Candy

A New Afterword by the Author

CANDY, PUBLISHED TOWARD the end of 1960, may have been Sheldon Lord’s last book for Midwood Tower. (It wasn’t the last book by Sheldon Lord—several ghostwriters produced a string of books for Beacon Books, and the last that Beacon printed was, in fact, one I wrote myself, a crime novel they called The Sex Shuffle, now available under my own name as Lucky at Cards. Nor was Candy the last book I wrote for Midwood; they published Jill Emerson’s first two ventures in lesbian fiction, Warm and Willing and Enough of Sorrow.)

If Candy was my final Sheldon Lord for Harry Shorten at Midwood, I suppose there must have been eight or ten before it. And that, it seemed to me, was enough labor in that particular vineyard. I’d welcomed the assignments and had a good enough time turning out soft-core erotica, but it wasn’t how I wanted to spend my writing life. It was very much my intention to write books that might be a source of satisfaction and even pride, and that was generically impossible in the field where Sheldon Lord had been making a name for himself.

I remember having read an article in which crime fiction writer Bill Gault talked about his own literary ambitions. Early on, he said, he’d wanted to become a second Ernest Hemingway, but over time he decided he was better off trying to become the best possible William Campbell Gault. While my earliest fantasies might have shown me as a second John O’Hara or James T. Farrell or John Steinbeck or Thomas Wolfe, I’d since lowered my sights, and becoming the best possible Lawrence Block seemed reasonable.

But I wasn’t entirely sure what that might mean, or how to get there. Mystery fiction, it seemed to me, was both respectable and attainable, and my inner self seemed to come up with ideas that lent themselves to the genre. My first sales were short stories to crime fiction magazines, and I’d sold a couple of crime novels to Gold Medal Books by the time I wrote Candy.

There were times when the two genres overlapped, at least in my house. Grifter’s Game started out as a book for Shorten; a couple of chapters in I decided it was cut out for better things and finished it accordingly. Knox Burger bought it at Gold Medal. And sometimes the reverse happened: Cinderella Sims was supposed to be a Gold Medal crime novel, but something went awry and I lost confidence in the book and finished it up for Bill Hamling’s Nightstand Books. ($20 Lust, they called it, by Andrew Shaw; it’s since been republished under my name and original title.)

This sort of migration, from crime to erotica or erotica to crime, isn’t all that remarkable. It was perfectly reasonable for crime novels to have sex in them, and it was a fairly standard ingredient in the paperback originals Gold Medal published. And crime was no stranger to the field of erotic fiction, serving the useful function of endowing the books with at least the minimal illusion of a plot.

Candy wound up being very much a crime novel. There are two murders in it, which would seem to satisfy the genre’s entrance requirements. But it never occurred to me to aim it higher than Midwood Tower, and all these years later—fifty of them, astonishingly—I have to wonder why.

It’s hard to know, but I suspect I’d written a substantial amount of the book before the crime element entered the picture. I’d have had to go back and change a lot of what I’d written if I were to aim the book at a higher market, and it would have been ever so much easier to wrap it up and save any ambition for another book.

For all the books I wrote for him, I met Harry Shorten only once.

This was very much in keeping with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency’s view of the author-publisher relationship. Scott didn’t believe in keeping writers and publishers at arm’s length—because that was far closer than he wanted them to get to one another. It was best, as he saw it, that they never meet, and just as well if they never exchanged letters or phone calls, either. The less contact writers and publishers had, the more indispensable was the agent who had established himself as their sole point of contact.

I don’t know how many books I wrote for Bill Hamling. Dozens, certainly, plus dozens more ghostwritten under my name. I never did meet the man, and the only time we were in contact was when I wrote him a letter after Scott and I had ended our author-agent relationship. I had begun a book for Nightstand, which I could no longer submit as the market was a closed shop, and I wrote to find out if I could, in fact, finish this book for him. He called Scott, wanting to know what the hell was going on; no one had told him I’d been dropped from the client list, and I’m sure Scott was prepared to ship him ghosted Andrew Shaw novels forever, leaving Hamling in the dark and me out of the picture.

There was a flap, and Scott called me and offered to resume representing me. I declined—pride? stupidity? The two, God knows, are not mutually exclusive—and I did finish that one book for Hamling but that was the end of it. We never met.

But I did meet Shorten. He wanted to meet Sheldon Lord and learned that I was in New York. My agent Henry Morrison, unable to figure out a way to prevent it, arranged a meeting at Midwood Tower’s midtown office.

I don’t remember much about the occasion. It seems to me Midwood had offices on Fifth Avenue in the Forties, but I could be wrong about that. Wherever it was, I went there, and Harry was a bluff and hearty middle-aged fellow. He asked me a few questions, and I did what I could to answer them. He did contrive to bring up the grease pit scene from Carla and expressed admiration for my having come up with that one. And he wondered how I managed to get so much sex in without having the books come out dirty. That’s not how he worded it, but that seemed to be the gist of it. And I vamped, and said something about writing realistic books about people whose problems and concerns happen to be sexual in nature. I’m not sure what I thought I meant, but I do recall that Harry nodded thoughtfully, and seemed to regard it as a meaningful response.

Harry retired in 1982 and moved to Pompano Beach, Florida. (My Aunt Mim and Uncle Hi lived in Pompano Beach; I wonder if they ever ran into Harry?) He died in 1991, at the age of seventy-six so he must have been around forty-five when we met.

Bob Silverberg, a prolific writer, told me recently that Bill Hamling’s still alive and living in Southern California. Maybe I’ll drop him a line …

—Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.