Lucky at Cards

“This is crazy,” Barb said.

“I know.”

“All my clothes and everything. And just rushing away like this. Maybe we ought to stop.”

“We’ll stop.”

“We will?”

“Sure,” I said. “As soon as I find a motel.”

So here we are. The town is Phoenix, although we’re never in one town long enough for it to matter too very much where we are. And Barb’s last name is Maynard, thanks to a Baptist Minister in Orchard Falls. But she uses her maiden name in the act.

The act is nothing too very special. We’re playing a small club called the Desert Points now. I’m Maynard the Magnificent, deft and agile as always, and Barb is my assistant, the girl I saw in half, the girl who drags out the prop wagon and enchants the customers with her mammary development. We go on before the stripper and after the female impersonator. We’re not exactly the World’s Fair, but we like it.

Sometimes I meet someone who knows me as Wizard. Once in a while somebody from the bad old days wants to know if I still like to take a crooked hand in a crooked game. I don’t. Some of them discourage easy and some of them try to push, but they all give up sooner or later.

The money is nothing exciting and the life itself is chaotic and uncertain. But we like it. Barb doesn’t seem to care about heavy furniture or charge accounts. There will be a kid or two some day, but we figure they can get used to the life. They may miss out on some schooling, but they’ll learn their geography first-hand. And they’ll be pulling rabbits out of hats before they’re toilet-trained.

It could be worse. Hell, it has been worse.

It’s never been better.

A New Afterword by the Author

Sometime in late 1963 I had a falling-out with my agent. I’d been represented by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency ever since I took employment there as an editor in the summer of 1957. I had left the job and returned to Antioch College after nine or ten months but remained a client of the agency until I chafed at some crap assignment and wound up suddenly agentless. My primary market at the time was Bill Hamling’s soft-core operation, Nightstand Books, and it was a closed shop; Scott Meredith (under a deep corporate cover) filled all their editorial needs. I had a wife and a mortgage and two kids under three years old, and no college degree or marketable skills except the ability to make up stories and string words together.

That sounds fairly dire, and I suppose it was, but it was decades later before I realized it didn’t have to be. I could have mended the fences. One phone call to Scott, a mumbled apology, and I’d have been back in the fold. In fact there was a phone call—from Scott—to clear up some unfinished business, and at its conclusion he suggested I return to the fold. And I declined. Does that sound like a principled stand? Or like wrongheaded obstinacy? I have to say it was neither, just an inability to perceive options. How could I go back to being a client? You know, I always did well on IQ tests and, when I put my mind to it, at schoolwork. But in certain basic respects, I really wasn’t terribly bright, was I?

Never mind. I had a living to make, and only one way to make it, and I went to work. I was living in a Buffalo, New York, suburb at the time, out of touch with the world of publishing. We probably should have moved back to New York City, but we stayed put and I worked to develop new markets for myself. I’d written a number of books for Harry Shorten at Midwood Tower, and that was not a Scott Meredith closed shop, but did I give Harry a ring and try to set something up? No, never thought of it. Instead I established a new identity as Jill Emerson, wrote a sensitive lesbian novel, and sent it to Midwood as an over-the-transom submission. (They bought it and launched Jill Emerson’s checkered career, but that’s another story; you’ll find it in the afterwords to Warm & Willing and Enough of Sorrow.)

I’d written some psychosexual nonfiction (made up case histories) for Lancer Books, and I knew Larry T. Shaw well enough to call him up and propose a book. So that was a market. I knew something about coins, and knocked out a book on coin investment that Frederick Fell published. I sold articles to a batch of numismatic (currency) magazines: Coins, Numismatic Scrapbook, and The Whitman Numismatic Journal.

And then there was Beacon.

Before there was Midwood or Nightstand, Beacon Books had essentially created the genre of widely distributed soft-core paperback fiction, with Orrie Hitt their leading writer. I believe A Diet of Treacle was my first book for Beacon, although it didn’t set out to be; I had more ambitious aims for the book, set in the beat/hip demimonde of Greenwich Village. But when other publishers passed, my agent sent the manuscript to Beacon, where it was published as Pads Are for Passion by Sheldon Lord. That was the pen name I’d put on my Midwood titles, and I decided to use it at Beacon as well.

I wrote two more books specifically for Beacon, April North and Community of Women. The latter was a Beacon editor’s idea; he must have been a commuter, given to fantasies about daytime life in his suburb after all the men had caught the 8:02 a.m. train to Grand Central Station.

When the books came out, I made the mistake of having a look at them; when some sentences struck me as unwieldy, I checked my carbon copies. Beacon was a strange publishing house indeed. The publisher, a fellow named Arnold Abramson, came out of the world of pulp magazines and took it as an article of faith that anything he bought from a writer had to be rewritten by an editor. And so he had a whole roomful of editors whose job it was to change the manuscripts they bought, whether they needed it or not. If the editors didn’t make abundant changes, they’d be out of a job. So they changed my compound sentences to simple sentences and hooked my simple sentences together as compound sentences and so on, all the way through to the end. They certainly didn’t make the stuff better, and I don’t suppose they made it a great deal worse, but the whole business annoyed the hell out of me. The pay wasn’t all that good, so I figured I’d write for somebody else.

But Beacon wanted more from Sheldon Lord, and Scott Meredith’s merry men figured out how to handle that. They enlisted ghostwriters to furnish Sheldon Lord manuscripts, and in return for the use of my name, I got a slice of the advance. Two hundred dollars a book, if I remember correctly.

And how many of these ghostwritten manuscripts were there over a two or three year period? Beats me. Eight or ten, something like that? I didn’t know anything about the ghosts and never saw their books or knew what they were writing. One guy was named Milo and one guy wasn’t, and my old college buddy Peter Hochstein wrote at least one of the books, with results that were interesting enough to discuss in the afterword to April North. But the whole ghosting operation had pretty much stopped by the time Scott Meredith and I parted company.

I don’t think I had Beacon in mind when I wrote Lucky at Cards. It’s a straight suspense novel, not a soft-core sex opus, and I probably intended it for Gold Medal, where I’d already published Grifter’s Game and Coward’s Kiss—albeit under other titles. But I needed a quick sale, and that’s probably what made me send the manuscript to Bernie Williams at Beacon.

Well, he loved it. I had lunch with him in New York, and we had this wacky conversation in which he told me how much of an improvement the book was on my recent work for them. It required hardly any editing, he said, and showed me some pages of a recent Sheldon Lord manuscript that had been edited to death. It was comforting to know I was better than the guys who’d been ghosting for me, but it made for a weird moment or two.

Bernie called the book The Sex Shuffle, perhaps thinking that the promise of sex might help offset the book’s lack of much sexual content. And he did something Beacon has never done before or since, so far as I know: He put a quote on the cover enthusing about the book. The source of the quote was given as one otherwise unidentified “William Bernard,” and my keen analytical mind leads me to suspect that it was in fact Bernie Williams.

There was a wonderful moment at that lunch. Bernie had an idea for a book I might write next, one that examined the relationship of an older husband with a much younger wife. “It’s almost a cliche in fiction,” he said,