The Headhunters #2: Starlight Motel Incident

The Headhunters #2: Starlight Motel Incident, by John Weisman and Brian Boyer
April, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Hard to believe it’s been three years since I read the first volume of the Headhunters series. This second installment is a direct pick-up from it, with our heroes Eddie Martin and Jake “T.S.” Putnam of the Detroit police internal affairs division once again coming off like guest stars in their own book; like Marc Olden’s Narc series, the Headhunters novels are more about merciless crooks and dirty cops.

One difference between the two series would be that Narc has a much stronger focus on action. Martin and Putnam in fact shy away from battle, and spend the majority of Starlight Motel Incident either tracking leads or investigating crime scenes. I guess this would be a problem with making your protagonists members of the internal affairs division; for the pair to even be involved, the majority of the storylines must revolve around crooked cops or internal corruption, and as with the previous volume that is once again the plot here.

However the plot moves a lot faster this time, and one thing I should mention is, despite the action-avoiding protagonists, The Headhunters is without question one of the more lurid series to ever see print. For pete’s sake, the first-page excerpt/preview is about a white reporter coming to consciousness “in a pool of blood from his ruptured sphincter,” having been sodomized by several black inmates…and now they’re coming after him for more! I mean, did Pinnacle think prospective buyers would peruse this first page and then rush for the checkout line to buy the book?? (Though to tell the truth, it did get my attention!)

Martin and Putnam (who by the way is still invariably referred to as “TS,” “Putnam,” and “Jake” in the narrative, which is pretty confusing) appear in maybe a quarter of the novel. Instead the majority of the tale goes once again to Henry Pacquette, crime kingpin of Detroit, who finds his kingdom threatened by the Black Saracens. Lead by the mysterious Malcom 4x Saladin, who has never been seen, the Saracens are trying to corner Pacquette’s market of drugs and hookers and whatnot. What brings our heroes into it is the fact that a lot of cops happen to be Black Saracens.

Reading Starlight Motel Incident could leave one pretty paranoid about cops, especially those in Detroit circa 1974; practically every one of them are on the take, and have side jobs as executioners for either Pacquette or Saladin. And the corruption runs right up to the top, with of course Martin and Putnam being the only two clean cops we meet. You wonder why they don’t just say to hell with it and bust out of town – which, as the acknowledgements page would indicate, is exactly what Weisman and Boyer themselves did. They dedicate the book to their wives, for talking them into leaving Detroit, “the most dangerous city in the world.”

The titular event occurs in the first pages, as a group of Black Saracen cops burst in on a group of Henry Pacquette’s cops as the latter play poker in the Starlight Motel, hookers squatting beneath the tables and giving them blowjobs at the same time! (I told you this series was lurid…) The Saracens blow the cops away (they allow the hookers to live, though), thus setting off a war between Pacquette and Saladin’s men. We learn this from the outset from the scenes with Pacquette, who again is surrounded by his top two henchmen: Sonny Hope and Dovell, but it takes Martin and Putnam a while to put everything together.

There isn’t much “action” per se in the novel, other than a scene where Putnam, who goes undercover as a Saracen inductee, is chased by a trio of Saladin’s cops, who quickly deduce who Putnam is. Again though these heroes don’t do anything heroic; Putnam just runs from the Saracens, even stealing some guy’s car to make his getaway. In fact the people who do “heroic” things are the villains, with Dovell and Hope swooping in to save Putnam, a foreshadowing of the finale, in which they save both Martin and Putnam from the Saracens.

But while there isn’t action, there are definitely sordid hijinks. As mentioned above there’s the sad plight of Joe Thomas, a Detroit reporter who stumbles on the fact that the Black Saracens have friends in high places; for his trouble he’s set up on a bogus rap for heroin possession, sent to jail, taken to a notorious wing, and tossed in a cell with several black inmates (and yes, the authors inform us the inmates are all black). After he’s gang-sodomized by the lot of them, Thomas comes back to consciousness only to have his throat slit by the Elephant, Saladin’s top henchman and yet another dirty cop, not to mention the person who set Thomas up in the first place. Talk about a sick bastard – Elephant not only set him up, but initiated Thomas’s raping, and then waited around for him to wake up so Thomas would be conscious while Elephant slit his throat!

There are other instances, though none of them reach this exploitative high (low?). Another of Saladin’s cops is caught by Pacquette and his men in a darkly humorous scene, with Pacquette posing as a bus driver, and the guy’s tossed to the bears in the Detroit Zoo; both Martin and Putnam puke at the sight of the mauled remains the next morning. And once Saladin is uncovered (his identity is easily figured out, though), he too suffers a horrifying fate at the hands of Dovell and Hope – thrown against a sheet metal-lined brick wall and smashed against it by an armored truck!

As for our protagonists, Martin and Putnam don’t even shoot at anyone, and throughout are at least one step behind Pacquette and Saladin. This concept does make the Headhunters interesting, as of all the men’s adventure series I’ve read, this one features the least effective protagonists. But then they’re moreso there just to framework the stories; the tales really belong to the colorful cast of villains. Be forewarned, though, if you’re sensitive to such things; as in the previous book Weisman and Boyer go out of their way to make their black characters “talk black,” which gives the book a humorous Blaxploitation tone, whether intentional or not.

Crystal Pharoah's Blaxploration

This is a promo video DJ Crystal Pharaoh created for the Blaxporation CD mix he self-released a few years ago. Not only is the CD pretty great (you can get it here) but the video is too: very similar to the original Black Dynamite trailer. I've been emailing the Pharoah for years asking him to do a full-length DVD mix...

Dave Hunter & Ron Donovan's Black Dynamite Poster

As I've mentioned in a previous post, Black Dynamite is one of my all-time favorite films. So I was happy to discover this poster, created by California-based artists Dave Hunter and Ron Donovan for the Red Vic Movie House in San Francisco. This was a limited run of 100 prints; I've read that "Black Dynamite" himself Michael Jai White and director Scott Sanders were given their own copies when they appeared at the Red Vic's special showing of the film.

Anyway, this is now one of the coolest things I own. I'm a big fan of blacklight posters (part of me is still a kid living in the 1970s), and this print is "blacklight tested and approved." In fact I broke out my own light and snapped a photo on my crappy digital camera of how this baby looks under a blacklight:

It goes without saying that the poster looks better in person. The colors are dynamic and really pop. Under the blacklight they swirl even more, and Black Dynamite's eyes become inky pools of fury. Dave Hunter still has a few copies left at his website, where he also has some photos of the print's creation process.

Fight Smack In The Orphanage!

The Headhunters #1: Heroin Triple Cross

The Headhunters #1: Heroin Triple Cross, by John Weisman & Brian Boyer

February, 1974 Pinnacle Books

Thanks to Justin Marriott's Men of Violence magazine for bringing this unsung series to my attention. This was the first of four volumes which detail the gritty adventures of Detroit cops Eddie Martin and Jake "TS" Putnam, the "Headhunters" of the title. Members of the Detroit Police Internal Affairs division, it's their job to ensure their fellow cops don't yield to the rampant vice and corruption of Detroit and go over to the other side.

The cover proclaims this as "an exciting new series" and the spine is tagged "Adventure," but The Headhunters series is only nominally part of the men's adventure genre. It's more "Elmore Leonard" than "Don Pendleton." This is basically just a crime novel that revels in its own lurid nature, filled with gutter-talking conmen and gangsters with colorful names (and even more colorful wardrobes), of two-bit hoods who go on murder and theft rampages. And our two heroes have none of the diehard resolve of the usual men's adventure protagonist; indeed Martin and Putnam barely even appear in the novel, and have little to do with the plot, climax, or resolution.

Eddie Martin is the boss, a WASP-type married into money who considers himself one of the few uncorrupted cops on the Detroit force. But behind his conservative veneer lies a true hellion, most notably in the turbo-charged engine he's installed in his VW bug. But otherwise Martin's one of those guys who likes to play old jazz on the high-fi while reading the newspaper.

Putnam is the new guy, a young black cop who likes to gamble and wears the latest superfly threads. A confusing bit in the narrative is that authors Boyer and Weisman can't seem to figure out how they want to refer to Putnam. Sometimes he's "TS" (which stands for "tough shit"), other times he's "Putnam," and most confusingly sometimes he's referred to as "Jake." (It took me a second to figure this out...because when Putnam's first referred to as "Jake" in the narrative there's no indication we're reading about Putnam...it was only after jumping back to the brief bio handily inserted into the text that I learned that Putnam's first name is "Jackson," thus "Jake!") One of the basic rules of writing is to only refer to your character by one name, and one name only -- other characters can call him by a million different names, but the author must be consistent.

At any rate the villains are the true protagonists of Heroin Triple Cross. They take up around 85% of the narrative, and there are a bunch of them: first and foremost there's Henry Paquette, the series' recurring villain. A hulking black former cop, Paquette is now the kingpin of Detroit's inner-city crime ring who poses as a law-obeying entrepreneur; Paquette's a grandiose figure who steals the entire book. His core group is just as showy: there's Dovell, Paquette's hit man, another black tough who happens to be gay and apparently gets off on murdering; and there's Sonny Hope, an over-the-top type who dresses as loudly as possible and occasionally bursts into impromptu song. Then there's "Gloves" Lewis, a black cop on the take; he works for Paquette and lives a double life, one as a cop with a bad attitude, the other as a high-roller who lives in a fancy penthouse.

Finally there are three black youths who provide the thrust of the narrative. Street punks who kill cops, steal cars, and rob Paquette-owned businesses, all within the first few pages. The entire city wants them, but most of all Paquette, because they have taken from him. He tasks Gloves Lewis with killing them, all while making it look like they were resisting arrest. During this Martin and Putnam (I almost typed "Martin and Lewis") attempt to crack down on Paquette, trying to figure out who his inside man is. The novel alternates between all of the above characters, again giving it the feel moreso of a grungy crime story than your average men's adventure novel.

As you no doubt noticed from the character rundown, the majority of the characters here are black. And Boyer and Weisman, white authors, go out of their way to have them "talk black." In many ways Heroin Triple Cross comes off like one of those latter Blaxploitiation movies, the majority of which were written by white screenwriters, filled with a sort of psuedo-jive dialog. The n-word is dropped more times than on a rap album, so if you're sensitive to such things, you've been warned. But then the novel would scrape the nerves of anyone too sensitive: this is one sordid, lurid piece of trash fiction, filled with gruesome murders, cops who fart and discuss their own stink, and some very unerotic sex...in particular a platinum blonde bimbo who "does blacks for kicks" and who does something so "shameful" with them that even her own cheeks burn with embarrassment at the thought of doing it. (Boyer and Weisman however leave what exactly this is a secret; my own sordid imagination came up with all sorts of stuff.)

According to Justin Marriott's informative article, Weisman and Boyer were journalists for Detroit's Free Press newspaper, and there's a definite air of legitimacy to the inter-office rivalries, police corruption, and gangster vice, no doubt gleaned from their many interractions with Detroit's cops and scumbags. Per the authors however this first novel was quickly written, and it shows. There are a ton of grammatical and narrative errors strewn throughout, things which could've been caught with a cursory edit. But in a way this rough nature lends Heroin Triple Cross a sort of underground charm -- it reads like a fictional counterpart to the Nark! pieces Joe Eszterhas was writing at the time over in Rolling Stone magazine (which supposedly were mostly fiction themselves).

I've got the following three volumes in the series and look forward to them, particularly Quadraphonic Homicide, the final volume and the one Justin investigated the most in his article.

Black Dynamite: The Original Trailer and "Fight Smack In The Orphanage"

Without a doubt one of the best movies of the past few years has been Black Dynamite. Where Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez fell flat on their faces with their Grindhouse project -- which despite being so slavish to the grindhouse films of yore suffered a huge error by being set in the present -- Michael Jai White and director Scott Sanders scored a perfect hundred. Everything about Black Dynamite works perfectly.

I loved the film so much I got the Blu Ray disc, which I've watched several times already. But even though the disc is stuffed with making-of documentaries and around 30 minutes of cut/extended footage, there's still a plethora of material not included.

First and foremost, there's the "original trailer" White and Sanders created over a few days to get funding for the movie. Both men discuss this trailer at length in the Blu Ray commentary track, but it's not included. No doubt this is because the studio wouldn't pay for the rights, because the original trailer is comprised of clips taken from various Blaxploitation movies, with a few shots of Michael Jai White inserted amid the chaos. But everything else is vintage, from the narration to the music. Luckily this trailer was leaked onto the internet:



Once the actual film was produced, White and Sanders went further and created some viral marketing to promote it. A series of four fake public service announcements, featuring Black Dynamite and supporting characters from the film, asking people to help "Fight Smack In The Orphanage." A tie-in with the movie, and wonderfully done...in fact, these four PSAs are some of the best viral marketing I've ever seen.

But due to studio indifference (which resulted in Black Dynamite itself bombing in the theaters) and an idiotic marketing department that didn't know what to do with such clever little pieces of viral marketing, these fake PSAs weren't allowed to achieve their full potential...the Man strikes again.

The Iceman #1: Billion Dollar Death

The Iceman #1: Billion Dollar Death, by Joseph Nazel

1974, Holloway House

Henry Highland West, the Iceman: Harlem-reared entrepreneur who grew his pimping business from a smallscale affair on the streets of the ghetto into a veritable kingdom of pleasure. He now operates out of a high-tech fortress/casino in the desert outside of Las Vegas, surrounded by his loyal army of "bitches," a multinational assortment of beautiful prostitutes who each know kung-fu, how to handle weaponry, operate the complicated machinery which runs the casino, and have sex with the patrons.

Sounds like the makings of a villain, doesn't it? But the Iceman is actually the hero of this series, created and written by Joseph Nazel and published by Holloway House on rough, super-pulpy paper. Man, I thought The Baroness series was expensive to collect, but it took extensive searching to find a copy of Billion Dollar Death at a reasonable price. But really, price mattered little: I've been on a Blaxploitation kick lately, and I kept running into mention of the Iceman series. From the makings it appeared to have all I could want, with a hero seemingly amalgamated from The Mack, Slaughter, and Shaft, with a little Black Belt Jones thrown in for good measure.

But if only the writing were up to par with the concept...

Nazel, a black author who churned out a lot of black-themed pulp, was apparently very prolific, but Billion Dollar Death is not the output of a writer who has honed his craft. The book reads like a first draft -- a hastily-written first draft at that. Every character speaks exactly the same, each narrative point-of-view is the same as the one before it, and no one behaves in any believeable fashion. Iceman himself comes off like a blank slate; we know he's supercool (because the narrative reminds us often), we know that everyone loves him, that his ladies adore him, but despite the adoration he's showered with by all the characters, he does nothing to gain the reader's respect. Not only that, but he's so superheroic that he's rendered bland.

Iceman's high-security casino is infiltrated; a bomb goes off in the middle of the night, killing a mob boss and one of Iceman's best women. The rest of the narrative follows Iceman trying to figure out what's happened. Long story short: an African prime minister is working with a US senator to smuggle a large cache of guns, with which he hopes to instill a revolution in his home country. Along the way the mafia gets involved, as does an old friend of Iceman's who, due to the helping hand Iceman has long given him, has become jealous of the man and wants him dead.

But it all goes down so ineptly. I mean, the prime minister also happens to be in Iceman's little casino paradise, as if it's the only place in the United States to be. Iceman flies around in his personal attack 'copter (he's richer than Howard Hughes, it appears), looking for clues, but instead it comes off like him wandering into one sneak-attack after another.

Along the way Iceman's two stalwart companions are Kim and Solema, prostitutes from his stable, the former an Asian martial artist, the latter a black weapons specialist. (Other than that the women are identical -- indeed, I couldn't tell a single one of the women apart throughout the novel.) Iceman also has a pal in Christmas Tree, a jive-talking hustler whom Iceman asks for help early in the narrative, but disappears until the very end -- where he's conveniently already on his way to the final showdown. But that's how Billion Dollar Death operates throughout: there's no real thought into the proceedings; shit just happens.

For a novel about a pimp surrounded by gorgeous women, there's zero sex in the novel. Sure, we have a few descriptions of female parts on display, but when it comes to the goods Nazel cuts to another scene. He does provide a fair amount of action scenes however, and despite their redundancy (basically just duck and shoot, duck and shoot), Nazel's sure to give us a generous amount of gore. For each bullet-hit we get a sentence or two describing the blood and brain matter which showers across the surrounding area.

But really, this is only a middling effort. It's poorly constructed and plotted, filled with spelling errors (Nazel doesn't appear to know the difference between "past" and "passed"), and it's just underwhelming on the whole. It's nowhere in the league of Marc Olden's superb Black Samurai series, so if you're seeking a little Blaxploitation with your men's adventure thrills, then look there.