The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance

The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance, by Stuart Jason

January, 1975  Pinnacle Books

At this point my enjoyment of The Butcher is relegated to spotting which previous installments James “Stuart Jason” Dockery rips off. In Blood Vengeance it seems to mainly be #4: Blood Debt that he’s rewriting, given that the book features characters from that earlier installment, but there are also elements lifted from #8: Fire Bomb. 

But then, Blood Vengeance is the same as every other Dockery installment since the first volume. The opening sequence with the deformed Syndicate thugs versus Bucher, the slackjawed cop who must let Bucher go, the briefing with the never-named White Hat director, the bustling about the globe on the “latest crazy caper” which becomes ever more convoluted as the narrative progresses. The very few action scenes, all of which are the same and feature Bucher’s fast-draw technique making our hero almost superhuman. The grand guignol finale in which all the characters get together for a sadistic send-off, with Bucher wandering off with “the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth…” 

All of it is here, as it is in every other Butcher written by James Dockery. The only difference with Blood Vengeance is Dockery’s sudden obsession with castration. This theme runs through the entire novel, with four characters castrated during the course of events; the finale is especially over the top, with three of them being emasculated at the same time. And in true “sweat mag” style the guy turning them into eunuchs is a sadistic “dwarf” who is so skilled at this particular “treatment” that he can castrate his “patients” before they even realize he’s started the procedure. 

All of which is to say Dockery’s dark humor is even more prevalent than normal this time. Also it seems clear that Dockery realizes his readers are in on the joke – that they know he’s just rewriting the same book over and over again, and he’s not fooling anyone. His deformed Syndicate goons are even more deformed this time around: just a few of them would be Warts, who has “large, ugly, horny seed warts all over his face and hands;” Mole, a heroin addict who looks like the animal of his namesake; and especially Spastic Sniggers, a goon who makes an unfortunately too brief of an appearance but whose bio takes the cake: 

Spastic Sniggers was a depraved psychopath who derived delicious enjoyment from watching others die. At the moment of death, at that instant when the soul fled the body, something deep in his fetid mind switched over to a wrong relay and he would be seized by fits of sniggering, all the while starting and jerking convulsively in limbs and body in the manner of a hopeless spastic. 

That made me laugh out loud when I first read it; it still makes me laugh out loud. So clearly The Butcher is for a special type of reader, as this sort of super-dark comedy runs throughout. And also, when I read something like that I realize there’s no way at all that James Dockery is on the level. His tongue is definitely in his cheek…which makes it all the more frustrating that he keeps writing the same book over and over. This is one of the more puzzling things in the world of men’s adventure, how a writer as talented as Dockery couldn’t be bothered to write an original story and just kept ripping himself off, volume after volume. 

To be honest, at one point I thought of extending the joke and making every one of my Butcher reviews the same, only changing the occasional particular – or rearranging them – but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just lazily churn out the same review over and over…and unlike James Dockery, I’m not even getting paid for this! 

Well anyway, for once we get some indication that time has passed in the series; early in the book, when Bucher is taken in by a cop per the template, it’s none other than Captain Handsome Staggers (what a name – up there with “Delano Stagg!”), a cop who apparently arrested Bucher in a previous volume, and knows from experience that Bucher will be let out – even though he carries a silencer “even God” would be arrested for. Checking my reviews, it looks like I failed to note the appearance of Handsome Staggers in that previous volume, which is surprising. His arrest of Bucher is stated as being “some months before” the events of Blood Vengeance, which by the way opens with a hapless stooge getting a phone call that Bucher’s here in Miami, and quickly getting out of town. 

From there to Bucher being stalked by the thugs Mole and Warts, with Bucher offing one of them – with the interesting development that the other will return to plague him, later in the novel. Usually these opening stalking thugs are one-offs, but this time Dockery integrates them into the overall storyline – which has nothing at all to do with the back cover. For the most part, at least. I’ll admit, I was fooled – the back cover notes that beautiful blonde Candy Merriman, one of the biggest stars on TV and the daughter of some bigwig, has been adbucted by a hippie terrorist-type group and held for ransom. I assumed we were going to get a take on the infamous Patty Hearst case. 

But as it turns out, Candy Merriman is a passing thought at best in the actual narrative; she isn’t mentioned until page 65, and even then only appears on a few pages. Rather, the villains of the piece are a left-wing Ethiopian radical group run by a guy named Egor Ginir, and comprised of Sudomics – a cult that is “the Thuggees of Ethiopia.” Working with another of Bucher’s old Syndicate colleagues, Sabroso, Ginir plans to kidnap children of wealth and hold them for upwards of fifteen million each, the money to be used to fund a revolution. But this isn’t enough for Dockery, and as per usual the plot becomes more and more convoluted until it ultimately involves atomic bombs and whatnot. 

Also as per usual Bucher almost immediately finds himself leaving the country, and as ever going someplace where Islam is the chief religion – Islamic culture is so frequently referenced in The Butcher that I assume James Dockery was either obsessed with it, or had worked in these areas and felt informed enough to refer to them. So it is that we get a lot of cultural stuff about Ethiopia, which is where Bucher immediately heads. And here we get more reference to a previous book, with Bucher shocked to discover his local contact is French-Arabic blonde beauty Barbe, who last appeared in the fourth volume, the events of which were “almost a year ago.” 

Checking my thorough review of Blood Debt, I see that Bucher and Barbe had a spatting relationship, and that Bucher referred to Barbe as “ugly.” Not so here, where she’s so gobsmackin’ hot that Bucher wonders why he never gave in to Barbe’s pleas in that earlier volume to get busy with her. But then, no one has yet gotten busy with Barbe; she’s a virgin, saving herself for the right guy. And guess who she’s decided it will be? Of course it is Bucher…leading to one of Dockery’s peculiar off-page sex-scenes. I’ve said it before and will say it again: it’s downright bizarre how Dockery will be so lurid and sleazy with his deformed villains and his focus on rape and torture…but will always cut away when Bucher’s about to have sex. Even the customary exploitation of the genre is curiously absent; there’s a part where Barbe and another hotstuff female agent get naked so as to distract someone, and Dockery can’t be bothered to give either girl even a cursory juicy description. 

That other hostuff agent babe is Eden Massawa, an Ethiopian woman who is related to the new prime minister. This volume is very heavy on the Ethiopian culture and whatnot – and this is where the castration angle comes in. Eden has a cousin who runs a slave trade or somesuch, and with just a call she’ll have someone over to castrate a guy into a new eunuch for such-and-such’s harem. This is actually the fate of two of the Syndicate goons who have tailed Bucher to Ethiopia…Dockery just giving us a taste of the sordid darkness to ensue when the guys are tied to a bed and then informed they are about to be castrated, and start screaming when “the doctor” comes in and lays out his tools. 

We’re often told how nauseated Bucher is by all the killing and torture, and frequently in the book he tries to stop it – but in every case he’s stopped by a woman. It’s an interesting subtext to the series, but otherwise Bucher is even more cipher-like than normal in Blood Vengeance, only getting in a few action scenes to boot. This has never been an action-heavy series, and the vibe is always more along the lines of a Western, with Bucher using his “kill-quick-or-die” fast-draw technique to blow away a handful of goons. And they’re always clean kills, too, with Dockery also curiously sparse with detail on the fountaining gore. That said, there is a humorous WTF? bit were Bucher calls one of the thugs “anus.” 

The other volume Blood Vengeance rips off is Fire Bomb; that one featured a letter Bucher was handed by another character, a letter Bucher put in his pocket and conveniently forgot about – only to read much later and discover that, if he’d read it sooner, he would’ve saved himself a lot of trouble. There’s a very similar bit here in Blood Vengeance where Barbe, who apropos of nothing has found out she has a degenerative eye disease that will leave her blind within a year(!), writes a letter for Bucher…and he puts it in his pocket and forgets about it until near the end of the book. 

But it’s Blood Debt that is most ripped off; that one also featured a famous TV personality who happened to be a hotstuff babe, Twiti Andovin, who ultimately turned out to be the main villain. Blood Vengeance rips all of this off in the form of Candy Merriman, who is first seen being executed – in an eerie foreshadowing of real-life Isis videos – on a tape the Muslim terrorists send to a US tv station. There we see (broadcast uncut on television!) a screaming Candy being forced to her knees and then her head chopped off by the High Priestess of the Sudomac cult – but Bucher suspects something fishy about the whole thing. 

Dockery is also pretty bad with pacing. Bucher hopscotches around the globe, from Miami to Ethiopia, back to Miami and then up to Yellowknife, Canada, but nothing much really happens. The final quarter is especially slow, with Bucher and Eden hooking up with a Canadian mountie and flying over an island Bucher suspects Egor might be hiding his atomic warheads on. But it just goes on and on and it’s clear Dockery is trying to meet his word count; the book would’ve been a lot more brisk without the convoluted plotting and a little more on the action front. 

That said, the sudden focus on castration is also puzzling. In a standard trope of the series, one of Bucher’s female conquests is brutally murdered – Bucher, as ever, almost casually sending the girl off to her grisly fate, completely mindless to her predicament per series template – and Bucher is all fired up to get vengeance on the sadist who “sodomized and garrotted” her. This entails one castration, but late in the novel Dockery introduces yet another go-nowhere subplot, one in which Ginir has also kidnapped a bunch of preteen girls to sell them as sex slaves, and Bucher rescues a fifteen year old who has been repeatedly raped by Ginir; she is insane with the desire to see Ginir castrated. 

The finale is especially dark, with Bucher and a few comrades assaulting Ginir’s island base, which of course has a dungeon where the villains can be strung up to be castrated; I mean James Dockery himself has gone castration crazy this time, with Blood Vengeance ending on the image of three men screaming as they are castrated, a group of people gleefully watching the spectacle. Not Bucher, though – he’s already walking away with that damn “bitter-sour taste of defeat” in his mouth. 

Overall, the castration angle really is the only thing unique about Blood Vengeance. Otherwise it is, like the volume before it (and the volume before that, and etc, etc), just a lazy rewrite of the first volume of the series. Here’s hoping that eventually Dockery will write something new, but I’m not holding my breath.