Our protagonist Sand (the man nobody walks on!) wakes up in a piss-stinking alley in Skid Row with a bullet hole in his body and a bullet crease across his forehead. The head injury caused amnesia for a week, which is why a badass like Sand finds himself in this lowly circumstance.
He wakes up next to a wino named Sticky, who gives him a pull of rotgut. Sticky paid for the rotgut by lifting a leather satchel filled with small bottles. He was disappointed that the bottles weren’t filled with booze, but at least the satchel was worth a few bucks at the pawn shop.
The bottles may not have had booze in them, but they weren’t empty. Turns out they were filled with…a potentially world-destroying biological weapon!
This crazy setup launches Ennis Willie’s Death in a Dead Place (originally published under the idiotic publisher-inflicted title Passion Has No Rule Book), the eighth of the Sand Shockers and the first I’ve read.
And what a read it was. It would be completely pointless for me to point out the flaws in this book. Death in a Dead Place does not aspire to be great literature. It aspires to give the reader a rocket-fueled tale of violence, sex, mystery, international intrigue, sex, and violence, and at that it succeeds in spades.
I mean, this sucker moves fast–I imagine the average reader could knock it out in less than an hour and a half. It moves so fast, I barely had time to notice and didn’t care about the plot holes or the parts that made no sense. I just enjoyed the ride.
Death in a Dead Place is one portion Mickey Spillane (Ennis’ acknowledged influence), but it maybe also has a portion of the crazier old-school pulp adventures of the Spider and others–it’s much wilder than the Spillane I’ve read to date. It’s completely delirious, and a whole lot of fun.
Death in a Dead Place was recently collected in the Sandthology Sand’s Game. Sand’s Game is available in hard copy directly from publisher Ramble House (with free shipping) here, and for Kindle here.
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“SANDOLOGY”. Very nice!