Forgotten Books: Sex Dancer - Clayton Matthews

You can’t get much more blatant about the title of a book than SEX DANCER, a novel by Clayton Matthews published by Beacon Books in 1961. The protagonist, Jean Winters, is a beautiful young blonde who dances in the girlie show at a traveling carnival. A year earlier, she left her hometown in New Mexico to go to Hollywood and become a big star. Well, we all know how that works out, so now to survive Jean travels with the carnival from one town to another and carries on a desultory affair with the sleazy concessionaire who runs the girlie show. But then she meets Mace, a motorcycle rider who used to be the star attraction of the motordrome show (where guys race motorcycles around the inside of a cylinder, held up by centrifugal force) until he cracked up in an accident and lost his nerve. Jean and Mace fall for each other, but there are all kinds of obstacles in the way, of course. Will their love survive?

I tend to like carny novels, and this one is okay. Like Fredric Brown’s MADBALL, it’s full of carny lingo and lore and colorful characters, but it lacks any real mystery or noir plot and is more of a soap opera than anything else. But it’s a pretty fast-moving and well-written soap opera, so I enjoyed it. It’s not the sweaty, desperate, naturalistic art of Orrie Hitt, and it doesn’t have the narrative drive of Ben Haas, but it’s still worth reading because Clayton Matthews was a good storyteller.

Matthews is an interesting author. He wrote quite a few of these soft-core sleaze novels for various publishers under his real name, and later he did a number of big, family saga type novels, also under his name, as well as a lot of books under other names. Rumor has it that in the Eighties he actually wrote dozens of bestselling historical romances published under another name. I never met him, but we had some mutual friends and he was also the cousin of my good friend, pulp fan and publisher Tom Johnson. I have some of his other novels published by Beacon and will be getting around to them in due course, I suspect.