Review: Never An Even Break - Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg’s softcore novel NEVER AN EVEN BREAK was published originally under the title PASSION PATSY and the Don Elliott byline in 1963 as an entry in the Midnight Reader line published by William Hamling. It’s been reprinted recently by Stark House, under what I’m guessing is Silverberg’s title for the manuscript, as part of a double volume with another softcore novel of his, STRIPPER. I read and enjoyed STRIPPER a while back and have now read NEVER AN EVEN BREAK.

The protagonist, if you can call him that, of this novel is Harry Fletcher, a mousy little accountant who has a gold-digging mistress, a bored wife, and a teenage son and daughter who are beginning to explore sex. This is a setup that’s bound to get worse, and so it does. Harry resorts to blackmail to finance his affair. His wife, already a drinker, starts hitting the booze even more and rekindles an affair with a lesbian girlfriend from far in her past. The kids get up to all sorts of things that are destined to end badly.

And boy, do they! NEVER AN EVEN BREAK is one of the bleakest novels I’ve ever read. As always with Silverberg’s work, though, it’s really well-written, and the prose just races along effortlessly to the story’s grim but inevitable conclusion.

Maybe it’s just me, but the older I get, the more I think I prefer the somewhat optimistic endings of Orrie Hitt’s softcore novels, contrived and far-fetched though they usually may be. But an occasional gut-punch like Silverberg’s books provide is worthwhile, too. The story in NEVER AN EVEN BREAK may not leave you with a smile on your face, but Silverberg’s skill as a yarn-spinner will. This latest double volume from Stark House is available in e-book and paperback editions.

Review: Easy Money - Robert Silverberg

Stark House has reprinted two more of Robert Silverberg’s soft-core novels published originally under the name Don Elliott. Most of these were actually hardboiled crime yarns with some sexual elements, and that’s true of the latest double volume. I just read EASY MONEY, Silverberg’s title for a novel published under the Elliott pen-name as FLESH PAWNS in 1964.

The protagonist is a young woman named Janey Vaughn, who, despite being a beautiful and voluptuous twenty-three-year-old, in the right clothes and makeup can pass for being considerably younger. Underage, in fact, which makes her the perfect foil for con man Charley Simmons, who meets Janey while she’s waitressing in a diner in Delaware. After a roll in the hay with her, Charley suggests that she accompany him to Florida, where they will run a variation on the ol’ badger game on lonely, middle-aged men vacationing in Miami. Janey will go to bed with their marks, acting like her true age when she does it, then Charley, pretending to be her older brother, will show up and claim she’s only sixteen or seventeen, leading to a payoff from the victims to keep them from being arrested for statutory rape.

It's not a foolproof plan, of course, since Janey’s not really underage, but things go along all right for a while for Janey and Charley. Inevitably, complications ensue, and threaten their arrangement. How far will they go to keep the game in operation?

As always with Silverberg’s work, the prose is smooth and polished and fast as it can be. The guy is just a great storyteller. He also does a good job of making two very unsympathetic characters . . . well, not sympathetic, exactly, but the reader can’t help but root for Janey a little. She and Charley may not be great human beings, but they’re very human, if you know what I mean.

EASY MONEY is a solid entry in this genre from Silverberg. It’s in a double volume trade paperback with GETTING EVEN (originally published as LUST DEMON by Don Elliott in 1966) that’s available on Amazon.

Killer -- Robert Silverberg

Many of the soft-core novels published by William Hamling in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties were crime novels, not surprising when you consider that some of the pseudonymous authors were writers such as Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake, who went on to be big names in the mystery/crime/suspense field. But Hamling had writers from other genres working for him, too. Robert Silverberg, already a well-known, award-winning author of science fiction, supplemented his income by turning out well over a hundred soft-core novels as Don Elliott. And many of them were crime stories at heart, too.

A number of these have been reprinted, and the latest comes from the always excellent Black Gat Books line: KILLER, originally published under the Don Elliott name as PASSION KILLER, Sundown Reader SR534 in 1965. As you might expect from that title, this is a hitman novel. Businessman Howard Gorman hires cold-blooded killer Lee Floyd to murder his wife so that he can marry his beautiful redheaded mistress, Marie Caldwell. But then Marie decides she can come out ahead by seducing Floyd and getting him to kill his own client, too . . . but only after Gorman has changed his will to leave everything to her. Throw in a beautiful lesbian call girl and a hotshot airline pilot to complicate things. At least one of these players is going to get double-crossed. The question is who and how . . . and who’s going to make it out of this novel alive.

KILLER reads much like a Gold Medal novel, only instead of fading to black as things are about to get too racy, it keeps going. There’s a lot of sex of several different varieties in this book, and by the mid-Sixties, when it was first published, those scenes are a little more graphic than they were earlier in Silverberg’s career as Don Elliott. However, he never loses sight of the crime plot, and that’s what really drives this novel forward at a very enjoyable pace. Also, as many of these books do, KILLER vividly captures the era in which it takes place. Genre novels are better time capsules than most historical non-fiction, I’ve found over the years. Reading this made me feel like I was back there in the mid-Sixties.

Of course, I never would have been able to read this novel then, because I was in junior high and such stuff was off-limits. (Hey, I had enough trouble smuggling Nick Carter books and Robert McGinnis covers past my mother!) So I’m very glad that many of them are being reprinted these days. KILLER is a very worthy addition to that group. I had a great time reading it and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in both paperback and ebook editions.

Forgotten Books: Gutter Road - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

As we all know, many of the soft-core “Adult Reading” novels published in the Fifties and early Sixties were really hardboiled crime novels spiced up with a number of flowery, euphemistic sex scenes, while the rest of the book was written in a much tougher, grittier style. GUTTER ROAD, a 1964 Sundown Reader by Robert Silverberg writing as Don Elliott, is a perfect example of this. It opens with the protagonist, a slightly dissatisfied with his life, 38-year-old bookkeeper named Fred Bauman, driving home one rainy night in New York City when he stops to pick up a beautiful young female hitchhiker.

Bad mistake, Fred, as anybody who’s ever read a vintage paperback could tell you. Before you know it, Fred is involved with a blackmail scheme and up to his ears in trouble. Like the ripples from a rock thrown in a pond, his problems spread out to include his wife and his hot-to-trot teenage daughter. There’s a subplot about a down-on-his-luck real estate developer who is also mixed up with the blackmail ring. Things look bad for Fred, but as we also know . . . they can always get worse.

And they usually do in the soft-core books by Silverberg, who turned out some of the bleakest novels in the genre. These aren’t feel-good yarns, but what they are is fast. GUTTER ROAD has some of the smoothest, page-flippingest prose I’ve come across in a while. (If page-flippingest isn’t a word, it ought to be.) I really raced through this one. I would have been okay if the crime element had been played up a little more and some of the sex scenes given fewer pages, but Silverberg knew his audience. GUTTER ROAD has never been reprinted, as far as I know, but if you ever run across a copy, it’s not pretty but it is worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Lust Victim - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

Recently Stark House reprinted two more of Robert Silverberg's early Sixties soft-core novels, LUST QUEEN and LUST VICTIM, so strictly speaking I don't know if you can call these books forgotten, but it wasn't that long ago they were. Bill Crider wrote about LUST QUEEN on his blog a while back. Today I'm taking a look at LUST VICTIM.

This novel was originally published in 1962 under the title NO LUST TONIGHT, which Silverberg mentions in his introduction was changed from his original title LUST VICTIM by editor Earl Kemp. For the reprint the original title has been restored, which is good because it works on several different levels. Almost every character in this novel is a victim of lust in one way or another.

Dave Lamson is a successful young industrialist married to a beautiful wife named Moira. Their idyllic suburban life is shattered one Saturday night when a burglar breaks into their house, ties up Dave, and forces him to watch while he rapes Moira. They both survive the incident, but their lives are ruined by the psychological effect the attack has on Moira. This leads Dave to have a number of sordid affairs—and also provides the requisite number of sex scenes for the book.

Silverberg is nothing if not clever, though, and not everything is what it seems to be. There's some detective work and some hardboiled action before the book arrives at a fairly satisfying conclusion.

The biggest problem with LUST VICTIM is that Dave is such a jerk it's hard to root for him. "It's been TWO WHOLE DAYS since you were raped. Aren't you over it YET?" (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the way he comes across at times.) Still, Silverberg is a skillful enough writer that we do indeed wind up rooting for Dave. And of course the book is well-paced and the prose just as smooth as it can be, as always from Silverberg.

I have to admit, I love these books from William Hamling's publishing empire. Even when they're not as well-written as those by Silverberg, Lawrence Block, and Donald E. Westlake, they're such perfect snapshots of the era in which they were published. And thankfully more and more of them are being reprinted. For now, you can't go wrong with this Stark House edition of LUST QUEEN and LUST VICTIM.