Narc #9: Kill For It

Narc #9: Kill For It, by Robert Hawkes
September, 1975  Signet Books

The final volume of Narc is of a piece with the previous installments: a sort of ensemble affair that has more in common with the crime novels of the day than men’s adventure. And poor John Bolt, the series protagonist (who seems to have gotten yet another makeover on the cover – love the plaid pimp coat!), disappears for long stretches of the narrative while we focus on the stream-of-conscious thoughts of various one-off characters.

For once though we have an actual change so far as the series goes: Kill For It doesn’t take place in the usual boiling hot New York summer, but in the midst of a freezing winter. Otherwise there’s no pickup from the previous volume or any other volume, and Bolt is even more of a cipher in this one. I just realized that it’s taken me ten years to finish this series, but Marc Olden wrote the series in the span of only two years – while also writing Black Samurai and who knows what else. So doubtless he was a machine at this point, churning out pages to meet an ever-approaching deadline. The only problem is, eventually the readers begin to detect this…I mean how many volumes now have followed this template? Busy plotting, too many minor characters, and Bolt lost in the shuffle. It’s no surprise really that this was the last one, and I wonder if Olden minded, as he seems bored.

Another change from the usual template is we’re denied an opening action scene. Usually the opening sequences are the highlights of the Narc books, but this one’s pretty tame: Bolt and recurring fellow narc Kramer (aka the black one) kneeling in the snow, guns to their heads. Posing as buyers from Detroit, they’ve been burned by a multiracial trio that’s posing as cops, three members of a group who have been burning drug dealers in New York over the past couple months. Bolt and Kramer walked right into the trap, falling for the story that these three had a connection to some high-grade heroin, and now they’re in the snow with guns to their heads. There’s no action, no fighting; instead it’s on the suspense tip, as the trio decide to abduct Kramer and hold him for ransom, believing his cover story that he’s the brother of a high-ranking Detroit drugrunner who could afford to pay for his release.

The plotting is especially busy in Kill For It. We have this storyline, about the group that’s burning drug dealers, adbucting them and holding them for ransom, and we also have another storyline about a group of New York cops who raided the porperty clerk’s office a couple years ago, stole all the heroin and coke, and sold it through a Mafia fence for a cool three million. But the brains of this group, an older married guy named Lt. Hannah, hid the money somewhere, telling the others to wait until the heat cooled off before they collect their earnings. This is enough for two books but Olden jams the separate plots together; gradually we’ll learn that the dealer-burning group has its sights set on the cop-stolen three million, and even more gradually the two plots coalasce.

Meanwhile Bolt’s been left to collect the demanded $75,000 for Kramer’s release; his main concern is that the captors not learn Kramer’s really a Fed. The novel occurs over a twenty-four hour period, another notable difference from previous volumes, but for the most part Bolt spends the time simmering in the D-3 office or chasing various leads. There’s nary a hint of action throughout; even the finale plays off more like a low-key ‘70s crime thriller. While fretting over Kramer’s predicament, Bolt is approached by a hulking, hirsute New York cop named Ira Kraft, who asks Bolt for help – Kramer’s been working on that stolen heroin case, and thinks he’s traced it down to two cops, one of them retired and one still active: Ray Zwerdling, the retired one, who now runs a sleazy bar, and Lt. Hannah, who is still on active duty.

Bolt initially brushes Kraft off – and it is kind of confusing for the reader, so far as the names go, that Olden’s named this new character “Kraft,” while there’s also the subplot about poor abducted “Kramer” – but of course the two eventually work together. And in fact Bolt’s hardly around at all; we get a lot of stuff about the kindappers, including Billy Brazil, the moustached Cuban ringleader, and Gypsy Waller, the black one who strikes up a sort of friendship with the bound Kramer. These minor characters, as well as Zwerdling and his hotstuff Cuban girlfriend (that’s her on the cover), take up the majority of the narrative, as ever rendered via stream-of-conscious thoughts. We get a lot of lecherous dialog concerning Toni, the hotstuff Cuban gal, but the sleaze factor has been greatly reduced in Kill For It, along with the violent action.

It eventually develops that Toni is a plant; she’s married to Billy Brazil, who brought his gang up here from Florida after they abducted a retired lawyer down there. The lawyer was penniless, though, his rich lifestyle just a façade, but in desperation he told them that he’d once represented a group of cops who got away with stealing three million. Armed with the names of a few of the cops, Billy brought his gang up north to seek them out, capture them, and torture them for the whereabouts of the money. In the meantime I guess they decided to keep putting bread on the table by burning average dealers – as I say, the two subplots don’t quite gel. Since Zwerdling was one of the cops Billy knew the name of, he sicced sexy Toni on him, there to keep tabs on him and any other cops who came into his bar. 

There’s no real action until well into the novel. Billy’s men were armed with new .357 Colt Pythons, and Bolt checks various leads on where they could’ve gotten them. This leads him to a grungy tenement building in Spanish Harlem from which a heavyset Hispanic lady in her 50s sells guns. Bolt actually gets in a fight with this woman, and she almost gets the better of him – a sequence that’s both gripping and played for laughs. One of the lady’s sons, a dude in his 30s, comes out with a machine gun blasting on full auto, and Bolt takes him out – his first kill in the novel. Olden well captures the grit and grime of this hellish place, from the ever-present stench of urine to the multiple locks the people have on their doors to hide their criminal activities.

But other than this, the ensuing action is pretty threadbare. Later in the book Bolt and Kraft get in a shootout with one of the dirty cops and Bolt takes him out, his second kill in the novel. (He’ll only kill one more, in a shootout with the abductors in the finale.) Bolt gets the address of where Kramer’s held in a novel way; per the cover, he finds one of the abductors, baiting the guy with a hooker, has him strip naked, and takes him up to a snowswept roof and makes him kneel in the freezing cold. Soon enough the guy, a hotblooded Cuban, is quaking and crying and tells Bolt all he wants to know. But as mentioned even the climax is pretty low-key, with Bolt, Kraft, and recurring fellow narc Masetta (aka the Italian one) storming the apartment in which the kidnappers are holding Kramer – a scene again played more for tension, with one of the abductors holing up in a room with a gun to Kramer’s head, but eventually giving up and coming out with his hands up.

The actual finale is even more on a suspense vibe: Lt. Hannah has kidnapped Toni and is in the process of breaking her fingers to find out what she’s told the Cubans. Bolt dashes onto the scene with some other agents, Kraft, and a bound Billy Brazil – ie, Toni’s husband. This finale is unintentionally goofy because suddenly Bolt cares all about Billy and Toni’s relationship (meanwhile, Billy’s the sadist who kidnapped Kramer and was going to blow his brains out!), so he shames Hannah for having tortured the poor girl, threatening to put Billy in the same cell with him when they both go to prison. So here’s yet another sequence that doesn’t culminate in blasting guns or action or whatnot; Hannah merely gives up in exchange for Bolt not fixing it so that Billy shares a cell with him – Billy being known as a master torture artist and all.

And this is where we leave John Bolt; Hannah has given him the location of where the three million is hidden, info which Bolt will give Kraft per agreement – Kraft wants to climb the ladder as the guy who busted the dirty cops and found the three million – but for contrived reasons Bolt won’t give him the info until the following morning. Kraft says he’s going to sleep on Bolt’s floor that night. And that’s really how the novel – and the series – comes to a conclusion. So overall, I’d say Kill For It was my least favorite volume of Narc, which is not to say it was bad or anything – just too jumbled with plots, too lacking in action or thrills.

Anyway like I wrote above I really took my time reading this series; I found that, like The Butcher, it was best appreciated if you took long gaps between volumes, otherwise it would get a bit repetitive. I don’t exaggerate when I say a lot of the narrative of this one is given over to arbitrary trips into the thoughts of various one-off characters. The earliest volumes also had this, but they also had memorable action sequences and more-gripping plots, leading me to suspect that Olden was struggling to maintain his writing pace and wasn’t able to give these later volumes as much attention – the deadline was too quickly approaching. That said, the series always appropriated the vibe of your typical ‘70s crime thriller, which is to say it had coolness in spades, and despite the occasional “off” installment I still really enjoyed it overall.