Haven for the Damned – Ennis Willie (Merit Books, 1963)

Okay, back to the books…

Haven for the Damned starts off really good but slips into a common and cliched set-up about 1/3 of the way through.

Our hero, ex-hitman for the Syndicate Sand, is recovering from the latest attempt by the mob to ice him; he has been shot four times in the torso and somehow managed to survive. To gain time to recuperate, he heads to unknown lands, probably Europe, to a castle/hotel run by The Count: a place off-limits to the law and the Syndicate, where criminals and those on the run, or wanting to hide, can find refuge, as long as they can afford the high price for protection…it is indeed a haven for the damned…there Sand meets with Lena, who is hiding from her estranged husband who wants to have her committed to the loony bin and have control over her family wealth. She is also a highly sexually charged nympho…

…as are all the women Sand crosses paths with at the castle. This is a Merit adult novel, after all, a universe where all women are beautiful, sexy, horny and kinky.

There is a village outside the Count’s lair, where the Count finds young women to become part of his concubine: they are paid well, live in luxury, and are required to spend quality time in the Count’s bed…but the Count is an ugly little hunchback with curious sexual desires.

Sand notes one new girl, Gretchen, 18, gorgeous and not looking like she is pleased to have to please the Count…and then she winds up murdered with two swords poked into the her eyes and coming out of the back of her head.

Lena thinks she did it, as she has blackouts and does violent things when she blacks out…she does have some psychiatric and mental issues, which is how her husband can institutionalize her.

Then more young women are found murdered over the days and nights…Lena still thinks she is the killer but Sand has his doubts, he believes she is being set up; he sets out to solve this case. The real killer is too obvious in the end, making this “Sand shocker” not so shocking and entertaining as previous books.

Game of Passion by Ennis Willie (Merit Books, 1964)

This one is probably the weakest of the four Sand Shocker’s we’ve read thus far, and wonder why it is included in the Sand’s Game omnibus, re-titled Too Late to Pray…perhaps for its connection to one of the short stories, “Flesh House.”

In Game of Passion/Too Late to Pray, Sand has been away for a while and seems the Syndicate has stopped sending killers. But he’s come back to his home city of Chicago to find out who killed a hooker he knew five years ago, working for Morpsie Steiner, a madam of a well-known brothel.  Sand has history with Morpsie and she may have appeared in other books.

The plot is basic: Sand runs around town, beating up and killing people as he looks for clues and evidence, learning about the dead hooker’s ties with wealthy and political men that indicates she knew too much…and seems every low life gangster boyfriend she’s had was given an anonymous and generous amount of cash to break up with her.  There are no plot twists as found in other Sand Shockers, or weird characters such as crippled domestic terrorists or, like in Warped Ambitions, a gorilla trainer with warped ambitions. This is standard tough guy noir fare with a predictable solving of the crime.

We get a quick glimpse of Morpsie’s son who answers the brothel door, a pimply young lad on vacation from an Ivy League law school…in the short story “Flesh House,” this son is about 10 years older, a legal eagle deep in Chicago politics with public office ambitions. So the story takes place a considerable time after the novel. Morpsie has been murdered, and after a few wild goose chases, Sand realizes it was the son, who changed his name but couldn’t have it come out that his mom was a pimp of female flesh — that would ruin his warped ambitions as mayor, assemblyman, senator, maybe president…

In his introduction to “Flesh House,” Bill Pronzini notes that there is enough material for a novel, and we can’t help but think Willie should have wrote this novel.

Passion Has No Rule Book by Ennis Willie (Merit Books, 1964)

This is one of the better Sand books, or better than the two we have discussed here, Aura of Sensuality and Warped Ambitions, which were okay…then again, maybe they were read out of order.  Ex-hitman on the run, Sand, as well as Ennis Willie, have quite the uinderground following, and seems to have influenced a number of writers, from Ed Gorman to Wayne Dundee to Bill Crider…and now we are convinced that Andrew Vachss modeled his anti-hero, Burke, after Sand: similar voices and tone, similar colorful characters popping up…like Sand, Burke lives on the edge of society and the law, but operates on a curious moral compass of justice and a code of honor found only in the mean streets of crime noir, with the occasional over sensual beauty entering the anti-hero’s life.

Passion Has No Rule Book is a dumb title for this short novel, which is why Willie has re-titled it Death in a Dead Place for the recent omnibus from Ramble House, Sand’s Game. It opens with Sand catching a bullet from a Syndicate snuper but surviving. He has been hiding out as a homeless man, making friends on the street…one is an old man named Sticky, who lets Sand rest at his niece’s place. His niece is shocked, but soon falls for Sand and they spend three days in bed — strange? Well, passion has no rule book as the title says, and women always fall for the tall blonde Sand in these books.

Uncle Sticky then turns up dead in a dark rented room with strange growths all over his body — just as Sand arrives, a man in a suit is there and tries to shoot Sand and Sand takes the gun and kills the man.  Seems Sticky had stolen an attache case belonging to this man, and inside were liquid viles, but they did not contain booze…

The man Sand kills has a foreign passport. He knows this isn’t a hit man from the mob.  He puts two and two together and comes up with a bio-terrorism plot that Sand’s inside guy at the police station thinks is a crazy idea, so Sand decides to do his own investigating — he cares less about the terrorists, he wants to avenge the death of his friend, which is the motivation behind the other two Sand books we looked at here.

The terrorists and their plot is a bit far-fetched, but who knows these days, maybe possible and plausible, and as Sand kills off more hit man on his tail, he winds up saving millions, and probably the world, something he will never get credit for…

Damn good read with an ending Mickey Spilliane would give two thumbs up.

Recommended: Sand’s Game by Ennis Willie (Ramble House, 2010)

Over the years there has been talk of this publisher or that reissuing the Ennis Willie books. We figured Stark House would step up to the plate, and maybe they still will, but Ramble House has just released this fine ditty, with two Sand novels (or “Shockers,”  which always tended be be short, about 25-30K words), a handful of stories, an interview with the author, and commentary from Max Alan Collins, Waynde Dundee, James Reasoner, Bill Pronzini, et al., about an author who influenced many and was published almost in a void by Merit Books (Camerarts).

Vice Town by Ennis Willie (Vega Books, 1962)

I wasn’t blown away by the two Sand Shocker novels I read of Willie’s, but I did like the writing style; Vice Town is more to my liking.  Willie creates an ultra-violent reality, an alternate universe of the real, comic-book like in many ways — I’m thinking Frank Miller read Willie in the ’60s and there’s some influence Willie had over Sin City, or that whole genre of dark crime fiction.

Gator is like Sand in some ways — the single name, the cryptic past of being “in the war,” and a sense of loyalty to avenge the murder of old friends.  Gator, 29, has returned to a mythic southern city on the edges of the swamp, called Labanion, to find out who murdered an old girlfriend, Castine.  The town has grown, is a “wet county” (booze served all the time), and gambling is legal, “a town that made its living in a darkness that hid its promiscuities, and decent people put up with it as the price of prosperity” (p. 56).  He is not welcome back in Labanion but he doesn’t care — he’s on a mission to find a killer, and exact vengeance, and come to terms with his past.  “All a man has is home,” he says, “and when he has nowhere else to go, he goes home.”

He also has a missing leg, and moves around on a crutch –but he uses the crutch as a weapon, and can take on multiple big thugs in dark bac alleys sans a leg…

Thrill Crazy by Jerry M. Goff, Jr. (Merit Books, 1963)

I got this one in a lot from eBay, opened it, and was pleasantly surprised.  This is an ultra-hardboiled sleazenoir set in Los Angeles. “One bullet killed three people,” says Bob Harding, Jr., the narrator who has set out to find who killed his father, Captain Robert Harding of the LAPD.

Bob is a high school English teacher, taking time off to sleuth.  It’s funny how hardboiled he is, fist fighting and shooting guns, but attests this to being a cop’s son.

The murder seems to trace back to the L.A. underground mob, and a mysterious woman, Lisa Farrell, former mob moll, now a thrill crazy nympho and his father’s lover.

The terse writing is good, damn good, but like Chandler, sometimes you have no idea what the hell is going on — not sure if Goff was doing this intentionally, in that L.A. noir way, or if all his work is like that — I have ordered some of his other Merit Books titles, like Wanton Wench, Tropic of Carla, Rocco’s Babe, and Hot-Road Broad.

Looks like Goff did about two dozen of books for Merit only…not sure if Goff is a pen name, and whose, but he also wrote as Jerry Lane for Playtime and Private Editions. Seems Goff’s name was his real name, and he passed away in 2002 — a reader of this blog pointed out an obit in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Another lost writer in sleazecore alley.  From what I have see, Merit focused on hardboiled men’s fiction with sex slant, like the Ennis Willie titles.

Why aren’t there publishers like this anymore?  A shame.

Thrill Crazy gets a little too hard-boiled with flat characters at times.  When the woman Bob is supposed to marry, the daughter of a detective, gets raped by the bad guy, Bob shows no emotion except to want to kill.  Even the victim is flat: “What I was saving for you is no more.”

Plus, Bob becomes a cad, sleeping with Lisa, even though he knew his father was having sex with the woman.

The bullet that killed three?  The bullet in his father, his mother’s death from a car crash in despair, and finally the thrill seeking wench…

We see it coming.  Predictable, but sometimes hardboiled fiction is read for the language and violence, and sex, not the solving of the murder.  Look how convoluted some of Chandler’s great works get — sometimes you have no idea where the plot is going in The Big  Sleep (even William Faulkner was flabbergasted when writing the screenplay adapt) but you are entertained by the dialogue and narrative nonetheless.

Warped Ambitions by Ennis Willie (Merit Books, 1964)

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…