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.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ace-High Western Stories, January 1949

I don't own this pulp, but like most of the Western pulps from Popular Publications, this issue of ACE-HIGH WESTERN STORIES has a good bunch of authors inside and an eye-catching cover. My hunch is that Robert Stanley painted it, but I'm not sure about that. Walt Coburn leads things off, as he so often does, and also on hand are Roe Richmond, Tom Roan, William R. Cox, Eli Colter, James Shaffer, Harold F. Cruickshank, Spencer Frost (whose name isn't familiar to me), and Richard L. Nelson, who's interesting because that's a pseudonym of William L. Hamling, much more famous as an author and editor and the publisher of the science fiction digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well the founder of the soft-core empire that included Nightstand Books, Midnight Reader, etc., books written by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter, Ben Haas, Harry Whittington, and many other legendary authors under assorted pseudonyms and house-names.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, June 1945

Is that a great big cat, or are those little-bitty spacemen? I don't know, but it's a striking cover by Robert Gibson Jones anyway. Several of the usual suspects are on hand in this issue of AMAZING STORIES, including Richard S. Shaver, Chester S. Geier, Berkeley Livingston, Frances M. Deegan, Don Wilcox, and surely the best-known name in the issue, at least as far as we remember them today, the great Edmond Hamilton. There's also a short story by William Hamling, who would go on to be the publisher of the Fifties digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as hundreds if not thousands of pseudonymous soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, and many other authors who became famous in other fields. It never hurts to recall that Hamling was a science fiction guy starting out.

Lust Treasures - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Ben Haas, best known for his Westerns under the names John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, and Richard Meade, as well as thrillers and sword and sorcery novels under the Meade name, also wrote a number of soft-core sex novels in the early Sixties for William Hamling’s publishing empire, all of them under the name William Kane. I’ve read a couple of those William Kane books, and they were well-written, entertaining books. But the William Kane novel LUST TREASURES is something different, and it’s very much a precursor to the work that Haas would soon be doing.

The narrator/protagonist of this novel is Len Wolfe (any resemblance to the term “lone wolf” is probably not coincidental), a former Marine who currently works as a rather amoral soldier of fortune, taking any dangerous job that pays enough, anywhere in the world. As this novel opens, he’s recruited by a lawyer representing an American fruit company for a job in a South American country. The company, which has extensive banana plantation holdings in the country, hires Wolfe to deliver a $200,000 bribe to the leader of a rebel army. In exchange for the money, the man will call off the revolution that threatens the fruit company’s holdings. But the rebel leader insists on one condition: the money will be paid in the form of American silver dollars. So Wolfe’s job is to transport 200 grand in silver across a rugged jungle landscape teeming with bandits, while also dealing with the possibility of a double cross from the rebel leader. Not to mention the threat of the cruel dictator who runs the country and his beautiful but possibly unhinged sister, and the complication of the beautiful American girl who is the rebel leader’s mistress.

Now I ask you, move that plot back from the early Sixties to the early days of the Twentieth Century, and does that sound like one of Haas’s Fargo novels or what? That seems like exactly the sort of job Fargo would get mixed up in.

There’s enough sex in this book to justify it being published by Hamling, but LUST TREASURES is definitely more of an action/adventure novel than anything else. The setup is a little slow to develop, but once Wolfe starts through the jungle with a mule train loaded down with silver dollars, the pace ratchets up a notch and things barrel along to a final showdown in a dungeon torture room underneath the Presidential Palace. Haas was a master of colorful settings and great action scenes, and there are plenty of both of those things in this book.

I think anyone who’s a fan of Haas’s work would enjoy this novel, but unfortunately, it’s a little on the rare side and likely to be pricey if you find a copy. If you come across it, though, and it’s in your price range, don’t pass it up. This might be a good candidate for reprinting, one of these days.