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.

Sex Bum by Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Midnight Reader #489, 1963)

Rumor has it this one may soon be reprinted.  It’s a Syndicate crime novel in the Manhunt or Trapped style. It could have been a Gold Medal.

Johnny Price is 22 and a big-strapping guy working for fifty bucks a week and tips as a grocery delivery guy in Reesport, NY, an upper state small town in the Orrie Hitt tradition, where girls dream of being high class call girls in Manhattan and boys dream of being made men.

Johnny gets his chance to prove himself to the two local mob hoods when he stumbles upon a kill of a rival in a pool hall and helps the local wise guys, Lurton and Kloss, take down their target and two of his henchmen.  He’s offered a job to work with them, mainly as muscle, and collecting weekly “protection” from local businessmen.  He even brings a girl he met, Elle, who wants to be a Syndicate hooker, into the fray, proving his worth.  Beyond his base pay of ninety a week (ah, again, 1960s money!) he learns how to “earn” — collecting the extra $5-to-10 “tips” on his collections, or that “extra protection.”

Johnny Price has plans, though.  He doesn’t want to be a hired hand all his life, or even a year; within six months, he schemes to betray his bosses and take them down, and take their place.  He makes good with one of the New York City bosses, Rizzo, and lets Rizzo know that Lurton and Kloss are skimming off the top of their monthly payments.

There’s plenty of sex, with the call girls, such as this subtle scene hinting at anal sex:

“I showed you a trick that day. Want me to show you another one?”

“I’m game,” he said.

She wriggled up against him.  The firm cushion of her buttocks pressed against his thighs. She thrust one hand around behind, seized him, guided him.

Johnny frowned. “There?”

“Sure,” she said. “I like it there just like the regular way.”

“Can you feel anything there?”

“If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do it. I feel different things there.”

“But doesn’t it hurt?”

“Only the first couple of times. Not anymore. I’ve been a busy little girl.”

“I bet you have,” Johnny said. (p. 121-2)

He falls for Rizzo’s main whore, too, Marie, too high class for him, and a wrong move, just as betraying the men who gave him a job was a dumb move.  Johnny Price is not the smart thug he’d like to believe he is.  “You gotta be careful when you play around with razor blades.  You can get cut” (p. 167) is advice he doesn’t heed.

Like all of Silverberg’s sleaze paperbacks — all of his work, in fact, i whatever genre or form — this is compulsively readable, but not the best of the Elliotts.  It’s predictable, Goodfellas way before the movie, where betrayal and loyalty in the mob is a fine line.

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…