William Maltese - Vintage Pulp 1

SURE, I’M GOOD! … BUT WORTH 1000 BUCKS?

If I’d been a genuinely smart author, way back when, first starting out and pumping out books for Greenleaf Classics (while I was busy pumping something else as well), I would have held on to a helluva lot more copies of my books than I did. Instead, I passed along all my author comp copies to friends and associates, like Jesus passing out bread and fishes.

Actually, I guess, compared to some other authors — very few who survive from the time of Golden Pulp Fiction —I managed to save at least one copy of all my books, with the possible exception of MASTER BLACK, which I wrote as Wm. Lambert III (if anyone has an extra copy, please send it along).

What’s happened, of course, is that those pulp books have since become hot items (in more ways than one) for collectors, for just the very reason that so few of them, considered as disposable as toilet paper in their day, have survived. You thumbed through them, you jacked off to them (I didn’t call them “one-hand reads” for nothing; and, yes, I do hold the trademark rights to that phrase — one-hand read), you got their pages all stuck together with your dried cum, you gave them a toss in the wastepaper basket, and you went down to the dirty-book section of your local sleazy hole-in-the-wall and picked up a couple of the more recent offerings. In those days, the halcyon days of pulp-fiction erotica, Greenleaf was putting out as many as four straight fuck-books and four gay-fuck books on a monthly basis.

While, over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed the decided increase in the amount of money anyone has to shell out for a good many of those early smut books, mine included, even I was surprised to find a copy of my straight STARSHIP INTERCOURSE erotica, written by me as Lambert Wilhelm, offered up the other day for the asking price of $1000.00. Of course, the cover is by none other than Robert Bonfils, an illustrator who has only recently started receiving critical praise for his work, but still …

I’ve decided to provide all of you frothingauthor.blogspot.com readers with a free peek at what, these days, you’d have to dig deep into your pockets (and not just to play with yourself) to see … because, as luck would have it, I do still have one author’s copy of STARSHIP INTERCOURSE in my collection, not only signed by me but by Robert; I’m holding on to it in order to pay for some very plush days of retirement.

Therefore, with no additional fanfare — feel free to unzip, pull out, and grab hold — for …


“Hi,” he said. “Remember me?”

Patricia Riley — Lieutenant Patricia Riley — yawned, stretched, lazily blinked her eyes, then suddenly realized where she was.

“My God, are we there?” she asked, sitting up with a start.

“No,” Buzz Shaw replied with a smile. “I just got lonely.”

Patricia looked about the cabin, noticing the neatly lined suspended-animation cylinders holding the Captain and the rest of the crew. She then turned her attention back to Buzz, who was still grinning like a little school boy.

“You’re mad,” Patricia said. “Absolutely dotty. Do you know what Reynolds is going to say when he finds out about this?”

“What do you mean, when he finds out?” Don’t you mean, if he finds out? I’m sure as hell not going to tell him. Are you?”

“Hell, yes,” Patricia said, indignantly. “You’ve committed a breach of orders. They’ll court-martial you for this. It’s my duty as an officer on this ship to see that those orders are carried out to the letter. You had no authorization to defrost me until we reached Beta 10. You were instructed in the briefing that no one was to be defrosted before Beta 10 unless it was an emergency. Then it was to be Captain Reynolds.” She looked at his smiling face, finding it really impossible to be mad at his baby-faced grin. The impossibility to feel anger annoyed her.

But then Buzz Shaw had always annoyed her. He wasn’t somebody she ever would’ve believed to be Space-Corps material. He was more of the country-club, cotillion, lawn-party, high-tea set. He wasn’t the dedicated sort of gung-ho person one expected to be wrapped in the cobalt blue of the Experimentation Squad. He was too carefree, too happy-go-lucky, and too unobservant of rules and regulations. He’d been that way from the beginning.

“You bastard!” she said finally. “You silly-assed, goddamned bastard!”

“Such language for a lady,” he smiled.

“They’ll have your head for this,” she said, trying to let some form of seriousness creep into the conversation, sink into his head. “They’ll cut the goddamned thing off, shove it in one of the vacuum tubes, and jettison it back to Earth before the rest of your body gets there.”

“How about a kiss?” Buzz laughed. He’d always thought Patricia a bit too serious. Not that they hadn’t had some fun times together. They’d surely had some of those. That’s why he’d decided long ago to defrost her when his turn came up to receive the periodic communiqués beamed to them from Earth.

“Like hell, I’m going to give you a kiss!’” Patricia almost screamed. Her attempt at impressing him with the seriousness of the situation had apparently gone way over his head.

“Hey, baby,” Buzz grinned. “When I pushed all those buttons, I thought I’d defrosted you. You’re just as frigid as ever.”

“My God, my God,” Patricia muttered hopelessly. “What more can I say than that?”

What more could she say? What more was there to say? Here they were, the only two conscious people in an intergalactic vessel in outer space. She was suddenly at a loss for words.

“Come on,” Buzz said, extending a hand. “It can’t be all that bad. Who the hell is going to know four years from now that Lieutenant Shaw defrosted Lieutenant Riley and fucked her in outer space?”

“Who fucked who, where?” Patricia asked. She retrieved her hand, which she’d extended for help in getting out of her suspended-animation tube. “Nobody is fucking this baby, anywhere.”

“Guess I defrosted the wrong bitch,” Buzz pouted. “I was really tempted to push the buttons for Susan. Now, she wouldn’t have bitched. She would’ve been pretty damned appreciative.”

“I guess you should have,” Patricia said, lying back down in her tube, crossing her arms as if she were a Pharaoh being laid out in the sarcophagus. “As a matter of fact, you can just freeze me back up and go defrost Susan.”

“And what makes you think I won’t take advantage of you once you start to go under?”

“You wouldn’t!”

“And just think what would happen if I didn’t get my rocks off fast enough. Everyone would wake up on Beta 10 and find my cock frozen up your cunt.”

“Ach!’ Patricia said, sitting up again. “You are damned impossible. And I suspect you’re a little perverted to boot.”

“The truth is,” Buzz confessed, “I haven’t got time to defrost Susan.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s time for me to check the ship and see if it’s in working order.”

“You haven’t done that yet?” Patricia was flabbergasted.

“Come, now, sweetheart,” Buzz consoled. “Things can’t be too bad. We’re all in one piece, all the machines are still making noise, and we are still moving.”

“And how about the message? You know your whole purpose in having been defrosted according to a schedule was to accept the message beamed from Earth.”

“I thought if you’d help me check out the ship, we’d have a few minutes to talk before the message. I mean a guy could get pretty damned lonely with nobody but the machines to talk to.”
“Just talk?”

“Or whatever.”

“What does that mean?”

“I thought maybe we could fuck. I told you that.”

“I haven’t been taking preventatives,” Patricia said.

“No fear,” Buzz smiled, extending his hand again. “I just happen to have some on me.”

“You just happen to have some?” Patricia asked immediately. “You just happen to?”

“Sure,” Buzz said. “I picked some up before boarding. “No one even noticed them in the pocket of my flight uniform.”

“You were instructed to bring nothing,” Patricia said. “Nothing at all except what the regulation set out. This goddamned ship has a maximum-weight capacity.”

“Now, how many excess pounds to you think I added by smuggling aboard one small box of preventatives?”

Patricia shook her head disbelievingly.

“Your time is fast arriving,” she said. “One of these days you’re going to do something you weren’t supposed to. Then look and see what the hell is going to happen.”

“Gee,” Buzz said. “Just because I wanted to fuck a fifty-five-year-old woman? Such static?”

“Just who in the hell do you think you’re calling a fifty-five-year-old woman?” Patricia asked indignantly.

“It’s the year two-thousand-three,” Buzz said.

“My God!” Patricia replied. She automatically checked her body for signs of age.

“You asked me once why I became a member of the Space Corps,” Buzz said. “Now you know. Who else could look twenty at fifty?”

“My God,” Patricia breathed. “Twenty-five years of my life gone in one night’s sleep.”

Unresisting, she let him help her from her capsule.


(to be continued)

Note from Jardonn: William's web site (Link HERE) has more pics of his pulp classic covers, as well as his library of hot erotic fiction still in publication. Best of all, he has an extensive collection of artwork based on his photograph that he calls "'Artists Do' William Maltese."

Best of the best of all, he's put together excerpts of Starship Intercourse from his Greenleaf Classics days for posting to this blog. It is a rare treat, ladies and gents, for here will be words you will find nowhere else -- not unless you were clever enough to save such material from when it was in print.