Sin City

by Wendy Perriam

Norah Toomey and Carole Joseph have always been losers - thrown together by chance in a seedy psychiatric hospital - until Carole wins a holiday for two in Las Vegas. They take wing eighteen-year-old Carole, with her seesaw moods and explosive sexuality, egging on the shy, unworldly Norah, whose only break from a lifetime of institutions has been the annual day trip to Littlehampton. But Las Vegas isn't Littlehampton, as these two innocents discover to their cost as they are plunged into a world of strippers and gamblers, brothels and crime. The pair are both dazzled and duped by America's glitziest - and saddest - hot-spot, where sex-shows throb with phoney passion, Godmen tout for cash, and Lady Luck rules and ruins lives. Carole seeks to win at romance as well as at roulette, but her wedding plans go disastrously awry and she lands up working in a whorehouse in Nevada, while poor confused Norah settles for marriage to St Joseph.

424 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 24, 1988

About the author

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’