By JIM HARMON (Ramble House; 1961/62/2007)
From the always-irrepressible Ramble House, here’s a compendium of two early 1960s sleaze novels by the late pulp meister Jim Harmon (1933-2010). THE MAN WHO MADE MANIACS debuted as a paperback original back in 1961, while SILENT SIREN was published (as SILENT SEX) the following year (with MANIAC SIREN trailing a 2006 two-book compendium from Armchair Fiction that featured THE MAN WHO MADE MANIACS paired with the 1936 LOOT OF THE VAMPIRE by Thorp McClusky). This two-in-one publication is graced with characteristically ornate cover art by Gavin L. O’Keefe, book design by Ramble House founder Fender Tucker and texts that are said to have been slightly updated from their initial forms.
THE MAN WHO MADE MANIACS is the more noteworthy of the two books by far. It’s an impossible-to-classify swirl of mind control, perversion, mistaken identity and what I assume was autobiographical angst about the perils of the writing trade.
It focuses on Jace Reid, a pulp novelist who learns one fateful morning that a homicidal maniac is claiming Jace put the idea of killing a man into his head. Jace figures it’s due to the guy reading and becoming inspired by something he wrote, but he’s wrong: the claim is that Jace deliberately impelled the evil actions as the leader of a sex cult. These would seem to be the rantings of nut, but then a woman turns up to demand that Jace “stop doing what you’re doing to my sister. Her health won’t permit it. It will kill her,” and shows him a photograph depicting “himself and a brunette girl doing something unspeakably vile” as proof. Things only grow steadily weirder in a narrative that encompasses lucid dreams, torrid (by 1960s standards) sex, a mysterious phone voice that seems to know everything there is to know about Jace’s existence, and a news report that states he’s been murdered…even though he’s still alive.
A compelling account, to be sure, but the novel never explores its many conceptions with any real depth or nuance. THE MAN WHO MADE MANIACS is a book the embodies its “pulp” designation quite snugly, and never ventures beyond its boundaries regardless of the whiplash narrative.
SILENT SIREN is a more down-to-Earth, and so less interesting, publication, an example of what passed for sexploitation in 1962. It’s a soap opera, in essence, set in a reasonably well-researched 1920s Hollywood milieu. Featured is Jenny Jordan, a Hollywood starlet with “big, full, pulsing breasts” who’s desired, in more ways than one, by a variety of questionable men, including Chicago gangster Benny Novak, publicity agent Bob Wilkins, cowboy star Tom Mason and Big Carl, a none-too-gentle giant.
Beyond that we have subdued (although pretty racy for 1962) carnal action that includes S&M, a catfight (in which “Her clothes half-torn from her, areas of golden flesh lying revealed, Jenny’s hand darted about furiously, biting and tearing into the soft flesh of the girl straddling her body”) and sentences like “And then Beverly did something to him and he almost went out of his mind in sensual wonder.” What that “something” might be is of course left unspoken.