Dead Run

Dead Run, by Jonathan Black

October, 1981  Jove Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snowball In Hell (Dennison’s War #6)

Snowball In Hell, by Adam Lassiter

November, 1986  Bantam Books

It’s not a very auspicious end for the short-lived Dennison’s War; this final volume is more evidence that Steven “Adam Lassiter” Krauzer was attempting something other than the typical “mercs versus terrorists and/or KGB” storylines in the 1980s men’s adventure marketplace…but unfortunately the story is tepid, the writing is overdone, and there are annoying authorial quirks throughout. 

To recap, Dennison’s War is an unusual men’s adventure series in that it does not feature the same person or groups of people each volume. Krauzer introduces a concept that the titular Dennison is more like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels, and instead of Angels he has a bunch of hardbitten commando types at his disposal…the ex-mobster, the tough cop chick, etc. So each volume he sends out the operative he deems best suited for the mission at hand, meaning that there was no real consistency to the series. One volume might be about one guy, the next about another, etc. 

This volume features Conte, the ex-mobster, who featured in the earlier Conte’s Run (which I do not have). But Snowball In Hell also features…Dennison himself, as if Krauzer realized he should have the titular character doing something other than bossing people around. That something is taking care of the hit the Mafia has put on Conte for leaving the mob. 

Dennison is described as a forty-something former spook who started up his own operation ten years ago; he is slight of stature and has an easy-going smile, but we are to understand he’s a badass. However, the way the novel pans out, it’s actually Dennison’s hotstuff assistant, Miss Paradise, who does all the bad-assery. The only problem is, Krauzer manages to make her come off like a prototype AWFL, constantly mocking everyone, bullying everyone, and taunting people…the people who actually work for Dennison! I’m not sure what Krauzer was going for, but somehow he manages to make Miss Paradise thoroughly unlikable. 

And, more damningly, he makes Conte seem like a whimp. First of all, the dude has to be convinced by Dennison to take the job, then he worries about the danger, and then he goes through the book either getting captured or getting beaten up. Admittedly, he occasionally hits people with a “leather sap” he carries around, but this dude is nowhere near the upper echelon of 1980s men’s adventure heroes. 

As for the job, it takes place in Snowball Springs, somewhere in the Ozarks (Krauzer is not specific): a hayseed town that has been taken over by the duplicitous Bert Dolly. Oh, friends, be prepared to know that name well if you ever read Snowball In Hell. Krauzer writes “Bert Dolly” every single time the character appears or is mentioned. 

And not just him! Casey Weathers, Tommy Chin, and others besides – every time these minor characters are mentioned in the text, whether it be dialog or narrative, their full names are given; the annoying authorial quirk I mentioned. I mean, I know these men’s adventure novels were under the radar, but surely some editor at Bantam could’ve been bothered to tell Krauzer to knock it off? 

But then, Krauzer’s writing is so flowery and overcooked that he constantly stalls forward momentum. I had bad flashbacks to Stark; there is too much of a focus on word painting, and while that’s all well and good, it’s just the wrong genre for it. Especially given that so much focus is given to scenery description and character introspection that when the actual action happens, it’s rushed – and very bloodless. 

The story is essentially Buck Town: Casey Weathers, the towering ex-military girl from hayseed Snowball Springs who has become the local deputy, hires Dennison to help her take down Bert Dolly, a mobster who has taken over town and turned it over to the thieves. Meanwhile the real mob is moving in, so Dennison decides to send Conte, the former mobster, to pose as a mobster, and hopefully start a war between Dolly and the mob. 

A convoluted setup for sure, but really Conte just spends his time trading barbs with Dolly and his redneck thugs…or dodging their infrequent attacks on him. Meanwhile Dennison and Miss Paradise track down the New York mobster behind the hit, looking to lean on him and get the contract on Conte removed. 

I was not very entertained by the novel at all. It was slow and ponderous, and Krauzer seemed embarrassed by the stuff people want from the genre. When Conte and Casey have their expected conjugation, it happens so far off-page that I wasn’t even sure anything did happen. As for the action…Conte doesn’t even make his first kill until page 93, and after that we’re treated to an endless bit of exposition as he tells Casey about his past. 

Even the stuff with Dennison isn’t much fun; it mostly concerns them kidnapping a mobster and threatening him with torture (something Dennison hates but Miss Paradise takes to naturally). It’s all just kind of tepid and it comes off as if Krauzer has lost interest. Even the finale, with Conte and Casey getting into it with Bert Dolly’s men and some mobsters, lacks much spark, and could’ve been the climax of an average A-Team episode. 

As I mentioned in my review of the similarly-underwhelming Hell On Wheels (and the heroine of that one, by the way, isn’t even mentioned in this one), Krauzer also wrote a seventh volume of the series (title unknown), but it went unpublished. Snowball In Hell leaves little wonder why.  It is clear Bantam was cutting back on it; this volume does not feature a foldout cover, as the previous ones did.  I was heavily into men’s adventure novels in 1986 – I’d just discovered them the year before – and I was not aware of Dennison’s War at the time. So this is one instance where I can attest that the series wasn’t even well-received in the era it was published.

Unreleased (?) 1970s Destroyer Poster

From the Glorious Trash Archives: I just discovered this image on an old laptop of mine; looks like I saved it to the PC in February of 2012.  Per my note it was an unreleased Destroyer poster from the 1970s:

No idea where I got the image from, so apologies if I have stolen it from some other site.  However I just did a quick search on the image and could not find it anywhere.

I do not have any other info on the poster, so if any of you know anything about it, please share.  Clearly the art is by Destroyer cover artist Hector Garrido, and I bet it would have looked cool blown out to full poster size!

Richard Blade #39: Les Dieux De La Mort Lente (The Gods Of Slow Death)

Richard Blade #39: Les Dieux De La Mort Lente, by Jeffrey Lord

1983  Plon Books

The French adventures of Richard Blade continue with another volume that was, according to ISFDB, written by Richard D. Nolane. Once again it is hard for me to judge the quality of his prose, given the bland way the book has been translated into English; as Johny Malone speculated, this is likely because it was translated by AI and not a human. 

At any rate, this is one of the most streamlined Richard Blade novels ever: Blade goes to a patch of Dimension X called Winter, a frozen tundra with a fat red sun, and he fights ice pirates and wizards. It’s all very humdrum, A to B sort of stuff, but it is filled with a lot of memorable imagery. Also I must note that The Gods Of Slow Death breaks series protocol by only having Blade sleep with a single woman! Yes, I too was shocked. 

We have the briefest of openings in the real world, ie Home Dimension, where we learn that Blade has picked up an English girl named Ann (“…she was quite tall, with fair skin dotted with light freckles that further-accentuated her cheerful demeanor”), and though we are told she is “kissing Blade’s muscular back” in the intro, there’s no hanky-panky for our hero; he is called to the Tower of London for another trip. 

Nolane is not one for big setup or development; Blade is thrust into an icy world, but unlike the earliest volumes of the series he no longer arrives nude, but wearing armor and carrying a “saber” of an alien metal that can travel across the dimensions. Otherwise the story is identical in development to every other volume of the series: Blade meets a crew of warriors, introduces himself as a warrior from a distant land, and spends the rest of the book proving himself and then leading them in battle. 

I want to think that Nolane was inspired by Barbarella, as Blade immediately encounters ice-roving warriors who go about on sleds that sound very much inspired like the one seen in that film (and possibly the original French comic); I’m talking about the craft that was piloted by the dude who wore the shaggy outfit which when taken off revealed an even shaggier torso. 

Nothing like this happens in The Gods Of Slow Death (fortunately); Blade, near death from exposure, is rescued by these guys, then soon after they are in a battle with ice pirates. As expected Blade proves himself in battle, splitting faces and spilling brains with his saber. 

Abruptly the novel changes pace, coming off like Toga Trash or somesuch; Blade is captured, stripped down to loincloth, and sold to a slave trader named Demetrio. Here the sole female character in The Gods Of Slow Death is introduced: Neysa, a super-hot blonde daughter of nobility who happens to be bad-ass warrior to boot. She too is in the clutches of Demetrio, and Blade’s first “conjugation” occurs when he is ordered to arouse a similarly-nude Neysa…a scene that leads to her visiting his chambers that night. 

Ultimately it will pan out that Demetrio and Neysa are part of a plot to take down the titular Gods of the Slow Death, also known as the Star Gods; Nolane, taking a page from Erich von Daniken, introduces the concept that Star Gods visited Winter centuries ago and now rule from their remote, heavily-guarded mountain fortress. 

The “slow death” refers to the double-edged sword of serving the Star Gods. Certain vassals are chosen and graced by the gods with magical powers, but the cost is a slow death, with facial disfigurement being one of the chief signs of decay. Given this the vassals all wear robes and golden masks; as mentioned, Nolane does pile on some cool imagery in the book. It’s just all underserved by the blasé translation. 

Blade of course becomes part of the resistance, Neysa often fighting at his side. And as mentioned she is his sole bedmate. Nolane adds variety with the off-hand mention that Neysa is kinky, delivering a sequence that again seems like it could come out of a trashy toga ripper, complete with slaves watching Blade and Neysa get busy: 

And as with the The Aerials Of K’Tar, gender often switches during the sex scenes, making for an awkward read, and also there’s again that weird connotation of mentioning the “stomach” in relation to sexual urges. Maybe it’s a French thing. And on that note, I actually read some of The Gods Of Slow Death while in Montreal the other month, so it was all rather fitting. 

The vassals of the gods have total power over all, able to kill people with their minds and whatnot. However Blade discovers that he is immune to their power – a development that superior series author Manning Lee Stokes would have exploited for all its advantage, with Blade ascending to his own godlike status. Instead Nolane’s characters have a reaction almost as blasé as the translation itself, with one guy exclaiming over Blade’s power, but not much else really being made of it. 

Then again, this is a book that features the line, “Of course, wanting to avenge an ice cream seller might seem insignificant compared to the future of an entire world, but history was full of facts of this kind that had set in motion crucial events for its future development.” An odd statement for sure, especially given the fact that there is no “ice cream seller” in the book! 

The finale is pretty good, with Blade leading combined forces on the mountain fortress of the Star Gods, slaying their Star Disciples left and right. It gets very Von Daniken in the end, when Blade discovers a starship in the mountain, the home of the Star Gods, and fights a towering alien – but is promptly zapped back to Home Dimension, where we have a talky denouement in which Blade and J figure that the “slow death” was radiation. Also, we have the offhand mention that Blade (or maybe it’s Lord Deighton, the translation being unclear) has a pet monkey…! 

Overall The Gods Of Slow Death was entertaining, but again it’s tough to truly gauge it because I feel like I’m reading a pale reflection of the French original.

$500

$500, by Nancy Weber

December, 1976  Ace Books

In late July I went to Montreal for vacation, my first time there in around 17 years, and I was surprised to discover this ultra-scarce PBO – so scarce that it isn’t even listed on author Nacy Weber’s Goodreads page – at a cool little book and record store called Encore Books.  And they only wanted five dollars Canadian for it! 

Many years ago I created a few Amazon Wish Lists of paperbacks I was looking for, and I see that I added $500 to the “Trash Fiction” list in April of 2014. So I guess I discovered it sometime around then; not sure why I didn’t order a copy at the time. Maybe no copies were available (which seems to be the case now), or the few copies listed were overpriced. At any rate, patience as they say is a virtue, so one can imagine my surprise to discover a copy of the book, wedged behind a stack of vintage sleaze novels at Encore – and I mean real sleaze paperbacks. (Curiously, there was a ton of vintage English-language sleaze paperbacks scattered in antique stores throughout Montreal…those dirty French Canadians!) 

But this sleaze packaging is part of the curious, mysterious story of $500. First of all, it has a stepback cover – the black outer cover opens to reveal a photo of a model (Nancy Weber herself?) lying on a groovy 1970s bed, complete with princess phone in the background:

There is no info at all on the back cover; just a wraparound shot of the groovy bedroom: 

Curiously, the “back cover copy” is on the back of the inner cover, and only here could a prospective reader in 1976 actually learn what $500 was about: 

Note the reference to Life Swap. This was a nonfiction book Nancy Weber published in 1973, which from all accounts caused quite a stir at the time (I was born the following year, so was a bit outside of the target reading audience). A stir that still resonates today – or at least still did in 2006, when Life Swap was reprinted and The Guardian tracked Weber down and interviewed her. 

Life Swap concerned Nancy Weber trading places with another woman – to the extent of sleeping with this woman’s husband and working in her office – and in a way $500 sort of deals with the aftermath of this, at least in a fictional context, as main character Anne Gilbert is a pretty and sophisticated journalist who has carried off a similar experiment, one that caused her much notoriety. 

Indeed, Ace Books even saw fit to remind us of the stir Weber caused in the Author Bio at the end of the book:

So by all accounts $500 should have been a big thing…a novel from an up-and-coming young author who had recently made waves in the publishing industry. And yet $500 came out as a paperback original, one packaged like their other sleaze books – something like Massage Parlor or, uh, Massage Parlor II – courtesy an imprint that was more known for its science fiction line. 

So what happened? I’d love to know. Maybe Weber’s agent got a bum deal, or maybe none of the hardcover imprints were interested…and yet Weber certainly writes the book as if she intended it to be a hardcover, a big bestselling followup to Life Swap. Instead, $500 is so obscure that it’s not listed anywhere online, save for that Amazon listing I came across in 2014…which even then didn’t have a cover photo. 

This is a shame, as $500 is a good book, and certainly not on the level of a sleazy cash-in of the day…though humorously, Weber actually mentions such books in her novel, with Xaviera getting two name-drops, as well as an obscure “hooker-turned-writer” named Shannon Canfield – whose 1975 Dell PBO Why Men Call Girls is so obscure I didn’t even have it listed on any of my old Amazon Wishlists! 

Taking place during the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 (I believe my earliest memory is actually of the Bicentennial…and I would’ve been two and a half years old at the time!), $500 concerns the aforementioned Anne Gilbert, a writer with a penchant for doing outrageous things, who goes undercover as a hooker for a magazine article…up to and including having sex with paying johns. But then Anne goes even further undercover when she vows to take down her pimp, Lenny Michaels, who might have killed another hooker, an Irish beauty named Mary Connolly whom Anne fell in love with. Not only that, but it develops late in the novel that Lenny “turned the ultimate trick,” pimping out Mary’s corpse to a necrophiliac customer for $500,000!! Man, and I thought $500 was expensive!! 

But as you might have guessed, the title refers to the cost for the services of Lenny’s stable; his is an elite class of “courtesans,” high-class and sophisticated and ultra-beautiful. We only get cursory overviews of these women and their various specialties, and Weber pulls no punches when it comes to the raunchy stuff…save for the actual sex scenes! While there area few sex scenes in $500, they are nowhere near the sleazy, explicit level one might expect from the way the book is packaged. Again, the impression is that this was intended as a hardcover novel from a more prestigious imprint…soon to be a major motion picture, etc, etc. 

No, we get a lot of dirty talk and ribaldry, but when Anne has sex with her first john, a congressman with a penchant for sleeping with hookers (ah, simpler times), Weber doesn’t so much go for the juicy details as she does the aftermath of it, with Anne’s mind well and truly blown by the experience: “So that’s what it’s really all about!” 

Like many novels of the day, $500 hopscotches around a fairly large group of characters, to the extent that Anne is often lost. Also, halfway through the book Weber pulls a narrative trick and goes back in time to focus on Mary Connolly, the hooker whose death initiated the novel’s events. I didn’t find this character nearly as interesting as Anne – Mary is an Irish wallflower who comes to the US, falls for a tennis player turned movie star, gets her heart broken, and becomes a hooker for Lenny Michaels – and thus I wasn’t as much into the latter half of the novel. Fortunately the final quarter returns to the “present day” of summer ’76. 

Weber very much brings New York to life – hers is a trendy Manhattan, of people dining at ‘21’ and going out for cocktails after…and a little coke-snorting to boot. From this book I learned the existence of “tooters,” fancy little “nozzled” metal straws for snorting coke; Marc Olden I don’t think even mentioned these in his otherwise-comprehensive Cocaine. Weber also has a great sense of humor, as there are several funny sequences and dialog exchanges in $500, in particular a chapter that is narrated from the perspective of a vagina:

This is just one of Lenny’s girls, and Weber has a chapter for each of them – there’s Veronica, Lenny’s “token black girl,” who has a child and got into hooking after her husband’s death, and also a blonde California girl with a host of STDs (“That’s one very busy vagina, kid,” her gyno informs her), but unfortunately they each only get the one chapter, after which they sort of fade in the background. Instead, the crux of the novel concerns Anne and her desire to get revenge for Mary Connolly – and as mentioned, Mary herself takes up an unfortunate brunt of the novel. 

There’s also the tennis player turned actor who has now also become a late-night talkshow host, but he’s more of a hostile type than a Carson type. Apparently he’s known for ranting about hookers and pimps on his show, given his hatred of them – and we learn why much later in the novel. Anne’s appearance, in costume and wig on this show, is what sets off the novel, there to expose the kinky a-doings of Lenny Michaels, whose tentacles reach all the way to Washington. 

This has the setup for a taut novel, but instead Weber hopscotches around her diverse group of characters. Like Anne’s first john, the senator; this guy has his own brief patches of the narrative, as does his pregnant wife, and we even get a little from the perspective of Lenny’s lawyer. The cumulative effect is that Weber has crowded far too many characters in the book. The problem is that she doesn’t really resolve all of the subplots…especially the main one! Anne appears on the talk show, rats on Lenny, then spends the rest of the novel afraid Lenny is going to figure out that it was her in disguise on the show, and that Lenny will be going after her for revenge…but Weber ends the novel without telling us what happens! Indeed, Anne essentially gives up on the whole thing, deciding on the last page to run off with her lover-slash-publisher. We do at least learn the handy tidbit, courtesy Lenny’s lawyer, that a person can’t even be arrested for pimping a corpse!! You can bet I jotted that down for future reference. 

Despite the lack of resolution, and also despite the latter-half detour into the mostly-uninteresting life of Mary, $500 was still a decent read, and certainly better than the sleazy paperbacks its packaging imitates. Weber writes with a definite panache, and one can tell she was using the narrative to work out the ramifications she experienced after Life Swap. 

This makes it even more curious that $500 isn’t mentioned anywhere. Perhaps Weber disowned it. I came across a 2014 interview with her, where the focus was again on Life Swap, but even here $500 goes unmentioned – however, Weber’s first novel, a paperback original titled Star Fever, is mentioned in the article…and folks it’s a Rock Novel, one that I’d never even heard of (and I’ve spent more time searching for them than you’d want to know), so of course I immediately got myself a copy…and will be reading it soon!

Star Fire

Star Fire, by Ingo Swann

May, 1978  Dell Books

I recently discovered this obscure paperback original at a Half Price Bookstore…and they only wanted 99 cents for it; a rarity these days. Dell Books, always one of my favorite publishers, pulled out all the stops for this one, with an embossed title and green tipping (or whatever it’s called – where the edges of the pages are all colored green). It’s a shame books look so bland today; Star Fire essentially jumped off the shelf, surrounded by a few recent thrillers, proving once again that those paperback publishers of yore knew what they were doing. 

They also had great copy editors back in the day, because once again we have a book where the back cover copy promises something other than what is delivered. Same goes for the first-page preview, which in pure “1970s trashy potboiler style” lists off a few characters, loglining their quirks and sexual peculiarities, really hyping up a lurid vibe that doesn’t quite exist in the book itself. I’ve said it before, but I love how ‘70s paperback publishers hyped up the sexual content of their books – it was like the top selling feature. 

Anyway Star Fire purports to be about “the first psychic war,” and the back cover and first page make you think you’re going to get a suspense-thriller with kinky overtones…instead, Star Fire is essentially a political thriller, filled with scenes of Washington bigwigs talking and talking and talking. Then they talk some more. The kinky stuff barely exists, and again all respect to the employee at Dell who sifted through the book and found the stuff to hype. 

There’s only a little info provided about the author, Ingo Swann, mainly that his own psychic abilities had been documented. Looking him up, I see that he coined the term “remote viewing” and did all sorts of other psychic experiments in the era, so it’s curious he is little known these days; you’d think he would’ve at least attained the pop-culture level of Uri Geller. But I guess remote viewing doesn’t draw in crowds like bending spoons. 

But back to that back cover copy – well, it states that a famous rock star named Daniel Merriweather (which of course made me think of Neal Merryweather, of Space Rangers and Kryptonite*) discovers his psychic talent and uses it to stop US-USSR psychic weaponry from being devised. Standing in that Half Price books, I imagined a sort of Rock Novel crossed with an upmarket The Mind Masters. 

Unfortunately, what I actually got was a talky political thriller that indulges in exposition and tedium for the majority of its runtime, with occasional slaps in the face where the author shows us that he could have delivered something better…creepy stuff like corpses in a top-secret DC lab that are “neuromorts,” undead psychics hooked up to computers and used by the government for ESP spying and whatnot…or a minor female character with sadomasochistic impulses (indeed, even necrophiliac impulses, as demonstrated in the last pages of the novel!), or the fact that the main character/villain is a popular rock singer… 

No, all of this stuff is passed over so that Swann can focus on a small group of DC and military figures who talk and talk and talk. Our nominal protagonist is forty-something General Harrah Judd, tasked with heading up the army’s psychic research arena, and the main female character is Dr. Bethany Coogan, a paranormal researcher who becomes Judd’s girlfriend…their blossoming romance is also glossed over. But it does give a whiff of that refreshing ‘70s attitude when, after meeting and working on the case a bit, Judd asks Coogan (Swann has a habit of referring to all of his characters by their surnames, male or female) what she wants for dinner, and Swann relates that it’s all innuendo for “sex being proposed and agreed upon,” like a business proposal…and then he completely skips over the actual sex stuff, and just has the two as an item! 

An author can’t really bother with plot and character development when his goal is to exposit about psychic research, and in this manner Star Fire is indeed quite similar to The Mind Masters. But at least John Rossmann/Ian Ross was sure to include sleazy Black Masses and women pleasuring themselves on gear shifts and other such lurid a-doings; Swann brushes all this stuff beneath the narratorial carpet and focuses solely on talking. 

It’s even one of those books where the President of the US is a character…and he too just talks all the time. It just goes on and on…and what makes it worse is that the main focus of the incessant talking is who is behind the psychic warfare that’s being waged against the US and USSR…and we readers already know who it is! So the entire novel is Judd, Coogan, the President, various senators, various government functionaries, various diplomats, various USSR characters, a gun-runner, and other assorted one-off characters, trying to figure out who has suddenly uncovered that both the US and USSR are engaged in top-secret psychic warfare research…and we readers know from the first pages that it is none other than rock mega-star Daniel Merriweather. 

Oh and his being a rocker has no bearing at all on the book. He could’ve been a postal employee, for all the plot is concerned. The trappings of the rockstar life are not dwelt on whatsoever; when we meet him, Merriweather has already decided to dispense with his megastardom and focus only on his psychic abilities – mainly, to stop the US and USSR from their respective warfare programs, which could destroy humanity. Late, late in the novel we find out he’s a Bob Dylan type (oh, those ‘70s authors and their penchant for only giving us “Bob Dylan-style” rock stars!) who quickly rose to fame, but then got “respectable,” and then one day he sang to a flower and the flower sang back, and that’s when he discovered he had psychic powers. 

Or, as he’s referred to later in the book when the army and everyone else in the world is trying to figure out who he is, Merriweather is a “megapsychic,” capable of such feats as burning all the documents in Coogan’s office while speaking to her on the phone. This is early on the book, when it seems like Merriweather is going to become the villain who taunts Judd and Coogan…but then Merriweather disappears from the novel, in hiding, and as I’ve mentioned frequently, the gist of the book features various characters trying to figure out who he is and where he is. 

If I wore a hat, I’d take it off to the employee at Dell who hyped up the salacious stuff on the back cover; it means he (or she!) actually read the book and sifted out the few bits and pieces that could be hyped. But really there is a kinky, mean book lurking beneath the bland exposition…like Shirley Paars, the aforementioned s&m chick with a late-developing taste for necrophilia, who hates men but sleeps with them to get info for her employer, the also-abovementioned gun-runner. She is only seldom featured in the book, and we never even see her in action, so to speak, save for the off-hand mention of her sleeping with Judd’s assistant…and even here the focus is on Paars trying to get information from the guy about, you guessed it, the mysterious “megapsychic.” 

Actually, it takes a few hundred pages for all these characters to even realize it is a megapsychic. The first half of Star Fire is focused on Judd and Coogan and all these others just trying to figure out what’s going on, and as mentioned, we readers already know, and then once they’ve finally admitted to themselves that a psychic is behind the attacks, they spend just as much time questioning the reality of it all. 

I forgot to mention, but the novel appears to occur in a near-future 1980s, but Swann doesn’t give many topical details, and doesn’t really bring the world to life – except in the case of the Washington politics aspect. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about various government administration roles and whatnot, and it’s just not the book I wanted to read. It’s certainly not the book promised on the back cover. 

The crazy stuff only exists on the periphery, but to Swann’s credit he ramps up this aspect as the novel progresses…at least a little. The neuromort corpse-psychic things begin to factor into the narrative, and also the top-secret US and USSR psychic warfare projects are enacted, resulting in the deaths of thousands in both countries. But curiously all of this is related in charts of death and destruction; I forgot to mention, but a lot of graphs and tables are inserted in the narrative, which only furthers the dry, clinical tone of the novel. 

This rampant death sort of goes against the grain of Daniel Merriweather’s entire plot to save humanity, which is something that’s at least addressed in the final pages of the novel. But Swann has spent so much time on psychic exposition and “who is really behind these attacks?” that the finale is upon us before we realize it – major characters are dispensed with in an offhand fashion and Judd and Coogan are suddenly reformatted as vassals of a new psychic era, one founded by the almost godlike Daniel Merriweather. 

I believe this was the only novel Ingo Swann published, but I could be wrong. Given his adventures in the psychic realm, I would have expected a bit more escapism, but Star Fire is curiously grounded for the majority of its 318 pages of small print…only occasionally, from the few scenes in Daniel Merriweather’s perspective, do we get flashes of a psychic at work, and these scenes are by far the highlight of the novel. That said, there’s a great, creepy scene where a neuromort comes to life and the humorless lesbian in charge of the government project (how prescient!!) refuses to accept its resurrection, insisting it is dead as she takes up a scapel. But such scenes are few and far between. 

But then, if I had written Star Fire, I would’ve made the hotstuff sadomasochistic chick with necrophiliac tendencies the star of the book.

*In one of those synchronicities I love so much, this past weekend I came across Neal Merryweather’s 1969 2LP “superstar jam album” Word Of Mouth...for a measley five bucks!  In mint condition, to boot!

The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light (second review)

The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, by Paul Kenyon

April, 1974  Pocket Books

I had a grand old time re-reading this third volume of The Baroness; I found that I remembered many things from the first time I read it, back in 2011. This is still my favorite cover art in the series, courtesy Hector Garrido, and overall Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt does a great job keeping the story moving while indulging in his sci-fi interests…and featuring his frequent, pages-consuming sex scenes. 

I still wonder about the explicit sex in The Baroness; it’s more explicit than most any other Lyle Kenon Engel action-series production (save perhaps for The Man From Planet X), and either it was given such a focus due to Engel’s request, Pocket Books’s request, or because Moffitt himself wanted to write it. I don’t believe Moffitt’s sci-fi books indulged in such rampant sexcapades, and given that Engel’s productions all had sex in them but not this much sex, I contend that Pocket Books, publisher of the paperback editions of Harold Robbins, perhaps requested it. Like many paperback publishers of the day, Pocket really hyped the sexual content of their books – sometimes quite misleadingly so – but as the official publishers of Robbins I suspect they felt that they had a cache on “upmarket” filth. It’s tempting to think that it was they who requested that Penelope “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini get down, in super-‘70s detail, frequently and explicitly, in each volume. 

Of course, I could be wrong. However, this seems to be proven posthaste, as Death Is A Ruby Light opens with Penny (as I’ll mostly refer to her; Moffitt himself, in true “house writer style,” refers to her by multiple names in the narrative, which I always find messy writing – I mean, the characters can refer to each other by various names, but the author should only use one name in the narrative…and here ends the sermon) getting in super-busy detail with a visiting Norwegian film director. 

The action goes down in Penny’s palatial Italian villa, and she ends up screwing the guy in the pool…after a few pages of foreplay where she keeps him from getting too excited too soon. The ensuing sex goes on for a few pages and is, again, more detailed and descriptive than any other Engel production I’m aware of…and I’m aware of them all by god, even the ones I haven’t reviewed here yet! Moffitt again shows a superior talent for sleazy details, like telling us how “the jellied evidence of [the Norwegian director’s] passion float[s] away like a water lilly” post-orgasm, or how the water rushes into Penny’s, uh, body cavity after the Norwegian pulls out of her. 

There’s a subplot, which gradually disappears from the narrative, that the cover identities of spies are being compromised and they’re being killed, on both the US and USSR side. Penny wonders why her wrist bracelet hasn’t “pinged” in a while, ie giving her a mission, and we learn in a cool scene that she too has been compromised – men in hoods come into her room late at night. One of the few times the Baroness is caught completely unawares, but the sequence is more of a plot convenience than anything else, as it’s John Farnsworth, here to tell Penny that her cover is in danger of being blown. 

As ever Moffitt makes a big deal out of Penny being “Coin,” super top-secret spy whose identity is only known to her handler, Farnsworth. Which means this series is like The Butcher in that it has a misleading title – Bucher’s codename was “Iceman” and the Baroness’ is “Coin.” Oh and on page 97 Moffitt shoehorns Penny’s backstory into the narrative: widow of an intelligence world bigwig who died in a plane crash, then wife of an Italian baron who died in a car crash…then deciding she wanted to become a spy and, after a few handy courses and whatnot, emerging as “Coin,” using her cover as a famous jet-setting baroness. It’s all very belabored and particularly hard to buy because Penny does not have much personality. 

I’d forgotten that’s the one element missing in Moffitt’s otherwise superb writing: there is zero character motivation and zero in the way of personality or memorable character traits. The Baroness is essentially perfect and likes to call people “darling,” and she certainly likes sex with handsome (and usually foreign) men, but what drives her is very remote. Why exactly did she want to become a spy? Then again, in a way it’s refreshing: Penny’s job is to find out what is knocking satellites out of the sky, and she goes about her mission with steely resolve; there is none of the hand-wringing or dramatic histrionics one might encounter in a similar story today. The only problem is, Penny is a cipher. 

This is proven when, with absolutely not setup or explanation, she straight up sleeps with Alexey, hunky GRU agent, the night she meets him; the complicated setup has it that America and Russia, at much page expense, have determined that China is behind the satellite affair, courtesy a large laser installation somewhere in Mongolia, and so a joint US-USSR commando team is to be sent in, led by Coin. 

Alexey is the leader of the USSR faction, and readers of the series know that he eventually became a supporting character, appearing a few more times – most notably in the unpublished ninth and tenth volumes (where in the latter he presumably was killed in the final pages…though I suspect Moffitt was only bluffing). Anyway, he and Penny exchange a few lines of dialog as the teams are united…and then they just go to bed together. Again, it’s kind of refreshing on one hand – Moffitt just delivering the sex scene everyone knows is coming – yet again it makes our heroine seem like a cipher. 

The same is true of Penny’s unwieldy team, which we know from Moffitt’s conversations with Baroness Yahoo Group honcho ppsantos were foisted on him by the publisher. The only team member with much spark is, as ever, Tom Sumo, the electronics whiz; it’s clear Moffitt likes him, and maybe hulking American Indian Joe Skytop, the best of all the team…with Dan Wharton coming in a distant third. The others are so bland and faceless that they fade right into the background…and this time the reader can sense Moffitt chortling to himself as he finds a way to dispense with all of them, having it that Penny can only bring a few members along on this particular caper. 

The villains actually have more spark. There’s Major Sung, who very much enjoys torturing people – we get a grueling scene of him happily chopping up a slackjawed native who accidentally came across the secret laser silo – and also Professor Thing, a towering Chinese albino with a ruby for an eye who is behind the laser cannon and who has a wanton hatred for America because, as a professor in the United States, he was blinded when someone burned out his retina with a high-powered telescope…or maybe it was an accident. But anyway, there are a lot of scenes with Thing and Sung, and as ever Moffitt fills the 207, small-print pages of the book to the brim. 

The spy-fy focus is also again here, with Penny and team using a host of high-tech equipment, most notably their super-thin winter gear which, like much of the equipment in The Baroness, is a by-product of the Space Race. Moffitt clearly was a follower of the moon launches and NASA ventures of the day; the climax of Death Is A Ruby Light features Professor Thing plotting to use his laser to destroy a US-USSR linkup in space, which is quite similar to the plot of the unpublished A Black Hole To Die In. 

Moffitt seems to cater to Hector Garrido’s recurring cover depitction of the Baroness in an off-hand mention of a “black body stocking” she has in her luggage and which she wears for only the briefest of moments. This is so similar to the outfit Garrido consistently depicted the Baroness wearing on his covers that I figure Moffitt was trying to cater to it…because otherwise the Baroness does not wear any such outfit in the series. That said, the Baroness also has jet-black hair, whereas Garrido consistently depicts her as having shoulder-length brown hair. 

Action is infrequent but memorable when it happens – and pretty hardcore, too. The Baroness is not only atypical of a female protagonist but also of men’s adventure protagonists in general in that she kills in cold blood; frequently, at that. There’s a grueling scene where she and a few hand-picked team members slip through a camp of sleeping Chinese soldiers and slit their throats. 

Another great action scene mixes violence with Moffitt’s lurid inclinations when Penny is knocked out and wakes up in the hut of the hulking Omogoy and his fellow Yakuts. Penny feels a “burning” in her loins and realizes, quite placidly, that she’s been raped – further evidence provided by the “crusting” she sees on the penises of two of the native men, who are walking happily nude around the hut! Curiously Moffitt doesn’t have Penny really getting vengeance on her rapists, though she does as expected run roughshod over them in her escape. Omogoy too is shuffled out of the narrative and meets his fate in an unsatisfying way, a fate dealt out by Professor Thing instead of Penny. 

Alexey doesn’t contribute much to the narrative, other than providing a team of redshirts who can die so that the Baroness’ team will, as expected, survive. And also he engages Penny in a few more sex scenes – lots of description of his uncircumcised “pole” and Penny doing her “rotary” movement as she rides him…another recurring series schtick, like Penny’s tendency to “crush” the throats of unsuspecting guards. 

That said, late in the game the Baroness says to Tommy, speaking of Alexey: “I think I love him, a little.” This “love” is not developed at all in the narrative itself; for the most part, Penny and Alexey trade barbs about the mission, as they each have confidential info they are not willing to share with each other until necessary. So there’s a lingering tension of whether Penny and team can really trust Alexey. So Penny suddenly admitting she loves Alexey is a little hard to buy…yet at the same time, it goes hand-in-hand with her overall cipher-like nature. After all, this is the same woman who woke to discover she’d been raped by two men, a discovery which was dwelt upon and passed over in the span of a few sentences, and never mentioned again. 

The climax is pretty good, with Penny and team captured and taken to the massive base of Thing and Sung, where Penny has the series-mandatory tete-a-tete where Thing reveals his motivations. There’s also a memorable part where he pulls out his ruby eye and tosses it to her. But once again Tom Sumo proves himself the most indispensable member of the Baroness’ team – perhaps including even the Baroness herself – when he uses his gee-whiz science knowledge to undo Thing’s laser cannon. 

Unfortunately the finale sort of peters out with Penny and the others again silently killing a full base of sleeping Chinese soldiers…sort of anticlimactic after the big bad guy and his henchman have been deposed. But Moffitt goes on to write even more, with a scene in which Alexey, back home, learns who “Coin” is – thanks to Dan Wharton’s casual reference to her as “Baroness.” This leads to a surprising finale where Alexey goes to Italy to surprise her, tells her he has a week off and wants to spend it with her, and they go off together – so clearly from the get-go Moffitt had Alexey in mind as a recurring character. 

Overall Death Is A Ruby Light remains one of my favorite installments of The Baroness, even though the majority of it occurs in a frozen tundra. Sure, there’s not much in the way of personality or motivation, but otherwise Donald Moffitt’s writing is a cut above the men’s adventure norm, doling out exactly what producer Lyle Kenyon Engel wanted. One imagines that Engel must have been ecstatic to acquire Moffitt for his writing stable; compare to Manning Lee Stokes, another gifted writer, but one who “did not adhere exactly to the approved outline,” per Will Murray’s Killmaster article in The Armchair Detective volume 15, number 4 (1982). Moffitt turns in books that actually deliver on what the back cover promises.