The Peeping Tom Murders (Morocco Jones #3)

The Peeping Tom Murders, by Jack Baynes

No month stated, 1958  Crest Books

Hardboiled junkies with a quarter to burn would’ve been well-pleased to discover Morocco Jones, but I’m assuming the series didn’t gain much traction in its day. The Peeping Tom Murders is more hardboiled in its approach than the previous two books, with Morocco in seedy Los Angeles and trying to figure out who murdered a movie star and her husband. 

I’m under the impression book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel was at least aware of this series; it seems very in-line with the paperbacks he would produce the following decade, particularly Nick Carter: Killmaster. This is mainly in how Morocco is a former globetrotting secret agent, and also how the books are written in third-person instead of the more hardboiled-esque first person. Even the narrative style of Jack Baynes (aka Bertram Fowler, apparently, but as with my previous two reviews I’ll refer to him by his much-cooler pseudonym) is similar to the house style Engel would instill in his productions. 

And on that note, The Peeping Tom Murders is almost like something Manning Lee Stokes would’ve written for Engel in later years, with an unwieldy plot and an ever-growing cast of characters. The only thing it lacks that Stokes would’ve brought is a lurid quotient; the uncredited cover art is the most lurid thing about The Peeping Tom Murders. But it’s misleading, as it doesn’t depict a sequence in the novel; the beautiful young starlet is already murdered before Morocco Jones arrives on the scene, so there’s no half-nude corpse for him to look at through a window. 

There’s also no pickup from previous volumes, nor an appearance of Morocco’s recurring cast of characters, the General and Llora. The former is only mentioned in passing and Llora is often thought of, but Morocco proves his macho worth by sleeping with some random lady during the course of this novel, even if he suspects Llora is the perfect woman for him! But folks that’s the biggest difference between Morocco Jones and the men’s adventure novels of later decades; the sex scene isn’t just off-page, it happens between paragraphs, leaving the sordid details to the reader’s fevered imagination because it’s 1958 and all. 

The novel gets off to a fine opening in which Morocco makes his way to a secluded estate up in the winding hills around Hollywood and is jumped by a trio of armed goons. Morocco makes short work of them, taking them out in believable fashion, even if he doesn’t have a gun. Oh and that’s another misleading element from the cover art: Morocco doesn’t even use a gun in the course of the book. At one point he gets hold of one, but tosses it aside later on. 

This is because Morocco is in the cross-hairs of the Los Angeles cops, just one of many factions that zero in on Morocco. I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of The Peeping Tom Murders concerns this or that character approaching Morrocco, usually in his hotel room, and either threatening him or asking him for his help. The novel quickly becomes overly complex and muddled with too-many characters and subplots overcrowding the central storyline of the murdered starlet. 

There’s also the question of why Morocco is even here; we’re told in the opening that the General “insisted” Morocco handle this job, but I never could figure out why an LA-based detective wasn’t hired instead of Morocco, who has come over from his home base of Chicago. He soon learns he’s out of his depth, with practically every character involved in the case figuring out where he’s staying in Hollywood and what his next move might be. Forward momentum is constantly halted by badgering, annoying characters who crowd the narrative. 

But the opening is cool. Morocco takes out the trio waiting for him, leaving one of them dead from a broken neck, and he goes into the bungalow of the man he’s working for: Garado Parano, scion of a wealthy family who claims not only that the men outside were not his, but also that he’s been framed for murder (the starlet and her husband). The thugs, Garado says, must have belonged to Santash, the leader of a local cult. 

Here The Peeping Tom Murders detours from what the reader might rightly assume would be the plot: rather than focusing on Hollywood and the movie biz, Jack Baynes gives us a story about a New Age cult that is run by a conman who works with a gossip columnist, and together the two are blackmailing Hollywood notables. There are also gangsters and whatnot involved, and all of them are constantly ten steps ahead of Morocco Jones; once again, Baynes manages to make his protagonist come off as dumb for the convenience of the busy plot. 

I was also a little let down with how Baynes treats the novel’s sole female character, Sonya Langley, a purple-eyed up-and-coming starlet who is one of the first characters to make an unnanounced appearance at Morocco’s hotel shortly after he arrives in town. With her “lowcut neckline” (which is about as risque as Baynes gets; there is zero in the way of anatonimical exploitation, sad to say) and her comment that “there are many beds between a bit part and a starring role,” Sonya throws herself at Morocco…who turns her away, not trusting her. This will begin a frosty rapport between the two, with Morocco suspecting that Sonya is working with the bad guys and trying to sway him. 

Indeed, she seems to be involved with Santash, formerly known as Joel Tuck, a black low-level criminal who started pretending he was a psychic to swindle superstitious gamblers. Now, in his robe and with a legion of followers, Santash commands a “psychic cult” that operates on the fringes of Hollywood society; the novel’s most memorable sequence has Morocco sneaking onto the cult grounds while a ceremony is in progress, complete with proto-psychdelic stuff like Santash praying to a “purple light” of the cosmos that shines on him. Morocco spends the time wondering what optical and stereo tricks Santash is using to fool his followers…talking aloud to himself the whole time. Yes, folks, a “tough” private eye who talks aloud to himself while sneaking around, just like Renegade Roe. 

The sordid Hollywood trash one might expect isn’t much to be found in The Peeping Tom Murders. The closest we get is a part where Morocco follows one of his innumerable leads to a Demille-esque director, and goes to the guy’s house to find him not there, but a bevy of post-party women lying around in an alcoholic stupor, and one of the women tells Morocco to “knock out” a particular young lovely who is getting on her nerves or something. 

What the lady is asking Morocco to do is bang the gal, you see, but it’s 1958 and all – and Morocco gamely obliges, but as mentioned above it occurs between paragraphs! Morocco takes the girl to a bedroom, she pulls him down to her, and next paragraph begins, “Five miles later, after a shower, Morocco…” I re-read the sequence just to ensure I hadn’t missed anything. Perhaps “five miles later” was a 1950s euphemism for “after banging the broad.” 

But really, Morocco just spends the novel going from one lead to another, and occasionally getting jumped by various characters. And in fact there are so many characters in the book I quickly got lost keeping track of them. There’s a lot of wasted opportunity, too; Garado, aka Morocco’s ostensible client, is himself protected by a lawyer who looks out for the family, and said lawyer employs this monstrous brute called Chaco who is described like some proto-Hulk. Hardly anything is done with the character, though. 

Not much is done with Santash, either. I thought it was interesting that Baynes made this character black, but it’s not much dwelt upon. One interesting angle though is that Morocco gets his information on Santash from a black crime boss in the city; Baynes again shows an admiration for inner-city blacks that was apparent in the previous two books. But otherwise Santash is sort of lost in the narratorial shuffle. 

Then there’s Ham Potter, a hard-drinking newsman (man, I wish those were still around today) who becomes Morocco’s pal during the course of the novel…eating steak and drinking hard and shooting the breeze. Again, I don’t exaggerate when I say that much of The Peeping Tom Murders features Morocco Jones talking to the many and sundry characters who populate the novel. 

Action is scant, and usually involves Morocco getting in a fistfight in pure hardboiled style. Lots of characters pull guns on him, but Morocco either turns the tables or manages to get saved by the sudden presence of yet another character who will distract the gun-toters. Again, Morocco gets saved quite a bit in the novel, which as with the previous books robs him of his tough-guy nature. 

To be honest, The Peeping Tom Murders was one of the most deceptively-slim books I’ve ever read. Despite “only” being 144 pages, it seemed that no matter how dogged of an effort I put into reading, the book just wouldn’t end! It was strange, because I wanted to like the novel, and thought the setup was interesting. But Jack Baynes fumbled the delivery this time, turning in a muddled effort that constantly stalled itself out, and way too many scenes of characters popping out of the woodwork to either threaten Morocco Jones or to provide him with info that would lead him to yet another character. 

My assumption is readers of the day felt the same, as the next volume would be the last. And as for Jack Baynes, aka Bertram Fowler, I have no idea whether he wrote anything else…if I had a copy of Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms, I’d see if there was an entry for him. Maybe I should order it from Interlibrary Loan again. The librarians are always super happy to lug that several-thousand-page monstrosity through the library’s pickup window for me when I pull up.

No Sympathy For The Devil

No Sympathy For The Devil, by Frederick Snow

April, 1982  Fawcett Gold Medal

I’ve managed to discover yet another obscure rock novel, one so obscure that there wasn’t even a scan of the cover online, so I had to take one with my phone. And also there’s no info out there about Frederick Snow; apparently this is his only book, and No Sympathy For The Devil is copyright under his name, but it could be a pseudonym; whoever it is, the writing is very clunky throughout, much clunkier than anything I’ve ever read from Fawcett, which in my mind was a slightly more upscale imprint. 

On the positive side, I can say without question that No Sympathy For The Devil is by far the raunchiest rock novel I’ve yet had the pleasure to read. Even more raunchy than Mick Farren’s The Tale Of Willy’s Rats; almost every other page features characters having sex, thinking about sex, or talking about sex. The image very much conveyed is that the rock world is comprised of fragile, juvenile egos that are driven by insatiable impulses, constantly snorting coke, smoking dope, or having depraved sex. This of course is a huge mark in the book’s favor. 

On the negative side, No Sympathy For The Devil is poorly written, with the aforementioned clunky prose, expository dialog, and often awkward sentence construction. Frederick Snow also POV-hops like a champ, meaning we’ll start a paragraph in the perspective of one character but finish the same paragraph in the perspective of another character. That sort of thing really grinds my gears. Also the plot is goofy – a suspense subplot is grafted onto the trashy template of the story, perhaps catering to the demands of publisher Fawcett, which of course was known for its suspense and crime fiction.

Another problem is the year of publication…I mean 1982 doesn’t scream “rock” to me. Fortunately Snow makes no mention of punk or new wave or synthesizers or whatnot, though “disco” is mentioned in passing a few times, mostly as in “disco clubs” up-and-coming singers got their starts in. Another interesting note is that the rockers for the most part presented here are all women…this however is so Snow can feature each of them in kinky, drug-fueled sexcapades. Hell, the women in this novel are so horny that at one point a 46 year-old housewife is abducted by thugs – while she’s masturbating in the shower – and one of the kidnappers is a lesbian who immeditely goes down on her when they pull her out of the shower; an orgy ensues. 

The most interesting thing about No Sympathy For The Devil is how it’s so much like something Belmont Tower or Leisure Books might have published the decade before. I’m not exaggerating. It has the same coarse narrative style as, say, The Savage Women, and the same focus on sadism as pretty much any of those BT or Leisure paperbacks – even the same big print. In fact there was something familiar about the writing style, and belatedly I wondered if it might have been written by J.C. Conaway, as there is a touch of his style to the prose – and also I can find no info on a writer named “Frederick Snow.” (Not to mention that I also suspect Conaway wrote The Savage Women.) The glitzy Hollywood trappings are another Conaway hallmark…and really the “glitz” stuff takes precedence over the “rock” stuff, as like Angel Dust this is another “rock novel” where the occupation of the main characters could be changed, from rockers to, say, movie stars, and the plot wouldn’t change. 

The chief rocker in the novel is Jennifer Carron, now “at the top of the rock and roll ladder” but at one point a no-name who sang in those aformentioned disco clubs and whatnot. Curiously Snow does not tell us what Jennifer Carron looks like; he has a tendency to not much describe his characters at all. He also doesn’t much describe the sex scenes, shockingly enough; while No Sympathy For The Devil is certainly raunchy and adult in nature, the actual sex either happens off-page or is only minimally described. What I mean to say is, the novel never truly descends (or should it be “ascends?”) to hardcore. 

And I’ve gone this far without acknowledging that the title, of course, is a nod to one of the greatest songs in history: “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones. At first I thought No Sympathy For The Devil took place in its own reality, with a made-up cast of rock stars and whatnot, but as it develops it is indeed a roman a clef, with occasional mentions of the Stones or The Beatles. We’re told though that the most famous rock group in the novel is “The Cinco’s,” five British guys who are “mentioned historically in the same breath as the Beatles, the Stones, or Elvis.” 

And yes, friends, it’s “The Cinco’s,” with the apostrophe before the “s,” as if “The Cinco” owns something. Remember when I mentioned the clunky writing? 

But as it turns out, The Cinco’s are a minimal presence anyway. It’s the women who stay at the forefront in the novel…which honestly could be yet another clue that Frederick Snow was really J.C. Conaway, given his preference for female protagonists. Jennifer Carron is sort of the main character, or should that be main antagonist, though surprisingly she fades into a supporting role, after a memorable opening which features her snorting coke and having sex in the studio. But there’s also a Tina Turner-esque singer named Darlene Silk, who has a rivlary with Jennifer, and the plot concerns their battle for which will receive this year’s “Entertainer of the Year” Grammy. 

And this is yet another “rock novel” where the author never tells us what the music sounds like, nor really much describes it – we have the opening bit where Jennifer Carron belts out what we’re told is a surefire hit in the studio, but describing the song itself is outside the author’s ability. Later in the book both Jennifer and Darlene will each sing a song at the Grammys, but again we aren’t told how it sounds – and friends that is it, so far as the “rock stuff” goes. As I said, Jennifer and Darlene could be changed into movie star divas, fighting for an Oscar instead of a Grammy, and the novel would be the same. 

Because, as it develops, the “thriller” stuff, such as it is, takes precedence. In the opening chapter we are told how, two years ago, a sleazy individual named Rudy Cannon was fired from IEM Records, where he served as VP of Sales – he was outed by hotsthot producer Greg Welles, who claimed that Cannon was selling pirated copies of the Cinco’s latest album, which had been withdrawn due to the Cinco’s being unhappy with the mix. IEM Chairman of the Board Townsend Parker, urged on by Welles, had no choice but to fire Cannon, who vowed revenge. 

Then the plot itself begins, two years later, and we see Greg Welles in the studio with Jennifer Carron, and this is the most “rock stuff” part of the novel, with studio musicians playing and Jennifer singing what will surely become a huge hit, then doing coke and screwing Greg while the engineers listen in the control booth. But after this No Sympathy For The Devil changes course and the focus of the plot concerns Ashley Burdnoy, attractive 46 year-old wife of John Burdnoy, a CPA who runs the agency that counts ballots for the Grammys. Burdnoy is a non-celebrity who, each year, enjoys a few seconds of celebrity as the guy who brings out the letter containing the winner of the “Entertainer of the Year” on live TV during the awards. 

Readers soon learn that Rudy Cannon’s revenge scheme concerns the Burdnoys: now running his own label, Good Vibrations (which started off due to a wealthy funder whose identity is left a mystery until novel’s end), Cannon seeks to steal artists from IEM, particularly ones who have worked with his archenemy Greg Welles. Jennifer Carron would be the big score, and Rudy has promised her a plush contract – as well as guaranteeing she will become Entertainer of the Year if she moves to his label. Jennifer is all for it, whatever Rudy must do to guarantee it – and his plan is to abduct Ashley Burdnoy and use her as collateral to force John Burdnoy to change the name written on the winning card to “Jennifer Carron.” 

A lot of the narrative is focused on the kidnapping, drugging, and raping of Ashely Burdnoy, who as mentioned is abducted while pleasuring herself, so of course Snow skirts the line with the subtext that Ashley, a bored housewife with no children and who keeps fit on the tennis courts, begins to enjoy it. Her kidnappers are a motley group: a radical lesbian named Ronni, a junkie slut named Eva, and a burly biker-type named Denny. Each of them will have their way with Ashley in the short course of the novel, including even a sequence where she’s forced to have sex with Denny on videotape as yet more collateral – Rudy Cannon’s safeguard to prevent John Burdnoy from going to the cops after all this is over. The kidnappers also have fun drugging Ashley up, most notably a part where they dose her with LSD and then Eva goes down on her, leading Ashley to experience the biggest orgasm of her life. 

So as you can see, No Sympathy For The Devil is pretty depraved. The issue is, it’s really more of a kidnapping/extortion novel than it is a rock novel. The “rock world” trappings are for the most part lost as the narrative becomes more concerned with Greg Welles trying to help John Burdnoy find his abducted wife. But this too is goofy, because multiple times through the novel they could just go to the police, but this is never addressed. But the idea is that Burdnoy assumes the mystery man who has kidnapped his wife – and who keeps calling Burdnoy with orders to declare Jennifer Carron the winner that night at the Grammys – must be Greg Welles, who of course happens to be Jennifer Carrons’ producer. 

As for Welles, he’s kind of a cipher and not much brought to life, despite being the hero of the piece. I did appreciate how the author recreated the casual infidelities of the rock world: as mentioned the novel opens with Welles and Jennifer having casual sex in the studio, even though both of them have respective others: Jennifer’s a sleazebag who serves as her manager and who is also part of the kidnapping plot (which Jennifer is aware of), and Welles’ a hotstuff movie actress named Frederica. The grimy vibe extends to all of this, with every character talking about sex or wondering when they’ll have sex again – even the Cinco’s show up at Welles’ place, having brought along a young girl they discovered in England who literally orgasms at the sound of the lead singer’s voice, entailing a bit where everyone sits around and watches her climax on the floor, complete with details on how wet her panties are getting! 

So yeah, all this depraved stuff is great, but the book is constantly undone by the comically-inept lack of payoff. Like for example, the opening sex between Jennifer and Welles. It’s Jennifer Carron who initiates it, fondling her producer in the studio and asking if he wants to “fuck” after offering him some coke. Later on we realize this is a casual thing between them, but Jennifer seems to secretly be in love with Greg Welles, and that he spurns her is one of the reasons she’s looking to jump ship from the label. But this is never paid off. Even worse is the case of Eva, the junkie who still likes men but for the most part is in a relationship with full-fledged lesbian Ronni. Well folks, we get the WTF? revelation midway through the book that Eva was once married to Greg Welles, and this is never really brought up again, other than another random WTF? tidbit that Welles’s chaffeur/bodyguard Tonto (a white guy with a very un-PC nickname) has “had a crush on Eva since college.” This info is just randomly introduced and then not dwelt on again…indeed, Eva seems to disappear from the text at novel’s end, leaving the reader to wonder what her fate is. 

But really the book is more focused on the various degredations of Ashley Burdnoy, who is captured while fondling herself in the shower and will spend the rest of the novel – which occurs over a few hours – either nude or in a bathrobe that’s constantly coming open so her adbuctors can fondle her nether regions. Meanwhile Greg Welles, working with Darlene Silk’s people, tries to figure out who abducted Burdnoy’s wife. Here’s where it gets hard to believe, with Tonto and another dude ultimately heading for the place where Ashley’s being held, one of them even toting a Magnum revolver – again, it would be just as simple for them to have gone to the cops, given that they’ve not only figured out where Ashley is being held but also who is behind the kidnapping plot. 

Instead the climax plays out at the Grammys, with lots of “tension” as Welles and Burdnoy wait desperately for word that Ashley is safe, the notification upon which Burdnoy will change the cards again so that Jennifer Carron does not win. This entire part is goofy – and here’s where I really started to suspect J.C. Conaway was the author – because there’s a bit where guest presenters The Cinco’s do a dumb comedy routine while presenting the Entertainer of the Year award, complete with them playing “peekaboo” with the audience from behind the award stage curtains, and it’s all very Conaway-esque. 

That Leisure Books vibe also extends to Ashley’s rescue: just as she was abducted while pleasuring herself, so too is she rescued while being forced into lesbian sex with Ronni. I mean this lady is really taken over the coals throughout the book. But there is a nice payoff with Ashley getting hold of that Magnum and blasting out vengeance – complete with the nonchalant reveal, at the end of the book, that she’s blown off the friggin’ head of one of her captors. 

Humorously, Frederick Snow just flat-out ends the book at the Grammys, complete with Ashley showing up still in nothing but that damn bathrobe – not that anyone seems to notice. It’s kind of hilarious in how poorly constructed the novel is at times, but also a refreshing reminder of the days when publishers didn’t have “focus groups” to judge the quality of a book before publication. But while it’s kind of a cold finish, it does at least resolve the kidnapping and revenge scheme storylines, as well as the outing of Rudy Cannon’s secret funder – which, honestly, is kind of easy to figure out, given that there are only a handful of characters in the novel. 

Overall No Sympathy For The Devil is certainly trashy and depraved, and in that regard serves up everything I could want from a rock novel. And at 224 pages of big ol’ print, it is a pretty quick read. Yet at the same time, the rock stuff in it is so minimal that it’s mostly just window dressing…in actuality the novel is more of a kidnapping yarn with a lot of sleaze and sadism, and I’d really love to know if “Frederick Snow” was J.C. Conaway or some other Belmont Tower/Leisure Books veteran.

Valley Of The Assassins

Valley Of The Assassins, by Ian MacAlister

January, 1976  Fawcett Gold Medal

Prolific author Marvin Albert published a few adventure novels as “Ian MacAlister” in the ‘70s, Fawcett clearly trying to capitalize on the success of Alistair MacLean’s books. Some of the “MacAlister” books were WWII thrillers, and others, like this one, had contemporary ‘70s settings. But if the others are as good as Valley Of The Assassins is, they’re all worth seeking out. 

The only material I’ve read from Albert is his work on Soldato, so what I know about him is his recurring theme of a protagonist being hunted by killers in a desolate terrain. That occurs here as well; Albert is a gifted adventure writer, capably bringing to life desolate, far-flung corners of the world and having his characters endure Hemingway-esque struggles while also fending off human enemies. With this novel Albert adds other elements to the mix: a sort of proto-Indiana Jones vibe with ancient maps written in secret code, an almost supernatural menace, and even a heist vibe to boot, with the main protagonist carefully putting together a team to carry out what is essentially an elaborate tomb raid. It’s an entertaining novel for sure, but be aware this is another of those deceptively-slim ‘70s paperbacks; it only runs to 190 pages, but it has some very small, dense print. 

It’s not a slow-moving novel, though; while we don’t get to the expected “hunted in a desolate setting” motif until late in the novel, Albert keeps the narrative moving with occasional action setpieces, lots of mystery and suspense, and very strong characterization. Not to mention a very strong grasp of setting: Valley Of The Assassins takes place in Iraq, Iran, Oman, and the desert, and in each locale there is the feeling that Albert has been there, even if he hadn’t really been; what I mean to say is that he confidently and succinctly captures the vibe of these areas with the air of an expert. He also capably brings to life his protagonist, Eric Larson, an American “adventurer” (per the back cover) who has lived in the Middle East for the past several years; Larson came here as an oil driller, “fell in love” with a cabin boat, decided to buy it at great expense, and now lives here still, doing odd jobs for foreign businessmen visiting the area. 

We meet Larson while he’s en route to one such job, venturing along the Persian Gulf for Iraq. He comes across three “corpses” along a reef; one of them, a frail little hunchbacked man, turns out to still be alive. Larson brings him aboard and, per the weak man’s whispered request, takes him to Iran. The novel takes place in pre-revolution Iran, of course, and indeed Larson never once is concerned about terrorism or the expected modern troubles during his voyages around Arabia. His main troubles are how the Iraqi authorities suspect him of occasionally providing assistance to Kurdish rebels, something we gradually learn Larson has indeed done in the past. 

Two weeks later he’s bumming around in Basra, Iraq, trying to avoid the suspicision of his “friend,” a power-hungry Iraqi cop named Hammad who likes to have the occasional secret drink with Larson – but who wouldn’t be bothered at all if he were to have to torture, beat, or arrest his friend if it turned out Larson was involved in anything illegal. Larson has bigger concerns, though; he returns to his cabin boat one night to find a strange young Arabic man waiting in the boat for him. The man draws a strange symbol on the deck and tries to kill Larson with a poisoned dagger. Larson blows the guy’s head off; Hammad comes in to collect the corpse, and everyone is baffled by the strange symbol tattooed on the would-be assassin’s chest. There are a lot of ideograms throughout the book, by the way, including even hieroglyphics. The assassin appears to have come for a piece of paper (with more ideographs) that the old hunchback secretly stashed on the boat without Larson’s awareness. Larson takes the map to a scholar acquaintance, one who has spent decades studying Arabic history. 

Albert skillfully weaves a mystery element into the narrative as it becomes clear the paper is a map. But everything about it is a puzzle, with the deciphered symbols coming out as odd lines of poetry which seem to be vague directions. Eventually Larson will learn this all has to do with the infamous Hassan I Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, a despotic ruler from centuries ago who retained a legion of fiercely loyal Assassins. The Old Man also factored into Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus!, which too was published around this time, so there must’ve been some book or documentary or something that was getting writers interested in him in the mid-‘70s. Larson suspects the Assassins still exist, even though official records state they were disbanded back in the medieval era – he gets confirmation of this when he draws the symbol that was tattooed on the would-be assassin, and his friend tells him it is the mark of the Assassin order. 

Larson gets further confirmation when another old acquaintance suddenly shows up – Darra, a “dark, hard-eyed young woman” that Larson had a fling with a few years before. She’s a Kurdish rebel, and while helping them against their Iraqi oppressors Larson and Darra fell in love…which didn’t go over well with her husband, thus Larson left. But she reveals that her husband’s since been killed in a Soviet airstrike. Now Darra is here with another young Kurd, Jamil, and they’ve also come for the map. Turns out they are aligned with the old man Larson saved at the beginning of the book: his name is Kasra Tofiq, and he’s an Iran-based scholar of Kurdish extraction who is the world’s leading expert on Hassan I Sabbah. After meeting the man again, Larson gets the full details: Tofiq had read that the Assassins had a great treasure which was hidden in Sabbah’s coffin after their fortress fell. They carried it around Arabia to stash it somewhere, but the location was lost. Tofiq thinks he’s found the location, but in pure Indiana Jones style it’s not so simple: the seeker must decipher several clues and jump through innumerable hoops to find the treasure’s location. Worse yet, Tofiq is certain the treasure is somewhere in the Rub-al-Khali, a massive desert so infamous that even veteran sand-dwellers go out of their way to avoid it. 

This takes us into the heist angle of the novel, as Larson begins putting together his team of specialists. However unlike a proper heist, these specialities aren’t fully exploited in the narrative. Like one guy, another acquaintance of Larson’s, named Church, who lives in Oman as a geologist and thus has free reign from the authoritative government to travel around. Larson hires him on with a promise of a nice cut in return for using Church’s free pass – Larson and the others will need to go through Oman for the desert – but after this is accomplished Church becomes inconsequential to the plot. More important are the other characters who come along: Darra, Jamil, and finally Hammad, who forces himself into the venture after having spied on Larson. Finally there’s Ivo Slasko, a Czech gunrunner who too has nothing of consequence to add to the plot and might as well be wearing a red shirt. 

Albert delivers yet another taut sequence where Larson ventures alone to desolate Alamut, impregnable desert fortress of Hassan I Sabbah. This is very much in the Indiana Jones mode as Larson must find the ancient garden and sit in the darkened, empty fortress throughout the night, waiting to see how the moon illuminates the map – only then will the first steps in the journey to the treasure be revealed. This sort of thing repeats throughout the novel, with the journeyer coming to the next stop only to have to wait for the next “signal” on how to proceed. Larson by the way has gotten so involved because, if the treasure is as great as expected, he wants fifty percent of it – and knows no one can prevent him, as he keeps Tofiq’s map and further burns it after getting the next signals here at Alamut. Thus Larson is the only person in the entire world who knows how to find the ancient Assassin treasure. 

Now there’s mystery, and tension, and mounting thrills with strong characterization, but I can hear you asking – where’s the sleaze? Sadly my friends there’s none. We know for sure that Larson and Darra are soon back together, but the most we get is a “morning after” moment in Darra’s small apartment in Iran, with Larson musing that she is “the epitome of a soft and supple harem delight.” Even the violence isn’t much dwelt upon; later in the book there are a few pitched firefights, but as with the Soldato books it’s more in the PG realm of “get shot and fall down”-type violence, with none of the exploding heads or fountaining cererbrospinal gore that bloodthirsty action readers typically demand. But friends it’s my pleasure to inform you that the lack of this exploitative stuff doesn’t matter! Valley Of The Assassins is a damn great novel even without it. 

We know action is forthcoming, as Larson is sure to get arms for the trip into the hellscape desert. Everyone carries an M16 and Browning high-power automatic, and they also bring along two Enfield rifles for long-range sniping. As they enter the desert in a truck and a Land Rover, Church learns via his friends in the Oman army that the Berber “desert raiders” have been especially violent lately. They almost come off like proto-Sand People in the novel, with the constant threat that they might latch onto Larson’s party in the desolate desert and set in upon them. But while cool, I felt the Berbers sort of distracted from the more narratively-important threat: the Assassins. And indeed the two menaces are easily confused, both being comprised of robe-wearing desert dwellers with little in the way of human compassion. 

Albert really brings the desert to life, and this material is straight-up adventure fiction, with lots of flora and fauna detail. But as mentioned the book is longer than you expect, and a lot of this serves to make it read a little slowly at times. Then again, Albert’s prose is so sinewy and accomplished that you don’t mind the slackened pace. There is as mentioned the growing threat of the Berbers, and this really comes to a boil in a gripping sequence that has several of them tailing Larson’s group. The Berbers are on camels, but when Larson’s Land Rover keeps breaking down on mountain-sized dunes the tables are turned. This leads to a gripping sequence where Larson and comrades mount an ambush on the Berbers, cutting them down on full auto. This leads to more of Albert’s patented “man being stalked” material, with Larson desperate to find the last four Berbers, but while super cool it turns out to be a precursor of the novel’s climax, which features the same situation of Larson being stalked. 

There’s another layer to the story in that Larson is certain there’s a “leak” in Tofiq’s organization; this became evident when the Assassin showed up on Larson’s boat in Iraq to kill him. The “mystery” of the leak is pretty easily solved, but regardless Larson doesn’t get certainty of it till near the novel’s end, when a trio of Assassins show up and start stalking his party through the desert. There’s no titular “valley” of Assassins here; rather, the treasure turns out to be in a twisted cavern system that sprouts over a volcanic crater. Albert again skillfully delivers the desperate situation as Larson and the few remaining members of his party navigate the rocky, dangerous terrain, all while the Assassins stalk them. The biggest reveal is when the treasure is discovered, lying for centuries on a pile of volcanic ash by the crater – the excellent cover illustration turns out to be a spoiler of what Larson actually finds in Hassan I Sabbah’s coffin. 

The finale is what Albert does best: two men tracking our hero through rough desert terrain in a taut sequence that will leave even the most veteran action reader exhausted. It’s the exact opposite of the typical gun-blazing action finale, with Larson desperately maintaining silence as he crawls in and out of canyons, moving inch by inch as he scans the horizon for a betraying cloud of dust – which would give away the location of his enemies. Oh and meanwhile he’s been shot in the leg so has to pull himself around, and Darra has a severe concussion. This part was especially synchronistic as I happened to accidentally bang my own head on the wall that very day (I forgot to duck when going into the downstairs closet, like a pure fool). Darra’s out of it for the finale, save for one very memorable appearance; I forgot to mention, but she too is a wonderfully-realized character, a kickass desert warrior babe who fights harder than most men Larson knows. 

At 190 dense pages, Valley Of The Assassins actually has a pretty curt ending; Larson manages to get out of the desert with the “treasure,” but what happens after this is unstated. Does he go back to Kofiq? Do he and Darra use the treasure money to start a new life in America, with Darra becoming a media presence to talk about the Iraqi subjugation of the Kurdish people? This is something Larson suggests they do, but whether they actually do or not is up to the reader to determine. Regardless, Valley Of The Assassins is as mentioned a great novel, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I’ll be looking for more of the “Ian MacAlister” books in the future.

Find The Don’s Daughter

Find The Don’s Daughter, by Jeff Jacks
January, 1974  Fawcett Gold Medal

Not much is known about mysterious author Jeff Jacks, but one thing we can certainly say is he wasn’t prolific. Find The Don’s Daughter was the second and final novel he published, coming two years after his previous novel, Murder On The Wild Side. This one also features Jacks’s narrating protagonist, ex-cop turned P.I. Shep Stone, and it picks up shortly after the previous book, set in early December of 1970. More adventures for Shep seem to be promised in the climax, but sadly none were forthcoming, and Jacks slipped into the aether, ultimately becoming such a mysterious figure that it was at one time rumored that “Jacks” was just a pseudonym of Lawrence Block (which Block denied).

I had little expectations going into this one, and mostly just got it years ago due to the title and the great cover art (which thanks to Lynn Munroe we know is by Elaine Duillo). But it turns out to be more of a rock novel than some actual “rock novels” I’ve read, with more rock-world and music description stuff in its first half than the entirety of, say, The Rock Nations or Rock & Roll Retreat Blues. This is because Shep’s latest case has him investigating the titular “Don’s daughter,” who happens to moonlight as the singer for a rock band in Greenwich Village. There’s a part where Shep watches the band in action, and Jacks does a great job of capturing what the group actually sounds like, something most of those other rock writers don’t even bother trying to do. In this regard it’s a shame that the rock stuff fades away and is gradually replaced by a sort of espionage plot with maniacal CIA agents and black militants.

At 223 pages of fairly small print, Find The Don’s Daughter is a bit too flabby for its own good, with the cumulative effect that the snappy, proto-Shane Black vibe of Shep’s narration and rapid-fire dialog exchanges gradually lose impact. This too is a shame, because there is some excellent dialog here, with laugh-out-loud smart assed comments from Shep throughout. Jacks also has a great skill with characterization, bringing to life a host of unusual figures. This is particularly true of our narrator, a former alchoholic private eye who lives in near poverty in SoHo and mostly works in the Greenwich area, chasing down runaway hippie kids.

Despite the suave gent on the cover, Shep in the book has long “hippie-dippy hair” and never carries a gun – we’re told he actually hides his revolver “behind the old socks” in a drawer in his SoHo apartment. He doesn’t retrieve it in the book. We learn in brief backstory that he was once a decorated cop, on his way to becoming the youngest captain in NYPD history, but then he was caught taking payoffs or somesuch. After a battle with the bottle, which presumably was part of the plot of the previous book, he started to make his wretched living as a gumshoe. But we aren’t given much info on Shep’s P.I. biz; he doesn’t have an office, and seems to just take jobs on the fly.

At any rate, per tradition, he’s given a case at the start of the book; three hoods come in and round him up in a Lower East Side bar, claiming to be messengers from Mafia Don Marco the Carpenter. One of the hoods was arrested by Shep back when he was a cop, and the thug gets some punches in as they’re taking Shep out to the limo. Surprisingly, Shep will not exact his revenge, and just rolls with the punches and then washes them down with some booze in the limo. This is just the first indication that we are not dealing with a Spillane-esque hardboiled hero. Shep doesn’t do anything physical in the novel and, when he decides to mete out justice very late in the novel, he has someone else do the actual dirty work for him.

The Carpenter, who knows and respects Shep from his days as a cop, wants to hire him to find his “niece.” When Shep bulks at the job, given that he’ll be paid ten thousand for it – he figures he’s being paid to find someone for the mob to kill – the Carpenter admits that it’s actually his daughter, hence the high pay. Her name is Melinda Rossi, but her performing name is Melody. There’s a belabored backstory on this, how he sired the girl with some other woman and thus no one knows that the Mafia don has a daughter. Now she’s a hotstuff blonde in her twenties and into that whole rock scene; the Carpenter insists she’s not on any hard drugs. The problem is she’s gone missing, last seen a few days ago – when she walked out of her day job at the bank with eighteen thousand bucks in her purse, lifted right out of the vault.

With the Don’s inability to understand the girl and this new era, Shep ruminates that he’s witnessing “A Mafia kingpin being victimized by the Generation Gap.” He takes the job, mostly because this is what he does – finding runaway kids in the hippie slums of Greenwich. He heads over to a psychedelic nightclub in the Village owned by an old acquaintance named Carney; this is where Melody’s group, The Riders of the Blue Bus, has a regular gig. I believe this is a double Doors reference, as in “Riders of the Storm” and “The End” (ie, “the blue bus is calling us/meet me at the back of the blue bus”). I wouldn’t be surprised, as Jacks is familiar with the rock scene, given that Shep tells us: “I happen to like Santana. Consider it about the best of the current scene,” and also mentions a Mick Jagger wannabe on stage at the club who is feverishly whipping the floor with a studded belt, a la the real Jagger was fond of doing at this time.

At the door Shep encounters the wonderfully-named Gutbucket, guitarist for the Blue Bus and also a heroin junkie, as Shep discovers after monitoring the long-haired punk. Gutbucket doesn’t seem much concerned that Melody’s gone and in fact bluntly tells Shep he thinks she’s dead. Later we get to see the Riders in action, sans Melody, with Gutbucket leading them through an hour-long jam session. As mentioned Jacks does a good job recreating what rock sounds like, with Gutbucket coming off like a junior grade Pete Townshend. Though you’ve gotta wonder how good the Riders of the Blue Bus really are, given that one of the members plays french horn. This reminded me of an old SNL skit where Phil Hartman (a former rock album cover artist, by the way – he did Steely Dan’s Aja, for example) portrayed “fifth Beatle” Albert Goldman, who was notorious for a mean-spirited John Lennon bio at the time (1988); the skit had it that Goldman had a grudge because Lennon had kicked him out of the group in the early days...saying the Beatles didn’t need a trombone player.

The french horn player is named Sheri, a 30-something lady who shared an apartment with Melody. It’s in her place that Shep peruses the record collection, informing us that he likes Santana; he also finds a hash pipe with a sweet smelling substance in it. Later we’ll learn it’s opium. Sheri’s in the process of showering when Shep visits her, but there isn’t one iota of exploitation throughout Find The Don’s Daughter. Shep in fact is curiously asexual, for the majority of the book, at least, with little of the customary “breasts” fixation one expects (nay, demands!) of the hardboiled pulp genre. But anyway Shep’s interests in Sheri are solely due to the case, and here we learn she plays french horn for the band and also spotlights as a session musician.

But sadly after this the rock stuff fades away. Shep heads back over to Carney’s nightclub and the novel’s only real “action scene” occurs here; after a spirited performance with the Riders, Sheri tells Shep that she’s found some letters of Melody’s that give a clue where she’s gone. But when Shep goes to find her later, he of course finds Sheri’s corpse, an icepick in her back. Then Shep is attacked from behind by a pair of “black hands.” He rushes from the crime scene and heads for Sheri’s apartment to find the letters, but instead finds a black ‘Nam vet waiting for him there. This is the guy who knocked him down in the club and presumably killed Sheri, something he denies. His name is Raymond Jefferson and he’s an old flame of Melody’s, and he’s looking for her too. Then someone blows Raymond’s head off with a shotgun and Shep is knocked out in the blast.

Here’s where some of the fat could be trimed from the novel, as Shep spends several days in a private hospital room, recuperating from his shoulder injury. He’s visited by his old police partner, as well as a shady spook type: this is Zara, a CIA agent who for some reason is conducting an assignment here on US soil (something Jacks doesn’t address in the narrative…but technically Zara should be FBI). Zara has it that Melody was involved with the Dusters, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, and that the case involves some mortars stolen in ‘Nam and smuggled here to the US to be used in radical terrorism. A heroin pipeline also factors into it. It’s kind of a big, complicated mess, and you wish it had just been a murder or kidnapping mystery set in the rock scene.

Zara now pretty much takes over the narrative; he’s a whackjob who has been working this assignment for the past year, having trailed Raymond Jefferson, the Duster who stole the mortars, from ‘Nam to New York. Zara wants Shep to work for him, prowling the kid-frequented areas Zara can’t access; to ensure Shep’s complicity he hangs a murder charge over him, as Zara saw Shep rushing from the scene of Sheri’s murder. There’s some fun, proto-Lethal Weapon dialog between the two throughout; Shep’s no shrinking violet and never refrains from telling Zara what he really thinks. But gradually the reader begins to resent Zara’s presence (as does Shep), as he takes the spotlight away from more interesting characters.

Once he’s out of the hospital Jefferson begins getting back together with Joan, a Village-based playwright whom he must’ve been friendly with in the previous book. The two also know a character named Gene Hilliard, who is now a member of the Dusters, and I assume he also appeared in the previous book, given how Shep introduces him to the reader. It just sort of goes into a stall here, with Shep and Zara searching for clues, only livened up when the latest body shows up – like poor prick Gutbucket, who is found dead in his crummy apartment, every bone in his body apparently broken. And also, the killer took a shit by the body(!). There’s more fun dialog here courtesy the female Medical Examiner on the scene; Jacks has a skill for bringing even minor, one-off characters to life. 

However this is not an action-packed novel by any means. Shep doesn’t do much of anything but walk around the city and ask questions. Even the sex is off-page; Shep and Joan get together again and the dude actually falls asleep on the night they’re about to have sex again for the first time since they broke up, or whatever. So again, neither sex nor violence is much on the mind of this particular private eye. There’s a fairly emotional romance story here as well, with the two characters embittered loners who make a stab at developing into an item, though Joan complains how ridiculous it is given that they’re both close to forty. This subplot has a bummer capoff, though – Shep’s car is blown up at the end thanks to a car bomb, but luckily neither Shep nor Joan are in the car at the time. Joan takes one look at the burning car and takes off, and that’s that.

I was also kind of bummed with how the main plot panned out. Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers. But anyway, Shep’s whole job is to find Melody. And the reader wants to meet her, too. But after various subplots and red herrings have taken up the brunt of the narrative, we learn in the final pages that some random guy discovers Melody’s body one day, shortly after Christmas. She’s been dead for weeks, likely killed as soon as she left work at the bank that day, and Shep’s been chasing a ghost all along. Instead the whole “mortars” plot takes center stage, and even here it has a bogus payoff, as it turns out nutjob Zara has been behind most of the kills (even setting that bomb in Shep’s car as a lark!). Shep at least gets revenge for this, but as mentioned the vengeance is delivered by some other character.

The impression I most got from Find The Don’s Daughter was that the writing, the character, and especially the dialog were all strong, but the plotting left a little to be desired. I also think that it could’ve been a little more streamlined, and the reveal of the “main villain” was a bit hard to buy. Not that it much matters, as Find The Don’s Daughter proved to be the last the reading public saw of Shep Stone and Jeff Jacks.

The Scarred Man

The Scarred Man, by Basil Heatter
June, 1973  Fawcett Gold Medal

Treading a similar path as another Fawcett Gold Medal biker novel, The Blood Circus, The Scarred Man comes off like one of those men’s adventure magazine bikersploitation yarns taken to novel length – and if the excerpts in Wyatt Doyle and Bob Deis’s awesome Barbarians On Bikes are any indication, many of those men’s mag biker stories were indeed first-person yarns about vets taking on bikers. Basil Heatter was a veteran pulp writer, and I’ve picked up a few of his paperbacks, but this is the first one I’ve actually read. He definitely has all the skills to be admired in a veteran pulp writer, delivering a lean, taut tale with memorable characters. The only misstep is that the final third seems to come from a completely different novel.

As I read The Scarred Man I was under the impression Heatter was British; the characters use the occasional British-ism (ie “bloody,” or an inordinate fondess for the adverb “quite”), and in general the narrative style gives off the vibe of British pulp. Plus there’s the name “Basil.” But Heatter was American, and his characters here are also Americans: William Shaw, a 40 year-old “brilliant young corporate lawyer from New York,” narrates the story for us, which given internal evidence takes place between September and November of 1972. Shaw is a veteran of the Korean War and now lives basically the life of a men’s mag protagonist, going on random global adventures with his beautiful 30 year-old wife Stacey. Their current getaway is a ketch they’ve bought near Miami, with plans to take it on a cruise to Jamaica.

But when the story opens Stacey and Shaw have decided on the spur of the moment to rent a Honda motorcycle and go riding through the Everglades. The Honda breaks down and Shaw has to fix it in the dark; just as it’s fixed they see a trio of bikers go along the road. When Shaw and Stacey get the Honda moving, they round a corner and find the three bikers waiting for them in ambush. They’re all on chopped Harleys but I’m not sure what sort of self-respecting outlaw bikers they are, given that they each wear leather jackets and helmets with the visors down. Shaw crashes to avoid hitting them, and then the nightmare begins; the brawny biker boss smashes Shaw in the head with a chain, knocking him into a stupor, and then he and his buddies get down to the business of gang-raping Stacy. Or as the big biker puts it, “We’re just gonna fuck your little chick.”

One thing that undoes The Scarred Man in this opening quarter is the snarky, ironic sense of humor in Shaw’s narration, which jars against the nightmarish aspects of the plot. For example Shaw wakes up in the hospital after passing out from the blow to the head, and he’s making ironic comments in his narration about being hounded by traffic cops in the afterlife. The reader’s like, “I know laughter’s the best medicine and all, but dude your wife was just gang-raped two pages ago!” This jarring humor wears out its welcome, but curiously disappears once Stacey’s left the narrative. In hindsight I wondered if all this was intentional and Heatter’s motive was that Shaw’s humor was a way of masking his true feelings over Stacey, her fate, and his own guilt. This could be it, as Heatter is definitely a quality writer, but still the ironic humor doesn’t sit right when you’re actually reading the book.

Shaw for his part now has a scar on his face, and presumably he’s the “scarred man” of the title (though confusingly a villain later in the book also has a scarred face), but Heatter doesn’t much describe the scar nor bring much attention to it throughout the book. For a couple months Shaw and Stacey try to rebuild their life, with Stacey slowly coming out of her catatonic shell. There’s a nicely-handled sequence where Stacey comes to Shaw’s bed one night – the first time she’s done so since the rape two months before – but Shaw pretends to be asleep, too wrapped up in his own hangups. She says nothing and gets back into her own bed. When Shaw comes back from getting breakfast the next morning, he discovers that Stacey has jumped off the balcony of their hotel suite to her death 18 floors below. After taking care of the funeral, Shaw gets around to what he’s subconsciously known he was going to do from the beginning: hunt down the three bikers and kill them.

Heatter as mentioned is a skilled writer, and he successfully works Shaw’s law background into the revenge scheme. While the cops seem unable to find out who raped Stacey, stating that there are too many outlaw biker clubs tearing through Florida, Shaw takes matters into his own hands. He reads about a gang that’s gotten in trouble down south, almost running over a little kid. Shaw flies down there – to represent the bikers in court. The club is called the Beaks and their leader, a cruel-looking bastard named Stud, distrusts this lawyer who claims to want to represent the Beaks at no expense. But Shaw ends up winning his trust and, hating himself for it, gets the Beaks exonerated on all charges, save for the biker who nearly ran over the kid – and he manages to just get that one a light jail sentence.

This succeeds in getting into Stud’s good graces, and Shaw starts hanging out with the club, hoping to get info. A problem with The Scarred Man is that coincidence too often comes into play; sure enough, Stud starts boasting about how women “want to be raped” by bikers, especially that one time in the Everglades when Stud and two buddies came across a guy and his girl on a Honda… Heatter plays out Stud’s fate in flashback sequences, with Shaw having drawn him alone into the Everglades and blowing his knee out with a .38. Here Shaw will grill Stud on who the other two rapists were and then blow his head off.

The action moves to Boston, which opens with an otherwise-random bit that I found very interesting from the perspective of 40-plus years later:

Here Shaw buys himself a chopper (which isn’t much described) and gets some biker clothes at the Army-Navy store; he completes the look with an “Indian headband.” There’s some good dialog here with various one-off characters wondering what the hell straight-looking Shaw is up to. This section of the book is really the only true “biker fiction” part of the entire novel. Thanks to Stud’s info Shaw has learned that one of the perpetrators was a biker named Soldier, who likely will be up here to take part in the East Coast Rallies, held in New Hampshire. Shaw gets on his chopper and joins up with the army of bikers that have descended on the small town that’s hosting the event – and again, coinicidence be damned, he strikes gold fairly quickly, finding himself singled out by a suspicious biker named Tiny. 

Gradually Shaw works his way into Tiny’s group, among them Tiny’s sixteen year-old mama, Pearly, and also a mysterious blond biker with a slight build but hard eyes. Pearly emerges as the most memorable character in the novel; she’s the first girl to get close to Shaw since Stacey, proving herself to be wise beyond her years – not that 40 year-old Shaw has any sexual designs on the teenaged girl. Instead Heatter succeeds in giving this more of an emotional resonance, with Pearly breaking through the icy façade Shaw has built for himself. There’s also nicely-done dialog about how her dad back home is more worried about the TV reception than where his daughter is.

The townspeople are terrified of the bikers, the local law trying to segregate them in a remote camping site, and soon enough it boils over and the assembled bikers are as “stirred up as Apaches on a rampage.” They descend on the town, and here Heatter too quickly brings this sequence to a close; that mysterious blond biker at Tiny’s side is Soldier, of course, and Shaw gets his revenge by challenging him to a chopper joust. But even here coincidence intervenes again – a random dog runs out in front of Soldier’s bike and proves his undoing. It’s little things like this that keep The Scarred Man from greatness; Shaw should be the deliverer of bloody payback, not some poor little dog that gets in Soldier’s way.

For some reason the final third drops the whole biker angle and goes for a marina mystery vibe; now it’s a taut thriller as Shaw heads for Jamaica on his ketch with a pretty jet-setting blonde named Mary Caldwell. And when I say the biker angle is dropped I mean it’s dropped. It’s almost as if Heatter is using the finale of some earlier, unpublished yarn and has just clumsily welded it to his biker revenge story. To say it’s dissatisfying would be an understatement. Shaw’s gotten to this point due to the final lead Stud gave him – the third and final biker is named Skid, and all Stud knew was that Skid was from somewhere in the Palm Beach area. Surprisingly, Shaw makes nothing out of the fact that all three bikers have a name that starts with “S” (as does Shaw himself – at least his last name), and also it seems ridiculous that Shaw was just in Miami and then went to Boston before coming back down to Florida.

Again it’s all like a completely different novel; Shaw goes into a notorious bar owned by a guy named Red, who dispenses drugs from upstairs, and makes up some story about having a line on a few hundred pounds of “Jamaican Gold.” The belabored setup has it that Shaw’s heard some guy named Skid is good for acting as security on drug deals, and he wants Red’s help in finding him. All very ridiculous and overly-complicated, and again just seems like Heatter had another unfinished story laying around that he decided to weld onto the end of this one. After meeting with Shaw encounters the lovely Mary Caldwell, who comes over to visit him at his ketch; she’s worldly and beautiful and claims to be Skid’s sister. Again Shaw finds himself becoming attracted to a woman for the first time since losing Stacey.

Eventually it builds to Mary and Shaw on the ketch, bound for Jamaica; Mary claims that Skid’s actually there, Heatter at this point deciding to go all-out with the coincidental nonsense. But he’s also peppered enough foreshadowing into this sequence that the reader kind of has an idea where it’s going. This sequence is also the most gory in the novel, with Red showing up to pull a heist on Shaw’s (nonexistent) drug money and Mary coming to the defense with a pistol. But the big “surprise” reveal just falls flat – as mentioned the reader at this point has a good idea who Skid is, and the inevitable comeuppance isn’t suitably retributive. There’s also stuff here that would offend the readers of our #metoo era, with declarations that Stacey enjoyed her gang-raping.

All in all, The Scarred Man makes for a fun read, but I definitely enjoyed the biker portions more than anything else. Heatter puts in enough biker details that you suspect he consulted an issue or two of Easyrider Magazine. The sequence in New Hampshire with the biker rally is especially entertaining, not to mention Shaw’s dialog with young Pearly, but it’s resolved too quickly – especially when you consider that the final sequence isn’t nearly as entertaining. But as mentioned Heatter’s writing is skilled and economical and he successfully pulls the reader along, though there is a strange tendency to randomly slip into present-tense at times; this happens on page 65, at the New Hampshire rally, and comes and goes so quickly in the narrative that I assume it had to be something Heatter missed in the editing stage.

Hand Of The Mafia (Morocco Jones #2)

Hand Of The Mafia, by Jack Baynes
June, 1958  Fawcett Crest Books

The four-volume Morocco Jones series continues with another volume that comes off like the Mike Hammer books if they had been handled by Lyle Kenyon Engel’s fiction factory instead of Mickey Spillane. This one hews a little more closely to the Spillane mold than the first one did, with bad-ass Morocco Jones heading down south to bust up some heads, meet some willing dames, and deliver a couple tough-guy lines. 

There isn’t much pickup from the previous volume, nor any idea how long ago it was. We do learn that Llora Madigan, aka former spy babe The Countess, now works at Morocco’s P.I. firm in Chicago, along with their old boss General Weyland. Whereas that first book implied that Morocco and Llora would become an item, in this one she only gets a couple lines of dialog in the opening pages, and it’s clear that she doesn’t have any proprietary rights on our two-fisted rake of a hero. This is of course as it should be so far as men’s adventure goes (or at least proto-men’s adventure), and thus Morocco will be free to score with a couple new willing babes in this installment.

Morocco learns in the first few pages that Chris Shane, his old intelligence world comrade (and a supporting character in the previous volume) has been murdered down in Border City, a badlands in a southern state which is never identified. Morocco decides to head down there posthaste, find out who killed Shane, and deliver some bloody payback. He tells Llora so long – the General we’re informed being in DC on business – and heads on down to Border City, where the rest of the novel plays out. It’s very much along the lines of the later Vice Town, a small city totally in the grip of crime; Morocco gets a lot of info from pal Joe Kincaid of the Chicago police, and learns that a new boss named Carlo Fontana has taken over the town, complete with his own army of henchmen and a dirty police force. The question is how Fontana is keeping the Syndicate out of the picture, as he appears to be running the entire city without the influence of the Mafia.

Our hero’s entrance is very memorable; a couple Border City hoods accost a local muckracking journalist and a pretty young woman in a bar, about to take them on a one-way ride. Then the big lanky new guy gets up from the bar and proceeds to maul them, even killing one of them with his bare hands. It is of course Morocco Jones; the reporter is a guy named Larry Mellon whose life has been endangered for his attempts at uncovering the truth (wow, even then it was rare for a journalist to seek the truth!), and the woman is a beauty named Brenda, a former flame of Carlo Fontana’s.

I’d forgotten that Morocco has this comic book schtick where his gray eyes turn green when he’s in a rage; Brenda duly notices this, getting all hot and bothered when Morocco wipes the floor with Fontana’s toughs in the bar. That night Morocco takes her to dinner, and too late Morocco realizes that Brenda’s car parked out front will bring in more toughs. So using those quick wits he often boasts of, he buys a pail of oil from the kitchen and sits in the passenger seat as Brenda tears through town, the stooges giving chase. Like that old Spy Hunter video game I played religiously in the ‘80s, Morocco tosses the oil onto the street and causes the car pursuing them to crash spectacularly. Immediately after this Brenda pulls over to the side of the road, hops on Morocco’s lap, and tells him she wants him, the shameless hussy.

But as with the previous book, the actual tomfoolery is left completely off page, usually denoted by an ellipsis. The raunch occurs in a “secret” cabin Brenda has in the woods; we do get only a minor bit of exploitation as Morocco checks out Brenda’s gloriously nude bod as she lays on the bed for him. But really he’s more concerned about leaving the windows out front open, as someone might sneak in. Baynes (I insist on referring to Bertram B. Fowler by his much-cooler pseudonym) spends so much dialog on this that, when the unexpected guests finally appear, it’s a foregone conclusion – and again Morocco takes Fontana’s stooges out without much fuss, killing all four of them without even the use of a gun.

Brenda turns out to be here on her own vendetta; her sister, also a former flame of Fontana’s, was killed – and in fact Brenda’s the one who hired Chris Shane to look into it. Then when she heard nothing more from him she came down to Border City herself, changing her last name and herself becoming a floozy of Fontana’s. This plot element is lost in the shuffle – like last time, Baynes throughs way too many characters into the mix – and indeed Brenda herself soon disappears from the narrative. Now that she’s served the function of providing Morocco with his first lay in town, she’s no longer needed…and Morocco scoots her off to safety with “a friend” and periodically calls her on the phone to make sure she’s still alive.

The opening half is very much in the hardboiled action mode; Morocco seems like a force of vengeance, mauling and killing Fontana’s goons without breaking a sweat. But as with last volume Baynes can’t contain his impulse to muddy up what should be a streamlined action yarn. So we have this triple mystery – how Fontana runs town without the Mafia, who killed Chris Shane, and what happened to the son of local newspaper magnate Blake Ellis. Of course all of it is mixed together, but Morocco chases separate threads, at one point even wasting time on former town boss Mike Dravo, a dude who employs his own henchmen (one of them an albino) but is otherwise Mr. Rogers when compared to Fontana.

Baynes tosses so much stuff into the middle half that the reader can quickly become lost; nothing lasts long enough to make an impression. I mean Morocco goes to great lengths to disguise himself as a bum and then, not too many pages later, has to drop the act. Or things that pomise to blossom into more interesting developments don’t pan out, like the passing mention that Fontana employs roving gangs of juvenile delinquents. Morocco gets in a quick fight with some of them, showing the punks the proper use of a chain, but it’s over too quick and nothing more is made of it. At least the element of Fontana employing a gang of crooked cops pans out, one of them a sadist named Granger who gets his mitts on Morocco and beats him to a pulp.

But the thing about Morocco Jones is that he’s got all the tough-guy lines, he’s got all the fancy espionage and commando training…but he keeps walking into traps and he keeps getting saved by other people. Like here, when he’s pulverized by Granger and other dirty cops in a dingy room in the local precinct…I mean that’s it for Morocco, he’s toast. Then a local crusading lawyer happens to come in and save his ass. The same exact thing happens at the end of the novel, Morocco caught dead to rights by Granger and Fontana…and he’s saved by one of the most brazen acts of deus ex machina I’ve ever read in a novel. But more griping on that in a minute.

Gradually heroin smuggling works into the plot; Morocco gets word to be on the lookout for a certain ship coming in from New Orleans. Once again he gets the drop on Fontana’s men, discovering that they’re bringing heroin in on it and going to elaborate lengths to get it off the ship before it docks. Morocco hides the stuff in the bum area of Border City, using a spot he learned of earlier thanks to a bum; as with the previous volume, Baynes again displays compassion for the downtrodden of society. While posing as a bum, Morocco becomes friends with a real one, a guy who knew another Border City character Morocco’s been hunting for, and the bum makes for one of the more interesting characters in the novel. But like the juvenile delinquents and sundry others, he disappears from the text too soon.

Morocco’s next conquest is another local babe: Dorsa Ellis, hotstuff blonde daughter of the newspaper owner. She too practically throws herself on Morocco moments after meeting him, but before the expected shenanigans she first takes him to a local watering hole and introduces him to…Carlo Fontana. At first I thought Dorsa was a honey trap of sorts, but she claims to have brought Morocco here to initiate the war full-on; she’s sick of her father’s cowering. Another of the too-many mysteries afoot is why Blake Ellis isn’t using his paper to take down Fontana. It’s clear that his vanished son – and Brenda’s murdered sister – has something to do with it.

The action of the first half gradually fades away and the mystery stuff takes precedence. But as mentioned Morocco does find the opportunity to score again, but as ever the most we get is stuff like, “[Dorsa’s] breasts were superb.” Dorsa’s kind of a trendsetter in her own regard; after some all-night sex she basically tells Morocco so long the next day, that this was a one-time thing she’ll never forget! Later she takes care of Morocco after his savage beating, but has her own cross to bear when her dad finally decides to do something about the situation with Fontana, and pays the ultimate price for it. This leads to the “big finale” where Morocco storms into Fontana’s place…and is promptly captured, once again.

Spoiler warning so please skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But man, talk about a brazen copout ending. Morocco’s about to get wasted by Fontana and Granger when someone springs in and shoots Fontana in the arm. And folks it’s – Llora Madigan, the Countess! You see, she has been working the same case these past few days, without Morocco’s knowledge, acting as Fontana’s latest floozy! And General Weyland is here, too! They both waltz in with guns and grins and cover the hoods while Morocco can beat Granger to a pulp. It’s all so brazen and unsatisfying; Baynes attempts earlier in the book to set up this lame reveal, with Dorsa Ellis casually mentioning she’s heard that Fontana has a new girl, “a real beauty,” but the revelation that it’s Llora is incredibly flatfooted, because it just reinforces the notion that Morocco Jones always needs help to get out of scrapes.

But really, the first half of Hand Of the Mafia is very cool and comes off just like you’d hope a series titled Morocco Jones would. Our hero comes off like this inhuman force of wrath, beating the shit out of various hoods and delivering one-liners with aplomb. Even when the odds are against him, Morocco wades into combat with a grin, confident that the training he received in Europe will make him more than a match for his opponents. He doesn’t use as many guns this time, using his fists to do the killing; he also employs some Judo moves to further maul and maim his enemies. But the thing is, Baynes retains his strange tendency to make Morocco a fool for plot contrivances…he’s forever forgetting to do something or overlooking something obvious and walking into an easily-avoided trap.

The book ends with Morocco and Llora deciding to take a quick vacation before getting into the latest caper the General has cooked up; there’s a bit of a modern feeling in how it’s implied Llora had to sleep with Fontana as part of the job, but it’s nothing for her to be ashamed over. In fact, she’s the one who scolds Morocco for sleeping around so much on this one. But at any rate we are reminded that Llora is Morocco’s woman (or she’s “his person,” in the gender-neutralized parlance of our miserable modern world), and all these other babes are just passing fancies. Two more volumes followed, and Morocco’s image returns to the covers; looks like the repeating image of his upper body, used on the first, third, and fourth volumes, couldn’t fit on this volume’s cover painting.

China Strike

China Strike, by William Chamberlain
No month stated, 1967  Fawcett Gold Medal

William Chamberlain, who I believe passed away shortly after this was published, delivers basically a paperback original variation of the bestselling “near future” thrillers of the day, like Fail-Safe and Seven Days In May. China Strike is also very similar in plot to Richard Tresgaskis’s China Bomb, published in hardcover that same year, so it would appear that around 1966 a big concern was China destroying America with an atomic bomb sometime in the near future. Little did anyone realize that China would just be destroying American jobs.

The book takes place in some unspecified future that is still unmistakably “1960s” in its makeup; the US has apparently been at war with “the Zulu Nations” of Africa, which are secretly funded by the “Chincoms,” aka Red China (I thought it was just “Chicoms,” no n?). As for the USSR, we’re briefly informed that the US and Russia are “on the best terms in over a decade,” which might be indication that this takes place in the ‘70s. The action opens with one of those Zulu Nations officials ranting on the UN floor that his country has the atom bomb – and will damned well use it. 

From here we cut to the Takla Makan desert of China, where the Chincoms do all of their atomic bomb testing and research; familiar haunts around here from Operation Starvation and Flight To Takla-Ma. Dr. Martin Shu, a Chinese-American physicist, has been here for the past several years, helping the Chinese perfect “cobalt alloy” bombs, which are basically thermonukes, I guess. Shu isn’t a turncoat, though; he’s secretly CIA, and his somewhat-confusing mission has him monitoring the Chincom A-Bomb progress…while helping them acquire it, or something. But now his assignment is complete, and it’s time to take off.

Chamberlain proves here from the outset that he’ll get us invested in characters and then drop them from the narrative fold. Shu for example is more than your average scientist; he kills the sadist in charge of the massive nuke-research complex with a karate blow to the face, sending a shard of bone into the bastard’s brain. From there it’s to a tense escape from the compound while Shu frets that his desert nomad contact won’t be there to smuggle him to safety. But after this Shu is demoted to supporting character status; when next we see him, he’s telling a secret Pentagon council, led by hardbitten vet General Alonzo Kennedy, about the cobalt bombs.

China, we’re told, will doubtless use these weapons of mass destruction, caring little for human life – the only question is whether they really have it. Chamberlain introduces another (somewhat time-wasting) subplot where an Atomic Energy Commission dude named Schuler claims Shu’s story is bullshit. Then a Red Chinese hit squad almost takes out Shu – he’s in a coma for almost the rest of the novel – and everyone realizes his story was legit. The damn Chincoms really have a cobalt alloy bomb – in fact a whole arsenal of them – and they’re going to destroy the West.

Well, there’s only one thing to do: take an “experimental airborne unit” with no field experience and drop it into Takla Makan! Seriously, this is the course of action General Kennedy decides upon, after discussing the matter with his top aide, Colonel Frank Starr – the man who created this experimental unit, dubbed Zorro Battle Group. Starr says so long to the wife and kids – the book is completely free of the maudlin sap of today’s thrillers, in which Starr’s wife and kid would be given their own tear-jerker of a subplot – and heads down to Puerto Rico, where Zorro is currently located. There follows lots of “military red tape” stuff where Starr busts the head of Colonel Holm, the twit who has been put in charge of Zorro.

The novel really is a streamlined thriller; there’s also a “Washington politics” subplot in which an eager young congressman named Heath hooks up with a muckracking journalist. The two have gotten wind that something big is going on in China, something being held from the public, and strike up a partnership to uncover it. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s even a bit of Bond-esque action, as Starr learns that a freelance spy named Pairvent has been monitoring Zorro Battle Group’s activities from his yacht – like a regular Goldfinger, Pairvent briefly captures Starr, giving him a Flemingesque speech, before Zorro Group shows up to save the day.

Chamberlain equips his fictional battle group with some crazy stuff. Most importantly there are “flying jeeps,” which look like “oversize manhole covers” and are like these flying wedges (with only a metal railing to protect the drivers!). These things fire compressed needles – thousands of needles that wipe out anything in their path. Chamberlain shows these in effect in a few instances and the horrific carnage is well captured. Zorro Group infantry wears body armor and big helmets that feature night vision binoculars and face plates; they carry a “combination ray rifle and grenade launcher.” The soldiers also wear “grasshopper harnesses,” which feature twin jets at the waist that allow the men to fly. The sci-fi weaponry extends to the Air Force; C304 transport planes unleash “ray guns” on attackers late in the novel, incinerating them out of the sky.

Other than the “needle gun run” which saves Starr from Pairvent, there isn’t much action until around page 165, which is when the assault on the Takla Makan complex begins. There isn’t even much in the way of adult shenanigans; this is very much a Boy’s Own adventure, with the only female character being a hooker/freelance spy named Monica who is hired to screw Starr and set him up for the kill via Pairvent, but she gets second thoughts, realizing how in deep she truly is, and she instead tries to save Starr. She ends up striking a deal to turn over all the info she’s gleaned from her traitorous actions, even scoring an off-page meeting with the President.

The climactic assault upon the nuclear complex is effectively done, if a bit threadbare at times. Indeed Chamberlain ends one chapter with Zorro Battle Group about to parachute out of the C304 transport planes to begin the attack, Starr in the lead in his own flying jeep, but next chapter the assault is already well under way. Given the amount of tension leading up to the attack, I thought it would’ve made sense for us readers to actually witness the opening moments of it. Chamberlain cuts around his large cast of military characters, showing the experimental weaponry in play. The needle guns do the usual gory damage, and there’s also something called “flashpalm” which sets off holocaustal flames.

Chamberlain is gifted enough that, despite the overwhelming amount of characters who compete for attention in a 190-page book, you still care enough when some of them bite the bullet. Zorro Battle Group suffers losses in the fight, and Chamberlain succinctly captures Starr’s remorse, brief as it may be – again, the novel is shorn of the sap that would be mandatory today, with Starr sticking to a military resolve, which is necessary in combat. No time for hysterics. Hell, there’s a part where he meets with General Kennedy shortly before shipping out to begin the assault; Kennedy offers Starr the night off to go be with his wife and kids, and Starr says no thanks – they’d just affect his mental resolve!

All told, China Strike is pretty entertaining, and certainly has the feel of a men’s adventure magazine story of the day. In fact I’d bet it was excerpted in one of them, just like China Bomb was. This one’s a good example of how to write a military-style thriller but still retain the immediacy of men’s adventure action-pulp. If anything I wish there had been a bit more action in it, and less about the preparation side of things, but that’s just a minor complaint.

The Huntress

The Huntress, by Williams Forrest
No month stated, 1964  Fawcett Gold Medal

You won’t find anything about The Huntress online, but according to the back cover copy it’s about a young Jewish girl whose family was killed in the Holocaust and who becomes a secret agent for the US, her goal the tracking down and killing of Nazis. Well, that’s sort of what the novel is about.

This sounds like a pulp masterpiece, but my friends, Williams Forrest is determined to write a “real” novel. In fact The Huntress should’ve been published in hardcover and received a glowing review in The New York Times or somesuch. It should not have been published as a pulpy-looking paperback from Gold Medal with a cover blurb calling it a “violent novel.” About the only way you’d think The Huntress was violent is if you’d spent the past decade reading Proust. This is a meaty, “literary” novel that only has a pulpish plot. It’s more Don DeLillo than Don Pendleton.

And yet, when I started to read the book I couldn’t believe how great it was. I found myself actually being moved by the opening sequence, something that rarely happens for an emotionless bastard like me. Unfortunately, The Huntress keeps going, which proves to be its undoing. But those opening pages are something special. The novel itself occurs in 1964, but the first quarter or so takes place in ’45, at the very end of the war. OSS spook Matt Winford is overseeing the freeing of a German concentration camp, and Willaims capably – and quickly – details the horrors therein.

The emotional content comes up when Winford spots a group of kids, converging around a US officer who happens to be a rabbi. Winford sees one of the kids – a little girl, maybe four, with wild black hair and “the eyes of a tigress.” Before he knows it he’s picked her up and he’s holding her. She says one word, in Yiddish: “Revenge.” And then she breaks down into tears. The little girl is named Sheila Koenig and it will be learned that her family was killed by the Nazis – her mother indeed hid tiny Sheila in a cupboard before the Nazis killed her. Yet Sheila was rounded up anyway.

From here the novel sort of hopscotches to important moments in Sheila’s life. Due to Winford’s brief presence she has, unlike most other Jewish kids freed from the camps, gone to America, where she is raised by a family she doesn’t really love. Matt Winford is for all intents and purposes her foster father, though she never calls him such; they have kept in touch over the years and he visits her in Virginia often. Winford has also stayed in the intelligence world and now works for the CIA. This is something that Sheila, now in her teens, is very interested in. She has retained her cold exterior and seems to live for nothing more than revenge.

Sheila, Winford is slowly beginning to realize, wants to become a secret agent herself. When she learns from him one day that martial arts could help a woman defend herself against a man, she throws herself into the study of karate, with the outcome that she achieves the rank of 4th Dan, higher even than Winford. At length he agrees to her demands and puts in a word for her at the Agency. Starting off on clerical duties Sheila soon realizes she could help the CIA in a greater capacity: in particular, in helping bring down the espionage ring of a Communist spymaster who was formerly a Nazi – in fact, the very same Nazi who was behind the massacre of Sheila’s family.

The Nazi, Colonel Ludwig von Bohlen, went over to East Germany after the War; we are informed that, while America took all the “good” Germans, the Commie countries eagerly took the bad ones. (However the revelation of Operation Paperclip in the ‘80s proved that America itself took its share of Nazis after the war…) Anyway, von Bohlen is you’ll be surprised to know a complete sadist, a man we eventually learn who gets off on whipping young women to death, a la any true men’s adventure magazine pulp Nazi. Yet our capable author is less concerned with showing us any of this sordid stuff and instead just shoehorns it into lots of dialog.

For that’s mostly what The Huntress is: dialog. The DeLillo reference above wasn’t made in jest. This is a novel mostly comprised of various weird characters speaking exorbitantly and at great length about various things, expounding on their arcane and bizarre knowledge. The emotional impact of those first several pages is gradually eclipsed, to the point where the reader wonders if he will risk losing the plot if he, say, skims a few pages. It’s a shame, really, as initially I thought I’d discovered a forgotten masterpiece. As it is, I found The Huntress a trying read.

Anyway, von Bohlen’s scheme, per Winford, is that he picks up talented whores from a particular cathouse in Rome, takes them over to East Germany, brainwashes them to the Red cause, and then trains them in the finer arts of sex and seduction. From there they are shipped to the free world, in particular the UN, where they are tasked with targeting particular ambassadors and VIPs and whatnot. The women then steal all kinds of info from the VIPs in bed, secretly sending it back to East Germany. But von Bohlen is a cagey ex-Nazi and travels secretly, and Winford and the CIA don’t just want to nab him but to expose his list of corrupted UN officials.

Per her request, Sheila is sent over to Italy, with an elaborate cover story of a young whore who was recently killed. (In a complete bit of coincidence, we later learn that the girl Sheila is posing as was killed by von Bohlen himself, in one of his whipping frenzies, but he never knew the name of the girl he was whipping…?!) Here the novel loses its steam and we must settle in for the long haul as Sheila meets one windbag after another. Most guilty of all is the old yet regal madam of the whorehouse, who is prone to going on and on for paragraphs of exposition over several pages as she regales Sheila with tales of her wanton youth and informs Sheila that she envies her youth. 

Meanwhile we also cut over to von Bohlen, who travels to Italy under a false name and as expected takes quickly to Sheila – part of the madam’s job was to ensure von Bohlen would note her. And as for Sheila, she herself is segregated in her own room in the cathouse and is not up for sale; this is something we learn at more page expense that pisses off the real hookers in the establishment. But von Bohlen takes to Sheila and goes about courting her. Forrest doesn’t do much to capture von Bohlen; it would be nice to see what this once-rabid Nazi thinks of the 1960s, how he feels working for the Communists and how he views Italy in comparison to the Italy of the 1940s. Instead, von Bohlen is just a sadist who enjoys the freedom the East Germans give him, and he figures Sheila will be perfect for nabbing another randy UN official.

Matt Winford is also here, shadowing Sheila in Rome before she’s taken to East Germany. There are also a few Israeli agents here, ones who are seeking von Bohlen. One of them, a sabra named Chaim, meets Sheila and quickly deduces she’s a spy and Winford her handler. In their quick meet Forrest lays the groundwork for a growing love between the two, but it’s hard to buy and at any rate comes to zilch; Sheila and Chaim never meet again in the novel, though it ends as she’s about to see him again. But in their one meeting together Chaim, posing as a man who has heard of this mysterious girl in the cathouse, tries to rent her for the day, and Sheila, wondering who the hell this rakish young guy really is, agrees to go along, but there will be no sex.

Instead Chaim takes her to the home in which the real girl whose name Sheila is using was captured by the Nazis, her own parents killed by them…in another bizarre and underdeveloped bit of coincidence, the girl Sheila is posing as had an almost identical past as her own. But nothing comes of this sequence…indeed nothing much comes of any sequence in The Huntress. The whole thing really comes off like the author working out his admittedly-talented writing chops. Von Bohlen as expected takes Sheila to Berlin, and here the novel still doesn’t amount to much, Forrest trying to be sordid yet still “literary” as Sheila is inducted into the Commie brainwashing/sex training gambit of the East Germans.

This sequence too just goes on and on, complete with another former Nazi at one point getting up on stage before the new class of whores and regaling them with endless speechifying. Eventually the girls are tested in various lovemaking scenarious, testing out the control of their inner muscles and whatnot. Again, you can tell it’s all quite torrid for its day but Forrest treats it all with kid gloves; that being said, this is the first pre-‘70s pulp paperback I’ve encountered to use the word “vagina.” But again it is not used in a racy sense. Instead it’s yet more locuacious minor characters going on and on. And despite the fact that all this takes place in a friggin’ sex school, it’s all very unerortic…like the long sequence where Sheila is forced to clean the bathroom.

Things don’t really pick up until the final few pages. Von Bohlen takes Sheila from the school and flies with her to Canada, from which they’ll enter the US. Winford and Chaim secretly follow. Sheila thinks she is being set up on her new UN deal, but it looks like Von Bohlen might’ve uncovered her identity. Or has he? It’s left vague; instead, a world-famous politician shows up after Von Bohlen has drugged and tied up Sheila and they get ready to whip her to death. Perhaps this is just this particular VIP’s sadistic kink. At any rate Sheila is in a bad way, hanging by her hair, only able to take the weight off it by balancing on a wooden chair beneath her.

The helluva it is, Sheila has had contless opportunities to kill von Bohlen. You keep wondering why she doesn’t, only to remind yourself, “Oh yeah, she needs to uncover his UN scheme and bring him to justice, or something.” And yet, here in the homestretch…Sheila kills von Bohlen. And rather easily at that! She gets the two men in range of her lethal legs and lets ‘em have it, choking the life out of Von Bohlen with her thighs. And that’s that! The rather amateurish cover painting illustrates this final scene, of a victorious Sheila standing over her dead prey.

But like I wrote above, The Huntress really should not have been a Gold Medal paperback with such a pulpy cover. Even the title makes no sense. Sheila is not codenamed “The Huntress” and she is never referred to as such. She is a junior agent on her first assignment and she doesn’t “hunt” a single thing; she just sits around in an Italian whorehouse and then in Berlin she just sits around in a sex school. She is not an ass-kicking spy babe, despite the fact that Forrest early in the book goes to great pains to inform us how much of a karate expert she is. It isn’t rocket science, people, just slap a skintight black jumpsuit on her, codename her “The Huntress,” and send her shapely ass over to Europe to kill ex-Nazi scum! The story practically writes itself!

Instead, Williams Forrest is determined to write a “real” novel, none of that funny pulp business. One thing to make clear though is that Forrest is a great writer. This dude can spin a sentence, that’s for sure. And yet his very writing qualities are what, for me at least, gradually led to my frustration with The Huntress. It seemed as if the majority of the tale was word painting, though word painting of a high caliber. I just wanted something finally to happen, and grew bored with the windbag characters.