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Stripper! / Never An Even Break
STRIPPER!
Diana DeLisle used to be Donna Hallinger. But that was when she was young and naïve. Now she is a high-paid stripper at the Pelican Club. She finds she likes undressing before an audience. And she doesn’t have to put out for cold-hearted Mack, the manager, too often. Then Mack’s boss, Johnny Lukas arrives. Johnny seems quite attracted to her. And before she knows it, she’s spending the night with him. The next evening she meets Ned Fawcett, a collegiate-looking guy who also falls for her. Diana is completely torn between the hard-muscled gangster and the sweet, crewcut Ned. Both of them are appealing. Then Mack comes to her with his crazy plan…
NEVER GIVE A BREAK
Harry Fletcher is a frustrated accountant. His wife isn’t interested in having sex with him, and his kids barely notice him. So he takes up with a young lady named Della. But it becomes increasingly difficult to afford Della on his meager salary. As an accountant, however, he works with a baby food company, where he discovers a discrepancy that solves all his problems. The vice-president is syphoning off some of the profits with a bogus product—so Fletcher confronts him and blackmails an extra $25 a week for Della. Unfortunately, whatever he spends on Della is never enough. She always wants more. If only she weren’t so good in bed… if only he could say no.
Diana DeLisle used to be Donna Hallinger. But that was when she was young and naïve. Now she is a high-paid stripper at the Pelican Club. She finds she likes undressing before an audience. And she doesn’t have to put out for cold-hearted Mack, the manager, too often. Then Mack’s boss, Johnny Lukas arrives. Johnny seems quite attracted to her. And before she knows it, she’s spending the night with him. The next evening she meets Ned Fawcett, a collegiate-looking guy who also falls for her. Diana is completely torn between the hard-muscled gangster and the sweet, crewcut Ned. Both of them are appealing. Then Mack comes to her with his crazy plan…
NEVER GIVE A BREAK
Harry Fletcher is a frustrated accountant. His wife isn’t interested in having sex with him, and his kids barely notice him. So he takes up with a young lady named Della. But it becomes increasingly difficult to afford Della on his meager salary. As an accountant, however, he works with a baby food company, where he discovers a discrepancy that solves all his problems. The vice-president is syphoning off some of the profits with a bogus product—so Fletcher confronts him and blackmails an extra $25 a week for Della. Unfortunately, whatever he spends on Della is never enough. She always wants more. If only she weren’t so good in bed… if only he could say no.
341 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 3, 2026
About the author
Robert Silverberg
2,434 books1,684 followersThere are many authors in the database with this name.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 29, 2026
This book is two separate novels by Robert Silverberg, the well known and prolific author of many pulp yarns and science fiction stories. I reviewed Stripper a month ago and posted the review here. I gave it five stars. I cannot give Never An Even Break the same rating. Here is why. Every pulp novel, especially ones written 65 years ago, contains a good deal of risqué material. Most of it is titillating and pushes the edge of the envelope when contrasted with the mores of the era. That is why they were not featured in the local public library of Everytown, USA. But Silverberg pushes the envelope to the edge and then jumps off the cliff. The result is a crash and burn that, without the boorish and sick sex scenes, would have warranted five stars. Let me explain.
Meet Harry Fletcher, a mundane accountant, living with his equally mundane wife and two teenage children in a suburban (or maybe Queens) apartment around New York City. The novel has four sub-plots playing out at the same time. First, we have poor Harry. A schlub. Hard working, low earning, boring, unappreciated. In a word, anonymous. Think Mad Men on the cheap. But by happenstance, the urge for lust captures him in the form of Della, a gold-digging hussy who entraps him in her sexual charms and starts draining him financially, penny by penny. Silverberg paints quite a devastating cent by cent descent into financial slavery. The meals go from $3 to $10. The theater tickets from the back of the room to front row. Poor Harry is like a dope addict without the means to sustain the habit as Della bleeds him dry. But wait, our hero has found a solution! While auditing an account for a big time grocer, he discovers an accounting error. Or is it? It's not a mistake but a clever scam devised by the son in law of the company founder, one Ed Ryan. Rather than doing the right thing and reporting it to the founder, Harry blackmails Ed. $50 bucks a week to keep his mouth shut. As expected with Della, the extra cash keeps her going for a few weeks and she cannot help become suspicious of Harry's recent generosity so she does what every kept tramp does so well: ups the ante. That puts poor Harry with his back to the wall as he has a family at home whom he must support. Like every successful blackmailer, he approaches Ed and bumps up the price for his silence. Now it is $100 a week. But Ed is no fool and knows this will never end well.
Meet Marge Fletcher, Harry's equally downtrodden and boring wife. While Harry is at work every day, Marge is, on the surface, a sort of Edith Bunker like housewife without the humor. She is bored. Her sex life with Harry is almost non-existent. To the extent it does exist, it is more akin to conforming to societal expectations once a month to at least pretend to have the trappings of a real marriage. More monotony than pleasure. But as with everything else in this novel, what appears to be is not. Twenty years ago, the good wife Marge had a lesbian fling with a fellow high schooler. All in the past. Or so she thought. There is a phone call in the middle of the day. The old flame is back. They re-unite. But the girlfriend finds greener pastures with a wealthy widow and decides to spend the winter island hopping with her new lover in the Caribbean. Poor Marge is now hooked on female fleshly pleasures. She starts frequenting lesbian bars in Manhattan and hooking up with random women and paying for it, which puts a hole in her rainy day fund at home.
Now the children. And here is where it goes off the edge into a land of sexual perversion that, even for the genre, is a bit uncomfortable for even a hardened reader of trash fiction. You have Nancy and Jack, two teenagers a few years apart who share the same bedroom. They each have a girlfriend or boyfriend and are at the experimental stage of teenage sexual exploration. Without going into the details and there are way too many of them, Jack gets Nancy, his sister, pregnant. Yes, you heard it right.
Put all this together and here is how it ends. Marge, in a fit of depression, overdoses on sleeping pills and meets her maker. Harry gets drunk and loses it with Della. In a fit of rage, he kills Della in her apartment and is run over by Ed Ryan as he leaves the scene of the crime. And Nancy? She goes to an abortionist who rapes her before he performs the deed. But the procedure, which I guess is what they call it these days, is botched and she dies on the table. All these loose ends are never tied up. The novel just ends.
This story would have been much more interesting if the incest angle were left out. There is simply too much page after page detail about sexual arousal that, like pornography, becomes very boring very fast. The Harry and Marge side stories are very well written, especially Harry's dilemma which could have been a novel all by itself if it were more developed at the end. All in all, three and a half stars. Your mileage may vary.
Meet Harry Fletcher, a mundane accountant, living with his equally mundane wife and two teenage children in a suburban (or maybe Queens) apartment around New York City. The novel has four sub-plots playing out at the same time. First, we have poor Harry. A schlub. Hard working, low earning, boring, unappreciated. In a word, anonymous. Think Mad Men on the cheap. But by happenstance, the urge for lust captures him in the form of Della, a gold-digging hussy who entraps him in her sexual charms and starts draining him financially, penny by penny. Silverberg paints quite a devastating cent by cent descent into financial slavery. The meals go from $3 to $10. The theater tickets from the back of the room to front row. Poor Harry is like a dope addict without the means to sustain the habit as Della bleeds him dry. But wait, our hero has found a solution! While auditing an account for a big time grocer, he discovers an accounting error. Or is it? It's not a mistake but a clever scam devised by the son in law of the company founder, one Ed Ryan. Rather than doing the right thing and reporting it to the founder, Harry blackmails Ed. $50 bucks a week to keep his mouth shut. As expected with Della, the extra cash keeps her going for a few weeks and she cannot help become suspicious of Harry's recent generosity so she does what every kept tramp does so well: ups the ante. That puts poor Harry with his back to the wall as he has a family at home whom he must support. Like every successful blackmailer, he approaches Ed and bumps up the price for his silence. Now it is $100 a week. But Ed is no fool and knows this will never end well.
Meet Marge Fletcher, Harry's equally downtrodden and boring wife. While Harry is at work every day, Marge is, on the surface, a sort of Edith Bunker like housewife without the humor. She is bored. Her sex life with Harry is almost non-existent. To the extent it does exist, it is more akin to conforming to societal expectations once a month to at least pretend to have the trappings of a real marriage. More monotony than pleasure. But as with everything else in this novel, what appears to be is not. Twenty years ago, the good wife Marge had a lesbian fling with a fellow high schooler. All in the past. Or so she thought. There is a phone call in the middle of the day. The old flame is back. They re-unite. But the girlfriend finds greener pastures with a wealthy widow and decides to spend the winter island hopping with her new lover in the Caribbean. Poor Marge is now hooked on female fleshly pleasures. She starts frequenting lesbian bars in Manhattan and hooking up with random women and paying for it, which puts a hole in her rainy day fund at home.
Now the children. And here is where it goes off the edge into a land of sexual perversion that, even for the genre, is a bit uncomfortable for even a hardened reader of trash fiction. You have Nancy and Jack, two teenagers a few years apart who share the same bedroom. They each have a girlfriend or boyfriend and are at the experimental stage of teenage sexual exploration. Without going into the details and there are way too many of them, Jack gets Nancy, his sister, pregnant. Yes, you heard it right.
Put all this together and here is how it ends. Marge, in a fit of depression, overdoses on sleeping pills and meets her maker. Harry gets drunk and loses it with Della. In a fit of rage, he kills Della in her apartment and is run over by Ed Ryan as he leaves the scene of the crime. And Nancy? She goes to an abortionist who rapes her before he performs the deed. But the procedure, which I guess is what they call it these days, is botched and she dies on the table. All these loose ends are never tied up. The novel just ends.
This story would have been much more interesting if the incest angle were left out. There is simply too much page after page detail about sexual arousal that, like pornography, becomes very boring very fast. The Harry and Marge side stories are very well written, especially Harry's dilemma which could have been a novel all by itself if it were more developed at the end. All in all, three and a half stars. Your mileage may vary.
September 4, 2026
This omnibus includes two early pseudonymous Robert Silverberg novels now published under the author's real name for the first time. Stark House is reissuing them in their line of vintage crime novels.
Stripper! (1960)
“You can’t buy every woman for five bucks, but you’d be surprised how many will come across for five thousand.”
Diane is a happy-go-lucky dancer at the Pelican Club. She is satisfied with her life. She makes $200 a week to peel on stage, and if she feels like it, she can let a customer pay her to turn a trick or two after the show. Right now, she has three boyfriends on the string, but that is turning out to be at least one bed too many…
Ned Fawcett appears to be a goofy, lovestruck college grad, but he is also a rich boy. He’s used to getting what he wants. His cornball exterior is hiding a will of iron…
Johnny Lukas is a mob boss who makes ten million a year. He runs drugs, casinos, and gentlemen’s clubs across the nation. He only wants two things: to get the IRS off his back and to get Diane into his bed…
Mack Garner is Diane’s boss and sometimes lover. He’s already a rapist and a cheat. Now he is aiming for murder. He wants to enlist Diane to take Lukas off the board, and he is promising her a $50,000 payday…
When Stripper! was first published in 1960, it was marketed as a sex novel. The cover features a buxom redheaded Diane in a lacy black bra-and-panty set doing a striptease for Lukas, who is just out of frame (only his hand holding a martini glass and sporting an expensive gold cufflink can be seen).
The book was reissued in 1973 with the better title One Bed Too Many. The new cover shows Diane, now raven-haired, embracing Ned, both fully clothed. In the background image, Ned is aiming his pistol for a kill shot… The transition from sex romp to hardboiled crime novel is complete.
4 stars
Never An Even Break (1963)
“Her wanton body was a sin trap for men!”
Meet the Fletcher family:
Harry – The Father. He blackmails his boss to pay for his mistress: “The calm assurance of her voice as she spent his money was like a drumbeat of doom blasting in his ears.”
Marjorie – The Mother, who still secretly pines for her forbidden college roommate, Connie.
Nancy – The Daughter. She gave up her virginity to a neighborhood boy, then he dumped her. Now, she has the hots all the time, but who can fulfill her needs?
Jack – The Little Brother. He is hot for his sister, even though he knows it’s wrong.
Some of Robert Silverberg’s early sex novels are entertaining crime novels in disguise. Some, like The Hot Beat, barely have any sex at all. However, this one is just as bland, tawdry and unredeeming as it sounds. Originally published as Passion Patsy by Don Elliott.
1 star
Stripper! (1960)
“You can’t buy every woman for five bucks, but you’d be surprised how many will come across for five thousand.”
Diane is a happy-go-lucky dancer at the Pelican Club. She is satisfied with her life. She makes $200 a week to peel on stage, and if she feels like it, she can let a customer pay her to turn a trick or two after the show. Right now, she has three boyfriends on the string, but that is turning out to be at least one bed too many…
Ned Fawcett appears to be a goofy, lovestruck college grad, but he is also a rich boy. He’s used to getting what he wants. His cornball exterior is hiding a will of iron…
Johnny Lukas is a mob boss who makes ten million a year. He runs drugs, casinos, and gentlemen’s clubs across the nation. He only wants two things: to get the IRS off his back and to get Diane into his bed…
Mack Garner is Diane’s boss and sometimes lover. He’s already a rapist and a cheat. Now he is aiming for murder. He wants to enlist Diane to take Lukas off the board, and he is promising her a $50,000 payday…
When Stripper! was first published in 1960, it was marketed as a sex novel. The cover features a buxom redheaded Diane in a lacy black bra-and-panty set doing a striptease for Lukas, who is just out of frame (only his hand holding a martini glass and sporting an expensive gold cufflink can be seen).
The book was reissued in 1973 with the better title One Bed Too Many. The new cover shows Diane, now raven-haired, embracing Ned, both fully clothed. In the background image, Ned is aiming his pistol for a kill shot… The transition from sex romp to hardboiled crime novel is complete.
4 stars
Never An Even Break (1963)
“Her wanton body was a sin trap for men!”
Meet the Fletcher family:
Harry – The Father. He blackmails his boss to pay for his mistress: “The calm assurance of her voice as she spent his money was like a drumbeat of doom blasting in his ears.”
Marjorie – The Mother, who still secretly pines for her forbidden college roommate, Connie.
Nancy – The Daughter. She gave up her virginity to a neighborhood boy, then he dumped her. Now, she has the hots all the time, but who can fulfill her needs?
Jack – The Little Brother. He is hot for his sister, even though he knows it’s wrong.
Some of Robert Silverberg’s early sex novels are entertaining crime novels in disguise. Some, like The Hot Beat, barely have any sex at all. However, this one is just as bland, tawdry and unredeeming as it sounds. Originally published as Passion Patsy by Don Elliott.
1 star
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews