Las Vegas Madam

Las Vegas Madam, by Matt Harding

No month stated, 1964  Domino/Lancer Books

While the spine and cover state “Domino Books,” the copyright page clarifies that this is a Lancer publication. So clearly Domino was the “adult” wing of Lancer, and that’s what we have here with Las Vegas Madam, with the usual caveat that this 60 year old book is not nearly as “adult” as it once was, and in reality the tale is more hardboiled comedy than it is outright sleaze. 

Also, the cover and title have absolutely nothing to do with the book’s plot. So once again I’d wager a guess that the good editors at Domino had a title and a cover, but their author – likely a house pseudonym – just did his own thing, only anemically catering to the general idea the editors requested. Of course this is all supposition, but I’m sticking with it. 

But boy, what a cover it is! Uncredited, though. In its own way this cover is as eye-catching as the cover on a contemporary “sleaze” paperback: Vice Row. But again, this cover – and the misleading back cover copy – implies that Las Vegas Madam is about a hotstuff blonde babe that runs a sort of hooker hotel in Vegas…something author Matt Harding, whoever he was, only caters to in the most minimal sense. 

As it turns out, the titular “madam” isn’t even a madam, but a college-aged beauty named Linda who has recently been willed a hotel called Bikini Beach in Vegas, which had been owned by a relative…all the girls who work there wear bikinis (including Linda herself), and our hero quickly deduces that most of the girls are selling it on the side, but Linda herself claims to be unaware of this and hell, Linda herself claims to be a virgin, so again, the book we get is not the book we are promised on the back cover. A common occurrence, really. 

So what is this breezy, 140+ page book really about? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s about a pro footballer named “Big” Mark Hale, or just “Mark” as he’s referred to in the narrative; he plays for the New York Comets, and the tale opens with Mark suffering a severe knee injury on the field which he’s afraid will keep him from playing next season. Humorously, there’s a dangling, never-resolved subplot here where a senator, who attended the same college as Mark, offers our hero a job looking into crime…but this is never followed up on. Almost makes me wonder if Mark Hale was conceived as a recurring character. Oh, and the senator is named Martin Stone…not that Martin Stone, however… 

At any rate, Mark hops in his Thunderbird and drives to Vegas for the dry heat to fix up his knee…but first he stops to bang the mother of one of his college pals. This is Jennie, a buxom 38 year old who married an older man who is now dead. Jennie is afraid her son, Tommy, has gotten in over his head with gambling in Vegas and might drop out of school, or something, and she wants Mark to look into it…but first she wants Mark. 

Our hero has long lusted after the full-breasted, long-legged beauty who is the mother of his best pal, and thus ensues a mostly off-page sex scene that leaves practically everything to the reader’s imagination. We do learn that Jennie is a “nymphomaniac” who tells Mark that “the eighth time” is the best, to which Mark responds, “Oh brother!” There’s also some stuff here about Puffy Lansing, a “homo” from Hollywood who apparently has a burlesque show in Vegas and who goes around with his own musclebound entourage…Jennie is afraid her son has fallen in with Puffy, and this is another thing she wants Mark to look into…all for five thousand bucks, money which Mark doesn’t want, anyway. 

So this turns out to be the plot of Las Vegas Madam, sort of. Actually, the novel is more focused on the bantering between Mark and the titular madam, who as mentioned isn’t even a madam, but a naïve gal with an incredible bod (always well displayed in a bikini) named Linda…who falls in love with Mark at first sight. The recurring gag here is that Linda wants Mark, but, being a virgin, she’s afraid to go all the way. 

This quickly becomes grating. Linda’s “pulchritude” is often noted (that the word “pulchritude” is used should tell you how sleazy this book actually is), and Mark often gets her in a state of undress, but she’s never able to commit…in many cases jumping out of bed and running away. In other words the book could just as easily – and more accurately – been titled “Las Vegas Tease.” 

Mark handles it well, taking cold showers and whatnot…humorously, midway through the book the author seems to remember this is supposed to be an adult novel, and he has a random girl show up, again from Mark’s college past, who has sex with him asap. This is Aggie, a notorious college slut or somesuch, and the author gets slightly more risque here, but again the novel is anemic even in comparison to what would be mainstream fiction in just a few years. 

The plot about Tommy and Puffy is most often forgotten; Mark will make periodic trips to the hotel where Puffy has a recurring show, but Puffy’s never there – again, the author just barely catering to the plot he’s apparently been given by the editors. Instead much more focus is placed on Linda following Mark around, telling him she loves him, and Mark wondering why he can’t stop thinking about her. 

There are periodic attempts at action, like when Mark is sapped from behind but can’t figure out if he was indeed sapped or if his knee just went out on him and he knocked himself out while falling. Later on Mark is shot at – right after boffing Jennie, who has come down to Vegas to follow up on him. Humorously, Matt Harding strives to make the book more risque as it goes along, with Jennie’s sudden appearance a facile way to have Mark get laid again, as Linda isn’t giving him the goods – a scene that features the humorous line, “[Mark] buried his head between the two twin mounds.” So either Jennie’s like that mutant-breasted chick from Total Recall, or Harding just didn’t bother editing his manuscript. 

I suspect the latter, as Las Vegas Madam becomes more nonsensical and typo-prone as it goes along. There’s a head-scratcher of an editing mistake on page 98; Mark is once again driving off from Linda, leaving her on the road…and then suddenly he’s sitting in a club and about to get in a fight with Puffy and his musclebound entourage. Puffy hasn’t even been introduced in the book yet, and this sequence is clearly intended to take place later in the book, but someone at Lancer dropped the ball in the rush to get the paperback out. 

There’s also a weird bit where we are suddenly in the perspective of Jennie, and also in the perspective of a scummy type of guy with the great name Slats Hannigan, but these sequences too are strange because otherwise Mark is our only protagonist. But Harding abruptly builds it up that Slats is in love with Jennie, and the author almost drunkenly ties this plot in with Puffy Lansing and Jennie’s missing son. 

Sensitive modern readers – as if they’d be reading this book in the first place – should steer clear of Las Vegas Madam. There is a lot of old-fashioned gay-bashing in the novel; Puffy, whose gender is constantly questioned (how prescient!), makes Mark’s skin crawl…there are many scenes where Mark can’t fathom how his college pal Tommy might have gone gay, and a recurring gag is that Mark just wants to know what gender Puffy really is…leading to a crazy finale where our “hero” pulls Puffy’s pants down and mocks his small size. Methinks “Big Mark Hale” might not realize he’s in the closet. 

All told, my assumption is that Las Vegas Madam was conceived as a sleazy hardboiled crime yarn about a titular madam running a hooker hotel, but instead author Matt Harding got roaring drunk and turned in a light-hearted screwball comedy about a football player meeting – and falling in love with – a super-stacked virgin in a bikini. And a lame crime subplot is mixed into this, but it goes nowhere and no one’s killed or even really hurt in the course of the book. 

And that’s it for Las Vegas Madam, a book I bought many years ago and have been meaning to read; a book that I thought would be about something else entirely, which just goes to prove how talented those paperback publishers of yore were – they could make any book sound good.