Stark #6: Corpse On Ice (aka The Revenger #6)

Stark #6: Corpse On Ice, by Joseph Hedges

June, 1975  Pyramid Books

(Original UK publication 1975)

Coming in to this sixth volume of Stark I knew what to expect: the narrative would be pointlessly nihilistic, every female character would suffer a gruesome fate, the “hero” would be an asshole with no redeeming features, most chapters would end with goofy puns, and Terry “Joseph Hedges” Harknett would overwrite to the point of tedium. Thusly prepared I waded into Corpse On Ice; I’d been meaning to get back to the series for a good while now, and decided what the hell, now was the time. As it turned out, while all the above things held true, I didn’t detest this one as much as the other two I read. 

Ironically Corpse On Ice was the last volume to be published in the US; Pyramid Books must’ve also disliked the series, or more likely it just wasn’t selling so they cancelled it. But still the lazy bastards couldn’t correct the footnotes; while the quotation marks for dialog have been changed to American-standard double quotations as opposed to the original British single quotations, previous volumes are still referred to as “The Revenger.” This of course was the title of the original British series, before it was changed to “Stark” in the US so as not to conflict with Jon Messmann’s The Revenger. But apparently no one at Pyramid Books realized they should change the footnotes, and surely this had to confuse at least some of the original readers. But hell, maybe they were too busy smoking their Kent cigarettes and enjoying the ‘70s to be bothered by such trivial details. 

True to series form this one picks up soon after the previous volume, with John Stark still in Sweden. It’s like a few days or weeks later, and now he’s in Stockholm, hiding out in a hotel from the company and the cops. And of course he’s managed to pick up some babe: Inga, the 19 year-old manager of the Ritz Stark is staying in. In fact he’s here with free room and board, courtesy Inga. The girl is becoming attached to Stark, even though she’s figured out he’s the criminal everyone is searching for, and she begs him to stay with her. This of course is Stark’s cue to get the hell out. But when Inga’s gone for the night, Stark meets another sexy chick: Belinda, a young Canadian girl who comes to his hotel room and within moments of introducing herself has stripped down, displaying her “sex beard.” (Certainly the most unpleasant description of pubic hair I’ve ever encountered.) 

But Stark is all business, and despite playing along with Belinda, who claims to be a friend of Inga’s, and that Inga’s sent her over to keep Stark sexually satisfied, he suspects her of being a company decoy. (As a reminder, Harknett never capitalizes the name of Stark’s archenemies, the global crime network that is “the company.”) Stark says his childhood fantasy was to bang his sexy teacher on top of her desk, so he has Belinda act it out for him…but instead he whips out his gun and jams the barrel into her “gaping orifice!” This believe it or not was a recurring image in the wild and wooly world of ‘70s men’s adventure novels, a la The Sharpshooter #16. But Harknett goes in a different direction, with a sequence so crazed I just had to share it: 

Yes, Belinda gets off royally, climaxing on the barrel of the gun. Which of course eventually leads to one of Stark’s lame puns: “I had you over a barrel.” It’s hard to believe that a series that includes a sexy chick climaxing on a gun barrel could be so lame. I mean this is a series I want to like. But again Harknett does himself no favors, overwritting with no editorial control: positively everything is described ad naseum, from the clothing to the cars to the weather. Any time a new character is introduced we get like a freeze frame as practically every single detail of their face, appearance, and clothing is described. As with previous books this only serves to halt the forward momentum. There’s a lot of action in Corpse On Ice, and Harknett doesn’t shirk on the exploitative detail, but man it still comes off as pretty slow-moving. He also again fills up way too much space focusing on a one-off character, this time the Canadian head of the company. While these sequences have their fair share of sleaze and lurid stuff (including a memorable bit where the guy kills someone by sticking his head in a microwave!), they ultimately only serve to make a long book seem even longer. 

Well anyway, once she’s had her fill of Stark’s pistol, it turns out that Belinda is the secretary of a Canadian businessman named Groves. After he’s made it clear he is not a threat to Stark, Groves reveals that he’s been tracing our “hero” around Europe since Stark’s war on the company began, and thus is here in Sweden given that it’s where Stark raised the most recent hell. Ultimately he offers Stark $10,000 plus expenses to kill a man in Canada. Stark, after a bit of deliberating, agrees – and then tells Groves to send Belinda back in so he can properly bang her on a desk! Harknett as ever does not fade to black; the helluva it is, Stark should be one of the best ‘70s men’s adventure series, what with its ultra gore, explicit sex, and cool setup. But there’s still something just so unpleasant and unlikable about it. Well I mean “sex beard” should give you at least some idea of what I am talking about. 

And another thing that annoys is that the action scenes seem to merely exist so as to set up the latest pun. For example, we have this egregious bit where Stark is attacked by company thugs at the Stockholm airport. This series is like The Lone Wolf in that Stark’s enemies are always surrounding him, no matter what lengths he goes to hide himself. So Stark goes into the restroom and waits for the company thugs to come in after him. Then he gets a “gas cylinder” from the janitorial room(?) and uses it to spark a torch, which he then uses on the thugs, frying them up. After which he quips, “It was quite a gas.” I guess Harknett must’ve had fun coming up with scenarios to challenge his gift for puns, but at the same time it would’ve been just as cool for Stark to blow their heads off with a .38 and call it a day. But heck, even this weird factor should be enough to give Stark an edge, but regardless the series still sort of bugs me. 

And there really is a Lone Wolf-esque dark, surreal vibe to Stark, especially how Stark is constantly being hounded. No matter where he goes, company men are waiting for him. Even in Canada, a place he’s never been before, he’s nearly captured by company men as soon as he arrives in Toronoto. This entails a long journey out into the Canadian wilderness, at the end of which Stark and Belinda find themselves the targets of a company sniper and a company demolitions expert. Again the overwriting slows down the proceedings, but this part does show a more savage side to Stark, as he wields a rake in a nicely violent sequence. It also features the grimy denouement of Stark talking to the blasted-out eyeball of a particular character. It’s at this point that Harknett “opens up” the narrative with a lot of stuff focused on Essex, the Canadian honcho of the company and the man who sent these two to kill Stark. 

Once Stark hooks back up with Groves he learns what all this is about: the company runs a male prostitution ring here in Canada, and Groves’s twenty-five year-old son has gotten involved with it, likely as a way to stick it back to his notoriously-whoring father. “A man does not live by perverted screwing alone,” Groves the elder puts it. As a reminder of how twisted this series is, it’s actually Groves’s own son that Groves has hired Stark to kill. The reasoning behind this is vague at best, and Harknett doesn’t do the best job of explaining the setup. However the titular “corpse on ice,” which turns out to be literal, throws a monkeywrench into these plans, and as it develops Stark’s “assignment” is no longer about assassinating one person but wiping out as many of the Canadian company thugs as he can. Groves even presents Stark with a souped-up car and a veritable arsenal of machine guns, pistols, explosives, and the like to wage his war. 

Stark heads into Calgary, getting in the occasional firefight along the road with the company thugs who are perennially on his tail. There’s a crazy part where he gets the drop on one of the company’s male whores just as the guy’s about to pleasure his elderly female client. Stark’s assholery is firmly on display here, as he mocks the woman’s appearance. So too is the nihilistic tone of the series, as Stark is so devoted to eradicating the company that even the lowest of peons must suffer and die. This leads Stark to a resort lounge in the snowswept mountains in which the male hookers are trained in the art of screwing by sexy young women(!). Harknett caters to the pulp vibe by opening this sequence with Stark, newly arrived on the location, immediately being propositioned by a sexy young snowbunny who doffs her clothes and lies down in the snow, waiting to have some sex asap. One likable thing about this series is that Stark is not as single-minded as some of his men’s adventure brethren, and thus gives the girl the goods in another explicit sequence – after which she says there’s nothing she could teach the phenomenally-gifted Stark! 

But the finale of Corpse On Ice dispenses with the “fun” pulp and gets right back to the series mainstay of “unpleasantly nihilistic” pulp. Stark goes into the main lodge and discovers a young woman delivering some bondage sex to a bound company freak, and this boils Stark right up – that a woman so young and innocent could be so corrupted by the company. So he whips out his pistol and blows her brains out! Then he gets out a rifle, heads onto the slopes to wait for his prey, Essex, to come out to ski…takes a nap(?!)…and then wakes up in time to see everyone leaving for the lunch call, so he starts firing willy-nilly onto the slopes. Company men and innocent young women fall beneath Stark’s bullets (he wonders if the snowbunny he screwed might be among his victims), and then he rushes for his car to escape the scene of his latest carnage.  

As mentioned this was the last volume of Stark to be published by Pyramid Books, but The Revenger continued on for six more volumes in merry old England. This is also the last volume of the series I currently have…by Harknett, at least. (And I’m in no hurry to fill the gaps in this particular collection.) The only other volume of The Revenger I have is the last one, 1977’s Angel Of Destruction, which is by Angus Wells, who wrote the final two volumes of the series. I’m only familiar with his work from the Raven series. We’ll see how his take on John Stark measures up to Terry Harknett’s.