Christina's Secret

Well that was something ...

It looks like this is probably a continuing series. I bought a bunch of vintage smut from Golden Age Erotica Books, and I’m plowing through it with some delight. These old dirty paperbacks (in ebook form) have a charming innocence to them, and it’s a joy to read them and share some thoughts. You’ll be able to find these pieces under the my filthy paperbacks link at the top of the Substack site.

As I continue to plow through the collection of dirty paperbacks converted to ebooks that I binged on in December, I’ve read "Christina’s Secret,” part of the Christina van Bell series published by Playboy in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. The stories are built around Christina van Bell, the wealthy publisher of World magazine, as she jets around the world having sexy adventures: think old school “Dynasty” if they’d been allowed to pull out all the stops and let Joan Collins be the Joan Collins of “The Stud” and “The Bitch.”

At least that’s usually the case. “Christina’s Secret” was a little different: weirder, but playful, and very self-aware. According to this list, it was published in 1983, seven years after the first book in the series and a year before the last. There’s not much of a through line in the stories — there are a few recurring characters an themes, but each book is really a self-contained story. And this one definitely stands apart from the rest.

“Christina’s Secret” starts at a literary conference in New York City, which Christina is attending as a publisher with her occasional college professor lover. The subject of sexy books comes up, and a panel on erotic literature is taken over by a group of anti-porn feminists. Christina, who is definitely pro-porn, is incensed at the notion that there’s anything at all wrong with sexy stories, and determines to tell the story of pulp writers in the pages of her magazine.

So begins a series of wild encounters with a range of genre writers: a science fiction writer who has transformed his apartment into a showcase of special effects; a noir writer in a foggy, hardboiled San Francisco; a romance author on her plantation in the South; a disaster potboiler writer (and his swinger friends) in suburban Connecticut; an adventure writer and would-be soldier-of-fortune in Tangiers; a “stroke book” writer who lounges in his hot tub in Spain while a computer generates his dirty stories; a horror writer on a stormy night in Vermont; a Western writer in Arizona (and his bronco-busting counterpart); and a sweet little old Yiddish lady who dabbles in all of the genres and sends Christina away with an incredibly hot book featuring a foursome at a drive-in porno movie.

The prose in “Christina’s Secret” is a darker shade of purple than that in “Song for Christina.” Which was fine with me, I like my sex scenes at that end of the spectrum. And not just the sex was over the top: each of the chapters is told in more or less the style of the genre being explored, with a hard boiled tone in the noir chapter, a faux “Gone With the Wind” flavor to the romance chapter, and lots of intrigue in the shadows in the Tangiers chapter. The Christina books were written by a handful of pulp writers who also published (under their own names and pseudonyms) in adventure, science fiction, and horror, and a love of the conventions of genre fiction comes through.

The sex, alas, is a bit less scintillating than in “Song for Christina.” The scene with the female romance writer is a fun bit of role-playing that’s pretty steamy, and the orgy with the disaster writer and his friends has some hot moments, but the real drive in the book is the exploration of the genre topics. And running through all of the chapters is the single thread that pulp fiction writers live a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence, churning out stories that get gobbled up by their fans but rarely seeing much of a profit for their efforts.

Oof. I could have saved myself the trouble of crunching my own numbers if I’d only read this book first:

“There are only two kinds of people who write erotic paperback novels,” he explained. “Those, like myself, who are wealthy enough to indulge their creative impulses, and all the other poor simps who don’t mind living in slums on food stamps. Believe me. There are no middle class writers of erotic books.

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, n’est-ce pas, darling?” a contemporary Christina van Bell (who sprinkles a bit of French about) might say. (I’m in the former rather than latter category, thanks to a solid day job, but while I don’t need your pity, I would totally love for you to buy my books all the same …)

It should be noted that many of the Christina stories were written by writers who published widely in many genres, under many names; this feels very much like a satirical but honest account of paperback publishing economics in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with a bit of sex sprinkled in to boost the sales. And I’m definitely on board with that. I haven’t determined which “Blakely St. James” wrote this subversive critique of the publishing industry, but my hat’s off to him (it’s definitely a him).

The scene with the erotica writer who generates his stories with the help of a computer program was also interesting in light of the current obsession with AI. While it does a pretty good job of describing how writing with AI often proceeds — feed it a prompt, do some editing, feed the output back through, edit some more, rinse and repeat — it fails to imagine our puritanical times in which most AI programs blush at the first hint of heat and refuse to generate anything at all sexy. It seems that dirty stories may in fact be the last bastion of human writers, as the computers’ minders refuse to let them delve into raunch. As both an AI skeptic (I’m not convinced that most humans could pass the Turing test, so the bar for regex-at-scale to look human is lower than the pundits imagine) and a writer of dirty stories, I can’t say as I’m entirely disappointed. (This vision of AI-generated literature reminded me a little bit of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton, published in 1974, whose protagonist works as an editor for a collection of paperback-writing machines; if you like odd British New Wave science fiction, this is one to put in your stack of books to read.)

So, should you grab a copy of “Christina’s Secret” at its current $2 price? Maybe, but more for the fun and playful romp through the world of paperback writers than for the sex (though with 3 decently hot scenes in ten chapters, it’s probably not a bad value — not as good as getting my Betwixtmas Switch for $2.99 or The Center of Attention for 99 cents this month, if we’re just measuring the bang (ha!) for the buck, but I’ve certainly paid more for less. And when the next sale at Golden Age Erotica Books rolls around, it’s definitely more than worth the $1.