A quick and goofy read, one of George H. Smith’s many southern/swamp girl type books he did for Novel Books. Certanly no serious work, the title page claims Smith is the author of The Farmer’s Daughter.
The farmer is Berle Gates, and he has a mail order bride from Germany, a bug healthy blonde gal that everyone is the town lusts for, even the Sheriff.
An okay read.
The first Jerry Goff book I read, a few months back, was Thrill Crazy, a Merit title, and here I thought: Wow, another cool find. Then I read Wanton Wench! which was better and Tropic of Carla which was an okay men’s adventure style yarn.
A reader of this blog mentioned that Goff had been sued by Richard Prather for plagarizing from a Shell Scott novel, and then bookseller and vintage paperback scholar Lynn Munroe told me the case just wasn’t one book, but a whole lot of them. In fact, Munroe’s Fall 1997 auction catalogue was for Goff books that were hard to find because the U.S. Court ordered all offending copies destroyed.
Munroe was kind enough to send me a copy of that old catalgue for research’s sake, that gives the whole nitty-gritty.
Basically, it began with Hotel Hustler, the novel I will discuss in this blog entry. Someone told Richard Prather there were plagarized sections from three of Prather’s Shell Scotts: Find This Woman, Strip for Murder, and The Wailing Frail.
Prather read Hotel Hustler, got wide-eyed and angry, and called his lawyer. Tracking down info wasn’t easy — Playtime Books was an imprint of Neva Books out of Las Vegas — but the address was a mail 
drop for an outfit actually in Florida (they had learned from the mistakes made by Nightstand and Faber about addresses and the feds); plus Jerry Lane was not a real person, but the pen name of Merit Books/Camerarts author Jerry M. Goff, Jr., a real name. A ceased and desist letter was sent to Neva and ignored — the novel remained in print and two more Lane books were issued, also with plagarized sections. Munroe writes:
Prather, who now lives in Arizona and is still writing, told me he never met Jerry Goff. When Prather’s lawyers tracked him down, he was in prison, a three-time convicted felon. In his sworn deposition, Goff admitted to
being such a huge “fan” of Prather’s books that yes, he would on occasion borrow ideas and dialog from Parther’s books. And then, to Prather’s lawyer’s shock and surprise, Goff proceeded to name for them some 30 books he had done so in, most of them published by a company neither Prather [n]or his lawyers had ever heard of, Merit Books of Chicago. This led to a second, larger lawsuit in The US District Court for Northern Illinois in 1972 […] the Judge in the trial would later say that Prather v. Camerarts Publishing was the largest case of plagarism he had ever heard about. (Lynn Munroe Books List 37, p. 3)
In some cases, Goff only “borrowed” phrases and paragraphs, but, with many of Goff’s books in hand, many reprinted with new titles a year after first publication, as Camerarts was known to do,
Prather and his wife spent hours at home with a box of Goff’s paperbacks, reading them and highlighting familiar
passages. To their amazement they found not just phrases but entire paragraphs, entire chapters, entire plotlines, lifted in whole from Prather’s books, with only the character’s names changed. Prather found one Goff book about a lusty French female spy named Julie Odlie. Something about Julie was so familiar to him, but what was it? Prather had never created such a character. Finally, as he read on, it hit him — Julie was Shell Scott, and Goff had only changed the character’s sex. (ibid)
In the end, after appeals, both Neva and Camerarts had to pay damages — about $17, 500K for Neva and $40K for Merit Books (plagarism cases have set amounts these days, I think the ceiling s now $120K per cause of action).
I have no information on Goff, other than his demise in the late 1990s. 
What was he in prison for? Did Camerarts, with its mob connections, go after him to pay that $40K back? Did they, like Neva, know he was lifting from Prather? Did Goff publish other books later under a different name?
And does this mean the Goff books I liked were really Prather novels I liked? According to Munroe’s catalogue, Thrill Crazy (reprinted as Lisa) stole from Strip for Murder, Way of a Wanton, and Three’s A Shroud. Wanton Wench! and Tropic of Carla are not listed — but if not taken from Prather, were they lifting from other books? Did Goff do any original material at all; were the Prather liftings done when the well was dry?
And does this change my mind about Goff being a nice vintage find? Well, he is still a find — but in a much different light. When Munroe was auctioning some Goff/Lane books, they seemed to be rarities because the court ordered all remaining copies destroyed. Now, however, you can find most of these books in the $5-20 price range, ad I have about 20 of them, which I will get to all eventually.
Hotel Hustler is a short novel, about 35,000 words, about a card shark on the run from both the mob and the feds. He travels around the world, steals a new identity, then someone inherits an old hotel, the Dorado Oasis, from a long lost uncle on the small West Indies island, Callerie — a fictional place, it seems, where the natives speak Creole and were once ruled by Napoleon, just like Haiti.
He thinks this is the perfect place to hide from those who either want to murder him or put him in federal lock up for tax evasion — fix the hotel up, make it profitable, live his days out on the small island as a small businessman.
Not so easy. A fellow named Ahogary (allegory?) has been using every means he can to push out and buy up all the small storefrnts, fishing boats, and eateries in center town, to build his own little business and crime empire. Ahogary wants the hotel — which seems worthless since it seldom has guests — and the land it’s on. The plot becomes a cat and mouse game between the narrator and Ahogary, who did not count on his competition having street smarts and knowing how to bluff and con.
Toss in some islander native sex and you got an “adult” novel.
While this one is not as good as, say, Wanton Wench!, the writing is smoother more confident — but is this Prather’s doing or Goff’s? The novel reads like a cross-between wanting to imitate the atmosphere of Casablanca and the intrigue of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.
I’d give it a C-plus overall, but a B-minus for being a part of vintage paperback history, the impetus for the court system’s biggest copyright infringement case at the time.
Also: Goff as criminal. A real hood, or crook, writing books about hoods and crooks, even if all the prose ain’t his — Goff was no pale weasel writer pretending at tough men’s fiction…in some way he was living it, even as he stole from Shell Scott.
I got this book in an eBay lot; it was falling apart and in bad shape and I’d never heard of the author, but it looked interesting and it was a Merit/Camerarts title so I gave it a try, as a “wild” titled novel.
Who is Bill Lauren? Real name or pen name? Who knows. But he did a number of titles for Merit.
Wild Pursuit wastes no time and jumps right into the action from the first paragraph:
The blonde was split from neckline to waist and a bare, trembling breast poked out at me. She wasn’t trying to cover it because hshe had her hands full wih the torn top of her capri pants.
Her eyes were wide with pleading. “Help me! Please, help me!” (p. 5)
The blonde is Eddi, short for Edwina, on the run from goons trying to kill her. She’s a cigarette girl at a club owned by the local Sndiacte boss, who is a choots with the town’s sheriff — both are planning to murder a politician getting in their way. She overheard their planning it and need to shut her up. So she’s on the run — and ran into the cabin of Brigham Galt, the narrator, a building contractor in the town of Marklyn (state unknown).
She’s hot, she’s in danger, and Galt has been separated from his wife for six weeks, after he caught her in bed with another man — so why not help her? Even with the goons shooting at them, and then kidnapping his secretary and raping her, threatening to kill her if he doesn’t give up Eddi.
But since he’s had great sex with Eddi only hours after she came running into his cabin for help, he’s got feelings for her…
But there’s still his estranged wife, whom he has make-up sex with the next morning after being with Eddi…ah, the sex lives of sleaze book heroes!
It had all the usual sterotypical tough hero, gun-toting hoods, bad cops, and over-sexed dames, the elements that make for good men’s fiction of the 1960s, or even now. This is no work of art by any long shot, but like Jerry M. Goff’s and most Novel/Merit titles, a fast-paced, tough-guy good read. I’m interested in reading others by Bill Lauren.
Several recommendations for Ennis Willie came in the past month or so…these used books are all pricey but managed to find a few on eBay in lots from people who didn’t know what they had (I got this one plus four other Merit Books for $9).
Merit Books evolved from Novel Books, both in Chicago, both boasting to publish shocking in your face novels “for men.” On the cover spine reads: MERIT BOOKS – UNCESORED OFFBEAT NOVELS FOR SOPHISTICATED ADULTS. Both were published by Camerarts, owned by Joe Sorrentino.
Orrie Hitt and George H. Smith were Novel regulars, but did not publish with Merit — some suggest that authors did not like their books re-issued with unauthorized new titles.
Ennis Willie published most of his books with Merit, and one with Sanford Aday’s Vega Books, Vice Town. Willie had a series character, Sand, who is the “hero” of Warped Ambitions (“A Sand Shocker”).
I didn’t need to read the previous Sand novels to get the gist of what was going on — Sand is a former syndicate knockaround guy who left the mob for moral reasons and is now on their hit list, but every time they send assassins, things get bungled. I felt, half-way through, having read the first few Sand books would have been good, to get a better “feel” for Sand — he’s basically two-dimensional, your run of the mill killer with his own moral code not unlike Andrew Vachss’ Burke.
Warped Ambitions opens with a botched hit on Sand on the street; a passerby gets the bullet, an old man who, dying, makes Sand promise to “find Sarda.” He later learns that Sarda is his daughter and they are carny people…and later he finds out Sarda is The Monkey Girl — she has a disorder where thick hair grows all over her body.
With “a blood oath” on his conscience, he sets out to find the Monkey Girl — was she kidnapped or did she run away, now that she has turned 18? Sand uncovers info that Sarda was actually the daughter of an old time mythical mob boss who gave her up for adoption because of her condition, and has left her $250,000 for her 18th b-day.
There are stereotypical thugs and hitmen, the stereotypical overweight detective who is pissed that Sand is always leaving bodies around, and the usual gorgeous blonde rich woman who has a thing for apes and simian rights.
Despite the stereotypes, Willie is a remarkable writer — he is spare, minimalistic, violent and witty. This book clocks in at 125 pages in large type and wide margins, probably 25-30K words long, far too short for commercial publishers like Gold Medal or Pyramid, where one mght expect gangster noir titles would come from.
Thee are some annoying issues with logic and continuity, however — if Sand is being hunted down by the mob, why do they have trouble killing him when he’s always out in the open, walking the streets, lives in a hotel room that everyone knows he is at? In one chapter he takes taxi cabs, in another he has a car — why? And the detective and cops just let him roam about with his gun, playing tit for tat…well, this is fiction.
In fact, the world Sand lives in is an alternate universe, much like Sin City — Sin City types of fiction ans film and many other dark crime works, even Andrew Vachss and Joe Lansdale, follow in Ennis Willie’s shabby footsteps.
I’m not sold on Willie yet. I need to read more, especially non-Sand books. There is much to admire but there are some major flaws in the story-telling — but did that matter for a “sleaze” adult book? This is not erotica or softcore, this is crime noir in the Manhunt vein with sleazy and dirty situations (a woman stripping in a private party to pay off her gambling debts), kinky encounters (a naked whore waits in Sand’s room as a gift to him, and she is surprised he does not take her as his slave), and warped ambitions (the rich woman wishes to have her favorite gorilla mate with the Monkey Girl and create a new species, which would be genetically impossible, but she does not care for facts).
Willie wrote 19-20 books it seems, and then stopped, taking up the fine profession of printing, or so I have read. He apparently is still alive and kickin’ and there seems to be a call to put his work back in print. His books tend to be scarce and pricey to find.
Now, as for Merit Books — in this lot I got are some curious gems that I will talk about later, from writers Jerry Goff, Jr., Herb Mongomery, and Bill Lauren…I love finding these obscure writers who are obviously pretty damn good, lost in Amercan pulp literature’s margins…
Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books 