Passion Web - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Years ago I owned a copy of this book, but I never got around to reading it before it was lost in the Fire of ’08. At that time, I had no idea who William Kane was, although I figured it was a pseudonym. I just bought all the Pillar/Ember/Nightstand/etc. books that I came across, especially if they were a reasonable price. I believe I paid a buck for that copy.

Time passed, and I never replaced that lost copy of PASSION WEB. Then I found out that none other than the great Western and adventure novelist Ben Haas wrote most of those William Kane books, including PASSION WEB. I’ve been on the lookout for an affordable copy ever since and came across one recently. I read it within a few days of getting it. Not going to miss out this time!

The cover by Robert Bonfils makes this look like a Western, and it sort of is a contemporary (1964) Western, set mostly on a dude ranch in West Texas and in the nearby small town. The protagonist is Lois Frost, a beautiful, ambitious young secretary at an oil company who has been promised a promotion to an executive job if she can weasel some vital information out of geologist Kirk Parsons, who works for a rival oil company. Lois is willing to do the job no matter what it takes, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. The dude ranch where Lois stays while pursuing her goal is owned by beautiful Tess Welch, who struggles not only to keep the ranch going but to control her burgeoning feelings for Lois. The neighboring ranch is owned by champion bronc rider Clint Sandifer, who has a violent streak, a fondness for whips, and a hankering for beautiful young Maria Galindez, who’s married to one of Clint’s ranch hands.

Most of the book is taken up by Haas’s skillful mixing and matching of those characters, plus a mystery of sorts over the location of a fabulously valuable pool of oil, before everything comes to a head at a rodeo. (Where else?) His smooth prose is a joy to read, as always, and keeps things moving along at such a fast pace that I raced through the book and enjoyed it quite a bit. There are a lot of sex scenes and they’re fairly graphic, but they’re well-written and actually have to do with the plot most of the time. Not only that, but there are several scenes of unexpected violence that would be right at home in one of Haas’s adventure novels, and his descriptions of the West Texas landscape are excellent. He’s just one of those writers whose work really resonates with me, no matter what the genre.

So I’m glad I finally got my hands on another copy of PASSION WEB. I really had a good time reading it. I found another William Kane book that wasn’t too pricey for my taste and ordered it. I figure I’ll enjoy it, too.

Killer -- Robert Silverberg

Many of the soft-core novels published by William Hamling in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties were crime novels, not surprising when you consider that some of the pseudonymous authors were writers such as Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake, who went on to be big names in the mystery/crime/suspense field. But Hamling had writers from other genres working for him, too. Robert Silverberg, already a well-known, award-winning author of science fiction, supplemented his income by turning out well over a hundred soft-core novels as Don Elliott. And many of them were crime stories at heart, too.

A number of these have been reprinted, and the latest comes from the always excellent Black Gat Books line: KILLER, originally published under the Don Elliott name as PASSION KILLER, Sundown Reader SR534 in 1965. As you might expect from that title, this is a hitman novel. Businessman Howard Gorman hires cold-blooded killer Lee Floyd to murder his wife so that he can marry his beautiful redheaded mistress, Marie Caldwell. But then Marie decides she can come out ahead by seducing Floyd and getting him to kill his own client, too . . . but only after Gorman has changed his will to leave everything to her. Throw in a beautiful lesbian call girl and a hotshot airline pilot to complicate things. At least one of these players is going to get double-crossed. The question is who and how . . . and who’s going to make it out of this novel alive.

KILLER reads much like a Gold Medal novel, only instead of fading to black as things are about to get too racy, it keeps going. There’s a lot of sex of several different varieties in this book, and by the mid-Sixties, when it was first published, those scenes are a little more graphic than they were earlier in Silverberg’s career as Don Elliott. However, he never loses sight of the crime plot, and that’s what really drives this novel forward at a very enjoyable pace. Also, as many of these books do, KILLER vividly captures the era in which it takes place. Genre novels are better time capsules than most historical non-fiction, I’ve found over the years. Reading this made me feel like I was back there in the mid-Sixties.

Of course, I never would have been able to read this novel then, because I was in junior high and such stuff was off-limits. (Hey, I had enough trouble smuggling Nick Carter books and Robert McGinnis covers past my mother!) So I’m very glad that many of them are being reprinted these days. KILLER is a very worthy addition to that group. I had a great time reading it and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in both paperback and ebook editions.

Forgotten Books: Executive Boudoir - Ken Barry (Ben Haas)

Before he became known as one of the best action writers of the Twentieth Century with dozens of Westerns, thrillers, and sword-and-sorcery novels under the names John Benteen, Richard Meade, and Thorne Douglas, Ben Haas got his start as a professional writer by turning out soft-core sex novels for Beacon Books and Monarch Books. He used the names Ben Elliott (which later became one of his Western pen-names), Sam Webster, and Ken Barry. I’d never read any of them until recently, when I picked up a copy of EXECUTIVE BOUDOIR, one of his Beacons under the name Ken Barry. Actually, I didn’t mean to read it right then, I was just looking at it, but after the first few pages, I was hooked. That’s because, no matter what the genre, Ben Haas was one of the best pure storytellers I’ve ever encountered.

As you might guess from the title, EXECUTIVE BOUDOIR is a mixture of corporate warfare and sexy, soap operatic romance. Jim Sloane is the hard-charging executive vice-president of Canady Industries. He’s in love with beautiful Lisa Canady, daughter of company president Mart Canady, who commits the company to a bad deal by buying a failing company and then immediately dying. Lisa takes over as president, she and Jim clash, both turn to other lovers for comfort, and Canady Industries teeters on the brink of ruin.

While there aren’t any plot twists in this book you won’t see coming, Haas spins the yarn with such great skill it doesn’t matter. He worked in the steel industry, and it shows, as the book has a real air of authenticity about it. There’s a good balance between the sexy romantic element and the corporate in-fighting element. Haas also has a sure hand with his characters and pacing. I stayed up later than I normally do to finish this one, that’s how much I was enjoying it. I recommend it, and I plan to read more of the books from this part of Haas’s career in the near future.

Forgotten Books: Meg - Loren Beauchamp (Robert Silverberg)

Sexy, redheaded, 19-year-old bombshell Meg Tandler loses her virginity to her farmboy beau, and that causes her to realize that if she doesn’t make a break, she’ll be doomed to marry such a dullard and live a bleak existence as a farm wife for the rest of her life. So she leaves the small town in Idaho where she grew up and heads for New York, determined to break into show business and make herself rich and famous.

That’s how MEG, written by Robert Silverberg and published by Midwood in 1960 under the pseudonym Loren Beauchamp, begins. And it’s a whirlwind that never really slows down after that. Almost before you know it, Meg is in New York and has a manager/agent who gives her a new name—Meg Loring. She wins a couple of beauty pageants, does some sexy but tasteful magazine covers and photo shoots, gets a screen test in Hollywood, signs a movie contract, and becomes a star. Oh, and along the way she sleeps with every powerful man who can help further her career. She’s made the proverbial journey from rags to riches, but of course, there are still a lot of pitfalls waiting for her in Hollywood . . .

The pace is so fast in this book, the plot developments so over the top, the characters so colorful, that MEG has something you don’t often find in Robert Silverberg’s soft-core novels: a really tongue-in-cheek tone and some genuinely amusing lines of dialogue, especially from Meg’s eccentric agent Max Bonaventura. Some of the Hollywood stuff is pretty funny, too, as many of the characters seem based on real-life figures in the movie business. It also provides a vivid, accurate portrait of the time period, the same way most of the novels in this genre do, at least the ones by the better writers.

MEG is certainly the most lightweight soft-core novel by Silverberg that I’ve encountered yet, and as such, it’s a nice change of pace and a very enjoyable novel. I thought the ending was a little lacking, but it’s still very much worth reading. It’s the second half of a double novel reprint volume coming soon from Stark House.

Forgotten Books: Connie - Loren Beauchamp (Robert Silverberg)

I’ve read a number of Robert Silverberg’s soft-core novels written under the Don Elliott pseudonym, but until now I’d never read any of his Midwood books written as Loren Beauchamp. CONNIE is an early Midwood, originally published in 1959, the same year Silverberg began his long run as Don Elliott for William Hamling’s Nightstand Books (and its other assorted imprints). The cover of the original edition is by Paul Rader.

Not surprisingly, Connie is the name of the protagonist, 17-year-old Connie Barrett, a pretty girl living in Brooklyn with her parents and about to get engaged to her high school sweetheart, who is off in his freshman year at Syracuse. One night she goes out to mail a letter to him, not really worrying because the mailbox is just down the street . . .

Of course, that proves to be a mistake, as Connie is kidnapped and gang-raped by a gang of juvenile delinquents. She survives but her personality is changed forever. Her parents send her to stay with her grandparents in Phoenix, but hardened and embittered, she runs away to San Francisco and becomes a high class call girl, soon having a lot of success in that sordid but lucrative racket. Then she meets a man who offers to take her away from it . . . but will she just wind up in the middle of something even worse?

As you might expect, and as Silverberg acknowledges in his foreword to an upcoming reprint of this novel from Stark House, CONNIE is not exactly a politically correct book. But it’s so well-written that it moves like the proverbial wind. Silverberg used the rape-and-its-aftermath plot in other soft-core novels, and as usual he doesn’t pull any punches in this one. His efforts in this genre are often pretty bleak. CONNIE is no exception. By the time it’s over, are there any glimmerings of hope left for its characters?

You’ll have to read it to find out, but I guarantee a fast-paced, engrossing yarn. I read it in two sittings, almost unheard of these days for little ol’ attention-span-challenged me. As mentioned above, Stark House is reprinting it later this spring in a double volume with another of Silverberg’s early Midwood novels as by Loren Beauchamp, MEG. All the Midwoods I’ve read have been good, no matter who wrote them. I’ll definitely be reading MEG soon, too, and then looking for more.

Forgotten Books: Lust Tycoon - J.X. Williams

(This post originally appeared on March 22, 2008.)

This book is almost one of those little gems that you find in unexpected places. Forget the sleaze novel trappings. LUST TYCOON is actually a hardboiled mystery yarn that reads more like a Fifties Gold Medal than a Sixties Nightstand Book. The narrator is Tom Dash, a former New York City police detective who retires because he accidentally killed an innocent bystander during a shootout with an armed robber. Dash buys a wrecked ketch, rebuilds and refurbishes it, and charters it for cruises on Long Island Sound. He’s just begun a casual affair with a beautiful young woman who works for him when she’s murdered. Dash isn’t a suspect in her killing, but when he starts investigating her death on his own, two more murders quickly follow, and the cops do think he committed those. So in classic fashion, Dash has to go on the run from the police while trying to find the real killer.

There’s nothing in this book you haven’t read a hundred times before, but whoever the real author was behind the J.X. Williams house-name, he tells the story fairly well and keeps the pace crackling right along for most of the book. There are some nice turns of phrase along the way and some decent action. The character of Tom Dash bears a certain resemblance to Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder and Donald Westlake’s Mitch Tobin, but the writing isn’t that good. I don’t think either Block or Westlake wrote LUST TYCOON, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual author was published under other names, too.

Reading LUST TYCOON isn’t quite the same as discovering a previously unknown Harry Whittington or Charles Williams or Gil Brewer novel, but it’s pretty entertaining. The plot sort of falls apart at the end, as if the author couldn’t quite figure out how to wrap things up properly. I’m still glad that I read it, and if you happen to run across a copy somewhere, you might consider picking it up.

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: Commie Sex Trap - Roger Blake

Bill Crider posted the cover of this novel on his blog a while back, and the title intrigued me with its air of early Sixties sleaziness. I was surprised to discover that there's an e-book version available on Amazon, but when I did, of course I had to read it.

It starts out with a scenario that's actually reminiscent of the work of Cornell Woolrich. Joe Guthrie is an American GI stationed in West Berlin who's living with a blond, beautiful East German girl who managed to slip through the Berlin Wall. But when he gets back to his apartment one evening, he finds an equally beautiful American redhead waiting for him in his bed. She insists the apartment is hers, there's no sign of Joe's girlfriend, and everybody in the building claims they don't know what he's talking about, that there's no blonde who's been staying there. Joe doesn't know if he's gone crazy, or if there's some sinister plot in motion against him.

It's a really effective opening, but unfortunately the author, Roger Blake, doesn't do much with it after that. The book quickly becomes a pretty standard Cold War espionage thriller spiced up with sex scenes. It's enjoyable enough, but it could have done with a little more crazed paranoia. (There's a sentence you won't read in every review.)

I don't know who Roger Blake was. The name strikes me as a pseudonym, but it's certainly possible that was the author's real name. He published several other novels along the same lines as this one for the lower-rung sleaze publishers. He keeps the pace moving along at a good clip in COMMIE SEX TRAP, the action scenes are well done, and there are a few moments of humor. This book is very much of its time, and if you remember that era like I do, there's a good chance you might get some lightweight entertainment out of it. I did.

Forgotten Books: The Sucker - Orrie Hitt

I felt like reading an Orrie Hitt novel since it had been a while, and I picked a really good one in THE SUCKER. It's written to the usual Hitt formula, but also as usual, he finds ways to change things up enough to keep the story fresh and interesting.

I thought this was going to be a car racing book at first—some of the back-story concerns how one of the female characters winds up in business with the driver responsible for the accident that killed her father—but instead it centers around a company that sells engines and engine parts to hotrodders, as well as a revolutionary design for one of those engines.

The protagonist and narrator is Slade Harper, the engineer responsible for that design, who's running a down-on-its-luck gas station that he won in a card game from a guy on a construction project in Iceland. The guy wound up blowing his brains out over an Icelandic girl, and when Slade shows up to claim the gas station, he finds the former owner's sister still living there and running the place. (You can't accuse Hitt of skimping on the back-story.) Anyway, Slade winds up working for a former race car driver and the beautiful daughter of the guy the driver killed in a crash (see above paragraph), and being an unscrupulous heel, Slade figures out a way to swindle them out of the company. But then he falls for the girl, and things get complicated...

Hitt's writing is really sharp in those one, with plenty of good lines and a pace that barrels along and an overwhelming sense of blue-collar angst. Slade Harper may well be the most unsympathetic Hitt protagonist I've encountered so far. Usually the main characters in these novels are amoral jerks (or at least they think they are), but deep inside they have a streak of decency. With Slade, the reader really has to wonder if that's going to turn out to be the case.

Hitt's "heroes" are usually torn between three women: the good one, the bad one, and the tragically flawed one. That seems not to be the case in THE SUCKER, as all three women Slade gets involved with are basically sympathetic characters. Or are they? Again, Hitt comes up with some nice twists. I've read enough of these novels to know who the protagonist is going to wind up with most of the time, but that question kept me in suspense all the way to the end, too.

Originally published by Beacon Books in 1957, THE SUCKER is available in an e-book edition from Prologue Books. It's a fine example of the thing Hitt did best: he wrote novels that are actually very small in scope, where not much happens and the things that do affect only a small handful of people. But in the lives of those people, those events are epic and earth-shaking, and nobody ever conveyed that emotion more powerfully than Orrie Hitt.

Forgotten Books: Lust Victim - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

Recently Stark House reprinted two more of Robert Silverberg's early Sixties soft-core novels, LUST QUEEN and LUST VICTIM, so strictly speaking I don't know if you can call these books forgotten, but it wasn't that long ago they were. Bill Crider wrote about LUST QUEEN on his blog a while back. Today I'm taking a look at LUST VICTIM.

This novel was originally published in 1962 under the title NO LUST TONIGHT, which Silverberg mentions in his introduction was changed from his original title LUST VICTIM by editor Earl Kemp. For the reprint the original title has been restored, which is good because it works on several different levels. Almost every character in this novel is a victim of lust in one way or another.

Dave Lamson is a successful young industrialist married to a beautiful wife named Moira. Their idyllic suburban life is shattered one Saturday night when a burglar breaks into their house, ties up Dave, and forces him to watch while he rapes Moira. They both survive the incident, but their lives are ruined by the psychological effect the attack has on Moira. This leads Dave to have a number of sordid affairs—and also provides the requisite number of sex scenes for the book.

Silverberg is nothing if not clever, though, and not everything is what it seems to be. There's some detective work and some hardboiled action before the book arrives at a fairly satisfying conclusion.

The biggest problem with LUST VICTIM is that Dave is such a jerk it's hard to root for him. "It's been TWO WHOLE DAYS since you were raped. Aren't you over it YET?" (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the way he comes across at times.) Still, Silverberg is a skillful enough writer that we do indeed wind up rooting for Dave. And of course the book is well-paced and the prose just as smooth as it can be, as always from Silverberg.

I have to admit, I love these books from William Hamling's publishing empire. Even when they're not as well-written as those by Silverberg, Lawrence Block, and Donald E. Westlake, they're such perfect snapshots of the era in which they were published. And thankfully more and more of them are being reprinted. For now, you can't go wrong with this Stark House edition of LUST QUEEN and LUST VICTIM.

Forgotten Books: Pleasure Ground - Orrie Hitt

It had been a while since I'd read anything by our old pal Orrie Hitt, so I figured it was time. PLEASURE GROUND was published originally by Kozy Books in 1961. It's not one of the novels that's been reprinted in recent years, although it seems to me to be a good candidate.

Hitt wrote a number of books set on farms, including this one. Bert Forbes is a typical Hitt narrator/protagonist: a big galoot, not overly bright, not burdened with an excess of morals, but deep down a fairly decent guy. He's been hired by farmer Flint Collins to paint Collins's house and barn. Collins is a brutal skinflint who pays all his help cheaply and treats them badly, including his teenage daughter Norma. He's maybe the most despicable villain I've run across so far in Hitt's work.

Things seem to look up a bit for Bert when he meets beautiful Lucy Martin, who owns the farm next to the Collins place, and in true soft-core fashion he first encounters her when she's sunbathing nude next to a swimming hole in the local creek. But then Bert's sleazy ex-wife Emily shows up with a tragic story, and Collins, a widower, brings home a new wife, a beautiful, amoral bitch named Sharon, and things start to get very complicated and messy, including an unwanted pregnancy (a staple in Hitt's books), blackmail, and finally murder.

Read enough of Hitt's books and the nuts and bolts of his various formulas really start to show, and I've reached that point. However, even when you know what he's doing, he has a way of dragging you in and making you care what's going to happen to his characters. I think it's the sheer passion that he brought to his work. He believed in it, so the reader does, too. Although by all accounts he had a happy home life and a reasonably successful career, he knew the desperation of people pushed to the brink, sometimes by their own choices and sometimes by a cruel fate they can't control, and he conveyed those emotions with a lot of power.

PLEASURE GROUND is a good example of that. It's not without its flaws—it seems to me to go on a little too long, stretching out not quite enough plot for its wordage—but I certainly enjoyed it, all the way to the seemingly tacked-on happy ending that Hitt employed in most of his books. People have speculated that such endings were an editorial requirement, but I'm not so sure. I think Hitt believed in them, as much as in all the angst that comes before them. If you're a fan of his work, this one is well worth reading.

As a side note, another Hitt novel called PLEASURE GROUND was published two years earlier by Bedside Books, but I don't think it's the same novel. The description of it given by an Internet bookseller doesn't match the plot of the one I read except in its rural setting. But I've never seen a copy of the earlier book, only a scan of its cover, so I don't really know.

Forgotten Books: Escape to Sindom - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

Like many of the novels in the various imprints published by William Hamling's black box empire, ESCAPE TO SINDOM is essentially a crime story. Val Sparkman is a professional criminal—a con man, a forger, a thief, a killer when he has to be. A bit of bad luck lands him in a small-town jail in Iowa. The local lawmen don't really have a clue who they've locked up, and Sparkman knows he has to escape before they find out. He manages to do so, but now he's on the run with no money and no gun. He hitches a ride and knocks out the traveling salesman who picks him up, stealing the man's car and heading for Mexico, but his odds of getting there are slim.

Meanwhile, a few towns away, beautiful but bored young waitress (and town tramp) Janey Haskell is tired of her life and wants to do something big and exciting. It's pretty much inevitable that when a handsome stranger comes along, Janey will latch on to him and run away with him, even though he may be dangerous...

Anybody who's read very many noir novels, or very many of these soft-core novels, or both (that would be me and no doubt some of you), will know pretty much everything that's going to happen in ESCAPE TO SINDOM. That said, a skillful author can elevate a book above its formula with good writing, and not surprisingly that's what we have in this one since it was written by Robert Silverberg under his Don Elliott pseudonym. Silverberg keeps things racing along at an entertaining pace, throwing in a few flashbacks to earlier sexual adventures of Sparkman and Janey. There's an occasional touch of humor to break up the overall sense of impending doom, and the final twist is a pretty good one.

By the time ESCAPE TO SINDOM was published, the sex scenes in these books were more frequent and more graphic and the rest of the plot isn't quite as important as it was in the books published just a few years earlier. That keeps it from being in the top rank of Silverberg's Don Elliott novels, but it's still pretty darned entertaining. I'll read any of them I come across, and I haven't been disappointed yet.

Forgotten Books: Private Club - Orrie Hitt

I'm wrapping up Forgotten Books for the year with an old friend, Orrie Hitt. PRIVATE CLUB (Beacon Books, 1959, and as far as I know, never reprinted) is set at an exclusive hunting and fishing resort in upstate New York, just the sort of place where Hitt worked as a young man. He drew on that part of his life as the inspiration for a number of books, and this is a good one.

The story focuses on three couples: Fred Jennings, who owns a successful valve company, and his semi-frigid wife Sandra; drunken copper salesman Virgil Blanding and his slutty wife Lucy; and Eddie Race, the manager of the club and a typical Hitt heel, who's involved with beautiful young waitress Beth Collins. Well, you can probably plug these characters into the various plot equations as well as I can, although Hitt throws in a little lesbianism to spice things up. And as usual, the cover promises more raunch than the book delivers. The club is hardly the hotbed of orgies you might think. In fact, although the characters think and talk a lot about sex (when they're not boozing it up), they never actually get around to doing much.

Nothing in this book really surprised me. So why did I sit there avidly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen? Because Hitt was a master at getting inside his characters' heads and making the reader care about them. I can't put my finger on how he did it, but he had one of the most readable, compelling styles I've encountered.

Actually, I think I do know, not on a technical level regarding the prose but on a more emotional level. The reader cares about the characters because Hitt cares about them. Although he was capable of writing excellent crime novels, most of his books are about the sort of people he saw around him all the time: blue-collar workers, hustling salesmen, owners of small companies. What he saw must have filled him with the bleak despair that permeates his books.

Yet at the same time there's a lot of compassion at work. Most of Hitt's heels have some decent qualities, too. A part of them wants to do the right thing, if they can just figure out what it is and find the courage to do it. Eddie Race in this book is a prime example of that. Most of the characters in Hitt's novels, no matter how bad they are, have at least a shot at redemption. It's been theorized that the rushed, sometimes awkward happy endings in Hitt's novels were forced on him by the publishers, but after reading more of his work I'm not so sure anymore. I think maybe Hitt, by all accounts a very decent, happily married family man himself, possessed a deep-seated optimism that carried over to his characters. He wanted to believe that no matter how much emotional torment he put them through, by the end of the book they still had a hope of happiness. I think those endings, hurried though they might be because sometimes he was running out of the required wordage, may just be the true essence of Hitt's fiction.

Or maybe I'm just full of it, who can say? For our purposes, here's what you need to know: PRIVATE CLUB is damned entertaining and one of my favorite Orrie Hitt novels so far. Like I said above, it hasn't been reprinted as far as I know, and the copies available on the Internet are a little pricey. But if you ever run across a copy for a reasonable cost, I'd advise grabbing it. It's well worth reading.

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.

Forgotten Books: Dial "M" for Man - Orrie Hitt

There I was, in the mood to read another Orrie Hitt novel, when what should arrive in my mailbox but an advance copy of the latest Stark House double volume, THE CHEATERS/DIAL "M" FOR MAN, by none other than Orrie Hitt. This book will be out in October, and it features not only the two novels but also a fine introduction by Brian Ritt (a revised version of his essay "The Sleazy Side of the Street", which first appeared on this blog), and an equally fine afterword and Hitt bibliography by Michael Hemmingson. As someone who played a small part in reviving interest in Hitt's work (along with Frank Loose, who produced a fine blog essay on Hitt's novel I'LL CALL EVERY MONDAY), I'm very happy to see these two novels reprinted and hope that the book sells well enough to warrant more Orrie Hitt reprints.

But in the meantime, I'm going to stretch a point and call Hitt's DIAL "M" FOR MAN a Forgotten Book, because the Stark House volume isn't out yet and this novel has been out of print since its original Beacon Books edition in 1962. Of the two books in the reprint volume, I chose to read this one first for a very personal reason: the protagonist is a TV repairman.


Now, some of you already know that my dad was a TV repairman for many years. In the early Fifties, sensing how popular TV was going to be and realizing there would be a need for people to work on them, he took a correspondence course in TV repair and then went to a trade school in Kentucky for six weeks to get some hands-on experience. He was already working in the aircraft industry and continued to do so for many years, but he also fixed TVs as a sideline, so I grew up around torn-apart TV sets, vacuum tubes, soldering irons, and more extension cords than you've ever seen in your life. (A bit of wisdom from my father: "If you ever fall out of an airplane, try to grab an extension cord. It'll get tangled and hang up on something before you hit the ground." He also taught me that if you take a TV apart, all the screws that came out of it don't necessarily have to go back into it, because "it ain't goin' anywhere.") I never really took to TV repair myself, although I worked for him for a while and got considerably better at it than the average person. I could diagnose and repair maybe half the problems I encountered.


Anyway, I could go on, but this is a Forgotten Books post, not an autobiography. At one time in Orrie Hitt's life, he also worked as a TV repairman, and I can tell you, he really nails that background in DIAL "M" FOR MAN. Dealing with the public, keeping up with the work in the shop and the service calls, the difficulty getting parts, trying to make ends meet . . . it's all there. I'm not sure anybody was ever better than Hitt at capturing the details of everyday life for struggling blue-collar workers.


Like a lot of prolific writers, Hitt would usually fall back on a specific set of plot elements, and that's true here. The protagonist is torn between two women, he struggles economically, there are forces beyond his control conspiring against him, an unwanted pregnancy crops up, the possibility of murder begins to look more and more appealing . . . The trick that Hitt pulls off consistently is to take these plot elements and work changes on them, which he does to nice effect in DIAL "M" FOR MAN. I've read enough of his novels by now that I knew where the story was going to end up, but I didn't always know how it was going to get there. Anyway, what makes Hitt's novels well worth reading are those little touches of everyday life and the sheer desperation that grips his characters as fate clamps down on them. If you want a true picture of certain segments of society in the Fifties and early Sixties, I suspect you're more likely to find it in an Orrie Hitt novel than in most of the mainstream fiction of that era. To see what I'm talking about, you can pick up this Stark House volume when it becomes available.


Heck, I'll bet you can even go ahead and pre-order it if you want to. Now, hand me that solderin' iron. Got a loose connection here on this resistor . . . or maybe it's that dang horizontal output tube . . .

Forgotten Books: The Barn - Glenn Low

(This post originally ran in slightly different form on January 29, 2006.)


Lurking behind this rather mediocre soft-core porn cover is actually a pretty good rural crime novel. Published in 1961 by Beacon Books, THE BARN features many of the same elements that can be found in a lot of backwoods novels. In this case, the dumb but likable hero visits the Kentucky farm owned by his fiancee's family and finds that he's stumbled into a lot more trouble than he expected. There's the fiancee's oversexed little sister, her hoodlum brother, assorted other criminals, and a lot of action and danger.


There are so many plot twists that it gets a little silly after a while, with the characters running around the farm like Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam chasing each other in and out of a bunch of different doors. Most of the story takes place during one eventful night, and that non-stop pace kept me flipping the pages even though the story got more and more implausible. These flaws keep THE BARN from approaching the level of the backwoods novels written by authors such as Harry Whittington and Charles Williams, but it's also suspenseful and fun to read.


Glenn Low had some stories in the Western and detective pulps during the Forties and Fifties, and he wrote quite a few books for Beacon, Novel Books, and other soft-core publishers during the early Sixties. I enjoyed THE BARN enough so that I wouldn't hesitate to pick up another of his books if I came across it at a reasonable price (this one was three bucks in Half Price Books' nostalgia section).

Forgotten Books: Naked Lust - Shep Shepard

NAKED LUST was originally published by Bedside Books in 1959 and reprinted ten years later by Macfadden Books, which is the edition I read. It’s the story of Jane Smith, who is, for want of a better term, a middle-class prostitute. She’s not an expensive, high-class call girl, or a lowly, drug-addicted streetwalker, either. She travels from town to town with another prostitute and their pimp, a guy who has Syndicate connections. Not a great life, but Jane copes with it pretty well.


Then she’s arrested, for the first time since she became a hooker, and as part of her sentence, she’s sent to work in a mental hospital (which seems like sort of a stretch to me, but hey, we’ll let it go). While there, she’s befriended by one of the doctors and a couple of the nurses, and she decides she’s going to change her life and start over somewhere new. That turns out to be a small town in California, where she gets a job as a waitress and even meets a decent guy who falls in love with her, not knowing her sordid past, of course. This book practically screams “noir”, though, so you know things can’t stay that good for long, and sure enough, they don’t . . .

For years there’s been some debate over whether Harry Whittington actually wrote this book, because the copyright notice in the original edition is in his name. The notice in the Macfadden reprint, though, says “Copyright 1959 by Bedside Books Inc.” Having read a lot of Whittington books over the years, I decided to give this one a try and see if I could make an educated guess.


Having read it, I can say I’m 99.9% sure that NAKED LUST is NOT Harry Whittington’s work. The plot is certainly noirish enough, but nothing in the style reminds me of Whittington’s writing at all. If someone were to come up with something in Whittington’s records saying he wrote this novel, I’d accept it, but I’d sure be surprised, too. I think the copyright notice in the original edition was just a mistake on the part of the publisher.


That said, is NAKED LUST worth reading? Well, yeah. It’s not all that well-written for the most part, although there are some really nice lines here and there, but the author does a good job of creating an atmosphere of bleak inevitability that hangs over the novel. And the ending, in which everything doesn’t work out exactly like I expected it to (always a plus) is very powerful. I have no idea who Shep Shepard really was, but a year or two later this could have easily been a Nightstand Book and held its own with the entries by Block, Silverberg, Ramirez, etc. I imagine the original edition is pretty scarce, but if you ever come across a copy of it or the Macfadden reprint for a decent price, my advice is to grab it. This one’s well worth reading.

One More Reason I Love the Internet: Tony Calvano Edition (Possibly NSFW)

So, Friday I publish a Forgotten Books post about the Anthony Calvano novel SIN CAMP, and by Sunday I'm exchanging emails with Mr. Calvano his own self, who, as mentioned in the post, is actually an extremely pleasant gentleman named Tom Ramirez.  There's a lengthy and excellent memoir by Ramirez in Earl Kemp's indispensible fanzine eI, which can be found here, and when you've read it, scroll on down for Earl's informative follow-up.  It was Earl who put me in touch with Tom, and I appreciate it.  I've ordered several more of Tom's books, including the two pictured here, and I'll be reporting my reactions to them in due time.

Forgotten Books: Sin Camp - Anthony Calvano (Thomas P. Ramirez)

According to Earl Kemp, Anthony/Tony Calvano was the pseudonym of Thomas P. Ramirez, who also wrote a few soft-core erotic paperbacks for Monarch Books as Tom Phillips but was most prolific under the Calvano name. There was also a Thomas P. Ramirez who wrote several of the Phoenix Force books (a spin-off from the Executioner series); I assume he was the same author.


Anyway, SIN CAMP is the first thing I've read by Calvano/Ramirez. It's an Army novel, set on and around the fictional Camp Coulter in Texas. The narrator, GI Tom Staton, falls in love with a young Mexican prostitute who works in a brothel in nearby Harden City. He discovers that she's being forced to stay there and decides to rescue her. Naturally, things do not work out well, as Staton also hooks up with a rich nymphomaniac (lots of those around in Fifties and Sixties erotica). There's another main storyline in SIN CAMP that involves the conflict between the enlisted men in Staton's company and the brutal non-coms in charge of them, and these sections read more like a mainstream novel.


There's a lot of raw vitality and fast-paced storytelling in this book to keep the reader turning the pages. The Calvano novels have a reputation for a certain amount of violence and sadism, and although it takes its time getting around to it, SIN CAMP has its share. There's also one plot development late in the book that comes out of left field. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed this one quite a bit and intend to continue sampling the various Nightstand Books that I have on my shelves.

Follow-up to Last Week's Forgotten Books Post: Jill, by Sid Kane

In my Forgotten Books post last week, I mentioned that Sid Kane’s prose in his novel JILL reminded me a little of James Ellroy’s work. Juri Nummelin suggested that I post a few quotes as examples, which is a good idea. So here they are:


Four o’clock.
Sun still high. Blast furnace hot.
Jill wanted a drink.
Her bra was hot and sweaty. Her feet hurt.
Hell of a way to have to start the school year.


Ten o’clock.
The Moon. Far out. Way out.
The edge of the city.
The edge of reality, on a good night, when the lights were dark, the police vice squad stayed away, and the flask was full and warm.


Midnight. And the music was midnight. And Jehova played it. He played it slow and low, deep, from way down. And at times, from far out.
On the floor, shoes off, shirts loose. On the bed, cross-legged. The room a smoke house, wine bottle on the floor, all silent as Jehova sang the songs of peace and war, hate and love.


Not exactly Ellroy-esque, but the rhythm reminded me of stories I’ve read by him. (I still haven’t read any of his novels, but I intend to.) Does this read like Ellroy to anybody else, or am I crazy? (That’s always a possibility.)