Bloody Sunday (The Marksman #21)

Bloody Sunday, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1976  Belmont-Tower

I would say that Lynn Munroe is once again correct with the theory that this volume of The Marksman was written by George Harmon Smith.* As Lynn notes, the style is identical to the series titles that have been identified (by Lynn) as ones by George Harmon Smith, like This Animal Must Die and Savage Slaughter. For once again we have a book that is wholly at odds with the typical Marksman yarn: 192 dense pages that are heavy with introspection and detail, with a literary flourish well outside the series norm. In past I’ve noted that George Harmon Smith was basically the John Gardner of the men’s adventure genre, and that is very apparent in Bloody Sunday; like Gardner (the American author who was briefly famous in the ‘70s, not the British author of the same name), Smith overwrites with abandon, making what is supposed to be a fast-moving novel instead come off like a laborious slog. 

Also, Bloody Sunday clarifies something I have long assumed: that George Harmon Smith was the author of Bronson: Blind Rage. In past reviews of Smith’s novels I was 99% sure of this; after reading Bloody Sunday, I’m 100% sure. I’ve only read a few books by Smith, including one non-series title (Bad Guy), but his style is unmistakeable, and all of his action stories feature a cold-blooded “hero” who tortures and kills without a thought and who is coupled with a headstrong, independent young woman who comes off as more human than the hero does. All these things are present in Bloody Sunday, just as they are in Bronson: Blind Rage, with the additional confirmation this time that here in Bloody Sunday George Harmon Smith uses the word “re-focussed,” instead of the more-typical spelling “focused.” Which is exactly how the word was (miss)spelled in Bronson: Blind Rage. I noted the unusual spelling of “focussed” in my review of Blind Rage back in 2012, hoping it would be a clue to the author’s identity…and Bloody Sunday was the payoff. When I saw the word “re-focussed” in this book it was the final confirmation of what I’d long assumed. 

But then, checking my review of Bad Guy from the other year, I see that I noted that “focussed” also appeared in that book, so it looks like even a few years ago I was 100% sure that George Harmon Smith was the mystery author of Bronson: Blind Rage. 

Also, I have a strong suspicion that Bloody Sunday started life as an installment of Bronson. That series ran three volumes, and George Harmon Smith only wrote the first volume. But I’m betting this Marksman book was originally going to be another Bronson offering from Smith. It has more in common with the Bronson series than the Marksman series, and just like Blind Rage was a lift of Death Wish, Bloody Sunday is a sort of proto-lift of the Death Wish sequels, in which Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey would dispense thugs in vengeance for wrongs done to others, not for wrongs done to himself. 

In other words, Philip “The Marksman” Magellan does not waste Mafia creeps in Bloody Sunday in his never-ending vendetta against the mob for the killing of his family. Rather, he spends the novel hunting down four wealthy men who, years ago, killed a young woman and got away with it, and Magellan, having met the young woman’s grandmother, has vowed to dispense bloody justice in the murdered girl’s name – even though he never even knew her. This storyline is much more at home in the Bronson series which, especially in George Harmon Smith’s Blind Rage, was concerned with “hero” Bronson taking out some wealthy “untouchables” who committed violent crimes with no reprisals. Bloody Sunday features the same storyline, only here the protagonist has not been affected by the crimes he is avenging. 

So my guess is, George Harmon Smtih wrote Blind Rage, then Len Levinson wrote the second volume and Joseph Chadwick wrote the third volume, but Bronson was cancelled while Smith was working on what would have been the fourth volume…and so he just turned it into a Marksman novel. It’s not even that preposterous of a theory; it’s not like this series is grounded in continuity or a theme that links all the titles. Just take a look at The Torture Contract, for example, which also comes off like an installment of an entirely different series, with Magellan reduced to secondary status, going about on the whims of a sadistic genius. The timing also works, with Bronson ending in 1975 and Bloody Sunday coming out in 1976, so George Harmon Smith clearly wrote Bloody Sunday shortly after he wrote Bronson: Blind Rage. 

Anyway, I rest my case. 

Only the opening of Bloody Sunday seems to come from your typical Marksman novel…sort of. Actually, it also serves as an indication of how George Harmon Smith just wasn’t suited to this genre…it’s an overwritten slog that, again, has more in common with something like John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogs than it does with an action series. We meet Magellan – only referred to as “he” for the first chapter – after he’s hit some Mafia creeps, but he’s been shot in the shoulder in the shootout, and he’s bleeding to death as he sits on a bus when the novel opens. Smith well captures Magellan’s plight here, but it’s way overwritten; even more overwritten than one of my reviews!! 

Here we’re informed of Magellan’s endless war on the Mafia, and how he just killed some of them in payback, though we didn’t get to see any of it…again, it’s like stuff grafted on to what was originally a Bronson plot. Magellan passes out in a dark alley (eventually we learn the city is Cleveland), and he’s found by an old woman named Zennie, a country-type who has a lot of Smith’s patented “headstrong woman” dialog. She nurses Magellan back to health if for no other reason than her country-born politeness, but more importantly there’s Zennie’s hotstuff young granddaughter, Janie (barely out of her teens, Magellan suspects), with her “small, jutting breasts.” 

Janie is from the same template as George Harmon Smith’s other female characters: very young, very independent, very outspoken. She goes on and on with a lot of dialog, but she’s got a lot of spunk because she’s just gotten out of juvie. She takes an instant “ownership” of the convalescing Magellan, and in fact soon learns who he is (“the badass of the badasses”). They start having sex, but as usual Smith keeps it off-page. Meanwhile Magellan has already decided to help out old Zennie, who has related in seemingly-endless exposition that almost all of her 11 sons (!) have died (and we get background detail on almost all of them!), but most importantly another granddaughter of hers, Wendy, died two years ago – and Zennie believes the girl was murdered by a quartet of wealthy businessmen who came into town and hired Wendy for her typing skills. 

On such shaky ground does Bloody Sunday stand: Magellan swears to avenge Wendy, if only because Zennie took care of Magellan and nursed him to health. Meanwhile he displays his bad-assery by taking out a black pimp-type who keeps scoping out Janie, pulling his silencered gun on him and later firebombing the pimp’s place with homemade napalm. It’s all crazy but this stuff too is written in Harmon Smith’s overwritten style, with the action less hard-hitting than it is overbearing. I mean it’s great writing, yes, but it’s not great for the genre. It’s inflated and ornate when it should be terse and fast. 

On page 64 the plot changes and here’s where I argue it is essentially the Bronson novel George Harmon Smith originally wrote. Magellan takes off in pursuit of these four men he’s never met, who never wronged him personally, to kill them one by one for Zennie. The first guy’s in New Mexico and Magellan scopes him out – he’s a laywer in a fancy building – and then goes in there on the pretext of a meeting and beats the guy around, causing him to have a fatal heart attack. But in the interrogation Magellan learns that Wendy was indeed killed by the four men, and from this lawyer Magellan gets the addresses of the other three he must kill. 

The next target takes up the majority of the narrative, if for no other reason than the motor-mouthed “chick” Magellan picks up: Cindy, a spaced-out Californian surfer girl who is turning tricks here in Topeka to get enough money to go back to California. She sashays up to Magellan while he’s scoping out target #2 and starts talking…and nearly a hundred pages later she’s still talking. George Harmon Smith does the same thing here that he did in Icepick In The Spine: namely, he replaces one “strong young woman” (Janie) with another “strong young woman,” and the issue is they both sort of run together for the reader. About the only difference I could tell was that Cindy was a little older, had bigger boobs, and talked a whole bunch more. 

In previous books I’ve really admired Smith’s penchant for bringing to life independent, fully-realized female characters in his men’s adventure novels, but I felt he really stumbled with Cindy here in Bloody Sunday, as she was more annoying than anything. And she has a lot of dialog and scenes here; there are endless scenes of her bumming a cigarette from Magellan or drinking beer – she informs Magellan she’d “only weigh seventy-five pounds” if she didn’t drink beer, and there are copious scenes of her buying a six-pack and downing it and “burping” afterward. Meanwhile the action stops dead as Magellan, a guy who in previous volumes could wipe out an entire Mafia squad in a handful of paragraphs, spends several densely-written chapters trying to figure out how to safely kill some rich businessman in Topeka!! 

Have I mentioned yet that I suspect Bloody Sunday started life as a Bronson novel? 

Because really, it’s fairly believable that a fromer architect, or whatever the hell Bronson was before he became a vigilante, might need endless chapters to figure out how to kill some random rich guy. But Magellan? Even in the previous volumes by Smith, the guy was essentially unstoppable. But man it’s kind of repetitive here in Bloody Sunday, with Magellan even getting Cindy in on the act, using her as bait for his target’s lesbian daughter(!?). Oh and meanwhile, the veteran men’s adventure reader will know where all this is going when Magellan goes from calling Cindy “chick” (among other names when she gets on his nerves)…to “darling.” Yes, Magellan and Cindy as expected become an item, with Smith as is his wont keeping all the dirty stuff completely off-page…usually just relayed, again as is his wont, via the female character’s never-ending exposition. 

Violence is also minimal for the most part. Magellan only makes a few kills in the book, usually dispensing someone with his pistol in bloodless fashion. And also when he takes out his targets it’s anticlimactic, especially given the inordinate narrative time given over to the setup for each execution. Indeed, Smith overwrites to such an extent that Magellan’s third and fourth targets are essentially rushed through, with the third target having the greatest ramifications for Magellan – what happens to Cindy is what happens to every other “strong, independent woman” in a George Harmon Smith novel, and won’t be surprising to any reader. Especially after Magellan starts calling her “honey” and whatnot. 

But this does bring Magellan personally into the vendetta at least – and here we get a very extended sequence of George Harmon Smith’s other hallmark: the “hero” torturing someone. This one really goes to town and might be the most over-the-top instance yet, as if Smith were intentionally trying to outdo his previous torture scenes. Magellan gets target number three and first puts a hook in his back, then drags him along behind his car in a field. Then he ties him up and whips him with a barbed wire whip. Then he throws “brine” on the guy’s bloody, lashed body. Then he burns the guy’s testicles off. Then he whips him again! By the end, we’re informed that the guy’s intestines are hanging out and etc. 

As Magellan warned Cindy earlier in the novel, “It’s going to get gross.” This I believe is the first knowing instance I’ve encountered in one of George Harmon Smith’s installments; Cindy nearly pukes when she sees Magellan stomp on some guy’s skull, and Magellan tells her things will only get more “gross” as he goes along. But man, after this extended torture scene, victim number four is hastily dispatched, as Smith has nearly reached his word count. Actually, I’d say he’s well exceeded his word count, as Bloody Sunday is a lot longer (and more laborious) than the typical Marksman installment. 

The book is curiously constructed, again harkening back to Icepick In The Spine, in that Janie is introduced as the first girl, then disappears from the text for like a hundred pages, replaced by Cindy…and then Janie returns at the end, when Magellan goes back to Cleveland. What’s interesting is that Smith does not mention that Magellan will soon leave her, or whatever…in fact, earlier in the book, before leaving on his vendetta, Magellan promises Janie that he will come back to her. And he keeps his promise at book’s end, George Harmon Smith ending the novel with the two walking off together. It almost comes off like the end of Magellan’s saga, which is curious. 

And as hard as it is to believe, we are coming near the end of The Marksman. There are only three more volumes in the series, and Lynn Munroe seems to indicate that George Harmon Smith wrote at least one more of them. So I’ll be curious to see if that one too comes off like a lost installment of Bronson. 

*As Lynn further notes, Bloody Sunday was reprinted a few years later, this time by sister imprint Leisure Books and credited to Aaron Fletcher. I agree with Lynn that this does not mean that Aaron Fletcher actually wrote the book. For one, the style here in Bloody Sunday is identical to the style in the Marksman novels we know for certain were written by George Harmon Smith…because Lynn Munroe was actually in contact with Smith’s relatives. I too was in touch with them for a while, and in fact received several nice emails from Smith’s granddaughter (which is interesting in hindsight, given this novel’s focus on two granddaughters, Wendy and Janie). So we know that George Harmon Smith indeed wrote many of these novels, especially Icepick In The Spine, as it’s one he would apparently mention facetiously to friends and family. And also, Icepick In The Spine was later reprinted by Leisure (as Icepick), where it too was credited to Aaron Fletcher. 

Aaron Fletcher was a real person, apparently, and thus one might guess that he really was the author of Bloody Sunday and Icepick In the Spine, and Belmont-Tower/Leisure merely reprinted those books under his real name once Fletcher gained success with his novel Outback. 

But remember…Belmont-Tower/Leisure was the same publisher that also published The Terrorists as by “Nelson DeMille,” even though it was really written by Len Levinson! So then, this grungy little publishing house had absolutely no problem with mis-crediting a novel to a more-famous name, even if the more-famous name didn’t actually write the novel! So the fact that “Aaron Fletcher” was credited as the author of these Marksman novels in the Leisure Books reprints probably doesn’t mean a damn thing, other than Leisure/Belmont-Tower’s typical lack of giving a shit. 

So finally, at long last, I rest my case again.