1960’s So Willing is credited to Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall, but they were pseudonyms used by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake. According to Block, the two wrote this, their second collaboration as Lord and Marshall, by trading chapters through the mail. They would occasionally try to trip each other up with unexpected plot twists, and we can only imagine it must have been a hell of a lot of fun. They tell the tongue-in-cheek tale of a seventeen-year old upstate New York horndog named Vince who’s so successful with girls he decides for variety to hunt up a virgin. He fails a couple of times, ends up running away to New York City with a nineteen-year old married nymphomaniac (their term, not ours), and eventually hooks up with an heiress. Good sleaze novels are diamonds in the rough. You have to dig through a lot of filth to find one. So Willing is better than average because it’s so obviously a lark, but even with Westlake and Block behind the typewriter it’s no gem. We think erotica is the most challenging of all genres for writers. The cover art on this Midwood edition is nice, but uncredited.
