Re-Kindling Interest: Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-Rated Movie by Lawrence Block writing as John Warren Wells

This is one of a series of reviews focusing on out-of-print works that have become available again via a variety of e-book formats.

In 1973, at the height of the mainstream pornography heyday, with films even now considered classics of the style (Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones) playing alongside other Hollywood fare, author Lawrence Block was hired to write a similar film that would have "a real script and a good cast and wide distribution." (Something author Terry Southern predicted in his novel Blue Movie.) The film was to be titled Different Strokes, but things didn't quite work out and it was never made.

But, as part of the deal, Block had arranged with his publisher to document the production in a book that would also include the screenplay and interviews — "for some subsidiary income [since] I wasn't going to be getting much actual cash for [the script]" — and publish it under Block's sexual-behaviors pseudonym, John Warren Wells.

Neither saw a reason why they couldn't go ahead with that part.

The result, Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-Rated Movie, is almost entirely fiction. (Some of it based on actual events that occurred before the production was cancelled.) But, according to Block's afterword in Different Strokes, "that was easy enough. It was fiction, and I'd been writing fiction for years. I liked fiction. You weren't tied down by facts."

And if there's something Lawrence Block is great at, it's fiction. I've been a fan of his for a couple of decades now, and Different Strokes has the same voice, humor, and skill at characterization and storytelling that have made him a best-seller since the 1980s.

His work from before that period is generally of the same quality; it has just been hard to acquire due to its often being hidden under a variety of pseudonyms. But now that Block has begun digitally releasing back-catalog works like Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-Rated Movie — and giving some away on Orange Wednesdays at his blog — it's going to be much easier to find a high-quality Lawrence Block book to read whenever I want one.

Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella (Stark House Press)

John Albano is behind on his child support. To that end, he needs to make quick money, and his car-driving job isn't cutting it. Luckily, he's come into a job running bootleg copies of the newly banned porn film Deep Throat (labeled as "Peter Rabit," misspelling and all) between Brooklyn and Long Island, collecting the receipts from the head-counters at the box office (five dollars for each patron), and giving the proceeds to the mob guys who "bought" the movie (actually, forced the film's writer/director Gerard Damiano out of their partnership).

For this, he is paid fifty dollars a day — and these are 1973 dollars. The guy who did it before him got the nickname Tommy Porno, but he was caught stealing and turned up dead with his hands cut off. So now they call Albano Johnny Porno, and he doesn't like it.

Meanwhile, John's ex-wife Nancy's first ex-husband Louis — whom she cheated on John with, and is cheating on her third husband with, too (are you keeping up?) — has hatched a plan to rob John of the mob's money when John comes to make his weekly child support payment to Nancy, with her help.

Louis owes four thousand dollars to his shylock and his bookie. He keeps looking for his next score but can't cut his nickel bags any more than he already does, or they'll start smelling like an Italian dinner. But Louis is a full-time con artist and philanderer loaded with ideas for whatever can make him an easy buck.

At the same time, Albano is also being pursued by police. Captain Billy Hastings, forced to retire when he took a swing at Albano and got knocked out for his trouble, is bent on revenge. And a duo is trying to clean the porn off the streets by investigating John's boss, Eddie Vento. Author Charlie Stella keeps all these subplots up in the air simultaneously without ever dropping a single ball.

Stella was raised in Brooklyn and spent 18 years making money wherever he could (legally or otherwise, much like his protagonist), so he knows the crowd he writes about. He wrote his first novel, Eddie's World, to impress his current wife, and he has steadily grown a following for his intelligent and astute books about criminals, receiving starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.

Inspired by a viewing of the documentary Inside Deep Throat — Stella and his wife looked at each other and said "Next book" — Johnny Porno, Stella's seventh novel, is a terrific crime epic from this woefully underknown author. It is loaded with a cast of quirky losers, layabouts, and louts, with the one shining star being John himself. It's the got the kind and number of characters that director Robert Altman liked to juggle, and I like to think it could have been his 1973 crime film if he hadn't decided to reimagine Philip Marlowe with The Long Goodbye.

Based on my experience with Johnny Porno — I haven't read his other books but plan to remedy that soon (Charlie Opera is $2.00 on Smashwords) — I must say that Charlie Stella is one of the best writers the crime genre currently has to offer. He's a natural wordsmith, putting down the way people really talk in a way that still reads smoothly — not an easy task. The fact that Stark House Press, who previously focused on reprinting "lost" pulp novels, chose Stella as their first original author — after author Ed Gorman recommended him upon reading the manuscript — says a lot about his peers' respect for him.