The Scarred Man

The Scarred Man, by Basil Heatter
June, 1973  Fawcett Gold Medal

Treading a similar path as another Fawcett Gold Medal biker novel, The Blood Circus, The Scarred Man comes off like one of those men’s adventure magazine bikersploitation yarns taken to novel length – and if the excerpts in Wyatt Doyle and Bob Deis’s awesome Barbarians On Bikes are any indication, many of those men’s mag biker stories were indeed first-person yarns about vets taking on bikers. Basil Heatter was a veteran pulp writer, and I’ve picked up a few of his paperbacks, but this is the first one I’ve actually read. He definitely has all the skills to be admired in a veteran pulp writer, delivering a lean, taut tale with memorable characters. The only misstep is that the final third seems to come from a completely different novel.

As I read The Scarred Man I was under the impression Heatter was British; the characters use the occasional British-ism (ie “bloody,” or an inordinate fondess for the adverb “quite”), and in general the narrative style gives off the vibe of British pulp. Plus there’s the name “Basil.” But Heatter was American, and his characters here are also Americans: William Shaw, a 40 year-old “brilliant young corporate lawyer from New York,” narrates the story for us, which given internal evidence takes place between September and November of 1972. Shaw is a veteran of the Korean War and now lives basically the life of a men’s mag protagonist, going on random global adventures with his beautiful 30 year-old wife Stacey. Their current getaway is a ketch they’ve bought near Miami, with plans to take it on a cruise to Jamaica.

But when the story opens Stacey and Shaw have decided on the spur of the moment to rent a Honda motorcycle and go riding through the Everglades. The Honda breaks down and Shaw has to fix it in the dark; just as it’s fixed they see a trio of bikers go along the road. When Shaw and Stacey get the Honda moving, they round a corner and find the three bikers waiting for them in ambush. They’re all on chopped Harleys but I’m not sure what sort of self-respecting outlaw bikers they are, given that they each wear leather jackets and helmets with the visors down. Shaw crashes to avoid hitting them, and then the nightmare begins; the brawny biker boss smashes Shaw in the head with a chain, knocking him into a stupor, and then he and his buddies get down to the business of gang-raping Stacy. Or as the big biker puts it, “We’re just gonna fuck your little chick.”

One thing that undoes The Scarred Man in this opening quarter is the snarky, ironic sense of humor in Shaw’s narration, which jars against the nightmarish aspects of the plot. For example Shaw wakes up in the hospital after passing out from the blow to the head, and he’s making ironic comments in his narration about being hounded by traffic cops in the afterlife. The reader’s like, “I know laughter’s the best medicine and all, but dude your wife was just gang-raped two pages ago!” This jarring humor wears out its welcome, but curiously disappears once Stacey’s left the narrative. In hindsight I wondered if all this was intentional and Heatter’s motive was that Shaw’s humor was a way of masking his true feelings over Stacey, her fate, and his own guilt. This could be it, as Heatter is definitely a quality writer, but still the ironic humor doesn’t sit right when you’re actually reading the book.

Shaw for his part now has a scar on his face, and presumably he’s the “scarred man” of the title (though confusingly a villain later in the book also has a scarred face), but Heatter doesn’t much describe the scar nor bring much attention to it throughout the book. For a couple months Shaw and Stacey try to rebuild their life, with Stacey slowly coming out of her catatonic shell. There’s a nicely-handled sequence where Stacey comes to Shaw’s bed one night – the first time she’s done so since the rape two months before – but Shaw pretends to be asleep, too wrapped up in his own hangups. She says nothing and gets back into her own bed. When Shaw comes back from getting breakfast the next morning, he discovers that Stacey has jumped off the balcony of their hotel suite to her death 18 floors below. After taking care of the funeral, Shaw gets around to what he’s subconsciously known he was going to do from the beginning: hunt down the three bikers and kill them.

Heatter as mentioned is a skilled writer, and he successfully works Shaw’s law background into the revenge scheme. While the cops seem unable to find out who raped Stacey, stating that there are too many outlaw biker clubs tearing through Florida, Shaw takes matters into his own hands. He reads about a gang that’s gotten in trouble down south, almost running over a little kid. Shaw flies down there – to represent the bikers in court. The club is called the Beaks and their leader, a cruel-looking bastard named Stud, distrusts this lawyer who claims to want to represent the Beaks at no expense. But Shaw ends up winning his trust and, hating himself for it, gets the Beaks exonerated on all charges, save for the biker who nearly ran over the kid – and he manages to just get that one a light jail sentence.

This succeeds in getting into Stud’s good graces, and Shaw starts hanging out with the club, hoping to get info. A problem with The Scarred Man is that coincidence too often comes into play; sure enough, Stud starts boasting about how women “want to be raped” by bikers, especially that one time in the Everglades when Stud and two buddies came across a guy and his girl on a Honda… Heatter plays out Stud’s fate in flashback sequences, with Shaw having drawn him alone into the Everglades and blowing his knee out with a .38. Here Shaw will grill Stud on who the other two rapists were and then blow his head off.

The action moves to Boston, which opens with an otherwise-random bit that I found very interesting from the perspective of 40-plus years later:

Here Shaw buys himself a chopper (which isn’t much described) and gets some biker clothes at the Army-Navy store; he completes the look with an “Indian headband.” There’s some good dialog here with various one-off characters wondering what the hell straight-looking Shaw is up to. This section of the book is really the only true “biker fiction” part of the entire novel. Thanks to Stud’s info Shaw has learned that one of the perpetrators was a biker named Soldier, who likely will be up here to take part in the East Coast Rallies, held in New Hampshire. Shaw gets on his chopper and joins up with the army of bikers that have descended on the small town that’s hosting the event – and again, coinicidence be damned, he strikes gold fairly quickly, finding himself singled out by a suspicious biker named Tiny. 

Gradually Shaw works his way into Tiny’s group, among them Tiny’s sixteen year-old mama, Pearly, and also a mysterious blond biker with a slight build but hard eyes. Pearly emerges as the most memorable character in the novel; she’s the first girl to get close to Shaw since Stacey, proving herself to be wise beyond her years – not that 40 year-old Shaw has any sexual designs on the teenaged girl. Instead Heatter succeeds in giving this more of an emotional resonance, with Pearly breaking through the icy façade Shaw has built for himself. There’s also nicely-done dialog about how her dad back home is more worried about the TV reception than where his daughter is.

The townspeople are terrified of the bikers, the local law trying to segregate them in a remote camping site, and soon enough it boils over and the assembled bikers are as “stirred up as Apaches on a rampage.” They descend on the town, and here Heatter too quickly brings this sequence to a close; that mysterious blond biker at Tiny’s side is Soldier, of course, and Shaw gets his revenge by challenging him to a chopper joust. But even here coincidence intervenes again – a random dog runs out in front of Soldier’s bike and proves his undoing. It’s little things like this that keep The Scarred Man from greatness; Shaw should be the deliverer of bloody payback, not some poor little dog that gets in Soldier’s way.

For some reason the final third drops the whole biker angle and goes for a marina mystery vibe; now it’s a taut thriller as Shaw heads for Jamaica on his ketch with a pretty jet-setting blonde named Mary Caldwell. And when I say the biker angle is dropped I mean it’s dropped. It’s almost as if Heatter is using the finale of some earlier, unpublished yarn and has just clumsily welded it to his biker revenge story. To say it’s dissatisfying would be an understatement. Shaw’s gotten to this point due to the final lead Stud gave him – the third and final biker is named Skid, and all Stud knew was that Skid was from somewhere in the Palm Beach area. Surprisingly, Shaw makes nothing out of the fact that all three bikers have a name that starts with “S” (as does Shaw himself – at least his last name), and also it seems ridiculous that Shaw was just in Miami and then went to Boston before coming back down to Florida.

Again it’s all like a completely different novel; Shaw goes into a notorious bar owned by a guy named Red, who dispenses drugs from upstairs, and makes up some story about having a line on a few hundred pounds of “Jamaican Gold.” The belabored setup has it that Shaw’s heard some guy named Skid is good for acting as security on drug deals, and he wants Red’s help in finding him. All very ridiculous and overly-complicated, and again just seems like Heatter had another unfinished story laying around that he decided to weld onto the end of this one. After meeting with Shaw encounters the lovely Mary Caldwell, who comes over to visit him at his ketch; she’s worldly and beautiful and claims to be Skid’s sister. Again Shaw finds himself becoming attracted to a woman for the first time since losing Stacey.

Eventually it builds to Mary and Shaw on the ketch, bound for Jamaica; Mary claims that Skid’s actually there, Heatter at this point deciding to go all-out with the coincidental nonsense. But he’s also peppered enough foreshadowing into this sequence that the reader kind of has an idea where it’s going. This sequence is also the most gory in the novel, with Red showing up to pull a heist on Shaw’s (nonexistent) drug money and Mary coming to the defense with a pistol. But the big “surprise” reveal just falls flat – as mentioned the reader at this point has a good idea who Skid is, and the inevitable comeuppance isn’t suitably retributive. There’s also stuff here that would offend the readers of our #metoo era, with declarations that Stacey enjoyed her gang-raping.

All in all, The Scarred Man makes for a fun read, but I definitely enjoyed the biker portions more than anything else. Heatter puts in enough biker details that you suspect he consulted an issue or two of Easyrider Magazine. The sequence in New Hampshire with the biker rally is especially entertaining, not to mention Shaw’s dialog with young Pearly, but it’s resolved too quickly – especially when you consider that the final sequence isn’t nearly as entertaining. But as mentioned Heatter’s writing is skilled and economical and he successfully pulls the reader along, though there is a strange tendency to randomly slip into present-tense at times; this happens on page 65, at the New Hampshire rally, and comes and goes so quickly in the narrative that I assume it had to be something Heatter missed in the editing stage.