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.

Carny Girl - John Dexter

Almost everyone who wrote softcore novels for the operation set up by publisher William Hamling and agent Scott Meredith had books published under the name John Dexter at one time or another. It was a true house-name. The actual authors have been identified on some of them, but at this point we have no idea who wrote CARNY GIRL, published as part of the Pillar Books imprint in 1964.

It starts off with a nude, beautiful young woman who finds herself on a beach with amnesia. She has no idea who she is or what she’s doing there. All she knows is that she’s mortally terrified of something and has to get away. As luck would have it, a traveling carnival is stopped on a road nearby because one of the trucks has a flat tire, so, since it’s the middle of the night, our heroine is able to sneak onto the merry-go-round and hide. Of course, she’s discovered in the morning and winds up joining the carnival, working as a shill for some of the games and in the girlie show. She also falls for the handsome but down on his luck owner of the carnival and battles against an inexplicable (amnesia, remember?) nymphomania that makes her go to bed with most of the men she encounters. Eventually she comes to be haunted by the mystery of her past, especially when she finds out the authorities are looking for a girl who matches her description. And then a hurricane blows in on the Gulf Coast where the carnival is set up . . .

Like most of these books, CARNY GIRL reads quickly and is entertaining. I like carny novels in general, and this one focuses quite a bit on that colorful background, although the nymphomania is the main plot element, of course. But it’s also frustrating (also common for these books) because with that set-up and if the sex had been toned down some, this could have been an excellent hardboiled novel published by Gold Medal or as half of an Ace Double. Whoever this John Dexter was, his prose is pretty smooth and there’s some good dialogue.

But there’s no point in lamenting what might have been, and anyway, who am I to judge? The author got paid a quick thousand or twelve hundred bucks (significant money in 1964), did his job in a professional manner, and I assume was happy to cash the check. I’m sure the thought that somebody would be reviewing this novel nearly 60 years later never crossed his mind. CARNY GIRL is no lost classic, but I enjoyed reading it and for me, that counts more than anything else.

Forgotten Books: Lust Grave - John Dexter

You never know what you’re going to get when you start one of these books, especially when it was published under a house-name. There’s no telling who “John Dexter” was on this book. It hasn’t been attributed to any of the usual stable: Block, Westlake, Silverberg, etc. And based on the quality of the prose, it wasn’t any of those guys. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Also with these books, you could get almost any sort of story, from the darkest noir to screwball comedies (although most of them lean toward the hardboiled/noir side). All you can really count on is that there’ll be a number of lengthy, highly euphemistic sex scenes.

LUST GRAVE, published in 1964, is one of the dark, noirish books. Corrupt, sociopathic Bull Chapman, who works as a cop in the small city of Adamsville, Missouri, prowls the local Lover’s Lane looking for couples he can prey on. He intimidates the young men into abandoning their dates, then rapes the girls and frightens them into keeping quiet about it. He sniffs out cheating wives and blackmails them into having sex with him. It’s a good life for a monster like Bull, but then he makes the mistake of targeting the wrong couple: pre-med student Richard Bristol, who just wants to settle down and marry his high school sweetheart Laura Dale. Although they intend to wait for marriage to sleep together, they get carried away one night in the woods, but before they can finish, Bull catches them and proceeds with his usual brutal assault. He figures he’ll get away with it the way he always has.

But in this case, Richard and Laura decide to get even with him. And the best way to do that is to kill him . . .

Of course, being a couple of typical small-town, mid-century American youth, planning and committing a murder isn’t necessarily easy for them. And in this type of novel, things always go wrong.

Whoever John Dexter was in this case, LUST GRAVE really moves. Like most of the books from this publisher, it has the narrative drive of a rocket. I was really flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen. The prose is kind of unpolished at times, and the author drags in some sub-plots that are there mostly to pad out the wordage and provide an excuse for more sex scenes, but there are long stretches of the book that read like a second-or-third tier Gold Medal novel. The plot doesn’t play out exactly like I thought it would, either, which is always a bonus. And as is also usual with books like this, LUST GRAVE provides a nice window into everyday life for the middle and lower class in the late Fifties/early Sixties era. You can almost imagine a slightly older Wally Cleaver or Bud Anderson getting into the sort of trouble that Richard Bristol does.

As I often say about books like this, LUST GRAVE is no lost masterpiece, but it is a highly readable, entertaining yarn that I raced through in a day. If you ever come across a copy for a reasonable price, it’s worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Lust Shop - John Dexter

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on September 15, 2009.)

LUST SHOP is narrated by Pete Ritchie, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles and owns a garage specializing in repairing foreign cars. Pete is a young, virile guy, of course, who enjoys romancing the rich, beautiful married women who bring in their foreign sports cars for him to work on, hence the title. To his surprise, Pete gets really hung up on one of his customers, a gorgeous blonde named Chris. She won’t have anything to do with him, though, until he agrees to handle a little problem for her. It seems that she’s being blackmailed . . .

Well, you know as well as I do that this is a set-up for a Gold Medal novel. However, since this isn’t a Gold Medal novel but rather an Evening Reader, Pete doesn’t jump right away at the chance to get involved in Chris’s troubles. Instead he tries to distract himself by bedding various other women in a series of scenes that seem like nothing more than padding at first. In a nice twist, though, later on they actually turn out to be connected to the main plot. When Pete finally does decide to try to get the blackmailer off of Chris’s back, you know things won’t turn out the way he wants them to. They’re just going to get worse. Again, this isn’t a Gold Medal, so even though you’d have to call it a hardboiled crime novel, the plot doesn’t play out exactly like you might expect if it was written by Charles Williams or Gil Brewer.

The thing about books published under the “John Dexter” house-name is that you never know what you’re going to get. I’m reasonably certain that this book isn’t by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, or Donald E. Westlake. All the Harry Whittington novels published under the John Dexter name have been identified, and anyway, LUST SHOP doesn’t read anything like Whittington’s work. The breezy, wise-cracking style reminds me a little of the Clyde Allison books by William Knoles, but this doesn’t seem like a Knoles plot to me. Which means the actual author is probably one of the half-dozen or so other writers who turned out books for William Hamling’s sleaze publishing empire. I have no real idea which one it might have been.

LUST SHOP certainly isn’t some sort of lost classic, but it is a fast-paced, fairly entertaining yarn with a couple of decent plot twists and the occasional nice line. If you like this sort of book – and obviously I do – it’s worth reading if you come across a copy. I recently picked up a nice stack of coverless John Dexter books (including a couple of Whittingtons), so you can expect to be reading about more of them here on the blog.

(Yeah, well, I'm still working on that . . . There was no cover scan in the original version of this post because my copy is coverless and I couldn't find one on-line back in '09. But the one above comes from the great Vintage Greenleaf Classics website, which you have to check out if you have any interest in these books at all.)

Forgotten Books: Wanton Bait - John Dexter

(This post originally appeared on somewhat different form on May 6, 2007.)

A lot of the soft-core porn novels published in the Sixties strike me as sexed-up, Gold Medal-type books. WANTON BAIT by “John Dexter” certainly starts out looking like it might fall into that category. Consider these plot elements: an old man who’s the richest and most powerful person in a small town; his young, horny, greedy wife; and an even hornier, greedier lawyer who’s bored with his wife and desperate for a big payoff. Sounds like a book by Charles Williams or Harry Whittington, doesn’t it? In fact, when I started this book I wondered if it might be one of those mysterious, unidentified house-name novels that Whittington is supposed to have written in the mid-Sixties. (Of course, now we know the titles of all those books, thanks to David Laurence Wilson and Lynn Munroe.)

But I’m confident now that it’s not (and I was right), as the style seems to be nothing like Whittington’s, and it never really develops into the crime novel that it appears it might turn out to be, either. Instead it remains throughout more of a domestic drama. That doesn’t make it a bad book, though. The story has a certain noirish edge to it, as the sleazy lawyer/narrator’s big plans take turn after turn for the worse. And whoever the actual author was behind the John Dexter house-name (and there are plenty of suspects), he was a pretty good wordsmith, as the prose is smooth and slick and reads really fast. By 1965, when this book was published, the sex scenes are a little more graphic than they were even a few years earlier, and there are more of them, making them seem somewhat shoehorned in, but they don’t overwhelm the main plot. I wouldn’t run right out and look for WANTON BAIT, but if you run across a copy or already own it, it’s pretty entertaining and probably worth reading.

Lust Shop - John Dexter

This post doesn’t include a cover scan because the copy I own happens to be coverless, and there doesn’t seem to be one anywhere on-line. But what about the book itself, you ask?

LUST SHOP is narrated by Pete Ritchie, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles and owns a garage specializing in repairing foreign cars. Pete is a young, virile guy, of course, who enjoys romancing the rich, beautiful married women who bring in their foreign sports cars for him to work on, hence the title. To his surprise, Pete gets really hung up on one of his customers, a gorgeous blonde named Chris. She won’t have anything to do with him, though, until he agrees to handle a little problem for her. It seems that she’s being blackmailed . . .

Well, you know as well as I do that this is a set-up for a Gold Medal novel. However, since this isn’t a Gold Medal novel but rather an Evening Reader, Pete doesn’t jump right away at the chance to get involved in Chris’s troubles. Instead he tries to distract himself by bedding various other women in a series of scenes that seem like nothing more than padding at first. In a nice twist, though, later on they actually turn out to be connected to the main plot. When Pete finally does decide to try to get the blackmailer off of Chris’s back, you know things won’t turn out the way he wants them to. They’re just going to get worse. Again, this isn’t a Gold Medal, so even though you’d have to call it a hardboiled crime novel, the plot doesn’t play out exactly like you might expect if it was written by Charles Williams or Gil Brewer.

The thing about books published under the “John Dexter” house-name is that you never know what you’re going to get. I’m reasonably certain that this book isn’t by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, or Donald E. Westlake. All the Harry Whittington novels published under the John Dexter name have been identified, and anyway, LUST SHOP doesn’t read anything like Whittington’s work. The breezy, wise-cracking style reminds me a little of the Clyde Allison books by William Knoles, but this doesn’t seem like a Knoles plot to me. Which means the actual author is probably one of the half-dozen or so other writers who turned out books for William Hamling’s sleaze publishing empire. I have no real idea which one it might have been.

LUST SHOP certainly isn’t some sort of lost classic or even a top-tier sleaze novel, but it is a fast-paced, fairly entertaining yarn with a couple of decent plot twists and the occasional nice line. If you like this sort of book – and obviously I do – it’s worth reading if you come across a copy. I recently picked up a nice stack of coverless John Dexter books (including a couple of Whittingtons), so you can expect to be reading about more of them here on the blog.