The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death

The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death, by Stuart Jason

April, 1974  Pinnacle Books

I was under the impression I didn’t have this volume of The Butcher, but I was looking in the box where I store the other volumes of the series I have, and lo and behold…well, you can probably figure out where I’m going with this. There it was in the box! So anyway Valley Of Death was the second of two installments written by Lee Floren, who previously wrote #10: Deadly Doctor. 

It’s been a long time since I read Deadly Doctor, so I went back to check my review. I found it humorous that I referenced Russell Smith in it, because as I was reading Valley Of Death I kept thinking to myself how much it read like a Russell Smith novel. The same surreal vibe, the same writing style; only Smith’s patented exclamation marks were missing. But this one was written by Lee Floren, as it’s clearly a sequel to Deadly Doctor, the events of which are referenced throughout. I only have one other novel by Floren, an early ‘60s sub-sleaze PBO titled Las Vegas Madam (written as “Matt Harding”), but I’ve yet to read it. I’m curious if it too is as surreal and rough as his work on The Butcher. 

Because this is one rough novel. Again, it is almost identical to something by Russell Smith in that it’s clear the author is winging it from the first page to the last, and not taking anything seriously. Random events happen and only gradually does a plot come together. Like the previous Floren yarn, there is a definite attempt at mimicking the style of main “Stuart Jason” James Dockery. As James Reasoner and I discussed in the comments section of my review for Deadly Doctor, Dockery and Floren both lived in Mexico, so it’s likely they were friends and this is how Floren came to write for The Butcher, not to mention why he strived to capture the style of Dockery for his two contributions. 

So we have the “bitter-sour taste of defeat,” the “koosh!” for Bucher’s silencered Walther P-38, and the recurring character of the director of White Hat (his title, curiously, is never capitalized). Also the repeating Dockery motif of Bucher being arrested by a smalltown sheriff and then being let go after a call to White Hat. But Floren toys with Dockery’s ever-recurring themes. Also, he skips some stuff: there’s no opening moment, for example, where Bucher is stalked by two superdeformed Syndicate thugs he soon blows away. And Floren expands the smalltown sheriff character from the one-off of the Dockery installments into more of a presence in the narrative. A weird presence, it must be stated. 

For that is the main thing Floren captures in his Dockery-isms: the weird, perverted nature of Dockery’s average Butcher story. There is, as in the Dockery books, the feeling that none of this is real, that it is all taking place in some alternate reality; Bucher himself muses at the end of Valley Of Death that this latest caper has been “like a bad dream.” I’ve gone on way too much in previous reviews that the idea is almost like Bucher himself is dead and cast in some purgatory where he relives the same nightmarish scenario, again and again into eternity. Like the entire series is based on the final chapter of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, where the criminal protagonists are trapped in hell. Lee Floren captures that vibe in this novel, more so than he did in Deadly Doctor. 

Like a Dockery installment, the “plot” only gradually comes together. But basically White Hat tasks Bucher with figuring out why elections are not going the way the “experts” predicted they would, both in the US and abroad. Yes, folks, we have another vintage men’s adventure novel with a plot that is relevant today. I mean check this out – the only thing missing is the name “Dominion” for the voting machines: 

But what I love is that, even in this surreal, fictional world, there is still enough rationality that everyone acknowledges that the election results are suspect. Floren keeps his politics to himself but does go the expected route and make “the Conservatives” the bad guys in both the US and Poland; we learn there is a new right-wing party, with fascist ties (because of course), that is gaining ground around the world due to those voting machines. But folks there are a lot of parts in this one where Bucher sits around watching TV or listening to the radio as election results come in. In the US it’s the Democrats versus the Republicans, with new party “The Conservatives” faring well in cities but not in rural areas…a curious reversal of today, but then again this book was published in 1974. And in Poland the right-wing Conservative party, dubbed the Sons of something or other over there (I was too lazy to jot it down), have beaten the Communist-backed party, and Russia isn’t happy about that. 

Oh, and there’s also something about the ridiculously-monikered “World King,” this volume’s main villain who is behind the nefariousness. This turns out to be the lamest bit in the novel because Floren does nothing with it. Anyway Bucher’s sure, as ever, that the Syndicate is behind the plot, whatever the plot is. So, the way these things go, he flies a Cessna to the Mojave Desert. That’s another reminder of Deadly Doctor, where Bucher suddenly became a pilot. The “flying fiction” isn’t as egregious in Valley Of Death, but in addition to the Cessna Bucher also flies a helicopter and an F4 Phantom jet. This latter factors into an aerial sequence that seems to be inspired by Chuck Yeager’s near-fatal accident in the NF-104 (which Tom Wolfe later brought to life in The Right Stuff) – an incident Floren was likely familiar with, given that he also names a minor Syndicate thug Zeager. 

The Dockery inversions are most apparent with the slackjawed yokel sheriff, generally a one-off character in Dockery, but here expanded into a supporting character: Sheriff Julia Whitcomb. That’s right, folks: a woman!! Indeed, one with “high breasts…a healthy young female animal.” We’re also told she’s so hot that even usually-unperturbed Bucher is taken aback. But spoiler alert – and we learn this pretty quickly in the novel – but, uh, she is really a he. That’s right again, folks: a transvestite! Boy, Lee Floren was batting two for two in the “relevance for today” department, wasn’t he? This gender-bending switcharoo is revealed when “Julia” is in bed with a Syndicate flunky named Mario Niccoli. 

The villain of the piece, Niccoli is the brother of the two other Niccolis Bucher killed in The Deadly Doctor. Again, Valley Of Death is a straight sequel to that one, with the sole surviving Niccoli burning up to get revenge for the death of his brothers. But Floren further tells us this about Mario Niccoli: “A fag himself, his two brothers had in fact been his wives, for they too had lusted after men, not women.” This tidbit is casually dropped in the opening; again, just very Russell Smith in vibe. Later Niccoli is in bed with “Julia,” and it’s revealed that “no female breasts” are beneath “her” padded bra. 

But it gets even weirder. Adding to the surreal texture is that Bucher is constantly getting “updates” from White Hat which inform him of practically everything going on in the plot, and the backgrounds of the various characters he encounters. Actually it’s the director who gives Bucher these updates, giving the impression that the old man is omniscient – and now that I think of it, furthering the whole “purgatory” conceit of The Butcher, with the White Hat director serving as god to Bucher’s doomed soul. But Bucher is constantly being informed off-page about this or that, so that he is caught up with what’s going on, to the extent that his presence seems unnecessary. White Hat knows all, so why can’t it do all? 

Well anyway, in one of those updates Bucher is informed by the director that Julia Whitcomb is really a guy – curiously, Bucher is informed of this right after we readers learn of it via the scene with Julia and Niccoli, which again gives the idea that all this is a “bad dream” with info gathered and incorporated into the story in real time. So Bucher starts hitting on Julia, asking her out to dinner and making insinuating comments about getting her into bed, and Julia becoming increasingly excited at the prospect. Just weird, wild stuff. But again it’s like Floren is just winging it, or the booze has run dry as he’s been typing, because he drops all of it with Julia leaving Bucher’s room in a huff and the incident never being mentioned again. 

Bucher does get laid, though – by a woman (not that I’m a biologist, you understand, but Floren tells us she is). This too is on the strange “dreamlike” tip: her name is Sandra Stone, and she claims she is a reporter when she boldly approaches Bucher in Poland. (He’s come here, for no real reason, to get more evidence on those voting machines.) Bucher immediately knows Sandra is a Syndicate spy, but soon enough the two end in bed. This actually happens between chapters, so Floren gives us absolutely zero in the way of sleaze. Which, again, is reminiscent of the Dockery books. So too is the weird misogyny on display throughout – Bucher treats Sandra like shit, telling her to take off and leave him alone, even though he knows the Syndicate intends to kill her. Her (expected) fate is still shocking given how casually Floren treats it in the narrative – surely the most blackly humorous moment in a blackly humorous novel. 

Action-wise there’s a bit more going on than in the Dockery books, with Bucher often getting in shootouts. The gore is not as pronounced, though. And also Bucher is slightly more human; Floren’s Bucher still experiences fear, and reacts close to panic at times. He is not the “Iceman” of the James Dockery books, and he’s more prone to displaying his emotions. He does a bit of deducting in the novel but it’s very lame because it’s based on coincidence. Like when in the small town in the Mojave, he just happens to see some “scientist types” go into a building, after which a balloon rises from the building. Gradually Floren will tie this together with the voting machines, but it’s all so hamfisted that it’s just more indication that he was winging it from first page to last. 

This is further demonstrated by the non-event that is the so-called World King. As with a Dockery novel, it all ultimately comes down to the same characters Bucher has been dealing with since the beginning of the book, characters who are suddenly revealed as being more important to the Syndicate plot than we readers were led to believe. Bucher sees more action here – but I forgot to mention! Suddenly Bucher has become a field tester for various White Hat gadgets. In Valley Of Death, he has these pellets he fires from his P-38 which knock a man into a deathlike state that lasts for twelve hours. There are so many scenes of Bucher shooting someone with these – usually firing the pellets straight down their throat – and then watching TV later on as the news reports on the “dead men” found in such and such a place, who later wake up with absolutely no memory, and the doctors trying to figure out what’s wrong with them. 

Oh, and Bucher also has this pole with a choker on it, or some such contraption, which he uses to ensnare various bigwigs. So there’s a lot of stuff where he’ll capture people with this, then shoot them with the deathlike-amnesia pill…it’s just super weird, folks. I mean the whole novel is like a lost installment of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman, we’re talking that same weird, surreal, “booze-fueled first draft” vibe throughout. All of which is to say that Valley Of Death was kind of fun, in a deranged sort of way. Floren’s imagination is so off-kilter that I would’ve enjoyed more installments by him…the book might not be great, or hell even good, but at least it isn’t the same story over and over like James Dockery was doing for the series.