Customer Reviews

Sand's Game

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Ennis Willie spent his entire writing career working for 1960's sleaze publishers. As a result, his name was known to only the most die hard collectors. Like a burlesque show, when you peel away the layers of lousy covers, improbable titles, the expensive sixty cent price of the original paperbacks, the stigma of having to buy them from the adult spindle rack, here, exposed for the first time in forty-five years, is Sand's Game---two novels and three short stories by the last of the great hard-boiled pulp writers. All the stories in the book feature Sand, the single-named character who used to be a made man in the Organization. He has walked away from his former life and is now hunted by his old bosses. So convincing is Willie's hard-boiled style that for many years rumors spread that Willie was actually a pen name of Mickey Spillane experimenting with a third-person style. Not true. The book features two rare Sand novels and all three of the ultra-rare Sand short stories. If you ever wanted to know what true pulp fiction is, this is the volume you need. The book also features essays, a complete bibliography, and an introduction by Max Allan Collins. Story introductions by Bill Pronzini, James Reasoner, Wayne Dundee, Gary Lovisi, Bill Crider, and an interview with Ennis Willie by co-editor Steve Mertz.

Full disclosure here: I am one of the writers who provided an introduction to one of the stories in this collection. Having said that, let me explain that until I was offered that opportunity I had barely heard of Ennis Willie and had never read any of the Sand books. So my reaction, as recorded in said introduction and expanded upon in this review, was fresh and sincere. How I managed to miss Willie and Sand back in the early Sixties when they were originally published (and when I was devouring every tough-guy crime/detective paperback I could get my hands on) is a mystery that remains as confounding to me as any I encountered in those pages.

At any rate, once I DID discover Willie/Sand it was a sheer delight.
Sand is not your standard tough-guy detective. In fact he is a criminal --- or rather a former one. As Willie himself writes it: "The great Sand. Hard. Tough. The fair-haired boy of the undrworld elite until the day he decided he'd had enough, that he couldn't stand the stink of corruption any longer." So he walked away. But as everybody knows, NOBODY just walks away from the organization. So now, while not exactly on the run, Sand must remain constantly on guard against the seemingly endless tide of hitters and killers the mob keeps sending to rub him out and reinforce the message that nobody leaves on his own terms.
But even under that threat, Sand still finds time to get involved with other people's problems, especially old friends who have remained loyal to him. And where Sand gets involved, three things are certain: Punches will be thrown, bullets will fly, and gorgeous, willing women will somehow be involved.
The writing in all of the stories gathered for this collection (there are two complete novels and three short stories) is lean, crisp, precise. Reminiscent in style of Paul Cain or Richard Stark and certainly conveying the hard-hitting impact of Spillane (who many at one point thought was actually writing the Sand books under a pseudonym) this is top-shelf, good old-fashioned hardboiled stuff.

The short stories originally appeared in men's magazines of the period and the books were put out by a publisher of so-called "sleaze" paperbacks for an adult audience. Ironically, by today's standards the sex is only titillating, not graphic, and the language is also relatively tame. But the writing is so spare and pitch-perfect that the grittiness (befitting his name) of Sand's world comes across as convincingly as a siren in the night.

Not to be missed. One is left hoping that Ramble House will reissue another collection of Willie/Sand material very soon.

I'm really glad to have this book avail-able, and I want to enjoy it, but I can't be-lieve the bad hyphen-ation. It's not that the words aren't break-ing right, it's that there are a bunch of hard hy-phens in the mid-dle of each page. $7.99 for a bad auto convert isn't right.

(see how not awesome all those hyphens are?)

Great book, great writer, you shouldn't have stayed away so long. Looking forward to many more! LOVE IT!