Thursday, August 4, 2016

The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection (second review)


The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection, by Paul Kenyon
February, 1974  Pocket Books

Some people re-read Moby-Dick; I’m re-reading The Ecstasy Connection. Six years ago I first reviewed this initial volume of The Baroness, and while I enjoyed it then I really loved it this time. This is opposite of the experience I had when I re-read The Enforcer #1 last year; while I loved that one the first time I read it, on my second reading I found it rather padded and uneventful.

Not so for The Ecstasy Connection, which still retains its position as one of the more sleazy, lurid, and entertaining men’s adventure novels I’ve yet read. And true to the standards of producer Lyle Kenyon Engel’s Book Creations Incorporated, it’s very well written. I don’t know how Engel did it, but he managed to always find quality authors – authors who all seemed to have the same sort of professional style. Thanks to ppsantos at The Baroness Yahoo Group, we now know that Donald Moffitt was the author of this book, as well as the seven volumes that followed (not to mention two others that were never published). Sadly, I’ve also learned from the Yahoo club that Mr. Moffitt passed away in December, 2014. Luckily he was able to discover the fan base his old series had acquired before he shrugged off those mortal coils.

I developed a lot of respect for Moffitt as I re-read this novel; the minor sleazy tidbits he packs into the book are incredible. He leaves no lurid stone unturned, from mentioning the “foamy pubes” of a nude woman who has died of a massive orgasm to detailing the plentiful carnage in the book’s frequent action scenes. While I didn’t much care for some of the later volumes (and I plan on re-reading them, too, so we’ll see if I still feel that way), it must be said that this first volume of The Baroness is one of the best men’s adventure novels ever written, hitting all the bases one could want. 

This makes it all the more interesting that The Ecstasy Connection was actually the second manuscript Moffitt wrote – the first one he wrote was Diamonds Are For Dying, which was published second in the series. (Thanks again to ppsantos for this info!) Diamonds Are For Dying was one of my least favorite books in the series, but maybe I should’ve read it first this time around, just to see how Moffitt improved between volumes. At any rate there is textual evidence throughout The Ecstasy Connection that it actually takes place after the second volume; for example, Penelope “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini at one point mentions her “previous mission in Brazil,” where she lost her favored pistol, a Bernadelli VB. All of this happened in Diamonds Are For Dying.

Perhaps Moffitt just figured out the series he wanted to write with The Ecstasy Connection; maybe he had trouble finding his footing with Diamonds Are For Dying. Whatever the reason, he scored a home run with this one, with a wildly over-the-top plot, constant action, a likable protagonist (the Baroness here isn’t as gratingly arrogant as she sometimes is in later volumes), and plentiful sex – yet again I wondered this time who exactly this series was written for. Was Lyle Kenyon Engel envisioning a women’s adventure series? Penelope’s frequent sex scenes are all written from her point of view, so we read of the pleasure she experiences as a man slides into her “scabbard” and whatnot. In the traditional men’s adventure novel, these sex scenes would of course be relayed from the man’s point of view. But then, there’s no way to get around this when your protagonist is a woman (unless you POV-hop, which you shouldn’t), so I digress.

Speaking of the rampant, explicit sex scenes, it occurred to me this time that perhaps the focus on sex is the very reason why The Baroness was published by Pocket Books, which didn’t really do much in the way of men’s adventure. However Pocket had cornered the market on trash fiction, mostly because it retained the paperback rights to Harold Robbins. Perhaps Engel envisioned this series as expressly catering to Pocket’s demand for sleaze – the dude was a genius for marketing and packaging books. Whatever the thinking, it got some attention; another thing Moffitt revealed to ppsantos of the Yahoo Baroness group was that Robbins himself at one point was trying to make a movie out of The Baroness!

Well anyway, this volume’s outrageous plot is about a dangerous new drug which activates the pleasure center of the hypothalamus, causing its users to literally die of pleasure. The novel features I believe the most memorable opening sequence in the series, with a gorgeous and famous stage actress, strung out on the ecstasy drug, doffing her clothes in front of a packed audience and yelling, “Screw me, darlings!” Meanwhile other notables are suffering from the drug, most damningly a nuclear missile operator in a military base who almost triggers WWIII before collapsing dead on his console. After the mandatory scene in which the various intelligence agency heads argue over who should get the job, we learn that “Key” – aka NSA man John Farnsworth – has been tapped by the President to activate “Coin.”

This is of course Penelope, the Baroness herself, and when we meet her she’s hosting one of her famous bi-annual parties in her plush Manhattan apartment. All the jet-setters are here, and Moffitt capably injects just the sort of sleazy ‘70s stuff we want throughout: “A blue haze of hemp hung over the rooms and drifted out over Central Park.” Interestingly, it’s just assumed that the reader already knows that Penelope is “Coin;” she sees a Senator in her party and reflects on the “NSA dossier” on him. Clearly this is yet another indication that this was intended as the second volume; I’m pretty sure Penelope was given a little more buildup in Diamonds Are For Dying.

A famous covergirl model – whom we learn later has even starred in two movies – Penelope is a smokin’ hot, raven-haired babe with an incredible bod, “huge luminous green eyes,” and “spectacular cheekbones.” (In other words, if Robbins had gotten a movie made, there was only one damn actress he could’ve hired to play the Baroness – Lynda “Good Lord!!!” Carter.) Oh, and cover artist Hector Garrido consistently depicted Penelope in a skin-tight black suit, which I always figured was his own invention. However at one point in this volume Penelope is in fact dressed in a black leotard, so maybe that’s what inspired Garrido.

Farnsworth contacts Penelope just as she’s engaged in her favorite activity – kinky sex. This too would become a recurring scene in future volumes, each of which for the most part follows the same template as The Ecstasy Connection. Moffitt turns out the first of his pages-long, XXX-hardcore sex scenes, as Penelope eagerly boffs a Joe Namath-esque football star. No detail is spared here. But once she answers Farnsworth’s call – and Penelope is contacted via her watch, which sends shocks through her to get her attention – Penelope meets her contact in the downtown Manhattan offices of International Models, Inc., where Farnsworth, an OSS veteran in his fifties with gray hair and a clipped moustache, acts as the company’s general manager.

The Baroness, tasked with finding out where this dangerous mystery drug is coming from, puts together her eight-person team. This time I actually paid attention to who they are, but be aware they are for the most part ciphers who add little to the series. Interestingly, it turns out that Moffitt himself felt the same, and indeed was requested to give the Baroness a large team – check out his comments on the origins of the series, which he also sent to ppsantos. But for posterity, here are the members of the Baroness’s team:

Dan Wharton: Described as “blond” and “bearlike,” he’s a former Green Beret who is in love with the Baroness. He’s also curiously prudish and there are many subtle mentions of how he will shyly look away when he sees a nude woman. It’s later explained that he was raised in a strict family, but still there’s enough textual evidence here for the reader to go “hmmm.”

Inga (no last name given): A “big-boned, babyfaced blonde,” whose cover is as one of Penelope’s models. She’s one of the team members who won’t contribute much here or in future volumes. This time she gives Penelope a massage.

Joe Skytop: Like Dan Wharton, he’s one of the few team members who will actually do anything in this and ensuing volumes. Another bear of a man – it’s not outright stated but I believe he’s supposed to be even more muscular than Wharton – he’s described as a “full-blooded Cherokee Indian” and he’s a master of all forms of unarmed combat.

Tom Sumo: Like Wharton and Skytop, another of the team members who actually matters. The Q of the Baroness’s team, Sumo is Japanese-American and contributes a variety of high-tech gizmos, each of which Moffitt overdescribes with annoyingly “gee whiz”-type narrative and dialog. (Ie, “My saliva is the electrolyte.”)

Paul (no last name given): An “elegant black man,” who I believe has maybe two lines this time. He won’t go on to much greater in the series. His cover is as one of Penelope’s top male models. We’re informed he’s some sort of guerrilla warfare specialist. (Meaning maybe he was a Black Panther??) And like June Cleaver, he can speak jive; ie “chillen” instead of “children.”

Yvette (no last name given): The other black member of the team, and usually paired with Paul, stereotyping be damned. (Humorously, when Penelope sends off her team on various missions early in the book, Paul and Yvette are instructed to don fly threads and head “uptown” to find out what’s going on with the pimps and the drugdealers!) She contributes nothing here and won’t in future, either. We’re informed she’s from Haiti, speaks with a slight accent, and is expert with disguises and piloting “small craft.”

Eric (no last name given): The most cipherlike member of the team, this dude’s apparently blond, the son of a merchant seaman or something, and a good fistfighter. He does absolutely nothing. We’re informed he’s Penelope’s “top male model.” It’s implied that he and Inga are an item.

Fiona (no last name given): A ravishing redhead, Penelope’s “top female model,” with no stated speciality. About the only thing we learn is that she’s notoriously late for meetings and is generally lazy.

Penelope spends the first half of The Ecstasy Connection in Manhattan, with Skytop and Wharton sent out around the country to track down various leads (which leads up to the memorable moment of Skytop taking on a bunch of bikers). This half I believe is the highlight of the book, with Moffitt capably juggling multiple threads and really keeping things moving. Not to mention sleazy – the villain, we learn, is a mountain of blubber named Petronius Sim who is behind the ecstasy drug but has hired the American Mafia to kill off any who might have taken it, as he doesn’t want any details leaked yet. One of his thugs kills one such user, and we watch again as a female character dies in the throes of orgasm. When Penelope later discovers the nude corpse, we’re informed: “Her crotch was a foamy mess.” As mentioned, Moffitt peppers the novel with such sleazy details, and it’s a wonder to behold.

The absolute highlight of the book is almost midway through, when Penelope crashes a party of the drug elite in Manhattan, where the mysterious “Big E” drug is supposed to be handed out. But Penelope quickly deduces that something rotten is going on. The Mafia hosts don’t seem too interested in the eager women here, and they also seem to insist that everyone engage in an orgy while they stand off on the sidelines. When Penelope sees the moving trucks down below she realizes that it’s a hit – they’re planning to kill everyone off and haul away the corpses. Acting fast, Penelope sheds her clothes and heads for the “biggest pile” of group-sexers: “She dove for the bottom of the pile and began wriggling her way inside. Eager hands groped for her breasts and buttocks. It was warm and steamy in the middle of the bodies, smelling of sweat and semen.”

Moffitt pulls out all the stops here, with the Mafia soldiers blowing everyone away mid-orgy, the bullets thudding into the bodies atop Penelope. In her escape she employs one of her trademark weapons, a black cigarette lighter/holder which dispenses “a splinter of synthetic black widow spider venom.” Even though I’d read it once before, I was still very caught up in this cinematic sequence, which sees a nude, blood-covered Baroness escaping up to the building’s rooftop and luring out the Mafia soldiers one by one, killing them with stolen weapons or with her bare hands. It’s a masterfully-written scene and proof positive that there was some very high-quality material in the otherwise-grubby world of ‘70s men’s adventure novels. And Moffit’s just as wonderfully descriptive in the gory action scenes as he is in the sex scenes, like when the Baroness shoots one of the mobsters: “His shattered skull began to ooze brain tissue like toothpaste.”

After this thrill-ride of a sequence – which is capped off with a nude Penelope stealing a moving truck right out from under the Mafia stooges’s noses – the team determines that the Big E has its origins in Hong Kong. After another several pages of sex with the football star, our heroine heads for Asia, Farnsworth having set it all up as yet another photo shoot for International Models, Inc. Penelope brings along all of the high-tech gear created for her – and annoyingly overdescribed via dialog and narrative – by Sumo, including her ever-reliable spyder, the “powerful little pistol-winch” that’s used throughout the series. There are also the “plastic sandal straps” which can become throwing knives, as well as a bra with “super polymer threads” and a pair of shoes with a “thermite core” in the heel. You can tell that Moffitt was really into sci-fi, and he appears to have done a lot of research on satellite technology and espionage gear of the day.

Moffitt was also well ahead of the curve in that he seems to have predicted the future sci-fi genre of cyberpunk; Petronius Sim employs a variety of “juiceheads,” each of whom have metal plates in their heads, which they insert wires into and, after entering that day’s code (provided by Sim), they experience orgasmic joy. It’s all very much like something out of a William Gibson novel from a decade later. He’s also good at capturing the feel of exotic places; Penelope is given a tour of Hong Kong’s slums by Major Nigel Pickering, who presents himself as a member of the police, and Moffitt brings to life the squalor of the place – and still doesn’t forget the sleaze, with Pickering at one point propositioned by a prepubescent girl!

Meanwhile Penelope knows instantly that she’s going to be having some hot sex with Pickering – even though she just screwed the football star half to death a few pages before. After an expensive dinner these two repair to Penelope’s hotel room for more XXX action, Moffitt again mostly relaying it through Penelope’s perspective. Who cares that she’s already deduced “Pickering” isn’t who he claims to be, and might even be an enemy agent? She wants to screw him anyway. Another overlong sex scene follows, Penelope’s “magnificent breasts” heaving away.

Moffitt hews closely to the Bond formula – after being wined and dined at the palatial residence of Sim, Penelope finds herself a prisoner of the sadist. But instead of the “mink-lined cell” of Fleming’s Doctor No, Sim instead straps a nude Penelope onto a matress and hooks her into a colossal artificial brain! Sim has used countless human guinea pigs to fully map the human brain, something no one else has been able to do; thus he knows exactly where the pleasure and pain centers are, and how to stimulate them. He proceeds to carry out his learnings on Penelope.

It all gets pretty psychedelic, with Sim and his scientific crony Dr. Jolly (and let’s not forget the flunky named Happy!) activating the portion of Penelope’s brain which still retains the hybrid sexual state it possessed when it was an embryo; soon Penelope feels that she is equipped like a man, even though she can see her nude body is unchanged. It gets more and more out-there, capping off with the unforgettable line: “And now Penelope herself was a giant penis.” It gets even more like an XXX-rated 2001: A Space Odyssey as Sim and Jolly next activate Penelope’s female region, so that she has sex with herself in a supremely psychedelic sequence:

And then, somehow, she was a vagina too. A starry tunnel bored into the sky. The two parts of herself, male and female, worked together at their cosmic copulation, and she could feel all of it. 

And then the universe ended in a galactic explosion. There was a vast milky spurt that shot to the boundaries of creation, and an answering shudder from the vaginal sky. Fiery meteors rained down from the heavens. The solar system shook.

As Dr. Jolly later says, the Baroness, like a regular Barbarella on the Excessive Machine, has “an extraordinary capacity to feel sex.” After beating the shit out of a nurse Penelope’s able to escape, and here the novel shows that it’s a bit too long for its own good – 223 pages of small print – as we have this arbitrary bit where Penelope, feverish and dazed, just manages to get away from Sim’s men and ends up collapsing on the Hong Kong docks. There she’s picked up by a kindly old junk trawler who cares for her – for three days! Once Penelope is recovered she discovers the man’s kindness was just a ruse; he intends to sell her to an old madame. Penelope laughs it off, goes back to sleep(!?) – and then the scene proves how arbitrary it is when Sim’s men board the junk and take her captive again!

So now our heroine is right back where she started, plus Skytop and Dan are also now captives; temporarily mindless thanks to Sim’s various pleasure center controllers. Pickering’s also a prisoner – turns out he’s a British secret agent. Sim plans to wire Penelope and Pickering’s minds together, so that they feel each other’s pleasure, and to get the festivities started he orders that the two be dosed with aphrodesiacs and chained together, given a night of total privacy so that they can become attuned to one another’s sex drives(just go with it!). This of course leads to another of Moffitt’s patented super-hardcore scenes, as the chained nudes have heroic sex:

He was moving in and out in a corkscrew motion now. She butted him with her bottom at each jab, trying to get all of him inside her. One of her bumps was too violent. Pickering lost his balance and fell over backward. Before he could get to his knees again, she swung around, dragging the ankle chain with her, and squatted atop his mast. She lowered herself and it pushed deep within her. “I want to watch your face when you come,” she whispered hoarsely.

Even though the Baroness frequently gets captured, she always manages to stage an ingenious escape – what will also prove to be a recurring theme in the series, and usually the highlight of each volume. After the night of super sex, Pickering is taken away and Penelope’s all alone. She manages to cajole Happy the stooge into opening her special pillbox, which really hides a microwave radar or something. At any rate it fries the wires in Happy’s brain, and a freed Penelope once again beats the shit out of the same nurse, steals her clothes, and massacres everyone in the operating room in one of the more wonderfully-gory scenes in the book…a scene complete with Penelope ramming a bonesaw through the “soft jelly” of Dr. Jolly’s brain.

The finale gets wilder and wilder, intentionally or not recalling Island Of Lost Souls, ie the Charles Laughton movie based on Island of Dr. Moreau. Penelope and her freed comrades lay to waste half of the villa, freeing Sim’s various human experiments, all of whom want their pound of flesh. Meanwhile Sim floats in a pool of honey(!), bombed out of his skull on a super-ecstasy drug he just perfected. He’s impossible to get to, safely behind steel bars and other protective barriers. However the designers of this fortress didn’t count on the freakish strength of the human guinea pigs, who break through the barriers and rip Sim to pieces with their claws in a gloriously outrageous finale.

Sadly, I don’t recall any of the successive volumes of The Baroness reaching the incredible heights of The Ecstasy Connection. Many of them come close, though, but with this one Moffitt really struck trash gold. It’s a shame the series has become so collectible and thus overpriced on the used books market. Moffitt’s even sure to end on the sleaze, with Penelope, back in Manhattan, looking up that football quarterback and demanding another night’s fun, whether he’s playing in the SuperBowl tomorrow or not.

Technically this volume would lead into #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, but I’ll read Diamonds Are For Dying next, mostly because it was published second. Ideally I guess you should read that one first, though, then this one, and then continue on with volume three. At any rate I do look forward to re-reading the rest of The Baroness, and I had a grand ol’ time enjoying the sleazy mastery of The Ecstasy Connection.

Monday, August 1, 2016

The Spider #13: Builders Of The Black Empire


The Spider #13: Builders Of The Black Empire, by Grant Stockbridge
October, 1934  Popular Publications

Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page brings The Spider back to the ground after the previous fantastical volumes, with an installment that sort of retreads the one in #10: The Corpse Cargo only minus the horror elements. Indeed Builders Of The Black Empire (titled “Builders of the Dark Empire” in the story itself) is mostly just a standard action tale, lacking many of the elements that make this series so fascinating.

The Spider’s already on the hunt when we meet him; Richard Wentworth is onboard a tramp steamer somewhere near Florida, disguised as a crewman. We learn that Wentworth began researching this latest caper a week ago, hunting the papers for anything amiss. There he found that some steamers were not returning to port in New York; Wentworth instantly suspected nefarious a-doings. And sure enough Page delivers the first of many, many action scenes, with Wentworth’s steamer attacked by airplanes – turns out the various steamers haven’t returned to port because they’ve been waylaid by “piracy by airplane.”

So yes, despite the recency of The Corpse Cargo, this volume again sees Wentworth up against modern-day pirates, but rather than the sadistic ghouls of that previous installment (not to mention their depraved female leader), this time we are presented with a much less memorable cast of villains: a bunch of Mexicans who seem to have walked out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Sadly, they will prove to be the sole villains – well, them and a French guy who is a known revolutionary or something, and he isn’t much more memorable, and is more so annoying than anything.

Wentworth, who sneaked off the steamer when it was ordered to dump it’s cargo of nitro on an uninhabited island named Belulah Key, watches in disgust as the planes swoop in and destroy the boat, killing everyone on board. Wentworth manages to get on one of the planes that come to collect the loot, and plants a bomb on one of them. He hijacks another plane, taking the men aboard captive as their comrades in the rest of the squadron blow up. But Wentworth blunders, falling into their trap – the first of several times he does so this volume – and he is taken prisoner by the pirates, not even a dozen pages in.

Here we meet the boring leader, Miguel Oriano, a redheaded Mexican of mixed parentage; be prepared for lots of racist invective courtesy Wentworth, calling Oriano “half-breed” and whatnot. Sure, the Spider’s trying to rile the guy, to make him clumsy, but at the same time it is weird in today’s world to read a hero spouting such things. Again, I’m not judging the sentiments of the past, just reporting. But in true cliched fashion Oriano is a big lout who carries around a big whip, and soon enough Wentworth’s to be hitched to the post for his own whipping.

The Spider’s escape is the goriest part of the book; he steals Oriano’s whip and slashes one of the leader’s “peons” with it, knocking out the dude’s eyeball! From there it’s an escape back to New York, where we get the details on what led Wentworth to this case. Turns out while slumming in disguise in waterfront bars he heard notorious revolutionist Remarque D’Enry saying something about a revolution in America. Well, Wentworth figures D’Enry is somehow involved with this airplane piracy deal, so he begins to hunt the Frenchman down.

As per the norm, here the plot is expanded a bit with various New York notables coming into the story – as usual, people Wentworth is familiar with, due to his highfalutin lifestyle. Chief among them is big blond Scott Haillie, a diplomat who was once known for his carousing days. Wentworth – with ever-suffering Nita at his side – spots Haillie in a posh restaurant, dining with D’Enry, wealthy Spaniard Don Esteban, the don’s son Andre, and the don’s lovely daughter Carmencita. Haillie and Andre have a grudge, and next thing you know the two men are engaged in a duel, with Wentworth and D’Enry acting as their respective seconds.

Builders Of The Black Empire is more along the lines of a pulp mystery than previous books; during the duel someone tries to take a shot at Andre, and the would-be assassin lies that Wentworth hired him. Meanwhile men in masks recently came to Wentworth’s penthouse, perhaps abducing Ram Singh, who has disappeared (the leader of the gang humorously refers to Wentworth as “boy friend” twice!), and Wentworth suspects that this plus the lying assassin means that Don Esteban is setting him up. The don you see is Wentworth’s chief suspect now, given the island kingdom he rules off the coast of the Yucatan, a perfect haven for a pirate army.

Wentworth suffers more in this novel than any other I’ve yet read, which is really saying something. He and Hallie are attacked by D’Enry and a pirate crew, and even though Wentworth captures them and ties them up, D’Enry gets loose – and shoots Wentworth in the friggin’ chest! Our hero plunges into the water…and comes to a few weeks later, having been fished out of the water by ever-loyal Jackson and taken to the hospital. Wentworth convalasces for a whopping five weeks – he was shot in the lung, we learn – and through it all Nita tells him the pirates have stopped their attacks.

Turns out though she’s lying, not that Wentworth blames her. No, the nation is close to revolution now, with seven thousand innocent people having been killed on the seas by the pirates. A “great Eastern nation” is suspected of being behind the attack (but in reality is being framed by the pirates, whose plan turns out to be to cause a revolution in the US so they can sell their loot freely, or something), and Wentworth in wheelchair watches as an innocent old man from that country is almost torn to shreds by an angry mob outside the hospital. Wentworth whips out a gun and shoots some of them down! But it turns out the mob really is being pushed by D’Enry’s pirates, and there follows another violent scene where guys toting shotguns attack Wentworth in his hospital. He manages to take away one of their shotguns and blows away one of them point-blank in an elevator.

There follows one of Norvell Page’s patented insane sequences, and the highlight of the book, where Wentworth gets to the consulate ahead of the rioting mob – the pirates in their ranks pushing them there to tear the place apart. Having put on his “Tito Caliepi” costume of the old face and lank hair (and we’re informed he hasn’t worn this disguise for a while), Wentworth, still in his wheelchair, staves off the mob with nothing more than his voice and a sort of “Spider light,” clearly the inspiration for the later Bat Light. Gunning down the occasional pirate in the mob (“Death to those who preach death!” he cackles like a madman), Wentworth succeeds in turning back the rioters from the consulate, in a scene almost as crazy as the “Silent Night” singalong in the later #15: The Red Death Rain

Wentworth is lured to Don Esteban’s island near Florida by a letter from long-missing Ram Singh. But he and Jackson are promptly captured; turns out Singh is working for the pirates. Jackson mutters that it was only a matter of time before the “heathen” showed his true colors, anyway! But no fear – Ram Singh is only pretending, and he and the lovely Carmencita free Wentworth and Jackson. Next Wentworth impersonates Don Esteban, routing the pirates from “his” island and engaging Oriano in a long chase back up the mainland. Next we have that aerial fiction pulp readers must’ve loved, with Wentworth stealing a pirate plane and blowing up a field filled with them, thus preventing their planned aerial attack on Washington.

The finale occurs in the capitol, with Wentworth having learned of an attack on the Washington Monument. But instead of big action it’s more of a suspense vibe, with all of the characters converging here and Wentworth, with a bomb ticking somewhere beneath them, trying to figure out which one is the secret leader of the pirates. Frustratingly, we don’t get to see the annoying D’Enry gunned down – instead he’s killed by another character, and off-page at that! But the finale is at least thrilling, with Wentworth finding and defusing the bomb with mere seconds to spare. This is another of those great scenes with Nita standing steadfast behind Wentworth, despite the fact that she could’ve easily run away to safety.

Overall Builders Of The Black Empire was too standard for me, and certainly was my least favorite volume yet. But Page still writes with the usual fevered passion, and he puts Wentworth through a particular hell this time out – so what that Wentworth spends the last quarter of the novel acting like his usual self, despite the fact that he was bedridden and half-dead just a few pages before? (We also get the minor and passing detail this time that Wentworth carries “stimulants” in his pocket – purhaps this is the secret behind the Spider’s single-minded determination? He’s just hopped up on coke!)

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Stand Your Ground


Stand Your Ground, by William W. Johnstone with J.A. Johnstone
August, 2014  Pinnacle Books

I happened to be in a Wal-Mart one Saturday afternoon in September, 2014 and for the heck of it I checked out the book section, just to see what garbage passed for bestselling fiction in today’s miserable, vapid world. Unsurprisingly, the majority of it was crap – paranormal romances, tweener-focused apocalyptic fantasy, and thick paperbacks with photoshopped covers about female FBI agents. But then I saw another paperback, this one just as fat as the others and with the same sort of generic cover apparently mandatory today, but this one had “William W. Johnstone” in embossed font.

“But he’s been dead for ten years!” I think I said out loud. However it turns out that William Johnstone is like the Tupac Shakur of fiction, a very prolific author despite being long dead. The book, Stand Your Ground, was co-credited “J.A. Johnstone,” which according to the back cover was none other than Johnstone’s nephew, continuing the tradition of his uncle – and curiously, the back cover bio never outright states that William Johnstone is no longer living. But the William/J.A. writing combo turns out to be quite prolific; I couldn’t believe how many books have been published by the two over the years.

So, as you all have likely figured out, William W. Johnstone has followed in the path laid out by Don Pendleton, with a host of ghostwriters turning out novels under his name. Pinnacle Books closely guards the secret of who has served as J.A. Johnstone, but the imprint has at least maintained the right wing sentiments so inherent in the work of the real William Johnstone. I found this interesting, as Pinnacle has been owned by Kensington since the late ‘80s, and Len Levinson told me once that Walter Zacharius, the man who ran Kensignton, was a rabid left-winger. Regardless, the William/J.A. novels appear to be very right wing, with Stand Your Ground itself given over to arbitrary digressions about the foolishness of liberalism. Mind you, I’m not complaining – I was chuckling throughout, mostly due to the arbitrariness of it all.

It looks like Pinnacle has tried to get on the Lee Child bandwagon with its own Jack Reacher; the William/J.A. union has, over the past decade, published a trilogy of thick paperbacks about John Howard Stark, a ‘Nam vet who, judging from the synopses of the three books, has spent a lot of time killing Mexicans who have attempted to invade America – taking advantage of those weak borders, naturally. For all intents and purposes, Stand Your Ground is another Stark novel, yet curiously his name is not mentioned on the back cover. Instead, we are informed that the hero is Lucas Kincaid (a badass name if ever there was one), a former soldier on the run from the government who is hiding in the small town of Fuego, Texas – location of a prison which a horde of Muslim terrorists have just been transported to.

My friends, don’t you believe it. Lucas Kincaid is a minor character at best for the majority of the book (which runs a too-long length of 408 pages). And forget about those ass-kicking qualities the back cover attempts to convey for Kincaid. The dude spends the first 300 or so pages sitting in front of a computer in the prison library! Rather, John Howard Stark is the true protagonist of Stand Your Ground, and either Pinnacle didn’t promote this as another Stark book because they were trying to launch Kincaid as the new William/J.A. hero, or perhaps the book was written by a different ghostwriter than whoever turned out those earlier Stark novels.

But then, even Stark isn’t the main protagonist. One of the main problems with Stand Your Ground is that there are just too damn many characters for the reader to contend with. I mean it’s like a right-wing War And Peace at times, as “J.A.” presents us with a host of Fuego locals, visiting left-wing journalists, and vengeance-minded Islamic radicals, all of them vying for the reader’s attention. William Johnstone also had big casts in the books of his I’ve read, but at least he’d gradually whittle the narrative span down to focusing on just one main character. Not so for J.A., which results in an unwieldy narrative mess at times.

The back cover also has it that the plot of Stand Your Ground is about a bunch of terrorists who invade Fuego to free their imprisoned comrades, taking the school’s high school football team hostage and threatening to kill them one by one until their demands are met. Well, this sort of happens…in the last 60 or so pages of the book. Before that the novel just keeps building and building and building…toward something. Annoyingly, every chapter – even every section within a chapter – ends on a cliffhanger, no matter how forced, which only makes the reader more eager for something to happen.

Because the thing of it is, the shit-kicker, right-wing residents of Fuego know something’s up, and they know the rotten liberal government in Washington isn’t going to do anything about it, but damned if it still doesn’t take them way too long to realize their asses are in the fire. The book is almost an exercise in constantly putting off the fireworks. Whereas normally I’d bitch and moan about this, for Stand Your Ground I really didn’t mind – mostly because “J.A.” takes the opportunity to bash liberals again and again and again. This book is in every way the exact opposite of another I recently read, The Hydra Conspiracy.

Stand Your Ground occurs in the near future, perhaps in 2024, ten years after the publication date. I did estimate that 2008 must’ve been the “over ten years ago” date which is often mentioned by the characters, complaining about how that’s when the country first started going to hell – the year Obama was elected into office, of course. But this novel gives a picture of progressive liberalism run amok, a world which we are heading toward in reality. While it never gets as over-the-top as the similar potential future in NYPD 2025, it shares the same sentiments: liberalism is stupid, its adherents are brainwashed hypocrites, it weakens society, and it is ultimately dangerous.

What’s interesting though is that, despite all the “grown up” politics stuff, the book is almost written on a Young Adult level. There is a curious lack of cursing throughout (other that is than a very late utterance of the word “fuck”), absolutely no sex, hardly any exploitation of the female characters, and rather muted violence – people die, to be sure, but the author rarely details the carnage. In other words the book is PG-13 at best, which leads to the unintentionally humorous outcome of a right-wing book that has been Politically Corrected. The author also tends to overdescribe things, which again lends it a juvenile vibe; the momentum is constantly halted so we can be informed how characters react to dialog or action or whatever, as if the author doesn’t want the reader to encounter a single bit of mystery or confusion.  (The cynic in me figures this is just the author catering to the perceived reading level of his audience.)

Which isn’t to say the writing is bad – indeed, I get the feeling that this particular “J.A.” might’ve served some time at Gold Eagle, or perhaps was just a fan of Don Pendleton. There is that same assured craft to the prose, and some of the single-sentence paragraphs sprinkled throughout definitely have the feel of Pendletonisms. And when things happen it all gets very good – it just takes a long time for things to happen. This leads me to believe that the author was handed an unwieldy word count, and thus had to keep staving off the climactic action until the fireworks promised on the back cover could actually occur.

At any rate, John Howard Stark is for the most part the central protagonist, and the novel opens with him visiting an old ‘Nam pal in Fuego. Stark is recovering from cancer – not sure if this was an element in the previous Stark novels – and he’s still a media notable, given all his battles against Mexican terrorists and drugdealers. His pal is the warden at Hell’s Gate Prison, near Fuego, and here a bunch of radical Islamic terrorists have been transported, the President finally having lived up to his promise to close down Guatanamo Bay (the novel is very prescient at times). Meanwhile the author presents us with our swarm of local characters, from the high school quarterback to the deputy with Down’s syndrome.

And meanwhile there’s Lucas Kincaid, the supposed badass, sitting in front of the computer in the prison library. He’ll be there for a good 300 pages or so. The mystery of his background is dangled throughout the novel, but in most regards he’s very similar to Stark, though younger – an Army Ranger, he expressly ignored orders and saved some of his comrades during some action in the Middle East. Now he’s in hiding, under the assumed name of “Lucas Kincaid” (meaning he chose his own badass name, which is pretty funny), and he decided to hole up in the nowheresville of Fuego, TX, even chosing to work at the prison’s library, because who would look for a wanted felon in a prison?

We also get many scenes from the point of view of the terrorists – which again lends the novel a Gold Eagle vibe – in particular Dr. Hamil, a well-known speaker of “Muslim issues” on the various cable news networks, where he insists that Islam is “the religion of peace.” However Hamil is in fact the leader of a terrorist cell – the novel predates the disgusting rise of ISIS, thus Al-Qaeda is often mentioned as the biggest Islamic terrorist faction – and he plots to destroy Fuego and free his jailed brethren as a message to the Americans. Yet he is also cagey enough to capitalize on the gullibility of the foolish liberal government – the author is careful to point out that Hamil and many of his followers are actually American-born citizens, raised in the country they secretly despised, wrapping themselves in the protective blanket of “progressive liberalism” to escape detection.

Representing the liberal front is uber-annoying Alexis Deveraux, a famous news journalist with a brick shithouse bod. Not sure if she too appeared in previous Stark novels, but she’s familiar with him and they dislike each other royally. Alexis has come to Fuego to document the recent transition of Muslim terrorists, whom she insists on referring to as “prisoners,” eager to point out how they’re being mistreated due to their religion and etc. Confusingly, though, she’s also brought along a Tom Brokaw-esque anchor to cover the story, despite the fact that Alexis herself is the one who keeps appearing in front of the camera, with the “anchor” relegated to announcing stuff like “We’re now entering the prison.” The author also seems unsure on how actual news broadcasting works – and humorously enough, so do the journalists themselves, with Alexis at one point not even knowing if they’re going out live across the country(??).

Around the halfway point things pick up. Hamil’s soldiers launch their attack on Fuego, and we read as various batches of slack-jawed yokels fight them off with hunting rifles and whatnot. The local cops for the most part carry the action here (Kincaid’s still pecking away at that library computer), with Stark meanwhile getting a tour of Hell’s Gate – just as Alexis and team have shown up to do their impromptu story. Handling the camera by the way is a sexy brunette named Riley who is not only a former Marine but also a Republican, something she keeps from her colleagues. (Humorously, calling someone a “Republican” is about the ultimate insult in this thoroughly liberalized near-future.) Riley, when she sees Kincaid in the library, recognizes him. By novel’s end they’re a couple, though the growing romance between them during the constant firefights which comprise the novel’s final quarter isn’t much explored and is hard to buy.

The finale sees the invading terrorist army heading for Hell’s Gate, where Stark and Kincaid muster the forces to stop them. It’s all very Assault On Precinct 13, and here some minor characters are killed off by Hamil as a sign of what will happen to those who oppose him – again, while Hamil and crew are presented as monsters, they are sadly nowhere near the level of our present reality; these guys are almost like Dr. Seuss when compared to ISIS. While Stark and Riley set up explosives, Kincaid marshals forces against the invading army, however the novel never does give me the scene I wanted, of a machine gun-toting Lucas Kincaid mowing down hordes of terrorists like a modern-day men’s adventure protagonist.

Oh and humorusly enough, when things finally start picking up in the last half and you figure Kincaid’s about to finally take over the show, the author doles out yet another badass who first takes on the terrorists, this one an old acquantance of Stark’s who commands an assault team which answers only to Texas senator Maria Delgado, serving as her personal (and private) army. Delgado is a strong female character, but because she’s a Republican she’s hated (sort of like how Maggie Thatcher doesn’t get any respect from the liberal feminists of today), and she instantly realizes something rotten’s going on in Fuego – I forgot to mention, but the President himself is behind the plot(!!). The author never describes him, but it’s intimated that he too is Muslim, or of Arabic descent – having gotten to the highest office by following the path paved by Barry Obama a decade before. 

But Delgado’s secret army is led by crusty Colonel Atkinson (whom Stark knew as a private in ‘Nam), and by novel’s end he has Stark on the force and Kincaid and Riley will also soon be asked to join. They are worried that a war against the government itself is on the way, and Stand Your Ground ends with Stark and Atkinson telling themselves that Fuego was “just the beginning.” No sequel has yet been published, but if one comes out it seems it will be about our heroes taking on the President himself.

Anyway, I did enjoy Stand Your Ground, but the barrage of characters and the constant forestalling of action got to be a drag. To the author’s credit, never once does he POV-hop, despite the plethora of characters; whenever he changes perspective, he either starts a new chapter or gives us a few lines of white space. I nearly wept in gratitude. And as I wrote above, the digressive attacks on liberalism were a “hoot,” as they say down here in Texas. In fact if anything I don’t think the author went far enough in this regard – the United States has only become more crazy in the two years since this novel was published.

The question remains whether William W. Johnstone himself would’ve enjoyed the novel, but one thing I can say without question is that this is a helluva lot better written than anything he could’ve done. And yet despite that Stand Your Ground misses the lovably bizarre amateurish quality Johnstone brought to his own works – not to mention the rampant sleaze. Here’s hoping Pinnacle asks its “J.A. Johnstones” to start veering closer to the style of sick Johnstone masterpieces like The Nursery – man, if the next Lucas Kincaid book is like that, I’ll snatch it up in a second!

Monday, July 25, 2016

The Last Ranger #3: The Madman's Mansion


The Last Ranger #3: The Madmans Mansion, by Craig Sargent
December, 1986  Popular Library

Strangely, I didn’t recall much of this third volume of The Last Ranger, though I’m sure I eagerly snatched it off the WaldenBooks shelves in ’86 and quickly read it, just as I had the previous two volumes. Yet as I re-read The Madman’s Mansion all these years later, damned if any of it seemed familiar; only Norm Eastman’s typically-great cover sparked anything in the dusty ol’ memory banks.

At any rate this one opens just two days after the previous volume. Hero Martin Stone speeds from Boulder, Colorado, where as we’ll recall he took on both a death-cult and a biker gang called The Guardians of Hell. Stone is determined to save his cipher of a sister, April, who was abducted by the Guardians and taken off to Vernal, Utah, where she will be put into the depraved hands of Poet, aka The Dwarf, a quadrapalegic sadist who goes around in a wheelcair with guns in the armrests and who turns out to be a lot more important than he seemed in his previous appearances – from his fortress in Vernal he hosts a deluxe watering hole for the new rulers of this post-nuke ‘90s America, from Mafioso to drug dealers to bikers.

While it takes its time getting to the good stuff, The Madman’s Mansion at least opens with the outrageous gore Jan Stacy (aka “Craig Sargent”) excelled in. Stone is waylaid by a group of bikers as he continues his escape through Colorado, riding as ever his armored and armed Harley Electroglide with ever-faithful pit bull Excaliber clutching the seat behind him. Our hero makes short work of the hapless scum: “But Stone was already firing forward again, taking out one more, with a stream of five slugs that scissored down his face, cutting a line from forehead to chin that seemed to just open up and spew out everything within it – eyeballs, brain tissue, tongue, and teeth – into a bubbling stew of parts in the road, a steaming smorgasbord just inches from the gushing corpse that dove forward into the white snow.”

But soon after this opening chaos the book settles into a measured pace for the next hundred or so pages. We do however get a return trip to “the Bunker,” ie the nuclear shelter Stone spent the previous five years in, buried in the Colorado mountains. I always enjoyed these scenes when I read this series as a kid, but even here I had no recollection of the Bunker sequence in this volume, which sees Stone opening up tons of canned food for Excaliber as repayment for saving Stone’s life so many times. Afterwards the pit bull is a bloated lump that can only lay in misery on the floor – once again Stacy develops a humorous rapport between man and dog, with many funny scenes between the two. 

Stone again consults the sort of proto-internet his father, Major Stone, left behind for him in the Bunker, a computer interface which answers any military-strategy question Stone might have. In this case he asks how a lone person can attack a heavily-guarded fortress, for Stone has learned that the Dwarf’s Vernal retreat – which was once a posh ski lodge – is guarded by hundreds of men, many of them former insane asylum patients. But Stacy holds off on the carnage, with the book sort of detouring into some of the goofier stuff one might encounter in Stacy’s other post-nuke series, Doomsday Warrior, as Stone stops off in “Mom’s Diner,” a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Colorado, where he gets in a poker game that becomes a gunfight.

Here Stacy introduces a character I had no recollection of: Dr. Abraham Reagan Kennedy, an old hippie-type who drives around the blasted country in a “house-truck” (complete with chimney), selling “Certified Snake Oil.” Stacy is much too enamored with Kennedy, giving over pages and pages to his blatherings, particularly when it comes to selling snake oil. But Kennedy proves to be Stone’s in to the Dwarf’s resort, as Kennedy is hired each year to put on a magic show there. And guess what, that’s just where he’s headed right now. So Stone hauls his massive bike onto Kennedy’s big truck (formerly a moving truck), which is both a home and a store on wheels, stuffed with the various bric-a-brac Kennedy sells to eager clientele.

More flashbacks to Doomsday Warrior ensue as Stone and Kennedy drive into the freak weather that was customary in that earlier series: a tornado-blizzard that goes on for too many pages and, despite the danger Stacy strives to convey, doesn’t have a chance in hell of actually killing our hero, his new best friend, or his faithful dog. If anything this scene just provides the setup for another goofy Stone-Excaliber moment, as a mud-drenched Stone, who rode out the storm from beneath the truck, demands that Excaliber – who stayed nice and clean inside the truck – jump out and also get muddy. This the dog does with joyful aplomb, once again coming out on top in this latest goofy exchange with his master.

But a bit after page 100 The Madman’s Mansion takes a change for the better, abruptly becoming the most lurid offering yet. The Dwarf’s plush resort is of course the titular “mansion,” and here insanity reigns; the nation’s new “elite” come here to cavort in the most outrageous, most sleazy manners possible, and Jan Stacy plumbs the darkest recesses of his capable imagination for some truly over-the-top shit, like a roulette wheel where the “ball” is a severed head to crazed “bloodcleaner” maids who worry about “flying penises” that might eat them. The Dwarf has staffed the place with former asylum patients, and as we know Stacy had a penchant for nutcases-turned-enforcers, as memorably shown in C.A.D.S. #1.

The former high-class ski lodge is now the stomping grounds of bikers, Mafia bigwigs, and scantily-clad female chattel; women are so disposable here that a shocked Stone even finds himself stumbling over casually-discarded female corpses as he’s shown to his grand suite by a jaded preteen bellhop. Later Stone will find sections of the lodge catering to the most perverted whims imaginable, including a room where girls are strung up and slowly sliced to ribbons. The Dwarf also runs a lucrative “white slavery” business, and Stone will gradually discover that this is the fate the sadist has in mind for April. Meanwhile Stone, after killing a Mafia thug in a knife fight, enjoys the explicit sex scene which is mandatory for the series.

I forgot to mention – Stone, due to the events in the previous volume, is wearing a disguise: he’s now “Vito ‘Pimp’ Staloni,” Mafia bigshot from New York, clad in a pink pimpsuit with violet sunglasses (the clothing provided by Kennedy). At any rate a blonde bimbo with an awesome bod named Triste is so turned on by Stone’s killing of the Mafia thug that she throws herself at him. After dancing in a room with an all-female, all-naked band and mutilated corpses arrayed along a clear floor beneath the dancers’s feet, Triste and Stone head back to his room for a “long night of super sex.”

Stacy devotes the entirety of Chapter Fourteen to the sexual shenanigans, and unlike in the Doomsday Warrior books it doesn’t get very purple-prosed, instead sticking to hardcore description throughout. It goes on for pages and pages as these two get along in the most XXX-detailed manner imaginable: “It was as if he were mining her. The harder he pumped, the more she seemed to open. As if her body had lived just for this night, her breasts just for his hands to squeeze, her entrance just for him to find the full depth of. Then he suddenly seemed to go half mad himself and started banging into her like a jackhammer.” And so on!!

Finally, in the last third of the book, things started to get somewhat familiar – and indeed made me wonder if the book had been so OTT that 12-year-old me just couldn’t handle it and promptly forgot everything! Anyway Stone, after checking out more of the Resort’s horrors, finds a slavery auction going on, beautiful, nude young women trotted out and pawed by an obese auctioneer. Who will be surprised when one of them turns out to be none other than April? Stone bids desperately for his sister and wins at exorbitant cost, even though he has no money. But it turns out to be a trap – when he goes to collect his winnings, Stone is instead bonked on the head and captured by Dwarf, who has been expecting him.

Here The Madman’s Mansion becomes even more like an ‘80s horror paperback. First we get a spine-chiller of a chapter where Stone is cuffed amd thrown in a brackish pool while rats, big centipedes, and various other creepy critters come after him. He passes out and comes to at a dinner table with Dwarf himself, presented with a banquet of delicacies. But man Stacy was in a gross-out mood when he penned this one, as it turns out the food is human flesh – “deveined” eyeballs for potatoes and even a poor young woman (nude, of course) with a spigot in her throat, so the Dwarf can tap it and hurridly share the “wine” before she dies! There’s even a bizarre bit reminiscent of The Butcher #2 where a massive snake eats another girl.

Stone, still in cuffs, must now fight a seven-foot mutant with “muscles that would have made Arnold Schwarzenegger turn in his bodybuilding badge,” with a face that’s “a mass of tissue like bloody pudding.” This knock-down, drag-out fight is particularly brutal, as is everything else in this volume, with Stone literally knocking the mutant’s brain out! When an outraged Dwarf orders Stone’s death, hell suddenly breaks out with the appearance of Kennedy, tossing grenades. Deus ex machina be damned, Kennedy also has the “blueprints” for the Resort, and in the commotion they escape to the elevator shafts and rappel up to Dwarf’s floor-spanning suite on the 18th floor.

Even though he was just down there in the chaos of the ground floor, Dwarf’s already somehow up here on the top floor – who cares about realism, anyway? – and he’s leading a bunch of dudes in robes as they prepare to sacrifice poor April, nude and nailed to a cross! Did I mention it’s Christmas? With “tommy guns” roaring Stone and Kennedy save the day, and here occurs about the only thing I remembered from The Madman’s Mansion, as a victorious Stone kicks Dwarf off his wheelchair, picks him up by the throat, and hurls the misshapen bastard out the window! Indeed I got such a vicarious thrill out of this all those years ago that I remember eagerly discussing this scene with a fellow Last Ranger fan I ran into at the Country Club Mall in LaVale, Maryland sometime in early 1987, when the fourth volume came out – and I remember the kid and I both reacted with the same excitement when we saw that the fourth volume was sitting there on the shelf; back in those pre-internet days you had no idea when new books were coming out.

Unfortunately though, we readers see that Dwarf does not die – he plummets through the frozen-over pool and bobs to the surface, “to mean to sink,” and as I recall he returns in the next volume to wreak his vengeance. Meanwhile Stone’s acting a little too concerned over April; intentionally or not, Stacy sort of hints at a more-than-siblings relationship between the two, with Stone fretting over the girl’s nude body. At any rate he lets her and Kennedy escape separately – and believe it or not April finally gets a few lines of dialog, revealing a fiery temper – while Stone meanwhile kills a bunch of guards, blows up the resort, and saves a mack truck full of “slavewhores.”

 Anyway, this one was pretty crazy when it got going, but the middle section was a bit too padded and goofy – I could’ve done with less of Kennedy’s “snake oil” blatherings. But man when it got out there it really got out there, and many sections of The Madman’s Mansion could’ve come out of the “splatterpunk” subgenre of horror fiction that was popular at the time.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

The Six Million Dollar Man: Season One (1973-1974)


Like any kid of the ‘70s I was a fan of The Six Million Dollar Man; but then, I was so young at the time I thought Steve Austin and Jaime “Bionic Woman” Summers were not only real people but a real couple. I recall watching the show on syndication and the later seasons in primetime – I probably started watching the show shortly before it ended, with its fifth season – but I’ve always meant to go back and check it out again. Now, thanks to the complete series being released on DVD, that’s a possibility; for too long The Six Million Dollar Man was way too hard to find.

The first season only ran for 13 episodes, starting as it did in January of 1974 as a replacement series for another that had been cancelled. However the series was preceded by a trio of telemovies which were each tonally different from one another – and all of them were pretty different from the series itself.

The Television movies

“The Six Million Dollar Man” (1973): The telefilm that started it all is wildly different from the series that ensued – indeed, only Lee Majors himself would be the sole remaining element. The rest of the cast, the production crew, even the soundtrack composers, would all change by the time the series began in early 1974. This grim, leisurely-paced movie faithfully follows Martin Caidin’s source novel Cyborg, with only minor changes, particularly when it comes to the bionic augmentations test pilot/former astronaut Steve Austin receives after a horrendous crash. For one Caidin’s character received a bionic left arm (rather than the right of the show), a metal-covered skull, a finger capable of shooting a poison dart, and legs with all sorts of augmentations (scuba gear, etc). The show whittled it down to a bionic left eye, right arm, and legs. But it takes its good ol’ time getting there; the movie moves at a snail’s pace, focusing more on Steve’s internal plight of grief and remorse – at one point he begs his nurse to kill him. This vibe would be quickly jettisoned, as was the shady motives of the government organization, OSO (changed to OSI in the series), which wants to use Steve as its bionic agent. Represented by a scenery-chewing Darrin McGavin, OSO is not the family-like agency that OSI would become, and Steve Austin is basically considered replacable junk. But the telemovie is very static and only picks up here and there. The highlight by far is when Steve finally goes on a mission; dropped into the desert he must fight off some soldiers and even a tank; he definitely kills the tank driver (by dropping a grenade inside the tank), but it’s left up in the air if he kills any of the others. The best part of this episode is the song composer Gil Melle crafts for this sequence, a two-minute masterpiece that starts off sounding like leftover material from Jerry Goldsmith’s bizarre Planet Of The Apes soundtrack before veering into jazz-funk. (Oliver Nelson – and his famous theme – wouldn’t become involved until the series itself.)

“Wine, Women, and War” (1973): The grim, fatalistic feel of the first telemovie is abruptly gone, replaced by the campy, self-spoofing tone of the Roger Moore Bond films. In the first minutes we already know it’s a completely different beast, with a tux-clad Steve Austin taking on a commando mission on a yacht at sea, spouting double-entrende quips that even Moore wouldn’t touch. The measured pace of the previous film is just a memory, something which is quickly displayed as Steve’s tux becomes a wetsuit and he takes out a bunch of terrorists. The confusing, muddled plot eventually has a grief-stricken Steve (mourning the lost of a female agent killed early in the film) going on vacation – whereas in reality OSI chief Oscar Goldman (the iconic Richard Anderson) has swindled him into taking another mission, Oscar here displaying some of the shadiness of McGavin’s earlier character. The babe factor is nicely improved this time out – this was inspired by the Bond movies, after all – with the appearance of Britt Ekland as a Russian agent. It gets even more Bond-like in the climax, which sees Steve infiltrating the underground base of the villain which is stockpiled with stolen nukes. This movie doesn’t get much love but I actually enjoyed it, despite the goofy camp of it all. Plus David McCallum co-stars as an old Cosmonaut pal of Steve’s, sporting the same pseudo-Russian accent he employed in The Man From UNCLE.

“The Solid Gold Kidnapping” (1973): The third and final TV movie is closer to the spirit of the ensuing series, though still very much in the “Bond for TV” mode of the previous film. The Moore-esque quips have been whittled away and Steve is closer to the laconic but quick-witted character of the series. The plot is also similar to later episodes, with a SPECTRE-like cabal led by Maurice “Bewitched” Evans which specializes in kidnapping notables for exorbitant ransoms. (And as double bang for your Bewitched buck, David “Larry Tate” White also appears!) It’s pure ‘70s TV as Elizabeth Ashley guest-stars as a scientist who has some RNA/memory serum or somesuch which she eventually injects herself with, giving herself the memories of a dead man. On the babe meter we also have Luciana “Thunderball” Paluzzi as a contessa Steve scores with (in the line of duty, of course – the price a secret bionic agent must pay!). The shadiness Oscar Goldman displayed in the previous film is mostly gone, with he and Steve now the “pals” they would be later in the show (you could almost base a drinking game off the number of times these two would go on to call each other “pal”), and Alan Oppenheimer is still playing Dr. Rudy Wells (Martin Balsam played him in the first movie and Martin E. Brooks eventually took over the role in the series). While it doesn’t have the constant action of the previous movie, this one does have a more-grounded tone, and is probably the best of the three telefilms. Plus it’s got John Vernon!

Season 1 (1974)

1: Population Zero: After three TV movies in 1973, the Six Million Dollar Man series proper debuted in January 1974 with this episode, which is basically The Andromeda Strain on a TV budget. This early in the series various elements that would soon become patented are nowhere to be found; for example, when Steve Austin uses his bionics we do not hear the famous bionic sound effect. Also the relationship between Steve and OSI boss Oscar Goldman is more factious here, with Oscar sternly issuing Steve orders – orders which Steve disobeys. The residents of a tiny town have all mysteriously died, and Steve insists on going there, despite Oscar’s orders to stand down; in an unneccessary subplot, the producers have it that Steve grew up near here. Thus he knows everyone; apparently this was intended so as to add a personal layer to the story, but not much is done with it. Turns out though the people aren’t really dead, despite the creepy opening of the ghost town. A somewhat-attractive scientist on the scene informs Steve that the town was hit by ultrasonics. Eventually it will be learned that a former government-contracted scientist is using his ultrasonic weapon on the town; he threatens to really kill everyone if he isn’t paid ten million bucks. Some of the episode is laughable, like when the villain buzzes the army compound with his private plane and the general and the soldiers stand around like morons, just watching. But Lee Majors carries the episode, and he’s perfect for the role of Steve Austin. Here in these early episodes Steve is more laconic and grim, and it’s notable that he kills off the villains in the finale, something you wouldn’t see happen in later seasons – he blows ‘em all up with a hurled metal pole which somehow causes their van to explode. Oliver Nelson’s music is the exceptional jazz-funk expected of the dude, but a bit muted in this episode, as is the theme – only a few bars of it play in the opening credits. Overall this is a fine intro to the series and more of a sign of things to come than the three TV movies that preceded it.

2: Survival Of The Fittest: Cleary The Six Million Dollar Man hadn’t yet figured out what kind of show it wanted to be, for this second episode seems to be a TV version of Airport. Steve and Oscar are somewhere, perhaps Hawaii, boarding a plane filled with military people, when Oscar reveals to Steve that someone’s been trying to kill him. We learn that the plotters are a corrupt Air Force major and a Navy officer played by veteran B-movie villain William Smith. But shortly the episode becomes Lost a few decades early, as the plane enters a heavy storm and ditches in the ocean. Suddenly it’s a survival tale as the passengers find themselves on a barren island and must wait until help arrives. Meanwhile the two assassins, who were also on the doomed plane, continue to plot Oscar’s death. Steve’s bionics are only sporadically used, from ripping open the plane’s escape hatch to running (in slo-mo, of course). The bionic sound effect still isn’t heard, but we do see some hazy infra-red through Steve’s bionic eye, as well as telescope crosshairs. It’s also implied that Steve kills again, hurling a rock with his bionic right arm at one of the would-be assassins. Oliver Nelson provides the score and gets a chance to groove things up with some Afro-Cuban drumming.

3: Operation: Firefly: This episode is for the most part just goofy fun, as Steve contends with a rubber alligator and a somewhat attractive female colleague who dabbles in ESP. Some scientist has devised this laser gizmo but he’s been kidnapped, reported as missing in the Florida everglades or something. Oscar follows the obvious logic: he has Steve team up with the scientist’s young daughter, because she has ESP and might know where he is! The pacing is measured as the two go down the river, with lots of weird jungle sound effects on the soundtrack. The attack by the rubber alligator is pretty great, and the episode gets even campier when the gal falls in quicksand – and her clothes are magically clean the very next scene. Steve only uses his bionics sporadically, like when he breaks out of the jail he’s wrongly placed in toward the climax. All told though this one’s only marginally entertaining for the campy aspects. We also get some early ‘70s psychedelic fades and whatnot during the “ESP” sequences.

4: Day Of The Robot: The series finally finds its footing with this episode based on a story by Harold Livingston, who wrote some of the whackier episodes of Mission: Impossible. This is also the episode which inspired the ‘70s Six Million Dollar Man toy Maskatron. John “Enter The Dragon” Saxon plays two roles: Steve’s old astronaut buddy Sloan, who is now part of some missile development deal which the bad guys want to steal. Enter Saxon’s other role: the robot created in Sloan’s likeness which the villains replace the real Sloan with, monitoring his every move. Steve, assigned to act as Sloan’s bodyguard, slowly begins to suspect something weird about his old friend, though it would be obvious to anyone that something very strange is going on – again, the show has a subtle campiness to it, which adds to the charm. This one culminates in an 8-minute brawl between Steve and the Sloan-robot (in slow-motion throughout, naturally) as Oliver Nelson’s theme song plays over and over again. Also Steve again kills, flipping a car over on a would-be assassin. However the good guys suffer no losses, with a bizarrely happy ending in which Steve, assuming the real Sloan is dead, just sort of stumbles upon him, sitting in confusion at a park bench.

5: Little Orphan Airplane: Greg Morris, of Mission: Impossible (where he played Barney, aka “the black one”) guest stars as an Air Force reconnaissance pilot whose plane goes down over contested area in the new African republics. The episode replicates the feel of a mini-Bond movie, with the Air Force going to Oscar at OSI, requesting their “special man,” and then Steve briefed by Oscar before heading to Africa. He’s to parachute in and rescue Morris and destroy the plane – and look out for a brief appearance by future B-movie lunkhead Reb “Space Mutiny” Brown as an Air Force dispatcher Steve briefly talks to via radio after landing in Africa. The Bond feel is quickly lost as Steve drops into Africa and meets two Dutch nuns who take him in. Coincidence be damned, they’ve also found Greg Morris’s character, and are hiding him from the local army – a group of “Africans” who sound suspiciously American and appear to be familiar faces from Blaxploitation movies of the time. Also their leader seems a bit too affable to be the villain of the episode (“All right, men, move ‘em out!”), which makes later scenes where he threatens the nuns a bit hard to buy. Rather than action this one focuses on Steve’s MaGuyver-esque abilities, particularly how he can use his bionics to fix Morris’s broken airplane using jerry-rigged parts from old trucks. While a bit plodding and certainly padded, this one nonetheless is entertaining, and plus those “jungle noises” from “Operation: Firefly” return.

6: Doomsday, And Counting: This episode’s like The Posidedon Adventure or another of those ‘70s disaster flicks on a TV budget. Steve’s old Cosmonaut pal (the actor speaks with an American accent but a “foreign” diction, which again sounds super campy) comes over to the US to discuss some new projects with Steve and Oscar, when he’s called away to the island base where he’s working on a new rocket or somesuch with his fiance. Turns out an earthquake has hit the island and, when Steve and his pal get there, they discover that the fiance, Irina, has been trapped underground. Here the disaster movie parallels begin as Steve and comrade work their way into a massive factory-type building, navigating through collapsed tunnels and whatnot. Things get more dire when Irina reveals that the computer which guards the base has gone into safeguard mode and is about to launch nuclear missiles. Steve reveals his bionics to the couple, using his arms to pull down girders and etc. Overall this one was pretty tepid, very static, however Irina would return a few seasons later.

7: Eyewitness To Murder: It’s The Six Million Dollar Man meets Mannix as Steve just happens to witness the member of a legal team being gunned down on a street outside the restaurant Steve’s dining in. The assassin is played by Gary “2001” Lockwood, sporting the same awful, shaggy hairdo he wore in his guest appearance a few years earlier on Mission: Impossible. Turns out he was actually gunning for the leader of the legal team, who is preparing a big case against the syndicate. Steve desperately tries to track Lockwood down and uncover his supposedly-solid alibi in another leisurely-paced episode. However this one’s saved by the awesome ‘70s fashions sported by Steve throughout, accessorized with his cool tan-lensed Ray Ban aviators (as seen above, in a screengrab taken from this episode). His bionics are relegated to telescope eyes (the “radar” sound now firmly in use) and the occasional running/stopping a truck with his arm (but still no “bionic sound effects” for this stuff yet.) Oliver Nelson says “to hell with it” and funks up random scenes with some jazzy grooves. Despite the leisurely pace I actually enjoyed this one more than the last few. And like Irina in the previous episode, Gary Lockwood’s character would also return.

8: Rescue of Athena One: Even the Six Million Dollar Man must contend with the Social Justice Warriors, as Steve finds himself having to instruct “the first female astronaut.” Despite her constant screwups (as if!!), Steve’s pressured by NASA/etc to ensure she’s fully capable of piloting her ship into deep space for some “energy research” project; due, of course, to all of the publicity the event’s getting. At any rate the astronaut, played by Lee Majors’s wife Farrah Fawcett, wilts under Steve’s humorously angry orders – the first half of the episode wouldn’t be possible in today’s proggressively-liberalized world…unless that is the instructing astronaut was a woman and the ill-equipped student was a man. Speaking of Farrah Fawcett, she gives a quality, reserved performance, not very recognizable as the pop culture sex icon she would soon become – only at the very end of the episode does she sport her soon-to-be-patented feathered hair. Throughout most of the episode she’s clad in a bulky space suit with her hair tied in a bun, and looks eerily like the future Jodie Foster! Anyway this episode is yawnsville. My guess is someone realized there was all this NASA moon/rocket launch footage lying around and decided to shoot an episode around it. When Fawcett’s ship, Athena One, encounters trouble in space, it’s up to Steve to blast off in a separate rocket to save the day, as apparently only his bionic right arm is capable of pulling off the wreckage which has trapped poor Farrah in her ship. This episode sees the now-recurring bit of someone outside OSI learning about Steve’s bionic parts; I like to imagine that Steve has orders to kill anyone who learns of this, orders which he carries out promptly after the end credits roll. Seriously though, this episode is only heightened by the fact that Steve’s bionic parts go screwy in space, with Farrah having to land the rocket herself. Oliver Nelson really gives an otherwise lackluster episode a rip-roaring fanfare of an ending; otherwise he puts a lot of weird synths and theremins on the soundtrack, sounding at times like the music in The Andromeda Strain. Also we get the hint that Steve scores again, at episode’s end, as Farrah (in an unflattering body-hugging pantsuit) invites him back to her place for “dinner.” 

9: Dr. Wells Is Missing: One of the highlights of Season 1, this episode has Steve venturing to Austria to rescue the kidnapped Dr. Rudy Wells, the character who gave Steve his bionic parts and who hasn’t been seen since the TV movies which preceded the series (and here he’s again played by Alan Oppenheimer, returning from the second and third TV movies, but later replaced by the more iconic Martin E. Brooks in the role). Steve, as usual sporting his awesome ‘70s threads with aviator Ray Bans, snoops around a scenic Austrian village (aka the Universal backlot) and using his smarts he quickly finds the villa in which Rudy is being held. This episode, unlike the past few, really puts the focus on action; after being captured Steve is put through a series of challenges by the Bondian villain, who wants Rudy to create a bionic henchman for him. Steve must fight a handful of the villain’s men; one of them is a black guy who is a master of savate (which looks suspiciously similar to kung-fu, which had taken the world by storm at this point – and the dude’s fighting screams are even dubbed chop-sockey style). The fight goes on and on, in slow-mo, and gets to be annoying because in reality a man with a bionic arm and two bionic legs could rip off the limbs of his enemies and smash their skulls into jelly. But anyway Steve, after throwing them all around, is undone when one of them smashes a lampost into his bionic arm. This long fight is notable for the first appearance of the bionic sound effect which would soon become so famous; it’s briefly heard when Steve twists the arm of one of his opponents and flips him to the ground. The climactic escape is cool and maintains the Bond vibe; Rudy makes off downhill in a jeep and Steve, arm in a sling, jumps out to take care of their pursuers. First he leads them on a chase back up the mountain, running at speeds in excess of 60 mph. Then he flips their car over the cliff, causing it to explode, thus killiing both men; he takes out the final henchman with a bionic kick to the chest which surely ruptured something. This episode is tonally similar to the third (and final) TV movie, “The Solid Gold Kidnapping,” and shows what the series might’ve been like if it hadn’t become progressively campier and more kid-friendly. 

10: The Last of The Fourth of Julys: My favorite episode of Season 1 retains the action focus of the previous episode; this time scene-chewing Steve Forrest is Quail, a very Bond-style villain who has devised “the ultimate weapon” for his nefarious employer. When an undercover agent sends in word that the evil plot hinges around July 4th, Steve’s sent on the job – after that is some training courtesy a paunchy, ill-tempered drill seargent who steals the show. Curiously, most of the stuff Steve’s trained in – including being launched out of a torpedo tube from a submarine – is stuff we already saw him do in the second telefilm, “Wine, Women, and War.” This episode really harkens back to that TV movie, minus the groan-worthy quips, with a sometimes-flippant Steve presented more as a badass spy than the “average dude with bionic powers” he normally was in the series; also, the finale maintains the Budget Bond vibe, with Steve diregarding “orders from Washington” to score with a sexy babe. This sort of stuff would be gone in future seasons, as would Steve’s cold-bloodedness; this episode again sees him killing off a bunch of bad guys, indeed blowing up Quail’s entire fortress. This episode’s really a lot of fun, again providing a glimpse of the show that might have been, with a rousing and funky Oliver Nelson score – and a great stunt when a pole vaulter stand-in for Lee Majors hops a thirty-foot fence. There’s even a bit of Mission: Impossible-type stuff where a captured Steve is strapped to a revolving chair while a light flashes in his face, psychological torture courtesy Quail. And you have to love how director Reza Badiyi really capitalized on the low-cut dress Quail’s sexy henchwoman Violette (Arlene Martel, most known for playing Spock’s wife) wears in the final quarter of the film – particularly when she climbs into Steve’s escape torpedo, a gratuitous cleavage shot if ever there was one. (But who’s complaining?)

11: Burning Bright: Finally, the opening credits present us with the four words we’ve been waiting for: “Guest star William Shatner.” Eschewing the action-focus of the previous episodes, this one’s more of character study, with an emoting Shatner providing the OTT melodrama we love him for. (In 2000 I met Walter “Chekov” Koenig, whom we’d flown into the company I was then working for to narrate an audio book, and I kid you not, the very first thing I said to him was, “What’s William Shatner like?” After a pause his reply was: “Bill is an unusual guy. He’s a good guy, though.”) Shatner plays Josh Lang, another astronaut buddy of Steve’s, who has come back from his latest space mission a little shall we say batshit crazy. Spouting New Age claptrap about “the sun as the origin of the space vector” and carrying on conversations with an unseen entity called “Andy,” Josh is in danger of being removed from the space program. It’s up to Steve, called in to observe his behavior, to give the recommendation on whether he should be or not. Shatner gets ample opportunity to chew scenery as Josh becomes more and more insane; he was affected by some cosmic forcefield or somesuch which all astronauts experience (including Steve), but they usually shrug off the effects. Not so for Josh, who is soon conversing with dolphins at the local aquarium – time for lots of ‘70s-style faux-psychedelic close-ups of Shatner’s face while Oliver Nelson provides goofy bleeps and bloops on the soundtrack. Pretty soon Josh is using his mind to overpower people and, most damningly of all, accidentally kills a kindly old sheriff in Houston – Josh having gone back home, where it turns out “Andy” was a childhood friend Josh accidentally caused the death of by daring him to climb up a power line. I was hoping it would turn out to be some alien intelligence. The finale sees Shatner pulling out all the stops, emoting grandly as Josh goes from pleading with Andy one second to ranting at Steve to “stay back!” the next. All Lee Majors can do is hang there and squint and say nothing, which is pretty much all you can do when you’re in the presence of a master at the top of his form. The two actors reunited many years later, on Shatner’s short-lived sitcom Bleep My Dad Says, but the producers blew the potential. The episode climaxed with Shatner and Majors – each in goofy costumes – getting in a brawl (in other words, Captain Kirk versus The Six Million Dollar Man!), but the idiot producers chose to focus instead on Shatner’s dweeb of a son. This is the course they chose for most every episode, which makes it unsurprising that Bleep My Dad Says was cancelled.

12: The Coward: Last time it was Shatner, this time it’s George “Sulu” Takei, in a much less important role – he has what amounts to a bit part as an Army climbing instructor who trains Steve for his latest mission: venturing into the Himalayas to retrieve intelligence documents from a recently-unearthed American plane which crashed in the mountains in WWII. But “this time it’s personal,” to quote the old cliché; turns out none other than Carl Austin was the pilot of that doomed plane…ie Steve’s dad. This entails a shaken Steve venturing home to talk to his mom – the first we’ve seen her or heard of her in the show (and it turns out Steve was raised by a stepdad, who is unseen this time) – where he learns that Mom never told him of the stories that Dad might’ve been a coward, bailing out of the plane and letting his crew die in the crash. This one, unlike the previous episode, includes action with the drama; when Steve and Takei parachute into Tibet they’re instantly attacked by Mongol warriors on horseback – the leader looks uncannily like Frank Zappa. Poor George is removed from the episode posthaste, and an escaping Steve runs into a grizzled old American expat – a dude who looks sort of similar to Steve. As a double bang for your “Star Trek” buck, this guy happens to be married to a lovely native gal who is played by France Nuyen, who played Elaan of Troyius. Humorously enough, Steve and his new pal never tell each other their names, but the writers don’t take the expected route – after the journey up to the crashed plane (where Steve sheds a few tears), and after a climactic fight with the Mongols – during which the old expat sacrifices himself to save Steve – it turns out that Steve’s dad did in fact die on the plane. The old expat was in fact the copilot, who bailed out and later climbed back up to the plane to switch dog tags, so no one would think him a coward. Or is that what really happened? It’s left intentionally mystertious, with it just as possible that the expat was in fact Steve’s dad, and the dog tag story just a lie.

13: Run, Steve, Run: So it’s come to this: A Six Million Dollar Man clip show. Steve is visiting a pal on a construction site when his elevator goes haywire and almost kills him. Turns out Steve’s being stalked by Dr. Dolenz, the old scientist from “Day of the Robot.” He’s been hired by a new Mafia boss who wants Dolenz to create a robot for him, one which he plans to rob Fort Knox with(!!). Talk about a guy who thinks outside the box. But boy this episode is lame. For one, Oscar, head of a friggin’ intelligence agency, waves off Steve’s concerns that someone is stalking him, and instead insists Steve go on vacation! This Steve does, and suddenly the episode becomes “The Six Million Dollar Hick” as Steve ambles around the ranch of an old friend, riding horses and trying to get a gangly but pretty young cowgirl to come out of her tomboy shell. Meanwhile he flashes back – at length – to previous episodes: “Day of the Robot,” “Dr. Wells Is Missing,” and “Population Zero.” The cheap producers even re-use footage from “Survival of the Fittest” when Steve takes a flight, early in the episode; you can even see the actors from that earlier episode in the background of the plane’s interior. The episode is dull as dishwater, only sparking in the finale, where Steve is caught again and must show off his bionics to Dr. Dolenz. We get more humorous quips from Steve at least, particularly when he insults Dolenz’s Sloan robot, saying it squeaked when it walked. But this is not a strong finale for the first season, and indeed they should’ve placed “The Coward” last.

Overall I really enjoyed this first season of The Six Million Dollar Man. Sure, some of the episodes were a bit static, but the relaxed pace was kind of refreshing when compared to the constantly-moving, cgi-ridden fluff of today. And Lee Majors is perfect in the title role, bringing to it the sort of square-jawed resolve impossible in today’s world, where Steve Austin would need to be bettered/ridiculed by a female partner and also have some sort of debilitating condition/issue which prevented him from being a “complete man.” In other words Steve would be more like the character presented in the first TV movie rather than the self-assured hero of the series. I also really enjoyed the lack of continuity, particularly when compared to the season-long story arcs demanded of today’s shows. Each episode resolves its central conflict before the end credits roll, and I really dug that. Today it’s like nothing can ever be resolved in most TV shows, which dangle subplot after subplot to the point where you figure even the producers have no idea where it’s all headed – and, as was proven by Lost, usually they don’t.

Now on to Season Two!

Monday, July 18, 2016

The Sharpshooter #12: Scarfaced Killer


The Sharpshooter #12: Scarfaced Killer, by Bruno Rossi
February, 1975  Leisure Books

Paul Hofrichter, the man who gave us the abysmal Stiletto, returns to the Sharpshooter series with an installment that turns out to have been written as a volume of The Marksman but changed by editor Peter McCurtin into a Sharpshooter. Yet for once the copyediting is fairly good, with only a handful of slips in which Johnny Rock is mysteriously referred to as “Magellan.”

As Lynn Munroe points out in his awesome Peter McCurtin checklist, McCurtin employed a ghostwriter named George Harmon Smith to polish the occasional Sharpshooter or Marksman manuscript. I wonder if Scarfaced Killer was one of those manuscripts, as the early pages display a level of qualitity inconsistent with Hofrichter’s typically-clunky style. Whereas Hofrichter’s typical novels are filled with pedantic dialog and scant description, the opening of Scarfaced Killer is for the most part pretty good, with Johnny Rock heading into the small town of Boyle, Oklahoma, which has been subtly overtaken by Mafioso who want to control Boyle’s newly-discovered gold mines.

Another thing that makes me think McCurtin or Smith tinkered with the book is the phrase “Soon he would again taste Mafia blood,” which appears early on and reminds us of Johnny Rock’s mob-killing psychosis. The phrase “taste Mafia blood,” to my knowledge, only appeared in the three volumes of the series written by Len Levinson, and given that it appears here makes me think that either McCurtin liked the phrase and used it in his polishing of the manuscript, or perhaps Hofrichter had been given copies of Levinson’s three books as study material before writing his own. But anyway, gradually the polished feeling of the opening page is replaced by the clunkiness we expect from Hofrichter – the same sort of style he was still employing over a decade later, in the Roadblaster books. 

But McCurtin (or one of his copyeditors) slips at times, missing the occasional “Magellan” in Hofrichter’s original manuscript and not changing it to “Rock.” However the reader gets the suspicion that this might’ve started life as a Marksman novel early on; when Rock checks into his hotel in Boyle, he gives the fake name of Phil Marsalla – ie Philip Magellan, the Marksman. This “subtle” joke clearly made more sense in Hofrichter’s original version, where it was Magellan. Curiously, a minor character in Scarfaced Killer is named “Emil Scaretta,” which is so similar to the Marksman house name of “Frank Scarpetta” that you wonder if this was yet another in-joke on Hofrichter’s part or if it was just an oversight. (At any rate, Scaretta’s accidentally referred to as “Scarpetta” on page 163.)

Anyway, as usual with this stuff, it doesn’t matter. Hofrichter’s Johnny Rock/Philip Magellan is such a cipher that it really could be either character; only minor details, very late in the novel, betray that the character we’ve been reading about started life as Magellan – namely, the tidbit that “Rock” once worked in a carnival. As all fans know, that’s Magellan’s background, not Johnny Rock’s. Also, this version of “Rock” is fond of carrying a “suitcase” around with him, in which he stores his arsenal; surely this is none other than the infamous “artillery case” Magellan lugs around with him in every volume of The Marksman written by Russell Smith.

Oh, and speaking of that suitcase – Scarfaced Killer is filled with typos, like a ludicrious amount of them. For the most part they’re the usual Belmont Tower/Leisure screwups, like “shair” instead of “chair.” But my friends, on page 180 we come across this humdinger: “…holding the handle of the heavy shitcase.” Yes, friends, someone actually wrote “shitcase” instead of “suitcase.” How this could possibly happen – let alone not be caught – will have to remain a mystery, but maybe it was the copyeditor or McCurtin or even Hofrichter himself letting us know what they thought about the book.

Anyway, Rock surveys Boyle and discovers that it’s practically the fief of a Mafia bigwig named Franklin Ditrinco, who rules the small town with a crooked mayor and the police in his employ. Only a hardscrabble group of salt-of-the earth types oppose Ditrinco’s complete takeover of the gold mines, and Rock finds out about them thanks to Carl Cortner, the town drunk. Leading the miners is Hank Belmann, Cortner’s son in law, and the man Rock gradually teams up with to take on Ditrinco’s goons and dirty cops. In particular Ditrinco retains a trio of wheelchair-bound killers, the Celebano brothers, who go around town on electric wheelchairs, toting shotguns. Their leader, sadistic Wendell, may be the “scarfaced killer” of the title and hyperbolic back cover copy, but probably isn’t – this is likely another indication of McCurtin once again coming up with a suitably “tough” title.

One thing that can be said of Hofrichter is that he doesn’t shy from the gory violence. While there isn’t even a hint of sex in the novel (the only woman in the book is an old lady who has maybe a line or two), there’s a ton of action and carnage, with Hofrichter, as in the inferior Stiletto, taking a sort of relish in describing how eyeballs pop out of skulls when a person’s gunned down or blown up. And Rock as ever is a straight-up killer in this one; his first victims being a pair of Ditrinco-paid lowlifes who occasionally rape runaways and then murder them. Rock catches them in the act of doing this, waits until they’ve raped and killed their latest prey(!!), and then guns them both down. This initiates his war of attrition against Ditrinco.

It’s constantly hammered home that Rock has been fighting the Mafia “for two years,” and practically everyone has heard of him. However in Hofrichter’s hands he’s kind of a moron. After his first hit Rock’s in his hotel room and falls for a Celebano brothers swindle; figuring the new guy in town is Rock, they send a flunkie up to his room, posing as a sandwich seller. Rock, who just killed two henchmen moments after rolling into town, buys himself a sandwich and doesn’t suspect a thing. It takes town drunk Carl Cortner to explain to him that it was a ruse to suss Rock out.

While he might be stupid, Rock is still sadistic – not to mention deadly to his friends. Learning that Ditrinco and the crooked mayor are hosting a dinner for various town notables, Rock steals a bunch of nitro, gets a job as a busboy at the restaurant, and then fills the coffee percolators with the nitro. After the tediously-overdescribed setting up of the explosives Rock escapes before the blast hits – and he wipes out around 70 men and women at the banquet. This leads to the first of many running battles in the novel, as Rock, armed with Uzi and grenades, takes on hordes of Mafia soldiers in the woods outside the restaurant.

Another long action sequence quickly follows, as poor ol’ Carl is gunned down by dirty cops who open fire on Rock’s hotel room, hitting the drunk instead. Rock blows ‘em all up with grenades, and then gets in another big firefight at Frank Belmann’s place. Oh, and speaking of which, that patented clunky Hofrichter dialog appears in an interminable chapter in which Belmann convinces his sickly wife to leave town until the action’s over; there are go-nowhere conversations throughout the novel, in particular the stuff with Ditrinco and his butler Scaretta, most of it recapping stuff we’ve already read.

The majority of the novel trades off between Ditrinco plotting to send killers after Rock and Belmann’s men and then Rock and Belmann fighting them off. Things really come to a head in the finale, in which Rock comes up with the “master plan” of serving himself up as bait in his hotel room while Belmann’s force capitalizes on this concentration of forces and heads for Ditrinco’s supposedly-defenseless home. Meanwhile, Ditrinco quickly deduces it’s a trap and Belmann and his little army is massacred in another running action sequence which sees more heads exploding and eyeballs popping out. 

The Celebano brothers are the highlight here, riding specially-made heavy-tread electric wheelchairs with armored shields covering their bodies, shields which have slots to see through and slots for their shotgun barrels. (“In them, the brothers looked like creature[sp] from Mars.”) These three butcher Belmann’s army, killing them to a man on a battle that rages on the streets of Boyle, and for once the reader figures Johnny Rock might be up against some stiff competition. But the finale is a total copout; in just a page or two Rock takes the three brothers out, shooting under their armored plates and then blowing them up with dynamite.

More focus is placed on Rock’s knife fight with Emil Scaretta, who is a master with the stiletto; here we get the background detail that “Rock” grew up in a carnival and thus is a master of knife-throwing. As for Ditrinco, he does Rock the favor of offing himself – after which “There was no one else left to kill,” and that’s it for Rock’s war upon Boyle, a war which humorously enough has seen the death of everyone, mobster and innocent townsperson alike.

As mentioned, despite the clunky prose and the headscratching amount of run-on sentences, Hofrichter really doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to the action and the gore, which makes Scarfaced Killer more entertaining than any of Hofrichter’s other novel’s I’ve yet read.