Christina's Favorite
In which our heroine reveals herself to be a horse girl
This is another entry in my continuing series of reviews of some vintage smut I bought from Golden Age Erotica Books during their December sale. You’ll be able to find these pieces under the my filthy paperbacks link at the top of the Substack site. This week, we have another of the Christina van Bell adventures published in the 1970s and 1980s by Playboy.
With a dash of international intrigue, some literal jockeying for dominance, and a whole lot of jet-setting sex, “Christina’s Favorite” is much closer to what I expected from this series than “Christina’s Secret” was. Our eponymous heroine shags her way around the world in pursuit of a horse that she impulsively purchases and then loses to international rustlers, racking up an impressive count that includes a Southern gentleman, a State Department attache, a Soviet jockey, and a Moroccan prince.
“Christina’s Favorite” is surprisingly plot heavy (though worry not, there’s at least one sex scene per chapter). It feels a bit like a crime caper crossed with a Cold War thriller, sort of a dirty John Le Carre by way of Dick Francis. Playboy hired seasoned pulp writers for these “Blakely St. James” titles, and it shows: the writing is good, the pacing is quick, and the action (both in and out of the bedroom) is madcap and intense. The horse chase through the Bois de Boulogne and down the Champs Elysee, with the gendarmerie and KGB in hot pursuit of a defecting jockey on a stolen steed, is especially well-executed.
Set against a Cold War backdrop, the politics of Playboy Magazine circa 1983 come through in interesting ways. I’d characterize it as “anti-Communist libertinism,” something akin to how I imagine the debates among Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Robert Conquest to sound as they staggered out of a London pub on one of their legendary benders. Christina traces her stolen horse to a Hungarian nobleman, where there’s a delightfully awful description of a sex scene between said nobleman and a Soviet official’s wife as recounted by a servant in broken English:
Best of all is bottom. Is Olga got bottom like best in Hungary before Communists. Such bottom surely counterrevolutionary. Is amazing such bottom is allowed in Russia! is in Hungary thought such bottom sent to Siberia before spread capitalist decadence!
When Christina discovers (before succumbing herself to the Hungarian nobleman’s charms) that her stolen horse has been spirited away to Moscow, she encounters the jockey who has been riding him. The little man offers to help reunite Christina with her horse if she’ll help him defect to America. He’s a man of simple dreams, wanting nothing more than “a pad in which to flop in the great city of Manhattan”, new elevator shoes, and access to high quality American pornography.
“To live in freedom!” Dimitri shook his fist fervently. “To play forbidden rock music at top volume as late at night as it pleases me, and the neighbors not being able to turn me in to the secret police! Such freedom is the meaning of America, right, doll?”
There are echoes of “Christina’s Secret” in “Christina’s Favorite”; the author clearly enjoyed the intrigue of a Moroccan medina at night and a little spy vs. spy fun in the streets of Paris. The plot is a little heavier than one finds in a lot of contemporary erotica (if you like this sort of thing, check out Logan Black’s delightfully filthy noir pastiches), and it’s a fast, fun, breezy read. As pulp potboilers laced with lots of sex, “Christina’s Favorite” is well worth the $2 you’ll put down for it at Golden Age Erotica.