| Vintage Pulp | Mar 4 2022 |
Oh, I heat up quite nicely, trust me. It just happens when my husband is away.
Above: a cover for Cold Wife by sleaze vet Arthur Adlon, aka Keith Ayling and other peudonyms, from Chariot Books. This came from Flickr, and it was uploaded without a copyright date, which was unfindable at first. But we figured we could deduce it. We went right to the serial number, but it didn't help because all the Chariot paperbacks we found had numbers in the 100s. This book is numbered 1602, which meant, near as we could figure, it would be published sometime in 2024 or 2025. Or maybe not. Actually, later we did find one Chariot with the number 1612 and that was from 1962. Figure this one is too. We've read Adlon before, and we have another on tap, so we'll see him again in a bit.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 29 2017 |
That isn't the place where kisses make me go crazy. Think lower. A lot lower.
In The Place protagonist Bill Martin is a novelist whose sexual adventures have earned him the nicknames the Goat of Gotham and the Monster of Manhattan. He's separated from his wife Betty, but they're happy to get together for sex. Enter Rika Balsemis, founder of STAIS, which stands for the Society to Abolish Instant Sex. Bill sees her as another conquest, but try as he might he can't get in her pants. He even resorts to force at one point and gets judoed for his efforts. Rika explains, “I realized that in certain situations our members might encounter violence such as yours, so I took a course in judo. It's admirably suited for female use. Karate is too violent. I might have kicked you and ruined you for life. I know how.”
At this point thought we had Rika Aoki on our hands. We thought we had a character that was going to unleash martial arts madness across the storyline. We were looking forward to it. But there are no more ass whippings. Rika instead gives in to Bill, but sex is just a prelude to hypnotizing him into being totally unresponsive to further sexual stimuli. Yes—she eunuchs him with the power of her mind. It's hilarious, though not to Bill. You know this state of affairs won't last, and indeed Rika can cancel the spell when she wants to make use of Bill's goatly talents. But the point of the wider narrative becomes getting him back together with his wife Betty. Written in 1966, The Place is a middling effort by Arthur Adlon, aka Keith Ayling, written with some style but virtually no sex. With sleaze, we recommend you prioritize the latter over the former.
At this point thought we had Rika Aoki on our hands. We thought we had a character that was going to unleash martial arts madness across the storyline. We were looking forward to it. But there are no more ass whippings. Rika instead gives in to Bill, but sex is just a prelude to hypnotizing him into being totally unresponsive to further sexual stimuli. Yes—she eunuchs him with the power of her mind. It's hilarious, though not to Bill. You know this state of affairs won't last, and indeed Rika can cancel the spell when she wants to make use of Bill's goatly talents. But the point of the wider narrative becomes getting him back together with his wife Betty. Written in 1966, The Place is a middling effort by Arthur Adlon, aka Keith Ayling, written with some style but virtually no sex. With sleaze, we recommend you prioritize the latter over the former.
