The Blood Circus

The Blood Circus, by Thomas K. Fitzpatrick
No month stated, 1968  Fawcett Gold Medal

I’d never heard of this obscure piece of bikersploitation until I came across Zwolf’s review. His comments are on point, as The Blood Circus is an enjoyably pulpy tale that definitely has the feel of a men's adventure magazine story; it’s about a young deputy who goes undercover with The Beasts, the worst gang of hell-raising bikers in the USA – even worse than the Hell’s Angels!

At 160 pages, The Blood Circus barrels right along, Thomas K. Fitzpatrick delivering his story with a veteran pulpster’s skill. Which makes it all the stranger that I can find no other work credited to this author. The book is copyright Fawcett Gold Medal, and Thomas K. Fitzpatrick isn’t listed in Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms. But it would be hard to believe that this was the work of a one-time author. Despite its faults this book has a very polished, professional nature, as if the author made his living churning out this kind of pulp. My guess is that maybe he was indeed a men’s mag writer, and “Fitzpatrick” is just the pseudonym he used for this book. Who knows.

And, just like a men’s adventure mag story, the novel opens on a scene of atrocity, as the Beasts descend upon Calico, a ghost town near Hollywood. They run roughshod over the tourists, beating up one dude and preparing to rape his wife when the cops show up. Their leader, a shaven-skulled, muscle-bound sadist with Nazi leanings named Paul Krascoe, orders them to beat a hasty retreat. Not that Krascoe or his minions are afraid of the cops; indeed, Krascoe looks forward to the day when he can openly declare war on them and “the whole square world.”

Captain Walt Mooney, an old-liner cop in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, has had enough of this shit. He brings in Lt. Bob Waldrop of the Intelligence department and together they hatch a plan to send someone undercover, to infiltrate the Beasts; Mooney has a hunch that Krascoe’s gang is planning something. Heavy-duty weaponry has been stolen around the Los Angeles area, and Mooney suspects the Beasts are the culprits. We readers know they are, and that they’ve got everything from machine guns to bazookas. Krascoe’s plan is to start a war on society and he intimates some foreign power is behind it, but this is a plot thread Fitzpatrick ultimately leaves dangling.

Mooney and Waldrop settle on Ed Bartel, a 29 year-old deputy new to the force. Bartel is a ‘Nam vet, a biking enthusiast, and even an actor, having appeared in minor film and tv roles and in local stage productions. Bartel sees the opportunity as a surefire way to promote his career, but Peg, his wife of one year, is overly concerned about it. Peg hasn’t yet accepted the lot of being a cop’s wife, and there’s lots of friction between the two. Given that the book occurs over only a few days, Fitzpatrick luckily doesn’t devote too much of the narrative space to this matrimonial discord, but there’s enough there that you feel bad for the two.

Ordered to stop getting his hair cut and to look more unkempt (complete with a trip to the local Warner Brothers studio, where a professional makeup artist works on him), Ed gradually begins to look more like a biker. Over the course of two weeks he’s trained in biker culture, undercover methods, and self-defense. The latter element provides us with the book’s title, as Ed’s martial arts instructor, who teaches him something very much like Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do, informs Ed, “Life is just a bloody circus.”

Telling a bitter Peg so long, Ed hops on his Harley chopper and scoots on over to Beast territory, in the Bell Gardens district of Hollywood. His cover is that he’s an ex-con biker from Florida who used to run with the Hell’s Angels and was told to look up the Beasts in Los Angeles. But as expected, when he meets up with them, driving around a riverbed near their hangout, the Beasts are suspicious. Krascoe immediately figures he’s a cop. Here comes Ed’s first test; to prove he’s a real biker, he has to do a trial race of six laps, chugging a beer after each lap. This he accomplishes, getting progressively wiped out, finally knocked on his ass when on the last lap he has to chug a bottle of brandy.

Krascoe sort of accepts him, but not as a full-fledged Beast. Meanwhile Krascoe’s woman, hotstuff blonde Maggie, sets her sights on Ed. Fitzpatrick is to be congratulated for specifying that Maggie is not in any way like the other biker chicks; whereas the others are grungy, unwashed and unkempt, Maggie looks like a million bucks, with clean clothes, skin, and hair, even makeup. So unlike William W. Johnstone in The Devil’s Kiss, Fitzpatrick understands that a hotstuff evil chick needs to have good hygeine. Otherwise the entire effect is ruined.

Maggie’s just as wild and cruel as the regular pulp biker chick, getting off on the outlaw nature of it all. The question is, why is she with the Beasts? This is another plot thread that Fitzpatrick never bothers to answer; Maggie ultimately is there to provide sex appeal, though to be sure there isn’t a single sex scene in the novel. She does promptly declare that she’s deciding if she’s going to let Ed “ball” her, though. Ed’s growing interest in Maggie, whose Levi’s jeans outfit fits as tightly as a “rubber scuba suit,” is another element that comes and goes in the book, and unfortunately Maggie just plain disappears in the final pages, as if Fitzpatrick forgot all about her.

After beating up a few Beasts, Ed is warmly welcomed by Krascoe. He then orders the gang on a midnight run to Mexico with no explanation. Throughout the ride Ed’s shadowed by a burly Beast named Frenchy. There are several tense moments as Ed and the gang are stopped by the cops and the suspicion plays out if his cover will hold up, or if Krascoe and gang will learn that he’s a cop. Meanwhile Peg continues to fret, and intelligence chief Lt. Waldrop sits around in his office, guzzling coffee, hoping Ed’s okay. Our hero manages to get tidbits of detail to Waldrop, but he’s never left alone very long, the suspicious Beasts watching him, especially Frenchy. He also manages to call Peg once or twice.

After Ed’s with them a few days Krasco unveils his master plan. Uniting the outlaw biker gangs into a guerrilla force, he’s going to pull the biggest robbery in history. They’re going to hold up seven blocks of downtown Los Angeles, looting the diamond stores in the area. The plan is so crazy that Ed has a hard time getting Waldrop to believe it. But Krascoe has another surprise up his sleeve: he actually pulls the job a day earlier than he announced. Ed is hauled off of his dirty matress (the Beasts live in a grungy old auto garage in Bell Gardens, by the way) at 4AM and told to get his ass moving. Now he’s desperate to get the news out, but he’s pulled along by the biker barbarian tide.

Krascoe’s plan is so audacious that it could only exist in the world of pulp fiction: a legion of machine gun-toting bikers descending on Los Angeles. The Beast leader’s got every detail down, though, from sneaking in his choppers to blocking off traffic around the seven targeted blocks. There are even snipers across from the LAPD headquarters. Unfortunately Fitzpatrick here veers into summary; so much happens over such a broad sweep of canvas, with so many characters involved, that he has to hopscotch back and forth, giving overviews of what happens. This is the novel’s biggest failing; whereas the short page length is a boon, because pulp should move fast, it’s also a bane when it necessitates skimming over so much.

But it all goes down in a scant several pages, the Beasts unleashing hell on Hollywood. We’re informed that this day will become known as “Bloody Thursday” and that ultimately thousands of civilians will die, along with around two hundred cops. Open warfare rages on the streets of Los Angeles, with the Beasts cutting loose with their stolen heavy weaponry. One thing Krascoe failed to wager on was the resourcefulness of the cops; figuring they’d be hamstrung by their pea-shooting .38 revolvers, he’s surprised to find that they’re able to get stronger weaponry and National Guard help.

Ed’s cast adrift in all this, and finally spurs into action by blowing away Frenchy and a few other Beasts. Fitzpatrick isn’t an author to dwell on the gory details, mind you, but he’s definitely got a knack for keeping the tension and pace up. But I swear this guy was a veteran pulpster under a different name because The Blood Circus suffers from that veteran pulpster speciality: the harried and unsatisfactory ending. Without any buildup or payoff Ed runs into Krascoe, who goes for his gun (did Krascoe know Ed was a cop all along? Who knows!), and Ed blows him away.

The Beasts routed, the city in flames, and Maggie completely disappeared from the text (the last we see of her she’s riding on the sidecar of a Beast chopper), the novel speeds for the end. Ed basically tells Captain Mooney to go to hell and calls Peg, to let her know he’s all right. Oh, and maybe he’ll quit the force and become a teacher. The end! We get no resolution on what happened to the rest of the Beasts nor if Krascoe was indeed getting his funding from a foreign power, despite vague mentions throughout the story that he was.

Anyway, I really did enjoy The Blood Circus, and it was only after reading it that I pondered its faults. But while I was reading it I loved it! This I guess is the problem; if I hadn’t liked it as much, I wouldn’t have expected more of it in hindsight. But given the quality of Fitzpatrick’s pulpy prose, the interesting characters, the bit of character depth, and the outlandish plot, you just sort of feel that if a couple more details had been ironed out the novel would’ve been great.

At any rate it would’ve made for a helluva ‘60s biker film. William Smith of course would’ve played Krascoe.

Sam Durrell #39: Assignment Quayle Question

Sam Durell #39: Assignment Quayle Question, by Edward S. Aarons
May, 1975  Fawcett Gold Medal

With a cover that could come off a ‘70s sweat mag, the 39th volume of the Sam Durell series picks up “shortly” after the events of the previous volume, though be assured that reading Assignment Sumatra isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying The Quayle Question. Plus, this one features a Fu Manchu-style supervillain who runs a Satanic cult!

Our taciturn hero Sam Durell is in rural Virginia, on an assassination mission. Teamed with a few FBI and DIA agents, his assignment is to take out a Japanese terrorist named Tomashita, who we gradually learn is one of the minions of Eli Plowman, “sanitation squad” leader of Durell’s K Section. Plowman, who appared in the previous volume, has gone rogue, and for vague reasons Durell’s been selected by K Section to take him out.

But first he must take out Tomashita, who is apparently in the US to kill the recently-selected head of a Japanese business conglomerate, one that has been steadily buying out media outlets around the world. (The novel is very prescient in how it predicts the coming trends of the ‘80s, by the way.) In particular this conglomerate, or zaibatsu, now has its sights set on the global media kingdom of Rufus Quayle, a notoriously-reclusive mega-billionaire who rules from his own private castle and is never seen in public (read: Howard Hughes).

On the job with Durell, against his objections, is the lovely Deidre Padgett – the only woman Durell has ever loved, to cue the old cliché. Apparently she appeared more frequently in earlier volumes; we learn that now, in this later volume, she works in an admin capacity for the DC-based K Section, to at least be somewhat a part of Durell’s world. It seems the two broke off their heated relationship because Durell couldn’t allow himself to “go soft” by falling in love. More importantly, he doesn’t want someone he loves to be harmed by his untold enemies around the world.

But here Durell learns something new about Deidre: she’s the niece of Rufus Quayle. And now she’s the man’s only living relative, or at least only one who can be found: Quayle’s daughter, Deborah Pentecost, has gone missing, as has old Quayle himself. The K Section theory is that they’ve been kidnapped by the henchmen of the zaibatsu. Not that Deidre has much to do with her reclusive, wealthy uncle; she claims to have only seen him once in her life. But still K Section fears she might be on some Japanese hit list.

We can already tell this novel will show a more personally-involved Durell, as when Deidre goes missing in the assassination attempt he’s frantic, but hides it beneath his professional demeanor. He finds her, though, tied up beside the hippie van she was using for cover as she trailed Tomashita’s rental car. And the Japanese terrorist himself has gotten away, not only escaping Durell’s sniper round but also butchering the zaibatsu head and his entire family, including his little kids.

Meanwhile Quayle’s attractive daughter, Deborah, is held captive in a dank dungeon, constantly questioned by some evil presence she never sees. Deborah has the mind of a computer, able to predict industry trends and whatnot, but this is more of a curse; “My talent is like ashes in my mouth,” as she memorably puts it. Her unseen interrogator constantly asks why Quayle’s second-in-command (and also Deborah’s ex husband) wanted to recently meet with her; when Deborah refuses to play ball, she’s shown the poor bastard’s carcass, which is mutilated and hanging from a meathook!

Durell eventually figures Tomashita and Eli Plowman are not only working for the Japanese but that they can be found in the Ca’d’Orizon, Quayle’s castle on the Jersey shore. He also figures the old man is there. Durell’s biggest clue is a bit of sand left in his supposedly-top secret safehouse, near DC; he figures the sand was planted there by Plowman, in the expectation that Durell would see the sand and connect it to the Jersey shore – and thus go to Quayle’s private castle.

Aarons really has a gift for word painting, so there’s lots of colorful description of the scenery and terrain of the places Durell visits. This does add a literary flavor to the book, but detracts in that it gets away from the action and lurid thrills. But then again, the argument goes that the Sam Durell books were never really considered part of the men’s adventure genre. If so, someone forgot to tell the publisher and the cover artist. As it is, one gradually begins to wish that less was being described and more was actually happening.

Things pick up with a firefight in an amusement park, where Durell and Plowman have a brief face-to-face. Here Plowman plays Darth Vader, asking Durell to join his cause. Of course, Durell refuses. He’s worried about this zaibatsu, which, if it takes over Quayle’s company QPI, will have a “world-wide network of media outlets,” and thus be able to sway public opinion. Again, it’s very interesting how prescient Aarons was. The novel’s big threat isn’t nuclear war or anything of the like, it’s about how the media can be misused.

Rufus Quayle is in fact hiding in his castle, and his scenes too are memorable. Bedridden, surrounded by armed henchmen, Quayle has recently lost his voice due to throat cancer and thus “speaks” through a teleprompter. He has no intention of selling QPI to the Japanese, even if they have his daughter – even if they threaten to kill her. Durell thinks the man is a “monster” but can’t argue with him; Durell too realizes what ramifications might ensue if the zaibatsu were to gain access to Quayle’s global networks.

Aarons seems to want to hedge his bets; I know he passed away not long after The Quayle Question was published, but at any rate he appears to want to leave Eli Plowman’s fate vague; the wily villain plunges into the ocean after a gunfight with Durell, and is wiped out by a big wave. Durell later bluntly states that Plowman’s dead, though he has no proof, and is himself uncertain. But at least Aarons wraps up the Dr. Sinn character, who also apparently had a run-in with Durell in an earlier installment.

Unfortunately, it’s only in the homestretch that Aarons begins to ramp things up. The book also gets more lurid here, with Deborah getting raped by one of Sinn’s more grotesque henchmen (one with a deformed member, naturally) – that is, after she’s had her finger cut off. And true to the genre, Deidre is soon after captured, taken to Sinn’s secret hideaway of a temple. This turns out to be in Baja, California, a Maharana temple that Sinn has rented from a drunk old lady who owns the property.

Even here more time is spent on scene-setting, so that when Durell finally goes to save Deidre (and have his final confrontation with Sinn), only a handful of pages are left. Dressed like one of the monks (the robes hiding electronic gear which is necessary to keep Sinn’s security devices from going off), Durell brazenly walks into the villain’s lair, where he’s promptly captured. The cover image comes to life, with Deidre shackled before an enthroned Sinn, who has ten black candles lit; when the final candle goes out, one of his henchmen will slit Deidre’s throat.

Aarons cheats on the finale, with one of Durell’s colleagues coming to his aid at the last second. While it’s realistic, I feel that this goes against the grain of heroic fiction; the protagonist should always save himself. Instead, Durell’s left standing there powerless as the love of his life is about to die, and some random DIA agent bashes in the window and starts shooting. You’re almost like, “Jeez, maybe that guy should’ve been the star of the book.” But anyway, the fireworks here are rather muddled, with even Sinn’s comeuppance barely dwelled upon; Durell just shoots him, and that’s that.

So while The Quayle Question was moderately enjoyable, it just didn’t have the spark of Assignment Sumatra, and I got a bit frustrated with the inordinate amount of word painting. I wanted a bit more exploitative verve than Aarons was willing to deliver.

Hype!

Hype!, by Leonard Jordan
No month stated, 1977  Fawcett Gold Medal

Hype! was my Harold Robbins novel, but as usual I could only cover the material in my own way. It contains incredible amounts of vulgarity. One of the characters is based loosely on Jacqueline Onassis. I’ll probably burn in hell for what I did to that poor woman. -- Len Levinson, in a July 2012 email to me

Published not long after The Bar Studs, Hype! tells the tale of a New York City Public Relations firm, its wacky clients and its even wackier employees. Despite what Len wrote above, the novel really isn’t much like Harold Robbins – the characters are too three-dimensional for that, and you can tell that Len, unlike Robbins, is actually having fun writing – but it is a lot like The Bar Studs, in that it’s about a fairly large cast of eclectic characters in funky ‘70s NYC.

But whereas the characters in that earlier weren’t connected, the ones in Hype! all interract in various ways. Our “hero” is Mike Brown, a hustling PR man who works for the Larry Walters agency. Mike’s life is hectic to say the least. Over the course of the novel he oversees several campaigns, hurries crosstown from one meeting to another, creates a nationwide movement, nearly gets trampled in a “free hamburger day” event, introduces an unknown French starlet to the US, gets in a fight with rioting Women's Libbers, and attempts to become a svengali for another promising actress. And this is just his work life – he’s also a dopesmoking, coke-snorting, skirt-chasing alpha male who is always right. (So in this respect the novel sort of is like a Robbins novel, as Mike is very much a Robbins type of protagonist, only with a lot more depth.)

Mike’s boss Larry Walters also gets his share of the narrative; heavyset and balding, he’s just as shrewd and crafty as his underlings, and indeed urges them to get more outrageous with their efforts. Len also develops a humorous banter between Larry and Mike, with Mike constantly asking for a raise because he does a “good job” and Larry responding, “I don’t pay you to do a bad job, do I?” Larry’s storyline has him being approached for representation by the most famous woman in the world: Diane Auberville, the above-mentioned Jackie Onassis analogue. Twice widowed (her first husband an assassinated American politician, her second a Greek shipping magnate), Diane now wants to branch out from her “ditzy society girl” image and looks to Larry to steer her toward something more fulfilling.

As for Diane, she too gets her own plot. In her 40s and still ravishing, Diane has a teenaged son named Jasper from her first marriage. Jasper is gay, and a minor plot has him basically cruising around Christopher Street looking for hook-ups. Not only that, but Diane is apparently in an incestuous relationship with her brother, Anthony, but truth be told this plot point really goes nowhere and has no development, other than a few cursory mentions in the narrative and some later threats from Jasper – when his mother refuses to let him move into his own apartment on Christopher Street, he threatens to let it out that she’s been screwing her own brother.

Then there’s Sharon Edmonson, a gorgeous and well-endowed blonde who can’t get a break – she’s too voluptious for modeling and she’s been unable to land a part that will lead to her big break. She enters the novel early, as one of the random group of models hired by Mike for his latest scheme, promoting the release of a film titled The Brass Bed by having a group of bikini-clad young women carry a brass bed across Times Square, despite the fact that it’s 40 degrees out. The event, tepid as it is (which even Mike admits) garners a media turnout, but more importantly serves as Sharon’s introduction into the narrative.

Hype!, rather than telling a single plot, instead comes off like a series of misadventures these various characters experience. For Mike it’s hustling one person or business after another, with little time for a private life – but then, Mike just combines the two. While on the job he snorts tons of cocaine, smokes dope, and even manages to have sex with a Stag Club “Pony” in the Stag Club itself, snorting some coke with the gal and then doing her up against the wall. Throughout the novel he’ll randomly head on over to the apartment of his drug dealer, Perce Washington, a black guy who has a constant party going on (that is until he smokes some Nepalese hash, which sends Perce into a three-day meditative trip in which he questions reality).

The highlight of the book, and the scene Len mentioned above, comes midway through, when Mike returns home after a trip to Perce’s in which he’s picked up some of that Nepalese hash, as well as a bottle of Amora, an imported aphrodesiac which Perce assures him is effective. First though Mike stops off to drop off some of the drugs with Anthony, Diane Auberville’s brother, who earlier asked Mike to score him some – and Mike has earlier met the famous lady, having handled the delicate situation of getting her son Jasper out of jail after his arrest for some public gang-banging, keeping the entire matter out of the media.

You know it’s headed somewhere when Anthony asks Mike to have a seat and smoke some hash with him. Diane’s interested but has never tried it, and easily enough the two guys have her joining them as they pass back and forth a potent joint. Now, given Anthony and Diane’s incestual relationship, I assumed Len was going to go somewhere crazy with this, but instead Anthony announces he has to pick up a friend from the airport and leaves Mike and Diane alone. Mike, realizing he’s here with one of the most famous women in the world, no less while she’s stoned out of her gourd, decides he has a prime opportunity.

Spiking Diane’s orange juice (and his own) with some of the Amora, Mike thus makes the “Fame Goddess” super horny, to the point where she’s asking him to screw her. And Mike happily complies, all the while marveling over this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Obviously Mike has perpetrated some sort of rape, but Len has already established that Diane herself isn’t the most wholesome of women. And hell, it was the ‘70s. But regardless of the moral implications one could draw, the sequence is played moreso for laughs – and also, Len never writes from a moral high horse, which I’ve always enjoyed. His characters do rotten things, and Len leaves it up to you whether you think they’re scum or not.

Diane meanwhile goes on with her public makeover, first as a champion of the ecology movement, then as a feeder of the poor. This entails a sequence similar to Mike’s “free hamburger” fiasco in which Diane and Larry fly down to a hardscrabble section of West Virginia and attempt to hand out food; the people riot, and Larry comes up with the last-ditch idea of saving Diane’s image by having her fake a heart attack. It’s curious though that Len has two PR events that entail the handing out of free food – either he was missing regular food in his remote cabin when he wrote the manuscript (see below) or this was a typical maneuver he’d employ back in his own PR days.

Around this time Larry hands Mike his next project – turning the unknown French actress Genevieve Benoit into a star. Featured in a softcore piece of lesbian exploitation titled Daughters Of Lesbos, Genevieve is engaged to Richard Davis, president of Ambassador Pictures, who demands that Genevieve be turned into a huge deal for the American public, despite that she’s a nobody even in France. Davis is notorious for picking up women, grooming them to be stars, and then immediately dumping them (coincidentally enough, right around the time he’s gotten bored of screwing them and has discovered another object of his lust), but regardless Mike takes to the job with his usual gusto.

This leads to the aforementioned social movement Mike engineers – that of “Breast Liberation,” which Mike comes up with on the spot when Genevieve arrives at the airport. From here we have many scenes where a topless Genevieve will meet with gobsmacked reporters and industry people, telling them that breasts should be free. Even though it’s all just some random idea Mike came up with, and Genevieve is just mouthing the words he’s written for her, the idea sparks the public imagination and soon women across the country are going topless. Genevieve however is promptly shuffled out of the novel, and plus Davis is no longer interested in her and doesn’t plan to marry her. Also, Genevieve doesn’t have the expected sex with Mike, turning him down cold but showing a definite interest in Mike’s drug dealer, Perce.

Mike gradually sets his sights on Sharon Edmonson, whom he bumps into again at a bar, having forgotten about her from the Brass Bed event. He ends up taking her home, sating his Genevieve-spawned lust on the girl (Len skimps over the details of this scene, for some reason). But later Mike realizes that Sharon actually has the potential to become star talent. Sick of never being paid for his hard work for Larry, Mike comes up with the idea to become a svengali for Sharon, a talent agent solely dedicated to this one client, using his vast industry contacts and hustling skills to turn her into a phenomenon. Currently cast in a small role in the upcoming Amassador Pictures mafia movie Capo, Sharon shows all the signs of being a star to be.

But those who know Len’s work will know it’s not headed for a happy ending – rather than be grateful to Mike for the time and money he’s personally spending on her, Sharon instead comes to hate him, angry over how he thinks he can just boss her around and sleep with her whenever he wants. And when she gets a call from Richard Davis, who has seen some publicity photos of Sharon (photos which Mike has had her pose for and which he paid for himself), she suspects she won’t much need Mike Brown anymore. And sure enough, Davis extends an offer to her to become a bigger actress, and he’ll even try to get her representation with the William Morris agency. All this leads to a huge blowout as a gloating Sharon kicks Mike out of her apartment, and Mike implores her to understand that Davis is notorious for promising starlets the world, screwing them, and then dumping them.

My only criticism of Hype! is that it seems to be leading toward a wild conclusion which ties everything together, but instead Len sticks with a chaotic feel, which I suppose is more realistic. But still, the potential was there for the novel to reach a calamitous climax along the lines of the unforgettable Oscar Awards ceremony in James Robert Baker’s Boy Wonder, as the various characters all converge upon the opening of Capo. Len well sets up the scene, and it appears it’s all leading to some fireworks, with Richard Davis showing up with Sharon Edmonson (having just unceremoniously humped her in her apartment before leaving for the event) but immediately ditching her for Diane Auberville, who has been brought here by Larry Walters. And meanwhile Mike is staring daggers into Sharon, who realizes no one has ever looked at her with such hatred before.

But instead of the fireworks I wanted, the novel instead ends with lots of foreshadowing – Richard Davis walks into the theater with Diane, telling her he’s got a new movie coming up that she’ll just be perfect for (his standard line for any actress he’s trying to score with), and Sharon, all alone in the theater, looks outside and sees Mike chatting with the Mayor of New York, who’s also come to the Capo opening. Ramming it home that Mike, the guy who believed in her talent, the guy who could’ve actually made her a star, is the guy she's just made into an enemy. Indeed it’s sort of a sad ending, as you feel bad for Sharon, despite it all being her own fault. And as for Mike's future -- he pops up again briefly in The Last Buffoon, as an old friend from Frapkin's PR days.

The other month Len was kind enough to send me his thoughts on Hype!. He mentions the current prices of used copies of the book toward the end of the essay; safe to say, Hype! is pretty scarce, and believe it or not the only copy currently listed on abebooks.com is priced at $400. However, a little searching will turn up the book at much more reasonable prices. I got my own copy for under two dollars from an Amazon Marketplace seller in 2012, and when Len wrote me that he’d heard copies were now at $400, I went over to Amazon again and found a few more copies in the single digits.

But by all means, do not pay $400 for a copy of Hype!. Asshole booksellers like that should be ignored.

Hype! was intended to be my big breakout novel. I wrote it after the success of The Bar Studs which sold around 95,000 copies. I wanted to build on the success of The Bar Studs and perhaps sell 250,000 copies. 

Someone reading this might be tempted to comment: “What a crass, mercenary writer. No wonder he failed. Evidently all the wretch cares about is money.” 

Please allow me to point out that I never was independently wealthy. No devoted wife was supporting me. I didn’t have a day job such as teaching English at a prestigious New England liberal arts college. I was never good-looking or charming enough to be a gigolo. And NYC landlords have this thing about the rent. They want it or they’ll throw your ass into the street without any qualms. 

No one becomes a novelist to make money. People write novels because they’re driven. And perhaps I was more driven than most because I’ve always been and continue to be mildly to moderately nuts. 

I wondered what to write after The Bar Studs. But I didn’t need to wonder long. Because the premise had been in the forefront of my mind for a long time, a Harold Robbins-type show biz novel based on my ten years as press agent in the entertainment industry. I’d worked for Paramount Pictures, 20th Century-Fox and a PR agency named Solters and Sabinson, which means I’d seen the underside of show biz, not the glossed over crap one finds in the media. 

I’m not Harold Robbins. He and I have experienced different facets of the biz. We have different worldviews. I don’t even try to imitate other writers because I know it’s impossible. I am what I am for better or worse. 

I wrote Hype! in a rackety cabin without electricity or plumbing in a remote forest in New Brunswick Canada, around 40 miles north of the provincial capital, Frederickton. What the hell was I doing in such an unlikely place? Let me take you back to circa 1974. I was living in Greenwich Village and my second wife was driving me out of my mind. I thought it might be wise to put a national boundary between us. My old buddy Bill Kotzwinkle and his wife Elizabeth had relocated to that part of Canada. Both were writers and we understood each other. That’s how I ended up in a rundown cabin, sitting beside a wood stove, writing on a manual typewriter during a fierce Canadian winter, using an outhouse. Sometimes I felt like the Jewish Jack London. 

I believed that I saw NYC more clearly in that cabin than when I was living in NYC and drowning in it. Distance and a change of surroundings provided an interesting new perspective that I hoped would add substance and verisimilitude to the novel. 

To the best of my recollection, I wrote The Bar Studs the first year I was there, Hype! the second year, and The Bandit And The Ballerina the third year. The latter never was published and I don’t know what happened to the manuscript. 

Anyway, Hype! is about a hustling unscrupulous press agent based loosely on me. His boss, Larry Walters, was based loosely on my last boss Lee Solters, one of the great legendary press agents. If you don’t believe me, check Wikipedia. Other characters also were based loosely on real people, some of them very famous. 

All my churning emotions, feelings and observations about show biz were poured into this morally atrocious novel. I held nothing back. Let me be clear: I had seen close-up and personal the squalid underbelly of show biz in addition to glitter and glitz. I met big stars who turned out to be ordinary screwed-up people like you and me, but they were rich and loved by millions. I also met many egomaniacs and once worked for a producer/director named Radley Metzger whose arrogance and cruelty were almost beyond human comprehension.*  I also ran into lots of struggling would-be stars who never made it and had to live with the bitter taste of failure. 

I called the novel The Shucksters. After completing and editing the text, I mailed it to my then literary agent, the very wonderful Elaine Markson. Eventually she sold it to Fawcett, same company that published The Bar Studs. Fawcett changed the title to Hype! My editor Harvey Gardner explained that most Americans probably didn’t know what a shuckster was. I wasn’t very happy with the murky cover that didn’t stand out against other novels in bookstores. The graphic artist used a strange kind of typeface that made Hype! look like Hypel. Talks with Harvey left me with the impression that Fawcett execs hadn’t liked the novel. After several months it became clear that Hype! was a big flop. I think it only sold around 20,000 copies, very little for a mass market paperback.It was one of the greatest professional disappointments of my life, but I didn’t realize that even greater disappointments were to come. 

Joe Kenney asked me to write something to accompany his review of Hype!. So I read the novel for the first time since completing the manuscript circa 1975. 

To my immense satisfaction, I thought it very good and quite possibly one of the great American show biz novels of all time. However I must admit it’s as sleazy as the subject itself. And it’s also kind of vicious, definitely not a pretty novel. Evidently I was an angry man when I wrote it, making uncomplimentary observations about all sorts of people and institutions, and especially contemptuous of the hypocrisies of the then-new Women’s Liberation Movement, which probably explains why Fawcett execs, many of them women, disliked Hype!. Such a novel probably could never be published in today’s politically-correct climate. 

Hype! was one of my early novels, written before I really understood my craft, not that I’m such a great expert now. Its worst flaw, in addition to my nasty point of view, was too much description of unimportant activity such as characters walking here and there, or taking elevators , riding in taxicabs, or eating a corned beef sandwich. 

Not long after writing Hype!, I had a conversation with my buddy Bill Kozwinkle. He’d noticed and disapproved of my pointless descriptions of activity, and gave me advice which I wrote into my notebook as he spoke. He said, “Fiction isn't a movie. You needn't show every movement and twitch. Fiction is the realm of inner mind, the second level of reflection.” 

I really thought about that comment and took it to heart. It made a big difference in how I wrote afterwards. For context, Bill Kotzwinkle wrote what some critics consider the greatest novel of 60s, The Fan Man, now available as an e-book. He also wrote the novelization of E.T. The Extraterrestrial, best-selling novel internationally of the 80s. 

One of my readers informed me recently that paperback copies of Hype! are selling for $400 on the internet. It’s not available yet as an e-book. I’m not gonna pay to e-publish it myself. That’s not my game. If somebody else wants to e-publish it, he or she will find me most reasonable.

*Radley was no saint, but did make some very sexy movies. My favorite was Therese And Isabelle. And there are two sides to every story. If you asked Radley about me, he probably wouldn't remember me, or would call me incompetent, although I'm the guy who arranged for him to lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, which probably was the high point of his life.

The Bar Studs

The Bar Studs, by Leonard Jordan
March, 1976  Fawcett Crest Books

The second novel Len Levinson published under his “Leonard Jordan” pseudonym, The Bar Studs is an awesome trip back to the shaggy pre-disco New York City of 1974. As usual with one of Len’s novels it’s more about the characters than the plot, with the tale recounting the sleazy lives of six bartenders as they variously find fortune, love, heartbreak, and tragedy. 

First up is Adrian, owner of a Greenwich Village bar which bears his name. A total ‘70s dude, Adrian is a good-looking guy who smokes dope in his upstairs apartment/office and entertains various women. This latter point gets him in trouble with his girlfriend, the true owner of the bar; after she catches Adrian in bed with a cute young waitress named Julie, she kicks his ass out. But don’t feel bad for Adrian, as within just an hour or so of losing his bar and girlfriend he’s once again in bed with Julie and her roommate, a pretty young black lady who also works at the bar.

Then there’s Johnny Mash, coke-snorting bartender at Adrian’s. At first Johnny and Adrian seem a bit too similar, but as the narrative progresses you see that Johnny Mash is one son of a bitch; he “treats” a somewhat-attractive customer by going home with her, and after forcing her to give him a blowjob at knifepoint he sleeps with her, makes her blow him again in the morning, and then steals cash from her wallet and an expensive watch from her desk while she’s in the shower!

Next is Leo, who tends bar at a hot nightspot where he himself sticks out like a sore thumb; whereas the place is known as a haven for the beautiful people, Leo himself is bald, fat, and “old” at 42. Of all the characters Leo the most comes off like Frapkin in The Last Buffoon, eternally bemoaning his lot in life and jerking off to fantasies of women who wouldn’t be caught dead with him. But like Frapkin he brings most of the misery upon himself, like when Leo lets a gorgeous stewardess stay with him after she has a fight with her boyfriend…and the lady proceeds to use Leo for everything but sexual purposes.

Jake is a bartender in the Bowery, and his sequences come off like a Jerky Boys skit a few decades early, what with the vitriol he spews out upon his hapless “customers.” Bums the lot of them, Jake treats these men and women like such pieces of shit that you can’t help but feel sorry for them. For instance his nightly regimen of closing the bar, which entails him screaming “Get the fuck out, you bums!” and roughing them up as he tosses them out. But Len develops a soft side for Jake when he comes across a stray cat; this serves as Jake’s story in the novel, as through the cat, which he names Khrushchev, Jake begins to actually talk to one of his customers, a “floozie” who was once married to a vet but is now a homeless alcoholic.

Teddy is a bartender at a trendy gay bar, and his sections get the least development in the novel (though Len does serve up an explicit sex scene when Teddy takes an attractive man home with him from the bar). Teddy’s scenes though are the most lurid, as in a scene that could’ve come out of Len's Ryker installment Teddy is knocked unconscious by the attractive man once they’ve had sex…and then the man rams an eight-inch railroad spike up Teddy’s ass! Turns out this guy has done this to a few other gays, and now Teddy, recuperating in the hospital, is trying to help the cops find the sadist.

Finally there’s John Houlihan, who gets almost as little narrative time as Teddy. Older than the other bartenders in the novel, Houlihan tends bar at a super-upscale hotel, where he’s worked for the past few decades. Here he is treated like a friend by the millionaires who congregrate around him for drinks. Houlihan’s character is opened up a bit more when we learn that he has a live-in son who lost his legs in Vietnam.

The above character-rundowns really also serve as plot-rundowns, as there’s no unifying thread that connects everything, save for Adrian and Johnny Mash. Whereas the other bartenders go on with their own separate storylines, Adrian and Johnny are together affected by the sudden closing of Adrian’s bar. Adrian himself tries to repair the relationship with his girlfriend, Sandra, and thus get back the bar, while Johnny visits his Uncle Al, who happens to be a mafioso. After berating Johnny for never visiting his mother, Uncle Al asks Johnny if he’d make a hit for a few thousand bucks, so now Johnny’s gone from being a bartender to a Mafia hitman.

And what with the Mafia stuff and a character named “Johnny,” you can’t help but think of Len’s three contributions to the Sharpshooter series, particularly his first one, The Worst Way To Die, which like The Bar Studs featured a hit in a restaurant. But whereas in that earlier novel it was Johnny Rock blowing away a mobster while he ate his pasta, here it’s Johnny Mash waltzing into a Puerto Rican bar and firing several shots into his victim.

Throughout the novel Len’s usual strengths are in full effect; you get the feeling these characters actually exist, and their ways of speaking and interracting with one another come off as very true to life. For example how Johnny Mash idly flirts with a Puerto Rican girl in the bar as he waits for his target to arrive; you can tell the girl finds his sudden interest in her exciting, but Johnny could care less and is just killing time. Or the scenes with Houlihan’s handicapped son, Donald, which are played with zero sappiness, with Donald bullshitting over beer and football with another vet about “Vietnamese pussy” and how cheaply it could be had during the war.

The maudlin-free treatment Len gives this sensitive topic is refreshing, as in today’s world it would be played up for all its “emotional content.” Len instead has Houlihan and one of his wealthy patrons going out into the city to find Donald a hooker. This scene also sees a cameo from the protagonist/narrator of a later Len novel: Shumsky the taxi driver, who later appeared in Cabby, a 1980 Belmont-Tower novel also published under the Leonard Jordan pseudonym. Shumsky, though only appearing here for a few pages, turns out to be one of the more memorable charactres, as he drives Houlihan and his wealthy friend around lower Manhattan in search of a suitable whore.

If like me you’re fascinated by the sleazy ‘70s, then you’ll definitely dig The Bar Studs, as Len peppers the novel with all kinds of period details. And speaking of sleaze he also serves up lots of graphic sex scenes, leaving little to the imagination as Johnny Mash gets his rocks off (while holding a knife to the poor lady’s throat!) or as Adrian has sex in his loft apartment above the bar with Julie. Drug use is also rampant, with characters snorting coke and smoking dope with abandon – and, best of all, with none of the “moral implications” that would be forced upon such scenes in today’s world. These people just want to get stoned and fuck, and what’s wrong with that?

I did sort of wish that there was more of a unifying thread to the novel; other than the fact that they’re all bartenders, the protagonists have no interraction with one another. It’s also worth mentioning that the novel really isn’t about bartending at all. Other than a few parts in the opening of the novel, we rarely see the protagonists at work. The novel is moreso about their lives outside of the bar. This is fine, though, as reading a novel solely about bartending would get to be a drag after a while. At any rate the novel sparkles with Len’s customary wit and moments of philosophy, enriched with the occasional dash of utter sleaze, and that’s basically all I could ask of a novel.

Finally, The Bar Studs has recently been e-published, and comes with a few bonus articles: “My So-Called Literary Career,” which Len wrote last year for Justin Marriott’s Paperback Fanatic #23, and a great new piece titled “John Lennon & Me,” in which Len recounts in entertaining fashion how he met John and Yoko back in 1970. The ebook is available here – the only thing it’s missing is the great cover art from the original Fawcett Crest edition.

A couple months ago I asked Len if he’d share the background on a few of his novels, The Bar Studs among them. Here’s what he had to say:

I wrote The Bar Studs because I liked to go to bars when I lived in NYC. And I was drawn to bars not because I liked to drink, but because that's where the action was, where I could meet single women interested in romance, the female counterparts of myself. 

During my 42 years in New York City, I went to all kinds of New York bars, from the Oak Room at the Plaza, to singles bars on the East Side, to Village hangouts, to Bowery dives, to gay men's bars in the Village out of curiosity, and even one jaunt to a lesbian bar called The Duchess, where I was made to feel very uncomfortable. 

I guess I should amend what I wrote above, because ultimately I didn't go to bars just for romance, or to get laid, although those were my primary objectives. I also went because I met many interesting people of all types who were great storytellers. 

I especially enjoyed a Village bar called Bradley's that featured live jazz. I'd give almost anything for another musical night at Bradley's, but Bradley now is dead and the bar no longer exists, as far as I know (I no longer reside in NYC). 

Since my writer's mind was and is always tossing up stories, a novel about bars coalesced in my mind as I sat on those bar stools around 1972. I conceived it as the varieties of bar experience, about all the different kinds of New York bars I went to, and the different people I met there. 

Before arriving in NYC, I worked as a bartender at various joints in Lansing, Michigan, when I was a student at Michigan State University. So I knew what it was like on the other side, rushing back and forth on the floorboards, mixing, pouring, collecting money, making change, becoming embroiled in conversations, and learning that inebriated people often spill their secrets to bartenders, while certain women, after a few drinks, tend to flirt with the bartender. 

My working title was "The Bartenders", and the developing novel told the stories of six bartenders. Adrian and Johnny worked in a bar similar to Bradley's in the Village, Leo in an East Side singles bar similar to Maxwell's Plum, Teddy in a Village gay bar similar to Ty's on Christopher Street, Jake was a Bowery bartender, and Houlihan served martinis and other libations to the upscale crowd at the Oak Room at the Plaza. 

Actually, the novel was about more than bar life. Like all my novels, it also was about love, hate, violence, anger, crime, frustration, and the pornography of everyday life. 

Fawcett bought publication rights, changed the title to The Bar Studs, and gave it what I considered a great cover. It became my best-selling novel, around 95,000 copies bought by unsuspecting readers. I hope it gave them a good ride. It certainly was a great ride for me. I love that book and always will. It's about a New York City that's gone forever, but never forgotten by people who were there. 

Of course, the novel includes examples here and there of my occasional awkward writing, and egregious bad taste. But I was a sleazy character myself in those days, and couldn't help myself. Now I'm trying to be a dignified elderly gentlemen, without much success, I'm sorry to say.

Sam Durell #38: Assignment Sumatra

Sam Durell #38: Assignment Sumatra, by Edward S. Aarons
October, 1974  Fawcett Gold Medal

I’ve never given the Sam Durell series much consideration, though I’ve heard good things about it. The series started in 1955 and ran until the early 1980s; the creator and sole writer until his death in 1975 was Edward S. Aarons (after he died the books continued on for a few volumes, published under the pseudonym Will B. Aarons). Recently at a bookstore I came across several of these books at half off the cover price, with an additional 20% on top of that, so I couldn’t say no – especially when the cover price on some of them was 90 cents!

I mostly picked up ones from the early to mid ‘70s, given the bias (which even I myself don’t fully understand) that I have for that era. I chose this 38th volume in particular as the one to start with, what with the back cover copy stating that on this assignment Durell works with a “lethal lady” who basically gets off on murder. To my pleasure, Assignment Sumatra turned out to be a great read. These books are only marginally part of the men’s adventure genre, in that there’s a series title and volume numbers, but the writing is several steps above the genre norm and the feel of the books is more in the espionage arena. But it still packs in enough sex and violence; there’s just a bit more mystery and suspense than you’d get in, say, The Executioner.

Durell is known as “The Cajun” given his Louisiana heritage, but we really don’t get much background information on him in Assignment Sumatra. No wonder, given that this is the 38th volume in the series! At any rate he works for K Section of the CIA, and is your basic James Bond type. Durell comes off as pretty taciturn and more concerned with seeing the job through as cleanly as possible – in other words, he doesn’t go out of his way to get into scrapes or to kill as many enemy agents as possible.

This last fact in particular forms most of the conflict in the novel – Durell has been assigned to work his current mission with the beautiful Lydia Morgan, aka the “lethal lady” of the back cover. Lydia is a 27 year-old assassin with Q Clearance, apparently the operatives of the CIA who have clearance to kill. She really enjoys her job, and Aarons does a great job making her character so fascinating – her complicated backstory goes that she was a hippie girl who had a bad “back to nature” scene in which the two guys she was with ended up dead.

After more mental breakdowns Lydia was contacted by the creepy Eli Plowman, head of the CIA’s “sanitation squad” and one of the people Durell most hates (it’s obvious Plowman has been in previous volumes); Plowman took Lydia under his wing and turned her into a master assassin, one who can use any weapon or her hands and feet to kill. However as mentioned Lydia enjoys it, something Durell suspects at first but gradually learns to be the truth. (He witnesses it, in fact, during a later scene where Lydia demands to have sex with Durell right on the battlefield, and turns to look at one of their slain foes as she orgasms.) Durell himself is disgusted by Lydia, and not just because of her affiliation with Plowman; despite her beauty Durell instantly distrusts the woman, and resents the command that he work with her.

Their mission is to cart around a decoy who resembles moderate Indonesian leader Hueng, Premier of Salangap (another person Durell has dealt with in a previous book). The decoy, Tu Fu, is a Hakka country bumpkin who bears enough of a resemblance to Premier Hueng that Plowman and Lydia hope he will make for a suitable target while the real Hueng makes his way in secrecy to the SEACROP conference, a meeting of South Asian leaders in which Hueng is expected to make an America-friendly speech. However out to stop him is K’ang Wu Chien, Hueng’s co-ruler who is attempting to take over the country and oust Hueng; K’ang wants Hueng dead so that he can make the SEACROP speech and unite the South Asian rulers against the US.

So begins the suspense and treachery, as Durell and Lydia try to escort Tu Fu across Sumatra in the hopes that K’ang’s assassins will spring forth and kill the guy. Durell begins to feel sorry for the Hakka decoy, and instantly grates against Eli Plowman’s exploitative scheme. The novel starts off heavy on the action as the trio are attacked shortly after Durell arrives on the scene, Lydia killing off the attackers with ease. Her trademark weapons are a two-shot, heavy caliber derringer she carries between her “ample breasts” (we learn that the handle has been specially formed to fit there) and a thin, needle-like blade she straps to an inner thigh. She is also competent with her hands and feet and butchers their attackers with relish.

Durell and Lydia take an immediate dislike to one another, though Aarons as expected builds up a gradual chemistry between them, leading to the mandatory sex scenes. However Durell never stops distrusting the woman, or treating her roughly. Aarons capably walks an unusual ground because he makes Lydia such a monstrous person, capable of cold-blooded murder and deceit, yet at the same time he makes us feel compassion for her, as she’s obviously mentally unstable due to her rough background, plus she herself is aware that she is “sick.” As the two get in more danger Lydia begins to cling to Durell, sometimes begging him for sex, saying that only Durell can make her human again. Durell tries his hardest not to fall completely for her, so this makes for an added layer of suspense.

Aarons has a definite command of his craft, and his writing is masterful in how he doles out topical details about his exotic settings yet still keeps the action moving. He also has a gift for characterization and dialog. The action scenes are all compelling, and very well staged, though Aarons doesn’t dwell on the graphic aspect. True, we get several mentions of exploding blood and brains, but for the most part Durell only kills when he absolutely must. The sex scenes as well are described enough that we know something happened, but again Aarons doesn’t dwell on the details. So again, the book has more in common with a more “respectable” series like say Fleming’s James Bond novels than it does with the average men’s adventure novel.

I guess my only problem with Assignment Sumatra is that Aarons doesn’t really tie up everything, so far as the main characters go, and he tends to build up characters and then drop them. K’ang for example has a grand entrance, complete with the genre-mandatory bit where he tortures Durell, but after that he disappears, and his comeuppance at the end is perfunctory. Tu Fu also disappears from the narrative, and Aarons leaves Lydia’s fate a mystery – Durell sends her off with the brother of a man Lydia killed earlier in the book, though Lydia doesn’t realize this. Personally I found it hard to believe that the guy would be a match for her, so I suspect Lydia probably reappeared in a later, Will B. Aarons-penned installment (or at least perhaps Aarons himself planned to bring her back).

Anyway I really enjoyed the novel, and I’m happy I picked up so many volumes of the series. These books are deserving of a rediscovery, and luckily enough it looks like they can still be gotten for cheap in most second-hand bookstores.

First Blood

First Blood, by David Morrell
September, 1982  Fawcett Crest Books

The cover of this Fawcett mass market paperback obviously ties in with the 1982 film, but the Rambo of David Morrell’s novel (originally published in 1972) bears no resemblance to Sylvester Stallone. We learn in the first paragraph that he’s “some nothing kid” with shaggy hair and a mangy beard, and in fact looks more like a hippie, enough so that conservative chief of police Wilfred Teasle is appalled by the sight of Rambo wandering through his little kingdom of Madison, Kentucky and promptly kicks the “vagrant” out.

Teasle’s hassling of Rambo is enough to make even the reader uncomfortable, as within the first few pages you’re already sympathizing with “the kid.” But the reader already knows that Rambo isn’t some hippie; he’s just back from ‘Nam, where he was a Green Beret who won the Medal of Honor. But Rambo was also captured and spent some time as a POW, finally managing to free himself and escape to American territory. During this ordeal though he sort of lost his marbles, and thus was discharged back to the States.

Now he wanders around the country, living off the land, unsure what to do with his life, barely into his twenties. Getting kicked out of small towns by redneck cops is nothing new to him, but this time with Teasle sets off a chord and Rambo vows that he’s not going to back down again. This time he’s going to fight back. Teasle keeps picking him up along the road and driving him to the town limits and Rambo keeps turning around and walking right back in.

Teasle could obviously just give in and talk to Rambo, but he’s a stubborn redneck bastard. Actually he’s more than that, as Morrell will later prove, but the novel hinges on Teasle’s stereotyping in the first pages, and the mistakes he makes thereafter. Actually Teasle comes off as more of the protagonist of the novel than Rambo himself does, with more of the “character meat” one would expect – more backstory, more subplots, more character growth, and more scenes from his point of view.

When Teasle forces Rambo to get a haircut before putting him in a cell, Rambo snaps back to his POW days, grabs hold of a knife, and guts a cop. From there it’s on, Rambo easily escaping the redneck cops and getting out into the woods. Morrell must be an outdoorsman at heart, because there is a lot of forest-life detail here, with vast portions of First Blood coming off like adventure/survivalist fiction as Rambo lives off the land, including a cool part where he kills an owl, hollows it out, and roasts its carcass on a spit! Every once in a while I hear an owl hooting out behind my house, and this novel now has me thinking…

My favorite part of First Blood has always been this opening section of Rambo in the woods, using his superior training and skills to take out Teasle’s cops. The movie neutered all of this. Here in the source novel Rambo is a true killing machine; there’s none of the “I just want to be loved” stuff of the film. He’s here to make a point, and he’ll kill as many cops as he wants. It’s not until later that he begins to regret it. But for now it’s very personal and he wants Teasle to get the message. The novel trades on the personal war that develops between these two men.

First Blood comes off like an action-adventure take on Moby-Dick, with Rambo and Teasle acting as both Ahab and the whale for one another. It operates on that vibe that powers Great Literature, with multiple readings possible in what is presented as an oridinary story of two men in a battle to the death. In Morrell’s hands this becomes a masterful theme, especially in how he makes neither Rambo nor Teasle the hero or the villain.

Teasle gets the majority of the narrative time, and as the story progresses you see more and more the nightmare he’s unleashed. As the bodies rack up Teasle begins to, correctly, realize that it’s all his fault. And yet you also feel sorry for the stupid old hick. He loses men he’s worked beside for decades,he loses his foster father, and he’s just lost his wife, who’s moved out and gone to California. But after escaping Rambo in the woods, Teasle becomes so obsessed with Rambo that it’s all he can think of, the wish to see “the kid” brought to justice being pretty much the only thing keeping him alive.

The middle half of First Blood is very heavy on the adventure/survivalist fiction vibe. One of the more memorable scenes in the novel has Rambo figuring out he can escape down into an abandoned mine – making this discovery just as he’s about to surrender himself to the National Guard – and then working his way on and on into the pitch-black shaft. Morrell proves his mastery with prose in a squirm-inducing scene where Rambo must get over a ledge filled with flesh-eating beetles, “putrid goop” all over the ground, and swarms of bats looming above him.

An interesting thing to note is that the character Trautman is much different in the novel. He has none of the “father figure” quality that Richard Crenna brought to the character. In fact, it’s implied that Rambo has never even met Trautman – Trautman was just the trainer of the trainers, not Rambo’s direct trainer. There are no moments where Rambo and Trautman meet face to face, and Trautman comes off as more cool and aloof, very much the professional soldier. As in the film he’s been brought here to help, but he doesn’t offer much assistance – Morrell understands his characters well enough to know that Trautman would in fact be proud of the hell “his boy” has unleashed, and indeed he is. It isn’t until the very end that Trautman sees that Rambo has gone too far, and thus decides to step in.

I think it’s pretty common knowledge that the novel has a vastly different ending than the film. Would it be considered a spoiler to give away the ending of a 41 year-old novel? In case it would be, I’ll leave it that both Rambo and Teasle have different fates here than in the film, the only fates Morrell has left possible for either of them. One thing I forgot to mention is the metaphysical bent Morrell also gives the tale, with Rambo and Teasle becoming so in tune with one another that they gradually find themselves dipping in and out of each other’s minds, with both knowing what exactly the other is thinking. This progresses to the point where Teasle even feels that he can see out of Rambo’s eyes. The metaphysical aspect finds its fullest realization in Rambo’s final moments, a scene which is downright touching.

Obviously the film version changed the majority of the novel. For one, Rambo doesn’t kill everyone in the movie, let alone the different fate he experiences. The film version of the character is also thoroughly softened around the edges. There’s no argument that the film version of Rambo is more charismatic and human. Not to say the novel version isn’t charismatic, but he’s been honed into such a killing machine that he operates most of the time on pure training, with none of the mercy the film version would show. Even toward the very end of the novel, when Rambo shoots a guy in the arm and doesn’t kill him, it turns out that it’s just a mistake – Rambo was really aiming for the guy’s chest, but his aim was off.

As for other stuff in the film but not in the novel…well, Rambo doesn’t stitch himself up here, so there goes that memorable scene from the film. In fact he suffers from swollen and possibly broken ribs throughout, and does nothing to repair them. He doesn’t have a survival knife, and there’s no point where he commandeers a National Guard truck or appropriates an M-60. No soul-barring moments between Rambo and Trautman, no protracted “man to man” dialog between Teasle and Trautman. In fact the entire second half of the film is different from the novel, and you guessed it, the novel is superior in every way. But then the two are wholly different animals and should be treated as such.

Morrell’s writing here actually reminds me of now-forgotten author John Gardner (of Mickelsson’s Ghosts and The Sunlight Dialogues, among others). Maybe it’s due to Morrell’s talent for getting in the heads of his characters, or how he brings to life Small Town, USA. But then even the style itself reminds me of Gardner, from the topical detail to the way the story unfolds. The only difference though is that if Gardner had written First Blood, the book would’ve been a bloated excess. Morrell is skilled enough and smart enough to keep it at a lean and mean 250+.

In the “you’ll never believe this” department, Morrell was actually contracted to write the novelization of the 1985 film sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II. I bought that one fresh off the racks at a WaldenBooks store in 1985, and still have my copy, which I will be reading next. I guess it would be a re-read, as I read it back then, but given that I was ten years old at the time I don’t remember much about it.

The Reassembled Man

The Reassembled Man, by Herbert D. Kastle
No month stated, 1964  Fawcett Crest Books

Before he hit mainstream success in 1969 with his “sell-out novel” The Moviemaker, Herbert Kastle published a variety of novels, from literature to genre fiction. As far as I know, The Reassembled Man was his only science fiction novel – but then, it’s only sci-fi in its trappings. In its execution the novel is basically soft porn (and “soft” due to the year in which it was published, I’m sure), not much different than the average Harold Robbins novel.

In fact, you could consider The Reassembled Man the story of how a regular loser becomes an alpha male, Harold Robbins-type protagonist. Our “hero” is Ed Berner, a 38 year-old sap who has been beaten down by life. Married to a shrew, the father of two prepubescent kids, Ed makes a moderate living as a copywriter at a Manhattan ad agency. Yep, just like Darrin on Bewitched -- and really, this novel is very much like a twisted episode of Bewitched. Like, if Darrin had asked Sam to make him ultra-human, and then decided to start sleeping around with every woman he met.

Kastle doesn’t make us spend too long with the loser version of Ed. This in fact might be one of the novel’s failings; Ed’s later actions come off as so self-centered that the book quickly descends into an endless string of softcore sexcapades, Ed living out the dreams previously denied him. But at any rate, as the novel opens Ed goes out for an evening drive, and comes to days later, having driven all the way from New York to New Mexico.

He’s been brought here by the Druggish, aliens who apparently look like Japanese Beetles, only human sized. Kastle well captures the purported experiences of UFO abductees, with Ed coming to himself as he sits in his parked car overtop a hole in the New Mexico desert, out of which pops these giant beetles; the ensuing dialog with the aliens occurs with a sort of casual-meets-bizarre vibe.

The aliens (who initially speak in beatnik, having assumed it was the standard Earth language from their research) inform Ed that he’s been chosen to be their “recorder” of life on Earth. They wanted an average guy living an average life, and Ed fit the bill. In exchange they will grant him his wishes; anything Ed has previously longed for will be given him.

Ed’s checklist is pretty basic. He wants to be better looking, he wants all of his hair back, he wants to be stronger, he wants women to find him attractive, he wants to have a lot of sex, and he wants a bigger dick. Oh, and he wants the ability to persuade people, and maybe even some empath powers to boot.

Ed emerges from this a superman, very similar to Tony Twin, from TNT. Kastle loses me here, though, because the Druggish make it clear that they want Ed to be an “average” human, and though they say they can only boost his inherent potential (in other words, they can’t make him fly or anything, because humans can’t fly), Ed still comes out of this a not-very-human being, able to read and influence thoughts and capable of superhuman feats, from lifting cars with one hand to breaking long-jump records with ease.

The Druggish have removed themselves from Ed’s memory – something they’d told him they’d do, so as to assure an unbiased report from him – so he comes back to himself in this new and improved body here in New Mexico with no idea how he got here. Pretty soon Ed gets to take his new body out for a spin with all the expected tropes; he nearly beats to death a pair of would-be robbers and quickly talks an attractive waitress into leaving work and going to his hotel room for some sex!

This first sex scene is just a taste of what the novel will become, just an endless string of sequences where Ed will meet some girl, affect her thoughts with his own so that she’s overcome with lust for him, and then take her to his place where he will bang her for several hours. Again just like Tony Twin, Ed is insastiable and can last for hours and hours, wearing out women until they’re in a stupor of ecstasy. He also apparently has a sadomasochistic bent, and Kastle hints at “experiments” Ed will put various women through. De Sade is even mentioned. But again due to the era it was published, the novel does not get into details.

Ed quickly discovers he can control others. He takes care of his previously-domineering wife, satisfying her with Herculean bouts of sex to the point where she’s in a daze. Meanwhile Ed sets his sights on Gladys, the attractive next-door neighbor with the loutish husband. This scenario is given the most setup of all of Ed’s conquests, as he goes to great lengths to get the couple over to his place for some barbecue and brandy, ensuring that Ed’s wife and Gladys’s husband pass out so Ed and Gladys can be alone.

His new powers also give Ed an advantage in the workplace. Whereas before he was a nonentity, by the end of his first week Ed has gotten his old boss fired and has taken over the department. This is very Bewitched/Mad Men as Ed hobknobs with wealthy clients and attempts to win over their accounts. But Ed discovers one strange drawback to his new condition – he can no longer handle booze; just the thought of drinking it is enough to make him puke. Which makes it pretty unfortunate that his agency mostly deals with licquor accounts!

Another thing Ed learns is that he quickly becomes sick of women once he’s conquered them. Again, the novel is very repetitive with Ed going from one woman to another, and you’re left with the unpleasant thought that the majority of these women are sleeping with him because Ed has influenced their thoughts. Once Gladys has been moved to the background, the biggest romance in Ed’s new life is Beth, a pretty 18 year-old heiress who is much wiser than her years would imply; after one night with Ed she calls to tell him that, while she likes him, she has a feeling she’s been used somehow. Beth is easily the strongest female character in the novel, and Ed soon becomes self-conscious around her, as she’s the only one who appears able to detect that there’s something different about him.

Meanwhile Ed discovers a much bigger problem with being a recorder for the Druggish. Right before landing a huge account, Ed loses his mind, steals a car, and comes to days later in New Mexico. Turns out his reports to the Druggish will be monthly; when the allotted time is up – which, remember, Ed will never know because the Druggish erase themselves from Ed’s memory – Ed will drop whatever he is doing, find the closest means of transportation, and get to New Mexico, where the Druggish will be waiting for him, all of it timed to their busy interplanetary-traveling schedule.

When reunited with the Druggish Ed remembers all – and instantly realizes that his life will have problems. What if he’s overseas when the monthly call comes to return to New Mexico? Since he’ll have no memory of the Druggish, he’ll blindly go on with his life, not realizing that once a month he’ll be expected to drop everything and get to New Mexico, where he’ll remain for days.

The Druggish give Ed more problems. Since their “recorder” is such valuable property, they instill deep fears in Ed of anything that might kill him; now he’s terrified to fly, and he can only drive his brand-new Triumph sportscar at 30 miles an hour due to his terror that he’ll crash it and die. And forget about taking on armed robbers or bullies anymore. But again, since the Druggish have wiped his memory, Ed has no idea why he’s so afraid of everything, just like he can’t understand how he got this new body and new skills.

But as mentioned, the novel by this point has fallen into a mire of repetitive situations. It’s salvaged though by Kastle’s masterful prose. Also, as would be expected he has more up his sleeve than delivering a wish-fulfillment fantasy. It doesn’t take long to realize that The Reassembled Man is really a morality play, the story of what happens when the male id is allowed to run rampant.

Ed Berner is not a hero, and Kastle doesn’t present him as one. Indeed you soon feel sorry for the other characters he manipulates and takes advantage of. But as the narrative moves on Ed begins to realize the errors of his ways, and also focuses on bettering himself – one advantage of his new form is that he requires little sleep, and so he spends many nights up reading the classics and philosophy.

Just as you realize it can’t go on much longer (sort of like this review), Kastle pulls out all the stops, delivering another of his dark comedy showpieces where Ed must drink a glass of fine brandy as part of the fulfillment of a new account – a scene that goes down with comically disastrous results. From here Kastle quickly wraps up his narrative, with some last-second changes of mind from the Druggish and a better future for Ed.

The Reassembled Man isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s enjoyable. Its biggest failing is that it starts off so strong, with a reborn Ed Berner living out every guy’s fantasy – getting the upper hand on bullies, telling his boss where to shove it, being desired by every woman he meets – but it soon falls into a rut.

Kastle must’ve realized some opportunities himself, as in 1975 he rewrote about 80% of the novel and published it as Edward Berner Is Alive Again!, a hardcover-only obscurity which I’ve just gotten via InterLibrary Loan. I look forward to seeing how different it is from its original incarnation.

The Ninja

The Ninja, by Eric Van Lustbader
No month stated, 1980  Fawcett Crest Books

This read has been decades in the making. I bought The Ninja fresh off the racks in the mid-‘80s, desperate like other kids my age for anything about ninjas. Even the cover of the mass market paperback seemed to suggest Sho Kosugi, who came to brief fame via Cannon’s Enter the Ninja -- which, I seem to recall reading, was rushed into production to jump onto the ninja bandwagon which was kicked off by the runaway success of this very novel.

But here’s the thing…as shoddy, goofy, and bad as Enter the Ninja sometimes is, it’s still a hell of a lot better than this novel. Comically overwritten, The Ninja is one of the more pretentious reads I’ve ever had the displeasure of enduring, as if Dow Mossman, after penning his similarly-overwritten Stones of Summer, had decided to take a stab at writing “something Oriental.” You’d think I was joking if I told you that a novel about a ninja was boring, but there it is – I tell you the truth. The book should come with a pack of No-Doze.

What makes it so funny is the story is quite simple; it’s just been overblown to staggering extremes. Our hero is Nicholas Linnear, improbably-named modern day ninja of caucasian and Japanese descent. Nicholas (and no, it’s never just “Nick”) is one of the more stoic/boring/unmemorable protagonists you’ll ever encounter, lacking much spark. Raised in Japan, Nicholas eventually came to the US (after becoming a ninja, though Lustbader keeps it a “mystery” for several hundred pages), where he apparently got a job at an ad agency (just like Darrin on Bewitched!). Not that it matters, for as it opens Nicholas has resigned his post after a breakdown...or something.

Anyway, it’s all just a convenient setup so that, when we meet him, Nicholas Linnear is a broken man, despite only being in his 30s, sort of living like a bum along the beach outside of New York City. Meanwhile, people around him are being murdered. Nicholas pays no heed, until he meets dropdead gorgeous Justine, who just happens to run into Nicholas on the beach…and several pages later they’re having sex in incredibly overwrought prose. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to get hot beneath the collar or consult a thesaurus.

Gradually (and I do mean “gradually”), Nicholas learns that Justine’s father is mega-wealthy, mega-infamous bad guy Raphael Tomkin. Nicholas gets dragged into Tomkin’s story when it develops that someone, apparently a ninja, is trying to kill him…and Nicholas incorrectly assumes that the mysterious muders going on around his beachhouse are due to the simple fact that Justine lives nearby – the murders are signs from the ninja that even Tomkin’s family is in danger.

The reader, of course, realizes that these signs are for Nicholas; in the occasional scenes from the evil ninja’s perspective, we learn that this guy has it in for Nicholas and is using this Tomkin job as a convenient way to kill the proverbial two birds. So he goes along murdering people Nicholas knows, most of them fellow Japanese who have moved over to the US, many of them martial arts instructors and etc.

Sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the narrative style is so torpid as to rob the story of all tension. Seriously, everything is drawn out here, put through the metaphor/analogy wringer, until it all comes off like the literary equivalent of an unintentionally campy film. Even if a character merely looks out of a window, Lustbader will go on for a full paragraph or so, comparing this to that and that to this. Pretty soon the entire story collapses beneath the onslaught of fluffy prose.

But wait, it gets worse. Not content to wheel-spin in the “present” (apparently, 1979), Lustbader will often jump back to the late 1940s and early '60s, so we can witness Nicholas’s youth. But this portion too is unintentionally hilarious, because Lustbader only tries to come up with more “mystery” to keep us reading, but it’s all just so uninvolving. I assume Lustbader is trying to set up storylines for future volumes, as he leaves all sorts of things vague…for one, Nicholas’s mother appears to have several skeletons in her closet, not to mention her “sister,” who is married to an evil bastard who turns out to be a ninja.

Then there’s Yukio, a Japanese girl of Nicholas’s age, a nympho with the mouth of a truckdriver; incapable of loving or showing any emotion, she exists only to screw, therefore giving Lustbader opportunity to write a bunch of unsexily-rendered sex scenes. Speaking of which, there’s a whopper of one a quarter of the way through the book, where Gelda, Justine’s hooker sister (and a lesbian to boot) has sex with a female client…a jawdropper of a scene involving a bathtub and a revolver. Truly, even Harold Robbins would have been impressed.

But even these flashes of perversion are lost in the deluge of pretension. Dialog also suffers, with characters, no matter how minor, given to grandiose, poetic speeches about life, love, or what have you. I mean, it would be fine if one or two characters spoke this way, but every single character speaks exactly the same. Even Croaker, a tough New York City cop who works with Nicholas in the novel, is given to prosaic utterances that seemingly have no end. And don’t even get me started on the “wizened Asian types” who proliferate through the narrative; the older they are, the bigger their bluster.

As overwrought as the dialog is, the characters themselves are just as bad. Early scenes featuring Justine are probably the worst; the victim of several unhappy romances, Justine now distrusts most people and is reluctant to get involved with Nicholas. So ensues soap opera-etic drama between the two, culminating in an uninentionally hilarious scene (one of many, really) where Nicholas, breaking the news to a heartbroken Justine that he’s going to work for her father, falls to his knees and begins to weep…! All he needed to add was a little teeth-gnashing.

Another priceless sequence is when Nicholas and Justine later reunite, in an honest-to-God disco… a scene that contains Lustbader's overwritten-but-nonsensical prose in spades. Such as:

Somewhere was the bar, obscured behind a forest of raised arms, swirling hair, shiny mindlessly concentrating faces. Dance dance dance: the imperitave was clear, treading an atavistic path, the primitive’s tribal revivals, an ecstatic communal orgy, trivialized to the point where all possible consequence was nullified.

Seriously, what does that even mean? This entire scene is hilarious, given the lengths Lustbader goes in describing the “modern hell” that is the disco…and the lyrics he writes for the blaring music is just the icing on the cake.

This is one of those novels where you start to root for the villain, if only because he does you the favor of killing off all of the annoying protagonists. So then, evil ninja Saito was a godsend for me, popping up from the shadows every once in a while to do in some colleague of Nicholas’s. Unfortunately Saito himself is lost in the turgid shuffle, to such a point that even a late scene, in which we see his own perversions (namely, taking a heroin-LSD combo and sodomizing young boys), loses its impact due to the torpor which has overtaken us.

But wait, you ask, isn’t this a novel about ninjas? Well…sort of. In actual fact, the ninja stuff takes up around 10% of the narrative. The rest is given over to elaborate backstories, elaborate philosophizing, and elaborate prose. Nicholas gets in a few quick scuffles here and there, but actual ninja warfare stuff doesn’t occur until the end, when Nicholas and Saito have their expected confrontation. But it too is anticlimatic, over in just a few pages, and lacks any novelty save for a part where Saito uses a handy corpse he keeps nearby to fool everyone into thinking he’s been killed.

And yet, The Ninja was a big seller, and indeed spawned a series of five more novels, each of them doing well. But then who am I to judge, given that the bestsellers of today are things like the Harry Potter or Twilight books; at least back then adults were reading novels for adults.

Summing up, while the storyline in no way justified the overblown prose and dialog, I still found some enjoyment in The Ninja; namely, the same sort of sick enjoyment I get when I watch overblown turkeys like Valley of the Dolls…bad films that were treated by their creators with such gravitas that you can’t help but laugh. The Ninja is just like that, and it’s a shame a similarly-overblown film was never made from it. It would've been an instant camp classic.

The Death of the Fuhrer

The Death of the Fuhrer, by Roland Puccetti
December, 1973 Fawcett Gold Medal

They’ll never save your brain now, Hitler!
-- Grampa Simpson

I read about this forgotten novel in Bill Pronzini’s Son of Gun in Cheek, specifically in the chapter about sex in mystery/thriller fiction. Pronzini gave a certain sex scene in The Death of the Fuhrer the “Alternative Sex Scene To End All Sex Scenes” award, quoting the scene in full. Unfortunately said scene ruined one of the novel’s biggest surprises, but then, as Mike Madonna notes, the cover for one of the UK paperback editions did the same.

The novel was first published in 1972 in the UK, receiving a hardcover edition that same year in the US via St Martin’s Press. A Fawcett paperback followed, and I’ve used that cover here, as it’s the best of them all, mostly because it captures the book’s pulpy tone. For The Death of the Fuhrer is a men’s adventure in all but name; it could easily be another installment of Nick Carter, what with its reborn Nazi plot and generic but heroic protagonist who narrates his own adventure for us.

Our hero is Karl Gisevius, and we meet him in a brief prologue set in 1972 (I guess), in a two-page sequence that is not narrated in third person. Gisevius is old and living in Switzerland; while playing a game of solitary chess he encounters an American tourist, and claims he can tell the young man the “truth” behind the death of Hitler. This then takes us to the story proper, “twenty years ago,” all of it relayed in the first-person narrative of Gisevius, a la Gary Jennings or something.

One issue I had with this novel is that, although it takes place in 1952 or so, I still kept getting confused and thinking it took place in 1972. Everyone acts like the war was years and years ago, even though it was only a few short years before. Puccetti himself I feel got confused here, and it doesn’t help that he has an unsure handling of his tenses. Gisevius’s narrative jumps from past-tense to present, which I guess is supposed to convey the feeling that he’s telling us this story, as people jump tenses in everyday speech, but still it comes off as clumsy.

Also, it must be mentioned that Gisevius is an idiot. Well, maybe only half an idiot. He rushes headlong through this novel, overlooking simple things and lacking even a grain of forethought. He never would’ve gotten into the Boy Scouts, that’s for sure, as the guy’s never prepared. Not only that, but just about every time he sneaks around in this novel (and he sneaks around a lot), he's always sure to bump into things or knock something over, like a regular Mr. Bean. Anyway, Gisevius was a doctor, or something, but now after the war he works as a reporter in Paris.

Gisevius meets an old Russian doctor who claims to have been part of the team that went into Hitler’s Bunker when the Soviets took it over. Again, Puccetti treats the character like he’s ancient and as if he’s recalling events that happened decades before, not five years ago. Anyway the guy has it that Hitler’s corpse lacked a brain, and the brain was missing, and Gisevius convinces his editor that there’s a story here, and next thing you know Gisevius is sneaking into the Soviet section of Berlin.

His entry into the closed-off Bunker is pretty hilarious, as it’s the first indication of our hero’s ineptitude. In a sequence that almost comes out of TNT, Gisevius worms his way down through a claustrophobia-inducing shaft and into the abandoned complex. Only now, after an hour or so of toil, does the guy realize he only brought one flashlight, no batteries, and didn’t even realize that the air down here might not be breathable! More TNT stuff ensues as Gisevius fights for air as he investigates the eerie surroundings.

But his luck is just as powerful as his ineptitude, and Gisevius is able to discover a hidden chamber in here, one which leads him into an apparent operating room. Gisevius knows the signs of brain surgery when he sees them; in fact, thanks to an engraved scalpel he finds in the mess, he even knows who was behind the surgery – Willi Tranger, an old doctoral school chum of Gisevius’s, from the days before the war.

Able to escape the Bunker, Gisevius works his underground contacts and tracks Willi down to a castle in the mountainous regions of Spain – a castle under apparent guard, with soldiers roving behind the gates, machine pistols in hand. Gisevius has not seen Willi since those days in doctoral school; Gisevius, we learn, turned against the Nazi party and ended up working for the OSS during the war, even becoming a US citizen. Willi meanwhile was a true-blue Nazi, joining the party and becoming a high-ranking SS officer.

Gisevius’s plan to get into the castle is another instance of his stupidity: he drives a friggin’ motorcycle right through the gates, in the hopes that they’ll just think he’s a lost tourist and Willi will come upon the scene of the accident and recognize his old pal. That’s pretty much what happens, though of course Gisevius nearly breaks his neck and is almost killed by Willi before he regains consciousness – seems that the Germans who live in this castle don’t want any visitors.

It turns out there’s a minor assembly of former Nazi officers living here, Willi overseeing them. Gisevius is granted a bit of leeway, allowed to stay with them, thanks to his former friendship with Willi plus some doctored papers he has with him, ones which make him appear to be a former SS hotshot himself. Gisevius meets the freaks and is instantly smitten with one of them, a gorgeous blonde named the Baroness, who shortly calls Willi to her chamber for dinner. (This dinner occurs after a sequence where Gisevius, sneaking around the castle in the middle of the night like Bruce Lee on Han’s island, finds himself in the Baroness’s quarters and hides behind the curtains while he watches her parade around her room in the nude.)

The dinner leads to the sex scene Pronzini quoted in full, and it’s a doozy for sure. Long story short, and skip here if you don’t want the surprise ruined, but the Baroness’s body contains Hitler’s brain! Yes, Gisevius discovers this right after the two have had sex. After their simultaneous orgasms the Baroness screams, “Ich ben der Fuhrer!” and Gisevius instantly hops off the bed and puts a nearby sword through her chest. You have to at least give the guy credit for quick reactions.

The novel takes on a Clockwork Orange vibe as Gisevius is caught and Willi implants a mental control device in his brain. Next thing you know, Gisevius is being controlled to do all sorts of things, and with the push of a button Willi can make Gisevius be consumed with rage, sorrow, etc. In the most laughable scene in the novel, Willi even makes Gisevius screw a couch!

Oh, and meanwhile Willi’s preparing to put Hitler’s still-living brain in another body, this time a sturdy young German who has given himself to the cause. The Baroness we learn was also a Hitler supporter, and sacrificied herself in those last hours in the Bunker after there was a problem with the original body that was to hold Hitler’s brain; further, Willi informs us that Hitler was righteously pissed to wake up in a woman’s body, but soon learned to love it, due to the fact that “the brain is bisexual.”

You’d think that Gisevius would be a goner, but in another bizarre sequence he’s able to perform brain surgery on himself. The entire finale continues on this lurid, hyper-weird vibe, as Gisevius staggers about the castle, steals an old Luger, blows away a few blackcoats, and settles the score with Willi. The two fight in the bowels of the place, Gisevius having set off the James Bond villain-esque self-destruct mechanism which will destroy the entire castle. He also makes his escape on an underground railcar in a finale that comes off like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a few decades early.

Puccetti ends the novel on a punchline, taking us back to that forgotten opening bit in 1972, or whenever the hell it takes place. Personally I found the epilogue just as unnecessary as the prologue; we already know the novel is pulp, there’s no need to try to explain it all away. The Death of the Fuhrer was apprently forgotten, despite receiving a few different printings, only revived by Pronzini in his 1986 book. As for Puccetti, he is as forgotten as the book, and as obscure; I can only find one other novel under his name, The Trial of John and Henry Norton, from 1973.