The Rapist

The Rapist, by Don Logan
October, 1975  Pocket Books

Jeez, here’s Don Logan with the feel-good book of the summer!! Seriously though, The Rapist is another of those lurid crime paperbacks copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, just like Manning Lee Stokes's Corporate Hooker, Inc. And, according to Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms III, “Don Logan” was none other than William Crawford.

Last year I read the first volume of Crawford’s Stryker series, which I found a little frustrating due to Crawford’s tendency to constantly stall forward momentum by doling out inconsequential backstories about every single character introduced or mentioned. He does the same thing throughout The Rapist, though not quite to the extent of Stryker #1. I wonder if Crawford was a cop, or a former cop, or maybe just a cop junkie or something, because once again he has turned out a cop novel that seems very much grounded in reality and research.

Also, like Stokes’s novel, The Rapist reads a lot like the ‘70s work of Herbert Kastle, in particular Cross-Country. It’s a dark, dark tale, about the titular character’s horrific and gruesome assaults upon strong-willed women in mid-‘70s New York City, and it pulls no punches. Suprisingly though, the novel never once trades in outright sleaze, and despite the lurid happenings it doesn’t comes across like a cheap work of exploitation. In fact there isn’t even a single sex scene, though Crawford does provide a few violent shooutouts.

The rapist of the title is a young, good-looking guy named Timothy Johnson (though Crawford at first only refers to him as “the Rapist” in the sections from his perspective). He’s tall, muscular, and very attractive to women. He’s also got tattoos all over his arms, and we eventually learn in a “boy how the times have changed” moment that tattoos are generally the sign of a criminal, though “there is no direct correllation between the two.” The Rapist opens the novel with one of his “hits,” stealing an attractive young woman off the streets, killing her instantly, and raping and mutilating her corpse in his windowless delivery van. 

Crawford never actually describes one of the Rapists’s attacks, but he does serve up the lurid details when the cops inspect the corpse he leaves behind. It’s so desecrated and defiled that even hardbitten vets run to the john to puke. However our two heroes manage to keep their gorge down, despite how revolted they are: Burrell Mackey, at 48 one of the older men on the force, but a mountain of muscle nonetheless, and Lee Cotton, a younger but still experienced cop who was a Green Beret in ‘Nam. Both men are detectives, with Mackey the lead, and Crawford serves up details about how crime fighting has much changed from when Mackey joined the force back in ’46, right after fighting in the war.

Another of Crawford’s annoying tendencies is referring to his characters by multiple names in the narrative. He does this in The Rapist, and it gets to be confusing at first, like for example how he refers to Mackey as “Mackey,” “Burrell,” and most confusingly (at first) “Burr.” It might sound like a minor thing, but it does cause for some disconnect when the reader’s trying to figure out who the author is referring to. Even more disconnect is caused by the arbitrary backstories that spring up in the text, usually so unnecessary as to be hilarious, like when Crawford mentions that a doctor helps out the precinct anonymously and then explains that he does so because he wouldn’t want his regular patients to know he is helping the cops. Just little things like this, like the Stryker installment I read, really halt the forward momentum for no good reason.

The cops are in an increasing panic as Johnson murders and ravages several more women, leaving mauled corpses in his wake. Instead of following on this story, Crawford instead gets in this long subplot where Mackey and Cotton begin hassling the well-known Johnson brothers, local criminals who have often had run-ins with the law. They check with them merely to see if they can get more info about this rapist – at this point, the fact that his last name is also “Johnson” is not known by the police; it’s all just lazy, coincidental plotting. But at any rate it leads to this very long gunfight in which a few of the brothers end up dead. 

Meanwhile the rapist gets clawed up by one of his victims, and later during his getaway he runs into cops, attacking them. When Mackey and Cotton see the guy at the next morning’s lineup of all people arrested the previous day, they instantly suspect him, due to his tattoos. At this point he’s given his name as “Johnsen,” but our protagonists can’t get over how his facial features are so like those other Johnson brothers. At great length it develops that “Timmy Johnson” killed his dad when he was a kid and almost killed his stepdad, and thus was placed in a mental ward, the majority of his brothers disowning him and insisting he change his last name. So in other words, he really is another of those criminal Johnson brothers the author so lazily introduced.

The rapist goes free after the lineup – only later do the cops learn who he is – and continues about his campaign. But The Rapist is also like Corporate Hooker, Inc. in that it starts off being one thing but ends up being another. When an A.P.B. is put out on the rapist, he spots a motorcycle cop following him, and runs him over. But with his dying breath the cop gets off a few shots, each of them hitting the rapist. Half-dead, he holes up in a building, eventually resorting to one of his brothers for help.

Now the novel becomes just another “fugitive on the run” tale, and this goes on for well over a hundred pages, with Crawford adding to the page count with anecdotes about what it’s like to be a cop. There’s also lots of time-filler stuff with Richard Rivers, yet another of those Geraldo Rivera-type journalists who always pop up in these pulp crime novels, as an eternal thorn in authority’s side; he starts up CAPJAL, or “Capture Johnson Alive,” an uber-liberal initiative to ensure Timothy Johnson is not killed via the usual “police brutality.” All of this ultimately leads nowhere, though we do get the memorable image of Rivers shitting himself when he finally gets a chance to meet Johnson – Crawford, as shown in Stryker #1, has a special fondness for having his characters shit themselves.

It all builds up to a gradual climax in which Johnson holes up in the apartment of his first victim in the novel, taking captive the girl’s roommate, Tawny. After lots of (undescribed) degradation of the poor girl, as well as traded rants with the cops, it culminates with Mackey and Cotton attacking the apartment, with Cotton in these final pages going into “Vietnam mode” and wanting to kick some shit. It all leads to a downbeat finale, with one of the two cops dead, but it sort of lacks punch because, despite the amount of time spent with these guys, it’s not like we got to know either of them.

I think Crawford is a good writer, with dialog and incidental details that seem cut from real-life, but I just don’t think he’s a very good novelist. Which is to say, he has the details and the dialog, but when it comes to putting it all together into a cogent whole, he sort of fails. The novel comes off more like lots of arbitrary cop stories interspersed with periodic flashes of sadism, before building up to a hasty and anticlimactic finale. In other words The Rapist is a lot like the later lurid crime novel Hellfire.

The Savage Women

The Savage Women, by Mike Curtis
No month stated, 1976  Leisure Books

Taking the battle of the sexes to extreme proportions, this obscure Leisure paperback original is almost a masterful work of lurid sleaze, but not quite. While it’s definitely sick and sleazy, filled with graphic and sadistic detail, it comes off as a little plodding due to its repetitive nature.

It’s a super-hot August in New York City, and as the novel opens a group of construction workers are checking out an insanely gorgeous woman who waltzes by them, wearing practically nothing. She stops to let them check her out further, then propositions one of them. The guy, not believing his luck, follows her to a fleabag motel near 42nd Street. There the woman strips, but suddenly refuses to let the guy touch her. When he gets insistent, she beats the shit out of him with incredible karate skills…and then takes out a knife and hacks off his dick!

This crazy opening scene is just a preview of an equally-crazy book – plus the author informs us that the girl, so excited by her kill, brings herself to a quick climax with the “blunt side” of the knife! Another murder soon follows, with an equally-gorgeous blonde waltzing into a singles bar and letting a guy pick her up. She goes back to his place (which is total ‘70s Bachelor Pad, with quad stereo and varicolored lighting), strips for him, and suddenly tells him she’s into S&M. He lets her tie him up on his waterbed, and then she takes out a knife and slashes up the bed, nearly drowning him. Ensuring he’s still conscious to witness the horrific act, she then hacks off his dick.

Yes, my friends, beautiful women are using “sex to lure men to their death.” The blunt cover blurb sums up the entire novel, but it’s a bit misleading about the “sex” part. It occurred to me toward the end of The Savage Women that there hadn’t been a single sex scene in the entire novel! Instead Mike Curtis concentrates on the sadism, with various gorgeous women disrobing for their hapless victims and then beating the shit out of them before castrating them. Finally they carve “MCP” on the chests of their victims, for “Male Chauvinist Pig.”

After this opening brutality we meet our hero, Detective Mike Bass, a hulking muscle-bound Manhattan cop who makes Dirty Harry look like Columbo. In other words, he’s just like Ryker. In fact I couldn’t understand why Leisure didn’t just make this book another installment of the Ryker series, as Bass is practically Joe Ryker in all but name. Hell, even the editorial goofs, as are typical in the Ryker books where Ryker is accidentally referred to as “Blaze,” are repeated here, with Bass sometimes referred to as “Base.” 

But still, The Savage Women easily could have been Ryker #9, even following the Bizarro World Ryker backstory Edson T. Hamill created in Motive For Murder, with the background detail that Bass is a widow, his wife killed by crooks. My assumption is this novel really was an original work by an original author, or perhaps Leisure was trying to get away from series novels at this time – one can’t help but note how all of the Leisure men’s adventure series ended by 1976.

The few action scenes in The Savage Women occur in the opening, where we are introduced to Bass’s hilariously-aggressive police tactics. Posing as a bum in a subway station, in the hopes that someone will try to mug him, Bass ends up solo when his partner, Detective Joe Rexford, responds to a call; Rexford had been acting as Bass’s undercover assistant. No big deal, though, because when the expected thugs show up, Bass easily beats the shit out of all three of them, even tossing one of them down onto the tracks, where he’s fried on the third rail.

Bass is per tradition constantly hounded by his “stupid chief,” Captain Lou Hudson, but moreso because the captain is exasperated with Bass’s violent nature and how much it costs the city. Bass is moreso hounded by Winston Wells, a Geraldo Rivera-type reporter who constantly accosts Bass over his police brutality. In reality though Wells practically serves as Bass’s punching bag, constantly getting beaten up and tossed around by the irascible cop. Even Rexford, Bass’s younger partner, sometimes thinks Bass goes too far.

I’m making the novel sound more introspective (and intelligent) than it really is. One thing that can be said is that Curtis clearly isn’t taking anything seriously, which adds to the fun. However you sort of wish he’d put maybe a little more thought into it. Instead the novel is just one sadistic scene after another, with various girls picking up guys and taking them back to some slum where they can castrate them, with Bass trying to crack the case.

But Curtis even gets his own details wrong, in particular the women who make up the villains. We learn there are seven of them, each gorgeous and phenomenally-built, each with their own reason for hating men. They have banded together as the “WGM,” ie the Women’s Guerrilla Movement…but strangely their leader is a man. And what a man he is! Named Rodolfo Liston, he’s a tall, muscle-bound gay albino who prances around in a skintight leather outfit, a .44 Magnum dangling from his hip.

Who exactly Rodolfo is, where he came from, and how he got these women to listen to him are all things Curtis leaves unexplained. Instead the WGM regularly meets in Rodolfo’s secret hideout near the Hudson, where the women lounge about in various states of undress and excitedly gossip about their latest kills. Rodolfo will then have them draw lots to see who is the lucky winner who gets to make the next kill. Then Rodolfo will take one or two of the women into his private room in back for a blowjob while the other gals go about pleasuring each other!

And yet while all of this sounds like goddamn perfect sleaze, it all sort of gets monotonous, because Curtis keeps writing the same thing over and over: we’ll meet some dude while he’s going about his life, he’ll spot this super-hot gal who unbelievably enough makes advances on him, he’ll follow the girl back to some slummy apartment she happens to know of, and after he gets the shit beaten out of him the guy, half-dead, will witness his own castration before dying.

Curtis does slightly open up the narrative with the introduction of the Rapists’ Vengeance League, an offshoot of the WGM formed by Nancy, the most lethal of the group. The RVL’s goal is revenge upon the men who raped them, and this is carried out in several more arbitrary but graphically violent sequences. Soon they too begin passing out communiques, and create the same effect as the WGM upon the female population of New York; Curtis presents a city on the verge of outright sexual warfare, with hassled women and mistreated wives being inspired by the WGM and sadistically killing their male oppressors.

It’s interesting that throughout the novel the women are the aggressors. While most of the men the WGM murder are perhaps shady, or at the very least immoral, they aren’t deserving of such horrible fates. In fact one dude even gets second thoughts when walking away with a hot WGM lady who has picked him up, and tries to leave, but the lady bolts the door and murders him anyway. With the RVL murders of course it’s different, as they purposely track down rapists who have gone free again and again due to lazy, disinterested cops. Thus the RVL have an actual positive (if violent) impact on society, getting rid of serial rapists. It’s also interesting that Rodolfo, when he discovers some of his women have created the RVL without his permission, throws a hissy fit.

What doesn’t help matters is the lazy plotting. The hapless cops are unable to find out who the WGM are, and thus stand around and wait for the latest castrated corpse to show up. But then halfway through the novel Curtis suddenly informs us that Bass is friends with a “dyke” named Sydney who is into all of this feminist stuff. He goes to visit her, and sure enough he finds that she’s had interractions with the WGM, though she’s afraid to tell him much more.

About all the “detection” Bass does is go around various Manhattan martial arts schools to ask if any of the instructors have had a beautiful woman in their class, one who has advanced to a high level, given the apparent kung-fu mastery of at least one of the WGM attackers. This leads to several humorous confrontations with Kim Chung, a “malevolent little Oriental” who runs a Midtown karate dojo and who clearly doesn’t like cops. But the laziness extends here as well, with Kim Chung “perhaps knowing” of the girl Bass seeks, but not offering much more than that.

The sudden appearance of the RVL provides more chance to break the case, as once again Bass just happens to know a person who might help – he’s friends with a heavyset restaurant owner whose sexy sister Bass once saved from drugs and prostitution. This is Marcia, and Curtis delivers the laziest “romantic subplot” I’ve ever read in a novel, with the girl unmentioned until like page 100, and then suddenly Bass is asking himself if he truly loves her and etc. Not that this stops Bass from using her as bait, hooking her up with friends of Sydney’s who might be members of the RVL.

Marcia also provides the novel’s only sex scene, throwing herself at Bass due to her undying love for him (and remember she hasn’t even been mentioned until over a hundred pages in), delivering the romantic line, “Let me do you.” This leads to an explicity-detailed blowjob, after which Bass tells her to hurry up and get going, as she has to get to that RVL meeting downtown! Curtis writes the book as if he’s trying to hit every cliché he can, so it goes without saying that Marcia is soon discovered (comically enough, while trying to make a phone call to the precinct from the phone in Rodolfo’s back room…while the WGM are meeting like a few feet away!). I mean, do I even have to mention what happens to Bass’s partner?

It all leads up to a finale in which Bass is given carte blanche by Captain Hudson, who basically tells him to do whatever is necessary to stop the women. Bass leads a squad of cops in an assault on Rodolfo’s tenement building near the Hudson, but the sequence is pretty anticlimactic. For here we learn that Bass, that hulking rule-breaker of a tough cop, “won’t shoot a woman,” and thus tries his best not to kill any of these crazed women who have been castrating and murdering men all over New York. In other words, there is no scene in which Bass – or any of the other cops – engages any of the women in single combat; he and his comrades take cover out on the street and exchange fire with Rodolfo and his women, up on the top floor of the building.

In fact, Curtis really blows the finale. He doesn’t even bother detailing what happens to the few WGM members he’s cast a spotlight on, such as Nancy the kung-fu master, Maggie the waterbed slasher, Judy the karate expert, and etc. Indeed Curtis even confuses his female characters throughout, not to mention their specialities and skills – it seems like each of them at one point or another is a martial arts expert. At any rate while the women are shooting at the cops Rodolfo beats a hasty retreat, which leads to a one-on-one confrontation between him and Bass right off of the Hudson.

No surprises on how it ends, though Marcia does survive, telling Bass she wants to marry him, which surprised me. I figured that would be the last cliché in Curtis’s book, the death of the hero’s girlfriend. As for the fate of the WGM, we’re only informed that “a few” of them died in the assault, and the rest are going to jail! What about the sexual revolution they were about to sow? What about the other women around New York who were inspired to acts of violence by the WGM? None of it is mentioned, as if by stopping the WGM the cops have saved the city.

The Savage Women is written in a very rough style. I don’t mean the grammar or syntax or anything, as for all that it’s written well enough. I mean instead the words and descriptions. Women’s breasts are always referred to as “tits,” even in scenes from the perspectives of the women themselves. Also, the women of the WGM are almost always referred to as “cunts,” particularly in the few scenes from Rodolfo’s perspective. The tone of the book is just rougher than even any of the other Leisure novels I’ve yet read, which is really saying something.

I’m pretty sure “Mike Curtis” was a house name, but it definitely was at least a pseudonym; one other Leisure novel, the lurid cop thriller Midtown North, was published in 1976 under the name, and according to this site the author of that book was a guy named Myer Kutz. However I don’t see any acknowledgement from him for The Savage Women, so I guess it was by someone else…or maybe Kutz just doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

Motive For Murder (aka Ryker #7)

Motive For Murder, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

It doesn’t feature a series title or volume number, but this was actually the seventh volume of the Ryker series. Not that it much matters, as Motive For Murder works as a standalone novel, likely turned out by a writer new to the series – given the research of Justin Marriott in Paperback Fanatic #28, I’m assuming like him that Edson T. Hamill was just a Leisure house name.

But here’s the crazy thing – whoever actually wrote this was pretty good! In fact, Motive For Murder is easily my favorite Ryker novel yet. It combines the assholic “hero” of Nelson DeMille’s original creation with the goofy tone of Len Levinson's take on the character. “Hamill” has a good handle on character and action, and one could argue that his version of Ryker is even more of a dick than DeMille’s; as evidenced by how we’re introduced to our hero in this volume: “If there was anything Sergeant Joe Ryker despised more than homosexuals, it was long-haired hippies.”

This is just the tip of the iceburg, as in Motive For Murder Ryker beats up innocent people, threatens “friends,” and even puts children in danger in his effort to track down “The Cremator,” a homicidal woman who is taking young men home and torching them. She has killed three men so far (we meet her during her latest murder, as she sets fire to a guy by putting a candle to his long hair), and the cops haven’t gotten any leads in tracking her down. All that’s known from the precious few who have seen her is that the Cremator is gorgeous, fantastically built, and wears various wigs.

Ryker is still Ryker, but this volume almost takes place in some alternate reality: his fellow cops all have the same names as in previous installments, but act differently. For example Bo Lindly, the closest thing Ryker had to a friend in DeMille’s Night Of The Phoenix, here comes off like yet another of Ryker’s enemies, constantly mocked as an “Ivy League cop” by Ryker and the others. Lt. Fischetti is out to get Ryker fired, and this time Ryker’s partner is Tex Medley, a new character and junior cop who might as well be wearing a red shirt, if you catch my drift. Also, continuing with the alternate universe feel, we learn here that Ryker’s wife and son were murdered by the Mafia years ago, in retaliation upon Ryker, whereas in the DeMille books Ryker had no son and he was divorced, still getting in fights with his ex on the phone.

Ryker’s biggest archenemy in Motive For Murder is Creighton Straichey, a TV reporter who apparently has been hounding Ryker for years (though, needless to say, this is the first we readers have ever heard of him). Hamill delivers a few scenes where the two men come head to head, with Straichey determined to out Ryker as a fascist idiot, and Ryker always getting the last laugh. Some of the scenes are pretty comical, with Ryker confronting Straichey on the street or while he’s dining in a restaurant. However the ultimate outcome of the Ryker-Straichey confrontation is pretty dark, as I’ll mention later.

While Ryker is busy busting heads and confronting Straichey, Tex actually gets the first break in the case – he finds out from a witness that the Cremator was wearing a special lipstick, one that is available in only one place: Madame Olga Petrovia’s Instituit de Beaut, a cosmetics store in Manhattan. Almost fascistly run by the ancient Madame Olga (whose right arm is the immense Gerte von Tiffell), the place is obviously somehow connected the Cremator, but Ryker doesn’t connect the dots until much too late.

Meanwhile the Cremator continues her murders, and we see in one haunting scene that her kills can rake in innocent bystanders as well, like when she burns alive some poor message carrier and inadvertently sets an entire apartment building on fire. Hamill here proves his ease with killing off characters, as we read how a young wife and her newborn twins die in the conflagration. Oddly enough the Cremator actually sleeps with this victim, though her standard m.o. is to have the victim strip down, throw his clothes at the bottom of the bed, and jerk off onto the blue bedsheets(!!). Hamill doesn’t elaborate on why the Cremator screws this particular victim, though he does provide a fairly graphic description of it all.

Unlike DeMille, Hamill keeps everything rolling smoothly; the Cremator kills a few poor saps, Ryker butts heads and makes asinine comments (even getting thrown in jail at one point for harrassing a woman in an insane asylum!), and the city becomes increasingly agitated, thanks to Creighton Straichey’s broadcasts over the inability of the police to stop the killer. Hamill even delivers a few action scenes, like when Ryker is nearly offed by a hitman moments after leaving Madame Olga’s store (yet he still doesn’t put two and two together!). He also delivers a sex scene for Ryker, when Creighton Straichey’s wife Ondine calls Ryker over to her secret apartment and throws herself at him – a very funny scene, which sees Ryker still treating the poor lady like shit even as he deigns to let her blow him. (“You give good fuckin’ head,” being his sterling endorsement.)

But Ryker’s using of Ondine gets even darker in the novel’s finale. After a few characters have been knocked off by the Cremator (who of course turns out to be connected to Madame Olga), Ryker comes up with one of his dumbass plans; he forces Ondine to draft her teenaged son, Mervyn, to pose as a delivery boy so as to capture the Cremator’s attention. The climax plays out in Madame Olga’s store and here Hamill once again displays his ease with killing off various characters. In fact by novel’s end Ryker is so despicable – even still threatening a character whose life he has ruined – that you just have to laugh at the dark comedy of it all.

Anyway, I have to say I really liked Motive For Murder, and I wonder if this same author served as “Edson T. Hamill” for any of the other Ryker novels. About the only complaint I could make is his tendency to POV-hop, with character perspectives jarringly changing between paragraphs, but I’m thinking this might’ve been the usual half-assed “editing” at Leisure at work.

Fringe: The Zodiac Paradox (aka Fringe #1)

Fringe: The Zodiac Paradox, by Christa Faust
May, 2013  Titan Books

Fringe ran for five seasons, from 2008 to 2012, and I never watched it during its original broadcast run on Fox. I was aware of it, though; I recall a coworker sometime in 2009 raving about it, and I was like, “You mean that show with the guy from Dawson’s Creek?” But I never watched it. 

Then last year a friend who shares many of my interests was telling me how much he enjoyed Fringe, and how much he knew I’d like it. So I went out and got Seasons 1-4 on Blu Ray for a pittance, thanks to Black Friday deals (getting the fifth season for cheap a year later, as well).  Still I procrastinated on watching the show. I mean, I watched Lost as it aired, and I grew to hate that show, and I didn’t want to be burned again.

But man, when I finally got around to watching Fringe, my initial reaction was, “Where’s this show been all my life?” Within the first half hour of the pilot episode resident “mad scientist” Walter Bishop was clapping his hands and announcing, “Let’s make some LSD!” The series covered a lot of ground in its five seasons, from X-Files-eque procedurals in the first to a final season that took place in a dystopian 2036. And it was all great, and unlike most shows it was made to be watched over and over – and unlike Lost, the finale was actually memorable and effective.

Fringe was never a killer in the ratings, but the fanbase was strong enough that Titan Books must’ve decided there would be a market for some TV tie-ins. It appears that they then approached Christa Faust, an author known for TV tie-ins (as well as her own material), and hired her to write a trilogy of Fringe prequels. (“Everybody loves prequels!” – Homer Simpson)  Also these books would apparently be “official,” and not only part of the show’s cannon but even approved by production company Bad Robot. (Though I admit, the jaded half of me figures this “approval” was mostly relegated to: “Okay, how much are we gonna make offa these books?”)

The Zodiac Paradox then is the first of this prequel trilogy, and details a backstory concerning Walter Bishop, easily my favorite character in the series. But this is a much younger Walter, 22 years old and fresh out of doctoral school when the novel opens in August, 1969. Faust shows that she’s at least familiar with the characters by opening with Walter in the middle of an LSD experiment, conducted with his colleage Dr. William Bell (Leonard Nimoy in the actual series).

The two young doctors are looking to meld their minds (surely a Star Trek in-joke) with a new LSD batch as they sit near Reiden Lake, a spot that only exists in the world of Fringe, in New York state. Meanwhile, in the alternate universe (a Fringe mainstay that wasn’t fully introduced until the second season), a killer named Allan Mather is on the run from the cops. Despite stalking his prey in the alternate-reality Reiden Lake, Mather too is hopped up on LSD – personally I don’t see how the guy would be able to even hold a knife, let alone run through the countryside as the cops chase him.

Through some nebulous means Walter and Bell open a rift between the universes with their LSD-linked minds, and, given his own altered state, Mather not only links minds with them, but also sees the rift on the other side, and falls through it as the cops surround him. Now this killer is loose in our world, Walter and Bishop having no idea where he came from. In fact this prequel has it that only during this adventure do the two men realize there even is an alternate reality…but then, given that a serial killer comes from over there, one must wonder why Walter and Bell would’ve gone on to so desperately try to breach the rift between the two worlds in later years, per Fringe lore.

In the early half of the book Faust spends more time with Mather, as we see him slowly realizing that he’s in an alternate reality. And after killing his alternate-reality self he decides to stick around and continue his killing spree here, under the guise of the Zodiac Killer. Personally I think this was a mistake on Faust’s part; I think the novel would’ve been stronger had Mather not been a real-life killer. And anyway, the Zodiac’s murders began before 1968. But regardless, Mather now calls himself the Zodiac Killer, and you have to at least give the guy credit for quickly adapting to changing environments!

Faust next cuts forward to September, 1974, and the focus is back on Walter and Bell. Both of them are now in San Francisco, conveniently enough, delivering a lecture. Of course, SanFran is the Zodiac’s stomping grounds, and Walter’s on edge because, on that night back on Reiden Lake when his mind was briefly linked with Mather’s, Walter saw Dead Zone-style a murder Mather would commit sometime in September, 1974. Walter, hardly ever getting out of his lab, let alone Boston, hasn’t heard much about the Zodiac Killer, but once some locals tell him about the murderer he realizes that this must be the man he and Bell encountered on Reiden Lake.

Walter and Bell take it upon themselves to stop him. At least they try to go to the cops first, but after hearing their crazy story the police brush them off – only for an FBI agent named Latimer to take them into custody. In one of the novel’s many logic lapses, Bell instantly deduces that they shouldn’t trust Latimer, and the two escape, only to run into another FBI agent, this one named Iverson. Claiming to be the originator of a “fringe” division in the Bureau, Iverson is on the outs with his colleagues and has been receiving notes from the Zodiac, who claims to be from another universe. Iverson hands over his casefiles to Walter and Bell, figuring they’ll have a better chance of cracking the complex Zodiac ciphers.

The novel now becomes a bit trying as Walter and Bell become amateur crimebusters, making one idiotic move after another. True, Walter would often rush off into the fray with little forethought in the series, but then this was an older Walter, one who’d recently gotten out of an insane asylum and had portions of his brain removed (more of which below). So for the same sort of thing to happen here, particularly with Bell going along, comes off as kind of dumb. Eventually Walter and Bell meet up with Nina Sharp (a perfectly-cast Blair Brown in the series), a young acquaintance of Bell’s (who is set up by Faust as a ladykiller here…seriously, did women find ‘70s-era Leonard Nimoy sexy??).

Nina and Bell had a strange romantic history in Fringe, the writers never making clear what actually happened between them (not helped by the fact that Leonard Nimoy only appeared in a handful of episodes, and never shared a scene with Blair Brown). At any rate here young Nina is herself a doctorate student, as sharp and ingenious as the boys, and she and Bell share a playful bantering. Having recently rewatched Altered States, it was easy to picture a younger Blair Brown here, and Faust does a good job of bringing her character to life.

In fact Nina is the only one with a square head on her shoulders, smart enough to bring a revolver along when rushing out into the fray with Walter and Bell. She also brings the early ‘70s acid rock movement into the story, as her San Francisco home is currently occupied by various members of Violet Sedan Chair, a Fringe universe rock group often stated as being Walter’s favorite band. Faust goes too far with the in-jokery, though, with Walter meeting group leader Roscoe Joyce, a keyboardist who was played in a Season 3 episode by Christopher Lloyd; Faust has the two meet, and Roscoe makes a prophetic utterance that they will meet again someday, but neither of them will remember having met here in 1974. Pretty lame.

Speaking of ’74, Faust also does a good job of capturing the era. Unlike most modern-day creators who santize the past, Faust actually has Nina going out to buy cigarettes! Drugs are also rampant, with mass partakings of LSD. Even better, Faust understands the whole New Age/self-help movement that was all the rage at the time, with talk of biofeedback and mind expansion. There’s even a brief visit to a clinic wholly devoted to biofeedback research, and you can just picture the white-garbed, frazzled-haired post-hippies in attendance. But unfortunately most of this is obscured by the bumbling Keystone Cops-esque shenanigans of Walter and Bell.

Things gradually build to a head as Walter and Bell crack various Zodiac ciphers, thwarting a few of his kills, but putting themselves (particularly Nina) in jeopardy. But once the duo realize that their LSD mind-meld caused the rift between worlds, they invoke a masterplan involving a batch of biofeedback enthusiasts and more of that special LSD. The finale plays out more on the metaphysical realm, as Walter and Bell dose up and try to lure Mather into a trap near the Golden Gate Bridge. And Mather’s fate appears to be another reference to the show, being very similar to the one suffered by villain David Robert Jones (no, not that David Robert Jones) in Season 1.

Online reviews for The Zodiac Paradox are pretty consistent in that most fans didn’t enjoy the novel. The biggest stated criticism is over Walter, who herein acts like the Walter of the show: bumbling, given to grandiosity, but very likable despite his faults. Fans know however that the Walter of the show was a result of brain surgery; Walter, in the late 1980s or so, felt that he was becoming too grandiose, too “evil,” and thus asked Bell to remove portions of his brain(!). In the two ‘80s flashback episodes (from Seasons 2 and 3), Walter was a different man, arrogant and abrupt (John Noble’s acting was truly legendary on this show). Readers of The Zodiac Paradox wonder then why this 1970s Walter isn’t the same.

But to defend Faust, I don’t see where this is necessarily a mistake. We never learned when exactly Walter started his slide toward “evil genius,” and there’s nothing in the series (that I can remember, at least) which would indicate he was always like that, and only became “likable Walter” after the brain surgery. In fact from the backstories doled out throughout the five seasons, it would seem that Walter was always the same, but only became deranged once his son Peter was born and developed health issues, something which didn’t happen until the late ‘70s/early ‘80s and is thus outside of the era of this novel.

Perhaps the bigger problem with The Zodiac Paradox is that it doesn’t feel like Fringe. Sure, it’s got Walter, Bell, and Nina, it’s got drugs and mind expansion, and it’s got inexplicable phenomena. But despite all that, it’s sort of plodding and dull at times, and lacks the momentum of the actual show. At any rate, if this was an episode, it would be one of the skippale ones – and there were precious few skippable episodes in Fringe. (For my money, all of them were in the regrettable fourth season, which featured an “altered timeline” in which the first three seasons never happened.)

A few months after this novel, the second volume was released: The Burning Man, which details a backstory about series protagonist Olivia Dunham as a teenager. The online reviews for this one are even more merciless – and it appears that these reviews got through to Titan Books, who postponed the publication of the third volume (which will be about Walter’s son Peter); originally scheduled to come out soon after The Burning Man, this third novel, Sins Of The Father, is now scheduled to come out in August 2014! Speculation has it that production company Bad Robot actually checked out the manuscript this time and likely ordered rewrites.

Psycho Squad #2: The Torturer

Psycho Squad #2: The Torturer, by Rick Dade
March, 1989  Berkley Books

If anything this second and final volume of Psycho Squad proves why the series was so short lived. Whereas the first volume spent way too many pages introducing one crazy cult member after another, this second installment at least focuses a bit more on its protagonists…that is, when it isn’t barraging the reader with an army of minor characters and unrelated subplots.

I still haven’t figured out who “Rick Dade” was, but it would appear The Torturer was written by the same person as Execution Night. I mean, it seems so for the most part, with the same mostly-good writing that nevertheless POV-hops, even occasionally lapsing into omniscient perspective (ie, “Someone fired at Flint. Flint didn’t know it, but the man shooting at him was one of Smokey’s thugs.”) But then there seems to be a lack of knowledge of what came in that first volume..the author only vaguely mentioning how the Squad got together, and not following up on any characters or events from Execution Night. Even worse, Flint never once uses his Eliminator “rocket gun,” and in fact never even mentions it!

But anyway, I can just imagine Dade, whoever he was, breaking out in a flop sweat as he tries to figure out how to put a novel together. “I’ll just keep introducing characters and situations! Th-that’s how you write a novel, isn’t it??” I honestly had to jot down notes to keep up with the swarm of characters and subplots. There’s no pickup from the previous novel, and indeed we never learn how much time has passed since Execution Night. We’re just tossed right in, and have to try to keep up.

At any rate Psycho Squad leader Jack Flint has upheld his vow on the final page of that previous volume to hunt down serial killers across the nation, using the unlimited funding of his boss, Anton Vraczek (who doesn’t even appear this time around). Thus Flint heads down to Miami, certain that the recently-discovered, mutilated corpse of a young woman named Linda Duquesne is the work of the Torturer, a serial killer Flint’s been tracking.

One of the few things that is picked up from the previous novel is the brush-off Psycho Squad member JJ Santiago is given; as in Execution Night he has a mere cameo role, not even appearing in the narrative until the final quarter. So rather than the titular trio heading down to Miami, it’s just Flint and Dr. Larry Mace, who despite suffering the horrific loss of his pregnant wife last time out is pretty much back to normal, though we learn he’s taken to packing a gun these days.

Immediately upon Flint and Mace’s arrival in Miami, Dade begins to hammer us with newly-introduced characters, and he won’t stop until the very last page. So first off Flint meets up with redheaded reporter Gloria Quarles, who of course is suitably gorgeous, though as with the previous volume there isn’t even a hint of sex in the narrative. She’s researching the Torturer case as well, and Flint trades info with her, as well as banter. Gloria acts moreso as Flint’s partner during the novel than Mace or Santiago do; strangely, Dade rarely gives us a scene feautring the Squad all together, as if he’s uncomfortable with the series concept.

Meanwhile Mace buddies up with an old colleague who now works as a Dade County medical examiner, looking over the corpse of a cop who tried to research the Linda Duquesne case. But instead of being the taut serial killer tale all of this introductory material makes you expect, The Torturer actually becomes a conspiracy/blackmail deal about rogue federal agents running guns into Central America, and the titular murderer turns out to be superfluous to the entire novel! And since Dade only gradually builds up this storyline, the novel is rather slow-going.

Action scenes sporadically liven things up here and there, to more of an extent than in Execution Night. For one Flint and Gloria are taken captive by goons who work for Rollo Prouty, a modeling agency owner who, we eventually learn, is blackmailing various Miami notables with a storehouse of files containing private and exploitable info. But Dade ruins all tension with Flint and Gloria being rescued at the last second by some guy in an orange Checker – a grubby private eye named Chub Odell who serves to take up more pages, with his own go-nowhere subplot.

Gradually (and I do mean gradually) all roads lead to Major Nordlinger, a shady military man who is trying to supply guns to Central America. Colonel North, I mean Major Nordlinger, employs two rogue Vice cops named Weems and Yates, merciless and humorless goons who have made a veritable kingdom for themselves in Miami. Cue many scenes of these guys harrassing Flint and Mace and then reporting back to North, I mean Nordlinger. Oh, and there’s a dude named Smokey Powers who operates out of the Florida wetlands, a guy who leads his own redneck army and is trying to get into the gunrunning business himself.

And I haven’t even mentioned Delgado, partner of the cop who was killed when trying to investigate Linda Duquesne’s murder. He plays a large role in early pages before being uncerimoniously brushed off toward the end. There’s also the infamous Borja, a sadist who ran a Nicaraguan death squad years ago but now lives in Miami, and who is enemies with Smokey Powers. When JJ Santiago finally shows up on page 142, it’s to go undercover as one of Borja’s thugs – and even here Dade introduces yet another half-assed subplot, revealing in the span of a page that Santiago has an old enemy here in Miami and so blows the dude away in a club to get Borja’s attention!

Hey, remember the Torturer? You might, but Dade has forgotten all about his titular villain; whereas Execution Night at least stayed true to its “men’s adventure meets horror” vibe, The Torturer forgets all about the horror stuff and focuses instead on a barely-there plot about gunrunning and displaced Nicaraguan rulers. What’s worse is the action scenes, when they go down, are dispensed with quickly, save that is for a climatic assault on Borja’s fortress compound, a chaotic scene which sees Smokey Powers’s goons attacking just as Flint and Mace have been captured.

Dade likely didn’t write any other men’s adventure novels in the ‘80s, as there’s none of the gun-porn the decade demanded. Guns are “guns,” and that’s it. Flint still uses his .44 Bulldog from the previous book, but other than a mention of Santiago picking up a dropped Uzi and using it to “ventilate” a few Borja thugs, this sequence is underwhelming from an action-series standpoint. It even skirts unintentional comedy, as Dade kills off swarms of characters he’s either just introduced or barely developed.

Anyway the Torturer appears on maybe two or three pages of the entire book, and not till the very end does Flint announce that he’s “figured out” who the killer is – not that there was a trail of clues for us readers to follow. In fact the book ends on the lamest of Scooby Doo cop-outs, with a “surprise reveal” that’s very hard to buy, followed by a quick wrap-up.

And that was it – there were no more adventures for the Psycho Squad. It’s too bad, because the series had potential, but it would appear this potential was squandered a mere two volumes in. And I’m probably reading more into it than intended, but it seemed to me that seeds were even planted for future volumes, namely due to a mid-novel mention that the murderer of Anton Vraczek’s wife and child ten years ago was never caught. Seems only natural that a future installment of Psycho Squad would’ve featured the trio hunting this killer down, but it was not to be.

Psycho Squad #1: Execution Night

Psycho Squad #1: Execution Night, by Rick Dade
October, 1988  Berkley Books

Thanks to Mike Madonna for letting me know about this forgotten, two-volume series. Credited to “Rick Dade” but copyright Berkley Books, Psycho Squad capitalizes on the late ‘80s serial killer/satanic panic fad and melds it with the men’s adventure genre. But while this first volume has an interesting concept, it’s lost amid the plethora of characters and the lack of action scenes.

My bet is the author was inspired by Maury Terry’s awesome 1987 book The Ultimate Evil, a true crime publication which contested, with convincing evidence, that the Son of Sam murders were actually committed by a satanic cult which operated around Yonkers, New York and stretched all the way back to the Manson massacre. Whether Terry was correct or not, the fact remains that The Ultimate Evil features a fascinating concept, that of a sort of “satanic mafia” which operates in the underworld, and one of these days I’ll probably get around to reviewing the book itself.

Anyway, Dade (whoever he was) peppers Execution Night with enough clues to let one know he’s read Terry’s book. He too presents a satanic cult for the villains, one with criminal leanings…it just takes forever for him to get them all together. Sadly, rather than being a slam-bang action-meets-horror affair, the novel instead hopscotches all over the place, introducing one new character after another until there are way too many cultists in the kitchen – and worse yet, there are so many of them that the author loses control and is unable to present them as a viable threat.

The heroes suffer too; the back of the cover has it that Jack Flint, Larry Mace, and JJ Santiago are the titular Psycho Squad, but Flint takes up all of the “good guy” narrative, with Mace getting a very small portion of the text and Santiago relegated to what’s basically a cameo appearance. In fact the group doesn’t even become a group until the final page; like most other first volumes of a late-era men’s adventure series, Execution Night is heavily focused on story-building. If this book had been published in the ‘70s, the Squad would already be formed by page 1 and they’d be gorily blowing away a faux-Manson by page 2. But since it was published when the genre was attempting to be a bit more “respectable,” it’s all about plot and story development.

Flint then is the star, but even he is lost amid the author’s constant shuffling from one newly-introduced psychotic villain to the next. A sergeant in the NYPD’s Homicide department, Flint we learn has gotten a rep for bringing down serial killers. When we meet him he’s in the act of taking on the infamous Doctor Blood, a serial killer dentist(!). Flint blows him away in what will prove to be one of the novel’s scant action scenes; as he dies Blood warns Flint that the killings “are just beginning.”

Meanwhile the author begins to unveil the endless parade of psychos who make up the threat in this opening volume; lead by the bald and creepy Myron Nemo, it develops at great length that they are members of the Tribe, a Manson Family-esque cult which got together in the late ‘60s and hasn’t been seen since. Their Manson is a freak named Dean Bishop, aka The Source, who has been in an insane asylum for 15 years but is now, due to dimwitted psychiatrists, about to be released.

There are way too many members of the Tribe to get into in this review (honestly, the novel is mostly comprised of introducing each of them in various one-off scenarios as they leave the real world to return to the cultish fold), however one of the main members bears mentioning: Erwin Roth, a massive biker who leads the Wheels of Death, yet another satanic cult, this one made up of bikers who do jobs for organized crime; in addition to leading the Wheels Roth also serves as Myron and Bishop’s top enforcer.

Pissed off over the political red tape which allowed Doctor Blood to run amok for so long, Flint ends up punching out his captain and quitting the force. But when a “copycat killer” murders the woman Blood was after in the opening pages (the killer being Roth, who’s finishing Blood’s job), Flint vows to bring the killer in on his own. Humorously enough he illegally portrays himself as a cop throughout the book; having kept his badge Flint goes around showing it to people so they’ll let him in on crime scenes and whatnot.

Flint visits a gun store operated by an old friend to decide upon his new hardware. Interestingly, he settles upon a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog revolver, the same gun that was used in the Son of Sam murders. I take it this is yet another Ultimate Evil reference by the author, but still, wouldn’t it have made more sense to give this gun to one of the villains?? Anyway this scene also serves to introduce JJ Santiago, a pencil-moustached “dandy” who too was once an NYPD cop, one known for his sharpshooting skills, but who was kicked off the force five years ago. I figured from here Flint would form the titular squad, but Santiago disappears until the final pages of the novel.

Larry Mace serves as the NYPD Deputy Medical Examiner, and thus has an acquaintance with both Flint and Santiago. (The cover artist by the way provides accurate illustrations of the three heroes, Mace being the blonde, Santiago the moustached “dandy,” and Flint the gruff one who looks like he’s posing for, well, the cover of an action novel, even though he’s in the middle of what appears to be an insanely close-quarters firefight.) Neither Mace nor Santiago are given much depth or personality, and the author further shames them by delivering Mace a serious blow in the final pages, one that despite its viciousness lacks much impact. (Long story short, Roth blows away Mace’s pregnant wife – shocking and unsettling enough – but the hell of the thing is Dade doesn’t even bother informing us she exits until a page before she’s killed!)

The series concept is introduced very late in the game with the appearance of Anton Vraczek, a Donal Trump-like tycoon whose family was murdered by nutjobs years before; Vraczek uses his massive funds to aid police in catching criminals, and asks the now-unemployed Flint if he’d like to work for him. Flint tells Vraczek he’ll head up a force that goes after serial killers, using Vraczek’s vast resources. Bizarrely enough, this is Vraczek’s only appearance, the author immediately going back to his one-off introductions of various Tribe members.

As mentioned the Tribe is getting back together; we gradually learn that years ago they perpetrated the Montauk Massacre, where a few of Bishop’s followers killed a slew of people. As Nemo puts the old gang together again he intimates that “Execution Night” is coming again, prepping the reader for an apocalyptic finale. Strangely though Dade delivers an eleventh-hour reveal where Nemo and another Tribe leader are really putting everyone back together as a land-buying scheme! It’s their plan to have Bishop et al murder a whole bunch of people in a certain developing area so Nemo’s company can buy the land for cheap, their logical assumption being that no one will want to buy land where a massacre has occurred. Makes sense, but why sully up a pulpy plot with such a “real world” concept?

There are only a two real action scenes: one toward the end in which Flint and Santiago take on the Wheels of Death, and Flint and Santiago’s climatic attack on the docked ship in which the Tribe is hiding. Though the book is violent, at least so far as how many people are murdered by the Tribe, when it comes to the action Dade brushes over the gore for the most part, just writing that people get shot and fall down. On the plus side there isn’t much gun-porn, though. The characters mostly use pistols, save for Santiago, who goes for a Mac-10. Elements of sci-fi, or at least the old GI Joe cartoon, are introduced via the Eliminator Mark IV Ballistic Launcher, a “rocket gun” that’s the size of a machine pistol and fires miniature tail-finned rockets; Flint uses it in the finale to blow up a few people real good.

The novel runs at a dense 234 pages of small print, and what’s odd is how rushed the finale is. As mentioned Mace is dealt a crippling blow in the final pages, but this too is glossed over for the most part, the author quickly dispensing of the villains he’s been building up throughout the entire course of the novel. In other words, the conclusion is not very satisfying. I was expecting something more massive or tense; instead the Tribe begins to turn upon one another, and the three protagonists basically show up and blow the remaining ones away.

There was only one more volume in the series, The Torturer, which appears to be a bit more action-centric. No matter of searching has revealed who wrote this first volume, but “Rick Dade” was likely a house name. I’m also not sure yet if the same author wrote the second volume. Given the book’s focus on story and character, to the detriment of the violent action scenes, makes me suspect that Execution Night might’ve been the work of Simon Hawke, who wrote the similarly-structured Steele #1, which coincidentally or not was published around the same time.

Cross-Country

Cross-Country, by Herbert Kastle
December, 1975  Dell Books

This was Herbert Kastle's last hardcover book for a few years, at least here in the States; after this novel he was relegated to paperback originals (until Ladies of the Valley, which came out in hardcover in 1979). Which is fine by me, as I much prefer paperbacks. But anyway at least Cross-Country was a memorable way to go out, Kastle returning to his crime fiction roots but leavening the tale with the hot and heavy sex scenes he’d been writing since 1968 in his steamy, Harold Robbins-style potboilers.

The novel opens with the discovery of Judith Keel’s mutilated corpse – Keel, a gorgeous blonde who worked as an assistant in an ad agency, has been hacked up in horrible fashion in her Manhattan apartment, her severed arms chained to the headboard of her bed and her body tossed on the floor and further desecrated. From this we jump to Evan Bley, a top ad man at the agency Keel worked for, and Kastle immediately lets us know that this guy likely killed Judith; Evan’s stopping off in a topless bar for a quick drink before getting in his Jaguar and leaving New York forever.

But Evan’s picked up by a stacked brunette with an Australian accent; the lady is named Lois, and she instantly deduces that Evan’s planning to ditch town and she wants to go with him, especially when Evan informs her he’s planning a cross-country drive to Los Angeles. After getting bombed out on the bar’s potent drinks, Evan wakes to find himself sprawled out on the backseat of his own car, Lois in the passenger seat…and some bearded freak behind the wheel. This turns out to be John, Lois’s ex-boyfriend, and thus begins the major twisted thread of this twisted novel.

In one of the most brazen acts of coincidence I’ve ever read in a novel, Kastle gradually reveals that, unbeknownst to one another, each of these strangers knew Judith Keel. Thus, since each of them have shady, lawless backgrounds and insane tendencies, each of them are actually suspects as Keel’s murderer. Before we get to that though we have a long, tense sequence in which they keep going up against one another, Evan feeling like he’s been swindled, what with the sudden appearance of John, who comes off like a creep who’s planning to steal Evan’s car and/or slash his throat while Evan’s sleeping. Kastle is a dark comedy master and this sequence is filled with it, as Evan and John keep trying to one up one another.

Meanwhile we are introduced to the hero of the tale, such as he is: Detective Eddie Roersch of the NYPD, a 30+ year veteran of the force who, at a heavyset and weathered 55, feels like life has passed him by and that he’ll never get the recognition or the pay he deserves. Despite having more collars than any other detective in his precinct, Roersch has never been promoted to Lieutenant, let alone Captain.

Beyond the job Roersch’s personal life is in disarray, given the death seven months ago of his wife of three decades. Not that Kastle makes much of Roersch’s widowhood; he’s already sort of moved on, scoring sex from a high-class hooker named Ruthie who happens to live on the same floor as Roersch’s Manhattan apartment. In exchange for not busting her Ruthie gives Roersch freebies, but over these past few months Roersch has found himself thinking of Ruthie as more than just a free lay.

Assigned the Keel case, Roersch very quickly deduces that Evan Bley is the top suspect. The majority of the Roersch sections follow a police procedural format, with Roersch tracking clues and leads. Soon enough he has what he figures is a cut and dry case against Bley. But this is a Kastle novel, and there are no white hats; seeing as how wealthy Bley is, Roersch decides that instead of tracking him down and arresting him, Roersch will instead build a solid case against Bley, find him, and tell him he can either go to the chair or pay Roersch a few hundred thousand dollars, and Bley will go free.

Evan Bley, though, is pretty sick. Not really sick, but tormented, having grown up with an overbearing mother who burned a permanent scar into young Evan, having once discovered him masturbating in the bathroom. In one of those bizarre yet (darkly) humorous scenes he excels in, Kastle has the mom go apeshit, beating young Evan and then, believe it or not, pulling down her skirt and graphically showing him that it’s her time of the month and blaming it all on him! Well, you won’t be surprised to know that this has had some definite ramifications on Evan, who nonetheless considers himself a “monster.” Kastle himself builds a pretty damning case against Bley as being Judith Keel’s murderer, but Bley’s fellow passengers are screwed up too.

John has his own sob story background: he’s from a wealthy background but has been drifting around the country for the past decade. In another dark comedy flashback we see how when John was a young boy his dad went balistic when he found out that John’s mom was sleeping around, a crazed scene that sees a poor dog kicked around until it’s hamburger. Lois too is fucked up, being raped by her father when a teenager and from there finding brief comfort in the arms of other women; but lesbian affairs are completely against her nature, she constantly chastizes herself. Having been in the States for the past few years she makes her meager living dancing in bars or working in massage parlors, but she dreams of becoming a famous actress. When she finds out that Evan has contacts in the industry, she latches on to him.

What’s weird is how Kastle builds a familial relationship for these three whackjobs. First though there’s the tension, both of the danger and the sexual variety; Lois coming on to Evan, much to John’s frustration. And you can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, given how Lois so brazenly rubs it in his face that she’s over him and now wants Evan – who is not only better looking and in better shape, but has more money and a bigger dick. In fact Evan’s size is often brought up, particularly in the first of several highly graphic sex scenes between him and Lois – as I wrote above, Kastle with this novel returned to the crime fiction genre he’d written in the early ‘60s, but here he’s free to give vent to his most explicit ideas. There’s some hardcore stuff throughout Cross-Country, and no detail is spared.

As the trio moves on through the Midwest they become closer, Lois feeling like the glue that holds them all together (sometimes literally). But she’s moved on from John and wants Evan for herself, so in another lurid sequence they manage to pick up an attractive but stupid redneck girl named Alma-Jean, who works in a clothing store. More drinking, drugs, and group sex ensues, but Lois, who has lesbian tendencies she tries to subdue, loses control of herself on the girl.

Another demonstration of Kastle’s skill, this sequence goes from erotica to horror as it devolves into bad vibes all around, Lois storming off and Alma-Jean hitting the road, sick of these “freaks,” with John trying to find her before she can get away. Kastle plays this game throughout where we know that one of the trio is a murderer, but which one? They all have their issues, and they all have their chances in the narrative to commit murder – and sure enough, later on we learn that Alma-Jean’s mutilated body has been discovered in a dumpster outside the hotel, and it could’ve been any one of the three who killed her.

Roersch, still in New York, begins to doubt his blackmail scheme, once news of Alma-Jean’s death comes to him. This means that, along with Judith Keel and two other murdered girls, four people have been killed by Bley (Roersch’s only suspect; he doesn’t even know about Lois or John), and how could Roersch live with himself if he allowed a monster like that to escape justice? Meanwhile Roersch goes on with his life, finding that his feelings for Ruthie, the hooker next door, have increased to the point where he wants the blackmail money from Bey so as to provide a better life for her and her prepubescent daughter.

Cross-Country is more of a slow burn affair, and lacks the dynamic characterization and plotting of Ladies of the Valley. It is however a much darker tale (believe it or not), with practically every character fucked up to some degree. But the writing is as strong as ever, with Kastle fully bringing his rejects to life; he remains locked in each perspective when featuring each character, and brings you enough into their worlds that you can at least understand them, if not like them. Save for Lois, who comes off as more self-centered and annoying in her sequences, and I get the feeling Kastle had a hard time writing about her, as there isn’t much there.

The action only picks up toward the climax, when Roersch feels he’s successfully put together his case (after visits with Roersch’s still-domineering mother, now old and alone, as well as a private eye named McKenney, who tailed Judith Keel for Bley) and heads for a confrontation with the man in the Grand Canyon, having got hold of Bley’s planned travel route through AA (Bley being a member). But we see that it’s all come to a head for our depraved trio, as well, as during another group sex session things again become nightmarish, with bad vibes leading to a startling but expected bit where John buggers Evan – who despite his shock realizes he enjoys it.

Please skip this paragraph if you don’t want the novel’s surprise spoiled. As mentioned above, Evan, John, and Lois could each have been the murderer of Judith Keel, as well as poor Alma-Jean and some other women back in New York. Gradually though I figured out which of the three it was, mostly due to a bit of foreshadowing Kastle delivers early in the book; Roersch, considering the horrible nature of the Keel murder, figures it had to have been a man behind it, as female murders of such brutality are few. He can only think of the Countess Bathory. From this I soon figured Kastle was foreshadowing that Lois was actually Keel’s murderer (and all the other girls besides). And Lois does indeed turn out to be the killer, as revealed at the very end. As yet another example of his writing skill, you can go back to the sequences from Lois’s POV and see how Kastle has so masterfully left clues therein. But my problem here is that after this reveal Lois immediately “acts crazy,” blithely recounting her murderous deeds to Roersch as she perches above a chasm in the Grand Canyon. The way her character acts here in the climax is so separate from how she acted throughout the rest of the novel that it comes off like a cheap cop-out; however Kastle does cover himself by having Lois already feeling a sort of psychotic break thanks to discovering Evan’s homosexual tendencies the night before. Now learning that Bley’s a “goddamn closet queen,” her hopes for Hollywood stardom are dashed, and she’s gone around the bend. But still, it comes off as too much, too late.

This was the first of a loose trilogy featuring Roersch; he appeared in Kastle’s next two novels, both of them as mentioned paperback originals: The Gang (1976) and Death Squad (1977). Finally, there was a film adaptation of Cross-Country, released in 1983; there’s no DVD, but it came out on VHS (glad I still have a VCR player!). One of these days I might check it out, just to see how far it strays from Kastle’s novel – one thing I do know is they changed it so that Judith Keel was Bley’s wife, which I guess they thought would add more tension and suspense.

Hellfire

Hellfire, by Thomas Tyger
November, 1987  Pocket Books

For some reason, this is one obscure book – I never would’ve discovered it if I hadn’t spotted it on the “Mystery/Suspense” paperback shelf in the Librairie Book Shop during a recent trip to the French Quarter of New Orleans. Thomas Tyger’s 1987 novel Hellfire is so unknown that Amazon doesn’t even have it listed under the correct author name, let alone a scan of the cover. I love the internet because I’ve discovered tons of books through searching on it, but here is a case where you would never just stumble upon the book after some online browsing; further proof that the occasional visit to a used bookstore will still yield rewards.

And this novel is totally trash! Hellfire is about a psycho who is bombing sex clubs in New York City during one very hot summer, but this plot is just a framework for Thomas Tyger (whoever he was) to serve up a host of fringe-society characters, each of whom regale us with endless stories about their sordid, twisted, and kinky sex lives. The “hero” of the tale is Detective Nick O’Shay, a movie star-looking NYC cop who is actually referred to as “the real-life Dirty Harry” by the press, but O’Shay is such a cipher (not to mention such an ineffectual protagonist, more of which later) that the villain of the novel, Daniel Glass, actually comes off as more memorable.

Glass was a POW in ‘Nam after his fighter jet was shot down. Tortured and abused, he returned to America a shattered man, his wife having left him. Now a drunk living on his pension, he has taken it upon himself to clean up the filth that has swept over America. Living in upstate New York he makes raids upon Manhattan and environs, wearing a Lone Ranger costume and sending the newspapers daunting letters signed “The Masked Man.” The novel opens with Glass’s firebombing of a sex club in Manhattan; our “hero” O’Shay is called in to helm up a team to bring in the Masked Man.

My friends, you will seldom meet as ineffectual a protagonist as Nick O’Shay. He does nothing in the course of this long novel, other than put together a big team, get occasional updates from them, and sit around and drink his Glenfiddich whiskey. Oh, and boff his bimbo girlfriend Maggie, who we learn late in the tale was once busted for hooking. (The gal by the way also snorts coke and smokes dope, all while O’Shay sits beside her, sipping his whiskey!) O’Shay is so famous that women hit on him in bars and the newspapers are always hounding him for a story, but the guy does so little you figure he has to be a spoof on the author’s part, a mocking satire of the “tough cop” of pulp fiction.

But in the course of his half-assed “investigation” O’Shay meets a variety of freaks and sadists, many of whom he knows from his past life in Vice. Here Thomas Tyger comes to life; each and every one of these minor characters spins endless stories about the sexual underworld. I’m telling you, there is some sick and twisted and kinky stuff in this book – though, strangely, not a single sex scene! We get a lot of talk about it, a lot of detail about bizarre sexual practices, but never once do we get a passage where any of the characters will do the actual deed…other, that is, than a scene where Glass visits a high-class brothel in Manhattan and briefly falls in love with one of the whores after she blows him. (He of course later bombs the place when he returns and finds out the girl is with “another client.”)

These fringe characters sparkle with life, but they are presented as so twisted and so focused on sex and sex alone that it seems obvious that Tyger sides moreso with Glass, the “villain” of the tale. Confronted with such rampant sleaze and sin, such overwhelming inhummanity, it’s no wonder he lashes out; though to be sure he lashes out in monstrous ways. Bombing, shooting (with silver-tipped bullets), even strangling the various members of the sexual underworld, Glass is the only character in the novel who makes the narrative move, the only one who doesn’t sit around and spin endless stories. Meanwhile O’Shay sips more Glenfiddich and shows up to look over the ensuing crime scenes.

One interesting aspect of Hellfire is how markedly different our current world is. O’Shay drops the fact that, as of 1987, tattoo parlors were still illegal in NYC – surely not the case today, when friggin’ everyone and their goddamn dog has a tattoo (I'm not the only guy who's sick of seeing tattoos all over women, am I??). In this novel, porn shops, massage parlors, S&M clubs, and etc are all shadowy underworld places that are far removed from mainstream America. Compare to today, where porn stars get their own reality TV shows. Glass obviously believes that all of this sin and corruption is destroying his beloved US…though exactly how he became such a moral crusader is something Tyger leaves vague.

There are only a few “action” scenes per se, the majority of them from Glass’s viewpoint as he guns down defenseless whores or bystanders. We see him carry out a few of his objectives, planting bombs, murdering a Larry Flynt-type, putting on his Lone Ranger costume and driving into the drug-dealing area of Times Square and blowing away people in a bar. One issue though is that the people harmed are presented as so thoroughly despicable that you feel little sympathy.

For example there’s Natalia Stein, a heavyset and lesbian reporter who inadvertently brought down Glass’s wrath with her sex club expose that was printed in the New York Times. Stein, a thankfully minor character, is presented as such a loathsome individual that when, toward the very end of the novel, she is partly disfigured by a package bomb Glass mails her, you still can’t stand her, as she’s right back into talking about how much money she’ll make from her upcoming “Masked Man” book while she bitches at her female assistant/lover, Jan. (That being said, Stein does here have one of the best lines of the novel: “Who do you think you are, Jan? I’m Natalie Stein! You’re nobody! You’re a glamorized go-fer and a mediocre cunt-lapper – and that’s all you’ll ever be!”)

O’Shay finally does something, at the very end of the novel…that is, after Maggie has been kidnapped by Glass. And even here O’Shay only acts due to someone else’s help – namely Hotdog, an overeager member of Glass’s squad (Hotdog was kicked off the force due to his arresting of countless people due to minor infractions, only reinstated thanks to O’Shay), who follows up a lead on a mutilated whore, discovering that the she-male was attacked by a man matching Glass’s description in upstate New York. Within moments they have Glass’s name and address, and O’Shay busts ass up there alone, to save Maggie and to cancel Glass’s ticket.

The finale is pure Hollywood action movie as Glass, busy torturing a nude and bound Maggie, catches sight of O’Shay just as he is sneaking on Glass’s property to launch his ambush. This leads to a shootout and a chase scene that goes all the way back to Times Square, ending with a climatic self-immolation. While it’s a great sequence, it comes off as strange given the disparity with what came before – honestly, there is barely any action in the novel, it’s all just a sequence of one-off characters relating explicit details about their sordid sex lives, plus O’Shay is such a loser that you have a hard time buying his last-second superhero makeover.

My guess is that Thomas Tyger was a pseudonym, but I have no idea. There’s zero info on the author or the book online; Hellfire appears to have made less than a ripple in the publishing world. Tyger, despite his despicable characters and boring protagonist, is actually a good writer, doling out funny dialog. He also has a definite gift for storytelling, of the tall tale variety; every character has at least two or three stories to tell, and each story is so packed with detail that you figure Tyger must’ve been a cop himself, or at least did a hell of a lot of research. The members of O’Shay’s force also sparkle with more interest and life than Shay himself, and Tyger ably captures the locker room chatter of veteran cops as they take delight in ribbing one another.

It wasn’t the greatest novel I’ve read, but Hellfire was for sure an awesome discovery (one of the few bright points of that New Orleans “vacation,” during which my wife contracted food poisoning from the awful, awful Mother’s Restaurant). But anyway the novel is very lurid and sleazy and exploitative; within the first handful of pages Tyger has already doled out a barrage of sensationalistic stuff, letting you know exactly the kind of ride you’re in for.

Masked Dog

Masked Dog, by Raymond Obstfeld
August, 1986  Gold Eagle Books

Raymond Obstfeld is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. Masked Dog isn’t as great as his Invasion U.S.A. novelization, but it’s a lot of fun, filled with vibrant dialog, strong characters, and plenty of suspense. It’s to the novel’s disservice that it was published by Gold Eagle, lending the impression that the novel’s just another SuperBolan or something. In reality it’s a melding of the suspense, spy, and horror genres.

“Masked Dog” is the code name of a CIA project that has been going on for the past decade: an agency scientist has been injecting a volunteer prisoner with a battery of experimental drugs that have removed all traces of fear from the test subject and have also granted him with superhuman strength. Gee, what could go wrong?? As you’d expect, the test subject, a pedophile pediatrist named Gifford Devane, has broken free and is now loose and looking for a little revenge.

Devane’s main target is a former rock superstar named Price Calender, who now lives a low-level life playing revival concerts and the like. Price worked for the CIA a bit in the previous decade; in a backstory that doesn’t quite ring true, we learn that Price got involved with the agency after a run-in with the law and in exchange for his freedom he agreed to act as a courier during his global tours. Price also eventually married a gorgeous lady named Liza R (no last name), a lady who turned out to be a Commie spy who insinuated herself with Price because he was a CIA goon and because she wanted to get to Devane and the Masked Dog program.

Liza R was a package deal; she came with a daughter from a brief, earlier marriage, a toddler named Rebecca who Price eventually adopted. But again, Liza’s marriage to Price was all just a ruse, and after an aborted attempt seven years ago to break out Devane, Liza carried out a running battle with the CIA, even using her own daughter as a human shield. (The end result being an errant bullet that shattered Rebecca’s knee, so that she now walks with a brace.) Price himself killed Liza…or so he thought. As Masked Dog opens, we learn that due to some commie subterfuge Liza’s death was merely staged, and now she is here with a fellow KGB operative, tracking down the loose Masked Dog.

Again, all this is backstory and it’s doled out gradually and masterfully in the narrative. Price is not your typical Gold Eagle protagonist by a longshot – he’s not a trained agent, and doesn’t even know how to handle a weapon. This is taken care of by Jo, one of Obstfeld’s typically-great female characters, a CIA agent who Baroness style was a woman of high society but grew bored of the jetset life and became a secret agent. Price and Jo have a great “meet cute” and Obstfeld really plays up on the comedy, banter, and relationship that grows between them. And when the expected sex scene comes, late in the tale, it’s unexpectedly explicit – yet another divergence from the typical Gold Eagle fare.

Obstfeld works up the tension and suspense; there isn’t much action in Masked Dog until the end, other than Devane’s brief encounters with old friends and the criminal underworld. Also graced with a quicker mind and photographic memory, Devane wants to advertise himself to the highest bidder as an assassin, so he announces that he will murder a famous East German dignitary, despite the massive amount of security which will surround the guy. Devane’s assassination too is carried out in more of a suspenseful nature than the pyrotechnics you’d expect, and Obstfeld makes it even more tense with Jo being caught in the fray.

Devane also has superstrength and can tear people apart. Obstfeld plays up the dark comedy with Devane coming off like a superpowered Hannibal Lecter, though without the serial killer aspect – his taste veers toward adolescent girls, and over the course of the narrative he catches a few of them, the ensuing grisly deaths only vaguely hinted at. But Devane gradually realizes that something is going wrong…his memory is clouding, he has lost his sense of taste, and it dawns on him that though he can’t feel pain, he can still be killed.

Obstfeld takes his time with the narrative, so that it all comes off as very character focused. All of the characters are given depth, save for maybe Liza R. I love pulpy female villains, but Liza R is just too inhuman, too much of a cipher. Obstfeld provides a backstory that attempts to explain at least a little how she could be so cold blooded (she was raised by leftist American parents who emigrated to the USSR but then abandoned her at a young age), but still she is too cold, too robotic. Obstfeld to his credit makes Liza thoroughly despicable; several times she “tests” herself to see if she might give a damn about her daughter Rebecca, finding each time that she doesn’t care if the little girl lives or dies.

Action scenes here and there liven things up…Devane’s assassination attempt of the German dignitary, or Devane’s scuffles with hoodlums. Suspense takes center stage throughout, particularly a tension-filled scene where Devane sneaks into Price’s empty home and poisons his cigarettes; throughout the ensuing scene with Price, Obstfeld keeps toying with us, mentioning the cigarettes lying there, Price picking one up and about to light it but then getting distracted. Then Jo shows up and the suspense really mounts – all told, a masterful scene. But just one of many.

The action heats up toward the end, like when Liza R and her KGB associates corner Devane, who manages to take out the redshirts and then engages in a duel to the death with a martial arts master, all while Liza coldly watches. The climax takes a page from Stephen King with Devane kidnapping Rebecca and stashing her in an empty fitness center, with Price venturing in solo and taking on Devane by himself. He’s easily outmatched, getting his arms and fingers broken by a nude Devane who swings from the shadows to torment him. All of this actually reminded me of the climax of Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford’s character was similarly tortured by his superpowered foe.

I guess the only problem I had with Masked Dog is it’s a little too long for its own good. The novel is over 300 pages and a lot of it could be cut. In particular the suspense of the climax is a little destroyed because, as Price sneaks through the darkened and creepy fitness center, Obstfeld somehow decides to inform us what the place is like during the day and what Price’s usual workout routine is like. But stuff like this is rare and for the most part the novel moves at an assured pace, really getting us to like its characters to the point where we are emotionally invested in the outcome.

Perhaps due to its publisher, Masked Dog didn’t make much of a dent, it appears…it only had this one printing, and like the other Gold Eagle titles of the time it was probably pulled off the shelves when the next bi-monthly shipment of Gold Eagle stock came in. It’s too bad, because this is a very good novel, one that should have had a larger audience.

And the cover by the way is a die cut, something I’ve never seen from Gold Eagle. Here’s the inner cover:

Ryker #2: The Hammer of God

Ryker #2: The Hammer of God, by Nelson DeMille
October, 1974 Leisure Books

I've been intrigued with this 8-volume* series for a while, but a few factors have prevented me from seeking it out. For one, these books aren't cheap. No doubt due to Nelson DeMille's mainstream popularity, the Ryker books are atrociously overpriced (and don't even get me started on his Keller series, published by Manor -- or the 1990 Pocket reprints which were published under the psuedonym Jack Cannon!). Also, both Marty McKee and Justin Marriott (in the first issue of his Men Of Violence magazine) have gone on the record that these books aren't always up to snuff, so to speak, with bad writing and a general lack of action.

But when I read about the lurid plot of The Hammer of God I basically just had to get a copy of the book. Luckily I was able to find one at an acceptable price; it was still overpriced, but at least it was well below the $20-$80 some online bookseller assholes list it for. This installment taps right into the occult craze of the early '70s, with a psycho who goes around the seedy streets of New York City, killing women whom he believes to be witches. Also worth noting is that, despite being published in late 1974, The Hammer of God actually takes place from late 1969 on into the spring of 1970.

Also worth noting is the psycho actually refers to himself as "God's Avenger," not "the Hammer of God." Only a few portions of the narrative are from his perspective, but we learn that he was some anonymous farmhand who was visited by "God" one day, who basically told him to go to New York City and start killing witches. Now calling himself "Zachariah," the psycho lives in a spartan apartment in the city, where he meditates all day, living solely off of wine and cheese. He only comes out every few months, for the seasonal "Sabat" festivals of the witches; his first murder occurs shortly before Christmas.

Attending a low-rent performance of Hamlet, Zachariah picks the prettiest of the three witches and follows the actress home, where he tells her she is possessed, then proceeds to strangle her, finishing off his divine task by putting a stake through her heart. Ryker, a tough cop with twenty years experience on the force, works the area in which the murder took place (the Upper West Side and Times Square), so this is how he is brought into the tale.

Joe Ryker is one hell of a character, to say the least. Racist, misogynist, homophobic, sadistic, chavaunist, you name it. In other words, he's a complete dick, fighting with everyone and anyone. This is often stated in reviews of the series, but one thing worth noting is that nowhere does DeMille imply that Ryker is a hero. In fact every other character is generally shocked by his words and actions, and no one seems to like him. Not only that, but his muleheaded ideas, which Ryker is positive are the only ones worth trying, usually backfire, most of the time resulting in the death or at least the harm of his fellow cops. In my opinion DeMille here has created an anti-hero in the truest sense, an antogonist who serves as the protagonist.

Ryker's partner gets more narrative time, and emerges as the true hero of the piece. This is Peter Christie, a new detective on the force, one who still only has a silver badge. One of the themes of the novel is Ryker's corruption of Christie. When we meet him, Christie is just a regular guy, terrified of the crime and corruption in New York City, determined to one day escape the hellhole and move somewhere far, far away. He looks to Ryker mostly with anxiety but also a dash of respect; Ryker's known to be an asshole, but he gets results. Pretty soon though Christie is pulling actions that please even Ryker; in one laugh-out-loud moment, Christie, while interrogating some young (and black) suspects, asks himself, "What would Ryker do?", and immediately kicks one of the kids in the balls.

Ryker and Christie canvas the squalid areas of New York City, searching for Zachariah, who we know can't be found because he never leaves his apartment. After a second murder in which Zachariah kills another Hamlet actress -- this one a real-life practicing witch -- Ryker concocts a variety of schemes. A large portion of The Hammer of God is given over to dialog, of Ryker brainstorming ideas (and then bullying anyone who disagrees), either with Christie or with the rest of the precinct. (And of course true to the genre there's a "stupid chief" who is always stonewalling Ryker, but of course eventually backs down.)

But as Justin pointed out in his Men Of Violence piece, there's scarce action here. No shootouts, no chases, not even any fistfights. And yet for all that, the novel moves at a brisk pace. DeMille does a great job bringing his characters to life, and he really brings to life the streets of New York. Marty McKee mentioned in his reviews of these books that the Ryker novels came off as rushed and sloppy, but I didn't get that here, so maybe DeMille had more time to craft this particular installment. Again, though, it lacks action and thrills.

However it makes up for it with some of the most outrageous dark comedy I've ever had the joy to read. Where to start? How about the scene where Ryker, getting surly after a full day of questioning various witnesses, starts to hassle an old "fruitcake" and his young boyfriend, baiting them with degrading taunts? Then, realizing that the kid has the hots for him, Ryker actually takes the kid back to the crime scene and pretends that he too is interested -- all because Ryker detects that the kid has extra info which he's afraid to give out in the presence of his boyfriend. The kid strips for Ryker (who remains clothed)...and once Ryker gets the info he needs, he beats the shit out of the kid.

There are many other similar instances. One of Ryker's brilliant schemes is to infiltrate Christie into the underworld of witches; through sheer deus ex machina it turns out that the precinct's medical examiner, Dr. Morloch (!) is himself a full-fledged warlock (not to mention gay -- more opportunity for Ryker's barbs), so the good doctor provides the training. But wait, Ryker's heard orgies go down at these witch meetings, so they need a female detective...Ryker wants the gorgeous Abigail "Abbie" Robbins to take the job, a headstrong gal who turns heads, lives the high life in Manhattan, and doesn't put up with Ryker's shit. The arguing between Abbie and Ryker is one of the highlights of the book, and the dialog DeMille gives Abbie is further indication that he himself doesn't think too highly of Ryker.

DeMille works in a lot of information about witches and cults, playing up the more lurid aspects. He downplays the actual sleaze, though; for a novel so concerned with orgies and whatnot, The Hammer of God doesn't feature much sex or graphic nature. As part of their prep work for going undercover as witches-to-be, Christie and Abbie sleep together, but DeMille skips the details and instead plays up the ensuing spat, with Christie getting jealous not only of the attention Abbie gets at the cult meetings, but also the fact that she appears to enjoy the attention.

As mentioned, most of the novel is comprised of Ryker always being a step behind Zachariah, and then Ryker's ensuing plans to catch the bastard. The final quarter of the novel is the best, as all of Ryker's plans have centered on getting Zachariah to attend a black mass either at Dr. Morloch's swank apartment in the upper 60s or one which will be held among a less-privileged cult in the East Village -- one that takes place in a closed-down church, to boot. Any idiot could tell you that Zachariah, since he has to choose (both masses take place on the same night), would go with the one in the former church, so I never could figure out why Ryker even bothered planning something at Morloch's.

But again, this is just another instance of Ryker's plan either going wrong or causing grief -- for everyone except Ryker, that is. The last half of the novel is almost fully given over to Christie, with Ryker a supporting character. The black mass sequence pulls out all the stops, with the ensuing orgy light on the explicit nature but still pretty lurid, DeMille again playing up on Christie's homophobia (no doubt picked up from Ryker); all along Christie's been afraid that a gay cult-member might pull a move on him at the orgy, because Christie's heard that anything can happen during them.

When Zachariah finally arrives DeMille delivers a harrowing, violent scene that expands upon all of the twisted stuff that came before. Meanwhile Ryker's still not around. Christie is on the scene, but he's messed up from the heavy dope smoked at the black mass, not to mention the orgy that's raging around him -- Abbie meanwhile having given herself over to another couple. This entire section is pretty disturbed, with lots of hippies getting gutted, beheaded, and cleaved. So many in fact that by the time Ryker arrives with his .357 you get the feeling he needn't have bothered.

I enjoyed this novel enough to track down a few more titles in the series, but unfortunately none of them by DeMille. (I did luck out the other month though and scored a copy of the 1990 reprint of his Keller novel, The Smack Man, which as mentioned below is basically just a Ryker novel, only with Ryker's name changed.) This is the first DeMille novel I've read, and I have to say, I enjoyed it. While The Hammer of God was lacking a bit in the action department, and certainly could've been a bit more lurid, DeMille really made up for it with his gift for bringing to life the squalor of 1970s New York City, combined with a strong cast of characters who deliver some humorous and memorable dialog.

*The Ryker series has a confounding publication history. The series ran from 1974 to 1976, with the first four volumes published in 1974. DeMille wrote volumes one and two, The Sniper and The Hammer of God. My man Leonard Levinson wrote the third volume, The Terrorists, even though it was still credited to DeMille, who himself returned for the fourth volume, The Agent of Death. After which DeMille jumped ship, going over to Manor Books, where he changed Ryker's name to "Keller," and continued writing the series under this new title for another four volumes. Meanwhile Ryker continued at Leisure; the fifth volume, The Child Killer (1975), was published under the name Edson T. Hamill, likely a psuedonym -- and likely one chosen because it sounds a little like "Nelson DeMille." The Hamill name remained for the duration of the Ryker books, however The Child Killer was the last numbered volume. The sixth installment was The Sadist (1975), which was also the last to feature a painted cover. The final two volumes, Motive For Murder (1975) and The Slasher (1976), featured photo covers.