18. Sex Peddler by Arthur Adlon (pseudonym for Keith Ayling)

I really feel like part of the paperback hipster zeitgeist having found and read Sex Peddler.  The cover design was cheap and anonymous enough that I thought it might be an actually pornographic read and hesitated to pick it up.  Not that I have anything against pornographic text, but just thought I wouldn't want to necessarily waste my precious reading time and overburdened on deck shelf on something that doesn't have a real storyline.  Well, no, this book, while having a lot of sex and a straightforward and relatively positive perspective on sex work, is still very much a crime narrative, albeit a soft one.

Ray is a high-class pimp in Manhattan. He fell into it by accident and though very good at his job and happy with the returns, he is internally morally conflicted.  He considers himself superior to the vice racket and is aggressively resistant to calls from Nick the big time pimp in town to join up.  Because he comes from class, at least failed upper-middle class, his endgame is to go legit. He is also dating Millie, a good girl from Flushing.  It all gets very complicated when he takes on a job for Nick to set up a super-hot fallen arisocrat Cuban girl so she can make a bunch of money and bring it back home to her family.

I don't know how real or based on experience it actually is, but the portrayal of this level of prostitution at this time is very interesting and convincing. He goes into detail about how residential hotels that house young women trying to make it in Broadway, keep tabs on them and their debts and then sell their names and habits to pimps who come and convince them to meet a nice man in their room one time.  It's all very genteel and fun and the pimp covers their rent.  It escalates from there, though nowhere is there any explicit coercion or violence in this story.  

The whole story is kind of soft, from the perspective of a fan of hard-boiled fiction. A woman is murdered and planted in Ray's room and it is almost an afterthought that opens the book and then gets brushed off in a few pages.  The real story is his internal conflict with all the women he is with.  Which one will he choose? Which one will he end up with?  How will this expose the true rot in his character?

The ending is quite weird, where he marries the cuban woman utterly against his will, even though they have the best sex scene in the book.  In some innate way, he is horrified by her, because she is a whore. The book ends turning the tables by making her comfortable with what she does and he being the ultimate whore, the pimp.  An odd little morality tale.