When his leading lady winds up dead, a Broadway producer goes searching for a different kind of hit

A vintage tale of lust and drugs in Greenwich Village

When Joyce Kendall arrives in New York, fresh out of Clifton College in Iowa, she has a job and an apartment waiting for her. The job’s as a first reader for Armageddon Publications. The apartment’s at 21 Gay Street, and the small Federal-period house is already home to a lesbian couple, Jean Fitzgerald and Terri Leigh, and an out-of-work newspaperman, Pete Galton.

Jeff Flanders has a perfectly good life. Until Candace Cain sashays into it and turns it upside-down..

17-year-old Johnny Wells was a very handsome young man, and you’d have called him a babe magnet, but I’m afraid they didn’t have that phrase back in 1961.

Danny Duncan drives his father’s Oldsmobile. It's a nice respectable family sedan, and April North is every bit as respectable as the car. Until he manages to get her into the back seat. Now she's no longer a good girl, but only Danny know it, and he can keep a secret, can’t he?

Carla was my first published novel.

I’d no sooner finished CARLA, my first book for Midwood Tower, than Harry Shorten asked for another. I’d just returned to Antioch College, where after two years as an undistinguished student I’d dropped out for a year to hang on to a summer job at Scott Meredith’s literary agency and bucket shop.

Then CAMPUS TRAMP came out, and a copy or two made it all the way to Yellow Springs, and a legend sprang up. I’d written the book as payback, it was said, a way to revenge myself upon the school that had expelled me.

Sheldon Lord began his career with CARLA (#5 in the Collection of Classic Erotica),published by Harry Shorten’s Midwood Books in 1958. Just about a year later he wrote CAMPUS TRAMP (CCL #7) for William Hamling’s Nightstand Books, for whom he’d morphed into Andrew Shaw.

When I decided to reissue my early books in the Collection of Classic Erotica, I did so without realizing what I was getting myself into. I would have to read them again.Or, as in the case of BORN TO BE BAD, I’d have to read them for the first time.

Young David Forrester is a sex-obsessed freshman student at Upper Manhattan’s Columbia University, although the institution remains unnamed in the book. An upperclassman shepherds him through the loss his virginity, then steers him into a club of libertines. And, you know, one thing leads to another.