Career of Sin by Marvin Rhodes
image courtesy of Project Gutenberg
I do not know exactly where Editor-in-Chief Laura Roberts found a copy of Career of Sin, a dusty paperback with a thick smell of old soured pages, nor do I have any real information about either the author, Marvin Rhodes, or the book itself. In fact, all Google brings up is a list of Laura’s books to read. I wonder if she gets to cross it off now?
When she handed me the book to review, I was thinking bad 70s smut and dreading it a little. I mean, there is bad and then there is 70s bad which, while bordering between hilarious and inexplicable, is a state of its own that I don’t think I am really old enough to appreciate.
The back of the book, starting with bold red font declaring that “IT TAKES ALL KINDS…” and then in smaller, darker letters to tease the minds of those who would pick it up off a table of used books, continues “…to satisfy a man-eater like Mary Lynn.” The rest of the blurb consists of short descriptions of her lovers: the raunchy millionaire, the virile young sculptor, the gigolo “whose vices were as far out as her own”—I take it you’re getting the idea? This did nothing to ease my mind about what I was getting into. It might seem strange to dread something so deliciously cheesy, but I realized that if I was going to review it, I’d have to actually read the thing, not just appreciate it as some 70s artifact. Could I stomach it?
This was my mindset going into Mary Lynn’s career of sin: the gory trials of her rise from a New Orleans prostitute to a swanky New York socialite/conwoman, and all the sexiness in between. Right away, I noticed something off about what I was reading—or at least different from what I had expected. There was too much talk about getting kicks, gold rococo, eunuch butlers and people saying things like, “I’ll give it to you straight, Cookie.” I flipped back to the copyright: republished 1970, original copyright 1953. Things begin to make more sense, and the artifact got a little dustier, a little more brilliant. Not to suggest it isn’t cheesy; it’s a nonsense game of cons, husbands, wives, madams, eccentric billionaires all constantly trying to swindle each other either out of their money or into marriages. There are blackmail schemes that literally swing back and forth between characters by the page, and the sex, while no doubt racy for the era of the birth of the suburbs, is muted soft-core stuff for us today. Still, the talk of kisses that send convulsive flames down to Mary Lynn’s vitals and her pursuit of “kicks” via a never-ending series of chess-like mind-games and confidence moves have an awesome fedora-tipping quality that couple well with the knowledge that this book was probably once hidden under a mattress or behind an encyclopedia. This is exactly the kind of cheap, smuggled filth that undoubtedly helped to inspire the Baby Boom.
