Stark House has reprinted two more of Robert Silverberg’s soft-core novels published originally under the name Don Elliott. Most of these were actually hardboiled crime yarns with some sexual elements, and that’s true of the latest double volume. I just read EASY MONEY, Silverberg’s title for a novel published under the Elliott pen-name as FLESH PAWNS in 1964.
The protagonist is a young woman named Janey Vaughn, who, despite being a
beautiful and voluptuous twenty-three-year-old, in the right clothes and makeup
can pass for being considerably younger. Underage, in fact, which makes her the
perfect foil for con man Charley Simmons, who meets Janey while she’s waitressing
in a diner in Delaware. After a roll in the hay with her, Charley suggests that
she accompany him to Florida, where they will run a variation on the ol’ badger
game on lonely, middle-aged men vacationing in Miami. Janey will go to bed with
their marks, acting like her true age when she does it, then Charley, pretending
to be her older brother, will show up and claim she’s only sixteen or seventeen,
leading to a payoff from the victims to keep them from being arrested for
statutory rape.
It's not a foolproof plan, of course, since Janey’s not really underage, but things go along all right for a while for Janey and Charley. Inevitably, complications ensue, and threaten their arrangement. How far will they go to keep the game in operation?
As always with Silverberg’s work, the prose is smooth and polished and fast as it can be. The guy is just a great storyteller. He also does a good job of making two very unsympathetic characters . . . well, not sympathetic, exactly, but the reader can’t help but root for Janey a little. She and Charley may not be great human beings, but they’re very human, if you know what I mean.
EASY MONEY is a solid entry in this genre from Silverberg. It’s in a double volume trade paperback with GETTING EVEN (originally published as LUST DEMON by Don Elliott in 1966) that’s available on Amazon.
1 comment:
Ordered. Thanks for the heads up, James.
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