The Devalino Caper

The Devalino Caper, by A.J. Russell
January, 1977  Ballantine Books

First published in hardcover in 1975, The Devalino Caper is another heist novel that really promised a lot more than it delivered. I’m unfamiliar with A.J. Russell, but despite the listless plot his writing is pretty good, particularly when it comes to dialog; he doles out some great tough-guy chatter, some of which wouldn’t seem out of place in Gannon. But then, dialog is part of the novel’s problem, as I’ll gripe about momentarily.

The action opens in rural Indiana, where Joe Dev has been flown in by a local crime boss for a specific purpose. Dev is around 30 and Italian born and raised, only having lived in the States for the past decade. He came here with his brother Bruno, who we soon learn is back in New Jersey where he and his wife and child have been taken captive by some Jersey mobsters; if Dev doesn’t pull a job and get them the $100 thousand Bruno owes them, then the mobsters will kill Dev’s brother.

As for the Indiana caper, Dev’s been summoned by Bick Anson, the underworld boss of this section of the state; he runs the place with his assisstant, the Indian. The caper involves breaking into the high security compound of Cugarman, a megawealthy recluse who has gotten hold of a million or so in securities. Anson has hired Dev because he’s legendary for his breaking and entering skills. Dev’s a tough guy for sure, but not a violent criminal; he informs Anson that he never uses weapons on his heists and has never even owned a gun.

Anson puts Dev up in a whorehouse run by a heavyset black madam named Harriet; there are only three prostitutes who live here: Helen, Julia, and Alice, and Russell spends a goodly portion of the narrative building up these characters. Julia and Alice have an ongoing rivalry, which is soon compounded when good-looking Joe Dev shows up and takes an immediate liking to Alice. There’s a fair bit of sex in The Devalino Caper, but Russell shies from the details – his characters all seem to have walked out of a David Mamet production, though, dropping F-bombs left and right.

Which brings me to the dialog. This is one of those novels where a character is introduced and he has this odd way of speaking, odd but memorable, and you think hey, this is pretty cool, a character with such a unique voice. Then another character appears, and he or she also has a unique way of speaking. Then a third and a fourth, until you realize that every single character has a unique way of speaking, and they all talk a lot. According to the author bio Russell was a screenwriter, and I can easily see that -- The Devalino Caper is like a Tarantino film or something, just filled with characters who talk and talk. (Nothing against Tarantino, I’ve always enjoyed his movies, but sometimes I wish his characters would just shut up and DO something!!)

But these chattering characters bring the novel to a dead halt. They chatter on and on, about their hopes and dreams and backgrounds, and the pages tick by, so that we’re almost a hundred pages in and we haven’t even gotten to the caper itself. Even interesting little oddball bits get shunted aside for more dialog, like the bizarre introduction of a cop named Cooley who knocks over gas stations for spare change. (I believe that’s supposed to be Cooley in the cover painting, by the way, illustrating a scene where he brutally mistreats one of Harriet’s whores – again, a scene which itself isn’t described in the narrative, we just hear about it.)

And as for the caper, when it goes down it’s almost laughable, given how lame it is. Dev’s built up as this almost-mythical conman famous for his impossible heists, but all he does in The Devalino Caper is get Julia to take a job as a waitress in Cugarman’s mansion (Julia now being Dev’s girl, once he’s figured out Alice is secretly working for the Indian) and Dev sneaks into the compound in the trunk of her car! He hides in her room’s closet by day and sneaks around the premises at night. After all the buildup I was expecting a lot more.

The final quarter of the novel deals in turnarounds and surprise reveals, but here again it’s more talk than anything. The few action scenes are perfunctorily delivered, Russell telescoping the details so that none of it is satisyfing. For example when Dev takes on the crooked cop Cooley while he’s beating on the hooker, the ensuing fight is flat and over quickly – not that the characters don’t talk about it a whole lot. The finale as well, with Dev fighting the Indian and some goons, is rendered so flat as to be anticlimatic.

Actually the best thing about The Devalino Caper is the uncredited cover artwork. The back cover features art as well, this time illustrating the climax, where the Indian’s goons chase after Dev. Also note how the back cover copy makes the novel sound a whole lot better than it actually is!

Hatchett

Hatchett, by Lee McGraw
October, 1976  Ballantine Books

This obscure paperback original features the first-person narrative of hardboiled private eye Madge Hatchett, who as you’ve no doubt guessed just happens to be a woman. A knockout of a woman at that, with other characters referring to her jawdropping good looks and her “big breasts,” even comparing her to Sophia Loren. But Hatchett’s female gender really doesn’t have much impact on Hatchett, and indeed you could read the first several pages of the novel and not even realize she is a woman.

The narrative voice is identical to that found in countless other hardboiled P.I. novels: a world-weary cynicism mixed with a bitter sense of humor. Hatchett carries herself just like Mike Hammer (and in fact it’s been wondered if this novel should be considered a sort of parody of Spillane’s Hammer novels), spouting off at the mouth and able to kick some shit when need be. Her femininity only comes up when she’s playing to the cliched image of the damsel in distress, usually to rope in some mark or to fool an overconfident opponent. Otherwise Hatchett goes through the novel knocking guys out, kicking them in the balls, or blowing them away with her Beretta (which of course she carries in her purse).

Hatchett was once a cop, but now works as a private eye in Chicago. She still makes use of her contacts on the police force, in particular Capt. Pete Connally, a guy who taught Hatchett everything she knew when she was a cop and who now feeds her information in exchange for info Hatchett has picked up in her own investigations. We don’t get much detail on past cases, but Hatchett opens with our narrator immediately on her latest case, which happens to be personal: an old friend of hers named Danny, a former convict who was trying to turn his life around, has had his throat slit in brutal fashion. Hatchett got Danny a job as a doorman in her apartment building, and she’s certain the guy had escaped his past life, so the running question throughout the novel is why he was killed.

Meanwhile McGraw serves up a host of other plots, all of which satisfactorily merge with the Danny murder as the novel progresses. For one there’s the mysterious Mr. Big, a shadowy entity who is supposedly heading up the entirety of Chicago’s ciminal underworld; the cops had a line-in on the man, with a star witness named Red Sharkey who was about to blab all he knew. But Sharkey was blown up (coincidentally, on the night Danny was killed), and the cops are trying to turn up the gorgeous blonde who was apparently behind the bombing of Sharkey’s “high security” apartment. There’s also the disappearance of Frank Flynn, a literary agent who lives in Hatchett’s apartment building; Flynn’s brother Mark is here visiting and approaches Hatchett, having read her name in the paper, to ask if she can find out what happened to him.

True to the private eye genre, Hatchett’s investigation leads her to a host of unusual characters, from a nebbish porn writer (who later turns out to be an agent from Bell’s security division!) to a Playboy Playmate of the Month. There’s even a talking parrot named Polly. The Flynn case gets the most narrative time, as it gradually develops that Flynn wasn’t just a literary agent, he was in fact a porn king, a publisher of kinky s&m paperbacks. (McGraw gives us a bit of foreshadowing on this; when Hatchett is confronted by a lecherous desk clerk early on, she sees that the guy’s reading a whips-and-chains porn book, and McGraw delivers an “excerpt” from it, displaying that his skills extend to sleaze parodies as well.)

All of the various plots (and a few more) are tossed into a blender, and it’s a lot of fun how McGraw handles them. As is mandatory for a hardboiled P.I., Hatchett barrels through the narrative with little fear or concern, threatening mobsters and dodging assassination attempts, blasting back at her attackers with her Beretta. She’s in danger throughout, and endures a lot of punishment, particularly when she is briefly captured in the finale. There’s only a bit of deus ex machina stuff, like when not once but twice Hatchett is sapped from behind, and her mysterious attackers don’t kill her, don’t even take her pistol. (This is later explained away with the old “I wasn’t considered a threat” copout.)

McGraw delivers some nice action setpieces, in particular that finale, which sees a bound and nude Hatchett locked in a room with Mr. Big (whose reveal is also nicely handled) on the top floor of a soundproofed building. This sequence ends with Hatchett escaping in a move that would make the Baroness proud, culminating with her setting the building on fire and walking out unscathed. There are also a few shootouts and chase scenes, but for the most part Hatchett uses her brains, in particular how she puts together Danny’s murder and who exactly was behind it, something McGraw saves for the very end.

An interesting note is that, even though Hatchett was published in 1976, there’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been published a few decades before. Other than a few f-bombs, Mr. Big’s high-tech (for the mid-‘70s) recording devices, and a brief moment where Hatchett smokes some dope, this whole novel comes off like a hardboiled pulp of the 1950s. You get little feel for the 1970s; in other words, the novel completely lacks the “shag rug” ambiance of other period novels, like the Killinger or Joe Rigg books.

As for the sex, it’s pretty much rated G. Hatchett sleeps with an old flame halfway through the novel, and it’s a fade to black scene, Hatchett out of it after smoking a joint. There’s also a bit later on where Hatchett tries to get it on with another male character, but this proves to be a ruse, and anyway McGraw again plays it conservative with the details. This means then that we have none of that strange stuff where a male author writes the first-person narrative of a female character as she has sex with a man, like you’ll encounter in the Cherry Delight books. So in other words, the sex here is much more tastefully described, which is to say it’s hardly described at all. However this results in huge demerits so far as the novel’s trash rating goes!

Finally there is the question of authorship. It’s been wondered if Lee McGraw is a male or female author. After some Googling I turned up a 1976 Catalog of Copyright Entries which states that “Lee McGraw” is the pseudonym of an author named Paul Zakaras. This at least puts to rest the gender of the author, however Zakaras has no other novels published to his name, and this was the only one to carry the Lee McGraw byline. I’d be curious to know why there was never a followup to Hatchett; the character is strong enough to carry another book at least, and obviously there are countless tales that can be told about a private eye, especially when the writer is as gifted as this.

Slaves Of The Empire #2: Haesel The Slave

Slaves Of The Empire #2: Haesel The Slave, by Dael Forest
August, 1978  Ballantine Books

This second volume of the Slaves Of The Empire series seems to bear out my theory that the five volumes were planned as (or at least written as) one long book. The story picks up immediately after the preceding installment, with no attempt at filling in readers who might’ve missed the previous volume. Author Dael Forest (aka Stephen Frances) whittles down his sprawling cast this time out, allowing the reader to better appreicate the story. And also he slightly increases the lurid quotient, something apparent from the first pages, which open on an orgy our main protagonist Hadrian attends.

As we’ll recall Hadrian has been hired to build a new town, which he does with the assistance of his co-planner, the slave Haesel, who has a long-simmering sort of thing for Hadrian, and vice versa. But now at this orgy Hadrian also is asked to head up a new Games, so he must figure out how to get animals and prisoners and gladiators for the event; he tasks his chief slave Cornutus with this, so there’s yet another new character to contend with. Meanwhile Haesel’s brothers and sisters still are slaves, except for studly Saelig, who remember had a fling with Hadrian’s wife Areta.

Saelig was whipped very harshly at Areta’s command in the climax of the previous volume, and we discover that Areta is bereft and has gone down to Baiae to mope. Saelig meanwhile has made a full recovery and has forgiven her. So moved by the slave’s obvious love for his wife, Hadrian gives Saelig his freedom. He offers to do so for Haesel as well, but she’s vehemently opposed to the idea; for reasons unexplained, she is determined to remain Hadrian’s slave until he feels that she has rightfully won her freedom. She doesn’t want a free handout, and this rightfully puzzles Hadrian, given how outspoken the girl has been about the unjustness of her slavery.

Meanwhile Haesel’s sister Mertice still pines away for Alexander, despite that he’s given her to the lusty object of his affections, Melanos. As sick as we readers are of seeing Mertice moping around, Melanos orders her chief of slaves to fondle the girl on a daily basis! Melanos herself has some fun; while at the Baths in a nicely-elaborated scene, she runs into Plautus, a young soldier of high family who has just returned to Rome after years away. Frances here really brings to life the decadent atmosphere of the Roman Baths, and the new couple rush back to Melanos’s place to have sex.

Frances does a better job sensationalizing his otherwise tepid soap opera: the long-simmer relationship between Hadrian and Haesel catches a little fire when Haesel gets bitten by a snake on her thigh and Hadrian does the ol’ “suck out the poison” routine. He also has Saelig, now a free man, making obvious moves on Areta. The most lurid sequence though would have to be the very long scene at the Ampitheater (which Frances confusingly refers to as “the Forum”), all of it pretty much taken straight out of Daniel Manix’s Those About To Die, with virgins being raped, prisoners being gutted, and charioteers crashing spectacularly.

I’m still having trouble putting together when this all takes place. The Emperor briefly appears during the Games sequence, but he is not named and we are just informed that he’s old and that there are factions of highborn and soldiers aligning against him. At first I thought a clue might be found in the name of the town Hadrian is building, Trebula, but a cursory Googling reveals that there were three such towns in Italy during the Roman era, and all of them predate the Empire. At any rate the Slaves Of The Empire series definitely takes place after the days of Nero, mentioned here as “long dead.”

The lurid quotient continues apace as Frances dives straight into a chapter-long recounting of a Bona Dea ceremony, as Melanos and her fellow female worshippers strip down, anoit themselves with oil, and get themselves nice and randy so they can set themselves loose on some lucky men of their choosing. In Melanos’s case it is Platus, Frances having built up the anticipation between the two, Melanos abstaining from sex until the night of Bona Dea, and Platus grinning and bearing it.

Platus meanwhile serves to bring more action to the tale, at least indirectly; plotting against the Emperor with others, he maneuvers an assassination attempt which is quickly uncovered, and we learn in passing that Platus has been tortured to death! Oh well, so long Platus. Melanos however finds herself knocked up after that night of Bona Dea passion, so she politely informs Hadrian that she’ll no longer be having casual sex with him. So too does another high-born Roman gal Hadrian has a relationship with, so that within a short span of time Hadrian finds himself without any friends-with-benefits.

This leads to the culmination of the Hadrian-Haesel situation, at least. Growing increasingly short-tempered due to his lack of sex, Hadrian finds himself snapping at others and even checking out the female slaves. Plus Haesel has become more and more distant ever since he sucked the poison out of her thigh, and it gets to the point where Hadrian can’t take it anymore and orders Haesel to remove her tunic in his presence. He’s going to make her his sex-slave whether she likes it or not, even giving her a place of her own and calling on her every once in a while – there will no longer be any need for her to actually work.

But Haesel again turns the tables, going into “slave mode” and telling Hadrian she will do whatever he orders, when Hadrian can easily see that she is against the whole thing. But it all finally leads up to the two having sex, at long last – the trick being that Hadrian breaks down and tells Haesel he can’t order her to love him, he can’t make her do what it is against her nature to do, she can only do what she wants to do, and this it turns out is all Haesel has been waiting to hear.

And with this long-simmer relationship coming at long last to boil, the book abruptly ends. It would probably be smart to go immediately into the third volume, but the placid nature of this series sort of dulls the reader’s senses, so it’s best to take some time between installments. But overall Haesel The Slave was at least more entertaining and sordid than its predecessor, which makes me hope that future volumes will continue the trend.

Another End

Another End, by Vincent King
January, 1971  Ballantine Books

Here’s a psychedelic sci-fi novel that had so much potential. Vincent King appears to have taken the final section of Kubrick’s 2001 as inspiration, where a lone astronaut voyages “beyond the infinite.” The first quarter of Another End is very much in the same mold, really far out, really great, before the whole thing collapses into a grating exercize in pretensionsness.

The novel occurs in the far future – like, the really far future. I think more time passes in this novel than any other I’ve read; King will jump entire millennia in the span of a sentence. Our protagonist, Adamson (actually refered to as “the son of Adam” on the back cover), is a “Rider,” an astronaut from far-future Earth who has been chosen to voyage throughout the Milky Way in search of alien life.

Adamson is alone in his ship, the Probe, a sentient craft which is capable of repairing itself and gains its power from the stars. The Probe is actually the most memorable character in the book…sort of a HAL-9000 with a bit more compassion. I failed to get an idea of what the Probe actually looked like, though; King’s descriptions of characters are a bit vague at times. At any rate, the Probe is big enough for Adamson to walk around in, looking out at the cosmos and pondering man’s eternal quest and whatnot.

That is, when Adamson isn’t being dissolved and rebuilt in the Dissolution/Reconstitution chamber. In a process never fully described, Adamson is granted immortality by actually being melted down into some sort of protozoic ooze, before being regenerated into flesh by the Probe. This is done during “boring” portions of the voyage where he’s not needed, or perhaps during times when the Probe must enter into super-high speeds, I guess the inference being that Adamson’s mortal body couldn’t withstand the pressure.

This obviously adds a surreal and bizarre touch to the novel, especially when Adamson will be in his dissolved state for several thousands of years. While he is dissolved, the Probe puts Adamson in a dreaming state, where during one psychedelic sequence – which completely foreshadows Inception -- Adamson comes to consciousness within his dream and discovers he is in limbo, his sole companion a woman he names Laura. Together they build entire cities, until Adamson realizes it is all a dream and he must kill himself within it to get back to reality. (Exactly like in Inception!)

All of this – an entire novel’s worth of plot – is over and done with in the first twenty pages or so. Adamson, having voyaged with the Probe for a million or so years, is going insane: they’ve discovered no aliens, and word has not reached him that any other Riders have met any. Boredom and rot have set in upon his mind, and he is stricken with guilt over having killed Laura in his dream world. But when all hope seems lost Adamson and the Probe encounter Protia.

This turns out to be an amorphous (but female) entity from the Andromedan galaxy, a being which communicates telepathically and so, within a few seconds of meeting Adamson and the Probe, has plundered the full depth of human history – indeed, this is why she names herself “Protia” for them, after the mythic shape-shifter Proteus. For Protia too is a shape-shifter, and assumes a host of guises throughout.

This first meeting of man and alien is ruined when Portia realizes that all those “entertainments” she picked up via radio waves in space, beaming her films of WWII and Vietnam and etc, were actually real events in which people died. Realizing humankind is violent and savage, Portia refuses to speak to Adamson, and hovers in a corner of the Probe (her ship is crashed). Meanwhile Adamson goes back to his Dissolution chamber…and several thousand more years pass.

When “the Call” comes for all Probes to return to Earth, the Probe turns back…the mission has obviously failed. Again, we’re not even halfway through yet. Instead of continuing with his (more compelling) tale of millennia-spanning interstellar travel, King now turns his hand to satire and spoof, and the book drops dead.

Stopping off at an Earth-like planet (we learn that humans have colonized many planets in the Milky Way), Adamson is in the midst of an orgy with the female-only inhabitants when Thead appears. Thead turns out to have been a fellow Rider, only now he has gone insane and lords it over these women, who turn out to be robots. He wants to kill Adamson, but when he discovers Portia he wants her instead, to return to Earth with her in victory.

From here on the novel becomes more surreal and wacky, only in a bad way. When Thead confronts Adamson, for example, he throws jam at him…you know, jelly. And since he’s in the midst of an orgy Adamson gets up to fight him, but doesn’t have on any pants, but then figures who needs pants when you’re going to fight someone…! The novel proceeds with this sort of funny-but-not-funny vibe throughout, and I have to tell you, it really grated my nerves.

Thead chases after our heroes throughout the galaxy, and it gets to be repetitive. Other than a memorable scene where Portia investigates a massive ship which holds several deactivated Probes – their Riders having killed themselves to escape immortality – the novel takes on more of a satirical, goofy touch, and the millennia-spanning, psychedelic touch of the opening quarter is lost.

King was a British author, and writes like it…Another End has that same clinical feel to it, with characters talking at one another instead of to one another. I know he achieved a cult sort of fame in the UK with Candy Man and the bonkers-sounding Time Snake And Super Clown (which I don’t believe was published in the US), but I think for me this will be the first and last of his books I’ll read.

Slaves Of The Empire #1: Barba The Slaver

Slaves Of The Empire #1: Barba The Slaver, by Dael Forest
August, 1978 Ballantine Books

This was the start of a five-volume series, originally published in the UK in 1975, which takes place during some unspecified time in the Roman Empire. The author, Stephen Frances posing as “Dael Forest,” namedrops a few people here and there: Poppaea for one is often mentioned, but it’s never stated if in fact this is the same woman who was Nero’s Empress of Rome (or, for that matter, Poppea the Elder). And one of the protagonists is named Hadrian, but it’s certainly not the future emperor. So there's no way to exactly pinpoint when it all takes place.

Anyway, the awesome Boris Vallejo cover and the exploitative title have you expecting a full-on blast of toga porn, but the novel itself is moreso a drawn out soap opera. The story is very domestic, with none of the empire-spanning travel you normally get in such books. Instead everything plays out on an almost humdrum level, not even bothering to play up on the salacious aspect of life in the ancient world.

Five young siblings from Briton are taken captive and imported to Rome as slaves, and I assume they will be the driving force of the series: Haesel, a pretty young girl who hates slavery; Saelig, a good-looking hunk of muscle who makes the ladies quiver; Redwall, who takes up a smidgen of the narrative but thrives in slavery, given his business acumen; Thane, a hot-tempered leader who quickly revolts and therefore is sent into hard labor; and beautiful Mertice, with the flowing blonde hair to her waist who falls in love with her handsome young master.

This first installment is titled “Barba The Slaver,” but Barba himself has little screen time. He’s the Rome-based slavemaster who sells the five youths, but other than a brief scene where he oversees their selling he doesn’t have much to do with the book. I’d imagine the book was named after him for the exploitative effect…which, again, the novel itself really doesn’t have much of.

Instead we hopscotch across a wide group of characters, sometimes from the point of view of the slaves, other times from their masters. Nothing much really happens, and given the book’s short length (barely 160 pages) it comes off more like the opening quarter of a larger novel – my assumption is all five books were written at once, but that might not be so. What I mean is, you could probably just read all five books as one novel.

But really, the multitude of characters overwhelms the paucity of pages…it’s like Frances has a hard time juggling everything and just says to hell with it and spins his wheels. So for one storyline we have Hadrian, intelligent business leader who has been given the job of building a new town. His slave is Haesel, who herself is intelligent, given that she was a high-born Briton. But as mentioned Haesel burns with a hatred of slavery and takes to her new lot in life hard, especially when she begins to grow feelings for Hadrian. Frances appears to be building up something between her and Hadrian, but leaves it open at the end of the novel.

Then there’s Areta, Hadrian’s wife, who has dedicated her life to pleasure and so is very much the cliched Roman harlot-wife. Her daily routine consists of going to the Baths, gossiping, and going home with some random guy – not that Frances ever gets explicit in the least. In fact the whole novel is written in a sort of antiseptic tone, which as I’ve mentioned before I find pretty common in British pulp. Dammit, I want trash, not psuedo-literature!!

Anyway, Areta initiates the novel because she’s envious of the oft-mentioned but never-seen Poppaea, who shows up at the Baths with a studly male slave that has all the women atwitter. Areta wants one of her own. So Hadrian takes her to Barba’s slave shop, where they spot Saelig, who is everything Areta could want. While there Hadrian kills the proverbial two birds by picking up Haesel, not because she’s Saelig’s sister but because he needs a new slave anyway. I guess Barba’s is like the Wal-mart of slave shops, but he does not discount on the double purchase.

The majority of the novel is given over to the interractions between Hadrian and Haesel and Areta and Saelig, with for example much focus given to Areta preparing Saelig for his debut at the Baths, where she’s sure he will be the envy of all the Roman women. Frances also dwells on initially-unrelated characters, like Melanos, a highborn Roman lady who has a casual sex thing with Hadrian and who enjoys competing against men in various pursuits. Frances intimates she might have Sapphic tendencies as well, but doesn’t elaborate.

Then there’s Alexander, studly young Roman of the priviledged class who gets ownership of beautiful Mertice, but doesn’t even notice her given that he owns a few hundred slaves. Mertice notices him, though, and so pines for him throughout the book, in what is by far the most annoying part. In fact Mertice is so stupid and docile that you eventually get a sick delight in her ensuing bad treatment, particularly when Alexander only notices her in his attempts to gain favor with Melanos, whom he lusts for (Melanos meanwhile loathes him).

A problem with the book is not only the similarity of characters and situations but also of names. Frances does himself no favors with character names like Melanos, Mertice, Areta, and even Rheta (Areta’s female slave steward). There are others besides, and it gets to be a chore keeping them apart.

Another problem is the aforementioned lack of events. The novel moves at its own torpid pace, with nothing major occurring. Saelig mimics various people for Areta’s amusement, Areta later throws herself at him demanding that he love her, Hadrian works on his new town with Haesel eventually becoming his right-hand woman, and in the only moment when the novel comes out of its own lastitude Alexander orders Mertice to wrestle another slave-girl, again in the vain hopes of gaining Melanos’s favor.

What’s missing is the sense of escapism one looks for in historical fiction, or the feeling of a lost age. Frances relates it all in a casual, offhand manner. I guess that could be seen as part of the book’s charm; whereas other Rome-centric historical fiction goes big and flashy, Frances here instead plays it low key and subdued, but still. When you read a novel titled Barba The Slaver which is announced as the first installment of a series called Slaves Of The Empire, you want something more than “low key.”

The Takers

The Takers, by Robert Ackworth
January, 1979 Ballantine Books

They Lived By Movieland's Golden Rule: Do Unto Others...Fast!

Sporting the dumbest cover blurb in history, Robert Ackworth's The Takers seemed to offer everything I'd been searching for in a trashy novel set during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s. It was a doorstop of a book, coming in at nearly 600 pages of tiny, tiny print, about three movers and shakers at the fictional Regency Pictures studio, with a focus on their lurid sex lives. Ultimately though the novel fell flat due to lack of characterization, lack of plot, and lack of description.

The three protagonists are Howard Stanton, who comes to Hollywood in the final years of the silent era and becomes Regency's top star through the '30s and '40s; Michael Baines, several years younger than Howard, an actor who too follows his dream to Hollywood and becomes a Regency star in the post-WWII era; and finally Tracy Gordon, a brunette sort of Marilyn Monroe who becomes Regency's sex goddess of the '50s. Howard Stanton gets the majority of the novel, with the Tracy Gordon sections taking up the least. At any rate all three of them connect in one way or another, with Michael Baines a huge fan of Howard's (yet still hoping to trump him one day as Regency's top star), and Tracy Gordon falling in love with both of them.

Stanton's tale in the '30s was the highlight for me, due to my interest in that era. He hobknobs with Regency's top star (like Baines later in the book, Stanton hopes to trump the current star when he arrives in Hollywood, and of course succeeds), and also becomes a surrogate son for the acting president of Regency. As his star climbs Stanton becomes friendly with a variety of ladies. I should mention here that Ackworth takes special relish in tossing graphic sex scenes into the novel, which gives it a nicely lurid touch. Sometimes it's laughable because the scenes just come out of nowhere, with no connection to the preceeding or following sections, as if Ackworth went through his manuscript and said, "I'll put a sex scene here....and another here..."

Stanton eventually falls in love with Leni Leibhaber, a sort of anti-Marlene Dietrich in that she's 100% pro-Hitler and spends all of her sequences denouncing the US and saying how great Germany is, thanks to the Nazis. All this of course occurs in the pre-WWII years, and despite her Nazi tendencies Stanton's still in love with her. (Also despite the fact that Leni spends a suspicious amount of time with her female assistant.) So then, we have with Leni Leibhaber a sex-crazed character who happens to be a lesbian Nazi; as I say, The Takers had all the makings of becoming a trash classic.

The problem is, it's all so boringly presented. Ackworth doesn't bother with scene-setting or placing his characters in a colorful world. He barely describes anything, and also given that he also doesn't pay much attention to characterization, it leads to colorless characters in a colorless world. Leni should leap off the page but in Ackworth's hands she's kind of dull, which is insane when you think about it. Not to mention that Ackworth hardly ever describes the films his characters work on, even down to the plots. Given the super-production of studio pictures back then, you'd figure Ackworth would have a field day describing the sets and everything, but he only comes close to this once, when Michael Baines first arrives on the Regency lot and walks through it, looking at the sets. But even here Ackworth is conservative.

Shortly before WWII Leni returns to Germany and refuses to come back to the US, so Stanton has no choice but to divorce her. He then marries another actress whom he's fallen in love with in the meantime; another blank slate of a character, this one named Georgina. By this time Baines is more in the storyline, coming to Regency to start off in bit parts. Unfortunately his storyline is a carbon copy of Stanton's, which we just read a few hundred pages ago. It's pretty much identical, with Baines lusting for stardom, hooking up with random ladies for some explicit sex scenes, and hoping to become top dog at Regency. Only Baines is drafted into WWII, so his storyline gets a bit different when he becomes a soldier on the battlefront; sadly Ackworth's powers of description fail him in these scenes as well.

Tracy Gordon too shares the same storyline, with the only difference that she's a girl, so Ackworth can write her sex scenes from a woman's point of view. She loves Stanton (who is divorced again) but marries Baines; the two men have a long rivalry for her. Eventually Baines and Tracy also divorce, which sets the scene for the 1962 reunion for the trio -- the novel opens in that year, with Regency about to celebrate it's 4oth anniversary, but it's a melancholy, dispirited affair, as the days of the studios are over, besides which all of the bosses and moguls from that time are long gone anyway.

But there's no plot here, no forward momentum. It's sort of like the same story over and over again. Even down to the small details -- Stanton loses his virginity (as mentioned, Ackworth leaves no sex scene unexplored) as a teenager to a whore; a few hundred pages later, Baines loses his virginity to a whore. The scenes are identical. Stanton falls in love with an actress who turns out to be involved, yet he can't get her out of his mind. Baines a few hundred pages later falls in love with an actress who turns out to be married, yet he can't get her out of his mind.

Perhaps this is Ackworth's theme, the banality and repetition of the lives of Hollywood celebrities, but it makes for a dull affair. Even the lesbian Nazi is boring, and that is the most unkindest cut of all.