Worst Cover of the Week?

According to Joe Kenney, master of the Glorious Trash blog, “Ross Webb” was one of several pseudonyms employed by J.C. “Jim” Conaway, who, during the last quarter of the 20th century, specialized in producing “low-thrills, high-sleaze” fiction.

Get Nookie, released by Manor Books in 1975 (and conceivably titled in imitation of the 1974-1975 TV cop drama Get Christie Love!), was the sequel to another paperback, put out that same year: Meet Nookie. Kenney observes that the earlier book introduced “Italian-American Indian beauty Nakomis ‘Nookie’ Narducci … a ‘well-stacked female dick.’ She has straight black hair that flows past her shoulders but no other body hair to speak of; her ‘hairless femininity’ will often be mentioned in the copious sex scenes, but none of her male consorts seem much surprised by it, which is strange given that this was written in the shaggy-hairy ’70s.” Based in New York City’s Greenwich Village—just like another Conaway protagonist, Jana Blake—the oft-naked Nookie finds herself quite literally in hot water in this novel. Here’s the back-jacket copy:

Swing Spas were places where young swingers got to know each other … very well. They offered free love for a fee, massages that rubbed you the right way and the kind of physical exercise that everyone loves to practice.

Suddenly the spa swung the wrong way. People were being stabbed in the steam room, strangled in the sauna and sucked to death in the whirlpool.

Nookie, the poverty-prone detective, took the case for money—and because she was tired of laying service charges on her boyfriends. But before she knew it, she was all balled up in a steamy conspiracy and someone was out to … GET NOOKIE.

Kenney provides a good deal more information about Conaway’s dubious literary endeavors here.

READ MORE: “Get Nookie by Ross Webb—Chapter 01” (Gardner Francis Fox Library Book Club).