By JIM HARMON, RON HAYDOCK (Ramble House; 2007)
Another Ramble House published Jim Harmon double (following MANIAC SIREN and VIXEN SCANDAL), featuring two Harmon novels, drafted in collaboration with fellow sleaze-meister Ron Haydock, that were written for the early 1960s sleaze market. One of them is a routine potboiler that won’t raise too many temperatures, while the other is indecent, irresponsible, morally indefensible filth that (needless to add) I greatly enjoyed.
I’ll start with WANTON WITCH (originally credited to “Judson Grey”), the earlier, and lesser, of the two. It begins with Jim Foyer, a literary agent, getting contracted by Kathy, the wife of newspaper tycoon Warren Forrester, to investigate her husband’s relationship with his secretary Janet Arden–but then Forrester turns up dead and everything is thrown into the air, with Foyer teaming up with Janet against Kathy, who, it transpires, is seeking to become “Katherine the First, Queen of the United States.” The literary setting allows Harmon to air some publishing industry grievances (as in an early passage about how Forrester “ran his book line like a dictator” and apparently “gets a kick out of” writing rejection letters) amid a lot of unarousing-by-modern-standards sex and violence, and a sporadically involving narrative that Harmon and Haydock very evidently made up as they went along.
That may also have been the case with APE RAPE (initially credited to “Vin Saxon”) from 1964. It, however, has a more propulsive flow, and no wonder: the premise, centered on the planning and execution of just what the title promises, is quite a grabber.
The opening pages describe an insanely bloody Mexico-based cockfight that’s “like something from a delirium, something emanating from a madman’s nightmare,” and the outrageousness only builds from there. Among the spectators at said cockfight are the American fugitive Bob Wilson and the sexually voracious Carla Mason. Against his better instincts (he “had a habit of not trusting women anymore, particularly women such as Carla Mason”) Bob cozies up to Carla, who makes him an offer he can’t refuse: she’s very anxious “to see some big animal rape the hell out of a woman” because “I think it’ll be lots of fun,” and asks Bob to arrange this in exchange for a thousand dollars.
The cash-strapped Bob immediately goes in search of an animal to fulfill Carla’s demands. Bob’s underworld inquiries lead him to the “kill-crazed” ape Banga, and an odyssey of ugliness that involves the “breaking in” of a recalcitrant prostitute, a violent kerfuffle with the latter’s pimp, a Mexican whore getting beaten severely, the slashing up of a couple goons with cock spurs, and Bob’s attempts at figuring out how to get Banga to perform “without tearing him apart as soon as he let him out of the cage.”
This novel was published prior to the hard core era of the late 1960s and early 70s, and feels quaint and even somewhat tame by comparison. The copious brutality and bloodletting are detailed with enormous relish, but the equally copious sexual passages are lacking in anatomical detail, and the titular outrage, when it finally occurs, is barely described (you’ll have to read very closely to discern precisely what happens). Back in 1964, however, APE RAPE represented the farthest extremes of smut fiction, and still packs a mighty squalid punch.