Review: Hamilton's Harem - William Kane (Ben Haas)

First of all, the fact that this book doesn’t have LUST, SIN, FLESH, SHAME, PASSION, WANTON, or ORGY in the title makes me suspect that Ben Haas, the author behind the William Kane pseudonym, came up with HAMILTON’S HAREM and the editors at William Hamling’s soft-core empire let it go. That’s my copy in the scan, and it’s in really good shape for a paperback that’s 60 years old, almost like it just came off of some bus station spinner rack. The artist hasn’t been identified.

The fact that Ben Haas wrote this means there’s a very good chance it’ll be a fine book. The protagonist is lawyer Gage Hamilton, a no-nonsense, abide-by-the-letter-of-the-law guy who finds himself administering valuable trust funds for a beautiful blond widow and her three equally beautiful, equally blond daughters (all of whom, not to worry, are of legal age). In addition, Gage also has a beautiful blond mistress who is more than a tad jealous. Sounds like a harem to me!

Gage’s life is complicated even more when each of his legal charges has some sort of soap operatic emergency that requires them to try to wheedle large sums of cash out of their trust funds. Gage has to approve such cash outlays, and in each case, the ladies pull out all the stops to convince him to go along with what they want. Throw in a lusty stable boy, a predatory lesbian, an embezzler, a hint of blackmail, and a murder, and you’ve got a book!

Some of Haas’s soft-core books are sexed-up adventure yarns, but HAMILTON’S HAREM is more of a romantic comedy, and a good one, too. I raced through it, since Haas’s prose is some of the most readable you’ll ever encounter, and there’s a great scene where a rat gets his comeuppance. The sex scenes aren’t very graphic, and most of the book is about Gage Hamilton finding some human decency under his hidebound legal exterior. I just had a really good time reading this book. It’s not much like Ben Haas’s other books, but at the same time, I think it’s one of my favorites of his so far. You’re not likely to run across a copy—Bookfinder shows only three currently for sale on-line, and they’re all pricey—but if you do, I recommend you grab it.