In 1962’s Vicious Vixen the main character Dyke Donohoe is a lifeguard torn between his hot girlfriend, his hot girlfriend’s hot girlfriend, and his hot girlfriend’s hot girlfriend’s impossibly hot boss. No need for suspense—he gets to have all of them. He falls head over heels for the boss, who’s married but hates her hubby and eventually suggests killing him for freedom and inheritance. Bad idea. Since the story is told in first person, we can’t tell if Dyke is supposed to be a total meathead or if it’s the bad prose that makes him seem stupid. Typical passage:
Her breasts were firm. They were pointed. They were full. They fitted just right. They gave a sense of exciting, delicious fulfillment. You felt you simply had to swallow them. Each of them. Both of them together. But that’s kind of hard to do. So I flew from one to the other, maddened by the knowledge that I couldn’t have both of them at the same time.
Yeah. That’s pretty bad. And the book is extraordinarily padded—without the constant repetition it would probably run fifty pages. But weirdly, the writing gets better as the story wears on. By the end it’s actually readable, and it has an effective twist ending we’ll admit blindsided us. Woolfe, or the inhabitant of his pseudonym, generally thought to be Edwin Adair, wrote several other books. Maybe he really hit his stride on Beach Heat, Hot Angel, Sex Angel, or Sex Addict. But probably not.
