The Butcher #14: African Contract

The Butcher #14: African Contract, by Stuart Jason

April, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Well, first the good news: James “Stuart Jason” Dockery for once writes an installment of The Butcher that isn’t a retread of every other volume he wrote, meaning that we don’t have the recurring template that I’ve nauseatingly complained about for the past several reviews of this series. But that brings us to the bad news: African Contract isn’t very good. It isn’t very good at all. 

This is a shame, because once again James Dockery proves himself a pretty good writer. But man, his plotting is so bizarre that even Russell Smith would get frustrated by one of Dockery’s books. Because once again Dockery takes a novel about a former mobster turned government assassin – Bucher the Butcher, of course – and, instead of the inner-city action piece one might expect from that setup, he turns in a tale where Bucher goes on a safari in Africa…oh, and apparently gets married! 

The reader knows he (and I’m sticking with the old-fashioned “he” instead of “they,” ‘cause we all know there’s no woman anywhere ever who would read a book titled The Butcher #14: African Contract, don’t we? I mean, let’s be honest!) is in for a bumpy and unusual read when African Contract opens, not with the series template opener of Bucher in some unstated city being dogged by two colorfully-named Mafia goons, both of which Bucher will gun down before being briefly arrested by a slackjawed yokel cop…but instead, African Contract opens with Bucher already in South Africa, already on a job – and indeed, there is no part where he is stalked in some city and briefly arrested, etc. (BTW I was trying to see how far I could stretch out that sentence.) 

Granted, that part will come later, but this time Dockery grafts his usual recurring schtick within the storyline proper (such as it is). So we don’t get the customary scene of Bucher being arrested, the slackjawed yokel cop going on about how illegal Bucher’s silencer is, etc. This does not mean that African Contract is wholly new, though; there are trace elements of Dockery’s previous installments throughout. 

Most notably would be #7: Death Race, an earlier tale in which Bucher, would you believe, fell in love, and you get a no-prize if you guess what happened to the gal in question. This time Dockery throws an old flame of Bucher’s on us, with little in the way of setup; Bucher’s in South Africa, on his latest assignment, when there’s a knock at his hotel room door…and he’s shocked to see his old girlfriend, blonde beauty Franziska, a South African babe who “picked Bucher up” on the street in Paris, years before, and Bucher immediately went for the gorgeous young college student with her “plump breasts.” 

It seems that Bucher was already a White Hat agent when he met Franziska, as it’s stated he was “on a mission” when she threw herself on him in Paris; at any rate, she calls him “gunslinger” as a pet name, so she is aware of his mob background. But here’s the thing: Franziska was the most important woman in Bucher’s life (though obviously we’ve never heard of her)…but Bucher thought she was dead! There’s a hazy backstory that she flew back home to South Africa, but the plane crashed, and Bucher was devastated for days because he thought she was gone. 

But now here the blonde is, alive and well – and what’s more, she’s a doctor, now. (Dockery isn’t very specific on how much time has passed, btw). She explains that she got off the plane when they had a stopover, and she herself later heard of the crash; further, she claims she sent Bucher a cable telling him that she was still alive, but Bucher never got any cable…so he’s just staggered that Franziska is still alive, after all this time. 

But Franziska isn’t done with the revelations yet – she also says she was pregnant at the time, but did not tell Bucher…however, the baby was stillborn. I mean all of this is a lot to dump on a guy who thought you were dead (for how many years we do not know), but still one would think Bucher would be a little suspicious of Franziska…especially because it soon develops that the mob knows Bucher is here in South Africa, and they’re sending people to kill him! 

Oh and Franziska has become a doctor due to the loss of her and Bucher’s child, and Bucher takes her back into his arms, and she will be the sole female character in the novel. But, anyone who has read the previous Dockery novels will know he is a “fade to black” sort of writer when it comes to the sleazy stuff; there are zero sex scenes in African Contract, and, also as is customary for Dockery, there is zero exploitation of Franziska. About the most we get is a bit, bizarrely late in the novel, where Dockery suddenly decides to write about her boobs:

Another thing the veteran reader of The Butcher might note from the above excerpt is that Franziska talks like every other female character in the series. A very highfalutin, reserved, “I rarely curse or use contractions” sort of demeanor, so Bucher cleary has a type…not to mention this is another facet in the (eternally?) recurring plot of Dockery’s installments – every novel sees Bucher in a sort of purgatory in which he experiences the same sequence of events, meets the same sort of woman, over and over again. 

Another thing the cagey reader might’ve noticed from the above is that Franziska refers to Bucher and herself as “husband and wife!” And mind you, this is Chapter 10 of the novel, and this is how the reader actually learns the two have gotten married! Poor Bucher is really head over heels for this girl he thought was dead…this is after 9 chapters in which Franziska acts increasingly suspicious…like for example she takes Bucher on a trip into the jungle in her “bush buggy,” and despite being a doctor she’s got this tricked-out truck that’s positively stuffed with weaponry, from rifles to machine guns. And when Bucher questions her on the necessity of this stuff, she has an explanation for each thing, like charging rhinos and whatnot, and Bucher accepts her explanations, and you wonder how this guy became such a top mobster (not to mention special agent). 

The main plot has to do with Bucher trying to figure out if the Mafia has started up a “replacement parts” deal where they give new human organs to old and dying mobsters. What’s been happening is that high-level mobsters who were previously old and near death have suddenly shown up looking younger and healthier. And also one of them was about to turn state’s evidence, or something, and exploded, and the theory is that these replacement parts might be booby trapped or somesuch. 

But as usual with a Dockery Butcher, all this is just background detail. Dockery does cater to his recurring template, just a bit out of the typical order: two superdeformed goons do inevitably come after Bucher, in the jungle no less, but Bucher easily dispatches them. There’s also a lot of stuff with various tribes Bucher and Fraziska encounter in the jungle, in particular one that is led by a guy who speaks in perfect British English, courtesy an education abroad. 

There’s also a lot of “flying fiction,” which harkens back to #10: Deadly Doctor and #11: Valley Of Death, in which Bucher suddenly became an aviator – which might indicate that Dockery had read those two installments, which were courtesy Lee Floren. Here Bucher flies an STOL around the jungle…I mean folks the title is not misleading at all. This one’s really an African Contract, and it’s more about Bucher on safari than it is the gritty action tale you might expect. 

Action is infrequent and, as ever with Dockery, fairly bloodless. Honestly, The Butcher is an anemic series in Dockery’s hands, not to mention how little it has in the way of sleazy exploitation. That said, there is still a ghoulish vibe to the series, mostly courtesy the dark humor Dockery brings to his plotting. But the thing is, Bucher must consistently be made to look stupid, as he overlooks obvious things…and, once again, the finale is a nightmare of exposition as everything is patiently explained to Bucher. This too is part of the recurring template of Dockery’s books. 

Overall, there isn’t much to recommend African Contract. I mean, saying “at least it isn’t a retread of the previous volumes” isn’t the most sterling endorsement. But what we get in exchange is so lackluster that a retread would’ve actually been preferable. Also, someone entirely new to the men’s adventure series will suspect something is amiss with Franziska’s story, but Bucher has proven himself in past Dockery installments to be a fool when it comes to women. 

At this point, I am looking forward to when Michael Avallone takes over The Butcher, but that won’t be for many more volumes – not until #27, to be precise.

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror, by Lionel Derrick

February, 1982  Pinnacle Books

Boy, we’re getting into the homestretch of The Penetrator, aren’t we? At this point there are only a few instalments left until #53, the series finale. And I’m happy to say that Mark Roberts continues to show a new investment in the series, as Quaking Terror is for the most part a bunch of goofy fun, Roberts doling out juicy gore and explicit sex with aplomb – meaning there is none of the half-assedry of the past twenty-some (or more!) volumes. 

I kind of hoped it would be the case when I saw the cover (credited to George Wilson on the copyright page), and I’m happy to report that Quaking Terror is indeed Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin versus a vampire! Not just any vampire, either, but Count Dracula! Granted, Roberts doesn’t go all the way with the setup, but it’s evident that he wanted to. Throughout the book he walks a thin line that the novel’s villain is either Dracula or just some nutjob Eastern European named Magarac who merely thinks he’s Dracula. Otherwise the horror-action hybrid you might be hoping for doesn’t really exist in the actual novel, as Mark Hardin spends the majority of the 200 pages gunning down technicians and guards who work for the would-be vampire. That said, Quaking Terror does at least end with a chainsaw-vs-chainsaw showdown between the Penetrator and Count Dracula! 

There’s also some of Roberts’s typical continuity, as one of Magarac’s men worked on the vibrating “super gun” that Mark destroyed way back in #21: The Supergun Mission. This is what Magarac-Dracula is using to set off volcanoes around the United States, in order to get a ransom from the government. Roberts ties into the then-recent Mount St. Helens eruption, implying that Magarac was behind it, and is now looking to set off more volcanoes. Given that there are limited areas where Magarac can carry out this plan, the entirety of Quaking Terror occurs in Washington state. 

Speaking of topical references, Mark Roberts even finds the opportunity to mention Mork & Mindy; Magarac breaks over the airwaves of the United States just as “Mork had climbed into his Orkan egg.” This line actually took me back; for no reason whatsoever, it made me remember a Mork & Mindy toy some kid in elementary school had at the time (I would’ve been seven years old when this book was published), and I really wanted one of my own, but I never got one. It was this cool little Mork action figure that came with an egg, and I’d completely forgotten about it over the past four friggin’ decades, until I read this line in Quaking Terror. I guess I must’ve really wanted the damn thing, as here I am 50 years old and I still remember it – well anyway, here is the toy. 

Continuing on, Magarac breaks over the TV airwaves to make his threat – sort of how Max Headroom hijacked signals a few years later – and this causes panic across the US. In particular the Mafia gets involved, putting together a hit squad to take out Magarac, becase he’s infringing on their territory. Or something. It’s reasons like this that leads me to conclude that Roberts wanted to do a straight horror-action hybrid, but felt straitjacketed by the conventions of the series. So instead of vampires, the Penetrator fights mobsters and henchmen, and Magarac stays off-page for the majority of the text. 

This is unfortunate, as Roberts really builds him up in the opening. For one, he looks more like Nosferatu than Dracula; Wilson’s cover art is great, but Roberts actually describes Magarac as being “egg-bald [with a] long, lobey head and over-large ears, all flour paste white so that the huge, smoke-gray eyes and nearly lipless gash of a mouth made stygian holes in a skeleton mask.” Ten points for the creation of the word “lobey,” by the way. Magarac also has a dwarf “familiar” named Koslov, who prepares Magarac’s victims – usually employees who have failed him in some way – for a “life bath.” Meaning, their veins are opened and Magarac does something with the blood, though it’s never outright stated if he drinks it. But boy, Mark Roberts ultimately drops all of this in the course of the novel; hell, the dwarf doesn’t even appear again, and there’s no part where Mark Hardin kicks him or anything. I mean, and spoiler alert, but Koslov the dwarf familiar is dead when the Penetrator comes upon him, at the very end of the novel! 

Mark Hardin doesn’t appear in the book until page 28. Roberts spends the preceding pages in exposition overload; we have an overlong bit where a scientist goes on and on about volcanoes and what sets them off and etc…and then, humorously, the scientist is killed off like a page later. But this guy was friends with Professor Haskins, ie the Penetrator’s mentor, or whatever the Professor is to the Penetrator. I mean, it’s not like he’s the M to Mark’s Bond. He doesn’t give Mark orders, or do much else. Well anyway, who cares; the series is almost over, anyway. 

So Mark heads to smalltown, Washington (he does not visit Seattle in the entirety of the book), Roberts of course taking the opportunity to engage in some of his flying fiction as he tells us about Mark’s plane and his flight. One thing to note though is that Mark comes fully stocked this time; in the course of Quaking Terror he uses a riot shotgun, a Mac-10 submachine gun (referred to as an “Ingram M-10”), various pistols, and even once again he uses Ava, his dart gun – with both the knockout pellets and the “instant kill” pellets. So again, the ferocity has somewhat returned to The Penetrator, and Mark avidly kills the majority of his opponents, instead of knocking them out like he was doing for a long, tepid stretch of the seeries. 

This is displayed posthaste, as Mark when he first appears in the text gets in a big gunfight with some of Magarac’s men around the base of a volcano in Washington. Mark guns them down and then heads into a small town on his plane, where he soon hooks up with a small-breasted, “raven-haired” beauty named Carrie who waitresses at a local bar…but is also a college student who is studying the psychological aspects of vampires. Magarac has been seen in the vicinity, and Mark looks to Carrie for info on vampires…cue even more page-filling exposition, as Carrie goes on and on about historical “vampire” cases. 

Here is where we learn of all the mysterious disappearances in the area, with blood-drained bodies showing up, and Mark will spend the time wondering if Magarac is really a vampire and if he’s really been drinking the blood of his victims. Meanwhile Mark gets it on with Carrie, though Roberts does not go for the full-bore exploitation as he would in the later Soldier For Hire. Or, for that matter, as he did in some of the earlier volumes of The Penetrator. But we do get a winner of a line when Carrie strokes Mark’s “pendulous, rising maleness…to fullness.” Sadly though Roberts denies us any similarly-goofy sleaze in the actual sex scene, with Mark castely “turning out the light” before he gets busy with the gal. 

Roberts does deliver a fair bit of action throughout. Mark not only blows away scads of technicians and thugs who work for Magarac, but he also takes on the Mafia. This is courtesy Lucky Lou Battaglia, a gunner from Chicago who has been hired to wipe out Magarac, but instead finds himself running afoul of the Penetrator himself. As ever Mark makes short work of these goons, to the point that you figure if the Penetrator swapped places with The Executioner, the Mafia would be finished off in a few volumes. Roberts injects a fair bit of gore into the tale, though as ever he it as if he’s consulted a copy of Grey’s Anatomy: 

For the most part, Mark Hardin spends the majority of the novel going around Washington, from one Magarac location to another, and shooting up his men – or shooting up the mobsters who are supposedly looking for Magarac. There’s a lot of repetition in the narrative, too; Carrie is abduced by the mobsters midway through the novel, and Mark rescues her humorously fast. But then, Carrie is abducted again later in the book! There’s also a page-filling bit where Mark has to quell a rebellion among the American Indians in town, who feel they are getting blamed for the earthquakes or somesuch. Honestly this part seemed grafted on. 

Which again makes it a shame that so little time is spent with Magarac himself. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Mark launches an assault on the villain and the two come face-to-face…or perhaps that should be chainsaw-to-chainsaw. Apropos of nothing, Magarac grabs one up when Mark is chasing him, and Mark picks up one of his own…it’s pretty wild, even if it’s just a goofy way for Mark Roberts to establish that a tree stump is conveniently chainsawed into a handy stake! 

Overall, Quaking Terror is pretty entertaining, and it’s nice to see the Penetrator acting like his old self. But it’s a shame the “vampire” stuff isn’t more dwelt upon, so either Mark Roberts didn’t think he could make it work, or perhaps he didn’t get buy-in from series editor Andy Ettinger.

The Liquidator #4: Invitation To A Strangling

The Liquidator #4: Invitation To A Strangling, by R.L. Brent

No month stated, 1975  Award Books

The penultimate volume of The Liquidator is another good one, the mysterious R.L. Brent turning in another fast-moving pulp thriller that has the vibe of a ‘50s Gold Medal paperback, only brought into the ‘70s. Brent also gets back to the continuity of the first two volumes; whereas the previous volume was sort of a one-off affair, Invitation To A Strangling continues with the storyline initiated with the first volume: Jake Brand’s war against the Mob in general and mob honcho Vincent Orsini in particular. 

Once again we have a cover blurb from King Features, but what I’ve failed to mention all this time is that the blurb refers to this as a “tough cop series.” Jake Brand is not a cop! Sure, he originally was, but The Liquidator is no more a “tough cop series” than The Lone Wolf is. Indeed, the two series are pretty similar, what with the setup of a tough former cop going out for justice on his own, but of course Lone Wolf is a bit more shall we say “surreal” in its treatment of the subject.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Liquidator was also one of the very few men’s adventure series to attain any sort of critical attention – at least judging from the cover blurbs – which makes it odd that the series disappeared for three years after this volume. After Invitation To A Strangling, The Liquidator did not return until 1978’s The Exchange, which dropped the cover design of the first four books and also dropped the volume numbers entirely. It was also published by Charter, not Award, so perhaps the Award-Charter transition played some factor in the delay of the fourth volume. 

As usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Invitation To A Strangling picks up on threads from the second volume; Gwen, the hotstuff babe who was a mobster’s girl in the first volume before becoming Jake Brand’s girl, returns to the series – for a brief time, at least. I’m not giving away any spoilers, as the title of this fourth volume refers to Gwen’s fate, and also the back cover tells us exactly what happens to her. Long story short, Gwen has been living in hiding in the (apparently short) time since the second volume; she’s staying in Raleigh, North Carolina, boarding with an older married couple who were acquaintances of Brand’s. 

Meanwhile the Mob has figured out where Gwen is. Orsini tasks a scar-necked thug named Monk Simon with fronting a team of Syndicate assassins to do the job; in R.L. Brent’s typical gift for hardboiled prose, we are told that “[Monk] wanted the job almost as much as Robinson Crusoe must have wanted a piece of ass.” Monk has a personal score to settle with Brand, as Monk was arrested by the man himself once upon a time. Monk puts together a team of misfits who seem to have come out of The Butcher; ironic, then, that one of the misfits is even nicknamed “Butcher,” which makes me wonder if R.L. Brent was intentionally referencing that other men’s adventure series. 

Orsini further instructs Monk that he is to kill Gwen and the couple she is staying with, and make it such a gory scene that the story will be picked up nationally, so as to ensure Jake Brand will hear about it and come running to Raleigh, where Monk and team are further instructed to kill Brand when he shows. Finally, Orsini – who by the way looks more like a kindly grandfather than a mob boss, we’re told – tells Monk that the women should be raped before being killed. “Fringe benefits,” as Monk thinks to himself. 

As I read Invitation To A Strangling, I couldn’t help but think that this was a plot tailor-made for Manning Lee Stokes. I could only imagine the lurid novel he would’ve turned in; Stokes worked a rape-strangling scene into practically every novel he wrote, and that’s the entirety of Monk Simon’s plan in this one. But whereas Brent covers the grisly topic in a taut, gripping chapter, Stokes probably would’ve spent at least a quarter of the novel on it, if not more. But, as evidenced by the title and spoiled by the back cover, Monk and team are successful – and, by the way, Brent is not too exploitative in the rape-murder sequence, which would be another difference from how Stokes would’ve handled it. 

Indeed, Gwen’s fate is left off-page, and Monk isn’t even the one who does her in; he enjoys his “fringe benefits,” having lusted after the sexy and well-built Gwen for a long time. After he’s had his fill, Monk turns Gwen over to one of the “Creech brother,” simian misfits (one of ‘em being the “Butcher” guy), and it’s one of them who strangles Gwen during the act. Brent is sure to dig the knife in us readers, though, having opened the book with Gwen pining for Jake and hoping she’ll see him again – even having refrained from sex in the time she’s been in Raleigh, as she’s so hung up on Brand. 

As for Brand himself, he’s busy getting laid. There’s no pickup from the previous volume; Jake (as Brent most often refers to him in the narrative) is just laying low as usual from the mob and he’s been thinking about Gwen lately. After knocking off a hippie-type pimp who thinks he might collect on the mob’s bounty on the Liquidator’s head, Jake heads to Raleigh to see Gwen again – and meanwhile, we readers already know that Monk and crew are going there that very night to kill her. 

Brent avoids what otherwise would have been a hard-to-buy coincidence; Jake’s car breaks down in some no-name town, and the local mechanic takes a couple days to fix it. And meanwhile the guy’s hotstuff daughter-in-law, a busty blonde former cheerleader, makes her interest in Jake clearly known; her husband was killed in ‘Nam, and she’s lonesome and horny as hell. As with previous books, Brent delivers a sex scene that’s somewhat explicit but not full-bore sleazy, with lines like, “The sound she made when he entered her resembled a growl.” Brent as I’ve said many times before is a pulp writer who knows his stuff; I particularly appreciate how he always finds the opportunity to mention the breasts of female characters. 

So as we know from the back cover, Jake arrives too late to save Gwen. And he doesn’t go on as big of a warpath as one might expect; indeed, Jake takes the loss with a sort of nonchalance at first, though Brent gradually builds up Jake’s true feelings as the narrative progresses. Not that this stops Jake from picking up another chick; Leila, another hotstuff babe (in true lone wolf fashion, Jake Brand always picks up hotstuff babes), this one a redhead who works as a reporter for a Raleigh newspaper. 

Jake’s seen the media coverage of Gwen’s murder, of course, and knows it’s a mob setup. He also knows Orsini is behind it. There’s a cool bit where Jake deals with two of Orsini’s backup assassins, who are staying in the house across the street from Gwen’s. The female assassin in particular is set up very nicely, but there’s no hanky-panky between her and Jake; she’s just out to kill him for the Organization. These are the types of action setpieces Brent delivers throughout, by the way; The Liquidator does not go for big action affairs a la The Executioner, and instead it’s usually just Jake with a .45 (his favored gun) or a .38, taking on one or two opponents. 

And meanwhile Jake gets laid again – courtesy Leila. Jake sees her on the news, comments on how hot she is, and seeks her out. I’m not sure why Brent didn’t just make the character of Leila a TV reporter; Jake sees her on TV because Leila is being interviewed. At any rate, she writes for the local paper, and has researched the murder, so Jake hunts her down for info. Leila will prove to be the main female protagonist in the novel; Brent delivers a few somewhat-explicit sex scenes between the two (ie, “[Jake] slid deeply into her welcoming warmth,” etc). 

Leila also makes possible an injection of Blaxploitation into the world of The Liquidator. As ever R.L. Brent cuts across a broad group of characters, from Jake Brand to the mobsters who are out to kill him, and from sequences with the latter group Brent has cagily dropped mention of a superfly black pimp waltzing around the streets of Raleigh. Monk Simon sees the guy, notices him doing un-pimp things like buying milk at a convenience store. Gradually we learn this is Sugar Boy Hollis, “one of the ten best-dressed macks in the southeastern United States,” as Leila puts it; she often pays the pimp for underworld info. And also, we learn Sugar Boy bought the milk due to a stomach ulcer! Unfortunately though, he’s only in one brief scene, providing Jake with the very useful info of where Monk and his crew are staying. 

Brent keeps the action moving, and there are no slow parts in Invitation To A Strangling. Even the sequences from the perspectives of Monk and his crew are entertaining, given the author’s skill. Which makes it all the more of a mystery why R.L. Brent – supposedly Larry Powell – did not go on to write more books. There’s a fight in an alleyway in which Jake is nearly run over, and also Jake’s takedown of the sadists who killed Gwen is effectively handled. Also these scenes again remind me of something I’ve mentioned before: Jake Brand is not the best strategist. Often he just storms into a situation with no consideration of how he’ll get out of it, but of course he manages to win due to his stubborn resolve. 

There’s a third girl in the story, a college co-ed who is the daughter of the couple Gwen was living with, but Brent doesn’t do much with her; she only factors into the finale, when Jake is taken to a cabin in the woods where Monk thinks he’s going to take out the Liquidator. Even here Brent goes for a realistic approach, and in fact Monk’s sendoff is somewhat of a surprise, but still effectively handled. Otherwise the takeaway from this finale is that Jake Brand is willing to put his life on the line to save an innocent person – as mentioned, Brent also effectively conveys how Jake’s sense of loss over Gwen’s murder gradually affects him more and more, to the point that he makes selfless decisions to prevent more innocent lives being taken. 

Other stuff I appreciate was how Leila, the newspaper reporter, intended to do a feature story on the Liquidator – and by the way, it’s official that this is Jake’s name, now, as both he and Orsini refer to it. There’s also an appearance by Jake’s mentor, a retired old cop named Nate, who tries to work with Leila to convince Jake to give himself up before the Mafia can kill him. 

Invitation To A Strangling ends with Jake Brand deciding to lay low for a while; “he knew how to disappear,” Brent informs us in the closing pages. The last we see of him, Jake is boarding a bus to Virginia, and he’s considering growing a mustache to change his appearance. It would appear he was very successful in disappearing; as mentioned, it would not be until 1978 that Jake Brand resurfaced, in The Exchange. With a plot concerning mob involvement in the porn industry, this is one I might check out sooner rather than later. 

Summing up, The Liquidator is one of the better men’s adventure series from the ‘70s – it’s better even than the majority of the bestselling crime novels of the day that I’ve read – and Invitation To A Strangling is another strong entry.

Shaft Has A Ball (Shaft #4)

Shaft Has A Ball, by Ernest Tidyman

April, 1973  Bantam Books

The first Shaft novel to be published as a paperback original, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner, who the following year turned in the execrable Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Fortunately Shaft Has A Ball is better than that one, though as John Lennon would say, “it couldn’t get much worse.” For the most part Shaft Has A Ball comes off like one of the hardboiled yarns Turner wrote for Manhunt and other crime mags several years before, as collected in the anthologies Shroud 9 and The Hardboiled Lineup. In other words, it’s not much of a Blaxploitation affair, though that seems to also be true of Ernest Tidyman’s original Shaft novel (which I intend to read one of these days!). 

Again a big thanks to Steve Aldous for the background detail that Ernest Tidyman did the final edit of Shaft Has A Ball. Tidyman did a good job in his editing and rewriting, as the style here is the same as in the final book in the series, The Last Shaft, which was written by Philip Rock. In other words, one could read the Shaft series and not even suspect it was the work of two ghostwriters and one editor. The only caveat is Philip Rock was a superior writer, and Robert Turner again takes a fun concept and proceeds to do little with it. And, as with every other Turner book I’ve read, it was a chore to finish the book; despite being only 150 pages, Shaft Has A Ball maintains a sluggish pace throughout. 

I first read about this novel twenty years ago on Teleport City, meaning to someday check out the book. I recall even back then the Shaft books were obscure and hard to find. I’m reading this series way out of order, but it’s no big deal; there’s not much in the way of continuity, other than the small group of people John Shaft regularly works with: Captain Anderozzi of the NYPD, a cleaning lady who stays off-page the entire book, and Rollie Nickerson, a minor actor who is part-time bartender at the No-Name Bar that Shaft frequents. There’s also returning character Ben Buford, a Malcolm X type who apparently grew up with Shaft and has a brotherly sort of antagonism with him. 

According to Steve Aldous, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner at the same time Philip Rock was writing Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which was the last Shaft novel to be published in hardcover in the United States (and, like all other books in the series, credited solely to Ernest Tidyman). This means there is some incongruity in how a certain character is presented in each book: Senator Albert Stovall, a black politician who in Shaft Has A Ball doesn’t have much to do in the narrative other than bet on a horse race, give Shaft an expensive watch, and get the shit beaten out of him (off-page) by a “sadie-massie” gay male prostitute. Meanwhile I was most staggered by the off-hand mention that Stovall, a black politician known for his firebrand personality, was a Republican. 

And yes, the sadie-massie (ie sadomasochism) mention brings us to the titular “ball;” it’s an event being held in the Hotel Armand in New York City for GAY, aka Gay American Youth, but really it’s a drag queen ball. Presumably the attractive black women on the cover are these drag queens, or maybe the artist (Lou Feck, per Steve Aldous) had no idea what the novel was about and just assumed there would be a bunch of hot black women in it. (Spoiler alert: There aren’t.) But then, even the drag queens are seldom in the text. Above I mentioned how Robert Turner does little with the plot. This is no truer than the ball itself; indeed, the entire “heist going down at a drag queen ball” element is almost an afterthought, and the heist could just as easily have occurred anywhere else. What I mean to say is, just as in Scorpio and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, Robert Turner doesn’t seem to know what kind of a book he’s supposed to be writing. 

Also according to Steve Aldous, the plot for Shaft Has A Ball came from Ernest Tidyman himself, and clearly his idea was of a heist happening in the middle of a drag queen event. One can already see the hijinks this would entail, with various characters dressed up like women and whatnot; but, brace yourself for this shocker, Robert Turner does zilch with the setup. If you expected Shaft himself would put on a dress in this one, be prepared to be crestfallen. Shaft isn’t even in the hotel when the drag queen ball takes place! I mean that’s how lame Turner’s plotting is. Rather, it’s a pair of crooks who dress up like broads and proceed to knock over the Hotel Armand (while knocking over some of their colleagues to increase their cut of the heist), and the whole thing is over and done with in a handful of pages. 

But really, it’s like a Manhunt story taken to novel length; Shaft the cynical, burnt-out private eye who wonders if he’s had enough of the city and just wants to give it all up, but is pulled into action again. Speaking of which, Shaft is pretty much a bad-ass in this one, killing people with his bare hands and blowing people away with a submachine gun in the finale. He also sees some bedroom action, courtesy a smokin’ hot black-Hispanic chick named Winifred Guitterez who works for a “black-themed magazine” and asks to do a profile on Shaft. Instead she wants to get, uh, shafted, and the two go from dinner to Shaft’s apartment…only, Shaft finds the naked corpse of a white girl in his place, a junkie who just got out on bail and has implicated Ben Buford in an upcoming heist. 

Shaft sends Winfired off…not that she holds any grudges, as she returns later in the narrative for the sole purpose of providing a somewhat-explicit sex scene, after which she completely disappears from the novel! The literary equivalent of the perfect woman, I guess. Curiously Turner does build her up a bit; Shaft researches her after she approaches him for an interview, learning that she was into boxing for a while, which is odd for a woman now and even more so was in 1973. But ultimately Winifred has no imact on the narrative, and is another indication of Robert Turner’s lackadaisacal plotting; she appears in the opening to interview Shaft, goes to dinner with them, gets sent home, and then calls him later so they can “finish business” – and next time we see her, she’s in bed with him. And then that’s it. I just felt she could’ve had more impact on the story. 

The same goes for the entire subplot around Ben Buford. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a group of professional criminals plan to heist the Hotel Armand and pin the blame on Buford. Why this is necessary is not much dwelt upon, but part of the caper involves a crook who looks enough like Buford that he will pose as the revolutionary rabble-rouser during the heist so as to make people think Buford is behind it. The only puzzling thing is, the Buford lookalike pulls off the heist in drag, which undermines the entire plan! It’s stuff like this that just makes me think that Robert Turner never really understood what he was supposed to write in these ghostwriter projects. 

So in a nutshell, Shaft Has A Ball mostly features Shaft being told his old “pal” Ben Buford is planning a heist, and Shaft insisting that Buford wouldn’t have time for such nonsense. Then some people leave a dead junkie girl in his apartment and Shaft hunts them down, brutally killing one of them in the filthy bathroom of a bar and crippling the other. And curiously this subplot sort of goes away for a while, and Shaft moves on to providing bodyguard services for Senator Stovall. But this doesn’t entail much: Shaft takes a nap on a couch in the senator’s hotel room while Stovall disguises himself, to go bet on a horse race. After this Shaft goes home to bang Winnifred, and is called late that night when Stovall is taken into the hospital, having gotten banged up by a rough-trade male prostitute named Cowboy.  This is a character who also receives some brutal payback from Shaft. 

A humorous thing about Shaft Has A Ball is that Shaft’s sentiments on the gay community are very out of touch with today…but Turner indicates they were for 1973, too. There’s a curious bit where Shaft, in the Hotel Armand where he is to bodyguard the senator, rides up the elevator with the head of security, who informs Shaft that a drag queen ball is going on. Shaft makes some off-color jokes, and the security guard gets upset…which just seemed a very modern reaction to me. Shaft by the way will continue to make off-color jokes about gays and drag queens as the story progresses, which again makes it damn puzzling that Shaft himself has no interraction with the drag-ball heist itself. Personally I pictured burly, mustached John Shaft toting a gleaming .44 Magnum while in a dress and lipstick…wait, didn’t Hightower do that in one of the Police Academy movies? I haven’t seen one of those since the ‘80s (I saw the fourth one in the theater!!), so I can’t remember. 

Meanwhile we know, from various cutovers to the villains, that a group of criminals are plotting to knock over the Armand and pin the blame on Buford. There’s a lot of stuff from the perspective from the heisters as they plan things, but in true heist style it all unravels. Instead two low-level criminals in the gang do the heavy lifting, and it is they who go about in drag during the heist, even though one of them is supposed to fool everyone into thinking he’s Ben Buford, which makes one wonder why he’s in drag in the first place. Then these two guys start knocking off their fellow criminals. Meanwhile Shaft is off sleeping somewhere. No kidding. He’s informed by Captain Anderozzi about the heist, the morning after, and Shaft sets out to clear his good budy Buford of any blame. 

Apropos of nothing, Shaft deduces that someone at the heist was impersonating Ben Buford…and then Shaft goes to the apartment of his part-time actor friend, Rollie Nickerson, and asks him for a book of local actors(!). Shaft then looks through the book and picks out the black actor in it who looks like Ben Buford…and sure enough, that is indeed the guy who pulled off the heist! I mean it’s ludicrous. But Turner is close to meeting his word count, thus the finale jettisons the gritty vibe of the rest of the book and has Shaft figuring out where this guy likely has holed up. Shaft spots some mobsters also scoping out the place, and ends up using one of them as bait. But at least we get an action-styled finale, with Shaft picking up a machine gun and blasting away at the house; all told, Shaft kills a couple people in this one, though not on the level of series finale The Last Shaft. 

While the concept isn’t sufficiently taken advantage of, Shaft Has A Ball is at least better than Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, but one can see why reception of the Shaft paperback series was lukewarm. John Shaft here is just your standard pulp private eye, with the same grizzled, cynical worldview as a million other pulp private eyes, and this blasé vibe extends to the narrative. But then, this could just be due to Robert Turner. Next I’ll be checking out Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which as mentioned also features Senator Stovall, but it was written by Philip Rock, whose work I prefer to Turner’s.

A Bullet For The Bride

 
A Bullet For The Bride, by Jon Messman

No month stated, 2022  Brash Books

(Original Pyramid Books edition 1972)

Big thanks to Lee Goldberg and Brash Books for sending me a review copy of this, a trade paperback reprint of a novel Jon Messmann published under his own name through Pyramid Books in 1972. Just missing the men’s adventure series glut by one year, A Bullet For The Bride does seem to be Messmann’s attempt at starting a new series, and bears some similarities to his later Jefferson Boone, Handyman. (Which has also been reprinted by Brash Books, by the way, along with most all of Messmann’s ‘70s output.) 

But hero Ed Steel did not cause much stir in the publishing world – indeed, his name is misspelled as “Ed Steele” on the back cover and in the Afterword (by Roy Nguyen) of this Brash Books edition, so the poor guy still hasn’t made much of a stir. It’s not hard to see why, as A Bullet For The Bride is not the most auspicious beginning for any series; the plot hinges around Steel working for a spoiled little rich girl who has Daddy Issues. So far as character motivation for a series opener goes, it’s not exactly up there with the Mafia killing your kid. 

Steel is essentially Jefferson Boone meets Travis McGee…or perhaps that should be Jedediah Killinger, if we want to stick to a purely men’s adventure comparison. He’s a vet of Korea who has done odd jobs for the Agency and now he lives on a boat, and when we meet him he’s lazing in the sun along the Florida coast. Here’s where the spoiled brat comes in: her name is Cam Parnell, she’s in her early 20s with “small, high breasts,” and Messmann will annoyingly refer to her by her full name, “Cam Parnell,” over and over again, through the course of the novel. But then Messmann does the same with his hero; it’s frequently “Ed Steel said this,” or “Ed Steel said that,” and the reader’s like, “I know the hero’s name, I’m not stupid!” 

But then, Messmann has his recurring quirks. Namely, poor treatment of female characters. Messmann’s protagonists are complete and total dicks with women; it’s one of the author’s most notable quirks, to the extent that you wonder if he had some sort of latent anger toward them. The typical scenario will have the hero baiting the girl, talking down to her, mocking her, occasionally even slapping her…and then bedding her when he has sufficiently tamed the shrew. The scenario with Cam here in A Bullet For The Bride is the same as in every other Messmann novel I’ve read: Steel treats her like shit from the moment he meets her, essentially telling her to take off when she asks to hire him, and then going on to talk down to her and constantly criticize her. 

But then again, Messmann’s female characters kind of deserve it, for the most part. We aren’t talking strong, sassy female characters like you’d get in a George Harmon Smith novel. A Messmann female character is usually kind of dumb (which I guess again factors into that “latent anger” angle), and Cam for example angrily tosses a bucket of chum on Steel when he sends her off in the opening sequence. Actually this whole part seems to be a riff on the finale of It Happened One Night, where Clarke Cable goes off to the wealthy father of Claudette Colbert with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for; Steel cleans himself up and heads to the home of Cam’s super-wealthy father with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for (cleaning the boat of chum, the cost for “lost business” during this time, etc). 

After this “meet cute” Steel of course begins working for Cam. Sorry, for “Cam Parnell,” as Messmann refers to her again and again in the narrative. And so begins the mean-spirited bickering and bantering between the two. There’s a lot of it throughout the novel; Messmann’s protagonists are also unusual in that they maintain their hostile tone even after having sex with the girl in question. But then, Messmann’s characters always tend to be an argumentative and unpleasant bunch, with Messmann doling out his usual dialog modifiers like “he bit off” or “he threw out” and the like, to the extent that it sounds like these people aren’t having a conversation so much as they are a food fight. 

Steel is into boats and whatnot, which means that a lot of A Bullet For The Bride reads like nautical fiction. This is proven posthaste as Cam gets Steel to compete in a boat race against the woman Cam is certain is trying to pull a fast one on her father: Grace White, a lovely brunette in her 30s who has moved in quick on the wealthy Parnell. Messmann either did a fair bit of research or was just a boating enthusiast, and so he really brings a lot of veracity to the race…but for me personally, it just seemed to go on and on. One gets the suspicion that if Ed Steel’s adventures had continued beyond this novel, the “boat stuff” would’ve become a part of the series schtick. 

Surprisingly, Grace White – and yes, Messmann constantly refers to her as “Grace White” in the narrative – does not factor into the novel as much as one might expect. Rather, it is her older sister Betty who does. Just kidding. Grace is sort of a peripheral character, and Cam does the heavy lifting as the novel’s main female character. However Grace is the titular “bride,” as she becomes engaged to Parnell and Cam wants to stop the wedding before it’s too late. As mentioned the entire thing hinges around Cam’s “female intiuition” that Grace is up to something nefarious, but the issue is she’s cried wolf about all of her father’s previous female interests, so no one really believes her. 

And boy, do we learn all about this. I couldn’t believe it, but Messmann devotes a goodly portion of the opening half to Steel researching Cam’s past accusations, even up to and including the women who were involved with Parnell before breaking it off due to Cam’s interference. Steel’s research leads him to conclude the girl is nuts, a comment which of course infuriates Cam and leads to their initial sex scene. Messmann does remember to properly exploit his female characters, and while his raunchy scenes are usually more metaphorical than explicit, he at least lets us know something is happening instead of fading to black. 

Not that this makes Cam and Steel much more of a working team. The bickering and bantering only increases, though we’re to understand that Cam is developing feelings for Steel…and perhaps vice versa. But Cam sort of goes away and Steel’s co-star for the second half is Domino, a Hispanic dude who has done some work for Steel in the past. This entails more nautical stuff; Cam swears Grace meets with an unmarked boat on certain nights, and so Steel and Domino go on a stakeout. Action, by the way, is infrequent; other than an early part where Steel walks into a honey trap and is nearly beaten to death on the docks, A Bullet For The Bride for the most part operates as a mystery novel…the same that can be said of Messmann’s later Handyman series.

The only difference is that Ed Steel is a bit more brutal than any other Messmann character I’ve yet read, though you’d never get that idea until the very final pages of A Bullet For The Bride. Without venturing into spoilers, or the overly-comprehensive vibe of some of my earlier reviews, it develops that Cam’s suspicions were, of course, on the money – otherwise, this really wouldn’t have been an auspicious opening to the series. The plot is fairly preposterous and seems more out of one of Messmann’s earlier  Nick Carter: Killmaster installments, but long story short it involves a mysterious island that is run by Commie villains. There is a crazy part toward the very end where Steel slices the throats of several guards, killing them in their sleep, and Messmann conveys an effective image of a gore-covered and grim-faced Steel going from cabin to cabin with a blade as Cam watches in horror. 

So in other words, all the action occurs in the final pages of A Bullet For The Bride, and this climax seems to come out of a contemporary men’s adventure magazine. It’s a taut, brutal sequence that sees Steel and Cam captured and condemned to a dawn execution, before Steel manages to turn the tables and go on a kill-spree to even the odds. If the entire novel had maintained this pace, perhaps A Bullet For The Bride would’ve been the start of a series, and not just an obscure one-shot in the prolific career of Jon Messmann. 

It’s super cool that Brash Books has brought this and other Messmann books back into print. They all look great and are professionally packaged, but as I stated before, I think it would be so much better if these reprints were done to the dimensions of a 1970s mass market paperback, which is how Tocsin Press does it. I mean, I love men’s adventure books more than anything, but they should never be made to look “upmarket.” That said, the Brash Books cover is certainly better than the Pyramid Books original, which was downright lame – and certainly had to play a little part in the lack of this “series” going past one volume. I mean who in 1972 would’ve grabbed a book with this cover off the rack and headed for the cash register?

The Spider #30: Green Globes Of Death

The Spider #30: Green Globes Of Death, by Grant Stockbridge

March, 1936  Popular Publications

I was under the impression this volume of The Spider was the third part of a trilogy that started with The Mayor Of Hell and continued into Slaves Of The Murder Syndicate, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case. Green Globes Of Death is for the most part self-contained, with only infrequent mentions of those previous two volumes. The volume it is really the sequel to is Prince Of The Red Looters, as it features the return of that one’s main villain: The Fly. This is quite puzzling for Richard “The Spider” Wentworth, as he’s certain he killed the Fly in that previous book – he impaled him in the heart with a rapier and then the Fly fell many stories to his supposed death. 

To be honest, the Fly is not one of the more interesting villains in The Spider, at least not to me, but either Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page liked him, or the readers demanded he return. Who knows. To me, the rapier-carrying character in monk’s robes is quite boring when compared to the average Spider villain. Also I don’t know how “Fly” equals a Medieval monk’s robes for a costume. I was thinking the guy would at least have antennae on his costume. But at any rate, as we know from the final moments of the previous book, the Fly is back – and what’s more he has killed the mayor. 

This was how Slaves Of The Murder Syndicate ended, and as a reminder the bigger deal here was that Wentworth was notified of the Fly’s return moments before walking down the aisle with long-suffering girlfriend Nita Van Sloan. This was one of the most emotionally-resonate moments in The Spider, as it was Nita herself who told Wentworth to go after the Fly, and to skp the wedding…this after an entire novel in which she’d nagged Wetnworth to stop being the Spider and marry her. So then, one might be under the impression that Green Globes Of Death would open immediately thereafter. 

As it turns out, that is not the case. As typical with the series, it opens on an action scene, with Wentworth in his Spider costume (demonic face with fangs and a hunched back) attending a costume ball in the hopes of rooting out the Fly. It’s two weeks after the previous volume, the events of which are not much dwelt upon. As is also typical, a reset has occurred and we’re back to the status quo, and there’s no real pickup on the emotional finale of the previous book. What’s even more curious is that Norvell Page doubles down on the alternate front, this time: the main subplot of Green Globes Of Death concerns Nita hobknobbing with one of the men Wentworth suspects of being the Fly, to the point that Wentworth kicks her out of his home and tells his companions that Nita is no longer their ally! 

Wentworth suspects a few men of being the Fly; another recurring schtick of the series being the various red herrings Wentworth busies himself with. But I’m happy to note that Green Globes Of Death throttles back on the endless, arbitrary action scenes of previous books and goes for more of a suspense angle. To be sure, there is quite a bit of action, but this time Page balances it with characterization and plot, and he doesn’t seem to just be coming up with stuff to meet his word count. There’s also a bit more care put into the mystery of who the Fly is – Wentworth is certain he killed the original, so this new one must be an imposter – so for once the outing of the villain’s identity isn’t arbitrarily shoehorned into the climax. 

Another cool change is that Nita is becoming more of the “adventuress” that she would be in later volumes, like Satan’s Murder Machines. A recurring motif is that Nita is always abducted by the villain’s people – because everyone and their brother knows that the Spider is really Richard Wentworth – but this time she has a surprise for her would-be captors, blowing one of them away with her own gun. She even makes an action-heroine quip afterwards. Of course, Nita is still abducted, but it’s cool to see the emerging action-heroine characterization for her. But this too picks up from the previous volume’s climax, in which Nita put on the costume of the Spider and went into action with guns blazing. 

Nita is saved off-page by a sort of alt-Wentworth, a “criminologist” who is not suspected of being the Spider, per Wentworth’s best friend-worst enemy Commissoner Kirkpatrick. Soon Nita is hanging out with this guy, and there follows “high melodrama” where Wentworth pretends to be outraged that Nita went off with another man, desperately hoping that Nita can see through his charade but spending the rest of the novel afraid that she hasn’t. So there’s a lot of melodramatic stuff here where he will see the two together and feign anger, not sure if the tears in Nita’s eyes are genuine or not, even telling erstwhile butler Jenkyns to mind his own business. As I’ve mentioned before, a reader can easily detect that Richard Wentworth is nuts; there’s an unintentionally(?) humorous part where, after sending Nita off in feigned anger, Wentworth looks at himself in the mirror and starts laughing…and just keeps laughing. 

The apocalyptic tones typical of the series are way whittled down here. In fact, I think this was true of the previous Fly yarn. In this one, the Fly’s minions hit the occasional bank and get in shootouts, but there’s none of the “New York is nearly destroyed” catastrophes of earlier books. The titular “green globes” are glass balls that are hurled by the Fly’s men; they contain an acidic gas that essentially melt guts. These things don’t even appear until near the end of the novel, and Page well captures the horror of them when they are hurled at victims during the Fly’s various robberies. Mostly though the Fly does his fighting with a rapier, and there are numerous parts where Wentworth engages the Fly – or another guy he suspects of being the Fly – in a fencing match. 

We’re often told that the Fly is the most dangerous, most cunning villain Wentworth has ever faced, but a mere perusal of earlier books will prove that is not true. But hell, Wentworth thinks that of every single villain, every single volume. The Fly also has a greatly reduced force compared to previous villains. Instead of an army, he just has a bunch of random hoods. All of which is to say that Green Globes Of Death operates on a smaller scale than its predecessors…which really isn’t a bad thing, because Page focuses more on internal turmoil than endless action. But the rift with Nita is a little tough to buy after the events of the previous book, in which her devotion to Wentworth was made clear. Then again, this is why Page does a reset each volume, so he doesn’t get bogged down by what came before. 

Another plus for Green Globes Of Death is that Wentworth wears his Spider costume a lot more than he usually does; in most books, he’ll appear as the Spider for a scant page or two. This time, though, he is often donning the garb and going out with fangs and hunchback to blow away the bad guys with his dual .45s. That said, he just as often fights without a costume, and Norvell Page once again points out that Commissioner Kirkpatrick is quite aware that Wentworth is really the Spider. Indeed, pretty much everyone knows Wentworth is the Spider, which lends the series a little unintentional camp value…as if everyone is going along with Wentworth’s charade that he’s just a wealthy gadabout. 

An interesting thing I wanted to note – there’s a part early on where Wentworth acquires the palmprint of a man he suspects might be the Fly. Wentworth has a cast made of the palmprint, even though we are informed crime labs haven’t yet been able to figure out how to use palmprints to identify a suspect. Ultimately Wentworth is able to use it to prove an identification, but it was cool to see how novel this technique was in 1936. Years ago I cut my cable, and if you cut cable and get a digital antenna you automatically become an armchair homicide investigator. This is because there are about ten thousand true crime networks on over-the-air television. I’ve seen several episodes of Forensic Files, for example, which hinged around identifying someone by a palmprint. I could only imagine how much better the show would be if, instead of a cop or a crime-lab technician relaying the story, it was a millionaire playboy “criminologist” in cape and fangs. “I knew he was The Fly!” 

Despite the more smallscale setup, Green Globes Of Death really entertained me, and kept my attention more than the average Spider novel, mostly because everything flowed so well in the story. Norvell Page this time does a great job juggling action, character, and introspection; the only setback is the villain, but Page does pull a cool surprise twist at the end concerning the Fly that has a horror vibe. It just happens so quickly that the reader doesn’t have sufficient time to realize it, meaning that Wentworth must exposit everything for us in the final paragraphs. The “rift” with Nita is also unsatisfactorily resolved in some quick, expository dialog, but still, overall Green Globes Of Death was one of my favorite Spider yarns yet.

MIA Hunter #13: L.A. Gang War

MIA Hunter 13: L.A. Gang War, by Jack Buchanan

January, 1990  Jove Books

Stephen Mertz turns in one of the better volumes of the MIA Hunter series, which sees Martin “MIA Hunter” Stone and his erstwhile colleagues Hog Wiley and Terrence Louglin fully transformed into a government-sanctioned commando squad that handles any type of action, not just ‘Nam POW rescues. In this way they are now along the lines of the innumerable men’s adventure teams of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but what’s interesting is that Mertz, who created and edited the series, injects more background and character development into the tale than you would encounter in those other ghostwriter-written men’s adventure series. 

To wit, L.A. Gang War opens with a flashback to 1965, with Martin Stone 21 years old and a new Green Beret on his first patrol. Mertz well captures a greener, much-less-experienced Stone in this prologue; while he is not the experienced commando of the series proper, he still has the same determination. This opening also establishes characters who will factor into the novel, like Master Sergeant Chug Brown, “a big black bear of a man” who serves as Stone’s commanding officer, as well as the villain of the piece: Lou Conte, a turncoat Green Beret who, when we meet him, is working with some drug-running Cambodians to ambush Stone’s patrol. With a birthmark running across his face, Conte is easily the most memorable villain we’ve yet had in the series. 

Stone gets his trial by combat, one of the survivors of Conte’s ambush – and also Stone takes a shot at Conte, but sees him get away. We will learn that this has long been a sore spot for Martin Stone…and, of course, here in L.A. Gang War he will get his decades-delayed revenge. We cut to 1989, and Stone and team have just flown in to San Clemente, California, having just completed another mission in South America. Stone has his first post-‘Nam reunion with Chug, who works now as an anti-gang cop here in California. Stone’s team has been brought in by the Feds to rescue a reporter who has been taken hostage by a drug lord he was investigating – and the reporter is Chavez, another of Stone’s buddies (and who also was introduced in the 1965 prologue). 

This is a crafty way to stay true to the original series concept – rescuing prisoners of war – while expanding on it a little, and the action scene here could have come out of a contemporary action film, with Stone and comrades blasting away at Hispanic drug-runners on full auto. Mertz also captures the long-running banter between Louglin and Wiley, with even more of that background stuff thrown in; we’re told here that the two were partners back in ‘Nam, which is a tidbit I had forgotten. But there is a lot of bantering between the two, and Mertz does a good job of making the two characters memorable (I enjoyed the little note that Loughlin reads Robert Ludlum novels). 

Perhaps the best part of this sequence is the introduction of a sexy young black woman named Silky Brown: her first appearance has her in the passenger seat of a Mercedes (with none other than Lou Conte behind the wheel) as it escapes the drug lord’s place in San Clemente. Later we learn that Silky is undercover, merely posing as Conte’s latest girl for some unspecified reason. From her name to her looks, Silky seems to be a clear nod to Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation flicks, particularly Foxy Brown. I was hoping for some Coffy-esque “This is the end of your rotten life, you motherfuckin’ dope pusher!” shotgun-toting sass, but unfortunately – spoiler alert – it was not to be. While Silky is indeed a great character, probably one of my favorite ever in the MIA Hunter series, she does not turn out to be a Foxy Brown type. Hell, her name isn’t really even “Silky Brown,” and she’s just a wanna-be reporter who is trying to investigate the drug-running in the area, due to her involvement with the much-older Chavez. 

Those taking notes will realize of course that this means there will be no Stone-Silky conjugation, which would have been par for the course if this novel had been published two decades before (as hard as it is to believe, we’re in the ‘90s now, even though the novel is stated as taking place in 1989). This is because Stone has a steady girlfriend, something that would have been anathema in a ‘70s men’s adventure series; this of course would be April, who has been with the series from the start, and who has slowly integrated herself into the team in proto-DEI fashion. Even here Mertz gives us more background than is typical of most men’s adventure, with the note that Stone has been with April for a while, and that she still turns him on (in other words, they aren’t married). But as is typical of this series (or ‘90s men’s adventure in general), any sort of hanky-panky between the two must be a product of the reader’s own fevered imagination. 

For the most part, Mertz here delivers a crime thriller that has no parallels with the early volumes of the series; the closest point of comparison, men’s adventure-wise, would be G.H. Frost’s Army Of Devils, only without the drug-fueled zombies. Otherwise there are frequent scenes of Stone, Hog, and Loughlin suiting up and blasting away crack dealers in inner-city shitholes; one part, quite similar to Army Of Devils, has them trapped in a building as both the Crips and the Bloods set in on them. While not nearly as gory as Army Of Devils, we do get good word-painting like “reddish-gray mud” to describe blasted-out brains sitting on the street. 

Oh, and another “modern” intrusion here is the introduction of comlink-type headsets Stone and team wear on missions: “earsets” that allow them to stay in contact while in the field. Certainly this was novel in 1990, but here in 2025 I can’t tell you how sick I am of seeing action movies with commandos touching their ears and talking into their comlink headsets, or whatever the hell they’re called. It’s become just as much of a cliché as the ass-kicking girl who is a better shot and a better fighter than all of the guys put together. 

Well anyway, I sort of lost the plot there. Mertz also pays tribute to his writing mentor, with the mention of a top cop named “Pendleton.” And in many ways L.A. Gang War is sort of a “modern” take on a ‘70s Executioner novel, what with its cast of squabbling criminal gangs who prove absolutely no match for a hardened commando team. The only difference is, instead of Mafia goons, it’s black crack dealers. However Lou Conte emerges as the main villain, and Mertz delivers several scenes from his perspective; another similarity to Pendleton’s Executioner novels is that L.A. Gang War hops around a fairly large cast of characters, not just staying focused on Martin Stone. 

Overall, this one was an entertaining read, and to tell the truth I prefer urban action to the jungle exploits of the earlier MIA Hunter books. But speaking of which, the final sentence of L.A. Gang War informs us that Stone and team will in fact be heading back to ‘Nam, as new POWs have just been discovered. Like they said in the old NBC ads, “Be there!”