Super Cop Joe Blaze #1: The Big Payoff

Super Cop Joe Blaze #1: The Big Payoff, by Robert Novak
February, 1974  Belmont Tower Books

I forgot that I even had this first volume of  Super Cop Joe Blaze. A little over three years ago I read the third one, which was by Len Levinson, and three years before that I read  the second volume, which was by some unknown author. It’s been too long since I read that one, so I can’t say if The Big Payoff is courtesy the same author. It seems to be, at least judging from what I wrote about the second volume. The same style is here, a rather bland police procedural only livened up when it comes to the exploitative description of the mauled female corpses detective Joe Blaze encounters in the line of duty.

First though a pedantic note – I think this is the novel I was confusing Trouble Is My Business with. In my review of that one I mentioned I had been under the impression it was about a “knife-wielding sex killer,” and figured that I “must’ve confused it with some other sleazy ‘70s cop novel.” As I read the lurid cover slugline of The Big Payoff (“The girl had been pretty before a sex killer worked her over with a knife”), I had the belated realization that this was the book I’d been thinking of when I read Trouble Is My Business back in 2013. How sad that I would remember something so trivial seven years later, but that’s just how my mind works. Anyway the editor of The Big Payoff (aka Peter McCurtin) liked that “sex killer” line so much it’s also repeated on the back cover.

And as with The Concrete Cage this novel is truly lurid when it comes to the copious descriptions of murdered and violated female bodies. In this regard I suspect it probably was the same author. Whoever it is has a pretty humdrum narrative style, with a lot of pages padded with incidental dialog and arbitrary plot digressions. Unlike The Concrete Cage, there are also random action scenes, just stupid stuff clearly put there to actually have something happen, like when Blaze goes into a bar to ask some questions and two guys storm in and try to knock the place over. The author was likely one of the Belmont Tower/Leisure regulars, and if I had to guess I’d say it might have been J.C. Conaway – who I still think was the mystery author of The Savage Women.

The novel opens with a feel for cop-world realism, a la William Crawford; we meet Joe Blaze while he’s on the take, picking up his illicit pay. We’re bluntly informed that some cops “just live with” being on the pad, and Blaze is one of those cops. Only later in the novel will we learn that he’s using the money for vaguely Robin Hood-esque purposes. This serves up a subplot which eventually ties into the main plot; Blaze goes to his precinct, where he’s told by his boss, Lt. Danny Coogan, that one of Blaze’s pad, a hooker named Doris, has given some guy at the U.N. the clap and needs to be brought in for questioning. Coogan advises Blaze to personally handle it, given that she pays Blaze for protection thus could get pissed off to suddenly find herself arrested…and turn Blaze in for collecting bogus “protection” pay from her.

Also appearing is Blaze’s partner, Ed Nuthall; both he and Coogan were also in The Concrete Cage, which might be another indication it’s by the same author. And unlike Nelson De Mille’s Ryker, Blaze has a friendly rapport with his colleagues, even referring to the Lt. as “Danny” in their frequent dialog exchanges. Indeed, Coogan is aware of Blaze’s pad, even though he isn’t supposed to be, given that it’s illegal and all, and goes out of his way to protect him. As for Nuthall, he doesn’t do much to gain the reader’s awareness, and thinking back on the book I can’t even recall a single thing he does. For the most part, Coogan acts more as Blaze’s partner, the one who brainstorms the case with him.

I almost thought some stuff had been cut out of the text, because Coogan tells Blaze to round up Doris at the bottom of one page, then at the top of the very next page Blaze is suddenly at an upscale apartment building on 69th Street…and finds a bunch of patrol cars outside of it…and goes in to investigate the murder scene within! And the murdered young lady is not Doris, and Doris isn’t even mentioned for several more pages, so the reader is really confused for a while…because it gradually develops that, as coincidental as can be, some other woman has been killed in Doris’s building and Blaze just takes over the case, completely forgetting that his original task here was to collect Doris. This will have repercussions later.

Here we have the first of what will be a few murdered young women, Blaze casually inspecting the mutilated and no doubt raped corpse, the killer using a knife to slash the poor young girl’s throat. Here’s where it detours from the other cheap Belmont/Leisure cop thrillers, because Blaze doesn’t go by the book and we don’t just get a dry procedural. First he tracks down a notorious pimp who works 69th Street, cornering him in a subway station on 42nd Street, and proceeds to beat the shit out of him for info. Immediately after this Blaze is almost mugged, and proceeds to beat the shit out of his would-be mugger. This is the first of the random action scenes Novak will use to spruce up the otherwise-boring narrative.

Blaze isn’t done slapping people around. From the pimp he learns of a moving van that was outside the building on 69th Street before the murder. Before Blaze can research there’s another body found, in an apartment building on East 51st between Lexington and Third. After viewing the latest mauled female corpse (in which the girl’s eye has popped out, nearly causing Coogan to barf), Blaze finds out one of the tenants discovered the body…and starts slapping the witness around for info. But it’s okay, because the guy’s a heroin addict and was in the process of preparing a fix. Getting into it, Blaze also slaps around the guy’s girlfriend and, apropos of nothing, says she might be the next victim of the mysterious killer! He gets more info from them on the possible perpetrator of the crimes.

“Talking, talking talking – half [Blaze’s] time seemed to be wasted in talking,” rants the narrative, and the reader can only respond, “No shit!” There’s too much talking in The Big Payoff. Blaze visits crime scenes, engages witnesses in interminable conversations. He goes back to the precinct, engages Coogan in interminable conversations. And things only pick up when there’s an arbitary action scene, like when Blaze – at the expense of more pages-filling dialog – gets a lead on the moving van at the scene of the kills, and finds it abandoned in the city. He goes into a nearby bar to see if anyone inside glimpsed the driver of the van…only for a black guy and a Hispanic guy to storm in with guns drawn and attempt to rob the bar. Blaze pulls his service .38 and takes them both down, shooting one in the leg and the other in the gut, getting winged in the shoulder in the process.

This serves to make Blaze a hero, with his story in the paper and the other cops at the precinct applauding him. It also serves to protect him from the shoe that’s about to drop; Doris, the whore Blaze was supposed to round up at the start of the book, got hauled in by some other cop and immediately threw Blaze under the bus – she pays him for “protection” so as to keep her out of jail for her whoring, and what good did it do her? Now Blaze is under investigation, and Coogan hopes the heroic act will play in his favor. Unfortunately it doesn’t, and Blaze is suspended for being a pig on the pad. Meanwhile we readers have learned, via another of those arbitrary scenes that seemingly exist only to fill pages, that Blaze gives his pad collections to widows of cops.

In his review, Marty McKee complained that there was no titular “big payoff” in the book, but what I think it might refer to is that Blaze “pays off” his debt to Doris. But again it’s handled as arbitrarily as can be. First Blaze captures the killer, a slim moving company guy named Jerry Laughlin, who per Blaze’s suspicion already has a mile-long record of assault and rape charges, yet has been let go due to slimy liberal lawyers. Blaze and Nuthall engage Laughlin in a massive, nigh-endless car and foot chase that spans along the East River and outside of Manhattan, with a few civilians and cops killed in the process. When Blaze finally gets Laughlin he beats him to a pulp…and that’s that, the novel’s ended. But it’s only page 129 and the book’s 173 pages!

So as to that titular payoff…right after collaring the killer Blaze is suspended due to his pad activities. And what’s worse, Laughlin’s been let off the hook, again due to liberal lawyers. So Blaze is walking along in desolation, and finds himself outside that building on 69th Street, where this whole sordid mess began – not just the kills, but also Doris, who has gotten Blaze fired. Blaze starts to get the vibe that something’s wrong in there, and bullshits his way past the door guard…and up to Doris’s floor, where he hears screaming in her room. Yes, folks, Jerry Laughlin, for no apparent reason, just happens to be in Doris’s room and is trying to kill her!

This leads to another pages-filling action scene that has zero spark despite the amount of words poured into it. Laughlin, even though he’s meek and thin, gets the better of Blaze, beating him up and almost throwing him out the window to the pavement 60-some floors below. Blaze finally remembers he’s supposed to be savage and both bites Laughlin and pokes his eye out, then throws him out the window…and a rescued Doris of course drops her charges against Blaze. Thus I propose that “The Big Payoff” refers to this climactic action scene.

Not that it much matters – The Big Payoff is fairly boring and slow-moving, and definitely lacks the lurid fun of Len’s contribution to the series. And this was just the first volume!! You’d think McCurtin and Leisure would’ve come out of the gate with something a little more entertaining. I didn’t dislike the book as much as Marty did – I always enjoy a look at sleazy ‘70s New York City – but there certainly was room for some improvement. You can see already why the series only lasted three volumes, because I don’t remember The Concrete Cage being much better.

Anyway, no idea who actually wrote it, but I’ll stick with my J.C. Conaway theory (another guess would be Ralph Hayes). The knowledge of Manhattan and its sleazier environs is one clue, as is the page-filling dialog. Not much is known about Conaway, but I did read – from an Ebay listing many years ago, where someone was selling all of Conaway’s personal author copies, shortly after Conaway died – that he never learned to type, and thus dictated all of his books. I find this image very funny…I can just see a grizzled pulp writer reclining in his Archie Bunker chair with a can of Schlitz and a cheap cigar and shouting lurid copy for some poor female typist to take down: “‘The girl had been pretty before a sex killer worked her over with a knife.’ Ya got that, toots?”