Introduction

It is no longer a secret that some iconic masters in the science-fiction and mystery / crime field earned money writing “soft-core” erotic novels—referred to as sleaze pulps—during the paperback’s halcyon days of the 1950s-60s, where books were printed in the hundreds of thousands for the newsstand market. Midwood, Lancer, Fawcett Gold Medal, Ace, Pyramid, Lion, Nightstand, Monrach, Signet, Lion and a number of short-lived imprints are well-known in the paperback fan and collector market. Ed McCain wrote as Dean Hudson; Marion Zimmer Bradley as Brian Morley, Dee O'Brien, Marlene Longman, Morgan Ives, and Miriam Gardner; Robert Silverberg as Don Elliott, Loren Beauchamp, David Challon, and Mark Ryan. Don Elliott is fairly well known these days among Silverberg and vintage paperback fans.

It all started with William Hamling, born in 1921 on Chicago’s South Side, a former Irish-Catholic altar boy turned sex merchant. He started in science fiction. He sold his first story, “War with Jupiter,” a collaborative effort with Mark Reinsberg, to Amazing Stories in 1939. In 1940, he founded a fanzine called Stardust. He then landed a job with Ziff-Davis Publications, editing the pulps he had been writing for, working alongside a young Hugh Hefner who, like Hamling, had some lofty notions about branching out as an independent magazine publisher. In 1948, Hamling established Greenleaf Publishing in the basement of his house on Greenleaf Street in Evanston, Illinois, pumping out science-fiction pulps such as Imagination and Imaginative Tales, which featured an entire novel each issue. Robert Silverberg was one of the main writers in his stable, paid $500 a month to produce content, often filling entire issues of his work under various pen names. When the genre magazine market started to dwindle with the collapse of the Chicago mafia-run newsstand distribution business, Hamling noticed that there was money to be made in soft-core sex books with flashy covers like those offered by Bedside and Beacon Books. Hamling worked out a contract with the Scott Meredith Agency: Meredith would supply new manuscripts for paperback books from a team of writers. Each writer was contracted to churn out a monthly title. The writers were paid six to eight hundred dollars per manuscript, at the start, then a thousand as the market proved profitable. The books were sent to Hamling under pen names; the agency kept the writer's true identities secret.

Don Elliott was the most productive author, having only one person behind the name. Lawrence Block (Andrew Shaw and Andrew Shole), Donald Westlake (Alan Marshall and Alan Marsh) eventually hired ghostwriters to complete monthly manuscripts, cutting young writers in on the pay, as they worked on other things under their own names but still wanted the monthly paycheck. Silverberg, however, penned every Don Elliott novel except one, Carnal Counselor, when he was unable to meet the deadline one month (it is unknown who wrote that Elliott for him); while Greenleaf, in the later half of the 1960s, assigned the house names to books written by a variety of authors, this was never done with Don Elliott.

Love Addict, Silverberg’s first Elliott, has some historical significance in sleaze book publishing, for Nightstand / Greenleaf / Cornith / Blake Pharmaceuticals, and science-fiction history. It was quickly written in a week and published in October, 1959. Some may contend it was all Harlan Ellison’s idea, although Ellison seems to have divorced himself from his contribution to sleaze publishing—not only did he commission and edit this novel from Silverberg (Ellison had been editing Hamling’s men’s magazine, Rogue, and a line of mainstream paperbacks, Regency Books), paying him $600, with a $200 bonus when it went into a 2nd printing (we must consider the value of the dollar in the late 1950s. $600 was about $6,000 in today’s money) but wrote one himself, Sex Gang, editing and writing cover copy for Nightstand’s initial years in business.

The second Don Elliott title, published December 1959, was Gang Girl, a soft core take on a popular pulp theme: juvenile delinquents. Only months earlier, Silverberg published, as Mark Ryan, Streets of Sin with Bedside Books, a gang story that is pretty much the male version of Gang Girl: criminal teenager in a new city, looks to join the local gang, has to prove worthy of the gang, gets in and tries to move to the top too fast which becomes their downfall. In 1960, the Elliott Sex Jungle was also a gang tale. Juvies were not as prevalent as other themes in the Elliott books. The more common themes were corporate settings in the offices of Madison Avenue or manufacturing (Convention Girl, Expense Account Sinners, The Flesh Peddlers), Manhunt-style noirish crime (Passion Patsy, Gutter Road, Sex Bum) grown men getting involved with teenage girls (Orgy Maid, Flesh Pawns, Sexteen), couples getting into sexual trysts while on vacation (Sin Cruise, The Lust Seekers, Orgy Isle), Hollywood (Sin Festival, Lust Queen, Backstage Sinner), prostitution (Convention Girl, Party Girl, Carnal Carnival) sado-masochism (Shame House, The Pain Lusters, Sin Servant), suburban wife swapping (Three Sinners, Switch Trap, Take My Wife), lesbianism (Alternate Wife, Sin Girls, Diary of a Lesbian) and, in the later part of the 1960s, sports (Lust League, Flesh Taker) and even elements of the supernatural (Lust Demon).

Lately, there has been a flurry of reprints of these vintage paperbacks from publishing operations large and small, from old Silverbergs and Blocks to Westlake and Orrie Hitt titles. This edition of Pickup marks the first Silverberg authorized Don Elliott strictly as an eBook; it falls under the crime noirs that Silverberg wrote for Hamling, originally under the Sundown Editions imprint, along the same lines as Gutter Road and with a Jim Thompson-esque sense of foreboding urban decay and noir irony. It was published in 1964, near Silverberg’s end of writing for the sleaze market (he stopped around 1965-6 in favor of more lucrative young adult non-fiction titles and the revival of the science-fiction New Wave era). Pickup is about a low-end criminal, Jimmy, traveling across the U.S., going from one woman to another, robbing gas stations and stores for money. He is running away from a painful break-up; he was with Maureen, a woman he loved, for years, and one day he catches her in bed with another woman. He is a bit old fashioned, feeling women should only make love to men, and be faithful to their man. Now he hurts women to get back at Maureen, and all of womankind: “you witches are all the same,” he says—and so he makes women fall for him, then he leaves them heartbroken the way he is … until he meets a hooker in a hotel bar, Helena, and the table gets turned …

Enjoy this fun ride from outer edge of sex-infused crime fiction of the past!

Michael Hemmingson, December 2013

Chapter One

There were two things that Jimmy Henstall needed to keep him happy. A woman by his side in bed, and some cash in his pocket. Right now he didn’t have too much either. He had a girl, but she was a dumb broad. He had some cash, but it wouldn’t last him long unless he went out and replaced it pretty soon with a fresh supply.

There was a filling station on Route 96, just outside of Corwin, that he’d been casing all week. At midnight, Henstall figured, he’d go down there and knock it over. It ought to be good for four, five hundred bucks, maybe even more if luck rode with him.

And then—on his way.

Right now he was settled down in a motel room about eight miles from the filling station. It wasn’t one of the modern, shiny motel rooms with air conditioning and free television and tiled floors and fancy baths and a $15 a night price tag. Henstall didn’t have enough cash in his jeans for that kind of luxury right now. He was staying in the kind of place that was typical of motels before motels went streamlined - a place that had about a dozen green-painted wooden cabins, separated from each other by a few feet as they ranged along the roadside.

It wasn’t plush, but it was cheap. With his cash supply what is was, the $5 a night tab that they got here was plenty.

He splayed out on the bed. The girl came out of the bathroom and looked at him.

“Relaxing?” she said.

“Why not?”

“Gonna pull the job tonight?”

“Depends on my rheumatism,” he said.

“Don’t kid me. You don’t have rheumatism.”

“Yeah? How do you know?”

“Well,” she said, confused, “you just don’t look old enough to have it.”

“Thanks,” Henstall said.

He looked her over. Her name was Carol, and she was around nineteen years old, maybe twenty, and she was one of the dumbest broads he had ever known. Henstall had picked her up around two weeks back, about five hundred miles to the east of here. She had been fun, at first. But now he was sick of her.

She wasn’t wearing anything except a bra and panties and a garter-belt whose straps dangled down foolishly into an absence of stockings. It was a hot night, and there was no air conditioning in the room, and Carol was making herself comfortable. She was a middling tall brunette with nice boobs and long legs. She had a little too much backside, that was her only really serious fault of figure. She had nothing in her head, though, and that was a much worse fault. Henstall wasn’t exactly an intellectual, but he couldn’t travel day after day with such a stupid, muddle-headed wench.

“You think this place sells beer?” she said.

“I doubt it.” He crooked a finger and beckoned to her. “Come here.”

“You want me, Jimmy?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I want you.”

She came over and stood next to the bed. He looked at her. He was a big, rangy man, lean and hard, with cool little dark eyes and close-cropped brown hair. He had been living the traveling life as long as he could remember, and it was the only life he liked.

Henstall reached out and grabbed a dangling elastic strap of her garter-belt. He pulled it and let it snap back. The metal of the garter whicked back against her soft flesh.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry,” he said.

“You did that on purpose!”

“No,” he said. “It was an accident. I reached out and accidentally grabbed your strap and then I accidentally let it go and it accidentally happened to hit your leg and hurt you. That’s all.”

“Jimmy, why do you always make fun of me?”

“Because you’re dumb.”

“That’s no reason, you ought to be nicer to me. I’m nice to you, ain’t I?”

“You’re a living doll,” Henstall said.

She beamed at him. “Jimmy, where are we going to go after we get out of this dump?”

He was heading westward. But she wasn’t, only she didn’t know that yet. After he knocked off that filling station, he was clearing out, but she was staying behind. He figured he’d be able to find another girl as he journeyed. He had never had to do without for long before. He’d just move along, grabbing a girl here and one there, and somehow he’d make out pretty well.

Henstall wasn’t planning to tell Carol anything about what was in store. He had learned a long, long time ago never to make a woman sore except when you absolutely had to. He had nothing to gain and a lot to lose by letting her in on his plans now.

He said, “Take the brassiere off, baby. Daddy wants a look.”

She giggled. “He wants more than a look, though, don’t he?”

“One thing at a time. Off with the bra.”

“Sure, Jimmy,” she said. She was always pleased as punch to show herself to him. Back in her home town, where be had found her, she had worked as a counter girl in a luncheonette, dating only the local boys. It must have been a pretty dull life.

She unhooked the bra and the cups fell away from the ripe, lush globes of her breasts. She had good boobs, Henstall thought. If there was anything he hated, it was a flat-chested chick. He liked something for his hands, and when he was all finished with loving he liked soft round things to rest his cheek against.

Carol’s things were plenty soft, plenty round. She had firm, solid breasts, very white-skinned, with a tracery of blue veins below the surface. Her nipples were small but very red, and they rose out of round dark smooth little aureoles. They were high breasts, close together, with a deep valley.

Lolling lazily on the bed, Henstall eyed them with approval. She was standing close enough so that he could have reached out and given them a squeeze if he was so minded, but he didn’t bother to exert himself just yet.

“Now the panties,” he commanded her.

She giggled again. And began to roll her dark green panties down over her ample hips and fleshy legs. Henstall’s eyes narrowed as he watched the view come into sight. He wondered vaguely how many females he had looked at in his day, how many times he had watched a girl rolling her panties down. Plenty, he figured. Millions of times. Henstall had always been a lover. Since the age of twelve. That was about as early a start as you could possibly get, he figured. Or just about as early.

The panties came off.

Nude except for the garter-belt, the dark-haired girl stood by the edge of the bed. Henstall stared at her. Then he reached out with his left hand and clapped it against her buttocks. The hand made a thwacking sound as it hit the solid flesh.

“You got a big behind, you know that, Carol?” Henstall said.

“You keep telling me that. What’s the matter, don’t you like it?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Round and firm.” He moved his hand lazily over the cool, smooth, satiny buttocks.

“Should I take the garter-belt off, too?”

“Might as well,” he said.

She discarded it. Completely nude, she stood there waiting for his next command. No mind of her own, that was the trouble with her. Henstall liked a girl with a little more spunk, a little more zing and dash.

Like Maureen, he thought.

As the thought of Maureen entered his mind, Henstall felt a stab of something very much like emotional pain. Maureen had been the only girl he had ever really given a damn about. He didn’t like using words like “love,” but if Henstall had ever loved anyone, he had loved Maureen. She hadn’t been only a dame.

But Maureen was out of his life now, forever and for always. He told himself to forget about her. She was part of the dead past. A closed chapter.

He dug his fingers to Carol’s hefty leg for a moment. Then he said, “Get on the bed.”

“Sure, Jimmy.”

“Undress me.”

Undressing him wasn’t very hard. All he was wearing was a pair of striped shorts. Carol opened the waist snap and pulled them down. He saw her eyes develop that familiar gleam. She was the sort of girl who started to pant at the mere sight of a naked man. Most girls needed to be caressed before they warmed up. Mere flesh didn’t turn them on. But Carol was different.

She tossed his shorts away. She was crouched there at the far end of the bed, her big round breasts swaying a little. Her eyes were turning into little smoky slits of desire.

She began to crawl to his face.

This was a point at which Carol didn’t need any further instructions. She was perfectly capable of acting under her own steam now, taking matters into her own hands from here on in.

She shimmied the length of his body, her soft jiggly buttocks touching agreeably against him. The effect was immediate.

“I like you,” she said. “You’re nice, Jimmy.’’

“At your service, baby.”

Her head swooped down. Her dangling heavy breasts touched him as her lips found him. Henstall sighed in pleasure. She was very, very good at this particular trick, he had to admit. For a moment he was half tempted to take her with him when he knocked over the filling station later this evening. But one of the lessons Henstall had learned during the course of a long, tough life was never to change any plans on the basis of decisions made while in bed with a girl. You couldn’t look at things objectively while she was making you happy.

She was dumb, and he had made up his mind to be through with her, and that was all there was to it. He had known girls just as passionate before, and he would know girls just as passionate or even more so afterward, so there was no sense sticking to this one.

Even so, he had to admit that she was a pretty eager little cookie.

He didn’t budge from his position, remaining sprawled out on his back while Carol worked, played little games with him.

After a couple of moments, she sat up. She was breathing hard. Her nipples were inflamed with desire, standing tall and straight from the big round balls of her bosom. Her eyes were wild with need and her nostrils were flaring and her cheeks were red.

“Jimmy, baby!” she whispered.

“Yeah, girl,” he said. “Go!”

She made things easy for him. She moved to his knees. He continued to stay stretched out relaxedly. He could sense the warmth of her very close to him. Her fingers found him and guided him. She took him effortlessly.

She began to work.

Effortlessly and talentedly, around and around, giving him the tired businessman’s special. Henstall loved that. He grinned and watched her, looked at her plump, heaving breasts, at the creases in her waist, at the passion-lines forming in her face. Every time she moved, she sent little pleasant shudders of delight through him.

Henstall reached out and grabbed hold of her breasts. He had big hands, but she had big boobs, and so he had to splay his fingers out wide to get the two ripe globes under control. He held them firmly, the rock-hard nipples pressing against the palms. He moved his hands around, shifting her breasts from side to side, pressing them inward, pulling them outward, playing with them.

She was gasping, now.

She was working faster and faster.

Henstall let go of her breasts and slipped his hands underneath her, to hold the large, heavy cushions of her buttocks. He guided her, using her buttocks as handles.

Excitement was getting hold of him, now. His cool, detached, bored pose of laziness was melting away.

She was making those little sobbing noises deep in her throat now, the soft strange sounds that told him of the forces of ecstasy building for her. Her eyes were closed. Her breasts were heaving fast now, bouncing around wildly.

“Jimmy, baby -” she gasped. “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, I’m almost there, Jimmy!”

“Yeah, kid! Go!”

She went. Like a rabbit.

He kept his eyes open long enough to see the contortions of passion sweep across her face. Her lips moved strangely and drew back almost in a snarl, and her brow furrowed, and she grimaced weirdly. Then the sudden force of the excitement blazing over him compelled him to close his own eyes.

He held tight.

Her breasts jingled and jangled, hitting each other as she worked violently. Now he could sense the ecstasy beginning for her. Hidden muscles began working like tiny hands. He liked that, thought that was just great.

Now the full fury was on her. Now she was wildly, insane, every part of her seemingly in motion in a different direction. Henstall grabbed tight and held on for dear life.

A sizzling wave of ecstasy ripped over her, so torrid that there was no mistaking what was happening to her. She cut loose with a strange gasping sound, a sigh of pleasure.

Henstall responded with his own fulfillment.

Searing delight rocked him. He welcomed the ecstasy, the jolting blows of his passion, again and again. His body was rocked by passion. He sucked breath deep into his lungs and let the ecstasy sweep over him.

Then that ended.

Slowly they came down from the peaks of passion. She leaned forward, so that her breasts dangled, the tips of them touching his chest. He locked his arms around her, all passion spent.

Neither of them spoke. Henstall closed his eyes and ran his hands down her bare back, down to the plump, satiny buttocks. He stroked them lightly and cheerfully.

After a long while she said, “Did you like that, Jimmy? Tell me?”

“Of course I did.”

“Sometimes I can’t figure you out. I don’t even know what you’re thinking, whether you’re happy with me or sick of me.”

“I like you fine, baby.”

“Do you really?”

“You know I do.”

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Jimmy. The first man in my life.”

“Come off it,” he said. “Don’t give me that stuff, baby. The first?”

“I don’t mean the first fellow. Lots of guys dated me before you came along. I wasn’t such a saint. But you’re the first man, you know what I mean. It’s a different thing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I know.”

“Don’t ever let go of me, Jimmy. I want you so much, all the time. You know I do, don’t you? I just have to look at you and I feel all fluttery. I just want you, then.”

He smiled, and kissed her earlobe. She was a good kid. Good and stupid. Wild in bed, sure, but thick between the ears.

She said, “We’ll go everywhere together, Jimmy, won’t we? You and me – we’ll be a team.”

He didn’t answer her. He went on stroking her buttocks. Big and fat, he thought. Right now she was a big kid with a nice hefty body, but what would she look like in ten or fifteen years. A pig, he thought. No, a cow. But he wouldn’t know her then. She’d be settled down by then, with five or six kids. One of them maybe even his, for all he knew. They had been pretty busy these last couple of weeks.

Something to remember me by, he thought.

Name it after me, honey, he thought.

She said, “What time are you going down to the filling station?”

“Around midnight,” I said.

“Will it take you long?”

“I doubt it.”

She rolled over and lay by his side. He looked at the big pale rosy-tipped mounds of her breasts. He put his hand out and rubbed it against them. Then he put his thumb over one soft pink nipple and rolled it round and round, making it start to grow hard like a little button.

She was ready to go again, he knew. But he wasn’t. Not that he couldn’t, but he wouldn’t. He had a lot of driving to do tonight, not to mention pulling off a holdup, and he didn’t want to use up all his energy teasing this broad.

After a moment he took his hand away.

She said, “Can I go with you when you knock over the filling station?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” he said. “And it’ll be easier all around if you stay here.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll stay here. Don’t forget to come back and get me, now.”

“Don’t worry. You just be all dressed and waiting for me when I show up.”

“Sure, Jimmy.”

Henstall grinned. The little girl was going to be in for a big surprise.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One