The Marksman #18: Icepick In The Spine

The Marksman #18: Icepick In The Spine, by Frank Scarpetta
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower

“The reason I write under a pseudonym is because I don’t want to be remembered as the author of Icepick In The Spine.” 

-- George Harmon Smith

A big thanks to Lynn Munroe for the above quote; as I mention in most all of my Marksman and Sharpshooter reviews, Lynn is owed a huge debt of gratitude for the research he did on these series. It’s due to him that we even know who George Harmon Smith was; a sort of fix-it author for series editor Peter McCurtin, who eventually went on to authoring his own installments, this being one of them. While Icepick In The Spine was one of the few Marksman volumes to have an attribution in the Catalog Of Copyright Entries, where Aaron Fletcher is credited as “Frank Scarpetta” (the book was also later reprinted under Fletcher’s own name), as Lynn successfully argues this was probably due to some mistake or behind-the-scenes nonsense. Icepick In The Spine is clearly the work of George Harmon Smith. And, as Lynn also points out, there’s that quote of Smith’s, above; it comes from Smith’s nephew, who specifically recalled this title as being one his uncle talked about.

As I think I’ve written in all my other reviews of his novels, George Harmon Smith was a great writer, very literary, delivering strong characters – particularly very strong, fully-realized female characters. But in many ways he was too good for the genre. By that I don’t mean he was a better writer than others in this genre, I just mean that he didn’t understand when to reign in the literary flourishes. Like all the other Smith Marksmans, Icepick In The Spine is just too damn long; 204 pages of small, dense print, most of it comprised of excessive topical details or description of menial actions. It’s hard to convey exactly what I mean other than there’s a lot of “baggage” in Smith’s work…you mentally slash entire paragraphs of abritrary, unnecessary (but very well written) material so as to keep the pace moving. These kinds of books should not have excessive baggage; also, as I’ve written before, Smith was basically the men’s adventure version of John Gardner, ie the American author of Sunlight Dialogs and such. Their narrative styles are very similar, even down to the excessive wordiness.

And as I’ve also mentioned in just about every George Harmon Smith review I’ve done, I am becoming more and more certain that he was the author who delivered the almighty Bronson: Blind Rage. There are too many parallels with the other books of his I’ve read; Icepick In The Spine in particular has a lot of similarities, from the insane “hero” to the strong female accomplice, not to mention the periodic detours into extreme sadism and torture. As with Blind Rage, and the other Smith novels I’ve read, there’s also an almost surreal vibe of dark humor, like real dark humor – for example, in this one Philip “The Marksman” Magellan briefly encounters a 16 year-old girl who sells herself for heroin money. She tries to spark up conversation with Magellan in a diner, questioning the purpose of life. Magellan gives her ten bucks and she leaves – only to immediately be run over and killed by a car. Magellan meanwhile can’t even be bothered to get up from his table and keeps right on eating. 

There’s also a sleazy dose of torture porn straight out of the sweat mags of the day; late in the novel Magellan stages an assault on a Mafia-controlled “school” in Arizona which is used as a training facility for girls smuggled into the country from Mexico. Here they are apparently trained to become good whores or somesuch, but really the place as presented is a nightmarish facility of torture and punishment, complete with about two hundred fresh graves outside the place of previous girls who didn’t properly buckle under authority. Smith pulls no punches throughout the horrific sequence, which starts off with a mob “turkey doctor” torturing a poor bound girl and ends with the freed girls running roughshod on their former captors, tearing them to pieces with their bare hands. Even here though Magellan displays he’s not your typical hero, or even a “hero” in any sense – when the freed Mexican girls ask him what they’re supposed to do now, where they should go, Magellan’s curt response is, “I don’t give a fuck,” and he just leaves them to their own devices.

George Harmon Smith is like another series author, Russell Smith, in that he knows without question that Magellan is a psychopath. As Lynn has pointed out, Harmon Smith likely edited many of Russell Smith’s manuscripts, so perhaps he was inspired by them; series creator and editor Peter McCurtin never presented Magellan as nuts as either of the two Smiths do. But a big difference is that Harmon Smith at least attempts to convey a sense of loss and desperation driving his version of Magellan; Russell Smith’s is just plain crazy, and hardly ever does he reflect on the events that put him on the path to becoming the Marksman. Harmon Smith occasionally does, bluntly informing people that his course was set when his “son’s brains were blasted out” and his wife was killed. But also Harmon Smith makes it clear that none of this justifies Magellan’s descent into sadism; he’s such a natural murderer (and he really does murder in this one, not just kill) that you wonder if this dude was ever “good” to begin with. Again, very much like – in fact, identical to – Bronson in Blind Rage.

There’s of course no pickup from previous volumes, nor any indication how long Magellan’s been at it. There are seeming repercussions for future volumes; Icepick In The Spine ends with the intimation that the heads of the Mafia have banded together to finally do something about the Marksman, and also Magellan has himself a female accomplice at novel’s end, one who wishes to help him wage his war. Judging from previous volumes, I’m gonna bet we’ll never hear of either of these things again. But for what it’s worth this one is a very entertaining read, giving you all you could want from sleazy ‘70s crime pulp, with the caveat that as usual Smith’s excessive wordiness kind of kills the enthusiasm factor. Sort of like my reviews! But man this one’s really overwritten, another hallmark of Smith’s work; every menial or trivial action is described ad naseum. Small stuff to be sure, but it piles up over the course of the 200+ small-print pages. To get back to that other Smith, ie Russell – his installments might’ve been messy, barely even “plotted,” but they certainly moved.

The back cover has it that in this one Magellan goes up against a capo who retains a squad of ‘Nam vets. This sounds promising but unfortunately there’s nothing like it in the book. In the early pages Magellan gets word that Bello, a sadistic young Mafia capo who served in ‘Nam, has gotten into sex slavery south of the border; we’re told Bello has a group of commando vets at his disposal, but we never get to meet them. And Bello himself doesn’t even appear until like the last three pages. He’s more of a white wale that Magellan hunts throughout the novel; the narrative is more focused on the sex-slave angle, with multiple detours…not to mention Magellan sort of falling in love not once, but twice! Another thing that separates George Harmon Smith from his fellow men’s adventure authors is his strong female characters – I don’t mean “strong” in the modern cliched meaning, like they can do backflips while firing 9mm pistols with each hand, but “strong” in that they are fully-developed, believable women who seem to exist outside the boundaries of the novels. That being said, the second female character in this one probably could do backflips while shooting guns; she’s presented as a serious asskicker.

After venturing down to Mexico to research the situation – and to beat up and murder a crippled guy at the Texas border – Magellan briefly holes up in El Paso to figure out Bello’s operation. He’s bringing in beautiful girls from Mexico and dispersing them across the US; eventually we’ll learn they’re smuggled around the country in big vans, and the soldiers carrying them around have orders to kill them if anything goes wrong with the job. This happens in the course of the novel, while Magellan’s tailing a “shipment,” and honestly Magellan’s “sickness” over the massacre is hard to buy given his sadism this time around. I wonder if Smith’s Goldfinger allusion is intentional; while checking out one of the Mafia staging areas in the woods Magellan runs into a hot young thing with a rifle, here to get a little vengeance of her own. Magellan’s response is typical; he beats the shit out of her, slapping her around and almost breaking her nose. All to keep her quiet.

As expected, the girl, a Latina named Anna, falls in love with Magellan soon enough. Anna is the first of two strong female characters we’ll get. There follows a domestic scene where Anna takes Magellan back to her apartment – after wiping the blood off her nose and stuff – and makes him burgers and fries, leading to one of Smith’s typical off-page sex scenes. He’s not one to much exploit his female characters, either…we’ll get like one or two mentions of nice breasts and that’s it. Anna’s cousin was abducted by the sex-slavers and she wants to find out what happened to her and get revenge (a subplot that is never resolved). She proves to have just as sadistic streak as Magellan; our lovable hero captures a Mafia goon and tortures him, setting his hair and feet on fire. The “fire torture” being another similarity to Bronson: Blind Rage, by the way. After this he blows the guy’s head off. Anna acts distant on the way home, not talking…only to later reveal that she was so turned on by the whole thing that she was afraid she’d jump Magellan’s bones right there if he’d said anything to her!

The problem with Icepick In The Spine is that it seems to be two manuscripts stuck together; perhaps this explains the “Aaron Fletcher” misattribution for the novel. Maybe he turned something in and Smith almost wholly rewrote it. At least Magellan’s characterization stays consistent throughout – he’s nuts from beginning to end. I also enjoyed his recurring penchant for calling all mobsters “motherfuckers” and all women “chicks.” Speaking of which, we don’t get to see Anna for the entire novel; I don’t want to spoil anything but she leaves the narrative shortly after telling Magellan she loves him. But after her departure we get to that seeming second manuscript – for the first half Magellan’s tracing Bello’s sex-slave ring, and it culminates with a shootout with the guys running the latest van filled with women. But after this we’re suddenly in Phoenix, it’s nine days later, and Magellan is posing as a bum on Skid Row, living in filth and squalor so as to fully hide from society and make Bello think everything’s clear so he can get back to his sex-slavin’ stuff.

Now the plot becomes something else entirely; Magellan reads in the paper about an old doctor being abducted, and he immediately deduces that this guy was probably kidnapped by Bello’s mobsters to look after the latest shipment of Mexican girls(!?). So he goes to the guy’s address…only to find a hotstuff statuesque babe (also described as Amazonian). This will be our second strong female character and she’s very memorable, very much in line with the action-prone female protagonists of today. Her name’s Julia, she’s in her 20s, and she’s unfazed when Magellan slips into the apartment, holding a gun on her. She’s not even afraid of the gun, and Magellan feels as if he’s lost control of the situation. It turns out that her father’s been returned secretly, but Julia’s not to tell anyone for a few days. And yes, the Mafia took him, apparently to inspect the anatomies of some women.

Eventually Julia will become Magellan’s latest partner in action and in bed. And she also falls in love with him, with Magellan feeling the same, despite his early protestation that “Not two weeks ago another girl with me was killed.” When Magellan hesitates about taking Julia with him, because she’s a girl and all, Julia responds, “The only thing a woman can’t do is catch clap from some whore.” She’s basically a female Magellan, anyway: an expert archer, she ends up nailing mobster scum with a bow and arrows later in the book. Unfortunately though the early parts with Julia come off like a carbon copy of the initial parts with Anna; she cooks him a meal, gives him some beer, they watch TV and then have some off-page sex. To the extent that you wonder why Smith didn’t just combine the two female characters into one.

Anyway I’m going on way too much again. The finale as mentioned piles on the sick sleaze; Bello’s “school” is in the woods and Magellan and Julia infiltrate the place, watching in disgust as a turkey doctor abuses a bound girl (Julia begs to be the one to kill this guy) and soon freeing all the women. It’s more lurid than action-packed, and indeed the climax itself is rushed; Magellan and Julia fly to San Diego, where Magellan intercepts Bello’s limo as it’s leaving his fortress. Magellan’s delivery of justice is rendered almost anticlimactic given how rushed it all seems – however the finale is memorable because Magellan flat-out murders Bello’s blonde floozy. I mean usually the “hero” will let the villain’s girl go, but not our Magellan. He says “Sorry, chick,” and shoots her in the throat! 

Also as mentioned, the novel ends with promises of future developments – Bello sneers that the Mafia has “plans” for Magellan, and Julia tells Magellan she’s coming along with him whether he likes it or not. They decide to head for Florida, for the hell of it; Magellan knows he’ll find Mafia business no matter where he goes. Here’s guessing if this plot thread ever picks up, but I’m not holding my breath. At least if past installments are any indication. At any rate, Icepick In The Spine is a fun if overlong slice of lurid ‘70s crime action, probably one of the best volumes in the series yet. However I have to tell you – there isn’t a single “icepick in the spine” in the entire novel!