By Lynn Munroe
In THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA, the
final novel written by Ben Haas, a young priest is talking to Lanier Condon, an
American writer living in
Vienna
.
Suddenly the priest realizes that Condon is the author of a novel he has
enjoyed, so he tells the writer, “It was indeed a memorable piece of work.
There are scenes in it which I recall as clearly as if I had experienced them
myself…” Condon replies, “Well, I guess
that’s fame. When you meet a stranger eight thousand miles from home and he’s
read your book.”
The priest has just summed up the
pleasure of reading the best of Ben Haas, who was an American writer living in
Vienna
when he started work on THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA. It is that difficult trick of
making fiction seem like a real experience that elevates the work of Ben
Haas. Ben once said, “I have tried to
develop a style which puts the reader into the novel itself.”
Benjamin Leopold Haas was born in
Charlotte
,
North Carolina
in 1926. In his entry for CONTEMPORARY
AUTHORS, Ben told us he inherited his love of books from his German-born
father, who would bid on hundreds of books at unclaimed freight auctions during
the Depression. His imagination was also fired by the stories of the Civil War
and Reconstruction told by his Grandmother, who had lived through both. “My
father was a pioneer operator of motion picture theatres”, Ben wrote. “So I had
free access to every theatre in
Charlotte
and saw countless films growing up, hooked on the lore of our own South and the
Old West.” A family friend, a black man
named Ike who lived in a cabin in the woods, took him hunting and taught him to
love and respect the guns that were the tools of that trade. All of these
influences – seeing the world like a story from a good book or movie, heartfelt
tales of the Civil War and the West, a love of weapons – register strongly in
Ben’s own books. Dreaming about being a writer, 18-year-old Ben sold a story to
a Western pulp magazine. He dropped out of college to support his family. He
was self-educated. And then he was drafted, and sent to the Philippines.
Ben served as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army from 1945 to 1946. Returning home,
Ben went to work, married a Southern belle named Douglas Thornton Taylor from
Raleigh
in 1950, lived in
Charlotte
and in
Sumter
in
South Carolina
, and then made
Raleigh
his home in 1959. Ben and his wife had three sons, Joel, Michael and John. Ben held
various jobs until 1961, when he was working for a steel company. He had
submitted a manuscript to Beacon Books, and an offer for more came just as he was
laid off at the steel company. He became a full-time writer for the rest of his
life. Ben wrote every day, every night. “I tried to write 5000 words or more
everyday, scrupulous in maintaining authenticity”, Ben said. His son Joel later recalled, “My Mom learned
to go to sleep to the sound of a typewriter”.
His son John told me “It sounded
like machine-gun fire coming out of his office”. Writing nonstop over the next 16 years, Ben Haas
would create somewhere around 130 books under his own name and a dozen pen
names. His output is even more amazing when we discover the high quality in so
many of those books. Ben wanted to be a real mainstream writer and he needed a
way to finance those times between serious books, so he became a paperback
writer in 1961.
Breaking into the paperback
market, he quickly received contracts from publishers like Beacon and Monarch.
His first agent Scott Meredith sold Ben’s first “mainstream” novel THE FORAGERS, set during the Civil War, to Simon & Schuster
in 1962. He continued alternating
hardcover novels under his own name with genre fiction paperbacks under pen
names – often using his alter ego Richard Meade – for the rest of his life.
Ben described himself as a
“Presbyterian Democrat”, and his upbringing, his deep sense of integrity and
fair play for all melded to make him a clear voice for underdogs and minorities
of every stripe. For example, he once was working at a factory in
Sumter
,
South Carolina
, where he discovered he was
the only employee who was NOT a member of the local White Citizens’ Council
(the uptown version of the KKK). Instead, Ben would later write a book exposing
the true and sordid history of the Ku Klux Klan.
We have been told that some
percentage of twentieth-century Southerners were virulent racists. The work of
Ben Haas reminds us that was simply not true of all of
them. Ben’s powerful books are like beacons of light shining on a hill during
those dark days. His second book under his own name was the superb KKK, his
only nonfiction work. This 1963 paperback original was published by Regency
Books. The publisher was William L. Hamling and the editor was Earl Kemp. Ben’s
next book was a powerhouse pastiche on the effects of the civil rights movement
on the South. LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY (1965) tells the story of three childhood
playmates – two white and one black - who come home from WWII to a South filled
with turmoil and strife, tearing them in different directions. The three are Cary Bradham, the white
governor’s son and heir to the throne; his black friend Houston Whitley, who
becomes a teacher and a vocal leader of the movement triggered when “Martha
Lacey” is too tired to go sit at the back of a public bus; and Burke Jessup, a
compassionate writer who travels and then returns home to find his homeland
torn asunder. His writing takes on the local Klan. There is a lot of Ben Haas
in the character of Burke. Ben had an eerie touch of prophecy in some of his
books, and by the end of LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY a character obviously modeled on
Martin Luther King Jr. is heading for the same fate Rev. King would meet in
Memphis in 1968, three years later. This
is writing from the inside of a historical event, like journalism coming out of
a combat zone. While reading LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY I woke up one night and thought
“I sure hope Huse gets out of that jam he’s in”, and then suddenly, coming fully
awake, I remembered he was only a fictional character in a book I was reading.
He just seemed actually real for a moment. That’s how I can best describe the
effect of the Ben Haas style.
THE
LAST
VALLEY
(1966) tackles the problem
of ecology head on. By making you care about the land and the people who live on
it when a local power company plans to flood a valley in the creation of yet another
dam, Haas involves us in their fight at a visceral level. Once again, each character
comes alive off the page. You pray for them to win against these powerful odds.
It is unforgettable. The third book in Ben’s trilogy on the modern South was
THE CHANDLER HERITAGE (1972), which takes one family from the Civil War through
the battle-bloodied skies over World War I France to the then-present day, when
a violent strike is set to shut down the family business, a textile mill.
Ben’s son Joel Haas figures there
are at least six different manuscripts for THE CHANDLER HERITAGE, as his Dad
perfected the epic novel that tells the saga of three generations of the
Chandler
family. You might think you know where the story is going, but midway through
the book a bomb goes off under the Chandler family car (was it placed there by
striking union agitators or by the KKK?), tearing the fabric of the family into
shreds. Ben told his sons he was unable to write any more of the book for some
time after that scene. “The characters stopped talking to me”, he said, a
statement that offers a lot of insight into his writing methods.
THE CHANDLER HERITAGE is one of
my favorite Ben Haas books. You don’t so much read it; it’s more like you live
through it. Epic in scope but firmly rooted in characters that feel as real as
people you have known, THE CHANDLER HERITAGE carries us into its characters’
lives to a level where we experience their feelings, ache with them and pray
for them. In one long and harrowing sequence, a young man and a young woman
leave their families behind and run off and elope. When the young man has to
call home and tell the parents, each word rings as true as if it all really
happened. “That’s no surprise”, Ben’s son Joel told me, “Mom’s parents did not
approve of my Father, and so they ran off and eloped. She borrowed ten dollars
from a friend and they were gone. I think that scene in THE CHANDLER HERITAGE
where the young man calls his new bride’s father is taken right from life,
right from Ben’s memory.”
The Haas family
returning from Europe on board the SS United States in
1966: Ben, John, Joel, Michael and Douglas
The
UK
hardcover jacket for LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY (Peter
Davies, 1965)
THE
LAST
VALLEY
Simon & Schuster,
1966
Ben’s early pen names include Ben
Elliott (his grandmother’s maiden name), who wrote Westerns for Ace; and Sam
Webster, who wrote five books for Monarch and STOLEN WOMAN, a Beacon that
offers the first glimpses of the dynamic paperback writer to come. As Ken Barry,
he churned out racy paperback originals for Beacon with titles like THE LOVE
ITCH and EXECUTIVE BOUDOIR.
The hardcovers under his real
name were solid if not spectacular sellers. Many were book club or Literary
Guild selections. He was a midlist author in the 1960s and 70s. At the same
time Ben Haas was turning out all these books, he was also a family man devoted
to his sons. He took the time to spin a new bedtime story for them every night.
Ben’s son Joel has a website where he tells many warm memories of his father.
My favorite story is “airplane milk”.
AIRPLANE MILK
By Joel Haas
“It was a Saturday. My mother was out and my father was seeing to me—age four—and my baby brother. I was
going through a phase in which I would only eat Spam and fried sliced hot
dogs. Wisely, my parents did not fight with me about my diet, and, so far
as I can tell, it did not stunt my growth. They figured I would outgrow
it soon enough and that I would be okay as long as I drank plenty of
milk. Back then, before anybody worried about gluten allergies, fiber,
too much fat, too much sugar or whatever, milk was the child’s elixir of good
health. “Build strong bones! Drink more milk!” Advertising
companies and the American Dairy Farmers’ Assoc. had seen to that. We always
drank a lot of milk. My Grandmother Haas declared from her experience
(she had 3 sons) there was no ill in a small child’s life that could not be
salved by copious quantities of chocolate milk. So, it was with some
consternation, my father noticed I had eaten all the fried hot dogs and Spam on
my plate but left my glass of milk untouched.
“Drink your milk, son,” he urged. “Finish your milk
and you can go to work.” In imitation of my father, I “went to work.” Every day in a patch of dirt outside the back window. There, I used a toy bulldozer, a toy hammer and a little hard hat to dig
shallow holes at random and then fill them back up.
(Yes, I know that describes your job today, but mine was
pretend work and yours is, well…real work?)
Anyway, I could not be bribed with the prospect of work.
I sat truculent, and the glass of milk sat untouched.
“So,”
my father asked, “do you want chocolate milk?”
No!” I
declared. This was not going to be as easy a victory as he thought.
“Well,”
Dad started, “do you want goat milk?”
“No!”
“Do you
want tiger’s milk?”
“No!”
“Do you
want elephant’s milk?”
“No!”
“Do you
want plain milk?” Dad asked, pointing at the glass.
“No!”
Frustrated,
Dad grated out a play on words he was sure a four year old would not
understand. “So, do you want air plane milk?”
Silence.
I was
curious. I remembered a trip to the airport and seeing the airplanes.
“Yes,”
I said. “I want airplane milk.”
Experienced
parent that he was becoming, Dad leaped for the chance.
“You
stay right here,” he instructed. “I think we have airplane milk in the
kitchen.”
In a
few moments, Dad came back from the kitchen. In his hand, he held a glass
of blue milk.
“I was
just by the airport at work,” he said, “and they were milking the airplanes, so
I bought some.”
He set
the glass of blue milk in front of me.
“Try
that” he said.
It was
sweet, as if it had had several spoonfuls of sugar mixed in it, with a strong
taste of vanilla and flecks of nutmeg. It was just as blue as when Mom
added food color to cake icing. It was delicious!
Who
in their right minds would mess with cows after this??!!
I drank it all and demanded more. Dad knew he had a winner
and was determined to expand his advantage. While I sat at the table, Dad
returned to the kitchen to mix up several more sample glasses of airplane
milk. Different kinds of airplanes gave different kinds of milk, Dad
explained. Jets gave blue milk, small planes gave yellow milk, while red
milk came from the DC-3s Piedmont Air still flew then, and so on.
After that, whenever my father called home from work during
the day, I would demand to speak with him. “Daaadyyy,” my reedy little
voice would stretch out the word, “Don’t forget to go by the airport and get
some air plane milk!”
As an adult, I have been in and out of a lot of airports
and flown on a variety of airplanes.
But you can’t fool me. Every time I’m sitting in my
seat waiting to take off and I see the big tanker trucks drive up under an
airplane wing and hook up hoses those long hoses….
I know what’s really going on!!! All I have to say is--- if
people quit flying, the cows had better watch out!
Recipe—to make Air Plane Milk
In an 8 ounce glass of cold milk, mix several spoonfuls
of sugar. Add a teaspoon of vanilla or almond flavoring. Add a
pinch of cinnamon or nutmeg. Finally, add food coloring as appropriate.
Serve in a mug while making airplane noises.”
All three of the Haas brothers have excelled in their
fields: Joel is a well-known sculptor, Michael is a four-time Grammy-winning
music producer trained in
Vienna
,
and John is the only Oracle manager with three degrees in theatre and opera
Ben Haas first visited
Austria
in 1964. The change of cultures inspired
him and he moved the family back to
Austria
for three years in 1972, working on several books including DAISY CANFIELD
(1973) and the book that would become his last great novel, THE HOUSE OF
CHRISTINA (1977).
“Yes, he lived in
Austria
twice”, Ben’s son Joel told me. “The first time was from October 1964 through
January 1966. The second time was from the summer of 1972 until the summer of
1975. The first time we lived in the
village
of
Krtizendorf
along the
Danube
a few miles northwest of
Vienna
.
Our address was 13 Schubertgasse. The second time we lived for year
in the village of Kierling near the Elisabeth Hof where he rented a room for an
office and originally conceived the basic story for THE HOUSE OF
CHRISTINA after talking with Elisabeth Welwert, the owner. A larger house
became available in Kritzendorf, though, one across the street from where we
had lived before. The address was 14 Schubertgasse. Dad set up his
office in what had been the maid's quarters of the house. My father did
research for THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA while living in
Vienna
.
He had the outline of the story; however, he focused mostly on gathering the
raw research material. He put ads in the newspaper saying he was an American
novelist looking for all different types of people's experiences in the 1930s
through 1945. Response was so overwhelming, that he had to hire a translator
and book hotel rooms in
Vienna
. Dad
had a reasonable walking around command of German, however, the dialects vary
and he was looking at making notes of what they said. Trying to translate at
the same time was just too much to handle, particularly since some of the
people could get quite passionate about whatever they were remembering and then
the German would come out at machine-gun rate. Besides, a native was more
likely to be aware of when somebody was telling him bull. He got so much
information he used some of the excess in THE DANUBE SUBMARINES, the John
Dollarhide series he planned.”
(Only the first book of the John
Dollarhide series was published. It’s called THE DANUBE COVENANT by John
Michael Elliot. One of Ben’s Richard Meade spy thrillers, THE DANUBE RUNS RED,
was set in
Vienna
also, and like
THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA and THE DANUBE COVENANT it rings true.)
Ben’s son Michael Haas remembers
his father:
“He was not just a marvelous
story-teller; he was an exceptional artist who could draw any likeness you
placed in front of him. He could have made a fortune sitting on the Ramblas in
Barcelona
tossing off portraits in under five minutes using
crayon. He always said that his color-blindness kept him from pursuing this
very natural talent – a talent shared with his older brother Otto. His
manuscripts are full of doodles of cowboys, Indians and that most difficult
thing of all to draw, horses in movement: galloping, bucking, cantering – he
could also draw the other great nightmare of all developing artists without any
problem: hands – hands working, hands in motion, hands shooting pistols, hands
doing nothing. It all came out of him fully formed without prior sketching or
any sizing up. I once had to present a school essay on Russian Communism
and asked him to draw Lenin for the front page, something he knocked off in
under a minute from memory.
His other
astonishing talent was spelling. There was no word in any language, (even the
ones he didn’t speak) that he couldn’t spell. Nobody was quite sure how he did
it. Both he and his older brother were excellent students. He was also – and
this is the tragedy – a child of his age: a returning soldier from the war who
had come close to death and seen death up close. He drank too much, he smoked
too much and he had never been told that eating too much made you fat. He kept
a vision of himself as the active youngster while steadily declining in health.
There were countless contradictions in his character. He was neurotically ‘macho’
while preserving a love of the finer arts – even poetry. His need to cause
conflict was in some ways similar to Norman Mailer’s and in retrospect, I
wonder if it wasn’t part of an unspoken sense of being an outsider. His father
was a German Jew, and he and his older brother were – as stated above –
brilliant students who seemed to excel at everything. This would not have been characteristic
of a typical young man from Western-North Carolina; so the brash talk, the
shooting contests, the hunting trips and the general hard-drinking were
possibly part of some kind of complex over-compensation. Had his father landed
in NY rather than
Tennessee
and
then NC, his children would probably have been totally different with fewer
needs to assimilate into the red-neck, hard-man environment of
Charlotte
’s
Appalachian suburbs – but then, this is what provided him with much of his
material. There is no doubt in my mind that many of his John Benteen characters
were simply projections of himself – or how he would
have loved to have been. He was intimidatingly well-read and could read any
book in under a day – even those in German. But he recognized that reading too
much was the writer’s biggest enemy. I remember him once saying, ‘if you want
to be a writer, write: too many people want to be writers who don’t even have
the wherewithal to write a post-card to their friends and family. Writers write
– everyone else reads.’”
THE
CHANDLER
HERITAGE
Simon & Schuster,
1972
Jacket illustration
by Allen Magee
Ben would eventually have a
falling out with his literary agent Scott Meredith. He didn’t believe Meredith
was interested in pushing his mainstream novels. Meredith was perfectly content
to keep Ben pounding away on the paperback contracts. Ben moved to a different
agency, Paul R. Reynolds, where his mainstream novels were then pushed. But
they were not crazy about Ben’s new interest, writing Westerns. They suggested
he represent himself on those sales. Ben had sent a trial novel to Harry
Shorten of Tower Books. Ben’s family remembers that book was called A HELL OF A
WAY TO DIE and was written for Tower’s new Lassiter series. It was published as
Lassiter #5 in 1969. Shorten was delighted with the way Ben Haas told a story and
invited him to create a Western Series of his own. The result was called
FARGO
.
FARGO
Neal Fargo is a mercenary, a
soldier of fortune in the early 20th century, for hire to anyone able to meet
his high price (usually $20,000 or more).
Fargo
is a killer, almost nihilistic in his awareness that he’s never going to be an
old man. His only great loves are his weapons – a Fox shotgun that was
presented to him by his Rough Riders Colonel, Theodore Roosevelt (the only man
Fargo would drop everything and come running for), a Winchester rifle, an Army
Colt .38 revolver, and a ten-inch Batangas knife he picked up while serving in
the Philippines.
Fargo
is larger
than life, often taking on entire armies, always eventually victorious, and
somehow managing to bed all available gorgeous females before each mission is done.
Ben Haas understood that although
the pulp magazines were gone, the grand tradition of pulp fiction lived on in
the paperback book, especially in a series like
Fargo
.
Haas would write (or, sometimes, supervise the ghost writing of) 20 of the 23
Fargo
books.
Fargo
is a tremendously
enjoyable series that became a bestseller for Harry Shorten and has kept hordes
of fans enthralled ever since in countries all over the world. On his excellent
Fargo
website, Randy Johnson very
astutely notes that the character of
Fargo
was based on a movie tough guy. Writing under the pseudonym John Benteen (the pen
name was the name of one of Custer’s officers), Ben Haas describes Fargo as a
rock-hard fighting man with prematurely white hair wearing a Rough Riders hat
and cavalry boots who smokes a black cigar and is always found carrying plenty
of guns and ammo. The marvelous screenplay Richard Brooks wrote for THE PROFESSIONALS includes a brief biography of Fardan: he was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, served in the Philippines, was a wildcatter and gold prospector, worked for Pancho Villa and is now demonstrating automatic weapons to the Army. He is offered $10,000 for the dangerous assignment. He shares all of these details with Neal Fargo. This is not only a spot-on description of Lee Marvin; it
specifically describes Lee Marvin’s character in the 1966 movie THE
PROFESSIONALS, based on the novel A MULE FOR THE MARQUESA by Frank O’Rourke.
Lee Marvin’s character there is named Fardan, and Haas changes that just a
little to
Fargo
to avoid any
problems. Fardan is a rock-hard fighting
man with prematurely white hair wearing a Rough Riders hat and cavalry boots,
who smokes a black cigar and is always found carrying
plenty of guns. Reading the
Fargo
adventures, it is effortless to imagine ex-Marine Lee Marvin playing the part.
Some of the more outrageous plot turns sail by smoothly, mainly because it is
so easy to imagine Lee Marvin handling everything.
Fargo
is in town to kick ass, kill baddies and make money. In other words, he’s already
familiar to us if we’ve ever seen a Lee Marvin action movie. In fact, Lee Marvin should have fired his
agent for not lining up a whole series of
Fargo
movies. They would have been golden.
My fellow
Fargo
fan James Reasoner has noted on his excellent blog that the
Fargo
books are not really traditional Westerns because they take place in locations
like the
Philippines, Argentina, Nicaragua, Alaska and Peru. And they are set in the 1910s, after the Wild West had been settled. Some of
them are later-day Westerns; some are Westerns only in the broadest sense. Either
way, they are all blood-pumping action adventure stories.
Series novels are formulaic, but
the
Fargo
stories are so much fun
we don’t mind the formula being repeated again. It’s like a visit from an old
friend, like watching a favorite TV series where the story is usually pretty
similar week after week, but we keep coming back because we love the
characters. All
Fargo
books start
with
Fargo
getting offered some
impossible mission. Then
Fargo
takes inventory of his trunk of weapons. Somehow even though he is described as
an ugly old guy,
Fargo
will then be
irresistible to the female in the story (and somehow all these different women
always have “huge” or “large” breasts – no complaints from
Fargo
).
Fargo
then goes on the mission, but
he gets captured by the badguys. And then somehow, against all odds,
Fargo
always ends each adventure on top. He never lets us down.
These stories were written for men and Ben
understood the formula perfectly. In fact when he was working on an idea to
have his sons ghostwrite some of the later
Fargos
,
he created an outline that is both insightful and humorous. And it shows Ben’s
keen understanding that no matter how strong the hero, a good genre novel is
only as interesting as its villain. Joel Haas shared it with us on James
Reasoner’s blog:
http://blackmask.com/?cat=125&wpmp_switcher=mobile
Fargo
is never without his Fox Sterlingworth shotgun and he wears a Batangas knife.
Joel Haas told me that after the war, Ben loaned some money to his old friend
Ike. Ike insisted Ben take his beloved Fox Sterlingworth shotgun as security.
And Ben brought home a Batangas knife from the Philippines after the war. “My brothers and I could not believe how long it was and how
sharp it was”, Joel told me.
Ben Haas made
Fargo
such an indelible character that when a different writer, “John W. Hardin”
(another pen name taken from a real outlaw’s name), tried his hand at three of
the books, it was painfully obvious those
Fargo
books were not written by the same author. They were almost like stories about
a different person with the same name. The Hardin Fargos were actually not bad,
they just paled by comparison. Hardin’s
Fargo
spends a lot of time wondering if he should have done such and such or gone to
bed with so and so. Benteen’s
Fargo
would never waste even one second on such introspection, such worrying. He is
much too busy figuring out how he is going to machine-gun an entire barracks
full of enemy soldiers. Benteen’s
Fargo
is constantly moving forward like a shark. Hardin’s
Fargo
stops and ruminates to himself a lot and then thinks things like “Get control…
Wait like a stone. Store up lightning.”
Another place the Hardin Fargos
and the Benteen Fargos diverge wildly is in the sex scenes. Benteen’s
Fargo
behaves like an experienced adult. Forgive me for saying this, but the Hardin
Fargo sex scenes remind me of something written by a person who has never had any
or many real-life sexual relations, but is just trying unsuccessfully to
describe things they are fairly uncomfortable with. The problem may be that
euphemisms were required to describe certain parts of the body. But Hardin’s
descriptions of sex are like something from Bill Pronzini’s review of
wrongheaded writing in GUN IN CHEEK. What
follows here are all actual quotes from the
Fargos
by John W. Hardin, NOT John Benteen (Ben Haas).
From DYNAMITE FEVER:
“
Fargo
mounted and plunged hornily into the swampy suction of her love gap.”
“She… thrust his hand in between
her lush, satiny thighs to the steaminess at their joining.”
“He thrust into the dark place
between her thighs and rode heroically.”
“Pressing into her hot
slipperiness, he heard her moan softly.”
“He slipped his manhood into her
slippery gap.”
From GRINGO GUNS:
“..the fluffy triangle of her pubes”
“He… caressed the furriness of
her lower belly.”
“He mounted her, with a thrust
cannoning into the steaminess of her gaping nest.”
(She feels) “a bit sore but also bubbly, and hot in there”
“He stroked her thighs, petted
the swampiness between them.”
“Her dainty caressing of his
crotch organs…”
“He found the gap in her dark,
furry underbody and pronged in, his stony length reaming a succulent cavern.”
Dark furry
underbody? I ask you, “swampy
suction”, does that sound like somebody with any knowledge of a working human
vagina? Is
Fargo
making love or spelunking
in a slippery cave of “swampiness”?
As the checklist that follows
shows, the publisher created a great deal of confusion when it came time to
reprint #7 in the Fargo series for the “Fargo is His Name – Violence is His
Game” reprint set. They had reprinted the first six, and brought out a new #13
and #14 in that format, so the next two books were due to be a reprint of #7
and the new #15. For who knows what
reason, but probably just incompetence, they put the wrong number on the #7
reprint and called it
Fargo
#15.
Then, instead of acknowledging the mistake as we’ve seen other series editors
do, they put wrong numbers on the next three books, then stopped numbering them
at all and never reprinted #7 again, even when they did a new uniform reprint edition
later (it jumps from #6 to #8). The screwed-up numbering does not affect the
reader’s enjoyment of the books; it just drives bibliographers to distraction.
Some call the reprinted #7 a #15 too and so count it twice, saying therefore
there are 24 books in the set. Others insist there are only 23 books. They’re
both right.
If you love high action, adventure
and genre fiction; and don’t give a damn if one man versus a hundred could have
really happened that way or not, try a Fargo (by John Benteen). You might
become another
Fargo
fan. There are
a lot of us.
The success of the best-selling
Fargo
series led to the Sundance series, a similar set of tough guy Western
adventures from another Harry Shorten line, Leisure Books. Jim Sundance is a
halfbreed gunslinger equally adept with bow & arrow or rifle. The Sundance
books have similarities to the
Fargo
books – similar stories and settings, same pen name, the guaranteed checklist
of all of Sundance’s weapons, the obligatory sex scene. There is even a break for three books by
another writer in the middle – this time by “Jack Slade”, a house name (like
many of them, named for a real-life Western outlaw or lawman). Perhaps the main difference between the
Fargo
series and the Sundance series is
Fargo
ended with Ben’s death in 1977, but Sundance lived on into the 1980s with new
books from “Jack Slade” and then Peter McCurtin.
According to Joel Haas, his Dad
eventually had a falling out with his
Fargo
publisher, Harry Shorten. He was getting
paid for the American editions. The dispute was over who was getting all the
money pouring in from the foreign rights. When Ben took his family to
Europe
,
he found that Fargo and Sundance were bestsellers in many different countries.
Ben would create one more great
Western series, this time for Fawcett Gold Medal. The five books that make up
the RANCHO BRAVO series are all great reading. He submitted the first one as by
“Douglas Thornton”, his wife’s real name. The editors at Gold Medal replied
“That name sounds too made up. We changed it to Thorne Douglas.“
Ben Haas wrote all kinds of books
as Richard Meade. One of the best author biographies from any of Ben’s books is
found in a Richard Meade book called THE DANUBE RUNS RED:
“Richard Meade is the alter ego
of an American who has lived in Central Europe, traveled behind the Iron
Curtain, and whose novels under his own name have been major book club
selections in the United States, Germany
and Scandinavia, as well as having been translated into many other languages.
Mr. Meade, a Southerner, is married and the father of three sons. He has
always been interested in weaponry and boasts the distinction of being the only
American member in the history of the four-hundred-year-old
Klosterneuberg, Austria, Shooting
Society.”
Richard Meade continued writing
into the 1970s too, even doing a novella for the high-paying GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
when Ben needed some quick cash to fill in as he worked on his next mainstream
novel under his real name.
“As a compulsive writer who’s
uncomfortable without working every day”, Ben would say in his CONTEMPORARY
AUTHORS sketch, “I spin off minor ideas and themes into lesser works under pen
names. When a major subject seizes me, I then spare no effort or sacrifice to
develop it under my own with all the force, clarity and honesty at my command.”
His final book under his own
name, THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA, was one of his most popular novels. Taylor
Caldwell called it “beautiful” and wisely noted the “marvelously depicted
characters”. After some nice paychecks
for paperback editions of his earlier hardcovers from Pocket Books, his agent
sold THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA to Dell for a hefty sum. But Ben never saw that paperback edition. Ben Haas died of a heart attack in
New York City
after attending a
Literary Guild dinner in 1977. At age 51 he was much too young. Sadly, all of
those wonderful books from all those pen names stopped. As the years passed,
his name grew obscure except to a small group of genre fiction fans and die
hard adventure lovers. James Reasoner,
an author who knows a thing or two about writing Western series books himself, has said on his blog, “Ben Haas was one of the best
action writers of all time”. In TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS, David
Whitehead wrote that Ben Haas “ranks among the most influential and under-rated
Western writers of recent times… the hard-hitting adventures of Neal Fargo and
Jim Sundance were largely responsible for creating the Western Series market
virtually single-handed.”
Mr. Whitehead later wrote, “I
discovered the Fargo and Sundance westerns of John Benteen and saw for the
first time just how a good, fast-moving western yarn should really be told”.
The John Benteen books set a high
standard followed or attempted by countless modern Western series that
followed. Of course there had been
Western series characters since the genre began over a century ago, but the
success of those Benteen books from 1969 to 1977 was instrumental in the gold
rush of paperback men’s adventure series novels that have appeared in the following
years.
|
|
DAISY CANFIELD –
Simon & Schuster, 1973
THE HOUSE OF
CHRISTINA – Simon & Schuster, 1977
WILLIAM KANE
That might have been the end of
the story, but several decades later the chief editor of Nightstand Books, Earl
Kemp, came out of self-exile in Mexico and starting talking about his days working for William Hamling, publishing
several thousand paperback originals supplied by literary agent Scott Meredith.
Meredith signed his stable of writers to contracts to provide a new book each
month. These “adult” books (the lawyers made sure there were never any
dangerous or obscene words, and they’d be rated PG-13 in this century) were published
under pen names and house names, but over the years the authors have been
revealed to be such well-known writers as Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block,
Harlan Ellison, Donald E. Westlake, John Jakes, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Harry
Whittington and Evan Hunter. And Earl Kemp started telling stories about all of
them in his excellent, highly respected e-zine. All the files had been left
behind when Earl left Hamling’s organization in the 1970s. But recently Earl
came across an old memo from Scott Meredith that had survived some 50 years.
Included in that memo was this note: “Enclosed you will find the latest William
Kane book from Ben Haas.”
William Kane was one of the other
Nightstand pen names; one nobody had ever attached an identity to before now.
Earl had forgotten who William Kane was, but he remembers Ben Haas well. As Ben’s
editor at Regency, Earl had edited the first edition of KKK. When Hamling
started Greenleaf Classics in 1965, chief editor Earl Kemp wanted only top
drawer material (they were calling them “classics” after all), so early on they
published CANDY, and Krafft-Ebing, and Henry Miller; and they brought out a new
edition of KKK. It was during that time that Earl has a memory of Ben Haas that
makes for a funny story. Trying to bring his family through European customs during
one of their sojourns in Austria, Ben told Earl that he ran into a language problem dealing with a fussy customs
agent. “So you claim to be a writer, well, what have you written?”
“Well”, Ben replied, “my book KKK has just
been brought out by Greenleaf Classics.”
“Greenleaf who?”
”You know, Greenleaf Classics.
They published CANDY, a million seller. Surely you’ve
heard of that.” The customs agent excused himself and suddenly Ben was
surrounded by other agents who wanted to shake his hand or get an autograph.
After some confusion he found someone who spoke a bit more English, who told
him “Oh, they are all excited to meet the man who wrote CANDY! They all loved it.”
And so the Meredith memo allowed
Earl Kemp to give us the name of another famous writer behind one of the
Nightstand pen names. There are 47 William Kane books (four of them appeared
under the byline William King when, during a court case, the publisher changed
everybody’s name for a while.) It is not
known exactly how many of the 47 Ben wrote, but we know he was the first
William Kane. Several of the books have his familiar professional style; some
of the later books have a decidedly different style. The William Kane books
appeared from late 1962 to early 1967, when they stop. Joel Haas suspects his
father was not writing any more of these by 1966-67, but there could have been
a surplus of available manuscripts for that pen name. At a book a month, 47
titles is almost four years worth of books. A staff member at Scott Meredith also
confirmed that he is “100% certain” that Ben Haas was one of the Nightstand
writers.
Not wishing to give away too many
local secrets, some of the William Kane books that seem to be set in the South
are described as taking place somewhere in the “Southwest”. Kane tells us the purely
small-Southern-town KKK story SEXPLOSION is taking place in the “Southwest”. SIN CITY SLAVES takes place at a thinly-disguised
“Southwestern” Army base called Fort Channing, across the river from
Gryffon
City
. Remembering that the gryffon
is a mythical bird like the phoenix is the key to the real location in the deep South, where
Fort Benning
GA
is right across the river from the real
“sin city”, Phenix City AL. Ben had trained at
Fort
Benning
during his service in the
Army. SIN CITY SLAVES, Nightstand Book 1650, was the William Kane book I remember
reading that suggested there was a bright and talented writer behind the pen
name. The story centers on three soldiers: Captain Lattimer Chase, Second
Lieutenant Lewis Payne, and their lusty platoon Sergeant Walt Martini; and
their lives and loves in the honky tonk bars and strip clubs along
Main
Street
. Investing these characters with much more
emotion than the average Nightstand Book, the author achieves the difficult
task of making us care about what happens to them. The action climaxes at a
live sex show, just like the one in William Kane’s RED LIGHT SISTERS, published
three years later in 1966 but obviously written by the author of SIN CITY SLAVES. When you are writing a story
that requires an obligatory sex scene every 20 pages or so, the live sex show
setting provides plenty of opportunities to meet that quota. Some Nightstands
have a happy ending tacked on that feels phony. SIN CITY SLAVES achieves its
ending very naturally, everything falling into place from the narrative instead
of arriving out of left field. SIN CITY
SLAVES was the second Nightstand by William Kane. I suspect that the first one,
FLESH ADDICT, Nightstand 1613 from 1962, was Ben’s first book for this
publisher. It deals with the effects of a clinical university study on
pornography on the students who have to collate and index the material, especially
on wide-eyed innocent lass Dorian Kay. Unfortunately the study is headed up by
a megalomaniacal sex fiend. FLESH ADDICT becomes a study on pornography’s place
in society:
“But, he wondered, could you ever
handle pornography in a dispassionate way? Wasn’t it something that appealed to
the darker reaches of the human psyche, the places in the mind that were purely
instinctual and defied all rules of reason and dispassionate conduct? Handling
pornography, he thought wryly, was like trying to find a container for a
universal solvent. No matter how carefully you insulated it, the stuff always
seemed to eat its way through whatever protective measures you set up, and to
play havoc with anything it touched. Just as it had played havoc with Dorian
Kay.”
The publisher always retitled
these, FLESH ADDICT is pure Nightstand (their first book was LOVE ADDICT). If
they had asked me to title this I’d have called it THE PICTURE OF DORIAN KAY.
I think that Ben Haas also had
something to say about his years writing as Kane in his 1973 novel DAISY
CANFIELD. The protagonist, Danny Rush, has an affair with a vacationing school
teacher named Paula Murphy. Paula dreams
of being a writer:
“She was the craziest woman. What
had she said, lying on his arm? ‘Sometimes I’d like to write a book. A pornographic book.’
‘You mean a dirty book?’
‘Why not?’
“The thought aroused him. She
went on: ‘After all, you’ve got a captive audience. You can say anything you
want to say, no holds barred, no matter how wild or esoteric, as long as you
put in enough sex to keep ‘em reading. And you don’t have to learn how to write
to do it. I think it would be a lot of fun.’ Then she gave that soft deep
chuckle that he liked so much. ‘Of course, there’s the matter of the necessary
research. But then, I’ve got you.’
“She could stay home and write
those stories…If she sold one a month, that was near
five thousand a year…”
Several of the William Kane
stories take place in “
Hazen
City
”,
a large Southern town that first appears as the setting for one of the earliest
Kane books, HOUSEWIFE CALL GIRL, Bedside 1213. When one of the students breaks free at the end of FLESH ADDICT, he
relocates to
Hazen
City
.
It also appears in two 1962 Midnight Readers: SEXECUTIVE and LUST LOTTERY. Then, four years later,
Hazen
City
is the location of Danny’s
Place, the titular tavern in THE TRYSTING PLACE, Leisure LB1141.
My current theory is there must
have been at least two William Kanes. The first one, who we now know was Ben
Haas, wrote (or supervised the ghostwriting of) the early softcore books. The
second Kane writes like a hardcore porn book veteran (somebody along the lines
of Paul Little or Richard E. Geis). I think the second
Kane wrote later titles like SIN-DEEP LOVER and SIN SAFARI. I say this because
the earlier Kanes are character-driven stories that actually have plots. In the
course of telling a story, they describe the seemingly realistic sex lives of
the characters. The later Kane books are peopled by types who exist for no
other reason than the outrageous and unbelievable porn stereotypes they wallow
in, like the nymphomaniac in SIN SAFARI who sexually exhausts every man in the whole
village in one evening. Keep in mind this is nothing but a guess based on
reading all the Kanes. Perhaps the first Kane just evolved as the times changed
and adult paperbacks edged toward the plotless X-rated movies and books that were
to come as the industry retooled (that’s a pun) in the 1970s. There was no need
for anything more than the simplest of plots (the pizza delivery guy arrives and
he’s got a large pepperoni) because that audience had no interest in the plot.
William Kane’s novels were identified
by their sexy cover paintings by such artists as Robert Bonfils, Harold
McCauley, Tomas Cannizaro, and the late Darrel Millsap. The covers were often
racier than anything going on inside the book, and were surely a major
contributor to the success of these paperback originals.
The 3 editions of KKK - and a story from the
same author writing as William Kane.
The checklist of William Kane
books that follows will give more information on all of the titles published
under that pen name.
One of the greatest testimonials
to the talent of Ben Haas can be experienced simply by looking at the size and
scope of the checklist of all his books that follows. He was a world-class
author, and at the same time he was one hell of a paperback writer.
LASSITER
Another recent development in the
literary life of Ben’s books appeared on a website posted by the family of
Peter Germano, a writer who had written some of the Lassiter series as Jack
Slade for Harry Shorten.
According to
HAWK’S WESTERN SERIES & SEQUELS, the ghost writer for LASSITER #5: A HELL
OF A WAY TO DIE was Ben Haas. This book was also listed on the
CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS entry for Ben Haas (and I think Ben himself was the source
for their list). However, James Reasoner notes on his blog that when the family
of Peter Germano listed which Jack Slade books Germano had written, they
included A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE. And there is a German web site called
Wildwester that lists the Lassiters, crediting A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE to Peter
Germano and a different Lassiter title, HIGH LONESOME, to Ben Haas. I’ve read
both books and find the stalwart A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE to be densely plotted
solid storytelling in the Ben Haas style. HIGH LONESOME, which borrows the
familiar plot of RED HARVEST / YOJIMBO / A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, reads like a
different author – his dirty lowdown Lassiter is a totally unique character, and
all sex scenes are described using only words never used in this way in any
Haas novel (or for that matter in any earlier Lassiter story); words like “bulling”
and “straddling”. Prostitutes are referred to not as prostitutes but as “crotch
thumpers”. The Germano website says that
Peter Germano was also the “Jack Slade” who wrote a Lassiter called THE MAN
FROM LORDSBURG, a book that has countless stylistic similarities to HIGH
LONESOME. But HIGH LONESOME is not on
the Germano list.
Ben’s sons remember their father
receiving a stack of copies of A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE in the mail. They have
never heard of HIGH LONESOME.
|