Dead Run

Dead Run, by Jonathan Black

October, 1981  Jove Books

So obscure there isn’t even a cover image online, Dead Run is presumably by the same Jonathan Black who turned out a series of paperback originals in the 1970s before finding more fame in the 1980s (in the UK, at least) with super-fat, super-long blockbusters like The World Rapers and The Carnage Merchants; as I mentioned in my review of The Ms. Squad #2, “Jonathan Black” was a pseudonym of prolific writer Bela von Block. 

Was this Jonathan Black that Jonathan Black? I have no way of knowing, and really, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just judge the book on its own merits. For one, we have here a serial killer novel. The particular type of victim this killer goes after is…joggers. Joggers in NYC. Jonathan Black, whether it was Bela von Block or not, has a theme and he’s sticking with it…Dead Run is so of its moment, capitalizing on the then-current fad of jogging, that you start to hate the joggers as much as the serial killer does. 

But then, perhaps that was Black’s intention. Dead Run is also curious because we have here a book where the author clearly hates every single one of his characters. There is this droll, eye-rolling tone to the narrative that makes it clear Black is “taking the piss” as the British would say, but ultimately it serves to make the book uninvolving. When even the author doesn’t give a shit about the characters he is killing off, why should the reader? 

Well anyway, Dead Run is also very much a New York novel. New York landmarks are mentioned, New York personalities are presented and dissected. We’re only talking Midtown-type people…trendy, affluent people who have given up cocktails to take up jogging, the big new fad that’s swept the city. Every single character in the novel has something to do with jogging, from the many victims of the killer to the ostensible “hero” of the book (I use quotes because the guy barely appears in the text), a former cop turned private eye – he too is pulled into jogging by a young woman who has her eye on him, despite being married. 

Oh, and that’s another thing. Jove Books as expected hypes up the sex quotient of the novel…but friends, there is none. Jonathan Black relishes in dangling the prospects of juicy a-doings, from the aforementioned young lady who just desperately wants to get laid by anyone who isn’t her husband, to the big movie star who is focused on her body, to the widow of one of the victims who keeps throwing herself at the ostensible hero…but nothing ever happens. Sex is always brushed off – the private eye in particular brushes off sexual advances, from both the widow and the horny married girl, to the point that the reader starts to get one of those “hmmmm” suspicions…especially given that the guy just wants to run home and give his dog a walk. 

I guess I should start using names for the characters to make this thing easier. Simon Larsen is the hero of the tale, a former NYC cop now barely making a living as a private investigator. The back cover has it that he’s brought in by the cops to crack the case, but that’s not really true – as usual I doubt the copy editors actually read the book. Instead, an old acquaintance named Ritalin who is still on the force (presumably he too later quit, to come up with a drug named after himself for hyperactive children) comes to Larsen to get an outsider’s view on the case…in other words, Larsen is strictly off the books, with no official involvement with the case. 

That is, until the sexy widow of the first victim comes to him and hires him, showing off her lush legs and basically telling him she wants to do him right there in his dingy office. Clearly Jonathan Black is catering to the private eye trope – the widow herself claiming as much – but our boy Simon fends off her advances, grudgingly takes her job, and gives his dog a walk. Hmmmm…. 

Black follows the formula of the standard mystery novel by given frequent chapters over to one-off characters who are about to become victims of the murderer. As mentioned Black’s distaste for these people is so palpable that the reader ends up siding with the killer; or then maybe Black is going for a dark comedy approach, which seems to be the case. It just gets old for 250-some pages of small, dense print. 

We have the guy who has become a devoted runner despite his wife’s distaste for the whole thing (ie the widow who later throws herself at Simon Larsen), the movie queen who jogs to keep her spectacular body in shape (truly a dark comedy scene, as she worries about a roll of fat beneath her chin – which is exactly what the killer’s attack dog latches onto when it mauls her to death), the young woman who signs up for the NYC race and who has the misfortune of being paired with…the killer himself, and so on. 

There are many other victims besides, and to his credit Black varies up the kills. The aforementioned dog attack is one avenue…the killer gets into the whole killing business by “accidentally” running a guy over while he’s jogging, then wondering if he did it on purpose, then realizing he enjoyed it. This is another of those novels where we know who the killer is from the start – a disaffected businessman who runs over the first victim on a whim, then realizes he wants to kill more of those goddamn joggers – but we are never given his name. He’s just never mentioned by name in his infrequent chapters. 

The mystery is more concerned with Simon Larsen figuring out who the killer is…that is, after pages and pages have been focused on Simon picking up jogging, at the behest of sexy young Katie – the horny married girl. As I say, Black’s distaste for his New York personalities is palpable; they’re all paper-thin, focused on the latest trendy thing; Katie wants to have an affair because she writes about them for her women’s magazine, and she’s always wanted to try one for herself, but she keeps striking out. 

The cops too are pugnacious, stupid, more prone to petty backstabbing than solving the case…and meanwhile the killer wracks up some impressive kills, often focusing on the various marathons that run through the city. And oh man. Tons and tons of narrative is given over to the discussion of these marathons, from organizing them to planning their routes…just so, so many characters involved in the jogging world, talking about jogging, thinking about jogging….just on and on and on. 

It’s one of those books where Simon owns a gun that he never carries, and besides he informs Katie he’s a “lousy shot.” So forget about action. Dead Run really is a mystery novel, one with a darkly droll sense of humor, given a “trendy jogging” overlay. 

So then a lot of the narrative is focused on those one-off characters, how they got into jogging, why they jog, going out for a jog…and getting killed by the murderer while jogging. There’s a very slow buildup as the cops and the people of New York slowly come to grasp that there is a “jogging killer” afoot (lame pun alert), and eventually the novel morphs into a procedural where Simon and the cops try to figure out who he is and stop him before he kills again…and meanwhile all these big marathons are being planned. 

It was curious reading Dead Run after the Boston Marathon bombing. The killer never achieves anything so drastic – once again fiction pales in comparison the horrors of reality, especially when radical Muslim terrorists are involved – but Black does manage to convey a sense of horror as the runners go about their race, oblivious that a killer is among them. That said, even here the victims are treated with tongue firmly in cheek, like the guy who finally succumbs to taking a drink from the water stand as he staggers by it, thirsty from running…and ends up drinking water that has been fatally spiked by the killer. 

Jonathan Black as expected centers everything around jogging in the finale: the big NYC marathon, Simon running it with Katie, on the lookout for the killer. At least his gun makes an appearance, but the finale is pretty anticlimactic (spoiler alert: Simon shoots the killer, the killer dies, that’s it). Oh and at the end Black has Katie casually reveal she’s filed for a divorce and now Simon had better give her some good lovin’! 

Overall Dead Run was fun for a peek at a lost Manhattan – like a lot of novels of its day, it manages to bring to life that lost era of the city, with the caveat that Black’s characters are too highfalutin to hang out in the seedier areas of New York – but overall the droll narrative tone lets the project down. Not to mention the hero who somehow manages to fend off the advances of two sexy women…hmmm….

Lone Star And The Badlands War (Lone Star #16)

Lone Star and the Badlands War, by Wesley Ellis

November, 1983  Jove Books

It’s been forever since I read a Western; I’ve never been a fan of the genre, though there was a brief time in middle school when I read a few volumes of Lone Star, The Gunsmith, and Longarm; yes, even then I gravitated toward the sleazier representatives of the genre. In fact I have a vivid memory of sitting outside during recess one day in middle school, my back against a brick wall, reading a volume of The Gunsmith that was about hunting Bigfoot while my classmates were playing basketball or whatever; this was sometime in the mid-late ‘80s, probably when I was 12 or 13, and I remember the class bully came by to make fun of me for reading while everyone else was playing sports. I should’ve just showed him the dirty parts in the book. And I also recall he wasn’t even really making fun of me, more like just shaking his head that someone would read instead of playing sports...that said, I also recall the school bully actually never messed with me and generally left me alone.* 

At that time Lone Star and other Western paperbacks were ubiquitous, or at least they were in West Virginia in the 1980s. My dad was a big Western reader, but I don’t think he read any of the “adult Westerns.” I am sure I found my Westerns at the local library – the Fort Ashby Public Library (still there, it appears, the same little building and everything!) – where they were on a spinner rack beside the men’s adventure novels. In fact I bet I grabbed up the Westerns precisely because they were beside the men’s adventure novels. 

Well anyway, I know I read a Lone Star or two at the time, probably because I figured they were like a Western take on The Destroyer, in that they paired a westerner and an Asian. Only in the case of Lone Star there’s no parody or satirical elements, and the westerner is a hot-blooded, hot-bodied redhead named Jessica Starbuck and the Asian is a slender half-Japanese samurai named Ki. And I also bet it was Ki that drew me to the series; this was the mid-to-late ‘80s, when ninja mania was at its peak, and I probably figured the karate-fighting dude on the Lone Star covers was like a ninja or something. In fact I recall thinking he looked like the GI Joe character Quick-Kick. 

The series ran for a long time. I was shocked to recently see how long Lone Star and Longarm actually ran. In the case of the latter it went on for decades and decades. Lone Star ended sooner, and James Reasoner wrote the last volume of the series; it was the only one he wrote. 

Speaking of James, I reached out to him to see if he knew who might’ve written this volume of the series, which was one of three I found recently at a used bookstore – and, contrary to the ubiquitousness of the 1980s, it would seem that Lone Star is not as easy to come across these days. I went to three different Half Price Books in the DFW area a few months ago, and only one of them had any Lone Star books; I bought all three books they had, and this is the earliest of them. 

Per James, The Badlands War might have been written by Jeff Wallmann, but there’s no verification available. Also per James, Wallmann wrote the majority of the Lone Star books, but there were some other series authors that I’m unfamiliar with, like Neal Barrett Jr. and Will C. Knott. 

Whoever served as “Wesley Ellis” for this one, his (or her!) writing is very polished, to the point it is a little sedate. This is very much a long-simmer yarn, and even the expected sex scenes are few and far between…but when they do get started, they go on for quite a while. In this regard the book reminded me of The Baroness; very “upscale” otherwise, but down and dirty and graphic in the sexual material. 

Personally, I love the idea that the Wild West was made up of randy women with the bodies of Victoria’s Secret models, and such is the case of Jessica “Jessie” Starbuck, she of the “flaming red tresses” and big breasts. She’s an interesting character for sure; scion of the Lone Star estate after the murder of her father (by recurring series villains “the cartel”), and thus fabulously wealthy, but also fabuously beautiful and a deadly shot with any weapon. She’s kind of modern in the regard that she’s a “woman with agency” per the latest trendy term, yet at the same time she is not an insufferable ball-buster like a similar female character of today would be; Jessie likes her men, and she likes to give ‘em a good time. 

Humorously, there’s a part early in The Badlands War where Jessie wonders to herself if she’ll ever get married. Given that the series went on for 150-some volumes and she had at least one man per volume, I think it’s safe to say Jessie might never have gotten married, but who knows. Even in this one she basically falls in love with a Clint Eastwood-esque “gunslinger” (who also falls in love with Jessie), but the guy is brushed off into the narratorial carpet at novel’s end. Jessie needs to ride on to the next volume – and her next male conquest. One wonders if she had female conquests as well, but I doubt Lone Star went that direction…even The Baroness didn’t. (Though Dark Angel did!!) 

Ki is also a character who seems to have stepped out of the 20th Century: a half-Japanese karate master who prefers bladed weaponry. If the series had been created a little later he doubtless would’ve been a ninja, and I’m betting there had to have been a volume of Lone Star that tapped into the ‘80s ninja craze. Ki gets along fine in this one; I expected there would be a lot of parts where slackjawed yokels would call him racial slurs, but there’s none of that in this volume…for most the part. 

It’s made clear that Jessie and Ki are not and have never been an item; theirs is a platonic relationship, actually more of a sibling one. We’re told in brief flashback that Jessie was young when Ki first started working for her father, so Ki is clearly older than her, but other than that we aren’t given much to go on. Then again, this is volume 16 of the series, so doubtless stuff like that has already been explained. 

There’s also the question of the year; given the appearance of a 20-something Theodore Roosevelt, The Badlands War must take place in the 1880s. And also Jessie and Ki do a helluva lot of traveling for the era; in this one they’ve come all the way up to the Dakota territory by train and by horseback, to check in on a ranch owned by the Starbuck enterprise that is in danger of being taken over by a sadistic Frenchman named Beaumont. 

Truth be told this is rather a slow-moving yarn, with little in the way of action. It operates on more of a long-simmer vibe, with Jessie slowly figuring out if Beaumont really is a bad guy who has his sights set on the Starbuck ranch here in the Dakotas while Ki meanwhile gets friendly with a Mexican bar whore named Olivia and has infrequent run-ins with Beaumont’s chief gunslinger, Korman. 

There’s also young Teddy Roosevelt, a minor presence in the novel; more focus is placed on Hawthorne, Roosevelt’s taciturn guide in the Dakotas, a Clint Eastwood-style cowboy who serves as Jessica’s only conquest in the novel. I’m wondering if Jessica only ever gets one bang per book, or if the ghostwriters and edtors ever got risque and let her have more than one guy. As for Ki, he too only scores with Olivia. 

This brings me to the subject of the sexual material, always one of the key features of an Adult Western. I was surprised to discover that Lone Star was also like The Baroness in that the sex scenes go on for a few pages instead of just a few paragraphs. No detail is spared and the author clearly has his tongue in cheek with the many memorable anatomical metaphors. 

Action as mentioned is sparse; The Badlands War is more of a suspense story, with it slowly becoming apparent that Beaumont is indeed a villain and has been killing people to take over their ranches. He sends Korman out to murder several people during the course of the book, from a newsman to a family that works at the Starbuck ranch. But it isn’t until the end of the novel that he’s given his comeuppance. 

The climax sees Jessica, Ki, Hawthorne, and some locals staging an ambush on Beaumont’s chatteau; I was surprised (SPOILER ALERT) that Ki took out Korman while Jessica meanwhile ensured Beaumont was arrested…we’re told she’s good with a gun, but she only shoots down a random thug during the climax. 

Ki features in more of the action scenes, like for example an alleyway fight with Olivia’s brother where Ki shows off his “samurai” moves. Also Ki’s sex scenes are written from an “Oriental” perspective, with Ki all concerned with pleasuring his lady and going down on Olivia, essentially blowing the young woman’s mind, as she has never even heard of such things. 

All told I enjoyed Lone Star and the Badlands War, but I’d wager there are certainly better volumes in the series. As mentioned I did pick up a few more, so will be reading them anon.

*After a bit of research I’m fairly certain the Western paperback I was reading was The Gunsmith #21: Sasquatch Hunt, published by Ace Books in 1984 – meaning it was another I got from the library spinner rack.