Narc #8: Death Song

Narc #8: Death Song, by Robert Hawkes
July, 1975  Signet Books

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been on a classic rock kick lately, thus this penultimate volume of Narc seemed to be just what I was looking for – both the front and back cover blurbs mention “hard rock” and imply that D-3 narcotics agent John Bolt is about to get involved in the rock music scene. Only…that isn’t so much what happens, and the novel is of a piece with the previous seven volumes, with the rock stuff barely explored.

As usual there’s no pickup from the previous volume (or any other volume, for that matter), and once again the story occurs in the insane heat of a New York summer. At this point I’m starting to think Bolt is stuck in some hellish purgatory, sort of like Bucher; an endless continuum of humidity, crime, and illegal drugs. About the only recurring character other than Bolt’s erstwhile partners Kramer (the black one) and Masetta (the Italian one) is Bolt’s custom-made shotgun, which is given a curious re-introduction this time, with the reminder that it has a three-foot barrel and was made for Bolt by an old ex-Nazi who still flies his swastika flag high.

With each volume Marc Olden has gotten closer and closer to the style Barry Malzberg seeems to have employed in the Lone Wolf series (which Marty McKee hooked me up with the other year but I’ve yet to read, but I intend to!); a barebones plot stretched thin and padded out with stream-of-conscious asides from the many various characters. It’s getting real outrageous, too, with almost the whole of Death Song comprised of hopscotching POV narration by various characters, to the point that it somehow achieves an almost psychedelic vibe – or at the very least until the reader is just plain confused by the incessant juggling of perspectives from one paragraph to the next. The fact that there’s very little forward momentum so far as the plot itself goes doesn’t help.

But Marc Olden always has a good opening sequence, and this volume’s no exception. We meet Bolt as he’s in Los Angeles, waiting on a building rooftop for an LAPD helicopter to pick up a Mafia prisoner named DiPalma who promises to blow the lid off the mob’s involvement in the rock music business. But when the copter shows up it’s a fake, and the dude on it starts hammering Bolt and his fellow D-3 agents with a grenade launcher. All as so faithfully depicted on the cover, though for some reason the artist has given Bolt blond hair this time. I wonder if this is due to a misreading of Olden’s text, as the guy on the LAPD helicopter with the grenade launcher is often described as “the blond cop,” so it’s possible the cover artist – or whoever gave him his marching orders – maybe gave the text a lazy read and assumed “the blond cop” was the hero of the piece. Hard to believe given that the same artist did the previous covers (I think), where Bolt was given brown hair, so I digress.

Anyway Bolt’s like the lone survivor, blasting back with his shotgun and taking out the grenade launcher guy. And wouldja believe – one of the killed D-3 agents was like Bolt’s best friend ever!! Of course we’ve never heard of him – the only recurring D-3 guys we meet are Kramer and Masetta – but that’s beside the point. Bolt’s desire for revenge gives Olden opportunity for more stream-of-conscious musings from Bolt’s perspective. That is, when Bolt’s even in the book. Once again he comes off like a supporting charater in his own series.

Instead, and again as per previous entries, the brunt of the narrative is devoted to a host of characters: Tom Thumb, the good-looking Mafia enforcer who really enjoys his work; Candyman, drug peddler to the rock elite who is described as like a Jewish Superfly; Richie Roses, Tom Thumb’s obese capo; Curt Crane, boss of mob-run Lina Records; Dutterman, former CIA agent, current Lina Records chief of security; and finally Richard Story, a black drug flunky who snitches on Lina’s illegal activities for Bolt. The rock characters are only peripheral, from a petulant glam rocker whom Candyman entertains with coke and a pair of willing gals, to a wanna-be Janis Joplin named Leslie Sugar who finds out the harsh side of the music biz quite quickly. There’s also a female act called “Silver” (Olden has this weird habit of always putting his band names in quotation marks) who are all sexy black women with silver wigs and lipstick and etc, curiously similar to the character Synne in Olden’s much superior Black Samurai #6, published just a few months before this one.

After the opening action scene things settle down to the borderline padding we know from the series…Bolt goes back to New York, often muses on the miserable heat, and tries to figure out how to bring down Richie Roses. As if worried the rock material isn’t enough to flesh out a full novel, Olden also introduces the subplot that Roses’s mob family recently heisted a million dollars worth of amphetimines and has it stashed somewhere. Really though the entire novel’s more about drugs and drugdealing than the “hard rock” promised on the cover, and other than a peek in a recording studio and a concert or two (used as the setting for action scenes), there’s really not much of it at all. Hell, Bolt doesn’t even bang a rock babe, as one might expect – Bolt’s sole conquest this volume is Chris Cotten, blonde PR whiz for Lina.

Halfway through the book I wondered why I was even paying attention…I’d read enough Marc Olden now to know what to expect. The villains would take the limelight, Bolt would get lost in the shuffle, there’d be a lot of talking and worrying and then the harried action scenes would be over before you knew it, and by novel’s end none of the villains would have paid for any of their ill deeds. And what’s more, all of them would likely have escaped. In particular I saw this coming with Dutterman, who per vague backstory ran afoul of Bolt a few years before, and our hero shot Dutterman in the hand and ear(!?), leaving Dutterman disfigured and permanently pissed at Bolt, vowing to kill him one day.

Strangely though, mob sadist Tom Thumb is given more focus in the narrative, coming off like the main villain of the piece. But then this is also typical of Olden; he busies up his Narc books with so many damn villains that I swear sometimes he himself confuses them. Dutterman is introduced as this bogeyman from Bolt’s past – in fact, sort of like old enemy The Apache in #2: Death Of A Courier (which I think is still my favorite volume in the series) – but he comes off more as a weakling, sort of terrified of Bolt and looking to Tom Thumb for all the heavy lifting. Candyman actually has more run-ins with Bolt than anyone, like an action scene that takes place during a Silver concert – Bolt chases Candyman, and the drug pimp throws his platform shoes at Bolt, almost knocking him out!

Only occasionally does the novel come off like the “VH1 Behind The Music From Hell” story we want; Lina prez Curt Crane (whose recently-purchased “Indian painting” is titled Death Song) has a few “look hard in the mirror and wonder what the hell I’ve gotten into” moments, and poor waif Leslie Sugar finds out the hard way that you shouldn’t consort with dudes who are friends with a snitch – the image on the cover of the blonde being held in an armlock while the guy on the floor is being forcefed amphetimines comes from this scene. Olden really toys with us on this one, as he writes it with such skill that you keep expecting John Bolt to crash in and save the day.

Instead, Bolt’s busy scoring with plucky PR babe Chris Cotten, though as ever Olden doesn’t get too explicit. Bolt hits it and quits it, though, called away when he discovers that Tom Thumb and crew are closing in on Robert Story. This leads to another of Olden’s taut action scenes, each of which are usually barebones so far as the genre goes (usually just Bolt against one or two people, with lots of ducking and hiding). That being said, someone tries to drop steel beams on our favorite narc in this one. But the climax goes back to the barebones style, taking place in a factory in Jersey where Bolt uses a decoy to lure out Tom Thumb, Dutterman, and a few other gun-toting cronies. Even here the vibe is more The French Connection than The Executioner.

And I’m happy to report that for once Marc Olden delivers a genuine, bona fida conclusion – by the end of Death Song all the villains are either dead, arrested, or on their way to prison. I couldn’t believe it! Not that this cheers Bolt up much; he’s probably one of the most dour, pessimistic heroes in the genre. Anyway, despite what comes off like a tepid review, Olden’s writing is as ever skilled, but it’s increasingly evident he was getting burned out by deadline pressure; too much of Death Song is made up of page-filler, and it lacks the spark of the earliest installments.

The Marksman #16: This Animal Must Die

The Marksman #16: This Animal Must Die, by Frank Scarpetta
March, 1975  Belmont-Tower Books

I definitely have to agree with Lynn Munroe that this sixteenth installment of The Marksman is courtesy George Harmon Smith, as it’s very much in the vein of another Smith novel: Savage Slaughter, which thanks to some tinkering from series editor Peter McCurtin became an installment of The Sharpshooter (apparently without Smith’s knowledge!). In fact, I’d go further and say that This Animal Must Die was written as a sequel to Savage Slaugher – which happened to be published the month before.

To recap, that Sharpshooter yarn, which clearly started life as a Marksman yarn, featured “Johnny Rock” doing a job for the CIA. Well, This Animal Must Die continues the trend, with Philip Magellan arriving in Naples when we meet him, wondering where his CIA backup is – and also he’s here thanks to a “63-page document” the President(!!) has given him. We’re never told what exactly this document says, but boy we’re often reminded that it’s sixty-three pages long. Why Smith came up with such an exact number is just yet another baffling mystery in the Marksman/Sharpshooter universe. But anyway the President himself has tasked number one wanted criminal Philip Magellan with taking out a Mafia boss in Italy.

It’s cool to read this one because you get George Harmon Smith’s unfiltered manuscript, with stuff that was apparently cut out of Savage Slaughter to make it fit into the Sharpshooter mythos. For one, we get the Spider-esque gimmick of Magellan often referred to as “The Marksman” in the narrative, ie in italics, which of course brings the flair of an oldschool pulp. But Smith tries to temper Magellan a bit; he keeps the psychotic rough edges of the Russell Smith installments – and Lynn Munroe is likely again correct in his hunch that Harmon Smith edited many of Russell Smith’s manuscripts – but he often has Magellan psyching himself up to do them. Like, even when he has to drug someone and stash ‘em in the trunk of a car, this version of Magellan “hates” it, whereas the Russell Smith version had all the emotional content of a Terminator.

After an aborted mob hit in which Magellan makes quick, gory work of his enemies with a Browning pistol (his choice gun this time around), our hero is whisked away by a hotstuff blonde. Her name is Toni and she’s very mysterious but Magellan’s certain she works for the CIA. In fact she works for an Italian-American who wears a mask, operates out of a cathouse, and tells Magellan that he was extradited from the United States years ago but wants to come back. He figures if he can help on this hit of Frank DiCarlo – ie the Mafia chieftan the President wants dead – then he might get passage back to the States. Interestingly, Magellan has made his way here hidden in a coffin as it’s hauled in a hearse through the countryside – perhaps some sort of sub-“literary” trick per Harmon Smith, certainly the most literary of all the Marksman authors. Don’t believe me?

At the roadside, peasants crossed themselves dubiously as the hearse rattled past. The quick dabs of their gnarled fingers across chests and foreheads were more in the nature of signs warding off ill luck than symbolic affirmations of the Christian faith. 

At the end of the valley the hearse began to climb as the road, curving upward in great loops, left the fields and orchards, the vineyards and little towns that lay scattered like toys on the valley floor to bask away the last of their long, hot, breathless Italian afternoon under the westering sun.

That’s right, folks, that’s taken from a Marksman novel.

But literary flourishes aren’t all Smith brings to the table – he brings a heaping helping of sleaze too. This Animal Must Die is the most explicit volume yet in the series, filled to the brim with that lurid mid-‘70s vibe I love so much. Now, Magellan as we know isn’t the most “sensuous” of men’s adventure protagonists, and in most volumes is a strictly business before pleasure type of guy. But the mysterious masked guy offering to help him (the mask being yet another pulpy touch) as mentioned runs out of a cathouse, the best damn cathouse in Naples – indeed all of Italy – and so he sets Magellan up with a steady stream of free tail.

In fact Smith doesn’t just bring us sex – he makes it sleazy and wildly pre-PC as hell; Magellan’s first “gift” is a black hooker who introduces herself, “Black can be beautiful. Do you like to fuck?” To which Magellan responds, “I don’t care to fuck you!” One of the stranger statements you’ll ever hear a men’s adventure protagonist utter. It gets even weirder, and wilder, with it turning into a hate-fuck thing, the hooker first throwing blood on Magellan so he has to take off his clothes(?!), then playing on Magellan being a “Southern Man” (ie of the Neil Young song type). And Magellan plays it right up for her, doling out the dreaded N-word a few times and calling her “slave” before finally screwing her good and proper. It occurs to me that the whole bit could almost be seen as a spoof of the torrid Plantation Lust subgenre that was big at the time – given that Smith was an editor and clearly had some writing chops, I wouldn’t be surprised. Either way, it’s some crazy shit.

Later we’re informed off-hand that the masked man sends Magellan a new woman every night, though we don’t have another “in-depth” sequence until the man takes Magellan up on his (apparently) joking concept that he “wants virgins.” That night Magellan is gifted with a sixteen year old beauty named China Doll who is a veteran whore, and likely this is Smith again catering to the prurient demands of the sleaze reader of the day. First Plantation Lust, now Jailbait Lust. Meanwhile Magellan keeps lusting over Toni, the blonde who rescued him in Naples. Smith keeps this sex scene off-page, only letting us know at the end of the novel it’s a sure thing; otherwise Magellan’s main fling here is the jet-setting wife of none other than DiCarlo, ie the man Magellan has been brought here to kill.

That’s just the sleaze angle; Smith also introduces this bizarro subplot that could come straight out of the other Smith who worked on the series – namely, Russell Smith, whose Magellan (and Sharpshooter) manuscripts were touched by a special kind of madness. The masked man puts Magellan up in the famous “Magellan Castle,” run by batty old women and a loony uncle who is locked in his chamber and howls at the moon every night. This ridiculous cover has Magellan posing as a wealthy Sicilian or somesuch who has come back to take over the “family castle.” Complete with Magellan dressing like a wealthy Italian gadabout and conducting tours of the crumbling castle(!). All this is wacky to say the least and easily could’ve been cut from the novel, but Smith at least tries to pass it off as Magellan going to all this trouble so as to find – and abduct – gorgeous Crocifissa, the never-seen wife of DiCarlo.

This is another callback to the Russell Smith books, as Magellan hoodwinks her into going up to his private chamber and then locks her in there – even though he “hates” doing stuff like this. Sure he does. He’s banging her that very night, but don’t worry, the lady’s hot for him too – we’re told she’s a passionate-blooded Itallian babe and she’s constantly compared to Sophia Loren, only she’s hotter and has a nicer rack. Smith builds up a relationship between the two, with Crocifissa knowing Magellan wants to kill her husband, but Magellan’s so good-looking and so great in the sack, what can she do? Magellan for his part threatens DiCarlo with Crocifissa’s torture and death, vowing he’ll chop off bodyparts and kill her if the mob boss doesn’t give up, and it’s clear that our hero will actually do it if necessary.

There’s a lot of stuff here that brings to mind previous Marksman and Sharpshooter books – like a hit on the laundry owned by Chinese agent Wing Quong. Magellan tortures him before killing him in a scene very similar to one in Smith’s previous Savage Slaughter. The “action climax” is along the lines of the ones Russell Smith and McCurtin would give us – no real dramatic resolution, just Magellan blowing people up from afar. Gore is given a slight more prominence than in other volumes, particularly when it comes to mentioning the “fecal matter” that blows out of gutshots. So far as the sleaze goes, there’s also the usage of the curious term “v-tuft,” ie female pubic hair, and the only other place I can recall encountering this term was in The Marksman #6 – which could be an indication that George Harmon Smith edited some of Peter McCurtin’s manuscripts as well.  Or maybe just that Smith read that McCurtin installment and latched onto the term, who knows.

Otherwise Smith’s writing is very good, with the caveat that he relies too often on adverbs and his characters are prone to exposition. There are some parts where Magellan and Toni exchange “philosophical” quips that are particularly aggravating. Also he lacks consistency in character names in the narrative, which is one of my pet peeves – our hero goes from “Phil” to “Magellan” to “The Marksman” all on the same page, which is pretty sloppy. I mean the characters can call him a host of names, but the narrative voice should stick to just one. Or at least that’s what I think.

But that’s just minor stuff; This Animal Must Die actually comes off like a masterpiece when compared to the other books in the series, most of which seem like speed and booze-fueled first drafts – most likely because that’s what they were.

The Smuggler #7: Welcome To Oblivion

The Smuggler #7: Welcome To Oblivion, by Paul Petersen
June, 1975  Pocket Books

Grab your hankies, everyone – The Smuggler comes to an end with this volume. Seriously though, it’s another tedious trawl of a read, 200+ pages of characters sitting around and talking – and usually the sole topic of their conversation is hero Eric “The Smuggler” Saveman, that perfect paragon of human perfection who is perfect in every way.

It’s four months after the previous volume, the date given as May, 1972. Eric is on trial, indicted by none other than the Supreme Court for his “treasonous” actions in the climax of the last book. As we’ll recall, Eric expressly went against the President’s orders so as to stave off a war with China or something, and now his ass is in trouble. It appears that Petersen set his series in the recent past (the first volume was set in 1969) because he wanted to bash Nixon a little more – this volume brings up a subplot that the government is corrupt and at novel’s end Eric wonders who he is even working for. 

The end result is that the Supreme Court puts Eric on suspension – for at least 4 and a half years, or until the ’76 election. Now we delve into the tedious, ultra slow-moving section of the book where Eric says goodbye to all his friends, like blue-eyed black guy Joshua Kane and his wife Belinda, and Eric’s dad, and all these other characters, because Eric is no longer a ZED agent and can’t associate with any of them because they are top-secret people living top-secret lives. Even Eric’s home in Connecticut, the pretentiously-named paradise that is Cascade, is ransacked by ZED staffers; the bastards even take his guns, though Eric still has a couple of his own. Not that he uses any of them. 

Indeed, action is pretty damn sparse in Welcome To Oblivion. And the title, by the way, is couresy an offhand comment Eric makes when he’s canned; “Welcome to oblivion,” he mutters to himself, in what will prove to be an incredibly lame bit of foreshadowing. Because this installment’s villain turns out to be named “Dr. Oblivion,” folks! But anyway Eric goes around saying so long to everyone, then decides to head out of town…and on the way he does what any other recently-fired secret agent would do. He sees a softball game in progress as he’s driving along the road and he decides to join in(!).

On this incredibly hamfisted “plot development” the entire novel hinges; Eric ends up with a hot tomboy on one of the teams. Her name is “Alysson O.” and she talks Eric into heading to Manhattan with her in her mobile home(!). While Eric’s driving she goes in the back to change and comes out with long blonde hair and a skintight dress that shows off her “full breasts.” She relates that her dad wanted a boy and raised her to act like one or whatever, so she indulges in the occasional baseball game and shit like that. It’s all just so ridiculous as to be awe-inspiring; Eric was just fired by the Supreme Court a day or two ago.

As if that weren’t enough, Alysson reveals that she’s a fan of Eric’s – she even has, believe it or not, scrapbooks devoted to his quarterback days at Stanford years ago. And that’s scrapbooks friends, ie in the plural! Man, The Smuggler is just an ego-trip of the highest order…as we’ll recall, Eric Saveman is a demigod among mortals, better looking, better muscled, better skilled than anyone, and smarter to boot. And when he’s not on the page, the other characters sit around and talk about him. Or think about him. Eric Saveman is the sole human being of any importance in the world of The Smuggler, with entire government conspiracies centered around him and a master criminal who has even devoted six years of planning to draft him.

And look at that…judging from the cover, Eric Saveman sort of looks a little like…why, he looks a lot like Paul Petersen! Wait a minute, it is Paul Petersen!

Petersen attempts to be going for more of an ensemble piece this time, with other ZED entities, in particular Joshua and Belinda, getting their own subplots…and yet all they do is talk about Eric! Or think about him! The fact that Alysson O. actually kept several scrapbooks devoted to Eric Saveman’s glory years as a friggin’ college quarterback is actually just one example of many such Eric-worshipping moments throughout the book. But at the very least Alysson turns out to be a great ultra-‘70s sort of babe, right up there with the New Age occult babe of  volume #3.

For one, her Manhattan pad is an ultramod dream – it’s got “platforms” that are like rooms on elevators, and with the push of a button you can bring different “rooms” down to you. This is explained at length – of course, Eric actually knows the guy who designed the place, ‘cause Eric Saveman knows everyone and everything – but I did dig the “music room,” which is stuffed with LPs. It’s suddenly an analog geek’s delight as Petersen starts namedropping vintage stereo gear – Alysson has MacIntosh equipment, a Garrard turntable, and a Shure cartridge. Eric’s such a superman he even fixes the “contact strips” of the faulty Shure in a matter of seconds so the music can blast.

And what music do they play? Welcome To Oblivion features a lot of period details, which is cool if you’re into stuff like that, as I am, so we get various mentions of rock or jazz groups of the day; Eric himself plays some Hubert Laws before leaving Cascade, and here at Allyson’s he tells her he “doesn’t understand” Miles Davis or John Coltrane, so Alysson decides on some more soothing jazz as the two of them get down to the dirty business of finally screwing – but Petersen, for once, cuts away from the shenanigans! Yet more evidence that the depraved, graphic second volume was courtesy another author…though maybe that one, which as I recall was written in a more rough-hewn style, was the work of Petersen, and all the other volumes, which are a bit more polished but not nearly as depraved, are courtesy the mysterious co-writer David Oliphant, who is only credited in small print on the copyright page. 

Not that Petersen (or Oliphant) doesn’t give us a little sleaze here and there. We come back to the Eric-Alysson thing mid-boink, as if the author(s) realized we needed a little something to keep us from falling totally into a stupor. I mean The Smuggler isn’t as boring as Dakota, but it’s definitely up there (or down there, I guess), and it doesn’t help that this final volume is mostly made up of talking, talking, talking. And usually all the talk’s about the same topic – you guessed it, Eric Saveman. But there are more topical ‘70s flourishes about, like when some of Alysson’s jet-setter friends come over (one of the lovelies, wouldn’t you believe it, immediately hits on Eric!!) for a bona fide cocaine party, and Eric after a little deliberation partakes in the coke bowl as it’s passed around. This makes Eric the second of two men’s adventure protagonists I know of who snorts cocaine, the other being Johnny Rock in Len Levinson’s The Sharpshooter #7.

Things finally pick up when Eric meets Alysson’s dad, Dr. Oblivion. He’s a spare guy with a bald head and a nondescript demeanor and no one seems too taken aback that his name’s friggin’ Dr. Oblivion. They’re jumped by some thugs outside a Manhattan restaurant and Eric of course makes short work of them, this being the second action scene in the book, about a hundred pages in. But it’s all a ruse, the thugs secretly in the employ of Oblivion, and the good doctor drugs Eric’s drink and the Smuggler’s out for the account. Doctor and daughter casually discuss everyone’s favorite topic right over his unconscious form – Dr. Oblivion has planned this for six years at least, and his goal is to turn Eric.

And yes, Eric met Alysson because he decided join a softball game on the spur of the moment…well, this is vaguely and quickly explained away as like Providence or something, at least on Alysson and the Doctor’s part. Eric comes to in Montana, in the doctor’s lair, where he’s to be brought into the man’s employ…to do something. At this point Petersen seems to be writing a James Bond script in the manner of the Roger Moore years; Dr. Oblivion has this high-tech SCUDA thing, self-contained underwater drilling apparatus, which he plans to cause some global havoc with. Oh, and he’s got a forest of coca plants, ie millions of dollars of cocaine, so Eric knows the dude’s loaded, yet he’s sure someone else is footing the bill. Eventually Eric will learn that Dr. O even bought out a portion of the US government to frame Eric, and also many of them are conspiring with him in his SCUDA plot. 

The finale sees Eric almost too quickly escaping, and calling in some of the students from the nearby Deep Security School, where Eric himself was a student in the second volume. At one point they get caught on SCUDA, where Alysson joins the cause – mostly because her dad decides to make her a casualty of war, to die from lack of air in the sealed-off, inescapable SCUDA! “Perhaps if you’d been a son,” he regretfully tells her over the ship loudspeaker. That’s cold, man! And while the other characters are freaking out because there’s no way to escape the SCUDA, guess who keeps a level head and comes up with a way to get out??

From here we have an almost off-hand climax in Venezuela, to which Dr. Oblivion has absconded. Whereas the previous volumes at least had some semblance of climactic fireworks, this one continues on the blasé vibe, with Eric and team surprising Dr. O and Eric handing the doctor a pistol to finish himself off. As mentioned the novel ends with Eric back at ZED, but wondering if it’s all worth it – the novel (and series) ends on a Watergate joke, which would imply that the “something treasonous is going on” subplot that runs throughout is intended as a reference to the soon-to-happen (in 1972, that is) Watergate fiasco.

I wonder if Petersen and Oliphant had this ending in mind all along. We know from publicity reports that Petersen got a contract to write eight books in the series – my hunch is still that the unpublished eighth volume was actually something between volumes two and three, as discussed in my review of the third volume. In other words I don’t think the eighth volume was one written after Welcome To Oblivion, as the series definitely seems to conclude here, and gives some indication at least why Petersen set the series in the recent past – perhaps he was leading up to Eric getting caught up in the corruption of the Nixon administration?

Who knows. The important thing is it’s all finally over.

The Man From Planet X #2: Tiger By The Tail

The Man From Planet X #2: Tiger By The Tail, by Hunter Adams
June, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Whereas the first volume of The Man From Planet X at least made the pretense of being a men’s adventure sort of spy-and-sex thing, this second volume drops all such pretenses and goes straight for a comedy approach. James D. Lawrence, once again serving as “Hunter Adams,” appears to already be bored with the concept “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel has handed him – a red-skinned alien with a monstrous-sized member who has come down here to Earth to “study Earthlings,” which is shorthand for banging tons of babes. All in the name of science, of course.

Branded a “New Erotic Adventure Series” by Pinnacle, Tiger By The Tail is more akin to the goofy sleaze novels that were so common of the era, a light-hearted sexual romp that encompases both purple prose and straight-up explicit material. But even though there’s the occasional fight or chase, none of it is treated seriously and hero Peter Lance, aka Pritan Lansol of the planet Tharb, is so superheroic there’s never any question of him getting killed or even injured. I mean the dude’s super strong, hyper fast, can do all sorts of bizarre mindblowing stuff in the sack, plus he can even talk telepathically to animals. Not only that, but he’s as patient as a zen master and as polite as Mr. Rogers.

Well anyway it’s a few weeks after that previous book and ol’ Peter is heading out of New York in his station wagon(!) for another excursion into human relations, when his ESP senses detect nearby danger, right across the border in New Jersey. Turns out to be a sexy young housewife who is being threatened by a tiger on her own front yard. Peter first literally (and lamely) catches the “tiger by the tail” and tosses it, then telepathically communicates with it. The tiger is a female named Tanya, and Peter calls her off, but then some dudes with machine guns show up, gunning for the animal. Peter easily defeats them, disarming them and beating them up in the blink of an eye. Then he and the housewife repair upstairs for some casual ‘70s sex – Peter’s sexual magnetism is such that these Earthling babes immediately think of getting him bed as soon as they meet him. (I happen to have the exact opposite affect on Earthling babes.)

But Lawrence seems to have gotten sick of all the intermittent banging in the previous volume, so this time his focus is on weird gross-out stuff. We get our first indication of this when, after their quick screw, the housewife notes that Peter’s extra-long and thin member has an injury on it, Peter having been knicked there during the fight or somesuch, and insists that he clean off the wound. Anyway to cut to the chase, Peter’s dick gets stuck in the sink. It’s just one of those books, folks…then the lady’s husband shows up, and he is, naturally, a plumber, but Peter with his superhuman strength is able to pull the entire sink out of the wall as he beats a hasty retreat.

Tanya escaped from a zoo run by Velma Thorp, brunette babe with beehive hairdo who is running the place in the mysterious absence of her great white hunter father, Hugh, a former movie star. But upon his arrival at the zoo Peter is again attacked by men with machine guns, and after quickly knocking out these ones it occurs to him that perhaps they are tracking something hidden within the animal. Ultimately he will of course be proven correct; Velma reveals that her dad brought Tanya back from Russia a few months ago, and mentioned something special about her – it will develop that something has been surgically inserted in Tanya’s hide, a device which could trigger WWIII or somesuch.

For the most part this main plot – which just barely categorizes the novel as men’s adventure – is cast aside and more time is spent on the “jungle porn film” Peter is roped into filming by drunkard director Burk Fontana, who declares upon seeing Peter’s dick: “That fucking whang of his is a potential goldmine!” Burk you see has been hired by Velma in a desperate bid to track down her missing father, who has been gone for three months but who is known for random, unexplained disappearances…Velma’s muddled hope is that this film, to be shot on the zoo Hugh Thorp opened, will somehow capture the attention of her father, wherever he might be, and he’ll come back home. Upon seeing that awesome whang, though, Burk demands that the flick needs to be a porn.

Burk, who steals the novel, calls in a former sword-swallower turned porn starlet to feature in some test footage based around fairy tales in which Peter screws a bevy of gals, capping off with this sword-swallower managing to contain his entire girth in her mouth. But she turns out to be a commie spy who has something hidden up in a certain part of her anatomy, something which latches onto Peter’s dick while he’s enthusastically boffing her, to the extent that Peter’s dick swells up to crazy levels. Enter the CIA agent from the previous volume, who has been tracking this sword-swallowing spy, Fifi, and informs everyone that she’s known for this trick – cue more gross-out stuff as Fifi again has to blow Peter, but this time it’s to suck that poison out.

Along comes wealthy socialite Crystal Warrick, a blonde vixen who demands, “Take out your cock!” promptly upon meeting our hero. She’s seen the test footage, you see, and through some chicanery she’s managed to buy out the Thorp zoo so she can have a controlling interest in the jungle porn. She is now running the film, and declares that they’ll be filming in Africa, not on the zoo itself, and that further she will star in the film and Velma can co-star if she’d like – there is a simmering jealousy between the two, not that this stops them from shooting girl-on-girl scenes for the movie! But Crystal, despite coming on strong to Peter, always refrains from full-on sex with him; it later develops, in another of the novel’s many arbitrary subplots, that Crystal’s a virgin – and of course Peter takes care of that for her.

Lawrence hits all the bases, so to speak: promptly upon arrival in Nairobi Peter is being propositioned by a sexy native: “Peter’s first real contact with a black Earthling.” And boy is it a memorable first contact. Later on, Peter, realizing that Crystal is hiding things from him, decides that “A simple little rape might do the trick,” and proceeds to anal-rape her, after which a satisified Crystal declares, “Okay, I’ve taken you up the ass, I guess I may as well take you into my confidence.” There’s also a part where Burk and the film crew are lured into the jungle by a bunch of horny native gals and screw away with aplomb, not realizing it’s a trap orchestrated by the Black Death, a big guy in black robes with a leprousy-ravaged face.

Despite the amount of sex there’s nothing steamy about any of it…particularly given how Peter’s always thinking of the women as “Earthling females.” You almost sort of get the idea that Peter would be just as game to experiment with Earthling males. But the explicit material is less pronounced than last time – I mean it’s graphic and all, but many times Lawrence spends more time on the foreplay or naughty dialog, then leaves the actual “coupling” vague. This one’s also missing those cool ‘70s touches that were frequent last time, I mean who could forget Peter Lance dancing to Led Zeppelin on a quadraphonic hi-fi?

But it does go on and on, and it’s more of a lame comedy than anything; even when Peter is briefly captured by Chicoms it’s more goofy than thrilling. But Lawrence plods away, almost desperately padding the 200+ pages; there’s even an arbitrary bit where Peter gets amnesia – a subplot that lasts all of a few pages and has no bearing on anything. For those diehards who want to know “But what’s it all about?,” long story short: Hugh Thorp turns out to be an agent of top-secret CRACK, as is Crystal Warrick, and he was on a mission to capture some doomsday tech from the Reds, and hid the schematics or whatnot in that cannister which he implanted in Tanya.

All told, Tiger By The Tail was really stupid, displaying none of the cool funky sleaze Lawrence delivered for Engel in the far superior Dark Angel series. My assumption is The Man From Planet X failed to resonate with readers even in its own day, as the third and final volume didn’t appear until two years later.

Steel Lightning: Slash And Burn (Steel Lightning #3)

Steel Lightning: Slash And Burn, by Kevin Sherrill
January, 1992  Zebra Books

The never-titled men’s adventure series that I call “Steel Lightning” reaches its third and final volume, sporting basically the same cover as the previous volume (only with “Slash and Burn” lamely added beneath the title) and jumping over to the Zebra imprint, which at this point was the same house as previous imprint Pinnacle.

Like those earlier two books, Slash And Burn is just way too friggin’ long for the genre, coming in at 256 pages. And the helluva it is, most of it’s padding. For once again Kevin Sherrill keeps his main characters on the sideline for the duration, only occasionally livening things up with some action – but even then the action is a bit bloodless when compared to the previous volumes. A sort of blandness has settled on things, and there’s no mystery why there was never a fourth volume.

To make it worse, the opening of the book promises something a lot crazier than we actually get – we meet a teen girl as she’s tripping on Delight, the new drug that’s basically Ecstasy on steroids; pop a pill and you’re a living orgasm or something. Well this girl takes a bunch and prety soon she’s sucking and fucking away, right in the middle of a New York nightclub that’s blasting techno music (the book is very “early ‘90s”)…and then she goes into a massive seizure (one of those unfortunate Delight side-effects), a seizure so, uh, climactic that it makes her entire body seize up, so quickly and so savagely that she severs off the dicks of the guys who happen to be inside the various orifices of her body! And plus she’s dead, too, another of those unfortunate Delight side-effects.

Meanwhile hot brunette Barbara Cohen, former druggie-hooker-pornstar-legal assistant-rape victim(!), current “Street Machine” smurfette, is jogging through the hellzones of New York (it’s the pre-Guliani era, baby), hoping to lure out the latest group of reprobrates her brothers in the Street Machine urban combat unit can wipe out. She lures out some teens with bats and we’re constantly informed how clean-cut they look, how hard it is for Barb (or “Cohen,” as Sherrill arbitrarily refers to her; the dude as ever can’t stay consistent) to grasp that these kids are trying to rape and kill her. This goes on for quite a while and finally Street Machine come out to even the odds…only here does Sherrill realize that he failed to inform us that these kids are “all black,” whereas previously he seemed to be describing like a roving pack of kids just escaped from a rerun of Leave It To Beaver. 

But “sloppy writing” is the name of the game in the Steel Lightning series, so we’re prepared for this sort of thing. However we are not prepared for the endless dirge of dialog that ensues here, as the members of the team, all hoisting subguns and suited up in their black kevlar uniforms, argue over whether or not they should kill these hoodlums. Here we are quickly re-introduced to the team: there’s JD Dinatale, the gruff and unlikable leader; Moses White, aka “the black guy,” a pro football linebacker once known as “Dr. Pain;” Miguel Negron, aka “the Hispanic one,” a former jazz trumpeter or something; Joseph Vernick, the stout WWII vet; and finally Brian Benson, the wraithlike force of malevolence who was burned to a crisp in the first volume. And of course we’ve already met “Barb,” she of the checkered, hard-to-understand past.

As usual though, Sherrill refers to these characters by a host of different names in the narrative, often making it hard as friggin’ hell to understand who he is referring to. As I’ve mentioned before, “main character” Dinatale is referred to as “J.D.,” “Dinatale,” or sometimes as just “John,” and it’s even worse when new characters enter the fold. And Sherrill is very much a “you missed the earlier volume, you’re shit outta luck” kind of a writer, as he doesn’t much re-introduce any of these characters and just thrusts them at the reader, arbitrarily referring to them by a variety of names with little concern for reader comprehension.

You’d think by this point someone at the publisher would call Sherrill and tell him, “Mr. Sherrill, consistency is your friend. All this referring to your characters by multiple names in the narrative, particularly when you’ve just introduced the character and haven’t given him proper setup, is most confusing for the reader. Could you please consider just referring to your characters by one name in the narrative to avoid such confusion?” To which Sherrill would respond, “Hey, fuck you, man – I don’t need this shit. I’m Kevin Sherrill!! If I wanna refer to my characters by a hundred different names, I will! Now suck it!” “Yes, Mr. Sherrill, I’m sorry to trouble you,” the publisher would say, but he’d be talking to silence because Sherill had already hung up. At which point the publisher would call up his chief editor: “Look, we’re cancelling Steel Lighnting. I can’t take anymore of this diva Kevin Sherrill, not to mention his lack of consistency in character naming.” “Cancel Steel Lightning? Are you crazy?” The chief editor would explode. “We’ve got Sherrill all lined up for Carson – he’s gonna be one of the last guests!” To which the publisher would respond, “Listen, I’m Mr. Zebra – if I say Steel Lightning is cancelled, it’s cancelled! Now suck it!”

But anyway our heroes have lured out these creeps and now they’re all rarin’ to gun ‘em down, just clean this scum right off the face of the earth, but instead they get in a long debate about it. Just back and forth, right in front of the punks who moments ago were chasing Barb with the intent of raping and killing her. And it goes on and on…with Moses White figuring maybe the punks should get a break and Vernick agreeing, and even Barb agreeing, but Brian’s over there chomping at the bit to kill ‘em all. It’s up to Dinatale to come up with the novel idea of beating them all up to a pulp.

The book as mentioned is too bloated for its own good, so we don’t get to the main villain until later: his name is Levi Golden, he’s an old Jewish man who escaped to America from the Nazi horrors of the ‘40s, and he’s behind the Delight scheme. In a bit of continuity we also learn he was the boss of the main villain in the previous volume. But man, talk about sending mixed signals. The back cover hypes Golden as “sadistic,” but when we meet him we’re treated to an overlong backstory showing all the horrors and misery he endured…escaping Germany as a young man with his wife and coming to New York, where he found even worse horrors, his wife raped and his daughter turned a hooker-junkie and his son killed and his wife left a catatonic wreck – and I mean all this before it’s even 1947!

So are we supposed to hate this guy or feel sorry for him? At any rate in a “tribute” to The Godfather, Golden a la Don Corleone had to get tough to face toughness, thus resolved to becoming more monstrous than those who preyed upon him. He set up a mafia of other escaped Jews and now, in 1992 (and we’re told this is all in December of ’92, right before Christmas, in other words a few months after the book was published – the future!!), Levi Golden is a kingpin of crime. But he has no marks on his record, and indeed his cover is as a harmless New York tailor, and he’s so successful in this pose that when Dinatale visits his shop later in the book only Dinatale’s cop-born sixth sense tells him the harmless old man is anything but harmless.

Sherrill though just wants to bide his time for the majority of the book; we endure all kinds of padding, from more Delight-spawned deaths to arbitrary action scenes starring Golden’s top henchman, Turk. When we get back to the Street Machine themselves, it’s usually to encounter them in mundane aspects – again arguing over the justness of their cause (three volumes in!!), or like with Vernick pulling the plug on his vegetable wife, or Dinatale bullyng an old nemesis of his from the force named Reimer who is clearly set up as a dude who will attempt to take down the Street Machine in some future volume that never happened.

While Slash And Burn is padded to the extreme, to Sherrill’s credit he writes as if it’s ten years earlier and not 1992; which is to say, the novel’s as un-PC as one could demand from the genre. This is mostly relayed via dialog, in particular from Dinatale; for example there’s a part early on where Maitland, the millionaire who secretly funds Street Machine, tells Dinatale that his team has picked up the notoriety of Batman and Robin in the underworld. To which Dinatale gruffly responds: “Two flaming queens if there were ever any.”

Speaking of sleazy stuff, the moment you’ve waited for has finally arrived, friends – Dinatale and Barb do it. As we’ll recall, our former hooker-pornstar-rape victim-crook asskicker has been doubting if she’s truly a lesbian; the thought of a man touching her makes her flesh crawl, after the gang-rape she endured in the first volume…any man, that is, except for Dinatale. As we learned last time Barb was wondering if she wanted to say to hell with it and do the guy – this time, after a failed hit attempt on Dinatale and Barb by Turk, the two repair to Metro Meats, ie the towering Street Machine headquarters, and clean up each other’s wounds before giving in to temptation. Sherrill really stretches this way out, long-simmer to the max, but after lots of talk, including the two smelling each other (seriously!), when they finally get to the down and dirty screwin’ Sherrill cuts away: “It went on like that for hours.”

After this Barb is now “the leader’s woman,” but nothing much else plays out on this subplot. It’s made clear though that it’s true love between the two and they would’ve remained an item in future installments. And the others othe team take it all in quite pragmatically, which is to say there are no ripples caused. I guess the only change is the two now worry over each other in the action scenes – which, finally, we get to in the final quarter. So in that way Slash And Burn is identical in its construct to the previous two volumes: an opening action scene, lots of padding, and then a final harried climactic action scene. Gee, I wonder if the fourth volume would’ve followed the same path…?

And the big finale is more goofy than anything: Golden’s secret Delight-manufacturing location is a fortress of a building deep in Chinatown, which we are informed is a no-man’s land along the lines of Beirut or something – such a no man’s land that Dinatale tells his troops they can go in with guns blasting, no silencers needed this time. And hell let’s bring a couple LAW rocket launchers along, too! But just when it goes down it all gets super ridiculous…Moses’s knee goes out on him due to an injury he’s been dealing with the entire book, and his massive frame crashes into the garbage the team’s hiding in, alerting Golden, Turk, and their entourage that it’s an ambush. And meanwhile Barb, apropos of nothing, goes into a seizure and starts freaking out!

Golden doesn’t have like an army or anything, so for the most part it’s just the Street Machine hiding in refuse and springing up to fire off a shot or two. We do get just a bit of gun-porn, not as much as previous volumes though, and as mentioned the gore is much toned down. In fact it’s all so bland I can’t even remember if Golden is given a big sendoff. About all I remember is all this occurs on Christmas Eve, and the book ends with a lame “Bah, humbug” joke from Brian Benson, and that’s all she wrote for the Steel Lightning series.

I recall the thrill I experienced when I discovered this series a few years ago, trawling Amazon for anything published by Pinnacle in the latter ‘80s, in particular any obscure men’s adventure books. I remember seeing “Midnight Lightning” listed, with no details provided, and then researching further and realizing it was indeed a men’s adventure novel – and that there were two more volumes! But sadly the series just never amounted to much, and my only suspicion is that Sherrill was given poor direction by the publisher…the books are always promising to go all-out, but never quite do, as if the publisher wanted a “real” novel, and not just a crazy action spectacle.

Mace #6: The Year Of The Boar

Mace #6: The Year Of The Boar, by Lee Chang
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

I’ve been looking forward to this sixth volume of Mace for quite a while. Because my friends we’re finally out of the weeds, ie the previous five volumes by Joseph Rosenberger, and as if in reward for enduring those five beatings we’re graced with an installment by Len Levinson (using the same house name that Rosenberger did, “Lee Chang”). So even though Len delivers a protagonist much different than his usual (at least when considering his other ‘70s novels), it goes without saying that The Year Of The Boar is vastly more entertaining than any of Rosenberger’s installments.

I know from Len himself that he never read those previous five books; in fact as he most memorably informed me once: “I never heard of Joseph Rosenberger.” So for all intents and purposes this could be considered a standalone novel. And in many ways it is much different from Len’s other books of the decade, with a straight-shooter protagonist wholly at odds with Len’s typical main characters from this era. In fact Victor Mace is kind of boring, and makes one miss, for example, the neurotic Johnny Rock of Len’s three Sharpshooter novels.

Len was clearly given at least a character outline to work from, though. It’s still Victor Mace, Chinese-American kung-fu wizard from Hong Kong who has relocated to America, but whereas Rosengerber’s Mace did CIA jobs on the side, Len’s is the head instructor at the Lotus Academy on Canal Street, in the Chinatown section of Manhattan. There is of course no mention of the previous five volumes, though if anything Len’s novel harkens back to the vibe of Mace #1, in that it doesn’t have any espionage commando stuff and is more of a simple “kung fu master versus stupid thugs” sort of thing.

The simple nature of the storyline is made clear by the plot: Mace goes up against some crooks who plan to burn down tenement buildings in Chinatown and build luxury high-rises in their wake. Mace comes into it when one of his students is killed in the latest fire; he learns later that another building was recently burned down in the same area. But as the dead guy’s teacher Mace is sworn by the ancient rules of kung-fu to avenge his student’s murder within a few days or something, so he’s off into action posthaste.

Mace starts off the novel being interviewed by sexy journalist Joyce Wilson, who is doing a story on the kung-fu craze. Len sort of pulls a fast one on the readers; we know that Joyce is attracted to Mace and hopes he asks her out – indeed she hopes he’ll take her back to her place and boff her brains out, being a “liberated woman” and all – but it never happens. Mace goes off with Joyce within the first few pages, but is first distracted by some would-be muggers who give him the handy opportunity to show off his skills, and then he’s further distracted by the burned-down building his student lived in. He ends up telling Joyce “maybe next time” and sets off – and Len apparently forgets all about Joyce, having her disappear for the rest of the novel, only returning near the very end when Mace calls her up to see if she knows a mob boss’s address. 

Instead, the novel is given over to a lot of chop-sockeying; same as in the Rosenberger era there are random all-caps bursts of “CHINK!” from Mace’s enemies, followed by Mace’s shouts of “KIII-AAA!” as he kicks them into oblivion. However the incessant “shuto chop” of Rosenberger is gone, replaced by various combinations of punches and kicks, though Len’s own “shuto chop” (meaning his own overused pose, a la Rosenberger’s shuto chop) would have to be the “horse stance,” which it seems Mace is going into every few pages. That being said, Len’s fights are more entertaining, even though they’re really the same as Rosenberger’s – endless, extended sequences of Mace kicking and punching people. But as I’ve said before, I personally feel that martial arts combat isn’t as suited to prose as say gun combat is. There are only so many ways you can describe a punch or a kick.

And as mentioned Mace is kind of boring anyway…he’s too much of a straight-shooter, and his occasional speeches on the kung-fu way kind of make him a bore. That said, he does have an incongruous habit of putting an unlit match in his mouth, which I guess is intended to make him seem tough – otherwise he’s very tall, slim build, long back hair, same as the cover. Also in an interesting bit of cross-series continuity, or at least what might be seen as such, Mace has a pal on the New York police force: Lt. Raymond Jenkins, who we can assume might be the brother of Lt. Richard Jenkins in Len’s Bronson: Streets Of Blood, written around the same time as The Year Of The Boar. Jenkins even gives Mace a gun at one point, insisting he keep it for protection against the Mafia enforcers who are coming for him, but of course Mace doesn’t use it.

Another harbinger of the Rosenberger installments is that Mace is suitably superhuman; he’s actually up in the Dr. Strange league this time, able to see and hear beyond normal human perception with his “shuh” talent. As if that weren’t enough, he’s even able to focus his “chi” to such an extent that he can stop the flow of blood from a gunshot wound in his shoulder…and when the bullet’s extracted (by a Chinatown acupuncturist, naturally), Mace is able to focus his will and re-seal the wound!! All of this, coupled with his take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward sex, makes Mace more of a sort of kung-fu Jesus than the typically-rabid (or at least driven) Len Levinson protagonist.

The title comes from Mafia bigshot Frank Zarelli, whose plans Mace threatens; Zarelli and Chinatown opium importer Mr. Sing concoct a scheme to hire some kung-fu killers to come over from Hong Kong and kill Mace. It’s Mr. Sing who compares Zarelli to a boar, so one assumes Len was given this title before he started writing and found some way to accommodate it into the narrative. Led by seven foot tall sadist Rok Choy, who happens to have been a kung-fu schoolmate of Mace’s who was kicked out twenty years ago, these kung-fu assassins are pretty cool and definitely bring the novel the flavor of vintage bell-bottom fury movies; upon their arrival in Manhattan they’re instantly getting drunk and taking advantage of Mr. Sing’s teenaged assistant – the only part of the novel to feature any dirty stuff, and most of it relayed via dialog.

However Rok Choy is dispensed with sooner than expected, and Mace quickly sets his sights on his remaining followers. In fact Mace is so superhuman that the question isn’t so much if he’ll survive but how quickly he’ll take out his opponents, no matter how greatly they outnumber him. I guess in this way Len’s book is also similar to Rosenberger’s, but it must be said that his Mace is a bit more likable, if too distant from the reader due to his perfection. As for Zarelli, his fate is a bit unexpected, and it occurs shortly afterward, as Mace promptly assaults the man’s heavily-guarded home. Len ends the novel right here, with Mace catching a taxi back to Chinatown – there’s a goofy out-of-nowhere recurring bit about a new cabdriver who doesn’t know his way around Manhattan, and the various characters keep getting into his cab – and that’s that. Vengeance has been meted out in the demanded time.

Overall The Year Of The Boar was entertaining, certainly when compared to Rosenberger’s previous five books, but at the same time I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Len’s other books from this period. Not that there’s anything wrong with his prose or his dialog, it’s just that it lacks that zany spark the others had. And mostly I feel this is due to Mace himself, but again this isn’t Len’s fault – he was hired to write a book about a kung-fu master and that’s how a kung-fu master is written. So in that regard he certainly exceeded, but when you’ve read say Shark Fighter you just expect something more from the guy. I mean when a cab driver who appears on maybe half a page total is more memorable than the lead character, you know something is up.

Back in July 2012 I asked Len about Year Of The Boar as part of the interview I did with him for The Paperback Fanatic. I asked him again about the book now that I’ve read it, and he decided to “augment” his original Paperback Fanatic comments for my review. So here’s Len on the origins of The Year Of The Boar – and I have to say, the “rapacity” of New York landlords (as Len memorably described them in a recent email) comes through loud and clear in the novel!

THE YEAR OF THE BOAR began with a phone call from an editor I knew at Belmont-Tower, don’t remember his name. He said he was working for a new publishing house called Manor and asked if I would write for them. I said “sure,” which was how a desperate freelance writer naturally would respond. 

I lived at 114 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in those days, and walked uptown to the meeting at Manor’s office located in the same vicinity as Belmont-Tower on lower Park Avenue south of 34th Street. Zebra Publishing for whom I later wrote was in the same area. 

Also in attendance at the meeting was a young lady editor who I also knew from Belmont-Tower. No one else was in the office, which as I recall, consisted of only one medium-sized room. This young lady editor had previously told me that she worked with Nelson DeMille when he was in the Belmont-Tower stable. I suspected that Manor was connected to Belmont-Tower in some way. 

I don’t remember details of the meeting but I ended up writing two novels for Manor, THE YEAR OF THE BOAR and STREETS OF BLOOD in their BRONSON series by Philip Rawls. I don’t remember which I wrote first. 

THE YEAR OF THE BOAR really stimulated my imagination because I was very interested in Eastern religions at that time, and had studied karate under the great Okinawan master Ansei Ueshiro who worked out in class alongside us students in his studio on West 14th Street in New York City around 1962. His speed, strength and precision seemed supernatural. Inspired by him, I affixed a bamboo mat to a wall of my apartment and punched it in order to build up callouses on my knuckles, but my knuckles bled and no callouses ever happened. 

In addition, I had studied Vedanta Hinduism plus Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, attending many lectures and reading lots of books. I also spent much time in NYC’s Chinatown, largest Chinatown in America, which was spilling over into Little Italy and the Lower East Side. Often I explored out-of-the-way streets and alleys, hung out in Buddhist temples, ate at funky restaurants, and munched on lotus seed buns as I wandered about. Sometimes I wished I could move to Chinatown because I loved the exotic atmosphere, almost like being in Hong Kong. 

I also had watched a few Kung-Fu movies on the Bowery in Chinatown. None had subtitles but were fascinating anyway. The nearly 100% Chinese audiences seemed to enjoy them very much. Those King Fu movies doubtlessly influenced action scenes in THE YEAR OF THE BOAR, which begins in Chinatown and much of the action occurs there. 

The character of Joyce Wilson, described as reporter for a NYC daily, was based loosely on a real reporter for an underground NYC weekly newspaper who lived in the same building as I in Greenwich Village, and was a friend of mine. Now she is a famous reporter for the NEW YORK TIMES. I don’t want to mention her real name because I don’t want to embarrass her. 

While writing THE YEAR OF THE BOAR, I was having problems with my landlord because my apartment was rent-controlled and he wanted me to move out so that he could jack up the rent. He refused to fix what was broken and threatened to have me beaten up if I complained to the Housing Authority. So he transmogrified into the predominant villain of THE YEAR OF THE BOAR and came to a very dark end in the novel. 

All these experiences and semi-understood theologies served as foundations of YEAR OF THE BOAR. As I skim through the novel today, I think the narrative was undermined by my tendency to toss in sex scenes that seem casual and unmotivated, but it seemed like a lot of sex was casual and unmotivated during the seventies. It was a strange time and I spent much of it sitting in a series of non-luxury apartments in Manhattan, writing action/adventure. To paraphrase Marcel Proust, it was life carried on by other means.

The Specialist #9: Vengeance Mountain

The Specialist #9: Vengeance Mountain, by John Cutter
June, 1985  Signet Books

It’s hard to believe, but The Specialist is coming to an end; after this one there’re only two more, and the shame of it is that by this point John Shirley (aka “John Cutter”) has gotten his template down – basically, The Specialist at this point has become a sort of parody of The Executioner, with everything taken well over the top. Vegeance Mountain is very much an indication of this, as it’s basically just a long-running action sequence with some of the darkest comedy you’ll find in men’s adventure. That being said, the series still isn’t as cool as the stuff Shirley was writing at the same time for Traveler. 

Another thing that makes it unfortunate that the series is ending soon is that Shirley sets up a subplot that promises big changes for tough-ass hero Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan: namely, he’s considering adopting a young girl and raising her! This character is named Melina and is introduced in one of the grimier opening setpieces yet in the series, reminding readers that, of all the ‘80s men’s adventure series, The Specialist comes closest to capturing the grimy vibe of such books from the ‘70s. Whereas most other series in the ‘80s glossed out the sick-o material one would find in a ‘70s men’s adventure novels, replacing the sleaze and filth with detals about guns, guns, and more guns, John Shirley delivers what comes off sort of like a more polished installment of The Sharpshooter.

We meet Melinda in an opening sequence which sees Sullivan taking out a kiddie porn producer in the woods outside New York, where the bastard shoots his “movies.” It is of course an unsettling topic, but it must be stated that Shirley has his tongue firmly in cheek throughout, ramping up the insanity. In other words he takes a subject that is disquieting and disgusting in reality, but puts an almost surreal spin on it, with a “producer” so depraved that one is certain – or at least prays – that such a creature couldn’t actually exist.

Melinda is the man’s latest “star,” kept naked and shackled in this cabin in the woods, forced to “act” in perverted movies in exchange for bare morsels of food. As ever Shirley goes wildly overboard to make his villain loathsome so that the reader can’t wait to see him axed, but this kiddie porn freak really isn’t around enough to make much of an impression. As expected, Jack Sullivan makes short work of the guy’s henchman, delivers the producer a fitting sendoff to hell, and saves little Melinda – Shirley keeping the scene refreshingly free of treacle. Sullivan drops the poor girl off with Bonnie, the hotstuff private eye who first appeared in the previous volume, and asks if Bonnie would consider adopting her – then, after some off-page good lovin,’ Sullivan splits!!

He's soon contacted by another private eye, this one a sleazeball by the name of Preminger. This guy’s been hired by several victims of one of the more depraved and psychotic characters you’ll ever encounter in fiction: Jerome Farady, Jr, who according to Preminger has murdered 180 women(!!) over the past years, each of them in sexually sadistic ways. Farady, a Ted Bundy type (in that he has boy-next-door good looks, and isn’t a slavering wild-eyed freak as one might expect), has escaped prison because his father, Farady Sr, is a multi-millionaire with all kinds of power and influence.

But these victims of Jr’s excesses have banded together; each of them has lost someone due to the sadist, and they’ve heard of the Specialist and knows he’s the guy who can permanently punch Faraday’s ticket. Sullivan briefly meets them – taking the opportunity to check out hotbod brunette Angela Mills, whose mom was chopped to hamburger by Faraday – and promptly takes the job. Sullivan, as ever fueled by the need for vengeance, is almost at comic book levels here, becoming more and more enraged by the stories he’s hearing about Farady, and vowing to kill him but quick. Unfortunately Farady Jr and Sr have both sequestered themselves in an old fortress deep in Mexico, guarded by roving packs of ruthless mercs.

Sullivan heads for Mexico, where the rest of the novel plays out. He picks himself up a CAWS auto-shotgun thing, as memorably featured in the later Cybernarc #4. Shirley pulls a fast one, making us thing the novel’s going to be a long-simmer affair of Sullivan posing as a mercenary hoping to get a job at the “castillo,” as the fortress is constantly referred to. Posing under the in-joke name of Richard Stark, Sullivan beats up a few of the mercs, including fat boss Ludlow and drug-dealing punk K.C., and gets a successful audience with Faraday Sr, who doesn’t trust “Stark” but decides what the hell, he’s hired. Sr by the way is appropriately insane, ranting and raving beneath the framed painting of his forebear. In a bit of series continuity he also reveals he was once a client of the Blue Man, from volume #3. As for Jr, he’s locked away on his own floor of the fortress; no one’s allowed to see him, but Sr occasionally sends local whores in there to be raped and killed.

Shirley really goes for an over the top dark comedy vibe throughout; the mercenaries who guard the fortress are all criminals of the most depraved sort, boasting of how many women they’ve killed. Even “harmless” K.C. brags about wasting a couple people who found out about his dope-smuggling venture. While the reader settles in for the long haul on this – Sullivan dealing with these guys while trying to figure out how to kill Jr – Shirley pulls the rug out with it all happening in the next few pages. Sullivan takes out a monstrous Jamaican merc (who of course is toking on an equally-monstrous joint before the fight) – and gets into Faraday Jr’s chamber. But he misses his chance to kill him and has to escape into the jungle.

From here Vengeance Mountain employs the same template as all the other John Shirley men’s adventure novels I’ve read: it becomes a long chase scene. Sullivan spends more time fighting the corrupt local cops, all of whom are in Faraday’s employ. Shirley doesn’t muddy up the storyline with too many characters; Sullivan befriends a local bar owner who considers gringos his best customers, and the only other character here is the mandatory easy lay Sullivan must have each volume: none other than Angela Mills, who has come to Mexico because she wants to see Faraday Jr dead, and just hiring the services of the Specialist isn’t enough.

Sullivan is more pissed than anything at the girl’s presence, but of course we have the expected sex scene – up to the usual explicit standards we now demand from Mr. Shirley. Angela by the way has “the most incredible body” Sullivan has ever seen; indeed, his “heavy artillery [begins] to throb” when Angela tries to seduce him back at her hotel room. A graphic sequence which has Angela promising Sullivan that he won’t make her climax. If you think Sullivan fails in this, you are hereby sent to the men’s adventure remedial class.

The plot is barebones but what keeps it moving is Sullivan’s near-insane resolve to kill Jr; there are moments where he basically fuels himself with thoughts of getting his hands on the bastard’s throat. But it must be said that Shirley himself finally seems to be running out of fuel. Much, too much, of Vengeance Mountain is padded-out backstory about Sullivan’s days in ‘Nam. Too many times he’ll be looking off into the Mexico jungle and think how it’s so similar to ‘Nam, and from there we go into an extended backstory about a hairy patrol he once endured with his loyal soldiers. This seems to be setting up the plot of the next novel, which promises to see Sullivan leading a new team of soldiers, this time in an excursion into Iran.

The fun as ever comes in the unexpected moments of dark humor. Like when Sullivan discovers a traitor in his midst, one who has come down to sell info to Faraday Sr; when Sullivan gets him, he beats the traitor so badly that his face looks “like a cherry pie that’d been run over by an 18-wheeler.” When the going gets too tough Sullivan sends out for help, and old familiars Merlin and Rolf show up for the climactic assault on Faraday’s castle. Angela takes part, too, getting some field experience with assault weaponry. Shirley doesn’t shirk on the gore, either, so his action scenes are always entertaining, though it must be said that the Specialst doesn’t do near as much gory damage with his CAWS as Rod and Drake did in Cybernarc #4.

For the most part, though, it was the dark comedy I most enjoyed in this Specialist. Otherwise the storyline was a little too simple, and the volume was a bit of a comedown after the more entertaining previous installments. As mentioned though, there was only two more volumes to be, so we’ll see if Shirley gets back to previous standards. 

The Iceman #2: The Golden Shaft

The Iceman #2: The Golden Shaft, by Joseph Nazel
March, 1974  Holloway House

Has it really been eight years since I read the first volume  of Iceman? Judging from my review, I didn’t much like it, but I bet if I were to read it again I’d enjoy it more. Eight years of reading trash pretty much rots your brain, folks, so whereas I was apparently expecting something more “literary” back in 2010, these days I’d probably just be content to read all the copious descriptions of guts getting blown out.

Well anyway I didn’t even realize I had this second volume. I knew I had a couple of the later ones, thus it was a pleasure to discover The Golden Shaft sitting in the same box as the rest of them. It seemed then only mere logic that I read this volume next, having previously read the first volume. Sorry, no idea where I was going with that. To cut to the chase, I actually enjoyed this one – as with Billion Dollar Death, it’s basically full-on Blaxploitation, lacking only a suitable soundtrack.

Speaking of that previous book, too-cool-for-words Henry Highland West, aka the Iceman, often relfects back on the incidents which occurred therein, “some time ago.” We’re first treated to an overlong prologue which reminds us who Iceman is, how he got his start, how he moved to his high-tech casino-fortress-cathouse, the Oasis, in the desert outside Vegas, complete with a massive computer in the bowls of the place that keeps Iceman abreast of what’s going on in the outside world. As ever he’s accompanied by his consorts Kim (Chinese) and Solema (African), and his favorite color is powder blue, so all his various Adventure Joe-like accessories are colored thusly: his dirt bike, his helicopter, his dirt buggy.

We start right in on the action, as a pack of bikers bully an old gold prospector, ultimately blowing him away. But this old prospector happens to be a friend of Iceman’s, and indeed all this is happening not too far from the Oasis. Not only that, but Iceman happens to be dirt-biking with Kim and Solema, and he heads off to see what the hell’s goin’ on. Probably the Man, fool! Just kidding; the spirit of these books is contagious. Anyway Iceman busts out his .44 automatic and starts gunning down biker scum – Nazel as ever delivers good gore, with brains blown out and the like. Iceman’s women all carry .38s in their knee-high leather boots, by the way, so Solema also guns down some biker creeps. 

Iceman’s been burning for some action, so he sees this as a chance to let it all hang out, baby. Eventually this puts him on the track of a wealthy enterprenneur named Johns and a sadistic South African mercenary Johns employs named Martin. These two did in fact hire the bikers, as it turns out Dipper, Iceman’s prospector friend, had discovered gold on Iceman’s land, and was hiding it from Iceman; Johns wants to buy the land, and still posing as just a regular businessman he visits the Oasis with Martin in tow. True to this subgenre, the racial invective runs rampant as racist Martin leers at the women and wants to tame the black ones.

Nazel does have fun with it, like when Iceman, who instantly detects the true motive of these two, plays up to their racist attitudes, acting as if he’s having a hard time reading the funnies in the newspaper. In truth though Iceman, you of course know, is not only street-wise but brilliant, thus he has these two fools under his thumb in no time. Nazel pads a lot of pages with cutovers to the two villains, plotting and bickering, the latter because Johns is against killing to get their way. Martin though is the cliched evil white villain mandatory of the Blaxploitation genre; the fact that he comes from a country in which whites rule the blacks is often mentioned.

Last time one of Iceman’s hooker-babes was killed in the action, something Iceman reflects upon quite often – indeed, much of the too-long word count is given over to arbitrary reflections on the previous book. But while at the Oasis Martin really has his depraved eye on Brenda, a black babe who decides to do her own work when she finds out that Iceman wants to know what Martin and Johns are up to. She figures maybe she can take the bastard up on his sleazy offer to come visit him, and get some intel while he’s humping her. What’s bizarre though is that Martin, despite wanting her badly, instead goes crazy and accuses Brenda of spying for Iceman, eventually killing her in a bloody struggle. In other words, no sex, nor are there any sex scenes featuring Iceman.

For yes, once again, Joseph Nazel has taken a novel about a pimp who runs a high-tech cathouse filled with ultra-hot fillies…and does not feature a single sex scene!! I mean where’s the sex?? It’s like that Living Color skit with Sam Kinison in hell: “Where’s Hitler??!!!”

Cut to Iceman and Solema in Iceman’s blue dune buggy, heading for Dipper’s shack. Here Iceman discovers that the old prospector was ripping him off (damn white folk!), but also that old Dipper apparently regreted his duplicity and was about to come clean with Iceman. But then Iceman and Solema are ambushed by Martin and forces; Iceman seeks cover in an old mine, where he gets some dynamite. This he puts to use pronto, blowing up Johns’s home, anticlimactically killing off one of the main villains off-page. Martin meanwhile heads home to South Africa, figuring the game is up here in America.

Little does Martin know how determined Iceman can be. He’s going to South Africa to kill the mofo. Along comes Christmas Tree, Iceman’s colorfully-attired pimp pal who appeared in the previous volume. Together they, with ever-present Solema and Kim, board Iceman’s private plane and head for South Africa. Nazel delivers a brief shoutut to the previous book when the four stop over in the fictional African kingdom that was home to the diplomat almost assassinated in the previous volume; here Iceman feels he’s “home,” “among his people.”

Nazel doesn’t belabor the point when the four fly into South Africa; Iceman basically points the plane in the direction of the mine Martin’s providing security for, they land, and they proceed to kill whitey. Iceman, surprisingly, is captured, but the other three come to the rescue. It must be said that New York City pimp Christmas Tree takes quite easily to chopping off heads with a machete. And Nazel makes a hilarious miss in this same scene; he introduces the fact that Kim is armed with nunchucks, but doesn’t have her do anything – the action is solely handled by Christmas Tree and Solema. 

Iceman of course promptly frees himself, leading to an overdone finale in which Martin runs away into the nearby mine, and Iceman follows him into the total darkness of the place. He ends up kicking the guy’s ass and leaving him to die in a cave-in. And that’s all she wrote for The Golden Shaft; Iceman heads on back to the Oasis to his loyal fillies, and they’re all a family again.

All told I found this one pretty entertaining, and also Iceman has a couple bad-ass lines throughout, but given that he usually refers to himself via the dreaded N-word, I fear if I quoted any of them Google would probably shut down the blog.  

Dirty Harry #6: City Of Blood

Dirty Harry #6: City Of Blood, by Dane Hartman
May, 1982  Warner Books

Here’s another series I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve also never gotten around to collecting all twelve of the volumes in the series, and doubtful if I will, for Dirty Harry is one of those series that’s priced too high on the used books marketplace…I’ve seen some of these offered at insane prices. But anyway this was another Warner Books “Men Of Action” title, and as with Ninja Master Ric Meyers  was one of the writers, though he didn’t write this one.

As typical with this line, it’s uncertain who other than Meyers wrote what. My hunch is that Stephen Smoke, who reportedly wrote Ninja Master #1: Vengeance Is His, wrote this book. Like Vengeance Is His, City Of Blood is saddled with a bland, boring protagonist, bland, boring prose, and overall is quite lifeless, save for a few unexpected moments of sadism; it’s also written in a needlessly-convoluted style, as if the author is constantly tripping over himself. The writing is the definition of perfunctory, coming off with a sort of passive style that is wholly unacceptable for this genre, as I’ll show in an excerpt below.

And yes, you read that right – Dirty Harry is bland in this novel. Dirty Harry! It takes a writer of a certain caliber to make the most famous tough-ass cop of all bland, but Smoke, if indeed it be he, has done it. The Harry of the movies has been replaced by just your average everyday cop; we’re told that Harry’s boss, Lt. Drexler, can’t stand Harry for all his rule-breaking and bad-assery, but it’s very much a case of tell not show. Harry in fact is even polite not only to witnesses and potential suspects, but even to the latest partner he’s been saddled with. As Marty McKee notes, it seems evident that this ghostwriter had never actually seen a Dirty Harry movie.

The unfortunate thing is that City Of Blood is one of the sicker men’s adventure novels I’ve read, but then that seems to have been a common thread in all the Men Of Action books; take for example Ninja Master #6, which seemed to relish in describing the gruesome murders of children. This book features a “sex killer,” per the hypberbolic back cover copy, one who likes to decapitate his victims after engaging them in graphically-described sex scenes. This stuff is as lurid as the men’s adventure novels of the previous decade (it seems to me that the genre, for the most part, was a bit sanitized in the ‘80s, at least in regards to the perverted stuff, replacing regular old porn with gun-porn).

But if only we had a suitably deranged protagonist to navigate us through this sleaze! Instead, City Of Blood is like, I don’t know, Bronson: Blind Rage if it had starred Killinger. The novel is also poorly plotted, jamming two separate subplots in a wild disregard for narrative construction. Okay, we open with one of those sick-o sequences, where “Teddy” avidly screws a pair of high-class hookers in a sleazy San Francisco hotel, then hacks them up into hamburger. From this to Dirty Harry Callahan, called onto the scene. But instead of chasing down this killer, Harry is instead ordered to track down another serial killer: the Mission Street Knifer, who has murdered sundry bums and thus far eluded capture. 

How tracking one serial killer will put Harry on the trail of another serial killer is something the ghostwriter hopes we won’t dwell upon too much. Anyway, Drexler sets Harry up with a new partner, much to Harry’s chagrin. This is Drake Owens, actor turned cop(!); he carries a “.356 Magnum.” (Well, the novel is fiction.) The ghostwriter doesn’t really articulate it, but Owens seems to get the gig due to his disguise abilities; much like the short-lived later men’s adventure series Decoy (not to be confused with the ‘70s Decoy), Owens can capably change his whole being through costuming and makeup and etc, and thus poses as a bum on loooong stakeouts in the hopes of baiting the Knifer.

In another parallel to Vengeance Is His, this ghostwriter seems to just want to turn out a generic, soapy novel about ritzy people doing ritzy things, and doesn’t want to bother with the blood and thunder expected of the genre. To wit, we have parts where Dirty Harry visits Drake and his wife at their home, accepting their offer of a homecooked dinner, and there’s even an overlong visit to the set of a movie, where Drake’s wife works as a seamstress or somesuch. However this does ultimately have something to do with the plot, as it’s her expertise which figures out the clothing on the hookers murdered in the opening section (unidentified due to their missing heads) came from expensive boutiques – a hunch that results in the humorous development of Harry visiting expensive clothing stores. However it must be stated that the author again fails to capture the dark comedy that would naturally ensue were such a scene to ever feature in one of the films.

The Mission Street Knifer subplot is not only ridiculous but poorly handled. After lots of padding with Drake as a bum and Harry on stakeout, it finally leads up to an endless part where, on Halloween night, Drake gets a hunch that this tall, mysterious figure dressed like the Grim Reaper (complete with a skull mask) might be the Knifer. And he just follows after him…and follows after him…and on and on. I forgot to mention, there are huge chunks of City Of Blood where Dirty Harry just disappears, and Drake Owens becomes the hero. But this guy is in fact the Knifer, and we do at least get a memorable climax, with the massive, robed figure seemingly impervious to bullets – even those fired by Harry’s infamous .44 Magnum.

Drake is nearly killed in the fight, and we thereafter have parts where Dirty Harry sits around and worries about him. I’ll just let that statement speak for itself; it pretty much says all there is to say about this novel’s handling of the character.

Now as for the main plot, “Teddy” continues to screw and kill with aplomb, including another sleazy bit where he goes to a club with his latest babe, and hacks her up while she’s having sex with some other dude. Now, in this particular ghostwriter’s usual penchant for sloppy editing, early in the book Harry and Drake are called onto the scene of some random shooting, an action bit that sees them taking out terrorists who are gunning for wealthy CEO William Maxim-Davis outside his corporate headquarters. This inrecibly lazy, coincidental plotting serves to bring Maxim-Davis into the plot, and Harry meets with him occasionally while tracking leads, and well…guess who Teddy turns out to be. 

Action is only infrequent, always bloodless (save for Teddy’s gruesome kills), and usually arbitrary, like when researching leads Harry and Drake stay with the uncle of Drake’s wife, and an assassin tries to take them out in the middle of the night. Unbelievably, Drake actually survives the novel, though the poor uncle is blown away. This bit takes us into the climax, which is straight out of a cliffhanger serial; Harry confronts Maxim-Davis in his office, and with the push of a button on his desk the CEO opens up secret passageways into his office, and in come a couple dudes toting guns! Off Harry’s taken in the bastard’s limo, a henchman pointing a gun at his head, when those same terrorists from early on attack again. But even here in this climactic action scene the prose is bland and lifeless:

[The guns held by Davis’s henchmen] contained a clip of eight rounds each, which would mean that before Harry could get out his own weapon and do much of anything with it, he would very likely find his body riddled with sixteen rounds. 

This prospect did not strike him as a very pleasing one, and, even as he cursed himself for blundering into Davis’s trap he tossed aside his .44, complying with the order Davis had just given him, almost casually, for he was still working on his contracts, signing his name over and over again as though he wanted to prove just how meaningless he had ever viewed the threat that Harry had posed. 

Harry remained seated, saying nothing – what was there to say with two guns targeted at your head? – waiting for Davis to conclude his business and get to the point which, he supposed glumly, was his imminent execution.

Folks, don’t write your action novels like this. Especially don’t write a Dirty Harry novel like this.