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Sin Hellcat
- Collection of Classic Erotica, Book 22
- Narrated by: Theo Holland
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
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Sin Hellcat
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Summary
"As a huge fan of both Block and Westlake, I had fun reading this early collaboration by them before they made it big.... Is Sin Hellcat a lost masterpiece? No. But it’s way better than a 1961 sleaze paperback deserves to be. There’s enough titillation to keep the dudes flipping the pages, and enough edgy, adventurous content to add some substance to the work. Meanwhile, the writing style(s) is pretty excellent and genuinely funny and insightful at times. It’s not top-tier Block or Westlake, but it was a nice way to kill a few hours. Recommended." (Tom Simon, Paperback Warrior)
Don Westlake and I become friends in the summer of 1959, while we were living a few blocks away from each other in midtown Manhattan. I was at the Hotel Rio, on West 47th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and Don was a block south and several blocks west of me. Then I moved back to my parents' house in Buffalo, and Don and his wife and kid moved to Canarsie, and we wrote letters back and forth.
And at one point we decided it might be fun to do a novel together. Not by thinking it out and talking through it and, you know, collaborating in a serious artistic manner. Our method was simpler. One of us would write a chapter, and then the other would write a chapter to come after it, and back and forth, like that, until we had a book.
It worked, and by God it was fun. The first of our efforts was A Girl Called Honey, and it started when I wrote a chapter and sent it to Don. And so on, and we stopped when we had a book and sent it to Henry Morrison who sent it to Harry Shorten. We put both our names on the book, our pen names that is to say, and that's how Harry published it: by Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall. And he included our dedication: "To Don Westlake and Larry Block, who introduced us."
It was so much fun that we did it again — in So Willing and again in Sin Hellcat. Damn, those were good days....
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What listeners say about Sin Hellcat
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- col2910
- 17-03-21
I liked it
I quite enjoy visiting Lawrence Block's early books. I think the intro-back story to the books entertain me even before I've delved into the book itself. And if it's Audible and Theo Holland narrating.... well Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!
Here there's a collaboration between Block and Donald E. Westlake from back before I was even born.
Man and woman, a boring, frustrating marriage - she's frigid and scared of sex, so he eventually hooks up with an old girlfriend in the big city where she works as a prostitute. Before too long he's involved in a smuggling operation to South America. The end.
No, obviously it's a little bit more fleshed out than that. We have some college days, and work days, and courtship and marriage days after a hilarious honeymoon, and before it all goes wrong. Well it was probably wrong from the start, our main man just hadn't recognised it or admitted it to himself.
Things get a little bit more exciting after that..... smuggling, bonding, a burgeoning relationship and a proposition with an outcome, which you kind of think might lead to a happy ever after scenario for the main characters in this little drama.
The thing with Block (and here Westlake as well) is that even when not much is happening I'm never really bored. I've more experience reading Block, but he could keep me on the edge of my seat with his shopping list.
Best book ever? No, far from it. But it did exactly what it was supposed to do...... entertained and amused and while I was listening to it, some otherwise drab and dreary commuting, work and/or exercise time went just that little bit more swimmingly.
3 from 5
Read - (listened to) January, 2021
Published - 1962
Page count - 182 (4 hrs 41 mins)
Source - Audible purchase
Format - Audible
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