall of 1958, that I had just returned to Antioch College after a gap year with a literary agency, that I wrote it on an office-model Remington typewriter in the office of the Antioch College Record, where I was serving as Managing Editor prior to assuming the full-time editorship the following semester, and that between the newspaper and the books I was writing, I was devoting precious little time to my classes. When I was supposed to be reading PARADISE LOST, by John Milton, and Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett, I was instead writing BORN TO BE BAD, by Sheldon Lord. It was my third novel for Harry Shorten at Midwood Books, and you'd think I might have a clearer recollection of the circumstances of writing it, if not of the book itself. At the very least, I'd have expected to have a good number of Oh Yeah moments while reading it. "Oh yeah, I remember that character. Oh yeah, I remember that scene. Oh yeah, I remember cooking up that plot twist." Nope. It was all remarkably new to me—and I drew great comfort from the discovery that it was better than I'd expected. It's the story of the daughter of a Cuban prostitute from the slums of Miami who goes to New York, breaks into show business, moves from a Times Square hotel room to a Greenwich Village apartment, and takes aim at a life of middle-class respectability. She meets some unusual people and does some unusual things, and stuff happens. And you know what? It's not bad. Still, let's keep Rita's bildungsroman in perspective. She's no Becky Sharp, and BORN TO BE BAD's not on the same shelf as Vanity Fair. (Uh, that's be the novel, by William Makepeace Thackeray, not the magazine. But you knew that, right?) Never mind. I can but hope you enjoy BORN TO BE BAD as much in your first reading of it as I did just now, in mine. I should mention that the cover is by the great Paul Rader, who did so many outstanding covers for Midwood. The book sported a different cover in 1962, when Midwood reissued it with the title PUTA. Then, five years later, they trotted it out again with a third cover and its original title restored. So I guess they must have sold a few copies over the years, but I never got anything beyond the original $600 advance. But you know what? I'm okay with it. This ebook edition of BORN TO BE BAD includes as a bonus the opening chapter of the next volume in the Collection of Classic Erotica, COLLEGE FOR SINNERS.

Here you go—the first collaborative effort for Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall...with cover art by the great Paul Rader! When Don Westlake and I were starting out as writers, we both served an apprenticeship writing erotic novels for Harry Shorten at Midwood Books and Bill Hamling at Nightstand. (I was Sheldon Lord for Midwood and Andrew Shaw for Nightstand, while Don was Alan Marshall for both publishers. Note though that the presence of either name upon a book is no guarantee that one of us wrote it. Both of us made arrangements whereby lesser writers would submit works under our names—and I know it's hard to believe that any writers were less than we were back then, but it's true.) Well. We'd become friends in the summer of 1959, while we were living a few blocks away from each other in midtown Manhattan. I was at the Hotel Rio, on West 47th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and Don was a block south and several blocks west of me. Then I moved back to my parents' house in Buffalo, and Don and his wife and kid moved to Canarsie, and we wrote letters back and forth. And at one point we decided it might be fun to do a novel together. Not by thinking it out and talking through it and, you know, collaborating in a serious artistic manner. Our method was simpler. One of us would write a chapter, and then the other would write a chapter to come after it, and back and forth, like that, until we had a book. It worked, and by God it was fun. The first of our efforts was A GIRL CALLED HONEY, and it started when I wrote a chapter and sent it to Don. And so on, and we left each other cliffhangers and threw each other's characters off those cliffs, and we stopped when we had a book, and sent it to Henry Morrison who sent it to Harry Shorten. We put both our names on the book, our pen names that is to say, and that's how Harry published it: by Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall. And he included our dedication: "To Don Westlake and Larry Block, who introduced us." It was so much fun that we did it again. This time Don wrote the first chapter, and I wrote the second. Was I still in Buffalo, and did we still send the chapters through the mail? Damned if I can remember. I think I may have been in New York by then, living with my first wife on West 69th Street. But maybe not, and what does it matter? We finished the book, we sent it in, Midwood published it, and we shared the advance, which was probably $600 for A GIRL CALLED HONEY, but may have escalated to $750 by the time we did SO WILLING. So each of us wound up with either $300 or $375 for our trouble, and that's not a lot of money nowadays, and it wasn't a lot of money in 1960 either, but neither was it a lot of trouble. Damn, those were good days. We did a third novel in collaboration, SIN HELLCAT, and I think it may have been the best of the three—but we didn't get to put a joint byline on it. Well, we did—but someone at Nightstand felt free to change it, dropping Alan Marshall from the "by Alan Marshall and Andrew Shaw" byline we'd supplied. Much the same thing happened to CIRCLE OF SINNERS, my collaboration for Nightstand with Hal Dresner; "By Andrew Shaw and Don Holliday" is what we tagged it, and this time it was Andrew Shaw who got bumped. Never mind. Here's the book that started it all, A GIRL CALLED HONEY—and if reading the saga of Honor Mercy Bane brings you a small fraction of the fun we had writing it, you'll be back right away to scoop up SO WILLING and SIN HELLCAT. This ebook edition of A GIRL CALLED HONEY contains as a bonus the opening chapter of Book #22 in the Collection of Classic Erotica, SIN HELLCAT.

Ah, yes. The Adulterators, the thrilling account of a couple of desperadoes whose violation of the Pure Food and Drug Act brought a nauseated nation to its knees, and— Oh, it's The Adulterers? Oh. Well, never mind. The Adulterers was my second effort for Bill Hamling's Nightstand Books. Like its predecessor, Campus Tramp, its cover was the work of Harold W. McCauley. I wrote the book in the fall of 1959, and it's not hard to find its beginning in my own life a little over a year earlier. In May of 1958 I left the employ of Scott Meredith and went home to Buffalo, where I wrote my first novel, Strange are the Ways of Love. (It was published by the first pubiher to see it, and it's available now, Im happy to report. Shadows, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson.You'll love it.) Then, with my friend and Antioch roommate Steve Schwerner, I headed to Mexico to devote two months to rest and recreation before returning for another year at the college. We flew to Houston, hitchhiked to Laredo—and that last empty stretch of road from Freer to Laredo, where the book begins, bas not faded from memory. We were a long time waiting for a ride, and learned later it was because nobody wanted to pick up a hitchhiker on that stretch of highway; if you did and he put you out of the car, you'd die out there. Well, the guys who picked us up weren't worried. They were Tex-Mex gangsters in a block-long Caddy, and the car's welcome A/C was cool, but they were way cooler. The Adulterators features George and Mona Sutton, a sexually incompatible couple on their way to a Mexican divorce. But they meet a helpful guide named Ernesto, and that changes everything. Now Steve and I had met an Ernesto of our own, and he was helpful enough to steer us to some pot, but this Ernesto took George to a live sex show, and it made an impression on the fellow. And, not too long afterward, Mona drank enough rum and Coca-Cola to float a light cruiser, and wound up as the sex slave of El Tigre, who might have been a narco-trafficker if the career category had existed back then. So it's a story of evolving depravity. And it's dedicated, you'll note, to Steve and Letitia. You already know who Steve is. Letitia was a young woman at work in one of the establishments we visited, and he became quite fond of her. But, you know, those summer romances never work out…

69 Barrow Street is Lawrence Block's fourth book, first published in 1959. A multiple-viewpoint novel, it's set in a brownstone in GreenwichVillage. Considered erotic back I the day, it's tame by 21st Century standards—but remains a hard-edged look at the world of its time. Here's whatBlock recalls: "While my first visit to New York was with my father in 1948, it wasn't until the summer of 1956 that I actually lived in the city. I'd completed my first year at Antioch College and was to spend August through October in the mailroom at Pines Publications on East 40th Street. (They had a paperback line—Popular Library—and a string of magazines, ranging from surviving pulps like Ranch Romances to movie magazines and a Readers Digest imitation.) I'd arranged to room with two other Antiochians, Paul Grillo and Fred Anliot, and we spent the first week on the top floor at 147 W 14th, the second on the ground floor at 108 W 12th (that building's gone now), and then found a first-floor one-bedroom apartment at 54 Barrow Street, where we stayed through October before passing the place on to another Antioch contingent. It was a wonderful apartment in a perfect location, and for a while it was where the folksinger crowd assembled on Sunday evenings after the singing in Washington Square shut down for the night. (Then the crowd outgrew the space, and moved to somebody's loft on Spring Street.) It was in the kitchen at 54 Barrow Street that I wrote the first story I ever sold, published in Manhunt as You Can't Lose. "A year later I was back in New York; I'd found an editorial job at a literary agency and liked it it enough to drop out of school to keep it. I shared an apartment at the Hotel Alexandria on West 103rd Street with Bob Aronson until the Army took him, at which time the hotel let me move to a single room a few floors below. While I lived on 103rd, I spent most of my time in the Village. "By the fall of 1958 I was back at Antioch, more focused on writing than classwork. I'd begun selling magazine stories whileI was at the literary agency, and began writing novels once I'd left, and Harry Shorten was eager to publish them at his new venture, Midwood Tower Books. My third book for Harry, following CARLA and A STRANGE KIND OF LIVE, was 69 BARROW STREET. "I'd had the idea of a novel set at a multiple dwelling—in this case, a Village brownstone—with the characters interacting and living their lives. One model for it would have been 79 PARK AVENUE, an early work of Harold Robbins, when A STONE FOR DANNY FISHER let the world take him seriously as a writer of American realistic fiction. (Then he wrote THE CARPETBAGGERS, and that was the end of that.) I decided—nudge nudge, wink wink—that 69 BARROW STREET would be an appropriately suggestive title. "Jesus, 54 Barrow Street. Fred Alliot and Bob Aronson, both of whom I'd run into now and then over the years, are gone now. Paul Grillo and I lost touch with each other fifty-plus years ago… "Years and years later, I found out that 69 PARK AVENUE had been Harold Robbins' original title. His publishers made him change it. My publishers had no such compunctions, and 69 BARROW STREET it was and shall remain. And now it's back in print, and graced once again by Paul Rader's magnificent cover art."

Sheesh. What a lousy title.   Flesh Mob was published by Midnight Reader, a fellow imprint of Nightstand Books, in 1962. I can tell at a glance that it's my work, although I don't specifically recall writing it. And I must have put a title on it, but I  an assure you that it wasn't Flesh Mob. It could only have been the inspiration of some editor in Illinois. Several notables filled that role over the years, including Earl Kemp, A. J. Budrys, and Harlan Ellison, but it's hard to imagine any of those three making a eureka moment of Flesh Mob.   For years it struck me as merely a bad title, two works that when combined had a sort of reverse synergy, amounting to rather less than the sum of their parts. Then just this week I looked at the title and saw that it could only be a pun on the phrase "flash mob."   That still didn't make it a good title, but at least it gave it a lame reason for being.   Except not. Because a little internet research shows that "flash mob" came into existence, as both phrase and concept, sometime shortly after the turn of the present century, and approximately forty years after my humble little novel first appeared wherever bad books were sold. AJ and Harlan and Earl were grounded in science fiction, but that's not enough to account for a title that was a pun on a phrase nobody would utter for another four decades.   Never mind. The book's a multiple-viewpoint novel, with a rich cast of characters. Here's a sample of two of them: # "I'M LEAVING MATT," Kitty said.   Linc digested this bit of information. She searched his face, trying to decide whether he approved or disapproved. His face was a mask. She couldn't tell how he felt about it.   "I'm leaving him," she said again. "He didn't even come home last night. And the fact doesn't even bother me. There's not a thing left between us, Linc. Nothing at all. He can go his way and I can go mine and neither of us gives a whoop in hell about the other one. That's no basis for marriage."   "Will he give you a divorce?"   "I think so. He barely knows I'm alive. He'll probably be glad to get rid of me."   Linc shrugged. "His pride might be hurt. And he might be upset from a pure financial standpoint. Divorce can be costly to a man. Alimony."   "I wouldn't want alimony from him."   "Oh?"   "Just freedom."   He said: "What will you do after the divorce?"   "Oh," she said. "I don't know. I may stay in Clifton, at least until I decide where I want to go next. New York eventually, I think. Small towns can get to you. I think I'm ready for the city."   "You'd fit right in."   "But for the time being we can have our fun. Do you feel like… like some fun now, Linc?"   "God, you're insatiable."   "I've been inactive for a long time," she told him. "Too long. It can get to you. Are you interested, Linc?"   "I'll race you to the bedroom," he said. # There you go, Gentle Reader. Flesh Mob. It is what it is…

When Don Westlake and I were starting out as writers, we both served an apprenticeship writing erotic novels for Harry Shorten at Midwood Books and Bill Hamling at Nightstand. (I was Sheldon Lord for Midwood and Andrew Shaw for Nightstand, while Don was Alan Marshall for both publishers. Note though that the presence of either name upon a book is no guarantee that one of us wrote it. Both of us made arrangements whereby lesser writers would submit works under our names—and I know it's hard to believe that any writers were less than we were back then, but it's true.) Well. We'd become friends in the summer of 1959, while we were living a few blocks away from each other in midtown Manhattan. I was at the Hotel Rio, on West 47th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and Don was a block south and several blocks west of me. Then I moved back to my parents' house in Buffalo, and Don and his wife and kid moved to Canarsie, and we wrote letters back and forth. And at one point we decided it might be fun to do a novel together. Not by thinking it out and talking through it and, you know, collaborating in a serious artistic manner. Our method was simpler. One of us would write a chapter, and then the other would write a chapter to come after it, and back and forth, like that, until we had a book. It worked, and by God it was fun. The first of our efforts was A GIRL CALLED HONEY, and it started when I wrote a chapter and sent it to Don. And so on, and we stopped when we had a book and sent it to Henry Morrison who sent it to Harry Shorten. We put both our names on the book, our pen names that is to say, and that's how Harry published it: by Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall. And he included our dedication: "To Don Westlake and Larry Block, who introduced us." It was so much fun that we did it again. This time Don wrote the first chapter, and I wrote the second. Was I still in Buffalo, and did we still send the chapters through the mail? Damned if I can remember. I think I may have been in New York by then, living with my first wife on West 69th Street. But maybe not, and what does it matter? We finished the book, we sent it in, Midwood published it, and we shared the advance, which was probably $600 for A GIRL CALLED HONEY, but may have escalated to $750 by the time we did SO WILLING. So each of us wound up with either $300 or $375 for our trouble, and that's not a lot of money nowadays, and it wasn't a lot of money in 1960 either, but neither was it a lot of trouble. Damn, those were good days. We did a third novel in collaboration, SIN HELLCAT, and I think it may have been the best of the three—but we didn't get to put a joint byline on it. Well, we did—but someone at Nightstand felt free to change it, dropping Alan Marshall from the "by Alan Marshall and Andrew Shaw" byline we'd supplied. Much the same thing happened to CIRCLE OF SINNERS, my collaboration for Nightstand with Hal Dresner; "By Andrew Shaw and Don Holliday" is what we tagged it, and this time it was Andrew Shaw who got bumped. Never mind. Here's SO WILLING—and if reading it brings you a small fraction of the fun we had writing it, you'll be back right away to scoop up A GIRL CALLED HONEY and SIN HELLCAT. This ebook edition of SO WILLING contains as a bonus the opening chapter of Book #19 in the Collection of Classic Erotica, FOUR LIVES AT THE CROSSROADS.