Review: Stripper! - John Dexter (Robert Silverberg)

I’ve probably read more soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg than by any other author except Orrie Hitt, so I’m glad Stark House keeps reprinting them. Their latest double volume is STRIPPER!/NEVER AN EVEN BREAK, and I’ve just read the first of that pair.

STRIPPER! is one of Silverberg’s soft-core novels originally published under the house-name John Dexter rather than his usual Don Elliott pseudonym. The Nightstand Books edition came out in 1960. A revised version was reprinted in 1973 under the title ONE BED TOO MANY and the pseudonym Jeremy Dunn. This was one of the so-called Reed Nightstand editions where the sex scenes were rewritten by some unknown editor to be even more graphic than the originals while leaving the rest of the story alone. The Reed Nightstands are okay if you can’t find the originals, but in the ones I’ve compared (which doesn’t include this one), the first versions were better.

Okay, with that bibliographic digression out of the way, STRIPPER! is the story of Diana DeLisle, the stage name of Donna Hallinger, a young woman from a small town in Maryland. She’s a beautiful redhead in her early twenties who has just been promoted to doing a solo act in one of a chain of strip clubs owned by notorious gambler/gangster Johnny Lukas. Her boss at the club is Mack Gardner. And one of the regular customers is clean-cut young Ned Fawcett. Diana, who is also the narrator of this book, winds up sexually involved with all three of those men and also has actual romantic feelings for both Johnny and Ned. But since this is a book full of crime and criminals, it’s no surprise that she also winds up in a dangerous web of scheming being spun by the evil and ambitious Mack Gardner.

Silverberg tells this tale in his usual smooth, fast-moving prose that’s a great blend of dialogue and action, interspersed with a few flashbacks to give us something of Diana’s history. The sex scenes are plentiful and fairly graphic, but Silverberg does a fine job of integrating them into the plot. Let’s face it, those scenes are a large part of why these books existed, but most of the authors made something more of them, and Silverberg was one of the best.

STRIPPER! does have a late twist that’s pretty easy to predict, and I didn’t find the ending quite as satisfying as in some of the other soft-core books by Silverberg that I’ve read, but I still raced through the novel and had a fine time reading it. Silverberg is one of the most consistently entertaining authors I’ve found, and I’m always happy to read anything he’s written. This double volume is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions, and if you’re a fan of these wonderful examples of mid-century erotica (I forget if it was Silverberg or Lawrence Block, another prolific author in the genre, who called them that), I recommend it.