Sos The Rope (Battle Circle #1)

Sos The Rope, by Piers Anthony

October, 1968  Pyramid Books

Sos The Rope started life as a three-part serialized novel in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction (July-September, 1968), before being published as this slim paperback. Then in 1978 it was collected with its sequels, Var The Stick (1972) and Neq The Sword (1975), as a fat mass market paperback titled Battle Circle. It was the collected edition that I read, but I’ll review the titles separately because I’m just that kind of guy. 

I recall picking up Battle Circle sometime in 2017, and recently discovered it in a box in my garage, of all places. Indeed, I discovered it on the very same day I (re)discovered my copies of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant (those were in a different box in a different room, though; I guess I’m just a hoarder at heart). 

While he is incredibly prolific, the only Piers Anthony novels I have read are the Jason Striker series and the Total Recall novelization. Thus I cannot say I am an expert in the style of Piers Anthony, but Sos The Rope reads very much like those other books: a somewhat formal tone to the narrative, with a somewhat lurid feeling (this is a good thing, of course), but nothing too exploitative or explicit (this is a bad thing, of course). 

The biggest comparison to Jason Striker is the dumb-ass protagonist. As we’ll recall, Jason Striker was this tough judo master who happened to be a ‘Nam vet, but he blundered like a fool from one situation to the next. The same holds true of this novel’s protagonist, the titular Sos The Rope, who basically gets his ass handed to him again and again in the battle circles of this post-nuke America. And like Striker he makes one poor choice after another, usually a victim of his own nature. 

Anyway, we know from the outset that Sos The Rope is set in a post-nuke world; or, post “Blast,” as the characters refer to it. In the first pages we have references to plastic, a refrigerator, and even television, yet at the same time it is clear this is a primitive society, with men wandering around on foot and challenging one another in the formalized, ritualized practice of battle-circle dueling. 

It’s worth noting however that this is not a bloodthirsty post-nuke society by any means; the battle circle fights are rarely to the death and are more so ritualized ways of settling differences or matters of honor. Brawny men choose their names, specialize in one of the weapons allowed in the battle circle (swords, staffs, knives, etc), and roam the post-nuke country like nomads. What sets off the course of Sos The Rope, and the ensuing trilogy, is a meeting between two men who have the same name: Sol. 

I’ll admit, the first several pages were a bumpy read. There’s nothing like trying to make sense of a post-nuke pulp from decades ago in which two muscular men, both named Sol, challenge one another in a battle circle on the windswept plains while a nameless young woman (with a “voluptuous body”) watches on. I had a helluva time keeping track of which Sol was which, but basically one of them has long black hair and a beard, and the other one has long blonde hair and no beard. 

The bearded one is Sol The Sword, because that’s his weapon; the beardless one is Sol of All Weapons, and he carries around a wheelbarrow or something with all his fighting gear. The two men meet at a hostel – a place, we’re informed, that was set up by “the crazies” and is used as lodging for the nomadic warriors – and they have a friendly disagreement over who “owns” the name Sol. They decide to settle their differences in the battle circle by the hostel, all while some busty chick who works at the hostel watches on, ready to give herself to the winner. 

Anthony, given his martial arts background, is pretty good with hand-to-hand fight description, as proven with Jason Striker. But still, it’s hard to know which Sol is which, let alone which one to root for. Not that it matters, as neither is killed and indeed they become lifelong friends: but, for what it’s worth, “our” Sol, ie the supposed hero of this novel who will become “Sos,” gets his ass kicked and loses – which, of course, sets the tone for the rest of the book. 

The fight was for the name of Sol, and now that this Sol has lost, he needs a new name. Eventually he will become “Sos.” As for the busty girl, she gives herself to Sol, the winner, and so she becomes Sola – in other words, women don’t even have a name until a man has taken them, a sign of how male-dominated this post-Blast society is. If you listen closely, you can hear the piteous wailings of the ever-indignant wokesters over on Goodreads: “How dare Piers Anthony stoop to such misogyny! His female characters have no agency!” And etc. 

An interesting thing is that Anthony works his world-building into the narrative, never shoehorning us with info; eventually we learn that there is no rape in this post-Blast world, where the men actually respect the women. Indeed, there is a later part where Sos sleeps in a hostel that is occupied by a girl who has expressly come there to find a man, and since Sos is not interested in her (not suprising, given his overall lameness), she sleeps by him without concern of being raped. 

The nomadic warrirors wear metal bracelets, and the women they choose – whether for life or just for the night – wear the bracelet when chosen. Gradually I realized this was Anthony’s post-nuke spin on a wedding ring. But this is how Sola becomes Sola, wearing the bracelet of Sol – and she, Sol, and Sos will prove to be the three main characters of Sos The Rope. 

The trio venture into the Badlands, ie the still-radiated wastelands around the countryside, and encounter all kinds of brutal flora and fauna. The latter is evidenced by a rat swarm that might raise the hackles of more sensitive readers (as if sensitive readers would be reading a book titled Sos The Rope!). The bigger threat however is the love triangle that develops: Sola belongs to Sol, but Sos and Sola have a thing for each other. 

Sadly, it develops that Sol does not have a, uh, thing; left comatose from the bite of a mutant moth, Sol is dragged to safety from the rats and loses his clothes in the process, and Sos discovers that Sol is castrated; something Sola was already aware of. So basically she’s “married” to a guy who cannot give her the goods, yet still – for reasons of honor and such – Sos won’t give Sola what she clearly wants. 

I forgot to mention: Sos as a child was reared by “the crazies,” ie the tech-savvy overlords who run things behind the scenes. They are the ones who stock the high-tech hostels and whatnot, and have all the learnings of the pre-Blast world, and Sos has not only learned to read but knows a fair bit of history…though he is uncertain how true those ancient books really are. 

Piers Anthony does a good job of keeping the story moving while doling out small bits of background about the post-Blast world. Meanwhile the main narrative has Sos becoming Sol’s best buddy and sidekick; Sol dreams of starting an empire, but he knows he isn’t smart enough. Sos, meanwhile, is smart in all those ways, so Sos agrees to serve Sol for one year and help him gather men into an army. 

Meanwhile Sos and Sola become an item while Sol is off gathering men, but Anthony leaves it off-page. About the most us sleazehounds get are random mentions of Sola’s “voluptuous” build and pretty face…not much. But Sos manages to knock her up, though this tidbit is left off-page; curiously, Anthony leaves many important events off-page…most notably, a part where Sos challenges Sol in the battle circle for Sola and her newly-born daughter. 

Yes, Anthony cuts immediately to some time later, and we learn that Sos has once again had his ass handed to him. So much for the “rope” he’s learned to fight with; all this is after the empire has been started, and Sos has gone back to the crazies to learn what to fight with now that he’s lost the right to use a sword. A rope wouldn’t be my first choice, and anyway Sos still can’t beat Sol, so whatever. 

Here’s where Sos The Rope gets real interesting. It’s some time later and Sos has decided to end his life by climbing this big mountain that people go to when they’re ready to commit suicide. He climbs up and up, then “dies,” then wakes up in this high-tech “underworld” that is run by the crazies. He will eventually hook up with a lithe young (and small-statured) lady with major karate skills (again, the hanky-panky occurs off-page), but most importantly Sos here is augmented into a sort of cyborg warrior so as to be sent back out into the world to kill Sol and topple his empire. 

My assumption is Piers Anthony was influenced here by Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, and this sequence – where Sos dies and then goes to an underworld where he has plastic armor embedded beneath his skin, and his muscles augmented, and etc – reminded me very much of the Neoplatonist readings of The Iliad. 

Simply put, the Neoplatonic reading of the Iliad goes like this: when Achilles’ best friend/lover Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector while wearing the armor of Achilles, the idea is that Achilles himself has died. After Patroclus dies, Achilles stops eating the food of mortals and instead eats ambrosia, the food of the gods. He goes to his mother, who happens to be a minor-grade goddess, and she in turn goes to Hephastus, aka Vulcan, and asks this major god to forge divine armor for Achilles. Dressed in this divine armor, Achilles is unstoppable when he goes back to the war at Troy, eventually killing Hector. The Neoplatnic reading here is that Achilles the mortal has died, reborn in his divine armor – ie his divine soul. 

That’s all very basic, and I’m sure I missed quite a bit, but that’s the essential idea, and more importantly for the goal of this review – that is what Piers Anthony has happen to Sos the Rope. It was at this point, around a hundred pages in, with Sos transformed into a sort of walking tank, with armor plating beneath his skin, that I realized Sos The Rope was a post-nuke Iliad. 

At this point I was very much into the novel; it was just that sort of late ‘60s/early ‘70s sci-fi I love, with a metaphysical and slightly psychedelic edge, but again it was slightly undone by the blunderings of Sos – or, “The Nameless One” as he is now known, a giant who towers over the average men. Piers Anthony again gives us a doofus protagonist who can’t make up his own mind; Sos has carried a torch for Sola all this time, and indeed he decided to climb suicide mountain over his loss of her. But, despite only thinking of the little karate lady as a casual lay in the underworld, Sos realizes, after leaving her forever, that he was truly in love with her, not Sola! Actually, now that I think of it, Piers Anthony might understand male characters better than any other sci-fi writer. 

Seriously though, this kind of gets to be a little much, and takes away from Sos’s post-death meta-human makeover (we’re told his hair has even gone white, like he’s some sort of super-deformed anime hero). But even in his superhuman state Sos blunders, outing himself on his first night back in the real world and inadvertently letting one of Sol’s men know who he is – the idea is, see, that Sos takes the job from the crazies to kill Sol, but really he plans to sneak into the empire and tell Sol to end his empire, so that Sol doesn’t have to die. 

This entails a lot of fights with Sol’s underlings so Sos can prove himself – again, the fighting is for the most part bloodless (save for one fight where Sos accidentally kills someone), but it’s cool how Sos has essentially become the post-Blast Hulk. Even here Piers Anthony does a curious skipping of important parts and suddenly has Sol and Sos confronting each other, though Sol apparently doesn’t realize this huge cyborg creature is actually his old buddy, Sos (or maybe he does; Anthony leaves this vague). 

The finale of Sos The Rope is quite curious, with the two characters arguing with Sol’s chieftans over whether or not Sol’s empire should be disbanded. SPOILER ALERT: The finale is rather downbeat, with Sol himself deciding to head on up suicide mountiain, his little girl demanding to go along with him – and Sos sadly watches his old buddy stalk off, kicking himself that Sol will no doubt make it up the mountain alive and end up banging the cute little karate girl that Sos has only now realized he’s in love with. In other words: wash, rinse, repeat – Sos now has the woman he wanted, Sola, but again he is jealous of Sol, who will no doubt soon be giving the little karate girl some good lovin. 

Well, all this no doubt is covered in the next volume, Var The Stick, which I’ll be reading soon. I have to say, I quite enjoyed Sos The Rope, especially the unexpected eleventh-hour jump into a sort of meta-human Iliad riff. I hope Piers Anthony continues with this vibe in the next books; one can only imagine the surreal, over-budgeted, psychedelic mess of a film Alejandro Jodorowsky might’ve made out of it.

A Bullet For The Bride

 
A Bullet For The Bride, by Jon Messman

No month stated, 2022  Brash Books

(Original Pyramid Books edition 1972)

Big thanks to Lee Goldberg and Brash Books for sending me a review copy of this, a trade paperback reprint of a novel Jon Messmann published under his own name through Pyramid Books in 1972. Just missing the men’s adventure series glut by one year, A Bullet For The Bride does seem to be Messmann’s attempt at starting a new series, and bears some similarities to his later Jefferson Boone, Handyman. (Which has also been reprinted by Brash Books, by the way, along with most all of Messmann’s ‘70s output.) 

But hero Ed Steel did not cause much stir in the publishing world – indeed, his name is misspelled as “Ed Steele” on the back cover and in the Afterword (by Roy Nguyen) of this Brash Books edition, so the poor guy still hasn’t made much of a stir. It’s not hard to see why, as A Bullet For The Bride is not the most auspicious beginning for any series; the plot hinges around Steel working for a spoiled little rich girl who has Daddy Issues. So far as character motivation for a series opener goes, it’s not exactly up there with the Mafia killing your kid. 

Steel is essentially Jefferson Boone meets Travis McGee…or perhaps that should be Jedediah Killinger, if we want to stick to a purely men’s adventure comparison. He’s a vet of Korea who has done odd jobs for the Agency and now he lives on a boat, and when we meet him he’s lazing in the sun along the Florida coast. Here’s where the spoiled brat comes in: her name is Cam Parnell, she’s in her early 20s with “small, high breasts,” and Messmann will annoyingly refer to her by her full name, “Cam Parnell,” over and over again, through the course of the novel. But then Messmann does the same with his hero; it’s frequently “Ed Steel said this,” or “Ed Steel said that,” and the reader’s like, “I know the hero’s name, I’m not stupid!” 

But then, Messmann has his recurring quirks. Namely, poor treatment of female characters. Messmann’s protagonists are complete and total dicks with women; it’s one of the author’s most notable quirks, to the extent that you wonder if he had some sort of latent anger toward them. The typical scenario will have the hero baiting the girl, talking down to her, mocking her, occasionally even slapping her…and then bedding her when he has sufficiently tamed the shrew. The scenario with Cam here in A Bullet For The Bride is the same as in every other Messmann novel I’ve read: Steel treats her like shit from the moment he meets her, essentially telling her to take off when she asks to hire him, and then going on to talk down to her and constantly criticize her. 

But then again, Messmann’s female characters kind of deserve it, for the most part. We aren’t talking strong, sassy female characters like you’d get in a George Harmon Smith novel. A Messmann female character is usually kind of dumb (which I guess again factors into that “latent anger” angle), and Cam for example angrily tosses a bucket of chum on Steel when he sends her off in the opening sequence. Actually this whole part seems to be a riff on the finale of It Happened One Night, where Clarke Cable goes off to the wealthy father of Claudette Colbert with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for; Steel cleans himself up and heads to the home of Cam’s super-wealthy father with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for (cleaning the boat of chum, the cost for “lost business” during this time, etc). 

After this “meet cute” Steel of course begins working for Cam. Sorry, for “Cam Parnell,” as Messmann refers to her again and again in the narrative. And so begins the mean-spirited bickering and bantering between the two. There’s a lot of it throughout the novel; Messmann’s protagonists are also unusual in that they maintain their hostile tone even after having sex with the girl in question. But then, Messmann’s characters always tend to be an argumentative and unpleasant bunch, with Messmann doling out his usual dialog modifiers like “he bit off” or “he threw out” and the like, to the extent that it sounds like these people aren’t having a conversation so much as they are a food fight. 

Steel is into boats and whatnot, which means that a lot of A Bullet For The Bride reads like nautical fiction. This is proven posthaste as Cam gets Steel to compete in a boat race against the woman Cam is certain is trying to pull a fast one on her father: Grace White, a lovely brunette in her 30s who has moved in quick on the wealthy Parnell. Messmann either did a fair bit of research or was just a boating enthusiast, and so he really brings a lot of veracity to the race…but for me personally, it just seemed to go on and on. One gets the suspicion that if Ed Steel’s adventures had continued beyond this novel, the “boat stuff” would’ve become a part of the series schtick. 

Surprisingly, Grace White – and yes, Messmann constantly refers to her as “Grace White” in the narrative – does not factor into the novel as much as one might expect. Rather, it is her older sister Betty who does. Just kidding. Grace is sort of a peripheral character, and Cam does the heavy lifting as the novel’s main female character. However Grace is the titular “bride,” as she becomes engaged to Parnell and Cam wants to stop the wedding before it’s too late. As mentioned the entire thing hinges around Cam’s “female intiuition” that Grace is up to something nefarious, but the issue is she’s cried wolf about all of her father’s previous female interests, so no one really believes her. 

And boy, do we learn all about this. I couldn’t believe it, but Messmann devotes a goodly portion of the opening half to Steel researching Cam’s past accusations, even up to and including the women who were involved with Parnell before breaking it off due to Cam’s interference. Steel’s research leads him to conclude the girl is nuts, a comment which of course infuriates Cam and leads to their initial sex scene. Messmann does remember to properly exploit his female characters, and while his raunchy scenes are usually more metaphorical than explicit, he at least lets us know something is happening instead of fading to black. 

Not that this makes Cam and Steel much more of a working team. The bickering and bantering only increases, though we’re to understand that Cam is developing feelings for Steel…and perhaps vice versa. But Cam sort of goes away and Steel’s co-star for the second half is Domino, a Hispanic dude who has done some work for Steel in the past. This entails more nautical stuff; Cam swears Grace meets with an unmarked boat on certain nights, and so Steel and Domino go on a stakeout. Action, by the way, is infrequent; other than an early part where Steel walks into a honey trap and is nearly beaten to death on the docks, A Bullet For The Bride for the most part operates as a mystery novel…the same that can be said of Messmann’s later Handyman series.

The only difference is that Ed Steel is a bit more brutal than any other Messmann character I’ve yet read, though you’d never get that idea until the very final pages of A Bullet For The Bride. Without venturing into spoilers, or the overly-comprehensive vibe of some of my earlier reviews, it develops that Cam’s suspicions were, of course, on the money – otherwise, this really wouldn’t have been an auspicious opening to the series. The plot is fairly preposterous and seems more out of one of Messmann’s earlier  Nick Carter: Killmaster installments, but long story short it involves a mysterious island that is run by Commie villains. There is a crazy part toward the very end where Steel slices the throats of several guards, killing them in their sleep, and Messmann conveys an effective image of a gore-covered and grim-faced Steel going from cabin to cabin with a blade as Cam watches in horror. 

So in other words, all the action occurs in the final pages of A Bullet For The Bride, and this climax seems to come out of a contemporary men’s adventure magazine. It’s a taut, brutal sequence that sees Steel and Cam captured and condemned to a dawn execution, before Steel manages to turn the tables and go on a kill-spree to even the odds. If the entire novel had maintained this pace, perhaps A Bullet For The Bride would’ve been the start of a series, and not just an obscure one-shot in the prolific career of Jon Messmann. 

It’s super cool that Brash Books has brought this and other Messmann books back into print. They all look great and are professionally packaged, but as I stated before, I think it would be so much better if these reprints were done to the dimensions of a 1970s mass market paperback, which is how Tocsin Press does it. I mean, I love men’s adventure books more than anything, but they should never be made to look “upmarket.” That said, the Brash Books cover is certainly better than the Pyramid Books original, which was downright lame – and certainly had to play a little part in the lack of this “series” going past one volume. I mean who in 1972 would’ve grabbed a book with this cover off the rack and headed for the cash register?

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #4: The Swiss Secret

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #4: The Swiss Secret, by Jon Messmann

September, 1974  Pyramid Books

At this point Jon Messmann has essentially turned Jefferson Boone, Handyman into a mystery series; what little action that does occur in The Swiss Secret is over quick and also bogged down by Messmann’s nigh-endless sentences, lacking any of the tension one would expect from such scenes. The main “action” of this fourth installment concerns Jefferson “Jeff” Boone, the Handyman, trying to figure out why two billion dollars has disappeared from a few Swiss bank accounts, and what nefarious means the money will be used for. And also there’s a girl who seems to fall in love with Jeff and incessantly nags, doubts, and disobeys him throughout the entire novel. I mean it’s like they’re already married. 

There’s no pickup from the previous volume, but then there hasn’t been much continuity in Jefferson Boone, Handyman. Jeff (as Messmann refers to him) is in Paris taking a vacation – or “holiday,” as he refers to it. I realized one of the things I don’t like about this series is that Jeff Boone, ostensibly a roving freelancer for the US government, doesn’t even come off like an American. He’s constantly saying stuff like, “I haven’t a gun,” and the like. I guess Messmann’s trying to convey that Jeff has a continental background or whatever, but Americans just don’t talk like that. It almost gives the impression that the series is British, and the sluggish pace, nigh-endless-sentences, and penchant for quoting poetry doesn’t help things. 

Well anyway, Jeff’s in Paris when we meet up with him, taking a well-deserved vacation. And of course he’s managed to pick up some chick: Meredith Pryor, a daughter of minor British royalty. Here we get Messmann’s patented “sex scene where you don’t know what’s really happening” material, with Dean Koontz-approved stuff like “cresting waves” and whatnot instead of the hardcore filth us sleazebags want. All this takes a sudden detour when Jeff and Meredith go to dinner at a bistro, and some guys with guns come in, and Meredith is killed in the crossfire. 

Here The Swiss Secret takes on its mystery vibe. Jeff will spend the rest of the novel trying to figure out if and why Meredith was involved with a scheme in which a combined two billion dollars have been snuck out of a few Swiss bank accounts. Messmann adds some pizzaz to the storyline with the appearance of Dianna (yes, with two “ns”), whose memorable intro has her blasting away at Jeff with a .38 while calling him a “rotter.” Again, the book just seems British. But then, Dianna herself is British, and what’s more she’s the sister of Meredith Pryor (and of course the daughter of Lord Pryor), and she’s after Jeff for revenge – info on the underground has it that Jeff and Meredith were working together on something, even though they weren’t, and thus the assumption is Meredith was killed because of Jeff. 

Messmann seems to have been inspired by Goldfinger, what with the Jill and Tilly Materton bit of the dead sister and the surviving sister who is now hunting the killers for revenge. Messmann’s even more overt with the girl’s name, ie “Dianna,” as in the ancient goddess of the hunt Diana. In fact it’s a wonder Messmann doesn’t have Jeff refer to The Golden Bough in this one, I mean something like that would be right in-line with our “phallic and literate” hero. But as mentioned in previous reviews Jeff’s a prick when it comes to women; the previous volume in particular featured him being a total ass for no reason. Messmann turns the concept around this time; Dianna as mentioned starts off literally shooting at Jeff in her intro, and will spend the rest of the novel fighting against him. 

The funny thing is, Jeff isn’t nearly as much of a dick toward Dianna as he was to the girl in the previous book, so it’s like Messmann increased the sexual hostility on the female front but toned it down on Jeff’s side. Granted, Jeff does spend the majority of The Swiss Secret telling Dianna to go home and leave it to the experts, and also he’s constantly pulling her out of the fire due to her stubborness. Otherwise Messmann tries to develop a belabored “love” deal between the two, with Dianna growing feelings for Jeff and constantly nagging at him for being “cold” and not opening himself up and etc. Indeed the lame finale has Dianna pulling a number where Jeff will have to chose between his “cold” devotion to duty or his feelings for Dianna. But once again the poor “full breasted” brunette is in over her head and Jeff must once again save her dumb ass. 

That I think is the main drawback of The Swiss Secret: Dianna is one of the more annoying female characters in the series, and Messmann spends too much time on her. This is because his plot doesn’t give him much else to work with; literally the entire book is Jeff chasing clues to find out why two billion was stolen, who stole it, and what the money will be used for. But this only causes even more friction between Jeff and Dianna, because Jeff is relatively certain that Dianna’s father was in on the plot, along with Meredith. Messmann foreshadows Meredith’s treachery at the start of the book, with the mention that Meredith has “small breasts;” per my doctorate paper on men’s adventure, only traitorous, evil, or ugly women have small breasts in this genre. Regardless, Dianna spends the novel trying to prove Jeff wrong. And meanwhile making a mess of things; for example, one of the novel’s few action scenes has Dianna getting caught by some bad guys in Paris, and Jeff has to go to her rescue, leading to a fight in the back alleys of Paris that honestly lacks any tension due to the protracted way Messmann writes. 

The same holds true for the lovin’. When Jeff and Dianna have their expected conjugation, something which actually occurs a few times throughout the novel, it’s rendered in overwrought prose like this:

Eventually Jeff deduces that the two billion is going to the Libyans, leading to a mention of Qadafi, almost as if we’re reading a men’s adventure novel from a decade later. But even here there’s no major action scene; as mentioned Jeff must save Dianna, leading to another Bond-esque bit where he must swim across a dark sea and infiltrate a Libyan boat and rescue Dianna before torpedos destroy them all. After this we have another fizzling action bit where Jeff and Dianna try to get to Lord Byron before the bad guys do; even here Dianna shows her stubborn foolishness, and also Messmann has wasted so many pages that he rushes through this climax to the point that it’s almost comical. 

Overall The Swiss Secret was my least favorite installment of Jefferson Boone, Handyman yet. I get the impression that, given that he was writing The Revenger at the same time (plus other stuff, I’m sure), Jon Messmann was getting a little exhausted with the whole “men’s adventure” scene. 

 I wonder if Pyramid Books was also getting tired of the series. Not only is the cover design different from the previous three volumes, but that doesn’t even look like Jefferson Boone on the cover. It looks more like Dakota! That was from a different publisher, but still. I wonder if the uncredited cover art for The Swiss Mystery was originally commissioned for a different series entirely.

Grizzly

Grizzly, by Will Collins

April, 1976  Pyramid Books

I’ve never seen the movie Grizzly, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever even heard of it. It’s possible I’ve seen the poster, which appears to be the most remembered thing about the movie. But this is another one of those “I can’t believe they did a novelization of that” situations – and once again I have Robert Mann to thank for sending me his copy. I’ve failed to mention Robert in my previous tie-in novel reviews, but over the past year he has been sending me boxes of tie-in paperbacks, like Lethal Weapon and That Man Bolt!…just tons of great books I’ve been happy to receive, and I’ve been meaning to thank him in the reviews. 

This paperback was included in the most recent box, and also Robert noted about it: “It was a quick read thriller that was at least entertaining. The movie was horrible!” I haven’t reviewed a horror novel on here in a long time, so I decided to read Grizzly first. Robert was very correct – the novel turned out to be a quick read, and it was entertaining for sure. This is due to the skill of the author, “Will Collins,” which turns out to be the pseudonym of Edwin Corley, a well-known author at one time. Corley takes what is a goofy concept and treats it with some gravitas; I’ve never read Peter Benchley’s Jaws (and hell I haven’t even seen the movie – though I did see Jaws III in the theater and had Jaws IV on VHS), but I’m assuing it was written in a similar style…for clearly Grizzly is like the wildlife take on Jaws. And speaking of which, last year Robert also sent me the novelizations of Jaws II and Jaws IV, and I intend to read them as well someday soon. 

The novel sticks to the horror template, with various characters meeting, uh, grisly fates at the claws of a giant grizzly bear that’s running amok in a park in Iowa. The cover says the grizzly is 18 feet, but the novel implies that it’s 15 feet, but why quibble. Another callback to the horror trope is that most all of the victims meet their gory fates just as they’re about to have sex, or stripping down for sex, or merely thinking about sex. To be sure, though, the only actual sex scene in Grizzly occurs off-page. That said, the novel caters to the rugged masculine ethic of the day, as displayed in contemporary “nature run amok” horror novel The Deadly Deep – a nice reminder of the days when popular fiction was written and marketed for a male readership. 

Proving this posthaste, the novel opens with a park ranger who is “a slim girl, tightly contained in a uniform that seemed a size too small.” Corley does his best to convey her ensuing jiggling and whatnot, and later in the novel we’ll even have a part where she strips down and gets in a waterfall as preparation for a little outdoors lovin’. Surprisingly though this busty Playmate-esque ranger isn’t the lead female character; instead it’s a local gal in her thirties named Allison Corwin who is a professional photographer. But don’t worry, as we’re assured Allison’s attractive too, and the male hero of the yarn, Kelly Gordon, has already been putting the moves on her before the story begins. But as mentioned no actual sex material occurs in the novel – though we do get a lot of dialog about it, including the absolutely unforgettable line: “Harry simply went ape screwing to Bolero.” 

Stuff like this is clear indication Corley is having fun and not taking the material too seriously, which jibes with the eco sermonizing that frequently runs through the text. Way too much of Grizzly comes off like proto-climate change ideology, with lectures on how poor old mother nature is just suffering unmerciful because of man. White man, be assured, because we also learn in an aside that American Indians respected nature and etc, etc…the sort of stuff that once appeared in a pulp paperback tie-in but now no doubt is lectured as “the science” in universities across this once-great land of ours. 

I had to look on imdb.com to see who played these characters; I was unable to get a visualization of them from the narrative, so I’m guessing Corley wrote the novel before production began. At any rate Kelly Gordon is the ruggedly masculine protagonist of the tale, very much in-line with the Marlboro Men-type protagonists of the era. Whereas today youth is key, in the ‘70s protagonists were often older, more experienced in various fields, and such is the case with Kelly, a 38 year-old Vietnam vet who acts as the chief park ranger, though he reports to a paper-pushing administrative government dweeb who has achieved his position due to politics. 

I haven’t yet gotten to the titular grizzly, who believe it or not has his own narrative sections. In some ways Grizzly reminds me of Snowman, which was also about a massive monster attacking a resort area, but whereas that one was totally sci-fi horror (complete with a giant monster), Grizzly tries to retain a semblance of realism. The grizzly, who is referred to as “The Beast” in his narrative portions, is a sort of throwback to the prehistoric era – or so it is quickly theorized at one point in the novel, so as to lend some unneccesary credence to the tale. The tale opens with the grizzly being kicked out of his usual foraging area high atop a mountain due to land developers; as I say, there is a definite eco-bent to the narrative, with man’s destruction of nature and whatnot often mentioned. But then personally I’d take a shopping mall over an 18-foot grizzly with a fondness for human flesh, so I fail to see Corley’s point. 

To his credit (or perhaps that should be to the script’s credit), Corley gets started on the horror action quick. Unlike Snowman, this nature-run-amok tale doesn’t spin its wheels in plodding setup. We’re introduced to the curvy rangerette (not a term used in the book, btw), then meet a few of the other rangers, and then we’re introduced to a pair of college gals who happen to be camping. They become the first victims of the bear, and Corley proves his horror-writing skills in an effective sequence. He’s also got the lurid vibe down pat because one of the gals happens to be talking about sex (with a park ranger she just met) shortly before meeting her fate…and also we get the tidbit that the girl happens to be having her period, the scent of which has gotten the grizzly’s attention! It’s all pretty violent, no doubt more graphic than the film version: 

Another thing the story doesn’t waste time on is people refusing to belive they are in a horror novel – I’m no expert on the genre, but “I don’t believe in any stupid old monsters!” seems to be a recurring schtick in it. That doesn’t happen here, so far as Kelly Gordon and his fellow rangers go. They come across the bloody remains of the girls and immediately know a bear is amok, promptly taking the necessary safety precautions. We get a bit of detail on how wildlife parks operate – Kelly is adamant that the rangers moved all the bears in the area to the high country months ago – and also we see some of the stupidty of the administrative ranks. The rangers work on the situation, demanding that campers move out of the vicinity…and of course, a few stubborn ones ignore the order, to their gory regret. 

With the help of a “hot-shot naturalist temporarily assigned to the park” named Arthur Scott, it’s soon determined that the attacking bear is actually a grizzly. Arthur Scott vies with Kelly Gordon as the star of the show; he’s a rugged individualist type himself, but one who likes to dress up in animal hides and lurk in nature for days, observing animals in the wild. In fact, there’s a bit of a Predator foreshadowing here when Arthur decides to buck the other rangers and go out after the giant grizzly on his own. Unfortunately for him he isn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger, so it doesn’t go very well. This stuff was cool, though, and I liked it that Arthur was the only character who really took the fight to the bear, going out in the element of “The Beast” cloaked in animal skins and armed with an experimental dart gun. 

It wouldn’t be ‘70s eco-horror without a bit of random casual sex, though, and Corley also delivers on this – though as stated all the sex is off-page. Kelly and Allison find the time to get it on in a remote cabin in the woods, in the midst of the grizzly’s carnage. This part is enjoyably ‘70s with them mixing drinks and shooting the pre-sex breeze while the other rangers are out in the dark woods waiting in ambush for a massive bear that’s chewing up random victims. However it’s also very ‘70s in that Allison has no bearings on the plot; she takes some photos of the carnage (and vomits), but eventually heeds Kelly’s advice that she get the hell out of the park until the bear is found. So in other words we don’t have any of the mandatory “female empowerment” of today with rugged female characters also taking on the bear; even the curvy ranger babe, Gail Nelson, doesn’t amount to much in the narrative, other than the aforementioned scene where she strips down by a waterfall, deciding to take this moment to finally give the goods to a hunky fellow ranger. You don’t have to be a horror veteran to guess how this scene plays out. 

The book also doesn’t shirk on the grizzly carnage; there are frequent attacks on hapless campers, both in the woods and in civilization. The latter plays out in a sequence more akin to a supernatural thriller, with the grizzly attacking homes and a restaurant – one that happens to be owned by Allison’s dad, and is also one of the reasons why she decides to leave until the bear is taken down. But speaking of which that’s one element in which Snowman was superior…but then, that novel featured guys with frigin’ nuclear crossbows going after the titular monster. Here, we just have Kelly piloting a helicopter while one of his colleagues takes aim with a big gun. It’s cool and all, but nowhere in the crazed realms of the other novel. 

All told, Grizzly was a quick and fun read, with that “full ‘70s flavor” I demand in my fiction. (Can’t recall where I read that phrase, but I love it.) It was so good that in my mind Grizzly will just be a novel, and I see no reason to seek out the film someday. Well, I did read that the actress who plays the curvy rangerette was a Penthouse model, so maybe there is a reason.

The Invaders

The Invaders, by Keith Laumer

August, 1967  Pyramid Books

The Invaders was before my time, but I became aware of it at some point. I don’t recall the series ever being run in syndication, but it came out on DVD some years ago, and also the digital antenna channel MeTV was playing it at one point. So far the only episodes I’ve seen were the two directed by Sutton Roley (“the Orson Welles of television”), and while I enjoyed them, I mostly just watched them due to Roley. 

Running for two seasons, The Invaders starred Roy Thinnes (star of one of my favorite ultramod “future ‘60s” sci-fi movies, 1969’s Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun) as a man who had stumbled upon the fact that aliens were here on Earth, posing as humans and up to nefarious ends. It was sort of a Fugitive schtick with Thinnes’s character, David Vincent, constantly on the run and going from place to place to stop the aliens. This novelization, by veteran sci-fi author Keith Laumer, serves as the origin story that never was. In fact, the novel is all original, which surprised me; you’d figure David Vincent’s first encounter with the aliens would’ve been the subject of the pilot episode. But apparently it wasn’t. 

TV tie-ins were known for sometimes combining several episodes into one novel, a la the Six Million Dollar Man tie-in International Incidents, which I have but haven’t yet read. Laumer follows the same vibe here, with the caveat that none of these stories were actually produced as episodes. So while the first section of The Invaders details how David Vincent becomes aware of the alien threat, the ensuing plotlines have him operating in more of the “lone wolf in a new town” capacity of the series. It’s all very episodic, but Laumer does tie things together with a recurring villain. So I guess people who enjoy the show would want to seek this tie-in out, as it delivers the origin story that the show itself apparently never did. However Laumer does detour from the show in some regards; the aliens do not have the extra finger that their TV counterparts did, and also they don’t turn into smoke when killed. However their faces have a masklike sort of appearance. In many ways the aliens here reminded me of the ones that appeared years later in another TV series, War Of The Worlds. 

When we meet him David Vincent is just a roving engineer who goes around the country providing consultation services for various companies. We don’t get too much detail about him, just that he’s tall and rangy, and that girls often smile at him. It doesn’t hurt that he drives a Jaguar XKE. But the passing mentions of young women smiling at David Vincent…these seem to be Laumer’s attempt to put at least some women in the novel, because folks there aren’t any others. In all three “books” of The Invaders, David (as Laumer refers to him) only deals with other men; there are only a few female characters in the novel, usually secretaries, or in one bit a college co-ed. In each case we’re to understand these women respond to the raw animal magnetism of our stud hero, but none of their burning yearning is ever requited. David spends such an unintentionally humorous amount of time telling himself he doesn’t “have time” for these women that one could easily come to a whole different sort of conclusion. 

Well anyway, we meet David while he’s consulting at a factory, where he happens to notice a strange object, one recently created by the factory for a client. David, we’ll eventually learn, has come across several of these strange objects on his nation-wide trips to various factories. They are made of a strange plastic he has never mentioned before and, when he inquires of the various factories, he learns that the objects are always ordered by a mysterious company in California. His interest runs him afoul of Dorn, the bulky security chief of the factory. When Dorn pulls the mysterious object out of David’s grasp, David marvels over how Dorn’s arm is “hard as oak” and also hot to the touch. Not that David Vincent is a pushover; in later backstory-via-dialog we’ll learn he kicked some shit over in the ‘Nam, though he doesn’t like to talk much about it. 

But then David isn’t much for talking, and comes off as cipher-like, particularly once he sets upon his one-man mission. He has a friend at least: Lieberman, an old college pal who works as a scientist. David, fueled by his curiosity, sneaks into the factory, grabs the pieces of mysterious plastic, and takes them to Lieberman. The scientist gradually figures out that the parts fit together into what appears to be a disintigrator ray gun – what we’ll learn is called an “Eruptor.” David and Lieberman decide that only the authorities can help, thus call the local FBI office. Laumer develops nice tension here with the agents being rather terse and, like Dorn, having faces that seem like rubber masks. David instantly distrusts them. 

One thing I can certainly say about this tie-in as compared to the actual show is that the tie-in is much more violent. David makes several kills here, and they’re all pretty bloody. He learns that Dorn and several other similar men are indeed aliens, their human forms elaborate disguises, and this leads to a violent battle. David kills a few of the aliens in the fight, dropping a crate on one of them (and ripping him in half) and impaling another with the tines of a forklift. He also gets in some shots with the Eruptor, but in true Maguffin fashion it grows so hot when fired that it can’t be held any longer, so David drops it, no longer able to rely on it. 

A vague detail Laumer doesn’t elaborate on is that David works for “the General,” a character who is ultimately unseen. After this big battle David rushes back to home base, hoping to get the General’s feedback…only to learn the General is dead. Here the novel gets very clunky, as we flash forward three months and David’s become a proto-Bruce Banner, traveling alone around the country, totally off the grid. A one-man army in the war against the invaders. Why? It’s never properly explained why he must stay underground, why he can’t go for help – in fact, the FBI agents were willing to help him in the earlier sequence. But that’s the setup of the show, of course, and Laumer’s constrained by it. He does what any contract writer would do and just barrells on, hoping we’ll overlook the illogic. I didn’t, because I take notes. 

David in his travels has come to a small town, where he happens to see flyers for ISIS, a “UFO cult” that has spread due to the numerous UFO sightings of the day. David goes to that night’s meeting, where he meets Henry Thrall, a man who claims to be like David – just here to gawk at the crazies. There’s some interesting insight here on how UFO sightings of the era were seen; David feels that it couldn’t all be a hoax, or a conspiracy…but personally I think Gian Quasar is on to something. David feels that these “saucerites” might be a sort of front for the invaders, and though he plays his cards close to his chest he suspects he might’ve encountered a kindred soul with Thrall. In fact, Thrall claims that he’s aware of the truth behind it all – and asks David to leave the meeting and come back to his house. (Again, the “hmmm” connotations are pretty strong here.) 

But this “book” is titled “The Maniac,” so we know something bad’s about to happen. And, sure enough, Thrall’s “house” turns out to be an abandoned wreckage in which he keeps all kinds of weird stuff…including an “autopsied alien” which is clearly just some poor guy the psycho captured and accused of being an alien. Again, all of it a lot more twisted than anything that could get on TV in 1967. This leads to a crazed game of cat and mouse between Thrall and David, the former chasing our hero through the darkened ruins of the house. The sequence builds in intensity, complete with the surprise return of our recurring villain. Here Laumer (or whoever wrote the unproduced script he was possibly adapting – perhaps series creator Larry Cohen, who is credited in the book) opens the story with Dorn offering David a chance at immortality – if David were to help the aliens, in return they would give him superstrength and other superhuman attributes, like being able to run forty miles an hour. 

All these things the aliens of the “Great Race,” as Dorn refers to his people, are capable of doing. They also have weird regrowth powers; Dorn’s hand was burned off by the Eruptor, and he displays a new babylike appendage that is growing on the stalk of his arm. Soon he will have regrown a completely new hand to replace the lost one. I don’t believe any of this stuff made it into the actual TV show; I don’t recall the aliens having any of these powers, but then again I’ve only seen two episodes. There is very much a hive mentality to the aliens in this novelization; Dorn also refers to the “Survival Master” as being the leader of the invaders; but then, Dorn later states that the aliens aren’t here to invade so much as they just want to cohabitate with the humans. They’ve spent millennia searching for a suitable planet, and have finally found it with Earth. I’m not sure if any of this backstory made it into the show. 

The final “book” is titled “Counterattack,” and has David hooking up with another one-off character, a sergeant near an Air Force base who relays his own story of having encountered aliens. It’s once again “three months later,” meaning The Invaders takes place over the course of six months. David Vincent is still traveling around on his own; Dorn mentioned that “something” would be happening within three months, and David is determined to figure out what it could be. A chance reading about an upcoming “meteor shower” in the paper is all the clue David needs; soon enough he’s meeting with various scientists to get more info on what the scientists claim will just be a harmless meteor shower in the desert. David suspects – and of course will be proven correct – that the shower will be camouflage for an alien invasion. 

Again we get more action than a TV show could handle, with David and his new military pal blasting away in the desert with heavy weaponry as the “meteors” turn out to be clusters of alien pods which are floating down onto the desert floor. We also get a final dealing with Dorn, who as mentioned is the novel’s main villain; another difference, as I don’t believe the TV show had any recurring villainous aliens. Like most ‘60s shows it was no doubt episodic, as is Laumer’s tie-in, but he does a good job of tying the three separate “books” of the novel into one story. By novel’s end David Vincent is once again on the road, one man alone against the Invaders, and you still don’t understand why he can’t go to anyone for help. 

Laumer is very much in a “pulp” mode for The Invaders, going for fast action and description. There are accordingly a lot of clunky sentences and typos, but then the latter could be the result of poor copyediting by the publisher. (Ie “Forty wall bulb” instead of “Forty watt bulb,” etc.) Laumer wrote another volume…and also there was an Invaders series published in the UK, some of the volumes of which were brought over to the US under different titles. It all seems rather confusing and I haven’t much researched it, mostly because I was fine with just reading this one book. 

Stark #6: Corpse On Ice (aka The Revenger #6)

Stark #6: Corpse On Ice, by Joseph Hedges

June, 1975  Pyramid Books

(Original UK publication 1975)

Coming in to this sixth volume of Stark I knew what to expect: the narrative would be pointlessly nihilistic, every female character would suffer a gruesome fate, the “hero” would be an asshole with no redeeming features, most chapters would end with goofy puns, and Terry “Joseph Hedges” Harknett would overwrite to the point of tedium. Thusly prepared I waded into Corpse On Ice; I’d been meaning to get back to the series for a good while now, and decided what the hell, now was the time. As it turned out, while all the above things held true, I didn’t detest this one as much as the other two I read. 

Ironically Corpse On Ice was the last volume to be published in the US; Pyramid Books must’ve also disliked the series, or more likely it just wasn’t selling so they cancelled it. But still the lazy bastards couldn’t correct the footnotes; while the quotation marks for dialog have been changed to American-standard double quotations as opposed to the original British single quotations, previous volumes are still referred to as “The Revenger.” This of course was the title of the original British series, before it was changed to “Stark” in the US so as not to conflict with Jon Messmann’s The Revenger. But apparently no one at Pyramid Books realized they should change the footnotes, and surely this had to confuse at least some of the original readers. But hell, maybe they were too busy smoking their Kent cigarettes and enjoying the ‘70s to be bothered by such trivial details. 

True to series form this one picks up soon after the previous volume, with John Stark still in Sweden. It’s like a few days or weeks later, and now he’s in Stockholm, hiding out in a hotel from the company and the cops. And of course he’s managed to pick up some babe: Inga, the 19 year-old manager of the Ritz Stark is staying in. In fact he’s here with free room and board, courtesy Inga. The girl is becoming attached to Stark, even though she’s figured out he’s the criminal everyone is searching for, and she begs him to stay with her. This of course is Stark’s cue to get the hell out. But when Inga’s gone for the night, Stark meets another sexy chick: Belinda, a young Canadian girl who comes to his hotel room and within moments of introducing herself has stripped down, displaying her “sex beard.” (Certainly the most unpleasant description of pubic hair I’ve ever encountered.) 

But Stark is all business, and despite playing along with Belinda, who claims to be a friend of Inga’s, and that Inga’s sent her over to keep Stark sexually satisfied, he suspects her of being a company decoy. (As a reminder, Harknett never capitalizes the name of Stark’s archenemies, the global crime network that is “the company.”) Stark says his childhood fantasy was to bang his sexy teacher on top of her desk, so he has Belinda act it out for him…but instead he whips out his gun and jams the barrel into her “gaping orifice!” This believe it or not was a recurring image in the wild and wooly world of ‘70s men’s adventure novels, a la The Sharpshooter #16. But Harknett goes in a different direction, with a sequence so crazed I just had to share it: 

Yes, Belinda gets off royally, climaxing on the barrel of the gun. Which of course eventually leads to one of Stark’s lame puns: “I had you over a barrel.” It’s hard to believe that a series that includes a sexy chick climaxing on a gun barrel could be so lame. I mean this is a series I want to like. But again Harknett does himself no favors, overwritting with no editorial control: positively everything is described ad naseum, from the clothing to the cars to the weather. Any time a new character is introduced we get like a freeze frame as practically every single detail of their face, appearance, and clothing is described. As with previous books this only serves to halt the forward momentum. There’s a lot of action in Corpse On Ice, and Harknett doesn’t shirk on the exploitative detail, but man it still comes off as pretty slow-moving. He also again fills up way too much space focusing on a one-off character, this time the Canadian head of the company. While these sequences have their fair share of sleaze and lurid stuff (including a memorable bit where the guy kills someone by sticking his head in a microwave!), they ultimately only serve to make a long book seem even longer. 

Well anyway, once she’s had her fill of Stark’s pistol, it turns out that Belinda is the secretary of a Canadian businessman named Groves. After he’s made it clear he is not a threat to Stark, Groves reveals that he’s been tracing our “hero” around Europe since Stark’s war on the company began, and thus is here in Sweden given that it’s where Stark raised the most recent hell. Ultimately he offers Stark $10,000 plus expenses to kill a man in Canada. Stark, after a bit of deliberating, agrees – and then tells Groves to send Belinda back in so he can properly bang her on a desk! Harknett as ever does not fade to black; the helluva it is, Stark should be one of the best ‘70s men’s adventure series, what with its ultra gore, explicit sex, and cool setup. But there’s still something just so unpleasant and unlikable about it. Well I mean “sex beard” should give you at least some idea of what I am talking about. 

And another thing that annoys is that the action scenes seem to merely exist so as to set up the latest pun. For example, we have this egregious bit where Stark is attacked by company thugs at the Stockholm airport. This series is like The Lone Wolf in that Stark’s enemies are always surrounding him, no matter what lengths he goes to hide himself. So Stark goes into the restroom and waits for the company thugs to come in after him. Then he gets a “gas cylinder” from the janitorial room(?) and uses it to spark a torch, which he then uses on the thugs, frying them up. After which he quips, “It was quite a gas.” I guess Harknett must’ve had fun coming up with scenarios to challenge his gift for puns, but at the same time it would’ve been just as cool for Stark to blow their heads off with a .38 and call it a day. But heck, even this weird factor should be enough to give Stark an edge, but regardless the series still sort of bugs me. 

And there really is a Lone Wolf-esque dark, surreal vibe to Stark, especially how Stark is constantly being hounded. No matter where he goes, company men are waiting for him. Even in Canada, a place he’s never been before, he’s nearly captured by company men as soon as he arrives in Toronoto. This entails a long journey out into the Canadian wilderness, at the end of which Stark and Belinda find themselves the targets of a company sniper and a company demolitions expert. Again the overwriting slows down the proceedings, but this part does show a more savage side to Stark, as he wields a rake in a nicely violent sequence. It also features the grimy denouement of Stark talking to the blasted-out eyeball of a particular character. It’s at this point that Harknett “opens up” the narrative with a lot of stuff focused on Essex, the Canadian honcho of the company and the man who sent these two to kill Stark. 

Once Stark hooks back up with Groves he learns what all this is about: the company runs a male prostitution ring here in Canada, and Groves’s twenty-five year-old son has gotten involved with it, likely as a way to stick it back to his notoriously-whoring father. “A man does not live by perverted screwing alone,” Groves the elder puts it. As a reminder of how twisted this series is, it’s actually Groves’s own son that Groves has hired Stark to kill. The reasoning behind this is vague at best, and Harknett doesn’t do the best job of explaining the setup. However the titular “corpse on ice,” which turns out to be literal, throws a monkeywrench into these plans, and as it develops Stark’s “assignment” is no longer about assassinating one person but wiping out as many of the Canadian company thugs as he can. Groves even presents Stark with a souped-up car and a veritable arsenal of machine guns, pistols, explosives, and the like to wage his war. 

Stark heads into Calgary, getting in the occasional firefight along the road with the company thugs who are perennially on his tail. There’s a crazy part where he gets the drop on one of the company’s male whores just as the guy’s about to pleasure his elderly female client. Stark’s assholery is firmly on display here, as he mocks the woman’s appearance. So too is the nihilistic tone of the series, as Stark is so devoted to eradicating the company that even the lowest of peons must suffer and die. This leads Stark to a resort lounge in the snowswept mountains in which the male hookers are trained in the art of screwing by sexy young women(!). Harknett caters to the pulp vibe by opening this sequence with Stark, newly arrived on the location, immediately being propositioned by a sexy young snowbunny who doffs her clothes and lies down in the snow, waiting to have some sex asap. One likable thing about this series is that Stark is not as single-minded as some of his men’s adventure brethren, and thus gives the girl the goods in another explicit sequence – after which she says there’s nothing she could teach the phenomenally-gifted Stark! 

But the finale of Corpse On Ice dispenses with the “fun” pulp and gets right back to the series mainstay of “unpleasantly nihilistic” pulp. Stark goes into the main lodge and discovers a young woman delivering some bondage sex to a bound company freak, and this boils Stark right up – that a woman so young and innocent could be so corrupted by the company. So he whips out his pistol and blows her brains out! Then he gets out a rifle, heads onto the slopes to wait for his prey, Essex, to come out to ski…takes a nap(?!)…and then wakes up in time to see everyone leaving for the lunch call, so he starts firing willy-nilly onto the slopes. Company men and innocent young women fall beneath Stark’s bullets (he wonders if the snowbunny he screwed might be among his victims), and then he rushes for his car to escape the scene of his latest carnage.  

As mentioned this was the last volume of Stark to be published by Pyramid Books, but The Revenger continued on for six more volumes in merry old England. This is also the last volume of the series I currently have…by Harknett, at least. (And I’m in no hurry to fill the gaps in this particular collection.) The only other volume of The Revenger I have is the last one, 1977’s Angel Of Destruction, which is by Angus Wells, who wrote the final two volumes of the series. I’m only familiar with his work from the Raven series. We’ll see how his take on John Stark measures up to Terry Harknett’s.

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #3: Murder Today, Money Tomorrow

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #3: Murder Today, Money Tomorrow, by Jon Messmann

August, 1973  Pyramid Books

The third volume of Jefferson Boone, Handyman is a little better than the previous two, because Jon Messmann backs off on the “international terrorist” angle and delivers a mystery plot that’s more in-line with his cerebral protagonist. It was kind of hard to buy the whole Jefferson “Handyman” Boone concept in the earlier books; as I wrote, he just came off a bit too much like “James Bond meets Frasier Crane” to be believable. Messmann also slightly tones down on the introspective musings, which is a help, but he also turns way up on the casual misogyny. 

Again, I don’t virtue-signal lightly (or ever, really), but in this case there’s no other word for it but misogyny. Messmann is kind of a creep in how he typically treats his female characters, as has been noted in reviews of his other novels (as well as in the comments sections). And I’m not talking about how he objectifies them, how he always mentions their breasts – I mean I encourage stuff like that from my men’s adventure authors; these books should come straight from the male id. What I mean is how many of his male protagonists are just total assholes to women. Constantly putting them down, snipping at them, mocking them, etc. Murder Today, Money Tomorrow goes further in this regard than any previous Messmann novel I’ve read, with the ultimate effect that Boone (or “Jeff,” as Messmann most often refers to him in the narrative) comes off as a dick, and the “taming of the shrew” angle ultimately makes no sense in the context of the book. 

There’s no pickup from previous volumes, and in fact Messmann gives a bit more background on Jeff this time. Not too much, but in dialog Jeff relates how he decided to become an international “handyman” after the murder of his diplomat father. In fact we’re told his dad was “killed right in front” of Jeff. This volume overall really ties into Jeff’s past; when we meet him he’s waiting in the dark in rural Virginia for a childhood friend named Roger Van Court, an eccentric guy Jeff never really liked. Jeff’s dad and Roger’s mom were apparently having a bit of a fling when the two boys were kids, and Jeff would spend every Christmas at the Van Court estate. And we’re really in the upper-crust world of the filthy rich; this series has always traded on the jet-set world, and Murder Today, Money Tomorrow makes it clear that Jefferson Boone grew up in the lap of luxury. This of course makes his current role as a total bad-ass a bit hard to buy, but whatever. 

That bad-assery is displayed posthaste, though; first Boone is approached by a “truculent” young blonde with an “elfin” build who appears to be with Roger. Jeff immediately dislikes her, for reasons Messmann never really makes believable. She’s protective of Roger, clearly, but Jeff suspects her of foul play or somesuch. Roger does appear, but only momentarily, as some guys with guns show up and start blasting at him. In the pitch dark Jeff manages to turn the tables, killing off the thugs with his pistol. Here Messmann introduces a new gimmick to the series: Jeff drops a “little gold toolbox” onto one of the corpses. In other words, the calling card of the “Handyman.” Meanwhile, both Roger and the girl have fled. Jeff goes back to DC for some good lovin’ with a chick he’s been checking out at cocktail parties over the past few years; Messmann develops this curious subplot where the girl, Fran, she of the “full-bosomed, long-legged loveliness,” wants to be Jeff’s steady, but the relationship is broken off within a few pages, due to jealousy. Fran calls Jeff up next morning and discovers another girl on the line. This is Cassie, the “elfin blonde” who was with Roger the night before; she’s lost Roger as well, and will hang out with Jeff for the duration to find him again. 

The funny thing about Money Today, Murder Tomorrow is that the back cover makes it clear that Roger Van Court, a geologist, has made a discovery that could lead to a new form of power. However, Jefferson Boone spends the entire novel not knowing what it is Roger’s discovered, nor why so many people are trying to kill him. Even more ridiculously, Cassie herself has no idea what Roger was up to, even though she’s spent the past year as his companion. The two had an “understanding,” one that Messmann plays out as a lame mystery for almost the entire novel. But it’s clear that she and Roger were close, and a recurring bit is that Jeff is just unable to see Roger being with this cute blonde with an elfin build…however, when Cassie comes over to Jeff’s pad and takes off her coat, Jeff sees that “the little elf had magnificently high, full breasts.” 

Poor Cassie can’t catch a break from Jeff or Roger. She goes around the world with Jeff, who treats her like shit the entire time. Putting her down, mocking her, disparaging her relationship with Roger. He’s constantly on the attack, too; I lost count of the number of times Messmann used the dialog modifier “tossed off” when Jeff spoke to Cassie. But then Roger was a dick to her, too, a condescending one at that. She’s from backwoods Tennessee (or maybe it’s West Virginia; Messmann can’t seem to make up his mind), and Roger met her while on one of his research trips. He took a cotton to her, took her under his wing; it was a podunk town and everyone always took Cassie for granted until Roger Van Court came along. But, we learn, he tried to give her culture, giving her books to read, teaching her how to act in “polite society,” etc, etc. Now that’s “mansplaining” folks. And of course done without any apology; indeed, Jeff is quite pleased with the progress Roger made on the otherwise rednecked Cassie! 

But see that’s the thing. Nowhere does Cassie act like a dumb hick, or do anything stupid, or do anything that would make Jeff dislike her. And yet Jeff does dislike or at least distrust her, and goes out of his way to attack her at all times. It makes him seem like a total asshole, and what’s weird is that you get the impression that Messman doesn’t think he is an asshole. I mean we aren’t talking like an anti-hero sort of deal here. Jeff is the hero, no questions asked. So he takes Cassie under his own wing and they follow the vague leads on where Roger could be holed up, and why. Given this, Cassie has a greater part in the narrative than previous female characters. But it’s a strange relationship for sure, and Jeff’s attitude toward Cassie would certainly get him canceled in today’s “believe all women” world. 

It soon becomes clear that Roger is into something deep and is hiding for a reason. Jeff is constantly followed; even when going to pick Cassie up, driving back into Virginia, he’s tailed by some goons, managing to lose them in some salt flats. It gets to be annoying, though, because every time Jeff gets close to Roger, the guy will either run away or send an emissary in his place, to the extent that it almost takes on the tone of a Monty Python skit. Roger’s sought out Jeff, though, because Jeff’s “Handyman” status has become legedary, and also even as a kid Jefferson Boone was known for his fortitude. The action is infrequent, but always handled in a realistic matter when it happens, however as usual Messmann never dwells on the gory details. After encountering a few random thugs, Jeff deduces that Portugal had something to do with whatever Roger was into, so he and Cassie head there. 

The jet-setting Eurotrash stuff is pretty thick, here; as I mentioned before, Jefferson Boone, Handyman is more akin to the trash fiction bestsellers of the day, a la Burt Hirschfeld and the like. Messmann shows restraint, though, in that Jeff does not conjugate with the ultra-hot, ultra-stacked beauty Maria De Vasquez, whom he first sees getting into a fancy vintage car outside of a restaurant. Through various plot developments, Jeff has settled on Maria’s wealthy uncle as someone who might know what Roger was up to. De Vasquez seems to have walked out of a Bond novel, a man of such wealth that he retains his own retinue of enforcers and who has a garage filled with priceless vintage cars. Even here though the battle of wills with Cassie is played out; De Vasquez invites Jeff and Cassie to a party at his villa, and Jeff keeps imploring Cassie not to go, telling her she’ll be “out of her league” and “make a fool of herself” in front of all the jet-setting Euroscum. Seriously, the guy’s a dick. 

But the “Pygmallion” stuff is only reinforced when Cassie, wouldja believe, comes out of her room ready for the party…and it’s as if she’s become an entirely different woman. She has just one dress – bought for her by Roger, of course, for when he took her to socialite parties! – and she’s gotten her hair done, and she of course manages to hold her own at the party. Indeed she holds it so well that Jeff finds himself ignoring super-stacked Maria to keep checking on Cassie! Now all along Cassie’s been telling Jeff there was “more to the story” so far as her relationship with Roger went, and that night she finally tells Jeff it all: due to a “childhood incident,” Roger was no longer able to, uh, rise to the occasion, thus he and Cassie had a sort of “student-teacher” relationship and nothing more. And folks you better believe she’s ready for some good lovin’. She and Jeff go at it in a fairly explicit scene that for once doesn’t play out with the Hirschfeld-esque metaphors and analogies of previous such scenes. 

And meanwhile, Jeff still ponders this unfathomable case, this “increasingly multifaceted rigadoon with death.” Yes, that’s actually a line in the book. I don’t think even prime-era William Shatner could’ve delivered that with a straight face. (Orson Welles probably could’ve…and then he’d take a thoughtful puff on his ever-present cigar.) Finally, on page 147, Jeff learns that Roger was in-line to a breakthrough in “thermal energy.” This he learns from his State Dept. contact Charley Hopkins. And, of course, De Vasquez and his minions are out for it. This leads to a nice action scene where Cassie gets in on it; a country girl, she’s more than familiar with handling a rifle, and uses one to blast apart some thugs they chase while Jeff handles the car. As I say, she’s a likable character, making Jeff’s treatment of her seem even worse…though of course by this point they’ve been to bed a few times together, so at least he’s nicer to her. 

This proves to be the action highlight of the novel. As befitting the mystery thriller Murder Today, Money Tomorrow really is, the actual climax plays out more on a suspense vibe. Jeff and Cassie return to Roger’s home, where they learn exactly why thugs were constantly popping out of the woodwork to tail them. In other words there was a traitor in Roger’s life, and this character is dealt with in an entertaining – if predictable – finale. And it’s also worth noting that Jeff pitchforks a guy in this climactic sequence. It’s also interesting that Cassie knows her fling with Jeff has a limited lifespan; at novel’s end she wants one more roll in the hay, then she’s off to live her life. 

But man, there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t even cover here…like the bit where Jeff and Cassie go back to Cassie’s home town and run into some rednecks there. And other stuff on Jeff’s highfalutin childhood and jet-setting life in DC. As ever Messmann packs a lot of prose into the small, dense print of the book, clearly trying to write a “real” novel instead of the third installment of an action series. And I have to say, I think he succeeded this time. It won’t float everyone’s boat, but Murder Today, Money Tomorrow was pretty entertaining…if you can put aside the main character’s rampant misogyny, that is.

Mafia: Operation Hijack

Mafia: Operation Hijack, by Don Romano
August, 1974  Pyramid Books

“Attention Mafia hijackers: Richard Dawson has had enough of your shit!”*

The penultimate volume of Mafia: Operation is courtesy Paul Eiden, the first of two books he wrote for the series; he also wrote Operation Loan Shark, which happened to be the last volume of the series. But again as I’ve mentioned in every single review, Mafia: Operation isn’t really a series, per se, and instead is a set of unrelated, standalone novels focusing on the world of the mob. This time the plot is hijacking, obviously, and my only assumption is that Eiden, like most other ghostwriters for series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, was given the title and synopsis and told to cater a novel to it – only he had a helluva time figuring out how to write about hijacking trucks for 190 pages.

The end result is that there’s precious little hijacking in Operation Hijack, with the focus more on inter-family Mafia rivalries, a complex heist involving freight shipments from Europe, and finally the seduction-via-subjugation of a couple cold-fish beauties – an Eiden staple, and a clear indication that he was indeed the author who wrote another Engel production, Crooked Cop. There’s a subplot here that’s almost identical to the one in that earlier, superior novel, where the titular crooked cop went out of his way to subjugate a beautiful high-society whore…and she ended up falling in love with him. Eiden is in some ways in an even more macho, misogynist realm than Manning Lee Stokes: Operation Hijack states often that most women want to be treated like shit or generally abused, and it’s the surest way to get them to love you – and when they love you they’ll do anything for you. Actually there are “tips” throughout on how to get women in line and to do your bidding. (None of these tips seem to work on wives, btw; in fact, it turns out they have the complete opposite effect.)

Another hallmark of Eiden’s work is that his books are basically tragedies, featuring an arrogant alpha male protagonist who is clearly headed for misfortune – misfortune he could easily prevent if he was more aware of what was going on around him and not so much wrapped up in his own ego. There are a lot of similarities to Crooked Cop, so far as the protagonist goes: the “hero” of this one is Ralph Borden, aka Rafael Bardini, a muscular former boxer who still runs a couple miles a day and hits the weights first thing in the morning, working out in his penthouse apartment in Manhattan. He’s 29, sports a moustache, moves through women with ease, and runs the “hijacking scheme” for Don Carlo Renati. Ralph was plucked from the streets by Don Carlo, taken out of his successful Golden Gloves career and put on the fast-track to Mafia success. He was sent to college and put his business ideas to work in refashioning the mob, immediately making the family tons of money through various legal and illegal schemes.

The main plot actually has more to do with Ralph scheming to become the youngest Don in the Mafia. Don Carlo is in his 70s and frail and Ralph worries that he might be going senile. The other families are closing in on them, and Ralph’s afraid a mob war is brewing, and their little family will be wiped out – unless Don Carlo can “make” more soldiers (ie giving them kill contracts so they can become full-fledged Mafia members) and put himself together a proper army. So there’s a lot of plotting and scheming in this one, more of a “peek inside the Mafia world” than in Operation Loan Shark, so be prepared for a barrage of Italian names and histories on the various fictional families at play. I found it all a little boring, but at the very least it is a “Mafia novel,” more so than any others in the series, most of which focused on characters who orbited around the Mafia. Operation Hijack is different from the other four books in the “series” in that the protagonist is a full Mafia member, wholly part of the mob life.

The opening had me thinking we were going to get something similar to Operation Porno (the best volume of the series by far!), as we meet Ralph while he’s planning the financing of a “black action flick with white money behind it.” Eiden was certainly aware of the urban action movies of the day, with the characters specifically referencing Blaxploitation, and Ralph telling the young black director of the movie that he could be “the next Melvin van Peebles.” Or as one of the black characters says, “People who put down so-called blaxploitation films are mistaken.” Central to this group of filmmakers is a six-foot black beauty named Camille Caine, who is to star in the movie Ralph is financing: “Black Motor Cycle Girl.” The title sucks, but the plot sounds promising (what little we learn of it)…a biker/Blaxploitation hybrid. But sadly friends this will be all we hear about the movie!

Instead, the focus is on Ralph getting his “pound of flesh.” Haughty Ciarra, a model, is pissed that she’s getting such low pay, and Ralph goes out of his way to talk down to her, to make it clear she’s easily replaced – just total prig stuff, like referring only to “the girl” when speaking of the main actress, even though Ciarra’s sitting right there. This will just be our first glimpse of how Ralph must subjugate his female prey before he dominates them…and the more they dislike him, the more enjoyment he gets out of it. The guys leave, and Ralph makes it clear that Camille has “the classic decision” all aspiring actresses face: anonymity or the producer’s bed. Camille of course choses the latter, trying to get some digs in on Ralph for being a “wop.” He responds that “to be Italian is beautiful,” and further makes a compelling case that all black women secretly lust for a white lover! 

As with other Eiden novels I’ve read, Ralph’s poor treatment of the woman works to his advantage, with her soon pleading for sex in his swank penthouse. And promptly falling in love with him afterward! Indeed Ralph has to threaten to throw her out a few days later, as she refuses to leave him – and she needs to fly out to California to get started on the movie. In other words she’s willing to throw away her potential career for this guy she just met, this guy she hated at first sight. This sort of alpha male dominance is of course unacceptable in today’s entertainment, but as mentioned Eiden doles it out so casually that you almost forget Ralph’s supposed to be an anti-hero. He’ll go on to subjugate and dominate two more women in the novel, and unfortunately this is the last we see of Camille, or even hear about the movie.

The only hijacking stuff in the novel occurs early on. Ralph’s lieutenant, a former street soldier named Mickey, oversees a trucking hijacking scheme, where they rip off some poor trucker, stuff him in the trunk (eventually letting him go), and take the wares to a secret location to sell later. We see one of the hijacks go down, then learn later that the hijackers themselves were hijacked – some guys with shotguns and lead pipes ran the truck off the road and beat the drivers so unmerciful that one of them dies and the other loses an eye. Mickey is simmering for revenge, as is Ralph, but Don Carlo finds out from the Mafia commission that they’re to let it slide – longtime rivals the Palucci family were behind the counter-hijack, lying that they didn’t know Don Carlo’s men had already hijacked the truck. The Don sees something Ralph missed: there must be a traitor in their family who let the Paluccis know about the truck.

Ralph succeeds into talking the Don into vengeance, so an elaborate scheme is set up where they can foil the hijackers…and figure out who the mole is in their own organization. The cover painting comes into play here, with Ralph and Mickey waiting in a decoy truck with shotguns; when they’re hit by hijackers they come out blasting, wiping out would-be hijackers in gory splendor. This will be the only action scene in the novel. After which it’s more into the “Mafia drama suspense” mode, with a lot of stuff centered on the elaborate revenge on the capo who set them up in the first place…a revenge which has another of Ralph’s men, Joey, making his bones by carrying out the hit. Later the Paluccis will approach Ralph, basically offering him the role of a minor don if he himself will kill Don Carlo. Ralph will of course refuse the offer, which sets off the climactic events, but honestly the Mafia subplot also disappears for long stretches.

Instead, Eiden is more focused on Ralph’s breaking down the icy demeanor of a “full-breasted” Dutch beauty named Holly, who is such a cold fish she wonders if she’s a “Lez.” Actually she doesn’t even wonder; she reveals later she’s had sex with “many” women, in addition to men…it’s just that no one’s able to get her off. This is the subplot that is so reminiscent of Crooked Cop. Holly works for Dutch airline KLM, and Ralph’s had this complex heist scheme in mind for a long time…basically, from what little we learn of it, involving Holly using her contacts in the freight departments of various airlines in Europe to hijack shipments by changing the shipping addresses. But first he’ll need to seduce Holly, so we have a lot of stuff of him breaking down her icy reserve, despite her reservations and hesitations and constant reminders that nothing turns her on. Of course Ralph succeeds, quite easily it seems, by merely going down on her…after which he has her calling him “Lord Ralph” and literally begging for sex.

I should mention that despite all the focus on seduction and foreplay, there really isn’t much hardcore material in Operation Hijack, certainly not as much as there was in the first three volumes by Alan Nixon and Robert Turner. Also Eiden’s recurring “widely-separated breasts” line doesn’t appear here, so maybe it’s something he only used occasionally as his literary calling card. We are often reminded of Holly’s “heavy breasts,” but even this boobsploitation is nowhere on the level of later Eiden offerings like Operation Weatherkill. So focused is Eiden on the subjugation and dominance of Holly that the actual Heist material is over and done with in a few pages; we’re told Ralph and Holly venture around Europe for “two months” to set up the complex scheme, after which Ralph thankfully deposits Holly in Zurich and hurries back to New York – she has, of course, fallen completely in love with him, hoping for marriage.

Ralph’s third conquest happens immediately after and isn’t as much explored as the previous two. It’s a redheaded beauty named Eilen, and he meets her at his country club, where she rides horses and enjoys the highfalutin life of the jet-set rich. She’s a stewardess, and Ralph doesn’t have to do much in the way of subjugation or domination for her, but Eiden does cleverly work it in when the first time Eileen sees Ralph, he’s screaming at some poor stable hand for failing to take proper care of Ralph’s horse. In other words she’s glimpsed his alpha male dominance from afar. So we get stuff of them romancing, and meanwhile Eiden occasionally reminds us that Ralph’s in the Mafia and there’s a war brewing between his family and the Paluccis.

As is typical with most of Eiden’s work, things come to a sudden head after so many, many pages of stalling and padding. Holly comes back without warning, to catch Eileen in Ralph’s bed, and literally tears her face apart in a shocking scene. Things fly to a conclusion after this, as Holly claims to have been sent back due to a cable she received from Ralph…however Ralph never sent a cable. It’s a setup from the Paluccis, and the finale is almost hamfistedly rushed; major characters are killed off-page, and Ralph assembles the remaining family to discuss going to the matresses…while a squad of Palucci hitmen with Browning Automatic Rifles converge on the scene. It’s memorable at least, and definitely the ending we’ve been expecting since page one, but man if Eiden had only spent more time developing the Mafia subplot instead of hopscotching around so much other incidental stuff. In other words he’s squandered the plot’s potential, something he did – even more drastically – in The Ice Queen.

That said, Eiden’s writing is fine as ever; he has a definite literary touch, same as most other writers in Engel’s stable, yet never lets it get in the way of the narrative flow. But he had a tendency to pad and stall, same as Stokes. Perhaps not as bad as Stokes, but then Stokes was capable of more memorable plots and sequences, whereas a sort of blandness often settles over Eiden’s books. But when he was on form, he could knock them out of the park, as with Crooked Cop. Maybe he just took a while to warm up to the series he was hired for, as Operation Loan Shark was much better than this one.

*In the tradition of Zwolf’s hilarious takes on celebrity lookalikes on cover artwork