Strip, Wench… or Die! This one had us at strip. Plus it was cheap, a mere five bucks. And you get what you pay for sometimes, because this was really bad. Basically, Rip Austin is an insurance investigator posing as a rep for the local strippers union in order to look into the death of a dancer. He finds himself involved in an organized crime scam, and soon more strippers are dying. But not before they get naked and he manages to fall into bed with a few. Typical passage:
Naked women were hardly anything new in the life of a loving rounder like Austin, but he was hardly used to having one come to the door of a fashionable mansion in broad daylight. He looked at the massive mounds of her breasts—huge but beautifully formed with nipples that jutted upward with almost virginal audacity.
We get it—it’s not supposed to be taken seriously. But it should at least be written in engaging fashion. Author Gene Cross, aka Arthur Jean Cox, obviously didn’t give a shit about this as long as he still got paid. In that way he’s a bit like a stripper himself. But again, at least the book was only five bucks. And there’s a character named Kooky Marsh, which we think is kind of cool. Those are the sum total of the book’s merits. Alas, onward and upward.
Oh, a final note: regarding the cover, the dancer is identified in a couple of places online as Libby Jones at the Zamboanga Club in Los Angeles. We think that’s an IRE™ (internet replication error). While the “Libby Jones” from the source of that identification may be same person you see above and below, if you search for Libby Jones elsewhere online, the many images which are definitively labeled as her are a different person. We may investigate in more detail a little later.
