Yup, that’s Elke Sommer again, this time on the cover of a Chariot Books edition of Arthur Adlon’s 1960 novel Blue Denim Doll. It was available the same day we bought Tramp Girl so we figured why not? The art here is by Clement Micarelli, who has more examples available at his keywords below.
You may be asking by now, after all the sleaze novels we’ve highlighted, what’s the point of reading them if you’re usually a fan of crime fiction? For us, the answer is that crime novels are populated by the women you find in sleaze. Rather than using women as background diversions or sexual interludes sleaze centers them in their own narratives about how they came to be used, abused, betrayed, jaded, occasionally criminal, and sometimes redeemed. The stories are usually written by men, but not always. There’s Peggy Gaddis, Florence Stonebraker, and others formulating tales about women who’ve taken wrong turns into manipulation, greed, and often danger. The male characters are the ones who are sometimes disposable.
Blue Denim Doll is about a rich sex addict named Ed Milne who meets his potential soulmate in horny young beatnik Carol Petrie, but can’t keep away from other women. He’s married, and his wife Mildred sits in their rural home neglected as Ed spends most nights in the city—er—working. He thinks of Mildred as a demure beauty, but she’s got burning sexual fires of her own and it’s just a matter of time before she gets them hosed down by some lucky fireman. Or firewoman. Or both. Meanwhile Ed gets involved with two more women—well, a woman and a girl, because one is only sixteen. All this activity begins to affect his professional life, and arouse the curiosity of his nosy private secretary. This is to come to a chaotic head, surely.
We’ve read a few Adlon books and can now draw firm conclusions about him. There was some talent there, but it was never honed to a sharpness that would make you call him a good writer. In the sleaze genre, though, he’s done better than average this time around. He writes with some introspection, and his characters, particularly the women, are interesting. Though he avoids sex in his prose, he constructs lots of moments of casual nudity and lyrical eroticism that might stimulate some readers. Of the three books we’ve read—the others are Key Club Girl and The Place—this is the best. It’s even good enough—though its ending featuring a fatal stabbing is bizarre—to tempt us again if we see a cheap one that has nice cover art.
