Wednesday, February 5, 2025

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.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

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.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

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?

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

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.

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

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!”

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

The Last Shaft (Shaft #7)


The Last Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman
January, 1977  Corgi Books
(Original UK hardcover edition 1975)

Well, the Internet Archive fixed itself and this final volume of the Shaft series, only ever published in the UK, is now back online. A big thanks to the person who scanned and uploaded their precious hardcover copy, as The Last Shaft is incredibly scarce and overpriced, either the orginal 1975 UK hardcover or the 1977 Corgi paperback. It’s surprising the novel still hasn’t been published in the United States. 

And also a big thanks to Steve Aldous, who notes that Shaft creator Ernest Tidyman intended this as the final novel in the series from the outset, and tried to get it published in the US. I’d love to know why he was unable to; it sounds as if Tidyman was courting upscale (read: hardcover) imprints, which is odd, given that the previous two Shaft novels – Shaft Has A Ball and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers – were paperback originals. Had Carnival Of Killers and Shaft Has A Ball sold so poorly that Bantam passed on The Last Shaft? Or was it that Bantam (or other US imprints) passed on The Last Shaft due to Tidyman’s insistence on making the title of the book literal? I guess we’ll never know. 

The helluva it is, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is the book that should’ve been passed on in the US, with The Last Shaft coming out instead. Carnival Of Killers, written by Robert Turner, was incredibly tepid, whereas The Last Shaft, written by Philip Rock (who turned in the awesome Hickey & Boggs tie-in), is for the most part fantastic – a pulpy slice of ‘70s crime, served up just the way I like it. And Philip Rock is a much more talented author than Robert Turner; there is no part where Rock seems to be winging it, banging out the words to meet his quota. The Last Shaft moves at a steady clip throughout, maintaining tension, characterization, and good dialog. In fact it comes off at times like Hickey & Boggs, which itself was a fantastic piece of ‘70s crime-pulp. 

There’s no pickup or mention of the previous book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft is even more bitter and worn-down when we meet him this time, looking out the window of his Manhattan apartment in the very early morning hours and wondering if he wants another belt of vodka. We are told Shaft is sick of New York, and wonders if it is time for him to go. Philip Rock maintains the world-weary characterization of John Shaft that Ernst Tidyman gave the character, as Robert Turner also did, but Rock manages to make Shaft likable, whereas Turner didn’t. Also we are often told Shaft’s a big bruiser, and, given the amount of action in The Last Shaft, I more so saw Jim “Slaughter” Brown as Shaft than I did Richard Roundtree. 

But then, The Last Shaft could just as easily have been the novelization of the third Slaughter movie we never got. It has more in common with the Blaxploitation action movies of the early-mid ‘70s than it does the hardboiled P.I. yarn Ernst Tidyman gave us in the original Shaft novel (which I really need to go back and read to completion someday). In this one we have Shaft beating people up, gunning them down, blasting away with a machine gun, and even blowing a place up and napalming stuff. We’re often reminded how he’s “Big, Black, and Bold,” per Billy Preston’s awesome “Slaughter” (which curiously was never released in its complete form until 2009’s Inglourious Basterds soundtrack.) 

Overvall, The Last Shaft sees John Shaft essentially becoming another Executioner or Revenger, or any other of the proliferation of mob-busters who showed up on the paperback racks in the mid-‘70s. Which again makes it curious that this novel did not come out as a paperback here in the US. Regardless, Shaft here turns into a one-man commando squad who takes on the underworld, even outfitted with a trick vehicle that’s stuffed to the gills with all manner of firearms and explosives. He even manages to get laid while kicking some Mafia ass, which is also par for the course for these ‘70s mob-busters. 

The plot is basically a Maguffin that allows Shaft to become a vigilante. He gets a visitor despite the early morning hour, none other than Captain Vic Anderozzi, a recurring series character. Anderozzi has come here with a guy named Morris Mickelberg, who per Anderozzi is the guy responsible for all the payoffs and whatnot going on in the city. Anderozzi has also brought along a massive box that contains all the dirty secrets – names, payoff dates, receipts, etc. It’s kind of a goofy setup, but Anderozzi’s reasoning is that Shaft is the only guy he can trust – the captain’s goal is to take Mickelberg and the box to the District Attorney first thing in the morning, and he just needs someplace safe to stay in the interim. 

Shaft’s reaction makes him seem a wholly unattractive character, which gave me bad flashbacks to Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft essentially tells Anderozzi he’s crazy and immediately grabs a shotgun and takes off – Shaft realizes “half the city” will be out to kill the captain, kill Mickelberg, and get that box. So Shaft leaves his “good friend” in the lurch, but to Shaft’s credit he has a change of heart while escaping; Shaft sees two men on the roof of his apartment building, one of them wielding a machine gun, and he swoops in to the rescue. As mentioned, Shaft does a fair bit of killing in The Last Shaft, blasting these two would-be hitmen apart with his shotgun. Philip Rock doesn’t dwell much on the gore, but he capably handles the action, a gift he demonstrated as well in Hickey & Boggs

Ernst Tidyman foreshadows his intention of making the title of The Last Shaft literal with the offing of a major character here in the opening, an occurrence which sends Shaft on his rampage – and furthers the “one-man commando Mafia buster” connotations of the novel. (I say Tidyman and not Rock, as per Steven Aldous the novel is based on a storyline Tidyman gave to Rock, with Tidyman also editing Rock’s final draft.) This death serves to be Shaft’s impetus for the rest of the novel: to get revenge on the killers and see that they all burn, handing off Mickelberg’s papers to the proper authorities. But Shaft is from this point a hunted man, with assorted crooks, mobsters, and corrupt cops out to get him. 

If there’s any failing to The Last Shaft, it’s that Rock (and Tidyman, I guess) introduces a deus ex machina conceit, a character who is randomly introduced into the narrative and will prove, again and again, to have just what Shaft needs for any given situation. This character is named Willie, a seemingly-inconsequential character who is introduced when Shaft checks himself into a hotel in the city. Willie, we’re told, has a “peculiar face,” one that is “striated,” and his hair is goofy, too. Another character mentions that Willie’s wife works at a salon and she “experiments” on Willie for practice. It’s an altogether curious intro for a character who will ultimately play a huge role in The Last Shaft, indeed serving as Shaft’s sidekick. Again, one can see this as a novelization of a movie that never was. 

Willie, as it turns out, is aware of who Shaft is (our hero giving a fake name when checking in and also covering himself with a hooded parka), and offers his help. This begins a gag that runs through the novel; Willie has decided he wants to be a private eye, and has been taking correspondence courses on it. But as the novel progresses, it turns out to be more – much more – than this. Willie not only knows all the tricks of the trade, but also has a delivery truck that is outfitted with virtually every firearm (up to and including machine guns), a mobile phone, and even C4 plastic explosive. (Not to mention napalm!) Rock clearly knows all this is a bit too much, and to his credit he has Shaft initially shocked by this, until finally accepting all of Willie’s vast bag of tricks with nonchalance. 

But seriously, if Shaft needs to shoot at someone, Willie has a machine gun for him. If Shaft needs to get some people out of a building they’re holed up in, Willie has napalm for Shaft to douse the parking garage with, flame-roasting the people within. (A sequence that has an eerie bit of prescience to it; Shaft and a random New Yorker stand on the street and watch the building burn, wondering how long the people trapped above have to survive, much as real-life New Yorkers would 26 years later as they helplessly watched the Twin Towers burn on 9/11.)  If Shaft needs to do some detective work and get a phone number, Willie knows just the things to say to the operator on his mobile phone. And yet at the same time we are to understand that Willie is naïve, an amateur who looks up to Shaft; there’s a big of a Hickey & Boggs vibe here, with the bickering and bantering black-white duo, but Willie is not Shaft’s equal on the action front, and acts more as the straight man. 

Willie also acts as a chaffeur, driving Shaft around town in his delivery truck, which is disguised as a bakery truck. And if that disguise is uncovered, not to worry; Willie has also taken a course on how to quickly paint the truck so that it looks like something else, like for example a yogurt delivery truck. Meanwhile Shaft sits in the back of the truck, formulating his plan of action; the second half of the novel is comprised of a series of assaults Shaft stages on the New York underworld, again operating in the same capacity as a Mack Bolan or a Ben Martin – like Bolan, he even takes to calling his targets moments before hitting them. 

Shaft also finds the time to pick up Sandra Shane, Morris Mickelberg’s hotstuff ex-wife, a former topless dancer Mickelberg picked up years ago. Now she’s determined to get the money her ex never gave her, becoming sexually excited over Shaft’s promises to get it for her. Rock doesn’t do as much to bring her to life, but at least Sandra Shane provides the series with some genre-mandatory spice, something that was completely absent in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. That said, the Shaft-Sandra conjugation is not much dwelt upon, though we learn that Shaft, uh, gets hs rocks off a few times. Our author has more fun with another secondary character, Rudolph Gromyck, a dirty New York cop who tries to outwit the Mafia and his fellow cops and find Shaft – so he can get Mickelberg’s papers and become rich off them. 

There are a lot of one-off mobsters yammering at each other on the phone before getting blown away by Shaft; our hero kills a fair number of people in the novel, again like Bolan or any other ‘70s men’s adventure protagonist. Rock also provides a little comedy with Willie fretting over Shaft using all those weapons in his truck – goofy, particularly when you consider that Willie himself is the one who stocked his truck with all of the weapons. But given that the novel moves so quickly, the reader doesn’t have much time to ponder over all of the plotholes. 

Unfortunately, the reader does have time to ponder over the ending of the novel, which is guaranteed to upset everyone. SPOILER ALERT, but The Last Shaft, as mentioned, lives up to its title. In a humorously tacked-on ending, we read as Shaft finally returns to his apartment building after successfully wiping out all the criminals who have been hounding him the entire novel. And on the way into the building the poor guy is mugged by a random thug and shot dead. This brief sequence, likely written by Ernest Tidyman himself, does not flat-out state “Shaft died,” but otherwise it’s clear as day – the mugger shoots, and we’re told the metal of the gun “became a blossom of flame…but only for the shortest moment known to man, that moment before dying.” Granted, the character dying could be the mugger; Shaft has already proven himself to be quite a resourceful individual, and might have pulled out a holdout gun and shot the mugger before the mugger could shoot him. I mean, Tidyman (or Rock) doesn’t specify who is dying in that last sentence, so it might not even be Shaft. And yet, I don’t think so; Tidyman’s intended irony here is that Shaft has spent the entirety of The Last Shaft cleaning up the city – of the bigwig mobsters and other high-level crooks – and then he is shot down by a random mugger. 

As mentioned above, perhaps it’s this lame ending that kept The Last Shaft from being published in the US. If so, it’s strange…I mean the publisher could’ve easily removed it before publication. As I say, this brief finale is tacked on, and comes off as the literary equivalent of the similarly tacked-on surprise ending of contemporary action flick Sudden Death: a downbeat, nihilistic cap-off that seems thrust on the reader more so for shock value than for any dramatic intent. 

Overall, I did enjoy The Last Shaft, and it’s too bad Tidyman didn’t get it published in the US…and change the finale along the way, opening the series up to be the continuing adventures of Shaft and Willie. But likely Tidyman considered himself above such pulpy things, and preferred offing the character that had made him famous. 

I’m reading the Shaft books way out of order; next I will likely read Shaft Has A Ball, but one of these days I will read Tidyman’s original Shaft novel.

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

The Executioner #20: New Orleans Knockout


The Executioner #20: New Orleans Knockout, by Don Pendleton
November, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Don Pendleton has his template for The Executioner now and he’s sticking to it: New Orleans Knockout covers all the staples, from Mack “The Executioner” Bolan announcing his presence to the local mob via an introductory ambush, to lots of surveillance and head-games with said mob, to the local cops who secretly root for Bolan…even the now-standard phonecalls between Bolan and undercover Federal cop Leo Turrin, who provides Bolan with insider Mafia info. We even get the new-to-the-template staple of Bolan about to get laid at story’s end. But this time Bolan’s got a motor vehicle that fires rockets, man! 

Really, I enjoyed New Orleans Knockout a lot, even though Pendleton still pulls the same copout as in previous books – another recurring staple, now that I think of it – where we are constantly teased with this big, climactic action scene that never happens. To wit, this is the umpteenth book in a row where Bolan finds out a ton of Mafia hardmen are converging on the titular city he happens to be in…but the huge battle never happens. I guess this is Pendleton’s way of showing us how Bolan gets by with his wits rather than his firepower, but this too is getting to be a bit much; at this point in The Executioner, one gets the impression that taking down the mob is as simple as making a few threatening phone calls and impersonating an enforcer. And having a motor home that fires rockets. 

As ever we open with a preemptory hit as Bolan makes his presence known in New Orleans; a cool opening in which Bolan, clad in black and his skin painted black, infiltrates the grounds of fashion-forward capo Carlotti. Again Bolan is presented as almost superhuman; the sequence is told from Carlotti’s point of view, and Bolan just appears in the man’s home, holding a gun to his head, despite there being armed guards everywhere. This leads to a crazed part that prefigures the ‘90s flick Speed where Carlotti drives into the compound of another New Orleans capo, but Carlotti can’t take his foot off the accelerator, or the bomb Bolan has wired there will go off. Pendleton well relays, mostly via dialog, how painful this is for Carlotti, who has not been able to move his leg for so long that it’s gone numb; I started massaging my own leg muscles in sympathy. 

We get the usual stuff with a local cop who soon learns the Executioner is afoot in his city, and receives random phone calls from the man himself, secretly offering this most wanted “criminal” assistance. In other words, the usual thing; I almost wonder if we’ll ever have a future installment with a Sheriff Buford T. Justice-type who is determined to bring Bolan down no matter what. Otherwise what’s interesting this time is the cop is named Jack Petro, and so of course I just assumed he was related to Kathy Petro

The biggest news in New Orleans Knockout is that Bolan has now acquired a massive GM motor home that he’s spent over $300k in mob money on, $100k of which was dedicated to outfitting the “war wagon” in state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, as well as the aforementioned rocket-firing system, which comes out of the rooftop with the press of a button. Curiously, we learn the motor home is not armored, and the windows aren’t bulletproof. Also, I didn’t get a good mental image of how the vehicle operates, particularly some of the weapons stuff. For example, we’re told Bolan doesn’t even use his hand to fire the rockets, and does it all with his leg, moving the sighting system and whatnot and then “slamming” his own leg with his fist to fire the rocket. Honestly this gave the entire scene some unintentional humor, as I just pictured his madman sitting in his huge motor home, watching a viewcreen and then randomly hitting his own leg. 

Another notable development in New Orleans Knockout is the return of future Able Team members Pol Balancales and Gadgets Schwartz. However they really aren’t in the book that much, and are just an extra plot Maguffin; in reality, Bolan spends more time with Pol’s sexy “kid” sister, Toni Balancales, in her early 20s and spectacularly built, though Pendleton as ever doesn’t dwell much on naughty stuff. It is nice though that he’s finally decided to cater to genre norms and give us a willing babe each volume. Toni too falls into the template, as she has the plucky, “I’m tough but I’m still a woman” demeanor as most other Pendleton gals. 

Speaking of unintentional humor, there’s a lot of it with Toni and Bolan. As we all know, Mack Bolan’s trademark phrase is “Stay hard,” and, well…Bolan keeps telling Toni to “stay hard,” leading to Toni to respond, “I’ve got to get hard…you stay hard!” It’s all quite goofy and funny, and it’s clear Pendleton doesn’t realize this (but then, maybe he did). But also, what with this plucky girl saying she needs to “get hard,” it all has a bit of a postmodern ring in our “gender is fluid” modern day. 

I got the impression Pendleton had recently read – or watched – The Anderson Tapes, as quite a bit of New Orleans Knockout concerns bugging and surveilling mobsters, with Bolan often sitting in the “command chair” of his motor home and listening to people talk far away, Pendleton delivering it all like a transcript much as Lawrence Sanders did in his best-seller. But Pendleton has certainly done his homework on surveillance. Toni informs Bolan that Pol and Gadgets started up “Able Group,” a private eye outfit that specializes in bugging places, typically working for companies that want to surveil other companies, and we get a lot of detail on the hardware they use. Recently the two were approached by a “Mr. Kirk,” who claimed to be a fed and tasked them with bugging one of the New Orleans Mafia bigwigs. Now Pol and Gadgets are missing, and Toni is close to panic as it’s been a week. Bolan quickly deduces that “Mr. Kirk” was none other than mobster Carlotti, looking to bug a rival don. 

Not to worry, though, as taking down the Mafia is essentially a cakewalk. It’s such a breeze for Bolan that there is no moment where he seems out of sorts or caught unawares. He slips in and out of Mafia hardsites pretending to be a troubleshooter from the organization, once again falling on that “Ace of Spades” gambit where he flips a poker card over as a sign of who he “really” is, and of course the mobsters blab freely, not knowing it’s the Executioner himself standing before them. Bolan at this point is toying with them; his goal seems to be to get all the families to kill each other, and to do so he plays mental tricks – like using a sniper rifle to blow apart a golf ball just as a mob chieftan is about to swing at it, and then calling him later to taunt him. 

Gil Cohen’s typically-great cover is both accurate and misleading. Accurate because the climax does take place during Mardis Gras, but misleading because neither Bolan’s prey nor the girl he’s holding at gunpoint are wearing costumes. Bolan however is wearing his blacksuit, so Cohen got that part correct. Getting to the climax, though, there really isn’t much in the way of action. Really, at this point Bolan takes down the mob mostly via phone calls and listening in on conversations. We’re often told of enemy forces encamped around the area, but Bolan slips in and out of their base camps with no problem; Pendleton is so focused on suspense over action that he even casually informs us that Bolan hits a couple places during his travels around the area, leaving these action scenes entirely off-page. 

Instead, Pendleton saves the fireworks for the finale, as Bolan takes his motor home onto the insanely-crowded streets of New Orleans just as Mardis Gras begins. This part alone is the most unbelievable element in the entirety of New Orleans Knockout, but Pendleton spends enough time on it that he makes it seem believable: Bolan, his motor home disguised as a mobile TV news station, creeping along the streets while engulfed by a human tide of partiers. Cohen’s cover art illustrates a scene that occurs here, as Bolan goes out into the crowd to rescue Toni, who has briefly been taken captive – even this happens and is resolved so quickly that, again, it all seems to be so easy for our hero. I mean Bolan just blows the mobster’s brains out, even though the guy’s holding a gun to Toni’s head and his twitching nerves might cause his finger to jerk on the trigger. 

Anton Chekhov would have been well pleased, as Pendleton follows the “gun on the mantleplace” dictum of Chekhov, or whatever it Chekhov called it; after teasing us about the rockets on the motor home throughout the narrative, Pendleton does indeed have Bolan employ them in the novel’s climax. This is on an assault of a fortified mob hardsite, Bolan blasting the shit out of the place with three rockets and then dispensing mercy shots to the flaming, screaming victims of his assault. For once Bolan comes close to the murderous, cipher-like vibe of imitators Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan, in an ending scene that has him gunning down a defenseless old man…and then briefly feeling bad about it, but brushing it off because the old man was a Mafia boss, so he deserved it. 

Pol and Gadgets stay off-page, and instead it’s up to Toni Balancales to see Bolan off…another humorous bit where she calls Bolan on his motor home’s mobile phone and demands that Bolan pick her up so she can give him some good lovin’ before he leaves town. And Bolan keeps trying to talk her out of it! Again though, Pendleton has finally decided to acquiesce to the genre and has Bolan ultimately decide to pick Toni up so he can bang her brains out…off-page, of course, as the novel ends here. 

All told, I enjoyed New Orleans Knockout quite a bit, but at this point The Executioner is almost becoming cartoonish with its breezy disregard for reality. Not that I have a problem with that, it’s just that Pendleton’s overly-serious narratorial voice clearly indicates that he himself doesn’t see it all as cartoonish, which is kind of crazy. I mean, at least the uncredited ghostwriters of The Sharpshooter and The Marksman knew their protagonists were psychopaths.