Kept

by Sheldon Lord

MY NAME'S MARK TAGGERT . . .I'm a drifter, a bum, a nobody. No job, no money, no future. I'm on the Thruway with a laundry bag over my shoulder and my thumb stuck out in the air.Then the most beautiful girl in the world picks me up. She falls in love with me. I fall in love with her.Nice? Yeah, sure.I'm still Mark Taggert—a drifter, a bum, a nobody. And she's Elaine Rice—a Park Avenue playgirl with more gold than Fort Knox.So where do I go from here?No one but Sheldon Lord could have written this book, probing so deeply into the inner reaches of human relations. This is a novel you won't be able to put down!

Mass Market Paperback

First published March 12, 2012

About the author

A pseudonym used by Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Peter Hochstein and Milo Perichitch.

Books positively identified as Westlake's or Block's will also have their name in the author field.

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Taggert is 28, a drifter with no roots, hitch-hiking his way back to New York, looking for work and a roof over his head. He gets a ride from lovely Elaine, a 25-year-old rich girl looking for some excitement and love.

Within hours after taking Mark home and sleeping with him, she feels she has met her soul mate. She wants Mark to live with her. Only, he is uncomfortable with her money, he doesn't want to feel like a kept man.

He wants to make his own way, but what skills does he have to get a good job? Elaine tells him it’s all about appearance she will dress him in the right clothes, tell him how to act, fake it that he has a master’s degree from “Clifton College” (remember that from other Westlake books).

This is the only "Sheldon Lord" book written exclusively by Donnald Westlake, the others were written by Lawrence Block. or Block and Westlake.

Worth the price alone is the beautiful cover by artist Paul Rader who is featured in this months Illustration magazine.

http://www.illustration-magazine.com/...

In this issue: The sexy paperback art of Paul Rader, first profiled in issue #9.

http://www.illustration-magazine.com/...

Our new version features more artwork and a complete checklist of his covers.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sheldon Lord was an early pseudonym of Lawrence Block. This starts out quite edgy with a guy hitchhiking and getting picked up by a blonde in a convertible and there's a sense that the storyline could go anywhere, particularly with the breezy, devil-may-care narrative voice. Yet, surprisingly, this turns out to be a Horatio Alger type story as well as a romance story. Our unemployed hitchhiking narrator decides he doesn't want to be the kept man of the Park Avenue blonde so he gets a job and works his way quickly up to general manager. He beds his secretary, but she turns down his marriage proposal because she can sense he's in love with someone else. So back to Park Avenue he goes to marry the blonde and then move to Westchester. Such a depressingly happy ending. Block was better after he switched his pseudo to Andrew Shaw and abandoned the happy endings and even better when writing crime/noir under his own name.