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.

Forgotten Books: Sex Dancer - Clayton Matthews

You can’t get much more blatant about the title of a book than SEX DANCER, a novel by Clayton Matthews published by Beacon Books in 1961. The protagonist, Jean Winters, is a beautiful young blonde who dances in the girlie show at a traveling carnival. A year earlier, she left her hometown in New Mexico to go to Hollywood and become a big star. Well, we all know how that works out, so now to survive Jean travels with the carnival from one town to another and carries on a desultory affair with the sleazy concessionaire who runs the girlie show. But then she meets Mace, a motorcycle rider who used to be the star attraction of the motordrome show (where guys race motorcycles around the inside of a cylinder, held up by centrifugal force) until he cracked up in an accident and lost his nerve. Jean and Mace fall for each other, but there are all kinds of obstacles in the way, of course. Will their love survive?

I tend to like carny novels, and this one is okay. Like Fredric Brown’s MADBALL, it’s full of carny lingo and lore and colorful characters, but it lacks any real mystery or noir plot and is more of a soap opera than anything else. But it’s a pretty fast-moving and well-written soap opera, so I enjoyed it. It’s not the sweaty, desperate, naturalistic art of Orrie Hitt, and it doesn’t have the narrative drive of Ben Haas, but it’s still worth reading because Clayton Matthews was a good storyteller.

Matthews is an interesting author. He wrote quite a few of these soft-core sleaze novels for various publishers under his real name, and later he did a number of big, family saga type novels, also under his name, as well as a lot of books under other names. Rumor has it that in the Eighties he actually wrote dozens of bestselling historical romances published under another name. I never met him, but we had some mutual friends and he was also the cousin of my good friend, pulp fan and publisher Tom Johnson. I have some of his other novels published by Beacon and will be getting around to them in due course, I suspect. 

Forgotten Books: Sin-a-Rama - Brittany A. Daley, Adam Parfrey, Hedi El Kholti, Earl Kemp, eds.

(This post originally appeared in different form on March 1, 2005.)

Like a lot of paperback collectors, I'm fascinated by the soft-core porn novels published in the Fifties and Sixties. In fact, I'd say I like reading about the books and their authors about as much as I enjoy reading the books themselves (although I've read quite a few by authors like Harry Whittington, Mike Avallone, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, and Robert Silverberg under their various pseudonyms, and find them all consistently entertaining).

The highlight of this volume is a reprint of Silverberg's wonderful "My Life as a Pornographer", which I missed in its original magazine appearance. Opening the book and seeing the cover of LOVE ADDICT, which was Silverberg's first novel for William Hamling's Nightstand line, as well as the first Nightstand book published, prompted me to exclaim, "Hey! I've got that book!" I didn't realize it was the debut book in the most famous line of porn novels ever published. In fact, I was surprised as I looked through page after page of cover reproductions by just how many of those books I own. I've never really collected them, just picked them up now and then as I ran across them.

As is the case with IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, the other book I have that was published by Feral House, SIN-A-RAMA could have used a little more text, a little more of the ol' who-wrote-what. But it's still a great book, highly entertaining and informative. The only problem is that now I want to go dig out some of those Andrew Shaw and Clyde Allison and Don Elliott books I have and read them, and I just don't have time.

UPDATE: My copy of SIN-A-RAMA was lost in the fire of '08, but I remember it fondly, especially for all the great cover reproductions. I've read quite a few of those softcore novels since this post first appeared and always enjoy them. SIN-A-RAMA is still available on Amazon.

For You Bibliographers Out There

A great website devoted to all the various imprints of the Greenleaf publishing empire has just been launched, and you can find it here. I've barely looked at it, and I can already tell there's a wealth of information. And if you're just interested in some great paperback cover art, there are scans of all the books, with covers by Robert Bonfils, Harold Macauley, and others. Check it out! (LUST FARM is one of the Harry Whittington books, by the way, and the cover is by Bonfils.)

Forgotten Books: My Bride for Yours - Curt Aldrich

When I try to figure out which books I’m going to write about for this series, one thing that comes into consideration is whether or not a particular book is actually, you know, any good. I think quality does have something to do with it, and I’m not going to do a Forgotten Books post about a book that I think is a real stinker.


However, some books do have a certain historical or nostalgic value that’s separate from their actual quality. And so it is with this week’s selection, MY BRIDE FOR YOURS, by Curt Aldrich.


You see, nearly forty years ago when I was a freshman in college, we had a circulating library of several dozen porn novels of this vintage in the dorm where I lived. In those pre-Internet days, in Texas anyway, pornography wasn’t that easy to find, although being 18-year-old guys, mostly living away from home for the first time, we did our dead-level best to find it anyway. (Some of us, of course, spent more time looking for the real thing, rather than a printed facsimile, but that’s another story.) Anytime somebody bought a new porn novel, after reading it went into the large cardboard box in Scooter’s dorm room (Scooter may have been the name on his birth certificate, for all I know; I never heard anybody call him anything else) so that the rest of the guys on the third floor could enjoy it, too. Over the course of the year I spent there, I read several dozen of these books, and I came across others here and there over the next few years.


We know now that just like ten or a dozen years earlier than that, when authors such as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, and Donald E. Westlake were turning out Nightstand Books, in the late 60s and early 70s some other authors who went on to have significant careers in more respectable genres were producing epics like RAJAH and LITTLE DONNIE’S MOTHER for Liverpool Library Press, Greenleaf, and other porn publishers.


The house-name Curt Aldrich originated as part of William Hamling’s porn enterprise and appeared on Nightstand, Leisure, Pillar, etc. Books. An early Curt Aldrich, maybe the original one for all I know, was Richard Curtis, who went on to become a well-known literary agent, which I believe he still is. By the time MY BRIDE FOR YOURS appeared, Curtis probably wasn’t Aldrich anymore, but who knows, maybe he was.


To finally get around to saying a few words about the book itself . . . well, it’s a sex novel, pretty plain and simple. Several young couples go on a honeymoon cruise to a secluded Florida resort. On the yacht taking them there, and once they reach the resort itself, much graphic swapping of newlywed spouses goes on. That’s it for the plot.


But the book does have a few things to recommend it. The writing in the non-sex scenes is consistently good. Admittedly, there aren’t many of them and they don’t last very long, but they’re there. And the prose in the sex scenes has a considerable amount of goofy humor to it, as if the author wasn’t taking things very seriously and wasn’t expecting the reader to, either. Whoever wrote MY BRIDE FOR YOURS was talented enough that he or she might well have published fiction in other genres, too. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.


So why have I written a lengthy Forgotten Books post about an obscure (no copies listed on ABE), forty-year-old sex novel? So I could wallow in nostalgia about my freshman year of college, of course, but also because these books, like other sex books before them, served as a training ground for a number of talented authors who went on to do other things. Looking at it now from the perspective of a bibliophile and all-around nosy guy, I find that interesting. But here’s the real reason I picked this particular book.


You can get a Kindle edition of it on Amazon for a buck.