…and Happy Holidays to all!
What are your favorite gifts? I love to give books, anytime of the year actually.
Christmas Eve in Iceland, it’s said, the celebrants exchange gifts of books and read them while enjoying hot chocolate? That’s most days in my abode (although the beverages vary). 😉
Books and literature, of many kinds, are the truest expressions of my heart.
I created the A.I. imagery at my stock photography account at depositphotos.com .
These are some of the books I’ve read in the last few weeks.
The Only Girl in the Game is a terrific novel of late ’50s, early ’60s Las Vegas, with an intriguing heroine in nightclub singer Betty Dawson. The book has a shocking twist in her adventures about two thirds of the way in that shows the honest commitment to the darkness of his story that John D. MacDonald fearlessly pursues. A really fine novel all around, like so many of MacDonald’s. You can get an inexpensive copy of this on Kindle.
Rebel Wench is a very entertaining novel of the American Revolution, and not only does Gardner Fox pack his book with realistic detail that well evoke the 1700s, but he provides us with two memorable female characters, the feisty but good-hearted “wench” of the title, Deborah Treat, and Laura Lee, the treacherous wife of the hero and a heartless femme fatale. This too can be found affordably on Amazon.
Chinese Lover by Charles Pettit is one of the funniest, bawdiest, sexiest novels I’ve ever read. Madame Li Pei Fou, the sexually unsatisfied wife of a persnickety, egotistic, aristocratic scholar, finds herself a kitchen worker named “Grain of Rice” for a lover–how’s that for the name of a man she basically enslaves!–but when he finally asserts himself and finds another lover, the wise widow Mrs. Tchang Hi, it’s both titillating and hilarious in the resulting complications. The cover of Chinese Lover is by the great artist Rudy Nappi and depicts Mrs. Tchang Hi enticing Grain of Rice when he’s on the run from Madame Li Pei Fou. I liked this book so much that when I learned about an earlier paperback edition with a different cover and title, The Unfaithful Lady, I ordered that just for the gorgeous art. (Actually, though, this earlier edition retained the original witty chapter sub-headings that Chinese Lover cut out). This too can be found on Amazon, though not as inexpensively as the first two books I mentioned above.
And Of Course, There Was The Girl is an intriguing new (2024) private eye novel by Brandon Barrows that has a femme fatale with her own unique twist. She scams men around the country into falling in love with her, proposing marriage, and giving her gifts, and then disappearing. That’s not such an uncommon con game, but her marriage scam turns out to have a far more complex backstory than it seems at first, as detective Sam Harrigan finds out through a twisting trail in a desert gambling town…you can find this absorbing novel readily and inexpensively on Amazon in ebooks or paperbacks.
Finally I want to mention my own literary contributions of memorable ladies. Fate of a Stripper is my noir psychological suspense novel about a lovely but disturbed dancer named Valerie Vickers who gets involved with a lonely older man. It captures Times Square as it transformed itself from the old sleazy “Deuce” days into something more “family-friendly” but still throbbing with darkness underneath the superficial glitter. You can find it as an ebook on Amazon.
And last but not least (as it is one of my favorite stories of the hundreds I’ve had published over the last almost fifty years), there is Spoilt Princess Grace Meets Blackbeard the Pirate, my historical erotic novella about a lovely Irish buccaneer and her adventures sexually dominating the men whom she so effortlessly entrances on “Lamarr Island” in the Caribbean in 1718. Published in November 2023, it’s available now as a Kindle ebook with a gorgeous cover by the master British painter of female domination fantasy, Sardax.
I guess for me a major highlight of any engaging piece of fiction is one or more exciting and memorable female characters. I like to read about other people’s femme creations as well as devise my own. So I hope you’ll take my suggestions and check out some of these entertaining books!
I was talking with one of my longtime friends from childhood, who is my age, and he was saying how he made no secret of being an “old man,” particularly in his line of work so full of younger colleagues. I told him I felt the same way, and did not shy away from pointing out that in my own field of endeavor, erotica/porn/smut/whatever-you-wanna-call-it, I talk proudly of my many decades of experience.
In fact, 2024 marks the fiftieth year I have been in the literary stimulation business. In 1974 I made my first professional writing dollars for two porn novels, The Screaming Virgins (it was BDSM week at the porn novel factory) and The Punk Stud and His Women (about a young guy entranced by the topless bars of ’70s Times Square).
Nowadays I write a lot about femdom, of course, which is one of my personal fascinations as well as the focus of some of my freelance clients’ websites. And sometimes I think that my mental intoxication with these desires, musings, realities and fantasies keeps the inner me forever young, always yearning…
I was never a follower of politics until recent years when it has become unavoidable, and I think William Butler Yeats’ poem, found here, still sums up my attitude, although I cannot help on a daily basis getting into discussions on the fate of our world…
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At Union Square in New York City, late January 2024.
The New York Review of Books offers “literary napkins” for Valentine’s Day, with passionate quotes from various scribes through the centuries, and I think anyone in the swirl of admiration for a lovely dominatrix, or any lady for that matter, can relate to James Joyce’s words to Nora Barnacle as highlighted in this sample from their catalog here:
Yes, it is cold in January, but when we can embrace pleasant daydreams–an upside of being a fiction writer, depending on one’s theme–spring is never very far away.Â
A family emergency finds me in Chicago on New Year’s Eve for the first time in many decades since I permanently moved to New York City in ’73. Of course, in this situation, there is no inclination to rousing celebration. Just trying to get through each day and evening.
Learning how to use Uber to get to a nursing home and back in the Uptown area. And of course, marveling at all the architecture; although I am a New Yorker since my early twenties, I have always said and believed Chicago is a far more beautiful town with its amazing buildings, with tiny memorable details even on “ordinary” structures. In fact, when I took a walk near my hotel, I saw so many things of which to take pictures that I didn’t. Overwhelmed. Another time. Too much beauty.
How well I remember, from growing up in Chicago, this skyscraper with what looks like a church on top, and Picasso’s famous Chicago sculpture below
At night, to wind down, reading my first Ross Macdonald novel (The Blue Hammer) and watching online a forgotten but interesting late ’50s movie The Pusher with a screenplay by Harold (The Carpetbaggers) Robbins based on an Ed McBain novel.
Anyway, since I do have to eat, I went to a famous restaurant I’d actually never been to before, the Italian Village, and had a chianti and sausage parmigiana sandwich. And managed to snap a picture of a goddess type of statue, standing behind the bar, when I was there.
I don’t know if this is a goddess or a nymph or just a Dionysian muse of wine, but of course I had to take a picture of it.
I have a kind of a noirish hotel room with a good desk for writing; I have tweets to do for one of my clients, as well as this end-of-the-year blog post–the writing of which seems to have broken the incredible tiredness I’ve felt since waking this morning. My room’s single window faces the back wall of a famous building called The Rookery.
Don’t be fooled by the sunlight coming in through the curtain–there is a brick wall opposite my window. Which I don’t mind.
It’s been snowing for a little while this December 31st Sunday morning.
Happy New Year to us all, and a lucky one too–please.
I’d like to meet with a couple of Chicago friends, old and new, while I’m here, but for the moment I can just focus my mind primarily on this family situation. There’s that brick wall opposite my window…
Irv O. Neil's EROTICA IS MY TRADE 