Mark obviously didn’t take his writing terribly seriously, and it’s like he with us for the ride, enjoying it as much as we do. In fact it’s quite well written, with fast pacing and a quick wit. This is not to say this is a badly written piece of period smut. While this may have been a racy book for its day, it would barely get an R rating today and the sex is watered down even more with all the witty banter and slapstick acrobatics. This happens all through the novel, meaning the sex scenes are all played for laughs.
The titular teeny-bopper is named Lolly Popstick! Anyway, Powers doesn’t get much joy from Boxx because his ex-wife has an almost psychic ability to call him long distance when he’s just about to have some fun. He soon hops into bed with Joy Boxx, a bored housewife and one of the many characters with joke names. Powers joins the theater group and meets a menagerie of suburban types, most of whom are hopping into bed with one another. A bunch of CIA dough disappeared with him.
Amateur theater, you see, is a front for the Commies, and the CIA operative who was investigating this group, Arch Fink, died recently. The story follows Vance Powers, a recently divorced corporate lawyer whose boring life gets turned upside down when a Congressman he knows hires him for a secret mission - infiltrate his local suburban amateur theatrical group in order to find some missing CIA money. I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA was published by Berkley in 1967, when Mark was already well established as a pulp writer. Ted Mark was the pen name for Ted Gottfried, author of more than a hundred novels and nonfiction titles, many of them on the racy side. I was right, I’ve never seen that book again, and now, 20 years later, I finally got around to reading it. I’d never heard of the title or author before (I wasn’t about to forget that title!) and figured this would be something I’d never see again. So when I came across Ted Mark’s I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA I just had to get it. I also learned the joy of collecting vintage paperbacks, with the added joy of getting them for next to nothing. My library exploded with books on every topic imaginable. I realized that I would never get another opportunity like that in my life and took full advantage. Sometimes the manager would be like, “You did a good job today, Sean, take a book.” Most books are half cover price, and employees got a 50% discount. They have several stores around the state and they’re all as big as supermarkets, filled with used books, music, and games. Many, many years ago I worked at a used bookstore called Bookmans in Tucson.
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