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Gang Girl / Sex Bum
The protagonist of GANG GIRL is Lora Menotti, a tough and experienced sixteen-year-old gang member from New York who has to find herself a new gang to run with when her family moves to a different neighborhood. Given Lora’s willingness to use sex to get what she wants, it doesn’t take her long to insinuate herself into the Cougars, and she doesn’t settle for being a junior member, either. She sets her sights on being the deb of the gang leader and actually running things as the power behind the throne.
SEX BUM is more of a hardboiled crime novel. Set in upstate New York, it centers around Johnny Price’s rise from being a small-town punk to becoming a powerful man in the New York Syndicate, double-crossing and stepping on anybody he has to in order to get what he wants. As in all tragedies, though, Johnny sets his sights too high and ultimately has to pay a price for his ambition.
SEX BUM is more of a hardboiled crime novel. Set in upstate New York, it centers around Johnny Price’s rise from being a small-town punk to becoming a powerful man in the New York Syndicate, double-crossing and stepping on anybody he has to in order to get what he wants. As in all tragedies, though, Johnny sets his sights too high and ultimately has to pay a price for his ambition.
236 pages, Paperback
First published April 29, 2011
3 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Robert Silverberg
2,343 books1,601 followersThere are many authors in the database with this name.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 18, 2019
Robert Silverberg has always been a straight-laced icon to me. He's an editor of dozens of anthologies & magazines as well as an author of really thoughtful SF. He also wrote several nonfiction books I read as a kid, so finding out he wrote porn was surprising. I looked around & found this book which contains 2 of his erotic novels & an introduction by Silverberg under his own name. It was well worth buying just for the intro. He explains why he wrote them & what it meant to him.
He wasn't alone in writing these sorts of books. The money was good & times were hard. He doesn't name them, but he does give some pretty broad hints, so I wasn't surprised to find John Jakes, Donald E. Westlake, & Lawrence Block on this list:
http://greenleaf-classics-books.com/v...
This list shouldn't shame anyone. Why did Silverberg & others turn to this form of writing? Money. In the late 1950s, the pulps crashed. He had been making a good living writing short stories for them in several different genres & while he preferred SF, they were especially hard hit. Harlan Ellison started editing & writing for Nightstand Books. He offered Silverberg the gig at $600/book. (Remember, that's 1950s money. My uncle raised 3 kids on $75/week & thought it was good money.) The books were a hit, the pay off got better & he wound up writing 150 of them in 5 years, roughly one every 2 weeks. (Wow!) He says it was an excellent education in how to write & he feels no shame. Good. He shouldn't. He bought a big house & a damn good lifestyle on what these books paid.
This book is billed as hard-boiled erotica. They certainly got the first part right, but it was erotica only during the repressed late 50s & early 60s. The stories were pretty much those that had appeared in magazines. Silverberg says he just expanded one previously published work from 10K to 50K words with 'sex scenes' every 20-30 pages. They don't use a word you couldn't say on TV back in the 60s. Censorship was so bad that the word 'it', as in 'do it', wound up being changed to 'that' at one point by the editor, Algis Budrys. "Do that" is much less prurient? SMH. (People are weird. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America has more about this & how the post office was involved.) Silverberg goes on to show one 'graphic' description of sex then & even how he'd write it now. It's really interesting.
Anyway, I wasn't all that interested in the books themselves, but I do like the Hard Case Crime books & other hard-boiled pulps, so I thought I'd skim them. I found that tough to do. They're not great literature, but they are exciting & interesting. They held my interest on a number of levels. I can't say that the erotic component put any lead in my pencil, though. It's awfully tame by today's standards. I think Twilight was more explicit. Times have certainly changed.
Gang Girl (1959)
This is very similar to many of the 1950s teen books I read way back when. Lora is a beautiful 16 year old who likes belonging to a gang where she can wield her sadistic power through the male leader that she has firmly leashed by his little head. She's tough, smart, & totally without scruples. Very much the gangs of Westside story. They even had dancing, although no one sang. Hung out at the candy store. Wow. Blast from the past.
The amount of graphic violence in comparison to the sex amazes me. According to the government at the time, watchdogs of morality, it's fine to graphically describe slowly killing someone by stabbing, stomping, shooting, &/or cutting them open on a whim. It's fine to slap women around too, but not describe having sex with them. The author has to allude to the mechanics so elusively that it wouldn't arouse a teenager today. I just don't understand that sort of morality. Never did, never will.
Sex Bum (1963)
Johnny wasn't just some small town hick. He was going to make it big, so he took up with the local Syndicate boys. Soon he was rolling in money & girls. He was on his way up to the big time if he could swing it.
This one had more & hotter sex scenes, although the language was the same. I think Silverberg's delivery was more polished. Like the previous book, the protagonist is thoroughly unlikable & yet fascinating to follow; a slow motion train wreck.
There's a moral component to the books that I found almost comedic. In both books, things end with a bang. IIRC, both a moral message & a wrapped up ending was almost a prerequisite for the time & type of books. Remember that these are primarily older teen stories that were adapted. Lots of youth & vigor - lots of vigor! Sometimes a couple of times per page.
The Afterword by Michael Hemmingson
Well worth reading. He goes into more detail about the people, especially the publisher's history & his 3 year stint in Federal prison for breaking the postal laws for mailing a flyer for a proposed book "The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity & Pornography" in 1971, I think. He also tells more about the various authors that wrote for Greenleaf & it's various front companies.
I consider my money on this book very well spent. I got to read a couple of quick, decent stories & I got another lesson on how governments can stupidly apply censorship. I can't highly recommend the books, but I do heartily suggest getting it to read the introduction & afterword.
He wasn't alone in writing these sorts of books. The money was good & times were hard. He doesn't name them, but he does give some pretty broad hints, so I wasn't surprised to find John Jakes, Donald E. Westlake, & Lawrence Block on this list:
http://greenleaf-classics-books.com/v...
This list shouldn't shame anyone. Why did Silverberg & others turn to this form of writing? Money. In the late 1950s, the pulps crashed. He had been making a good living writing short stories for them in several different genres & while he preferred SF, they were especially hard hit. Harlan Ellison started editing & writing for Nightstand Books. He offered Silverberg the gig at $600/book. (Remember, that's 1950s money. My uncle raised 3 kids on $75/week & thought it was good money.) The books were a hit, the pay off got better & he wound up writing 150 of them in 5 years, roughly one every 2 weeks. (Wow!) He says it was an excellent education in how to write & he feels no shame. Good. He shouldn't. He bought a big house & a damn good lifestyle on what these books paid.
This book is billed as hard-boiled erotica. They certainly got the first part right, but it was erotica only during the repressed late 50s & early 60s. The stories were pretty much those that had appeared in magazines. Silverberg says he just expanded one previously published work from 10K to 50K words with 'sex scenes' every 20-30 pages. They don't use a word you couldn't say on TV back in the 60s. Censorship was so bad that the word 'it', as in 'do it', wound up being changed to 'that' at one point by the editor, Algis Budrys. "Do that" is much less prurient? SMH. (People are weird. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America has more about this & how the post office was involved.) Silverberg goes on to show one 'graphic' description of sex then & even how he'd write it now. It's really interesting.
Anyway, I wasn't all that interested in the books themselves, but I do like the Hard Case Crime books & other hard-boiled pulps, so I thought I'd skim them. I found that tough to do. They're not great literature, but they are exciting & interesting. They held my interest on a number of levels. I can't say that the erotic component put any lead in my pencil, though. It's awfully tame by today's standards. I think Twilight was more explicit. Times have certainly changed.
Gang Girl (1959)
This is very similar to many of the 1950s teen books I read way back when. Lora is a beautiful 16 year old who likes belonging to a gang where she can wield her sadistic power through the male leader that she has firmly leashed by his little head. She's tough, smart, & totally without scruples. Very much the gangs of Westside story. They even had dancing, although no one sang. Hung out at the candy store. Wow. Blast from the past.
The amount of graphic violence in comparison to the sex amazes me. According to the government at the time, watchdogs of morality, it's fine to graphically describe slowly killing someone by stabbing, stomping, shooting, &/or cutting them open on a whim. It's fine to slap women around too, but not describe having sex with them. The author has to allude to the mechanics so elusively that it wouldn't arouse a teenager today. I just don't understand that sort of morality. Never did, never will.
Sex Bum (1963)
Johnny wasn't just some small town hick. He was going to make it big, so he took up with the local Syndicate boys. Soon he was rolling in money & girls. He was on his way up to the big time if he could swing it.
This one had more & hotter sex scenes, although the language was the same. I think Silverberg's delivery was more polished. Like the previous book, the protagonist is thoroughly unlikable & yet fascinating to follow; a slow motion train wreck.
There's a moral component to the books that I found almost comedic. In both books, things end with a bang. IIRC, both a moral message & a wrapped up ending was almost a prerequisite for the time & type of books. Remember that these are primarily older teen stories that were adapted. Lots of youth & vigor - lots of vigor! Sometimes a couple of times per page.
The Afterword by Michael Hemmingson
Well worth reading. He goes into more detail about the people, especially the publisher's history & his 3 year stint in Federal prison for breaking the postal laws for mailing a flyer for a proposed book "The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity & Pornography" in 1971, I think. He also tells more about the various authors that wrote for Greenleaf & it's various front companies.
I consider my money on this book very well spent. I got to read a couple of quick, decent stories & I got another lesson on how governments can stupidly apply censorship. I can't highly recommend the books, but I do heartily suggest getting it to read the introduction & afterword.
July 18, 2022
Two novels from Robert Silverberg's time as a writer of sleazy bedside novels, he wrote several hundred of them in a couple years.
Gang Girls is the story of Lora, a 15 year old, whose family moves from the Bronx to what looks like Stuyvesant Town. She was a major player in the gang in the Bronx, and this novel tells the story of her machinations to become the deb of the leader of the local gang, and how she manipulates the gang members (both male and female) to become that leader. Of course, things don't really work out for her. Plotting and writing and characters are good for this kind of book, but I couldn't get beyond the fact that jeez, she's only 15!
Sex Bum (not a title that fits the story) is about a young hood wannabe who goes to work for two local hoods in smallish town upstate New York. He has plans to take their place and move up to become a gang leader in NYC. He's also pretty obsessed with women, and how when he makes it to the big time he will have all he wants, and gets a few along the way. But of course this doesn't work out the way he wants either. The plotting here is a bit more complicated, but not much.
Gang Girls is the story of Lora, a 15 year old, whose family moves from the Bronx to what looks like Stuyvesant Town. She was a major player in the gang in the Bronx, and this novel tells the story of her machinations to become the deb of the leader of the local gang, and how she manipulates the gang members (both male and female) to become that leader. Of course, things don't really work out for her. Plotting and writing and characters are good for this kind of book, but I couldn't get beyond the fact that jeez, she's only 15!
Sex Bum (not a title that fits the story) is about a young hood wannabe who goes to work for two local hoods in smallish town upstate New York. He has plans to take their place and move up to become a gang leader in NYC. He's also pretty obsessed with women, and how when he makes it to the big time he will have all he wants, and gets a few along the way. But of course this doesn't work out the way he wants either. The plotting here is a bit more complicated, but not much.
May 18, 2025
While reading Gang Girl, I was reminded of a film I saw years ago called Teenage Gang Debs (1966). Anyway I thought I'd also revisit the movie (there's a badly colourised version of it on the internet archive site) and it soon became apparent why the book reminded me so much of the film, since Teenage Gang Debs completely rips off the plot of Gang Girl. They changed all of the character names, and the black and Puerto Rican characters in the book are all portrayed by white actors in the film, but otherwise they copied the book verbatim with lots of dialogue taken pretty much word for word. There's no mention of the source novel in the film credits, so I guess Robert Silverberg is unaware that his book got the big screen treatment.
May 18, 2023
This omnibus includes two early pseudonymous Robert Silverberg novels now published under the author's real name for the first time. While both these books were originally published as paperback original sleaze pulps, they are more properly classified alongside the author's early crime stories. They have more in common with Blood on the Mink and The Hot Beat than The Flesh Peddlers.
The author contributes a new introduction "Those Good Old Soft-Core Days" in which he talks about what he learned working in Nightstand's sex-book factory and how he narrowly avoided getting arrested by the FBI on obscenity charges.
Gang Girl (1959)
"Lora Menotti was five feet five of concentrated sex, one hundred twenty-five pounds of undiluted viciousness. She was sixteen. She was deadly. Her parents knew it, and they were afraid of her. Her older brother knew it, and he tried never to turn his back on her. Her neighbors knew it, and they kept their distance. The other kids in the gang, the Scarlet Sinners, they had known it too. They feared her, and because of that they respected her. In a teen gang, fear equals respect. There is no other law."
Lora is the new girl in the gang. She uses her sex and her wits to usurp the power of the male hierarchy. She seduces men only to betray them when they no longer serve her purposes. She has her female rivals beaten, excommunicated, and gang raped. She forms alliances with the Blacks so she can incite deadly rumbles against the Puerto Ricans and Irish.
This book conforms to the tropes of a long dead subgenre: the juvenile delinquent crime story. Lora is the nightmare daughter of the 1950's. As ambitious as Tony Romero in Richard S. Prather's The Peddler. As seductive as Cora Smith in James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. As deadly as Kit Tolliver in Lawrence Block's Getting Off.
Expanded from the short story "New Girl in the Gang" (Guilty, Sept. 1959).
Sex Bum (1963)
"You sang like a miserable stoolie because you saw a way of climbing over their dead bodies, and now that they're both out of the way you'll be setting traps for me next."
Johnny Price has the makings of a good mob man--strong, ruthless, and willing to get his hands bloody. However, he is about to learn that naked ambition has a dangerous cost when you operate on the wrong side of the law…
Expanded from the novelette "Mobster on the Make", which can be found in the collection Rough Trade by Robert Silverberg (PS Publishing, 2017).
This is a fun story, although Silverberg simply pads the original short story with a bunch of steamy sex scenes. The only addition of real value is a nasty little subplot concerning the rebellious daughter of a crusading anti-vice politician; it contains shades of Mario Puzo six years before The Godfather was written.
The author contributes a new introduction "Those Good Old Soft-Core Days" in which he talks about what he learned working in Nightstand's sex-book factory and how he narrowly avoided getting arrested by the FBI on obscenity charges.
Gang Girl (1959)
"Lora Menotti was five feet five of concentrated sex, one hundred twenty-five pounds of undiluted viciousness. She was sixteen. She was deadly. Her parents knew it, and they were afraid of her. Her older brother knew it, and he tried never to turn his back on her. Her neighbors knew it, and they kept their distance. The other kids in the gang, the Scarlet Sinners, they had known it too. They feared her, and because of that they respected her. In a teen gang, fear equals respect. There is no other law."
Lora is the new girl in the gang. She uses her sex and her wits to usurp the power of the male hierarchy. She seduces men only to betray them when they no longer serve her purposes. She has her female rivals beaten, excommunicated, and gang raped. She forms alliances with the Blacks so she can incite deadly rumbles against the Puerto Ricans and Irish.
This book conforms to the tropes of a long dead subgenre: the juvenile delinquent crime story. Lora is the nightmare daughter of the 1950's. As ambitious as Tony Romero in Richard S. Prather's The Peddler. As seductive as Cora Smith in James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. As deadly as Kit Tolliver in Lawrence Block's Getting Off.
Expanded from the short story "New Girl in the Gang" (Guilty, Sept. 1959).
Sex Bum (1963)
"You sang like a miserable stoolie because you saw a way of climbing over their dead bodies, and now that they're both out of the way you'll be setting traps for me next."
Johnny Price has the makings of a good mob man--strong, ruthless, and willing to get his hands bloody. However, he is about to learn that naked ambition has a dangerous cost when you operate on the wrong side of the law…
Expanded from the novelette "Mobster on the Make", which can be found in the collection Rough Trade by Robert Silverberg (PS Publishing, 2017).
This is a fun story, although Silverberg simply pads the original short story with a bunch of steamy sex scenes. The only addition of real value is a nasty little subplot concerning the rebellious daughter of a crusading anti-vice politician; it contains shades of Mario Puzo six years before The Godfather was written.
March 14, 2012
This is pretty trashy stuff and it doesn't feel as real as Hitt's The Cheaters, also classified as "sleaze noir." SF writer Silverberg is incredible, though. He wrote each of these complete novels in six days when he was in his 20s....wicked fast.
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