Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action

Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action, by Joseph Rosenberger

July, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Friends, like The Ninja, this is a read that has been years in the making. How many years? Nearly forty years. Was it worth the wait? Of course it wasn’t, it’s a Death Merchant novel by Joseph Rosenberger! 

To quote The Jimmy Castor Bunch, “What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time.” Back to the mid-late 1980s, to be exact, when yours truly was first caught up in the world of men’s adventure. It was probably around 1987, but not much later, and not much earlier. This would have been the height of my men’s adventure fandom, around when I wrote a letter to Gar Wilson. In fact, I no doubt looked very much like this. 

Back then I did my shopping for new men’s adventure paperbacks at the WaldenBooks in the Country Club Mall, in LaVale, Maryland. I have not been in that store in over thirty years – I haven’t even been to Maryland in over twenty years – and the store has been gone at least since 2011, when WaldenBooks folded, if not before. But I went to that store so many times that even now, as a fifty year-old “adult,” I can close my eyes and see the exact layout of that bookstore, and I can walk through it in my mind. 

The men’s adventure paperbacks were along the left wall of the store, almost all the way in the back. Probably a fitting place for them, the cynic might observe. Actually, sci-fi was all the way in the back; it was when heading for the science fiction paperback section in October of 1985 that I finally stopped to look at the action paperbacks that were placed on a shelf right before it. This was how I discovered Phoenix Force, specifically Night Of The Thuggee, which was my gateway drug into the world of men’s adventure. (I really should get a copy of that book and re-read it someday.) 

But for older men’s adventure novels, like earlier installments of Phoenix Force or the other older Gold Eagle stuff, I went to a used bookstore near the mall: The Paperback Exchange. This place was run by a lady who seemed “old” to me, but I’m probably older now than she was then. It had pretty much everything a prepubescent geek like me could want: a robust selection of second-hand books, particularly paperbacks (as you might guess), plus a large assortment of comics, new and old. Indeed, in my teen years, when I moved out of men’s adventure and more so into comics (though I had always liked comics), I would only go to Paperback Exchange for my comics shopping. 

Today I can only imagine what great stuff that lady had in her Paperback Exchange in the mid-to-late ‘80s. Back then, though, the older stuff – ie the stuff from only ten years before, the ‘70s – wasn’t as highly valued, at least by me. I remember going through her “old” copies of The Executioner, which as I recall were half off the cover price, and buying one or two of them out of obligation – #3: Battle Mask in particular I recall buying. But they just seemed so old to me, so outdated, and I had no interest in them – at the time, I just wanted the ‘80s terrorist of the week stuff, specifically the Gold Eagle stuff, and if you could throw that ninja guy John Trent in there, so much the better. I had no interest in reading about Mack Bolan’s Mafia war, which seemed like ancient history. 

But one day at the Paperback Exchange I saw this particular copy of Death Merchant in the men’s adventure paperbacks section, and the cover grabbed me, even though the book seemed so old. As mentioned above, I was already a comic book fan, and I was a sci-fi fan, so this cover – credited on the copyright page to an artist named Dean Cate – fired my imagination good and proper. It looked so cool! A dude in a red jumpsuit with a facemask, a mad scientist on the top of the cover, a lot of uniformed goons getting blown away…it had the potential to even be better than Phoenix Force (though not one of the ones with John Trent, of course). 

I snatched up the book and took it to my mom and she bought it for me; my mom, as a single mother on a teacher’s assistant salary, didn’t have much money, but she always bought me books. And looking back on it now, I never even valued it at the time that she would buy me books that she clearly knew were written for adults, but she bought them for me anyway because she knew I loved to read. I never had to make a sales pitch or anything. I’d just run with the book over to my mom and ask her if she’d buy it for me, and she’d buy it for me. 

So, I can say I was pretty excited to read this one. I’m not sure if I knew about the Death Merchant at the time. I want to say I didn’t. As mentioned, I was squarely into the new stuff. It’s funny that I thought these ‘70s books were so old at the time, but even looking at them today I can see why I thought this – the ‘70s paperbacks were taller, the paper was pulpier, and overall they were less glossy than the ‘80s men’s adventure paperbacks. They just seemed to be from a different, altogether rougher time. 

But regardless, Death Merchant 23: The Budapest Action grabbed my attention, what with its cover promising some guy in a red jumpsuit with a visor over his face blowing away a bunch of uniformed guys with a Luger. Whoever this Death Merchant was, he clearly had “incredible adventures,” at least per the cover. 

Then I went home and tried to read the book. 

No, this was not Phoenix Force, not by a long shot. This was just weird. And it was almost indecipherable, at least for a twelve year-old like me. Who this Death Merchant, aka Richard Camellion, really was, I couldn’t figure out – it just opened with him in action, and he stayed in action for the rest of the densely-written, small-print 202 pages of the book. After some dogged reading, I finally gave up and tried to root through the book for the scene depicted on the cover, before failing on this as well. Ultimately The Budapest Action went on my bookshelf, neatly arranged with all my other men’s adventure paperbacks…but continnuing to loom in my imagination. For nearly four decades. 

A long time ago I picked up another copy of the book – I guess all of my old men’s adventure novels are boxed up at my mom’s place, and I’d love to get them all someday – but it too sat unread in a box with a bunch of other books. I’m not sure why I didn’t try to read it sooner, opting instead for other Death Merchant novels. I guess I just didn’t want to finally read it and get verification of what I knew as a twelve year-old: that the book wasn’t very good. But I finally decided to read the damn thing, which was a curious experience – not the least because, even as a fifty year-old, I still found The Budapest Action nearly indecipherable. 

But first of all, and really a note to the twelve-year-old me: the cover does not illustrate anything that happens in the novel. At no point – at least no point that I caught – does Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion put on a red jumpsuit with a clear visor, arm himself with a Luger, and shoot up a bunch of uniformed guards. Presumably artist Dean Cate was given his assignment by the editors at Pinnacle – who probably didn’t read Rosenberger’s manuscript, either, I mean life’s just too short – and proceeded to illustrate what he thought would be a scene in the novel. 

It’s funny when you think of it; that cover image has stayed with me for decades. I’ve even subtly referred to it in some of my own writing. And now I finally discover that the scene isn’t even in the book! Actually this makes me think of a quote from none other than Rosenberger himself, I think from one of his Mace books, something to the effect of, “As surprised as a kid who went downstairs on Christmas morning to discover that Santa Claus was really a child molester,” or something like that. 

While Dean Cate’s cover art might be misleading, the title itself sure as hell isn’t: this one’s nothing but “action.” I don’t exaggerate when I say that the vast majority of the 202 pages concerns Camellion fighting his way into a castle in Budapest in which a special psychedelic gas is being stored. The entire novel is focused on him trying to get into this place, and he doesn’t even get there until the final pages. 

I determined long ago that there are two kinds of Death Merchant novels: the ones where Joseph Rosenberger bothers to achieve his own potential and the ones where he doesn’t give a shit. The Budapest Action is one of the latter. Examples of the former are rare, but they exist; see, for example, The Cosmic Reality Kill or The Burning Blue Death. Both of these actually live up to the outrageous premise Rosenberger creates. But more likely you get something like Hell In Hindu Land, where the outrageous concept – friggin’ ancient aliens – is nothing more than a Maguffin that Rosenberger uses to tie together several action scenes that seemingly go on forever. 

The back cover, which also did a great job of luring the twelve-year-old me in, has it that Richard Camellion must go to Budapest to destroy a new psychedelic gas that has been developed by a Commie scientist; to be used, of course, to conquer the world. I mean, surely that wild-eyed, vaguely Slavic-looking, lab-coated and beaker-toting sub-Lenin on the cover is supposed to be this mad doctor. Too bad, then, that we don’t even meet him, but spend more time in go-nowhere chapters devoted to General Barthory, who is in charge of security for the remote castle in which the experimental psychedelic gas is being stored. 

I’m not sure if it’s the take I got as a kid in 1987, and it probably wasn’t, but reading the setup now, as an “adult,” I can only think of scenes where the gas is let loose, and people start freaking out, and we see their delusions and the madness that ensues. Sort of like, now that I think of it, The Deadly Spring. But as I mentioned above, this is one of the volumes where Rosenberger doesn’t give a shit; the setup is just there to allow him to lazily tie together several action scenes. 

The novel opens with Camellion breaking into a government building in Budapest to find the plans for the psychedelic gas, only to discover the safe is impossible to break into. This leads to a near-endless action scene, after which Camellion hooks up with his contacts in Hungary, a group of resistance fighters. They are hiding out with some monks, and throughout Camellion disguises himself as a visiting cleric, wearing makeup to make himself look like he’s in his late forties – which we’re told is ten years older than Camellion’s actual age – with a splotchy face and a bald head. Presumably this is how Camellion looks throughout the interminable action scene that takes up the final half of the novel. 

There’s a big annual festival in which the faithful climb the nearby mountains upon which is perched the castle that has the psychedelic gas. So Camellion and his group – one of whom is an American CIA agent – go along with the faithful, secretly toting weapons. Camellion doesn’t bait the monks as much as you’d think, but we do get a little of Rosenberger’s bizarre “Fate Magazine” type stuff, like a random assertion from Camellion that the ages of man are determined by the weather, and we’re heading into a “heat” phase, and etc. It’s goofy, but really not much different from the proclamations of the average climate change “expert” of today. 

But the bizarre stuff too is a Maguffin. The focus is solely on action. That’s really all it is. There’s a lot of stuff devoted to Camellion and team, in the mountains, commandeering a Hound helicopter. Also, before this sequence, there’s another endless action scene that prefigures the later Super Death Merchant, where Camellion commandeers an Armored Personnel Carrier and drives it through the streets of Budapest. But with the Hound, it’s used to fly them over the walls of the castle – and folks, this scene goes on forever. 

Like a fool, I kept waiting for the part where Camellion would pull on his red jumpsuit, don his clear visor, and go charging with Luger raised into the swirling mists of psychedlic gas, blasting away uniformed soldiers. It never happened. As the final page got closer and closer, and more and more time was spent on Barthory freaking out that his defenses had been penetrated, or Camellion landing the Hound where it could easily be gotten into again, I realized that the entire novel was nothing more than getting into the castle. The stuff I wanted – the stuff Dean Cate illustrated on his cover – only happened in my imagination. 

In fact, the psychedelic gas is such a Maguffin that more time is spent on how to destroy it than seeing its effects. Granted, destroying it is Camellion’s entire mission, but still…the reader deserves more. The reader deserves more than just page after page of Camellion and his friends gunning down “AVO” soldiers, ie the Hungarian version of the KGB. Seriously, “AVO” is repeated so much in The Budapest Action that you could make a drinking game out of it. 

As the final slap in the face, Rosenberger is so checked out that he rushes through the finale…and on the very last sentence, apropos of nothing, Camellion is thinking about how he’ll be on his next mission “in less than a month!” It’s like even the friggin’ Death Merchant himself just wants it all to be over, so he can get on to the next one. I can only assume this is how his creator felt. I mean Joseph Rosenberger, of course, not the Cosmic Lord of Death. 

I’m sure it wasn’t fun turning out so many of these books a year, every year, and we know from the Joseph Rosenberger letter that Stephen Mertz sent me many years ago that Rosenberger wasn’t even getting paid very much. So I try not to be too hard on these men’s adventure writers of old. To be honest, I envy them. I mean, Joseph Rosenberger might have been paid squat, and he might have turned out turgid, soul-crushing banalities (though not always)…but at least he was creating something, something that I’m here reviewing nearly five decades after he wrote it. Today, at my work, I wrote the creative brief for a piece of email marketing I’m going to send out in a month. Who’s going to remember that in fifty years? Who’s going to remember it five minutes after opening it? 

So, this is one to mark off my “bucket list,” if that phrase is even still used. It took me nearly forty years, but I finally got around to reading The Budapest Action. I’ll prefer to remember it as the story I originally envisioned, all those years ago. And I’ll hope the next Death Merchant is better. But I won’t count on it.

Barca

Barca, by Lou Cameron

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The first of a handful of paperback originals Lou Cameron published with Berkley in the mid-late ‘70s, Barca is like the later The Closing Circle in how it clearly seems to take the work of Lawrence Sanders as inspiration. Indeed, Cameron is at such pains to produce a “legitimate crime novel” that, again like The Closing Circle, he undermines his own pulpy premise and turns in a tale that is much too staid for its own good. As it is, Barca is a slog of a read, a 256-page, small-print slog that is more focused on dialog than it is on thrills. 

Reading the back cover copy of Barca, the reader is promised a tale in which the titular tough-guy cop is shot in the head but survives, and now is on a trail of revenge. The reader will be frustrated to discover that this is not the novel he actually gets. 

Rather, the reader gets a lot of talking in Barca. A lot of talking. Hell, folks, even after waking up in the hospital bed with a bullet in his friggin’ brain, even here Barca gets in a pages-long conversation with his partner, Crane, and his boss, Lt. Genero. And they aren’t just talking about the bullet in the brain, either! It’s almost like a proto-Seinfeld in how their conversation just roams all over the place. 

And this is how it will go through Barca. It was the same thing in The Closing Circle, of course, and it occurs to me now that this was the same thing Herbert Kastle was doing in his own contemporary crime novels – lots of “salty, realistic chatter from jaundiced cops” stuff. I’ve only read a few novels by Lawrence Sanders – and I’m ready to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever, these days, surpassing even my old top favorite Boy Wonder – but from what I’ve read, his novels too were dialog heavy. And yet, at least from the ones I’ve read, they didn’t come off as stultifying chores, like these two Cameron novels. 

So here’s the deal: Detective Sergeant Frank Barca is a New Jersey cop with twenty years of experience in Homicide. At novel’s start he and his younger partner Crane are providing protection for a guy in the hospital who is about to turn evidence against the Roggeris, a mobbed-up family with tentacles all over Jersey. Then when Crane goes out for cigarettes and Barca’s alone with the guy, someone sneaks into the room and shoots Barca in the back of the head, then puts the rest of the gun’s bullets into the would-be witness. 

In material seemingly taken from a medical textbook (like Sanders, Lou Cameron wants us to know he’s done his research), we learn how the bullet did a ton of damage to Barca’s neurons but came to rest in his brain in such a way that he survived – and maintained all of his physical abilities. However, the bullet has also come to rest in such a way that to retrieve it via surgery could result in Barca’s death. This too is explained in copious detail, as Barca exposits back and forth with a neurosurgeon some months later, after coming out of therapy. 

Barca struggles with some memories, like when a pal from the Korean War calls him to wish him well, and Barca cannot remember the guy for anything. Barca’s bigger problem however is that it is only a matter of time until his brain rejects the bullet that is embedded in it. When this happens Barca’s mind will blank out, and meanwhile his body will go into convulsions and he will ultimately die. This too is covered in copious expository dialog. 

The premise is interesting: Barca gets the chance to solve his own murder, and he has to do it fast, before his brain explodes. Instead of Plot A, however, we get Plot B: Lt. Genero, reluctantly accepting Barca back on duty, puts Barca on another case, because it would look bad for the force if Barca started investigating his own shooting(!). Which Genero assures Barca the force is totally doing, it’s just a question of manpower and whatnot… 

So Barca gets the case he was working on before he was shot: looking into the hit-and-run death of a guy named Fantasia. It’s maddening in a way; the back cover and first pages set you up for one story, then Cameron pulls the narrative rug out from under you and soon Barca’s looking at the corpse of a dead young black girl who hooked for some boys who lived above Fantasia’s pharmacy, kids who were mostly into a dope and booze scene and not so much into heavy drugs. In other words, you get another story entirely than what was promised. 

Barca’s old partner, Crane, has moved on to a new gig after being promoted, but Barca will occasionally head over to his place to engage in dialog – because, gradually, it becomes clear that the Fantasia death might be connected with the Roggeris, ie the mobbed-up family that was going to be ratted on by the guy Barca and Crane was guarding the night Barca was shot in the head. 

It takes a long while for this to develop, though. For the first half of Barca we have a methodical procedural in which Barca interrogates a cast of characters who knew Fantasia; most memorable is Wrong Way Corrigan, an 18 year-old punk child of wealth who is known for crashing expensive cars. During this Baraca becomes acquainted with Beth Wilson, an (apparently) pretty blonde social worker who was helping the young black hooker who died of an OD. 

For a writer with a pulp background, Lou Cameron is curiously chaste. At least in the novels of his I’ve read. That he pulled off such prudery in the sleazy ‘70s is quite a feat. But there’s zero exploitation of the female characters and there is zero sex; Barca notices that Beth gradually begins to grow feelings for him, but when she asks him on a date late in the novel he turns her down – he doesn’t want her to start to like him and then have her feelings crushed when he suddenly dies. Personally I thought Barca was coming on as a little too self-important; just because a girl asks you out doesn’t mean she’s going to fall in love with you. 

We fare slightly better on the action front, but even here Cameron fails to deliver what he promises. Due to his condition Barca is not allowed to drive a police car, so he finds a workaround and starts driving a motorcycle. It’s a Honda, not a Harley, but Barca also starts wearing “leather togs” and packing two pistols, making the reader think of Chopper Cop, or better yet the bike-riding cop from The Blood Circus. 

But man; we only even know Barca looks like this because other characters mention it (again, the majority of the novel is relayed via dialog), and Cameron does precious little to deliver on his own pulpy conceit. I mean Barca drives the Honda around here and there; at no point does he turn into the leather-wearing, bike-roaring hellraising cop the veteran pulp reader might want. 

The novel’s sole “action scene” is over before we know it; following leads, Barca ends up at a garbage dumb outside of town, and none other than one of the Roggeris pull up. One of the guys with him’s a coked-up “junko,” and Barca shoots him with his Colt Cobra when the guy rushes him. But this scene too is played up more for the suspense angle, as Barca soon learns that there was more to this situation than he expected. 

But then overall Barca is more of a procedural than a thriller. Sometimes it’s unintentionally humorous, like the many and confusing tentacles that make up the Roggeri family. I mean there’s the one who was going to be turned against, the one who is a legitimate businessman, the one who became a priest. Then there’s the old crone who might be the most cruel mafioso of them all. And it’s all talking, talking, talking; even parts where Barca goes to talk to his old priest and they get into various theological debates. 

I mean a part of me can see Lou Cameron enthusing over all this, turning in a meaty and weighty “crime novel” that has more in common with John Gardner (the American, not the Brit) than Don Pendleton. But it comes off as so ponderous, especially given that so many scenes have no bearing on the outcome of the novel. The bantering between Barca and Lt. Genero also gets old after a while, and there are so many parts that are dumb – like Barca figures out another workaround, how to keep his gun even when he’s temporarily removed from the force, but when Genero tries to give Barca back his gun officially, Barca tells him to forget it! 

Probably the biggest issue with Barca is Barca himself. He’s nowhere as interesting as Cameron seems to think he is. There’s a lot of muddled stuff about his Italian upbringing, and how he could’ve been in the Mafia, but again it’s all just dialog with no payoff – like when Barca tries to ask that old priest of his about “omerta” and all this other stuff. None of it amounts to anyting other than making the book seem even longer. 

So, the reader can forget about the plot promised on the back cover of Barca. The concept of a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain going out for revenge on the mobsters who tried to kill him sounds like a great story, but it’s not the story we get in Barca. Instead, we get a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain who…investigates a hit-and-run death and talks to a bunch of people. Only gradually does he get around to solving who it was who almost killed him – and even this doesn’t have the emotional payoff the reader might want, Cameron going for more of a ‘70s-mandatory downbeat ending. (But an unsurprising one, as it should be obvious to even a disinterested reader who shot Barca.) 

I wasn’t very crazy about The Closing Circle, either, as it suffered from a lot of the same stuff. But that one was marginally better because the subplot about the killer at least kept things moving, and there was certainly more of a sleazy overlay – not via sex or anything, given Cameron’s prudishness, but in the wanton description of people shitting themselves when they’re strangled. To this day when I watch Dateline or whatever and it mentions a victim being strangled, I’m like, “Why aren’t you telling us they shat themselves?!” I mean, it’s the one thing I learned from The Closing Circle. 

Cameron wrote a few more of these “realistic cop novels in the vein of Lawrence Sanders” for Berkley; curiously, one of them is titled Tancredi, a name that appears in Barca. It’s not a cop or even a character in Barca, but a building where one of the Mafia capos operates out of, “The Sons of Tancredi.” There doesn’t seem to be any connection between these novels, so maybe Cameron just liked the name and decided to use it for his next book. But I’ll probably read that one next, and hope that it’s better than these first two.

No Job For A Virgin!

No Job For A Virgin!, by Jock Killane

No month stated, 1968  Softcover Library

I picked up this obscure paperback original some years ago, and I believe I was under the impression it was a Lancer publication. But, having finally decided to read the thing, I saw that it was actually published by Softcover Library. “Wasn’t that a sleaze imprint?” I asked myself…and, sure enough, the first page opens with our narrator, hotstuff female hotel dective Red, engaging in fairly explicit sex with a guy. 

Yes, friends, this is another of those curious instances where an (apparently) male author writes a sleazy novel in the first-person narration of a female protagonist. No idea who “Jock Killane” was, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a lady. The protagonist of No Job For A Virgin! is a former cop turned hotel detective who manages to screw her way through a few men and women during the course of her investigation, which sees her uncovering a diamond ring that is operating out of her hotel. 

To be sure, like most vintage “sleaze” novels, No Job For A Virgin! is more so a hardboiled crime yarn, with less of a focus on the actual sleaze than you’d encounter in a later example of the genre, like for example Lorna’s Lust For Men. That said, when the sex happens, not much is left to the reader’s imagination, but this being 1968 the details still aren’t as explicit as they would be some years later in books like The Baroness and etc. 

Regardless, the sex scenes are for the most part intrusive to the plot, and seem to be there to meet a publisher requirement. Also, I obviously have nothing to go on other than my own guess, but my assumption is that Jock Killane was a serious boozer, and turned out No Job For A Virgin! during a two-day bender fueled by Jack Daniels and uppers, with the occasional snort of coke. Either that, or he just pieced together disparate subplots and storylines in order to meet a word count. Personally I like the first option better. 

I say this because No Job For A Virgin! is a crazy read for sure, akin to something Russell Smith might write, but not that crazy (no book is as crazy as a Russell Smith book). And I’m not putting forth the notion that Killane was Russell Smith; the narrative style is completely different. If anything Jock Killane writes more like it’s the 1950s and he’s publishing a novel through Gold Medal Books. There is a definite hardboiled tone to the book, and zero in the way of topical late ‘60s details, which further makes me suspect that No Job For A Virgin! was actually written earlier. And also, a pedantic note: the exclamation point in the title only appears on the cover and the spine, but not on the first page of the book itself. 

Another interesting note: No Job For A Virgin! is copyright Script Associates, the outfit that later brought us ‘70s men’s adventure paperback series like The Butcher and The Big Brain. It is for the most part a hardboiled crime novel, narrated by a tough dame who happens to be a hotel detective at the Seagull Inn, in an unspecified city. The bodies start building up, and it soon becomes clear that a diamond smuggling ring is working out of the hotel. And then later there’s a sort of white slavery angle as well. As I say, the author seems to have jammed together a bunch of unrelated plots to make a book. 

Well anyway, the book is a rocky read at best. As I’ve frequently mentioned, it’s narrated by a woman: Sally “Red” Barnes, a tough dame who was previously “on the force,” but quit when a fellow cop “tried to rape” her. Now Red works in the Seagull Inn as the day detective, but usually works nights as well, as the night detective, Charley, is off drinking somewhere. Humorously, there is zero detail on what Red looks like. Zero! We only learn through dialog that she is called “Red” due to the color of her hair. It’s a given that she’s attractive, as everyone – man and woman – wants to take her to bed. But Jock Killane does not exploit his protagonist in the least; indeed, one could read the novel and not even know Red was a female (especially when she starts having casual sex with other women). The book is narrated in the same terse, hard-assed tone as any other hardboiled novel narrated by an ass-kicking male detective…just like, it now occurs to me, the later Hatchett. 

But man, there is no self-exploitation from Red, as you’d expect from a male author turning in a sleazy novel from the point of view of a sexy female character, ie “My full, upthrusting breasts jutted forward proudly, demanding the attention of every male eye, my nipples sharp as diamonds,” and etc. (Note how I even subtly worked in an allusion to the jewel-smuggling plot, friends!!) If I’m not mistaken, Red only refers to her breasts like once in the book, and in passing. 

She does, however, talk up the guys; the novel opens with Red having sex with some guy in her hotel room: “His left hand plucked at my right nipple…I could feel the massiveness of him, pressing against my thigh.” Personally I’d take an opening like that over “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” any day. A fairly explicit sex scene ensues, though again nothing compared to what would pass in the mainstream fiction of just a few years later. And also eventually we’ll learn that this random guy Red is banging is really…her ex-husband, Hank, a lawyer who will prove useful to her in the first half of the novel, before summarily disappearing from the text when the author tires of the plot he’s been constructing for the past hundred pages. 

Red is called immediately post-orgasm to a room up on fourth, where a fight has broken out. Red runs up there to find a burly guy strangling a blonde woman, and the guy knocks Red’s purse – with its .25 automatic in it – out of Red’s hand, and then knocks her out. This will be the start of all of Red’s problems, as Detective Heller – the very same cop who once “tried to rape” Red, back when she was on the force – accuses her of stealing jewels that the burly guy claims he had in his room. 

There is a perhaps-intentional comedic tone to the novel, as soon more and more shootouts keep occuring at the Seagull Inn, happening in that very same room on the fourth floor, yet customers keep checking into the place. Jock Killane spends a goodly portion of the tale building up a crime-suspense angel in which Red, working with an accomplice on the newspaper, learns that a diamond smuggling ring has been operating in the city and is apparently using the Seagull Inn as its base of operations. 

Red gets in a few shootouts, but truth be told No Job For A Virgin! is not an action thriller by any means. And, for that matter, nor is it a jokey, takes-nothing-seriously type of novel, like I initally assumed it would be. You know, like one of those Man From O.R.G.Y. books or whatever. Again, the impression is very much that this is one of those vintage “sleaze” paperbacks that are really crime yarns with occasional detours into somewhat-explicit sex, ie Vice Row. 

But boy, the sex scenes sure are frequent. Red does her ex-husband, then later hooks up with Olga, the sexy traveling businesswoman who stays in the hotel room across from the one on fourth. Olga invites Red over for “dinner,” and the two are soon dining someplace else entirely, if you get my sleazy drift. Humorously, Red’s sapphic pursuits are treated almost casually by the author; initially Red is anxious about how Olga makes her feel, but after Olga starts giving her a nude massage our narrator is jumping right into it. Olga is the main female character to get exploited in the text: first she’s making drinks, “her large breasts juggling” with the act, which of course gives a completely different (and anatomically-impossible) mental image than what the author likely intended. Later we get the classic line, “Her big, milk-white breasts were firm and upthrust,” which is straight out of Harold Robbins. 

Jock Killane is only getting warmed up on the sex front. After Red and Olga’s lesbian fun, there’s yet another shootout in the hotel, in the same damn room on the fourth floor, and then we have a hilariously-unrelated subplot in which Red, on her day off, goes on a yacht cruise with a wealthy couple who also stay at the hotel…and soon enough she’s engaging the sexy wife in some lez action, after which she’s screwing the husband. 

As mentioned, Jock Killane struggles to meet his word count…and the book’s only 154 pages, by the way! But this whole middle sequence has nothing to do with anything, and even after Red has slept with the couple, another couple comes aboard the ship, and Red’s having sex with that wife, too! Then later she also does the husband, and again it’s the men who get most detail; Red uses her ex-husband Hank as her reference point for the male anatomy, so that we are often informed, “He was big, almost as big as Hank.” 

Killane does try to tie this part into the overall plot, as they all end up on an island, and Red suspects that the diamond smugglers might be using the island. But then it’s back to the Seagull Inn, where another firefight ensues – and Red gets raped. This guy is bigger than Hank, she tells us, and it hurts – or, as Red tersely informs the hotel doctor: “He tore up my guts,” spreading her legs to show the damage. “Doc” meanwhile tells Red to have a stiff drink and informs her she’ll be fine, but she’ll “walk bowlegged for a few days.” 

You win a no-prize if you guess that Red will have sex posthaste, regardless! This is courtesy Sid Bartlett (whose name of course made me think “Syd Barrett”), a businessman who is thrust upon the readers in the final stages of the narrative. He’s another traveling business person, and Red is surprised to see him at the Seagull Inn (business at the hotel doing fine, despite all the shootings and killings). Red informs us that things “have never worked out” between her and Sid…until now! 

Sid takes Red out, this just a few nights after her rape, and there follows the most egregious plot-filler yet in No Job For A Virgin!. They go to an amusement park, and there a barker is promising a live sex show, and Sid gets in an argument with the guy, calling him out for his lies, saying there’s no legal way actual sex acts could be performed, etc. The barker lets Sid and Red in for free, and there follows a several-page sequence in which Red details every moment of the live sex show, which does indeed feature actual sex (you win another no-prize if you guessed that, by the way), and it goes on and on, having nothing to do with anything. Then Red and Sid go back and have sex – and Sid’s “even bigger” than Hank, by the way – and folks this ultimately even includes some backdoor shenanigans: “Sid raised me onto my knees and gently spread the cheeks of my buttocks…and then wham!” 

The final quarter of No Job For A Virgin! seems to come from a completely different novel…same as the live sex show bit did, now that I think of it. But Red wakes to find herself nude and locked in a cabin room on a ship at sea, and soon she befriends kindly Chinese guy Wang, who seems to be part of a white slavery group that has apparently gotten Red in its clutches. This is all apropos of anything that has come before in the narrative, mind you. But this is the homestretch of the story; the captain – whose member is the biggest of all, by the way – keeps trying to rape Red, and Red keeps fighting him off, while slowly gaining the trust of Wang so that the two might escape together. 

On the very final pages Jock Killane ties all this stuff into the diamond smuggling plot that he spent the previous half of the book developing. In a way I was impressed by his ability to pull off such a brazen act of connect-the-narrative-dots. But it goes without saying that the finale is wholly unsatisfactory, as Killane throws the “big boss reveal” on us in a way that would even take Norvell Page aback. 

Curiously, Killane also goes for a downbeat ending for the novel, with Red telling the dead villains, “See you in hell” as she walks off. There’s no resolution to the storyline at the Seagull Inn…and in fact, Killane pulls a total trick on readers, as he has us suspecting that other characters Red works with are involved with the smuggling ring, but he doesn’t follow up on these plotlines. Of course, there was no reason to, once he had hit his word count. 

Overall, No Job For A Virgin! was a fast read, fun mainly due to its madcap vibe (Syd Barrett again), but I suspect the story behind the book was even more interesting. Oh, and the title has nothing to do with the book – it’s not something Red ever says, or any other character says. For that matter, the cover photo could’ve been pasted on any other paperback of the era – I mean, the cover model doesn’t even have red hair! She does have a red dress, though, so maybe that counts for something.

The Peeping Tom Murders (Morocco Jones #3)

The Peeping Tom Murders, by Jack Baynes

No month stated, 1958  Crest Books

Hardboiled junkies with a quarter to burn would’ve been well-pleased to discover Morocco Jones, but I’m assuming the series didn’t gain much traction in its day. The Peeping Tom Murders is more hardboiled in its approach than the previous two books, with Morocco in seedy Los Angeles and trying to figure out who murdered a movie star and her husband. 

I’m under the impression book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel was at least aware of this series; it seems very in-line with the paperbacks he would produce the following decade, particularly Nick Carter: Killmaster. This is mainly in how Morocco is a former globetrotting secret agent, and also how the books are written in third-person instead of the more hardboiled-esque first person. Even the narrative style of Jack Baynes (aka Bertram Fowler, apparently, but as with my previous two reviews I’ll refer to him by his much-cooler pseudonym) is similar to the house style Engel would instill in his productions. 

And on that note, The Peeping Tom Murders is almost like something Manning Lee Stokes would’ve written for Engel in later years, with an unwieldy plot and an ever-growing cast of characters. The only thing it lacks that Stokes would’ve brought is a lurid quotient; the uncredited cover art is the most lurid thing about The Peeping Tom Murders. But it’s misleading, as it doesn’t depict a sequence in the novel; the beautiful young starlet is already murdered before Morocco Jones arrives on the scene, so there’s no half-nude corpse for him to look at through a window. 

There’s also no pickup from previous volumes, nor an appearance of Morocco’s recurring cast of characters, the General and Llora. The former is only mentioned in passing and Llora is often thought of, but Morocco proves his macho worth by sleeping with some random lady during the course of this novel, even if he suspects Llora is the perfect woman for him! But folks that’s the biggest difference between Morocco Jones and the men’s adventure novels of later decades; the sex scene isn’t just off-page, it happens between paragraphs, leaving the sordid details to the reader’s fevered imagination because it’s 1958 and all. 

The novel gets off to a fine opening in which Morocco makes his way to a secluded estate up in the winding hills around Hollywood and is jumped by a trio of armed goons. Morocco makes short work of them, taking them out in believable fashion, even if he doesn’t have a gun. Oh and that’s another misleading element from the cover art: Morocco doesn’t even use a gun in the course of the book. At one point he gets hold of one, but tosses it aside later on. 

This is because Morocco is in the cross-hairs of the Los Angeles cops, just one of many factions that zero in on Morocco. I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of The Peeping Tom Murders concerns this or that character approaching Morrocco, usually in his hotel room, and either threatening him or asking him for his help. The novel quickly becomes overly complex and muddled with too-many characters and subplots overcrowding the central storyline of the murdered starlet. 

There’s also the question of why Morocco is even here; we’re told in the opening that the General “insisted” Morocco handle this job, but I never could figure out why an LA-based detective wasn’t hired instead of Morocco, who has come over from his home base of Chicago. He soon learns he’s out of his depth, with practically every character involved in the case figuring out where he’s staying in Hollywood and what his next move might be. Forward momentum is constantly halted by badgering, annoying characters who crowd the narrative. 

But the opening is cool. Morocco takes out the trio waiting for him, leaving one of them dead from a broken neck, and he goes into the bungalow of the man he’s working for: Garado Parano, scion of a wealthy family who claims not only that the men outside were not his, but also that he’s been framed for murder (the starlet and her husband). The thugs, Garado says, must have belonged to Santash, the leader of a local cult. 

Here The Peeping Tom Murders detours from what the reader might rightly assume would be the plot: rather than focusing on Hollywood and the movie biz, Jack Baynes gives us a story about a New Age cult that is run by a conman who works with a gossip columnist, and together the two are blackmailing Hollywood notables. There are also gangsters and whatnot involved, and all of them are constantly ten steps ahead of Morocco Jones; once again, Baynes manages to make his protagonist come off as dumb for the convenience of the busy plot. 

I was also a little let down with how Baynes treats the novel’s sole female character, Sonya Langley, a purple-eyed up-and-coming starlet who is one of the first characters to make an unnanounced appearance at Morocco’s hotel shortly after he arrives in town. With her “lowcut neckline” (which is about as risque as Baynes gets; there is zero in the way of anatonimical exploitation, sad to say) and her comment that “there are many beds between a bit part and a starring role,” Sonya throws herself at Morocco…who turns her away, not trusting her. This will begin a frosty rapport between the two, with Morocco suspecting that Sonya is working with the bad guys and trying to sway him. 

Indeed, she seems to be involved with Santash, formerly known as Joel Tuck, a black low-level criminal who started pretending he was a psychic to swindle superstitious gamblers. Now, in his robe and with a legion of followers, Santash commands a “psychic cult” that operates on the fringes of Hollywood society; the novel’s most memorable sequence has Morocco sneaking onto the cult grounds while a ceremony is in progress, complete with proto-psychdelic stuff like Santash praying to a “purple light” of the cosmos that shines on him. Morocco spends the time wondering what optical and stereo tricks Santash is using to fool his followers…talking aloud to himself the whole time. Yes, folks, a “tough” private eye who talks aloud to himself while sneaking around, just like Renegade Roe. 

The sordid Hollywood trash one might expect isn’t much to be found in The Peeping Tom Murders. The closest we get is a part where Morocco follows one of his innumerable leads to a Demille-esque director, and goes to the guy’s house to find him not there, but a bevy of post-party women lying around in an alcoholic stupor, and one of the women tells Morocco to “knock out” a particular young lovely who is getting on her nerves or something. 

What the lady is asking Morocco to do is bang the gal, you see, but it’s 1958 and all – and Morocco gamely obliges, but as mentioned above it occurs between paragraphs! Morocco takes the girl to a bedroom, she pulls him down to her, and next paragraph begins, “Five miles later, after a shower, Morocco…” I re-read the sequence just to ensure I hadn’t missed anything. Perhaps “five miles later” was a 1950s euphemism for “after banging the broad.” 

But really, Morocco just spends the novel going from one lead to another, and occasionally getting jumped by various characters. And in fact there are so many characters in the book I quickly got lost keeping track of them. There’s a lot of wasted opportunity, too; Garado, aka Morocco’s ostensible client, is himself protected by a lawyer who looks out for the family, and said lawyer employs this monstrous brute called Chaco who is described like some proto-Hulk. Hardly anything is done with the character, though. 

Not much is done with Santash, either. I thought it was interesting that Baynes made this character black, but it’s not much dwelt upon. One interesting angle though is that Morocco gets his information on Santash from a black crime boss in the city; Baynes again shows an admiration for inner-city blacks that was apparent in the previous two books. But otherwise Santash is sort of lost in the narratorial shuffle. 

Then there’s Ham Potter, a hard-drinking newsman (man, I wish those were still around today) who becomes Morocco’s pal during the course of the novel…eating steak and drinking hard and shooting the breeze. Again, I don’t exaggerate when I say that much of The Peeping Tom Murders features Morocco Jones talking to the many and sundry characters who populate the novel. 

Action is scant, and usually involves Morocco getting in a fistfight in pure hardboiled style. Lots of characters pull guns on him, but Morocco either turns the tables or manages to get saved by the sudden presence of yet another character who will distract the gun-toters. Again, Morocco gets saved quite a bit in the novel, which as with the previous books robs him of his tough-guy nature. 

To be honest, The Peeping Tom Murders was one of the most deceptively-slim books I’ve ever read. Despite “only” being 144 pages, it seemed that no matter how dogged of an effort I put into reading, the book just wouldn’t end! It was strange, because I wanted to like the novel, and thought the setup was interesting. But Jack Baynes fumbled the delivery this time, turning in a muddled effort that constantly stalled itself out, and way too many scenes of characters popping out of the woodwork to either threaten Morocco Jones or to provide him with info that would lead him to yet another character. 

My assumption is readers of the day felt the same, as the next volume would be the last. And as for Jack Baynes, aka Bertram Fowler, I have no idea whether he wrote anything else…if I had a copy of Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms, I’d see if there was an entry for him. Maybe I should order it from Interlibrary Loan again. The librarians are always super happy to lug that several-thousand-page monstrosity through the library’s pickup window for me when I pull up.

Fire In My Blood

Fire In My Blood, by Edward Hunt

No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

A few things first off about this obscure Manor PBO: the cover photo has nothing to do with the book, and my suspicion is that “Edward Hunt” was trying to get the book published by a more mainstream imprint and ended up selling it to Manor when there were no other takers. Also no idea who Hunt was/is; from my short research I discovered that an author of the same name published a paperback original through MacFadden-Bartell in 1971, titled Fortune Road.  There were a few parts where I wondered if it was a pseudonym of William Hegner, given the haughty bitchiness of the narrator, but overall Fire In My Blood does not demonstrate Hegner’s usual knack for snappy rapport or memorable situations. That said, there’s a part where the narrator’s father rapes her…and she enjoys it. 

That’s another thing: while credited to “Edward Hunt,” Fire In My Blood is narrated by a woman. Indeed, the conceit is that this book contains the unedited tapes of this woman’s life story, dictacted for an autobiography she’s been offered a tidy sum to write. This is because the woman, Marquesa Helen Giliberti, is the “queen of the jet-set,” daughter of a famous songwriter, wife of a famous entrepreneur, and later the wife of a famous Italian marquis. And also, she’s slept with about a zillion people. 

In former common parlance, our narrator Helen would be referred to as a slut. Today she’d probably be called an empowered woman. In the short, 193 pages of the book, Helen recounts how she has slept with practically everyone since losing her virginity at 14, sometime in the very early 1950s (I think; the author isn’t very forthcoming with dates). In an “Author’s Foreword,” which is actually by Helen and not the actual author, our narrator informs us that she’s been contracted to write about her torid life, and has insisted that she alone tell the tale, even though she has no writing background. She tells us that she’s about to speak of her life into audio tape, and the ensuing novel is supposed to be the ensuing recording. 

Edward Hunt, whoever he or she was, does properly convey the vibe of someone telling us this tale. There’s not much in the way of scene-setting or fancy wordplay. Also, curiously, there is hardly any sex. Yes, friends, this is another of those puzzling conundrums I encounter all too often in the world of sleazy ‘70s paperbacks: the “sexy novel” that doesn’t have any actual sex in it. Time and again “Helen” (which is to say Edward Hunt) ellipses the many and sundry sex scenes, usually telling us something as simple as, “it was a shattering experience” when reffering to the wholly off-page conjugations. And, given that the narrator is a woman, there’s none of the exploitation one would expect of the trash genre; I mean, it’s not like Helen keeps exploiting herself. (“My breasts were full, fresh melons, ripe for the plucking,” etc…hell maybe I should take a shot at writing the book.) 

Well anyway, this is also one of those novels where I wonder what the point of it even was. Helen is the darling of the jet-set and screws her way through a host of notables, but there’s no grand scheme to the narrative and no roman a clef moments that would fool the gullible ‘70s reader into assuming Fire In My Blood is the true story of some anonymous, real-world jet-setter. It’s a bland novel, is what I’m saying, and it’s more soap opera than trash. 

Humorously, the novel proper – after the facile “Author’s Foreword,” that is – opens with Helen complaining about 18th Century novels that would go into needless detail about the ancestors of the protagonists, or whatever, ie telling rather than showing…and then telling rather than showing is exactly what Edward Hunt proceeds to do over the course of the novel. Fire In My Blood gave me bad flashbacks to another bust of a “trashy novel,” Belladonna, which was similiarly sunk by an overbearing “this happened, then that happened” narrative that sucked all the life from the story. 

So basically, “Helen” tells us how she entered life as the daughter of a famous songwriter, a “virile” songwriter at that, known for his lusty conquests and whatnot. Plus there’s an older brother from a previous marriage of her father’s, Robert. Helen is sent off to live in a convent or whatever until she’s a preteen; her mother is dead, and she meets her father for the first time when she’s fourteen. She stays with him for a summer at Martha’s Vineyard, where Robert does her a huge “favor” by bringing her into the world of sex – not himself, but through a friend of his, a notorious “cocksman” who manages to take Helen’s virginity without much fuss. 

From here Helen goes full-on slut, sleeping with everyone (off-page, I should clarify). She bangs practically every boy in the vicinity; she tells us sometimes she takes on more than one at a time. Again, all this is told to us; none of these characters have a chance to breathe. One night Helen’s father catches her coming home late from her latest tussle, where she handled some guy on the beach. (Now that I think of it, perhaps this is the inspiration for the cover photo, after all.) Her father accuses Helen of whoredom (“Your teats are sagging,” being one memorable line in his savage appraisal of her post-sex physical state) and then…why then, he too has sex with her! 

After this, Helen’s father shuffles off in shame, and she tells us she never sees him again. Having gotten the ultimate taboo off his checklist, Edward Hunt quickly moves along, shutning Helen’s family to the narrative side; Helen summarily tells us in a few pages of her father’s death, years later, as well as her half-brother Robert’s death. Meanwhile Helen has latched onto the Kennedy-esque Bennet clan. 

Helen’s already told us she was in love with her father, claiming it was this unspeakable love that was the reason behind her whoring – doing anything possible for her father’s attention – but the author does little to explore this. Instead Helen becomes involved with a man her father’s age, family scion Jason Bennet, a widower who has spent decades ensuring his three sons have moved into politics and into law. 

Here too it’s very soapy; Helen comes into the fray because she first is with Ted Kennedy-esque Frank Bennet, even becoming pregnant by him. When she tells the elder Bennet that she’s with child, Jason tells Helen she is no longer to see his son…and then Jason asks Helen to dinner! We get more “tell don’t show” when Helen informs us that Jason Bennet, 51, is like an “old lion…insatiable” in bed. Oh and then Frank Bennet comes home unannounced one night and beats Helen in his rage, causing her to abort, but Helen never tells Jason Bennet about it. And Frank never finds out that Helen was pregnant with his child. 

Jason Bennet buys the farm shortly after, and though Helen is left the entirety of his estate, the three sons bully her out of it, leaving her with “only” a million. Off Helen goes to Swinging London – it’s apparently the mid-‘60s now, though Edward Hunt never specifies dates – and the whoring begins anew. “Before the night was over I would be under them, they would be inside me,” Helen tells us of the sundry men she sleeps her way through, making a name for herself as a world-class lay on the jet-set circuit. 

Here Helen makes her first friend, a wealthy widower named Sonia, but the character doesn’t contribute much to the story…other than to introduce Helen to The Steamrollers, a roman a clef Rolling Stones. “The Pop group,” Sonia clarifies, and Helen ultimately screws all five of them in one all-night orgy: “It was more like a wrestling match than a coupling.” Again, juicy details are threadbare in Fire In My Blood, a “Big Sexy novel” without any sex. 

The Steamrollers factor so meagerly in the tale that the book doesn’t even rate as a rock novel. Rather, Helen becomes involved with another guy, a wealthy British entreprenneur named Sir John Radlett; she meets him at an auction. This sequence is tiresome at best; Radlett has little interest in sex, and though Helen tries to be a good wife she can’t help but be attracted to the servants and whatnot. Given that Helen has screwed around a bujillion guys at this point, the reader won’t be too shocked at how this one plays out. 

The novel limps to a close with Helen in Italy, where apropos of nothing the famous Marquis Giliberti, an old Italian man of wealth, asks Helen to be his wife. But he’s another husband with little interest in her (Helen soon discovers the Marquis is more interested in little boys), and by novel’s end Helen is alone again. 

This is, of course, right where we met her, and Fire In My Blood ends with Helen proud of herself for accomplishing her task of telling her tale to the audio tapes…and informs us that this won’t be it for her: “In twenty years I expect to be writing a sequel.” 

As we all know, Fire In My Blood II: The Quickening was a worldwide success upon publication in 1994…okay seriously, it goes without saying that this obscure novel died an obscure death, and nothing was ever heard of Marquesa Helen Giliberti or Edward Hunt (whoever he or she was) again.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, by Sam Greenlee

January, 1970  Bantam Books

(Original hardcover edition 1968)

Most likely known more for its film adaptation (below), The Spook Who Sat By The Door started life as this hardcover novel published by Sam Greenlee in 1968. According to the back cover of the 2020 edition published by Wayne State University Press, the novel has been “continuously available in print since 1968,” and what’s more it “has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture.” Of course, “anti-racist” means the exact same thing as “racist,” but we’ll leave that alone for now. 

Actually, we won’t. The back cover of the Wayne State University Press edition also goes on to state, “As a tale of reaction to the forces of suppression, this book is universal.” To which, like pretty much all other “progressive” double-speak, I say bullshit. Indeed, the “hero” of this tale is such a craven, hate-filled bastard that I almost wondered if Sam Greenlee intended him as a lampoon of the whole “black rage” movement. But that might be giving more credit than is due, as there’s nothing to indicate Greenlee had any tricks up his sleeve; the novel is tiresomely serious, and the attempts at instilling a second-hand rage in the reader fails, mostly because the main character is such an iredeemable prick. He isn’t so much “reacting to the forces of suppression” as he is instigating a race war, for reasons that are decidedly self-centered. In fact the dude basically plans to have others do the fighting for him, while he lives in his bachelor pad sipping whiskey and listening to jazz on the hi-fi. 

The novel is also written in such a way that the reader must do all the heavy lifting; Greenlee has a tendency to write much of the narrative in summary, ie such and such happened, then such and such happened – like, it’s all nearly in outline format, with no drama or suspense to bring the characters or situations to life. And a lot of important stuff happens off-page, or isn’t exploited well enough to reap the full dramatic potential – something the filmmakers astutely corrected, as the movie is a lot better than the book, and not just because the soundtrack’s by Herbie Hancock. 

On the plus side, I was happy to discover that Greenlee wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door in the style of the popular fiction of the era; this is not a “literary” novel, or something akin to Ishmael Reed. And at times Greenlee does capture a masculine vibe in his terse prose; I also appreciated the frequent mentions of music, with characters even visiting record stores. Jazz musicians are mentioned often, and particular albums are mentioned, but Greenlee, writing in the late ‘60s, has his characters listening to the pre-electric stuff. I mean, as I’ve said before, I like my jazz funky, electric, and from the ‘70s. In fact, I’m listening to Eddie Harris’s Bad Luck Is All I Have as I write this review. 

The novel is set in the same period in which it was published, though the action takes place over a few years, leading to the “it could happen!” sluglines that adorned paperback copies in the early ‘70s. Despite what the Wayne State University edition’s back cover wants you to believe (not to mention what a particular political party wants you to believe), the era in which The Spook Who Sat By The Door occurs is very different from our modern era. But then, that same political party stays in power by cultivating and harnessing race rage – or, really, any kind of rage – so on that note you could say the book is still timely. I guess rage just never goes out of fashion with the left. 

Confirming this, politics is not really a driver for our “hero,” Dan Freeman. Rage is. This is fine; I mean rage is the driver for most men’s adventure protagonists of the era. But at least with those characters, you can empathize with them. Freeman is kept at such a distance from the reader – and other characters – that it’s not until late in the novel that you even learn what drives him. This undermines the power of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, along with the passive, summary-style narrative approach. 

If anything, Freeman – which is to say, possibly, Greenlee – shows most rage for liberal whites. A disdain for “caring” whites runs through the novel, meaning those white people who pretend to care for the plight of the blacks but have ulterior motives. In other words, virtue-signallers as they would now be called. There are a lot of humorous parts where these hypocrites are called out for their hypocrisy. 

But then, just as much anger is directed at blacks. There is a lot of antagonism between Dan Freeman and other blacks; in his intro in the novel, he’s bickering and sniping at fellow blacks who have been chosen for a new CIA program. They don’t like Freeman because he doesn’t seem to fit in, and Freeman doesn’t like them because they all have Ivy League educations and fraternity pins. In other words, in Freeman’s mind they are pretend caucasians. 

Curiously, the one group Freeman – and, possibly, Greenlee – does not have a problem with is actual racist white people! Indeed, it’s subtly conveyed that Freeman respects these people for showing their true feelings…with the hidden inference that Freeman likes it because he himself is a racist. 

Unless I missed something, Dan Freeman is not the titular “spook” who sat by the door. Rather, it’s a black man who has been hired by a congressman as a sounding board for the black voting public, but who mostly “sits by the door.” He opens the novel, implying that he will be an integral character in the novel, but he disappears after this opening – and, what’s more, the idea that forms the plot of the novel doesn’t even come from him! 

Rather, it’s the congressman’s wife who proposes, apropos of nothing, that the congressman push for an integrated CIA as a way of currying support from “the Negroes.” I mean, the “spook who sits by the door” isn’t even the one who comes up with the idea! Perhaps this is Greenlee’s point, that even the “token negro” who has literally been hired to give the black viewpoint is ignored by the liberal whites who have employed him – rather, they listen to their fellow liberal whites instead. As I say, the book is downright timely in some regards. 

Nevertheless, the plan is put in motion, and thus we are introduced without much fanfare to our ostensible hero, Dan Freeman. We don’t learn much about him, only that he’s from Chicago and has gotten through the intense trials to become one of the few black men up for CIA membership. We learn that he harbors a lot of rage, and also that he has ulterior motives of his own – the implication is clear that he plans to use this CIA training to cause some hell. But Greenlee keeps him at such a distance from us that we don’t get a clear idea of what it is he plans. 

In the meantime, he fights with his black comrades as well as the racists in charge of CIA training. As I stated at the outset, The Spook Who Sat By The Door takes place in a different world, where “integration” was detested by the racist whites who ran everything. At least, according to this novel. As mentioned, the book itself is very racist: all whites here are bigots who harbor prejudices against black people and whatnot. But then again such fiction is taken as truth today. Personally I’ve learned after fifty years of life that skin color means not a thing – an asshole is an asshole, regardless of race. 

Greenlee occasionally veers outside of his summary approach and gives us actual tense scenes, like when Freeman takes on his racist judo instructor. This is a cool part and has that masculine, men’s adventure-type vibe; the instructor is a white man, the referee is Korean, and Freeman mops the floor with the bigot. But after which he scolds himself for letting his “mask” slip; again, Greenlee has this tendency to keep Freeman’s true inclinations hidden from not only other characters but the reader himself (or “themselves,” if you go that way), and this sort of neuters the impact of the narrative. 

The CIA is run by “The General,” another bigot who intends to drum out all of the blacks through rigorous training. But as expected, Freeman manages to pass until the end – and, instead of becoming a field agent, he’s given a desk job in DC. So essentially he too becomes “a spook who sits beside the door.” Over the next few years, Freeman becomes a key player for the Agency, traveling around the world with various politicians and learning to grease the wheels in other countries. 

Along the way he has some “side pieces,” like a black hooker in DC he retains over the years, and also an old flame who apparently is Freeman’s main girlfriend, though she’s thrust on readers so casually that at first I confused her for the hooker. The idea is that even from these women Freeman hides his true self, though via the hooker we learn of his revolutionary tendencies, in that he refers to her as a “Dahomey Queen,” a reference to Africa. 

But again, the reader must do a lot of the work to make the narrative come to life. In this way Greenlee is similar to author Cecelia Holland, who also refrains from providing the motivations for her characters; I’ve tried two times over the past six years to read her doorstep of a sci-fi novel, Floating Worlds, and have given up halfway through each time due to my frustration over not being told why characters were doing what they were doing. 

Anyway, the General gives a patronizing speech to Freeman over dinner one night, telling him how “you people…will take generations” to fully integrate, and etc, and Freeman keeps his “mask” on, only losing control when he excuses himself to the restroom, where he cries in rage – curiously, a scene that was left out of the movie. Again following his own unstated goal, Freeman abruptly quits the CIA and goes back home to Chicago, returning to his former job as a social worker; he sets up a nice bachelor pad and again integrates with the upper-crust (read: liberal) white society. And meanwhile he hobknobs with the Cobras, a Black Power guerrilla outfit (read: The Black Panthers). Freeman only now demonstrates his true goal: to instill his CIA training on these black freedom fighters, to start a war on whitey. 

Now, the cynic in me wants to accuse Dan Freeman of cultural appropriation. I mean, think of it – he’s been taught by white people, and now he wants to use their own stuff against them. It’s not like Dan Freeman is an originator. This is why I think Sam Greenlee might have had some tricks up his sleeve, as he constantly refers to jazz musicians – real ones, like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt – and the implication is that these black Americans are originators, men who have broken away from their shackles (rather real or conceived) and have gone on to create instead of to destroy. 

But as we all know – and have learned – the left only knows how to destroy, not create. And this is what Freeman teaches the Cobras to do. All the hand-fighting, shooting, bomb-making, and etc tricks he learned in the Agency. As “Turk,” Freeman again wears a mask, not allowing himself to get too close to the Cobras, as he knows they’ll need to be expendable. Again, our hero is a prick. For Freeman plans to begin racial skirmishes across the country, his Cobras using all kinds of whitey’s tricks against them…while Freeman himself maintains his pose as the high-society “integrated negro” who lives in a cushy apartment, sipping whiskey and listening to jazz. 

Again, so much is told instead of shown. The Cobras hit a bank – we’re told about it. They dose a guy with LSD, we’re told about it. Indeed, for years I’ve had this jazz-funk DJ mix, which I blogged about on here many years ago: Pulp Fusion: Cheeba Cheeba Mix. Well there’s a sample in that mix, some guy saying, “I just met the most wonderful bunch of n—” (you of course know the word I mean), and I had no idea that line of dialog came from the movie version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door. And it’s in the novel, too – but unlike the film, it’s delievered in hindsight, capping off yet another summary-style excursion of “this happened, then hat happened,” so that, like virtually everything else in the novel, the line lacks any punch. 

Things come to a head in Chicago, where the riots begin, soon erupting across the country. And meanwhile Dan Freeman sits in his bachelor pad, posing as a member of integrated society. His “mask” is still firmly in place, as he lies to everyone – to the Cobras who serve him and look up to him, to the old girflriend who comes visiting. None of them know who the true Freeman is, and as mentioned even we readers never do, as his motivation is never satisfactorily delivered. Thus the novel’s intended downbeat ending – or happy ending, depending on your point of view – also lacks much punch.

In 1973 a film adaptation was released; I’ve come across speculation online that the CIA “yanked” the movie from theaters because it gave away too many secrets, and etc. Again: bullshit. This is a low-budget film, of a piece with the other independent Blaxploitation productions of the era, and I highly doubt the CIA was bothered by it at all. Episodes of Mission: Impossible gave away more “secrets.” 

The only things that elevate this film adaptation are Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack and the fact that protagonist Dan Freeman – as well as the other characters – is given a chance to breathe; we actually see things as they happen, and aren’t told everything in summary. If the Cobras – here named “The Black Cobras” in the movie – rob a bank, we see the bank robbery as it goes down, instead of reading a paragraph summary of the events. 

Also, Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook, who is very good in the role) is given the motivation he was denied in the novel. Indeed, the idea that he goes into Agency training precisely to start a race war is not evident in the film version; the idea is just as easily conveyed that his frustrations with lack of integration are what push him over the edge. As mentioned above, the part where the General gives his patronizing speech remains in the film version, but Freeman’s emotional breakdown after it has been removed from the adaptation, which I found curious. 

Sam Greenlee himself was a co-writer of the script, as well as a producer of the film, so one wonders if it was his attempt to rectify the passive tones of his original novel. Characters are still sort of thrust on us, like Freeman’s old girlfriend from Chicago who still throws him a casual lay every once in a while, but at least these characters are introduced more properly than in the book. Also the movie sports better characterizations for the Cobras, leading to memorable scenes – like the “yellow” Cobra (ie a light-skinned black) who chaffes that everyone thinks he’s white, leading to an emotional “I was born black, I’m gonna die black” speech – one that was sampled in yet another funk DJ mix I like a lot, Blaxploitation Mixtape by DJ EB. 

But as mentioned, the movie is clearly low-budget. The novel opens with a big cabinet meeting, but in the movie it’s three people in a small office. And hell, the titular “spook” who sits by the door has been turned into a woman in the movie, but even here it’s the politician’s wife who comes up with the “integrated CIA” idea. A lot of Freeman’s simmering schemes are left out of the movie, but the fight with the judo teacher remains. Overall, though, the feeling is that the producers were trying to make a legit movie, as The Spook Who Sat By The Door lacks much of what one thinks of when one thinks of a “Blaxploitation” movie. Indeed there isn’t even any nudity or much violence. 

One thing the film does have that is similar to other Blaxploitation flicks is a great soundtrack. Recorded right in the midst of his “Headhunters” phase, Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack features early versions of material that would come out on his Thrust LP. We’re talking jazz-funk with serious cosmic aspirations, courtesy far-out synth work with ring modulators and echoplex and a host of other sonic trickery. It’s a shame the soundtrack was never properly released, as what exists in the film sounds incredible, and for me the music was the highlight of the film. 

It’s taken me some weeks to write this review, mostly due to work and life commitments. In this time the race conflict has come even here to Frisco, Texas – on April 2nd of this year a seventeen-year-old boy was stabbed to death at a track meet by another boy of the same age. This garnered national coverage, but curiously race was never mentioned by the mainstream news outlets; the victim was white, the perpetrator was black.  Curious indeed that this racial element was not mentioned, given the corporate media’s obsession with “racial motivations” when it’s white-on-black crime.  (It was up to the “right-wing news outlets” to even mention the racial angle…which of course was yet more indication of their right-wingery, you shouldn’t be surprised to know.) 

Granted, race could very well have had nothing to do with the murder here in Frisco – it’s a horrific event regardless of motivation – but I bring it up because it illustrates, again, how different our world is from the 1968 of Sam Greenlee’s novel. How would the national media have responded if a black boy stabbed a white boy to death then? Indeed, per the incessantly-aggrieved pearl clutchers of social media, it’s racist to even consider that there was a racial motivation to the murder here in Frisco. Of course, these are the same people who took to the streets in “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020.  Of course, race was never proven to be a motivation for the incident that sparked that particular outrage, either, but whatever.

Now that I’ve finally read The Spook Who Sat By The Door, I think it would only make sense to read Civil War II, written by Don Pendleton and published shortly after Greenlee’s novel came out; it appears to pick up where The Spook Who Sat By The Door left off.

UPDATE: I wrote this review over the weekend, and in that time the situation here in Frisco has quickly progressed.  Race has now been brought into it...but not by the side you might assume.  (Actually, if you have been paying any attention whatsoever to our collapsing modern world, you know exactly which side brought race into it).  That the murdered white kid has been demonized as a deserving victim says all that needs to be said about how far astray our society has gone.  But at least there are people out there like this young lady who see and speak the truth.