Dakota #5: Chain Reaction

Dakota #5: Chain Reaction, by Gilbert Ralston

November, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Chain Reaction is so dull that I could hardly finish it. Really, I spent the last chapter and a half speed-reading, even though this is where the allegedly thrilling climax occurred. It lacks excitement and mystery, the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large, and many scenes exist of filler dialogue telling us stuff we either already know or don't care about. Sort of if a writer was trying to stretch a 50-minute screenplay to a 180-page manuscript. – Marty McKee

Man, first they cancelled ALF and now this! It’s the last volume of Dakota, friends, so I’m sure you all are shedding just as many tears as I am. 

Once again Marty McKee has succinctly captured my own thoughts – as mentioned before, Marty sent me his Dakota books, so I’m reading the same copy that he read. Like it’s a holy relic or something! Marty’s comment that “the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large” pretty much sums up my major problem with Dakota. I sort of get what Gilbert Ralston was trying to do, like a family saga mixed with a hardboiled American Indian detective in “today’s West” sort of thing, but I don’t think it worked. As it is, Dakota comes off like a guy who needs to bring a few buddies along with him to the restroom when he takes a leak, and then calls his mom afterward to let her know how it all went. It’s like I wrote in my review of the first volume: Dakota is the only men’s adventure protagonist who regularly calls his mother, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the character and the series. 

The helluva it is, there’s material here for a good yarn…it’s just that Ralston’s insistence on straddling Dakota with legions of clingers-on robs the character of any ass-kicker potential. I’m not so much sure if Ralston was trying a different spin on the lone wolf ‘70s paperback action hero ethic than it was he just didn’t understand it. As Marty also noted, and I concured with, it seems evident that Ralston intended Dakota as the springboard for a TV series. It just seems very clear, given Ralston’s Hollywood background, the large group of characters, the lack of much violence and zero sex at all…I mean it’s not too hard to believe that’s what this series was intended as. After all, fellow Hollywood vet Paul Petersen attempted the same thing, around the same time, with The Smuggler, and that too failed to gain any traction outside of the paperback field. 

As Marty also noted in his review of Dakota #3 (here’s my review if you are super bored – and that installment of the series was mostly interesting because it seemed to be a rewrite of Ralston’s concurrent The Deadly, Deadly Art), Dakota is like “McCloud meets Nakia,” and again it’s not hard to see this might have been Gilbert Ralston’s exact intention. Nakia was a 1974 TV crime show with Robert Foster as an American Indian cop, and McCloud was a ‘70s crime show starring Dennis Weaver as a Nevada marshall assigned to the big city of New York…hey, what if you combined the two concepts into a series and hoped it got picked up for a TV deal? This would explain the tepid thrills, the “ridiculously large cast of characters,” the focus on Dakota’s home town as a central facet of the storyline, etc. 

Unfortunately, it still doesn’t make the series any good. Dakota is a far cry from the ‘70s-mandated lone wolf vigilante hero, though the potential is there for him to be one. We’re often told of how he’s packing a pistol, but rarely if ever does the guy actually use it. Instead, he’s more likely to let one of his many, many friends do the job for him. I mean like a fool I got my hopes up several times in the course of Chain Reaction; like we’re told at the start that Dakota has a .38 hidden in his “new Chevrolet,” same as he had one hidden in his original car back in the first volume…but it’s not really used. Later on he arms himself with a .357 Magnum, but again it’s his buddies who do the brunt of the fighting, one of them using a carbine Dakota has loaned him. 

So it seems clear Ralston was aware of the market he was writing for, he just couldn’t be bothered to do the job right. Once again the editors at Pinnacle understood what the series was supposed to be: the memorable cover art and the back cover copy all illustrate the novel’s most memorable sequence, of a naked American Indian woman hung by her thumbs while a pair of thugs torture her to death. “Hung By The Thumbs” is even emblazoned as the slugline on the back cover, like this was a grimy crime paperback from Leisure Books. But this scene is only vaguely brought to life in the very opening pages, Ralston cutting to brief sequences of this undescribed woman hanging by the thumbs, nude, and some guys passing a flame over her body – all very grim indeed, but hardly exploitative. 

Instead, the big focus of the opening pages is…Dakota’s buddy Joe Redbeard getting married!! Friends I kid you not. While the poor “Indian woman” is hung by her goddamn thumbs and being torture-killed, Ralston keeps cutting away from the scene, back to Dakota…who waits at the airport for his girlfriend Alicia (whom he still keeps begging to marry him – again, pretty much says all you could say about Dakota), and then he goes back to his overpopulated home to shoot the breeze with his many, many hangers-on. Hell there’s even a part where the Indian woman’s daughter has come here to Dakota’s ranch, unknowing that her mother is being tortured to death that very minute, and Dakota literally tells her to wait because first he has to attend Redeard’s wedding! In like a dozen pages you learn everything that is wrong about Dakota. You can almost hear the editors at Pinnacle sighing in exasperation. Like I said before, there’s no mystery why this was the last volume. 

Well anyway, it’s a few months after the previous volume; it’s Spring now, as we learn via some evocative word-painting that again indicates Ralston was attempting his own sort of Spoon River Anthology for the paperback crimefighter set. Dakota’s latest private eye job is courtesy the aforementioned daughter, a teenager from San Francisco whose dad was mysteriously killed and now she has this key in an envelope that was given to her by her mother – who, we readers know, is also now murdered. Dakota, forever putting off Alicia (it might be implied they have off-page sex, but you have to really use your own fevered imagination), takes the job and assembles his unwieldy cast of clingers-on and hangers-on to look into the mystery – and, like the previous volume, that’s pretty much all Chain Reaction is: a mystery novel. 

The opening “sweat mag” vibe is lost…and again Ralston blows his own potential with his refusal to cater to what we want. Those two torture-killing thugs? Dakota doesn’t even deal with either of them. Either of them!! Indeed they are pretty much red herrings on that front, and instead the narrative plays out as more of a mystery: Dakota gradually unravels a plot that connects these two thugs with the crime world guy who has been plaguing Dakota for volumes. The same guy who hired Guy Marten, the ineffectual professional assassin who first appeared in Cat Trap. Luckily Ralston goes back to the Marten subplot here in final installment Chain Reaction, but we don’t get any resolution on it (indeed, Marten by novel’s end is geared to becoming even more of a menace in Dakota’s life, given his advancement up the crime world chain), which indicates Gilbert Ralston did not plan to end Dakota here. 

Dakota gets some pals from previous volumes together and they head off to San Francisco – that is, after Dakota’s let his mommy know. (Not joking, either.) Here they follow the leads on the two thugs and gradually figure out it has to do with Dakota’s old archenemy. There’s occasional action, but again it’s Dakota’s buddies doing the shooting and stuff; Dakota just drives the car during one such scene. There’s another part where Dakota and his mini-army are jumped by some stooges and they get in a protracted fight, but Ralston again proves his lack of mettle in this field by writing so much of it passively, ie “Dakota was handling two of them,” and the like. Dakota does knock out one dude with a “savate kick,” at least, but even in the finale there isn’t much in the gun-blazing action you’d expect from this publisher; it’s more of a taut suspense-thriller vibe. 

But even here it lacks much bite. So without any spoilers, the deal is Dakota’s girlfriend is abducted by Guy Marten, working under the auspices of the aforementioned crime boss, Marvin Kintner. But since Alicia’s hardly been in the novel, this event doesn’t have much impact. Also, she’s not mistreated in any way, so there isn’t much impact in that regard, either. So to get the upper hand Dakota puts together a team (can you believe it??) to kidnap Kintner, and use him as a bargaining chip. It’s written like a heist, with the group breaking into the high-tech defenses of the guy’s place, getting him while he’s in bed with his floozie, etc. It’s an okay scene but again the thrill factor is undermined by the amount of people Dakota has working with him, plus there’s confusion because the names of all these people blend together and you often forget who is who. 

Spoiler alert, but there is no confrontation between Dakota and Guy Marten; the two don’t even meet face to face. As mentioned though Ralston clearly intended Marten to be a continnuing threat, as by novel’s end some crime-world bigwigs discuss moving Marten up the totem pole. Instead, as with the previous volume, the “climax” is more on a mystery tip, with Dakota putting pieces of the puzzle together and getting justice for the orphaned teen Indian girl who hired him. Speaking of whom, I thought she was going to be added to the menagerie of supporting characters, but Ralston indicates at the end of Chain Reaction that she might be moving away with other relatives…I doubt it, though. I bet if there’d been a Dakota #6 she would’ve been in it, probably getting married to Dakota’s young helper Louis Threetrees (marriages being another recurring gimmick of the series, btw…another indication of how Ralston just didn’t get it). 

So this was it for Dakota, and to tell the truth it’s a miracle it even lasted this long. Thanks again to Marty for sending me the books all those years ago (along with tons of others I’m still working through!), but if anything I found Dakota interesting as a failed genre experiment. But then, maybe Ralston didn’t even know it was an experiment. Regardless, now that I’ve read the series I really think Marty is correct – as theorized in the comment he left on my review of Dakota #2 – that the series was Ralston’s attempt at farming out a concept he’d failed to get produced in Hollywood.