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.