The Sadist (aka Ryker #6)

The Sadist, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

This was the last installment of Ryker to sport a painted cover, and as usual with Leisure Books I figure it was commissioned for a different novel – the guy that’s supposed to be Ryker has blond hair and is toting what appears to be a .45 automatic, and the white-haired doctor looming over the naked woman on the operating table doesn’t exist in the book. In fact, the villain of the piece, the titular “Sadist” (though he’s never actually referred to as such), has dark hair and is relatively young. There is a part where Ryker visits the morgue and views the burned corpse of a female victim, so maybe the cover artist just got his wires crossed.

At any rate The Sadist is a slow-moving chore of a read, lacking the spark of the earlier De Mille installments. Ryker here has been emasculated into a cipher, with none of the blowhard assholery of the De Mille original, nor even the fiery gumption of the version Len Levinson gave us in #3: The Terrorists. He lives only for his job, and when not at work sits at home and watches TV or reads magazines. He doesn’t fight with his fellow officers, and indeed has a friendly, respectful rapport with his commanding officer, Lt. Sal Fiscetti, referring to him on a first-name basis. But otherwise the same recurring characters and locations appear as in the De Mille novels –  there’s fellow cop Bo Lindly, and Ryker works out of the same fictional department, the Twenty-First Precinct on West 68th Street – which leads me to believe that series editor Peter McCurtin at least tried to retain some order of semblance with the original De Mille installments. Ryker even reads with his lips, a habit De Mille noted in his books. The Sadist also follows the late ‘60s/early ‘70s settings of the De Mille novels, taking place in 1970.

Thanks to Lynn Munroe we know that the first writer to serve as “Edson T. Hamill” was Paul Hofrichter, who turned in the fifth volume, The Child Killer. I have that one but likely will never read it, or at least not anytime soon – a novel about a creep who rapes and kills little boys just doesn’t sound like something I want to read. As Bill Crider so aptly put it, “It’s probably best that some books remain forgotten.” And thanks to Lynn we also know that Hofrichter wrote this volume as well – and it’s on the same level as all his other work. There’s hardly any action and the book is mostly comprised of arbitrary situations featuring the main villain or Ryker just sitting around and brainstorming about the case.  There is a bland, meat-and-potatoes narrative style and zero spark to the characters or the situations.

And as with most other Hofrichter books I’ve read, the supposed protagonist is a supporting character in his own book. The true star is Michael Marlin, a professional hitman in his 40s or 50s who has spent the past few decades killing women – older housewives in particular. We meet him in action, in an overlong sequence in which he chases some poor woman to her death in the Columbus Circle section of Manhattan, which we’re informed at night becomes a no man’s land of junkies, rapists, and pickpockets. Marlin forces the woman to climb an endless series of stairs to the rooftop, holding her at gunpoint, and then throws her down the chimney stack. After this folks we get a 32-page backstory on who Marlin is and how he got into this particular game; a specialist, he charges twenty thousand bucks a hit to rid wealthy husbands of wives they no longer want.

Meanwhile Ryker sits around in the precinct house and gabs with “Sal” and Lindly about the case. There’s a gruesome bit where he and Fiscetti visit the morgue at Bellevue, all of it uncannily similar to the part in Death Squad where Keller views a corpse being embalmed. In fact this part goes aboveboard in the “too much information” department, Hofrichter clearly striving for legitimacy in his otherwise lethargically-paced procedural, as Ryker views the horrifically charred body of the woman killed in the opening chapter and we get to know every little detail of what he sees.

Marlin is the star of the show, even picking up a woman for himself, a “sleazy” blonde go-go dancer who lives next door at the grungy hotel he’s staying in. (Ryker for his part goes without a woman – but he’s such a cipher he wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway.) Marlin despite his killing specialty is a hit with women – you might even say he’s a lady-killer if you were into lame puns – and he picks this babe up with ease, though Hofrichter keeps the tomfoolery squarely off-page. Eventually she figures out there’s more to her mystery neighbor than she suspected, leading to another gruesome sequence in which Marlin employs one of his fallback termination methods: Drano.

Women fare very poorly in The Sadist; it only occurred to me after I read the novel that every single female character in it is killed! In fact on the same night Marlin uses his Drano technique, he also flat-out strangles a woman he’s been hired to kill, another “sleazy” type who comes on to him. It’s all very lurid but undone by Hofrichter’s typical penchant for page-filling and padding. For example, Edward Marcel, the husband of the woman killed in the opening chapter, is giving his own inordinate subplot in which hardly anything happens. What makes it all the more annoying is that his name, Marcel, is so similar to “Marlin” that you can’t help but confuse the two characters.

There isn’t much of an attempt at bringing sleazy ‘70s Manhattan to life. Occasionally we’ll get the mention of a certain street, or maybe a topical detail like “a seedy hotel on Ninth Avenue,” but there’s no feeling of grungy veracity like you’d get with Len Levinson. But anyway Ryker and “Sal” basically just drive around the New York area and interview people who knew Mrs. Marcel, leading to reader annoyance in that they go over stuff we readers were privy to way back in the first chapter. What’s worse is we have lots of brainstorming sequences where the two cops try to figure out how Mrs. Marcel was killed and who might’ve hired her killer. This does at least lead to Ryker detecting a pattern; there are a few other murdered housewives in Manhattan, and Ryker begins to suspect they’re courtesy the same serial killer who has been offing housewives across the United States over the past few decades.

But there’s no action, nothing memorable. The “climax” involves Ryker rounding up Marcel and a few other husbands whose wives were “mysteriously murdered” and grilling them for info. Eventually he finds the bookie who arranged the hits, a sleazy character named Poagie. There’s a lot of stuff where Fiscetti – a police lieutenant, mind you – questions Ryker on basic investigative method and delivers bald exposition on this or that. And again as is typical with Hofrichter the book features an abrupt switch to “action” for the harried finale…poorly-handled action that doesn’t deliver a jolt because it’s so unexploited.

Marlin has relocated to another hotel, and a dragnet has surrounded him there without his knowledge. Ryker, Fiscetti, and Lindly go in with guns drawn and try to get the jump on Marlin, but he sees them and starts shooting with his .38. Lindly is hit in the chest, and the last we see of him he’s lying on the ground with a pale face.  Hofrichter never bothers to inform us if he lives or dies. This is another interesting paralell, because the “real” Lindly, ie De Mille’s original creation, was also killed in the line of duty, in Death Squad (despite appearing without any explanation in The Smack Man, which took place after Death Squad!). So I guess Bo Lindly just can’t catch a break. 

Anyway Ryker’s knocked out but then chases Marlin up to the roof, where the two get in a knock-down, drag-out fight in which Marlin kicks Ryker in the balls twice. Finally our hero, who has been instructed to take Marlin alive (the dude’s killed literally thousands of women and they want him to get the chair), decides to hell with it and hoists Marlin in the air and tosses him. And then delivers a lame one-liner, calling Marlin a “devil,” which seems incredibly underwhelming given how many innocent lives the guy has taken. And that’s it for The Sadist, and I guess that’s also it for me and Ryker…unless I ever decide to read The Child Killer.