April, 1973 Bantam Books
The first Shaft novel to be published as a paperback original, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner, who the following year turned in the execrable Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Fortunately Shaft Has A Ball is better than that one, though as John Lennon would say, “it couldn’t get much worse.” For the most part Shaft Has A Ball comes off like one of the hardboiled yarns Turner wrote for Manhunt and other crime mags several years before, as collected in the anthologies Shroud 9 and The Hardboiled Lineup. In other words, it’s not much of a Blaxploitation affair, though that seems to also be true of Ernest Tidyman’s original Shaft novel (which I intend to read one of these days!).
Again a big thanks to Steve Aldous for the background detail that Ernest Tidyman did the final edit of Shaft Has A Ball. Tidyman did a good job in his editing and rewriting, as the style here is the same as in the final book in the series, The Last Shaft, which was written by Philip Rock. In other words, one could read the Shaft series and not even suspect it was the work of two ghostwriters and one editor. The only caveat is Philip Rock was a superior writer, and Robert Turner again takes a fun concept and proceeds to do little with it. And, as with every other Turner book I’ve read, it was a chore to finish the book; despite being only 150 pages, Shaft Has A Ball maintains a sluggish pace throughout.
I first read about this novel twenty years ago on Teleport City, meaning to someday check out the book. I recall even back then the Shaft books were obscure and hard to find. I’m reading this series way out of order, but it’s no big deal; there’s not much in the way of continuity, other than the small group of people John Shaft regularly works with: Captain Anderozzi of the NYPD, a cleaning lady who stays off-page the entire book, and Rollie Nickerson, a minor actor who is part-time bartender at the No-Name Bar that Shaft frequents. There’s also returning character Ben Buford, a Malcolm X type who apparently grew up with Shaft and has a brotherly sort of antagonism with him.
According to Steve Aldous, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner at the same time Philip Rock was writing Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which was the last Shaft novel to be published in hardcover in the United States (and, like all other books in the series, credited solely to Ernest Tidyman). This means there is some incongruity in how a certain character is presented in each book: Senator Albert Stovall, a black politician who in Shaft Has A Ball doesn’t have much to do in the narrative other than bet on a horse race, give Shaft an expensive watch, and get the shit beaten out of him (off-page) by a “sadie-massie” gay male prostitute. Meanwhile I was most staggered by the off-hand mention that Stovall, a black politician known for his firebrand personality, was a Republican.
And yes, the sadie-massie (ie sadomasochism) mention brings us to the titular “ball;” it’s an event being held in the Hotel Armand in New York City for GAY, aka Gay American Youth, but really it’s a drag queen ball. Presumably the attractive black women on the cover are these drag queens, or maybe the artist (Lou Feck, per Steve Aldous) had no idea what the novel was about and just assumed there would be a bunch of hot black women in it. (Spoiler alert: There aren’t.) But then, even the drag queens are seldom in the text. Above I mentioned how Robert Turner does little with the plot. This is no truer than the ball itself; indeed, the entire “heist going down at a drag queen ball” element is almost an afterthought, and the heist could just as easily have occurred anywhere else. What I mean to say is, just as in Scorpio and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, Robert Turner doesn’t seem to know what kind of a book he’s supposed to be writing.
Also according to Steve Aldous, the plot for Shaft Has A Ball came from Ernest Tidyman himself, and clearly his idea was of a heist happening in the middle of a drag queen event. One can already see the hijinks this would entail, with various characters dressed up like women and whatnot; but, brace yourself for this shocker, Robert Turner does zilch with the setup. If you expected Shaft himself would put on a dress in this one, be prepared to be crestfallen. Shaft isn’t even in the hotel when the drag queen ball takes place! I mean that’s how lame Turner’s plotting is. Rather, it’s a pair of crooks who dress up like broads and proceed to knock over the Hotel Armand (while knocking over some of their colleagues to increase their cut of the heist), and the whole thing is over and done with in a handful of pages.
But really, it’s like a Manhunt story taken to novel length; Shaft the cynical, burnt-out private eye who wonders if he’s had enough of the city and just wants to give it all up, but is pulled into action again. Speaking of which, Shaft is pretty much a bad-ass in this one, killing people with his bare hands and blowing people away with a submachine gun in the finale. He also sees some bedroom action, courtesy a smokin’ hot black-Hispanic chick named Winifred Guitterez who works for a “black-themed magazine” and asks to do a profile on Shaft. Instead she wants to get, uh, shafted, and the two go from dinner to Shaft’s apartment…only, Shaft finds the naked corpse of a white girl in his place, a junkie who just got out on bail and has implicated Ben Buford in an upcoming heist.
Shaft sends Winfired off…not that she holds any grudges, as she returns later in the narrative for the sole purpose of providing a somewhat-explicit sex scene, after which she completely disappears from the novel! The literary equivalent of the perfect woman, I guess. Curiously Turner does build her up a bit; Shaft researches her after she approaches him for an interview, learning that she was into boxing for a while, which is odd for a woman now and even more so was in 1973. But ultimately Winifred has no imact on the narrative, and is another indication of Robert Turner’s lackadaisacal plotting; she appears in the opening to interview Shaft, goes to dinner with them, gets sent home, and then calls him later so they can “finish business” – and next time we see her, she’s in bed with him. And then that’s it. I just felt she could’ve had more impact on the story.
The same goes for the entire subplot around Ben Buford. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a group of professional criminals plan to heist the Hotel Armand and pin the blame on Buford. Why this is necessary is not much dwelt upon, but part of the caper involves a crook who looks enough like Buford that he will pose as the revolutionary rabble-rouser during the heist so as to make people think Buford is behind it. The only puzzling thing is, the Buford lookalike pulls off the heist in drag, which undermines the entire plan! It’s stuff like this that just makes me think that Robert Turner never really understood what he was supposed to write in these ghostwriter projects.
So in a nutshell, Shaft Has A Ball mostly features Shaft being told his old “pal” Ben Buford is planning a heist, and Shaft insisting that Buford wouldn’t have time for such nonsense. Then some people leave a dead junkie girl in his apartment and Shaft hunts them down, brutally killing one of them in the filthy bathroom of a bar and crippling the other. And curiously this subplot sort of goes away for a while, and Shaft moves on to providing bodyguard services for Senator Stovall. But this doesn’t entail much: Shaft takes a nap on a couch in the senator’s hotel room while Stovall disguises himself, to go bet on a horse race. After this Shaft goes home to bang Winnifred, and is called late that night when Stovall is taken into the hospital, having gotten banged up by a rough-trade male prostitute named Cowboy. This is a character who also receives some brutal payback from Shaft.
A humorous thing about Shaft Has A Ball is that Shaft’s sentiments on the gay community are very out of touch with today…but Turner indicates they were for 1973, too. There’s a curious bit where Shaft, in the Hotel Armand where he is to bodyguard the senator, rides up the elevator with the head of security, who informs Shaft that a drag queen ball is going on. Shaft makes some off-color jokes, and the security guard gets upset…which just seemed a very modern reaction to me. Shaft by the way will continue to make off-color jokes about gays and drag queens as the story progresses, which again makes it damn puzzling that Shaft himself has no interraction with the drag-ball heist itself. Personally I pictured burly, mustached John Shaft toting a gleaming .44 Magnum while in a dress and lipstick…wait, didn’t Hightower do that in one of the Police Academy movies? I haven’t seen one of those since the ‘80s (I saw the fourth one in the theater!!), so I can’t remember.
Meanwhile we know, from various cutovers to the villains, that a group of criminals are plotting to knock over the Armand and pin the blame on Buford. There’s a lot of stuff from the perspective from the heisters as they plan things, but in true heist style it all unravels. Instead two low-level criminals in the gang do the heavy lifting, and it is they who go about in drag during the heist, even though one of them is supposed to fool everyone into thinking he’s Ben Buford, which makes one wonder why he’s in drag in the first place. Then these two guys start knocking off their fellow criminals. Meanwhile Shaft is off sleeping somewhere. No kidding. He’s informed by Captain Anderozzi about the heist, the morning after, and Shaft sets out to clear his good budy Buford of any blame.
Apropos of nothing, Shaft deduces that someone at the heist was impersonating Ben Buford…and then Shaft goes to the apartment of his part-time actor friend, Rollie Nickerson, and asks him for a book of local actors(!). Shaft then looks through the book and picks out the black actor in it who looks like Ben Buford…and sure enough, that is indeed the guy who pulled off the heist! I mean it’s ludicrous. But Turner is close to meeting his word count, thus the finale jettisons the gritty vibe of the rest of the book and has Shaft figuring out where this guy likely has holed up. Shaft spots some mobsters also scoping out the place, and ends up using one of them as bait. But at least we get an action-styled finale, with Shaft picking up a machine gun and blasting away at the house; all told, Shaft kills a couple people in this one, though not on the level of series finale The Last Shaft.
While the concept isn’t sufficiently taken advantage of, Shaft Has A Ball is at least better than Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, but one can see why reception of the Shaft paperback series was lukewarm. John Shaft here is just your standard pulp private eye, with the same grizzled, cynical worldview as a million other pulp private eyes, and this blasé vibe extends to the narrative. But then, this could just be due to Robert Turner. Next I’ll be checking out Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which as mentioned also features Senator Stovall, but it was written by Philip Rock, whose work I prefer to Turner’s.
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