A look at Adios, Scheherazade by Donald Westlake

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A blog called Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books has a look at Donald Westlake’s Adios, Scheherazade, a comic novel inspired by his years cranking out sex paperbacks. (I haven’t read this one.)

The narrator of Adios is a writer, 25, with a wife and kid and dreams of graduate school someday, knocking out a book a month for a New Orleans paperback house as Dirk Smuff.  The pen name used to belong to his friend Rod, who now has a spy series with a better house at $3,000 advances, pubishes articles in [P]layboy, and has a movie deal in Hollywood.  The smut publisher still thinks they are getting Dirk Smuff novels from him, not knowing he has “a ghost” as they call it.

Too many typos make this overview tough to read in spots, but it’s worth it for a look at one of Westlake’s literary detours. Read the whole thing.