Friday, July 17, 2020

Forgotten Books: Gutter Road - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)



As we all know, many of the soft-core “Adult Reading” novels published in the Fifties and early Sixties were really hardboiled crime novels spiced up with a number of flowery, euphemistic sex scenes, while the rest of the book was written in a much tougher, grittier style. GUTTER ROAD, a 1964 Sundown Reader by Robert Silverberg writing as Don Elliott, is a perfect example of this. It opens with the protagonist, a slightly dissatisfied with his life, 38-year-old bookkeeper named Fred Bauman, driving home one rainy night in New York City when he stops to pick up a beautiful young female hitchhiker.

Bad mistake, Fred, as anybody who’s ever read a vintage paperback could tell you. Before you know it, Fred is involved with a blackmail scheme and up to his ears in trouble. Like the ripples from a rock thrown in a pond, his problems spread out to include his wife and his hot-to-trot teenage daughter. There’s a subplot about a down-on-his-luck real estate developer who is also mixed up with the blackmail ring. Things look bad for Fred, but as we also know . . . they can always get worse.

And they usually do in the soft-core books by Silverberg, who turned out some of the bleakest novels in the genre. These aren’t feel-good yarns, but what they are is fast. GUTTER ROAD has some of the smoothest, page-flippingest prose I’ve come across in a while. (If page-flippingest isn’t a word, it ought to be.) I really raced through this one. I would have been okay if the crime element had been played up a little more and some of the sex scenes given fewer pages, but Silverberg knew his audience. GUTTER ROAD has never been reprinted, as far as I know, but if you ever run across a copy, it’s not pretty but it is worth reading.

6 comments:

Dixon H Chandler II said...

We need a reprint series or an omnibus of the Don Elliott Silverberg books.

Dixon H Chandler II said...

A-ha! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933586680/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_RVEeFbYN0JC97

James Reasoner said...

One of his Loren Beauchamp books is available on Kindle, too:

https://www.amazon.com/Sin-Wheels-Uncensored-Confessions-PlanetMonk-ebook/dp/B071XTPLH8/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=loren+beauchamp&qid=1595011154&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Howard said...

Posted on Saturday, July 18: another Don Elliott item... presumably another rarity too.

https://pulpcovers.com/sin-club/

Howard said...

More Don Elliott titles just in case anybody is interested:

https://pulpcovers.com/sin-cruise-1961/
https://pulpcovers.com/sin-quest/
https://pulpcovers.com/party-girl-1960/
https://pulpcovers.com/sex-fury/
https://pulpcovers.com/lust-queen/
https://pulpcovers.com/the-flesh-peddlers-1960/
https://pulpcovers.com/the-lecher/
https://pulpcovers.com/lust-captive/
https://pulpcovers.com/passion-trap/
https://pulpcovers.com/expense-account-sinners/

There are some Don Elliott paperback originals for sale on abebooks.com...

James Reasoner said...

Thanks for these links. I love the covers from those books and always enjoy reading them, as well.