We’re always right. We’ve gotten used to it. A couple of years ago we shared Paul Rader cover art for the Russell Trainer sleaze novel His Daughter’s Friend, but lamented that the book was selling for more than two-hundred dollars. Have a look at the art here. It’s worth the detour. We consider it one of Rader’s best covers, but the price made the purchase a non-starter for us. Sleaze fiction is usually poorly written, and in our view no cover makes a book worth two bills. But we hoped we’d see it listed at a reasonable price one day.
It happened. His Daughter’s Friend popped up in a large group of paperbacks for which we paid a little more than a hundred bucks. We’d have already done well paying half rate for a potentially two-hundred dollar paperback, plus more books, but it gets better. In the lot were a few of the more expensive gets in the paperback game—among them Paul Renin’s Midnight Sinner, listed for up to $60.00, and Mary Clare’s rare White Man’s Slave, which we saw sell most recently for $120.00. Jackpot. Of course, the ironic part is we’ll never actually cash in our chips—the books are way too useful to us as conversation pieces.
We delved into His Daughter’s Friend immediately upon reciept. Trainer spins the tale of widowed advertising man Mark Corbin, who gets mixed up with his virginal daughter Judy’s sexually precocious best friend Lithe. We thought the story might be one in which Corbin is tempted but ultimately resists, but no, he gets on seventeen-year-old Lithe at first opportunity, and second, and third, and so forth. She falls in love with him, but he feels considerable guilt and tries to break off the relationship. At that point Lithe turns vengeful and seeks payback, even if it means using Judy as a pawn.
How dark does His Daughter’s Friend get? Pretty dark—Lithe arranges to have Judy raped. Revealing that would normally be giving away too much plotwise, but were you going to pay an exorbitant amount for mediocre fiction? Really? Oh. In that case—spoiler alert! But there’s more to Trainer’s Lolita-lite, so if you see it on sale feel free to splurge. Trainer may not be a great writer, but he tries to make a point without overstepping his bounds—which is to say, when it comes to sleaze he knows his place. We’ll be getting into the rest of these novels over the next year or two.
