When some rando in a beret is looking into your bedroom from the street, what kind of streets are we dealing with exactly? Why, the Streets of Paris, obviously. Rudolph Belarski produced an awesome cover for this book by Robert E. Reynolds, published by Original Novels in 1953. We have a lot of Belarski in the website, so you can click his keywords to see more, but for ease you can also have a look at a small collection of his work at this link. Robert E. Reynolds is a well known name in low rent literature. He also wrote Loose Women, Backwoods Bride, and Lost Women. He was in reality Leo Rifkin, also published as Winchell Barry in the case of the lurid sleazer Scarlet City, and in addition wrote for television and the stage.
Books of this genre, which you can recognize immediately from their lurid cover art and digest formats, are sometimes referred to as love novels, though we can’t be sure whether that’s what they were called back then. But the term gets the point across. We just call them sleazers. They aren’t romance novels exactly. The basic idea, as we’ve mentioned before, was titillation for predominantly male readers. The leading characters are women, young and romantically challenged. There are always unsuitable men for them to experience before (or if) they find the right one, a format that means she usually gets laid by up to three different fellas. Whether those encounters generate any heat for readers is strictly a matter of authorial skill.
In Streets of Paris, young Colette Keating, née Colette Moreau, is an artist’s model whose employer Bud James sees her naked every day and thinks he can take liberties. She resists him, but gets in deep with Bud’s uncle, and pretty soon the two tumble into bed. The lure was not so much the uncle himself, but his promise to take Colette on a trip to New York City. Is she that shallow? Not really. The reason she’s née Moreau is because she married at eighteen and had a child. That child is in the U.S. under the care of Colette’s rich, evil mother-in-law, who ended up with the kid when Colette’s husband Ralph was killed in an auto accident while Stateside. She can’t afford to go to the U.S., and can’t wrest the child from her mother-in-law—especially when the mother-in-law has enough money to clog legal channels.
So there’s your basic set-up. Colette eventually makes her way to New York City, where her mother-in-law slams the phone down in her ear when the subject of custody is broached. Oh no. Will she ever see her child? If you’ve read enough of these love novels you know that the endings are not quite as predictable as in mainstream romances. We’ve even read one where the lead character was killed. But with motherhood involved you can be sure Collette and child end the book reunited in a tearful cuddle. It’s about the journey, not the destination. With its fade-to-black sex and middling execution Streets of Paris isn’t a book you need to seek out, but unlike most digest novels it’s pretty cheap. You could certainly make a worse purchase.
