Slave Queen

Slave Queen, by Norman Gant

August, 1970  Dell Books

It seems like forever since I’ve read a Slavesploitation novel (aka Plantation Novels); I just checked the blog and I see I’ve never posted a review of one here, so I guess it’s been more years than I thought. Well anyway, I’m reviewing one now: Slave Queen, courtesy prolific writer George Wolk, using his “Norman Gant” pseudonym. And also checking the blog, I see that so far I’ve only reviewed one other Wolk novel here, despite his productivity: Michelle, My Belle, which he published – also through Dell – a year after this one. 

Coming in at 204 pages, Slave Queen is yet another vintage paperback with back cover copy that seems to describe a completely different book. The back cover tells us that beautiful young Owerri is taken from her tribe in Africa and, at the tender age of 13, learns to use “the white man’s lust” to get the better of her captors…and then, some years later, becomes a mistress of the erotic artists and even heads up her own “voodoo empire” in New Orleans. 

Sounds cool and certainly button-pushing (I wasn’t so much in for that “13 years old” part, to be honest), but unfortunately it’s not the novel we get here. As it turns out, the titular “slave queen” Owerri is hardly in the book, and she isn’t even a slave queen! As for the “heading up a voodoo empire” part, that does happen…in the last 14 pages! 

Rather, Slave Queen comes off like a proto-Roots for the first half, detailing the horrific capture and captivity of Africans belonging to the Owerri tribe of the Ibo; the book starts in 1713 when Princess Owerri, named after her tribe by her people’s king, is 13. Arabic men with guns come and start taking the women and then the men; there are all the usual genre staples, like the native warriors valiantly fighting against them but dying beneath the advanced weaponry. 

From there it is to the grueling trek across the Sahara, where the slavers – a “Moor” and a Portuguese – push their captives relentlessly, the goal being that the trek across the desert will wipe away any personality the captives have and any memories they have of their former life, so that by the time they’ve endured the long sea voyage to the New World they will be docile slaves. Cruel stuff, and again even here the entirety of this is relayed through the perspective of the slavers. 

Owerri, our supposed protagonist, is seen infrequently; her sister (who completely disappears from the narrative), older by a few years than Owerri, uses her body to please the slavers so that Owerri can have an easy captivity; to this end Owerri rides across the Sahara in a covered wagon, accompanied by a burly eunuch who teaches Owerri all of the erotic tricks of the trade – stuff he picked up while working as a guard for the sultan’s harem(!). 

Then we get a lot of stuff about the person buying the slaves: John Philip Dumond, a French American from New Orleans (constantly described as a squalid shantytown hellhole – no comment!), a blond-haired rake with dashing good looks: that’s him on the (uncredited) cover, and certainly that’s intended to be Owerri beside him, but note that Owerri is specifically described by Wolk as not having an afro; indeed, her hair is stated as being long, like past her shoulders, and curly. 

Well anyway, now John Philip is our protagonist, and he pretty much remains so. The slavers are cast out of the narrative – one courtesy the wiles of Kantad, a mute priest from Owerri’s tribe who has sworn to protect his princess, and the other courtesy the wiles of Dumond. Then we have the grueling sea voyage…where Dumond takes Owerri’s virginity, and yes she’s only 13 at the time, possibly 14 at the most, but the way Wolk writes it we are to understand these slavers think “the younger the better” when it comes to slaves, and besides the slaves don’t have feelings anyway in their worldview. 

We then jump to 1722 and the action is now in New Orleans…and we learn that Dumond keeps Owerri, now 22, as his very own concubine, and indeed he has a child with her: five year-old Angelique. New Orleans has grown a bit due to Dumond’s philanthropy – he’s a plantation owner and all the usual tropes – but the issue is there are no white women, and this is a big deal for the people who have come over from France and whatnot, so they have to make do with banging black whores and American Indian whores in the local “bawdy house.” 

Meanwhile Owerri is still mostly off-page, but when we do see her she is incredibly memorable. Essentially she has Dumond, her supposed owner, wrapped around her finger. He does what she wants, when she wants, even though he knows he could just sell her off…and especially because he knows that one day he will marry a white woman and then Owerri and Angelique will have to go. 

Wolk treads an interesting line here by making Dumond seem a total cad to our modern eyes yet at the same time making him seem somewhat advanced for his era. The subplot that is gradually built up is that Dumond, of course, loves Owerri, even though he denies this to himself; after all, so he tells himself, “one doesn’t fall in love with blacks.” And curiously his slaves – the people he bought in Africa – actually look up to Dumond, seeing him as the man who “saved them” after their grueling trek across the Sahara, taking them away from the evil slavers, an irony that Dumond often dwells on. 

But even here we don’t get the plot the back cover promises. New Orleans is essentially a village of French and Germans and Spaniards who have come over to the New World to make their stake and are having a rough go of it, and most of them owe money to Dumond. Kantad, the mute slave who protects Owerri, now works as a butler at the whorehouse and he learns of a plot among some of the men to kill Dumond. 

This takes up the majority of the second half of the novel, Kantad going around New Orleans to find out the plot and then going to “the Voodoo” of Queen Hati, a freed black woman who is spiritual leader to the slave community, and securing the aid of her warriors in the upcoming battle – a memorable scene in which Kantad, a follower of the old African religions and a disbeliever in voodoo, proves his knowledge and skill with snakes so as to pass Hati’s test. 

And then, in true “prolific paperback writer” fashion, George Wolk completely rushes through the assassination scene that he’s been building up for so many chapters; it’s all over and done with in like a paragraph, with multiple major characters dead…and then we flash forward several months and more focus is placed on how Owerri has been sulking in her room, to the extent that Dumond’s had to resort to having sex with the fat Indian girl at the whorehouse – a somewhat-explicit sex scene that Wolk manages to make quite displeasing. 

Oh and I forgot to mention: Owerri does feature in a sex scene of her own, another fairly explicit one but nothing too major, where we learn that Dumond also keeps her as his very own because “it’s not like with any other woman” when he’s with Owerri. This is of course due to the tutelage she received from the eunuch on the trek across the desert; Owerri knows several sex tricks, we’re to understand, and we see one of them in this sequence: holding her feet up by Dumond’s head while he’s atop her and then, uh, jamming her fingers in his ass to make him orgasm mightily. The Slave Queen, baby! 

But more focus is placed on the control Owerri has over Dumond, and like a pro Wolk conveys all this subtly. Dumond sulks when Owerri does not talk to him, Dumond frets constantly about how he will eventually have to send her away; he refuses to hear Owerri’s demands that little Angelique be sent off to France to study, because Angelique is “just a black” and the whole idea is absurd. But more often than not he does what she says, and Wolk does a good job of bringing this bizarre relationship to life. 

Things really pick up in the final quarter, and also come closer to aligning with the otherwise misleading back cover copy. The white women finally arrive, six French girls sent to the New World by no less than the king of France after Dumond’s many implorements for women over the years, and Dumond snatches up the prettiest of the bunch; immediately he decides that Owerri will now go. But when he gets back to his mansion he is informed by his increasingly-“uppity” black servants that Owerri is already gone, with Angelique, and indeed she’s demanded her manumission papers and the deed to a nearby house! 

Then we get into the cool stuff, as Owerri takes up the mantle of the deposed Queen Hati of the voodoo cult, fifteen pages before the end of the book. Better late than never, I guess! But man, finally the book becomes everything we’ve been waiting for: Owerri regains her lust for life after some hot (but briefly described) sex with one of Hati’s muscular guards, who thereafter becomes her consort, Owerri now becoming the new queen and leading her people in various voodoo rituals and ceremonies – and, in another hurriedly dashed-off scene, preventing yet another assassination attempt on Dumond. 

As it turns out the crux of Slave Queen concerns the choice Dumond must make: the attractive but frigid French chick or the hotstuff black chick who jams her fingers up his ass when he’s banging her; a choice every man must make at some point in his life. But given that this is 1722, Dumond’s choice is easily guessed…leading to some nicely-played irony on Wolk’s part (spoiler alert: Madeleine, the frigid French girl, turns out to be a lesbian and indeed came to America precisely because she was outed in a lesbian affair, and she refuses to ever have sex with Dumond!). 

In true “I’m a contract writer with a deadline to meet” style, Wolk sort of leaves the reader cold in the finale, but the ending is fitting regardless. Spoiler alert again, and I only go into such thoroughness because Slave Queen is so scarce and obscure, but Dumond of course realizes he has made a mistake and pines horribly for Owerri…but she has moved on, about to have a child with her new man and starting up her new life as the voodoo queen. And meanwhile Dumond is sad and miserable with his frigid lezbo French wife. At first I was underwhelmed – when Owerri first becomes the voodoo queen, it is implied she wants revenge on Dumond, and the reader expects some pulp fun – but as it turns out, this is her revenge, to spurn the man who spurned her, and to live her best life while Dumond lives a miserable one. 

Wolk handles the plot well and manages to convey a slave epic in just 200 small-print pages. He brings his characters to life – Kantad in particular is memorable, which is especially notable because he doesn’t speak – and Wolk brings his world to life. My only issues were his rampant POV-hopping (we’ll go from the thoughts of one character into the thoughts of another, with no white space or warning), and also his tenses sometimes slip, using present-tense when it should be past-tense. But his dialogue is good and descriptions are great and economical in true paperback writer style – which of course is also demonstrated in the aforementioned rush through what should have been a more played-out sequence (the assassination attempt on Dumond). 

I had a lot of fun reading Slave Queen; it was a nice reminder of how wrong (but oh so right) these vintage Slavesploitation books were. It’s incredible that this little industry was so popular in the day – Lancer Books in particular seemed to have a cachet on the genre – and of course the novels have an extra “forbidden” quality in today’s tamed world. I’ll be reviewing more of them for sure; I just need to figure out which ones I actually have.

And speaking of voodoo, here is a crazy story from Haiti that virtually every news outlet is ignoring (likely because if they covered it they would have to admit a certain someone was right all along).

The Fate Of The Phoenix

The Fate Of The Phoenix, by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath

May, 1979  Bantam Books

Way back in January of 2013 I read The Price Of The Phoenix, an ultra-weird Star Trek novel that introduced me to what is called “slash fiction,” that fan-fiction conceit in which homosexual relations are strongly implied – or downright depicted – between two male characters, in this case Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Why anyone would want to do such a thing is of course the mystery – I guess these original “shippers” just overlooked the fact that Kirk banged practically every space babe he encountered in the original TV series – but regardless, The Fate Of The Phoenix is the continuation of the story, and is just as reviled by modern-day Trek readers. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a positive review of either book. 

But here’s the crazy thing – I kind of liked this one! The first half, at least, which reminded me of Leigh Brackett more than Star Trek, concerning as it did a sort of fantasy-feudal world with masked Romulans wearing chain mail and wielding swords. But a big difference is that Brackett’s was a very masculine fiction, her protagonists most always men; Marshak and Culbreath are feminists, and throughout The Fate of The Phoenix they once again relish in stamping out the “toxic masculinity” of the TV show they claim to love. 

In that way the two women were ahead of the curve. In our post-modern era, in which “empowered women” like Kathleen Kennedy et al have taken the reigns of previously male-dominated properties and sucked the life out of them – removing all toxic masculinity, empowering all women…and, not-so-coincidentally, losing money and tanking the properties in the process – it is very evident that Marshak and Culbreath were doing the very same thing with Star Trek. 

Throughout this book, Captain Kirk – that “alpha male” of the series (the term isn’t as used as much in this book as the previous one, by the way) – is constantly shown as weak, or it’s hammered home that Spock is so much stronger than Kirk…or even how the clone of Kirk, introduced in The Price Of The Phoenix and now named simply “James,” could literally be crushed in the arms of the Romulan Commander, ie that somewhat-sexy female Romulan introduced in the TV series and who also appeared in the previous book. There are many scenes of Kirk (both of them) being knocked out, carried around in the arms of these Vulcans or Romulans, as weak as a kitten…again and again Kirk’s power is diminished so that the non-caucasian male characters can shine. 

Yes, for with even more prescience Marshak and Culbreath’s “toxic masculinity deconstruction” only extends to white males; just as black men and Muslim men are never demeaned nor criticized by the progressivist AWFLs of today (which occasionally leads to some humorous developments), so too is Spock safe from the “toxic male” tag…he’s the Star Trek version of a protected class, I guess. Sure he’s strong and smart and all, and also he’s straight, but he’s not a white male, you see – not a white human male – so our authors do not place their critical lens on him. 

No, as with the previous novel, The Fate Of The Phoenix seems to delight in inverting the charisma and strength that William Shatner brought to Captain Kirk…there is even a part toward the end where Kirk gets amnesia, and he’s fawning over the returning villain of the piece, Omne, basically acting like a loyal little lapdog as he follows him around on some planet, looking to Omne to make all the decisions and etc. Again, the prescience is off the charts…it’s a wonder these authors didn’t come up with some ultra-powerful Mary Sue female character a la Captain Marvel to inject into the toxically masculine Star Trek universe – but then again, they actually did do that, in 1983’s Triangle. 

What makes this all so strange is that Marshak and Culbreath claim in Jeff Ayers’ Voyages Of Imagination that none other than William Shatner himself loved The Price Of The Phoenix (and perhaps this sequel, they don’t really specify), and indeed they even go so far as to claim that, shortly before Star Trek: The Motion Picture got underway, Shatner told them he’d pushed Gene Roddenberry to use the Phoenix books as the plot for the movie(!). 

Of course, in Voyages of the Imagination the authors do not reveal that they’d also written a biography with Shatner around that time – Where No Man, which I picked up years ago and keep meaning to read – so I’m sure that had to play into it a bit…also, according to the About the Authors page at the end of The Fate Of The Phoenix, Marshak and Culbreath were working with Shatner on a non-Star Trek sci-fi project, which never came to pass…all of which is to say, perhaps Shatner had a vested interest in promoting their work. And also let’s face it, he was probably eager to get two roles in a film based on the Phoenix novels, playing two versions of Kirk…just like he had years before in White Comanche, which I once had on VHS and I’d get drunk and watch it and just laugh and laugh…really, why hasn’t that movie been better discovered today? 

Well anyway, the two novels are basically one; The Fate Of The Phoenix opens immediately after the end of The Price Of The Phoenix. So then, Omne returns, aka Omne the Black, aka Omnedon. The guy who died twice in the previous book, but we’ll recall the “Phoenix” is Omne’s invention, a sort of transporter that captures a soul and can make a duplicate out of it. In The Price Of The Phoenix, “James” was created, a perfect duplicate of Kirk. But Omne himself was killed, and we learn at the start of The Fate Of The Phoenix that Omne has duplicated himself…and also, since they had a duplicate Kirk in the previous book, this time the authors introduce a duplicate Spock, pretentiously referred to throughout as “The Other.” 

“Pretentious” is a fitting description of the writing style; there is a tendency to pad the pages with a lot of words, words that don’t say very much. Characters speak in obfuscations or riddles and there were a lot of times that I had no idea what was going on. Humorously, Marshak and Culbreath seem to understand this, as throughout the novel we will have periodic recaps of what has happened; seriously, characters will either remind themselves of what has happened so far in the narrative or some other character will come along and they’ll tell this person such and such happened, and it’s almost like the authors understood that their own book was practically impossible to follow. 

And while the slash fiction weirdness is mostly toned down for this sequel, the fan-fiction roots remain; once again only Kirk and Spock matter, the rest of the characters from the Enterprise not even really appearing. McCoy has one or two lines, and I think Scotty might as well, but otherwise the authors only focus on Kirk and Spock…and once again practically the entire universe knows about them, as if they were the stars of a TV show even in their own fictional world. 

But the opening is kind of cool, if for no other reason than the authors leave the regular characters alone. It features the Romulan Commander, with James in tow – and, picking up from the finale of the previous book, he’s been surgically augmented to look like a Romulan – taking care of a potential rebellion on some Romulan-owned world or something. It’s all very Amok Time, with pointy-eared Romulans in armor and this warrior-woman who has her own male consort, and there’s a lot of intended hanky-panky between the two women and two men. 

Indeed, the authors let us know in no uncertain terms that the Romulan Commander and James have been getting it on; there’s even a ridiculous bit where the Commander comes in on James when he’s gotten out of the shower and the authors note how only a towel covers him, which of course made me think of that time in Who’s The Boss when Tony Danza walked in on that blonde chick in the shower. More prescience, people!! 

Anyway, this will be it for the hanky-panky, and as you’ll note it is directed toward the male character (despite being feminists I assume the two authors are still attracted to men), so admittedly it wasn’t the sort of hanky-panky I look for in my fiction. And besides, it seems that Marshak and Culbreath focused more on this stuff in the aforementioned Triangle. 

But the slash stuff is here, if mainly due to the theme of possession – and I don’t mean in the supernatural horror-thriller sense. No, the gist is that Omne “owns” the first “Phoenix” (ie James, the clone of Kirk), and he keeps trying to claim him as his own…indeed, and spoiler alert, but the novel actually ends with Omne and James alone on a deserted planet, out of touch from the rest of the universe for like fifty-thousand years or something. In other words, an Adam and, uh, Adam sort of situation. 

Like Arsenio Hall would say, “Hmmmm.” I mean folks, if you have a goofy stipulation that you must own your first clone, then by god clone a porn actress or something! 

But it takes a goodly time to get to that finale; indeed, The Fate Of The Phoenix is similar to its predecessor in that it moves slowly and things take forever to happen. A commenter on my review of The Price Of The Phoenix noted that Omne was like Thanos, and that’s true…with the caveat that this is a Thanos that is all bark and no bite. In fact it is even specified in this novel that Omne never kills anyone, and he spends the entire novel making veiled threats and insinuations; but have no fear, we are assured again and again that he can tear Kirk apart and crush his limbs with absolutely no problem whatsoever. That weak little kitten Kirk; he couldn’t harm a fly! 

Oh and Marshak and Culbreath have this super bizarre viewpoint that I guess ties back to the “alpha male” bullshit of the previous book; so basically, we learn here that Omne has this huge grudge against Kirk because Kirk didn’t bow his head to Omne when they met! I mean, the entire thrust of the two-volume scenario is that Omne was not given his proper due, and he’s mad as hell about it, and there’s this simmering grudge between the two…and even I, a guy who to this day still has not seen every episode of the original TV series, even I am familiar with at least a few episodes where Kirk got on his knees, or showed proper deference to some alien king or whatnot (even if Kirk was just feigning it), so I kept wondering to myself what show these two “Star Trek experts” were even watching. 

So there’s this ridiculous bit where as mentioned Kirk has amnesia, and he bows his head to Omne, and this “touches Omne more than he thought it might,” and it’s just weird. Now that I think of it, the slash fiction shit didn’t go away; the authors just changed it from Kirk and Spock to Kirk and Omne, with “James” added in to make it a veritable three-way. 

But the opening is at least cool…we have not one but two Romulan babes: the Commander and the Doyen, a warrior-woman in armor who very much seems like a creation of the TV show; you could totally see a character like her in some third-season episode in a Rodenberry-approved revealing costume…something else that has been gutted from the franchise, or correct me if I’m wrong and there are scantily-clad space-babes in that “vintage-inspired” Star Trek: Strange New Worlds bullshit? 

The warrior-woman’s male consort also has a memorable costume that would’ve looked cool on the show: a cape and half-mask, which is how James dresses when he’s in public with the Commander. That is the two of them, by the way, James and the Commander, on the cover (courtesy Bob Larkin) – though we certainly are not informed that the Commander wears any such cleavage-baring outfit in the novel itself! 

Things derail when Omne returns and the empty boasting ensues – I mean things derail both for the characters and for the reader. And now there are two Omnes: the regular one and the Other, ie the Spock clone, who is supposedly the “more evil” version of Omne, not that you’d really guess it. Really the book is a lot of talk, a lot of speculation, a lot of internal turmoil and stressing out over things that the actual characters of the show wouldn’t even concern themselves with. 

As for action…there isn’t much. I think The Price Of The Phoenix actually had more. Kirk gets in a few fights with Omne (getting his ass handed to him, of course), and there’s one part where someone shoots a phaser (I think), but this is not an action-heavy novel at any means; it is even more probing and talky than the average episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

But at the same time, I kinda dug the ‘70s weirdness of it all. It’s for this reason that I suspect I will always be more interested in the 1970s Star Trek paperbacks by Bantam than the ‘80s ones by Pocket, as the former were just stranger, more off the beaten path…and were not at the mercy of Rodenberry and his arbiter of Star Trek continuity. That said, also according to Voyages of Imagination, Roddenberry did review The Fate Of The Phoenix, and his only stipulation was that there could not be two Kirks in the universe, hence the authors sending James to that impossible-to-reach planet with Omne at the end. 

As mentioned neither Phoenix novel is much regaled these days – seriously, just do a Google search and take a look at the scathing reviews – but they did well enough at the time that Marshak and Culbreath were able to write two more novels for Pocket: 1982’s The Prometheus Design and 1983’s Triangle. 

I’ve been on a bit of a Star Trek kick lately, mainly through watching the animated series every Saturday night on MeTV Toons, followed by the second half of the original-series episode over on MeTV (I don’t know why they don’t just program the shows so that the animated series is on first and the original series on next), so I’ve been in the mood for some vintage Star Trek fiction – and as ever I am only interested in the original crew/cast. 

As I mentioned in my review of The Price Of The Phoenix, a good thing about being interested in Star Trek fiction is that so much of it is available…and for cheap! One thing that has not changed since 2013 (when I last decided to pick up some Star Trek novels) is that used bookstores still stock tons and tons of Star Trek books, and unlike vintage men’s adventure novels and whatnot, they’re actually half-price! Just this past weekend I went to three different Half Price bookstores in the Dallas area and found all of the Star Trek novels I was interested in reading, and they only cost me a little over a dollar each. 

And being the glutton for punishment I am, I bought both of the Marshak and Culbreath novels for Pocket Books, and the next Star Trek novel I plan to read is…Triangle! Based on a quick flip-through it looks like the authors toned down on the slash kink and brought in a bit more of a standard kink, in the guise of a hotstuff alien chick called Sola Thane who manages to bang both Kirk and Spock (not at the same time). So hopefully – hopefully! – that one will be quicker-moving than The Price Of The Phoenix and The Fate Of The Phoenix.

Black Angel: Hell Outta Harlem

Great news, everyone: a new volume of Black Angel has just been published by Tocsin Press! It’s titled Hell Outta Harlem, and this volume debuts a new cover design for the series, with an acid-green wraparound color scheme that practically screams “1975 paperback spinner rack:” 

THE BLACK ANGEL IS BACK — AND SHE’S BRINGING HELL! 

When the fascist thugs of the Crime Control Division turn Harlem into an occupied territory, there's only one woman mean enough, wild enough, and deadly enough to fight back! The Black Angel is going to take the battle straight to the bastards — and she's bringing the pimps, the hustlers, and the streetwalkers along for the ride! 

From machine-gun ambushes and exploding cars to crooked politicians, dirty cops, and a conspiracy that stinks worse than the dope poisoning the streets, this is a no-holds-barred showdown where the whole damn city becomes a battlefield! 

The Crime Control Division has the guns and the numbers. 

But there’s one thing it doesn’t have… 

THE BLACK ANGEL!

Blood in the streets! Lead in the air! A city pushed to the breaking point! And one black-clad avenging angel who's about to show what happens when Harlem fights back! 

Lock and load, baby! The revolution is going down, the body count is climbing, and the streets are gonna run red!

Here is the Amazon link to Hell Outta Harlem, a hard-driving blast of Blaxploitation mayhem! Available in paperback only, baby, and printed to the exact dimensions of 1970s mass market paperbacks — just the way you love it!

WHEN THE MAN BRINGS AN ARMY, THE BLACK ANGEL BRINGS HELL!!

The Penetrator #47: Orphan Army

The Penetrator #47: Orphan Army, by Lionel Derrick

September, 1982  Pinnacle Books

If you’ve ever been reading an installment of The Penetrator and thought to yourself, “This is great and all, but it would be even better if Mark ‘The Penetrator’ Hardin was wasting a bunch of kids,”, then have I got the installment for you! 

To be honest, though, Orphan Army isn’t all kid-killing, all the time. Mark Roberts fills pages with abandon, and in addition to the orphan plot we have appearances from past characters, an egregious “perfect storm” middle section, and a “military combat” climax that wouldn’t have been out of place in Roberts’ later Soldier For Hire. 

And also I should clarify. Either due to his own decision or some behind-the-scenes editing, Roberts never specifically has Mark killing kids. The brainwashed orphan soldiers he does take out are all carefully specified as being teenagers. Kids, still, but certainly a different image than the Penetrator blowing away some seven year-old. 

But otherwise I’m happy to report that some of the bloodlust of the earliest volumes has sort of returned; at the very least, Mark kills a few people this time, and Roberts dwells on the exploding brains and gore. That said, he knocks just as many out with his plastic dart gun Ava, which also makes a return appearance here – it seems to me to have been a few volumes since we saw it, but then I take many months between volumes so at this point the entire series seems like a blur. 

Roberts must have been feeling some nostalgia for the series, as with this one he brings back the SIE, the Societe Internationale d’Elite, that New World Order organization first introduced in #3: Capitol Hell and which then later appeared in #25: Floating Death, both Roberts installments. We’re told that the events of Capitol Hell were “a few years back,” but meanwhile that book was published eight years before this one. Then again, later in Orphan Army we’re told that Mark’s “Brown Beast,” a 1977 Ford camper, is “getting old,” and there’s a go-nowhere diversion where we are informed that Mark has tasked David Red Eagle, back in the Stronghold, with getting a new vehicle for the Penetrator. Nothing comes of this in the novel so we eagerly await developments in the next Roberts installment. 

We’re informed that the SIE has gone somewhat legit, no longer just a shadowy organization and now posing as an up-and-up NGO that meddles in the politics of various nations, skewing things in a progressive-leftist direction. In other words the SIE is the deep state in all but name. We see them in action in the first chapter, when a Walter Cronkite type of newsman is murdered just as he’s putting the final touches on a report about the SIE – and folks the ‘80s have entered The Penetrator, the age of computers is here, as we have a lot of stuff about the “chip” in his electric typewriter that stored what he was typing out, even though the assassins made off with the printed pages. 

Then again, the age of computers extends to the book itself; Orphan Army has big, blocky print that looks nothing like previous Pinnacle publications, making the book come in at nearly 200 pages. All of which is to say the era of the ‘70s paperback was well and fully over by 1982, and honestly a lot of the charm was gone as well. 

Dan Griggs – the Justice guy who heads up the task force that is dedicated to bringing the Penetrator in, remember – puts Mark on this one, telling him about the SIE connection. Mark talks to the people who worked with the Cronkite type and discovers that there was something about orphanages, and from there Mark will ultimately learn that the SIE is funding orphanages where kids are being brainwashed with socialist drivel and turned into combat-ready killers. 

There’s quite a bit of stuff with the SIE types themselves, from Felder, the new head of the SIE, to a guy named DiFalco who runs one of the orphanages. Roberts doles out some of the expected sleazy stuff with random mentions of the “photographs” DiFaclco and some others keep of some of the orphans, though fortunately Orphan Army doesn’t go as far down that dark, sleazy road as the contemporary Ninja Master #7. 

But honestly, the “kid killer” stuff really comes and goes in the plot. I swear, Mark Roberts was bored as hell with the series at this point and just wanted the damn thing to end – possibly one of the reasons he decided to end it so permanently in the 53rd and final volume. We have long digressions on how much Mark Hardin likes trains, to the aforementioned digression on what type of new truck he’s going to get, and then the most egregious part is an endless sequence where he endures an ocean storm in Japan. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s also stuff from the point of view of Dennis Roberts, a prepubescent orphan in one of the SIE orphanages who takes umbrage with the socialist drivel being taught…and is constantly punished for it. Mark sees this kid when making his first sortie of the orphanage (posing as a safety inspector), and eventually this kid will help out in an action scene – and, ultimately, will be adopted by none other than Dan Briggs. 

I almost forgot, Roberts also goes way overboard with esoteric martial arts terms in this one, like he’d read a couple volumes of Mace. It has the same lame impact, too, with no real verve to the plentiful hand-to-hand fights, Roberts just namedropping various kicks and punches as Mark fights sundry North Korean experts. I also almost forgot, but the SIE turns out to be working with North Korea. 

As for the firefights, these two are unusual because many scenes feature Mark going up against brainwashed kids. Almost halfway through he blows away an 18 year-old, hating himself for “killing a kid,” and later in the book he will unwillingly kill a few more teens in various firefights. But for the most part he goes up against North Koreans, and Roberts indulges in his usual in-jokery by naming one of them “Chiun.” 

After Mark has hit a few of the orphanages the SIE takes all the kids and heads over to Korea, and at this point Mark has been warned off the case by Dan Griggs, due to higher-ups in Washington who want the SIE left alone (again, the deep state connotation). Mark goes over anyway, hooking up with some commando types in Japan…and leading to that aforementioned scene where he’s on a boat in a massive ocean storm, and folks this part just goes on and on and on. 

Then in South Korea he engages in various military skirmishes with the SIE orphans, and here it is very much like Soldier For Hire, lacking the lone wolf action escapades of earlier books and instead featuring Mark commanding various fire teams in combat. I’m not so much a fan of this and all told it’s probably why I prefer the installments by co-writer Chet Cunningham. 

Roberts also brings back Angie Dillon, first introduced in #29: Aryan Onslaught and then in #35: Black Massacre; both Roberts installments, and as I argued earlier Angie was likely Roberts’s attempt at the “perfect match” for Mark Hardin, competing with Chet Cunningham’s own perfect match(es). Angie as we’ll recall is a widower with twins, and surprisingly Roberts treats us to an all-too-brief conjugation between Mark and her, though it doesn’t reach the sleazy heights of the earliest volumes. That said, Angie disappears from the book, then shows up at the very end, somehow in Japan as a “surprise” for Mark – and Roberts ends the novel there. 

Throughout the novel Roberts doles out some of his patented clunky sentences, my favorite being: “A long, two-second silence followed.” But overall he keeps Orphan Army moving, though I still bet he was relieved when the series soon came to an end.

Star Fever

Star Fever, by Nancy Weber

April, 1971  Signet Books

As mentioned in my review of $500, Star Fever was Nancy Weber’s first novel, a paperback original published by Signet that is so obscure I didn’t even find it when I was obsessively searching for rock novels a few years ago. 

This slim novel, barely over 150 pages (the last several pages are comprised of song lyrics by Weber’s fictional musicians), is very much of its era…sort of a more literate take on what J.R. Young was doing. In her 2014 interview Weber described Star Fever as a “a silly work-for-hire about groupies,” but really it isn’t – it’s more along the lines of the later Rock & Roll Retreat Blues, a sort of surreal slice-of-rocker-life sort of thing, with the caveat that Star Fever is like so, so many other “rock novels” of this era in that it really isn’t about rock music at all. 

No, the focus is on Susan O’Brien, sexy young socialite reporter (apparently a Weber staple; the same sort of protagonist featured in $500) who is doing a magazine expose on groupies…and to this end a lot of the book is comprised of taped conversations between Susan and Star, essentially the top groupie of her day: a young groovy chick who is the main woman of Frog Johnson, a Bob Dylan-esque folk singer with big underground cred. 

Then a lot of the novel is comprised of the pseudo diary entries of Jan, a teenager who saw Frog in her hometown of Seattle, had sex with him in his hotel room, and now is obsessed with him, to the point that she’s run away from home and is trying to be with him because she thinks they were meant to be together. The novel starts off on very casual footing; Susan “rapping” with Star, diary excerpts from Jan…the actual rockers, ie the focus of the novel, are barely even seen! The editor at Signet is to be given much credit for sifting through the novel and making it seem like it’s going to focus on the “sleazy rocker stuff.” Just check out this first-page preview: 

And also the back cover, which promises a completely different novel than what we get: 

So yeah, it develops eventually that Susan, a roving magazine reporter who comes off like a proto Sex and the City character but a lot less shrill and self-involved, once had a casual fling with Pete Kettle, drummer for top British sensation The Boys. That Susan is determined to get him, as per the back cover, is not really an element in the novel…though she does eventually get him. 

As for the porno flick hyped on the first-page preview? It happens so casually in the novel that it barely even resonates. Once she’s hooked up with Pete Kettle again, Susan is at a party and smoking pot and all those usual late ‘60s things (the novel is set between 1969 and 1970, though curiously there’s no mention of Woodstock), and someone decides to shoot a porno for another guy’s birthday present, and Susan says what the hell, she’ll be in it. But the actual shooting of the movie happens off-page and indeed, Weber keeps all the sex-scenes off-page or so obfuscated that even the most depraved reader will have to do some heavy lifting in the imagination department to make things juicy. I mean, this ain’t no $500, but even that wasn’t too explicit. 

But really, this isn’t a “plot” type of novel. As with the later $500, Weber really excels at bringing a lost New York to life – though again, hers is a New York of upper-crust socialites. One of the subplots of the novel is Susan, “old” in her late twenties, learning to let herself loosen up and join up with the young hippie crowd. 

But where are the rockers? Sadly, they’re window dressing. Star Fever could’ve just as easily been about movie stars. Frog Johnson and Pete Kettle are only there to deliver a few lines of dialog, otherwise the novel belongs to the women. That said, Weber gets major props for bringing an unexpected magickal direction to the novel; Frog hangs out with a black guy who fashions himself as a wizard and Star sees herself as a witch, and there’s a lot of groovy ‘60s ritual stuff when Jan is indoctrinated into the world of magick. 

Oh and speaking of random metaphysical things…now this is crazy, but then again it would really only matter to me, but still. As I mentioned in my review of $500, I discovered that book in Montreal. Well, folks, guess where Susan O’Brien just randomly decides to go early on in Star Fever? That’s right – for no reason than just to be spontaneous, Susan catches a flight to Montreal and hangs out in Old Montreal for a few days, which I thought was crazy – what Jung would’ve called synchronicity, especially because as mentioned the coincidence of it all really only mattered to me (the essence of a synchronicity…or at least that’s what Robert Anton Wilson always said, but what the hell did he know?). 

I seem to be losing the plot. And speaking of plot, one gradually develops in Star Fever. Basically, Star learns that she will never have a child due to all the abortions she’s had, and she thinks that’s a damn shame because Frog Johnson should have a child. So on one of her witchy ritual trips she gets the idea for one of Frog’s fans to carry the child. And guess who it turns out to be? That’s right: Jan. So the teenaged Jan spends the last third of the novel very pregnant – something her desperate-to-be-hip mother thinks is just grand, but something that might not resonate very well with sensitive readers of today. 

As for Susan, her story has her wondering if she should just hook up with her agent, with whom she’s had a long-simmer “will they or won’t they” relationship (another $500 carryover), but then after the trip to Montreal she runs into Pete Kettle again – hanging out in a hotel a la John Lennon  – and soon enough she’s spending New Year’s with him and heading down to Majorca and whatnot. 

But man, there is absolutely no scene here where Frog Johnson or the Boys have a concert, or perform music – other that is than randomly strumming guitars during parties. This is very much a “rock musician’s life” novel instead of a “rock novel,” and even the “groupie” element Nancy Weber mentioned in her decades-later interview is minimal. Star is already established as Frog’s girl, the groupie who managed to snare her idol. That said, her parts are by far the most entertaining, including randomly bizarre stuff like when she decides to drive against traffic in downtown Manhattan. 

As for Weber’s writing, as with $500 it’s exceptional, with the note that her skill is snappy wordplay and dialog. There are some narrative portions that are a bit muddied because Weber is trying to capture the fractured mentality of a drugged-up hippie girl (that “driving against traffic” scene mentioned above). 

Overall Star Fever is entertaining, and in its easy-going attitude toward plot it manages to capture the era very well. But it isn’t really a rock novel. It’s more of a “socialite woman in her late twenties decides to get with the Now Generation” sort of novel, and even then it’s really easy-going…like a part early on, where Susan attends a party at Star’s and apparently has an orgy with Star and Chinese cook “The Wok,” but Weber doesn’t dwell on the sleazy details and the reader is left wondering what actually happened. 

Finally, Star Fever wins the award for most abrupt ending this side of an average installment of The Sharpshooter; Jan is pregnant with Frog’s child, Susan is in Majorca with Pete Kettle and wondering if she should take this cushy new deal to write a roman a clef about The Boys…and then the novel just ends, and suddenly we have a few pages of song lyrics. 

But I guess in that way too Star Fever succeeds in capturing the vibe of its era, but apparently the novel made little impact when published, and is so obscure today that I had to hunt to find a reasonably-priced cover. And it’s got a groovy Gene Szafran cover, too, despite the naked male ass on display. But hell, a woman did write the book, so… 

Black Samurai #8: The Katana

Black Samurai #8: The Katana, by Marc Olden

June, 1975  Signet Books

To cue the old cliché, this time it’s personal for Robert Sand in this, the final volume of Black Samurai. The plot concerns Sand trying to get his hands on a priceless Japanese sword made of pure gold that is a few hundred years old and was given by Sand’s old master to the government of Japan – but someone just stole it, and they’re trying to sell it. 

So, not the most earth-shattering of plots in the series. Indeed, The Katana is by far the most grounded installment of them all, with Sand up against a humdrum group of foes. I suspect that poor Marc Olden was getting a little fatigued at this point; he wrote the entire Black Samurai series in one year, and at the same time he wrote the Narc series…so yeah, it’s not surprising some of the wind had gone out of his sails. 

Personally I think the series crested with #6: The Warlock and started its downhill slide with the previous volume. Sadly The Katana continues that slide, and we have here an altogether listless tale that has Sand getting his ass kicked by a group of villains who are completely underserving of the page count they’ve been given. Chief among this is Mrs. Thomms, a hulking German woman who acts as the sadistic henchwoman of the novel’s main villain, an effete stolen art dealer named Flowers; Olden spends way too many pages on these characters, so that once again his ostensible hero Robert Sand comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

 Another unusual thing about The Katana is that Sand works in a solo capacity for most of the tale. It opens with him homing in on a dealer who might have gotten his hands on the stolen katana, leading to the first of many fights with Mrs. Thomms and her underlings, chief among them her dimwitted brother Dieter. Man, there is a lot of bullshit about Thomms and Dieter, Olden not-so-subtly implying there is more than a sibling love between the two, but Thomms is already so grotesque that the whole taboo thing comes off as too much. 

The real issue is Olden’s tendency to POV-hop and spend pages and pages in the rambling thoughts of his one-off characters. Even the thugs hired by Thomms are given inordinate pages of rambling, like the ex-cop who just wants the money, etc. There’s also a lot of stuff about Flowers, the boss behind it all; he stays off-page most of the time, and given that he’s a British crook with sadistic tendencies he made me think of Harry Flowers from Performance. That said, we do get the humorous off-hand note that Flowers gets his kicks by dressing underaged girls up in dresses and then spanking them. 

As for Robert Sand, he’s almost somnambulant this time around. What I mean is he doesn’t have much to say, and as usual he goes without sex – Olden teases the possibility very late in the tale, when a pretty Chinese stewardess who dabbles in art smuggling on the side briefly hooks up with him…but she’s so terrified, and Sand is so beaten and worn from his latest tangle with Mrs. Thomms and crew, that nothing comes of it. Presumably that’s her on the cover; it has to be, as there’s no other female novel than Mrs. Thomms in the book. Whoever the uncredited artist was who did this and the other Black Samurai covers, he or she did a fairly good job of depicting characters and incidents within the actual books, so the artist either read the manuscripts or got very good direction from the editor. (“Show a hot Oriental broad! In boots!”) 

Action is infrequent and, like the plot itself, very grounded. Sand gets in a lot of fistfights with Mrs. Thomms and her thugs, but the veteran series reader wonders why Sand is having such a hard time with a crew of misfits like this. They nearly get the better of him again and again; as ever Olden really wants us to believe that Sand is not superhuman, that he cannot take on a few people at once, etc…but it sort of cheapens the escapist vibe of the entire series and only serves to undermine the cool character Olden created. It was like Marc Olden was always afraid to fully unleash Robert Sand. 

Eventually Sand’s boss, ex-president William Baron Clarke, comes into the tale…and there follows a weird non-sequitur bit where Sand shames Clarke for possibly having stolen art in his collection(!?), and Clarke has his people look into it. But this is what I mean when I say Marc Olden was running on empty at this point. You don’t pick up a book titled Black Samurai #8: The Katana and expect to read about art smuggling, but that’s exactly what you get. 

The main gist concerns Mrs. Thomms wanting Robert Sand’s head, as early on in the book Sand beats her brother Dieter nearly to death, so the hulking German woman has a mad-on for Sand. But as unfortunately is his wont, Olden page-fills so much that he robs us of the very climax he’s been building toward: during the climactic fight in the desolate French countryside, Mrs. Thomms throws a rock at Sand and it hits him in the head and he falls down – and she thinks he’s dead(!). Then the action moves to London, and Sand slips through Flowers’ estate, offing people one by one (including surprisingly savage stuff for the Black Samurai, like chopping off heads), but the confrontation with Mrs. Thomms never comes! The last we see of her, she’s “terrified,” but unfortunately very much alive. 

The veteran reader also knows this is common in Marc Olden’s work. As in The Warlock and the other series highlight, #3: Killer Warrior, Olden gives us a great villain, allows the villain to escape…and never brings the villain back. Now, Mrs. Thomms is not a great villain, not by a helluva long stretch, but it’s just an indication of Olden’s recurring schtick. She’s another one that gets away; Narc too was filled with main villains who escaped at novel’s end, never to return. 

I mean, imagine how cool The Katana would’ve been if it featured the return of the Warlock, or the crazy Indian guy from the third volume. Unfortunately such ideas did not occur to Olden, thus he gives us a slow-moving affair that constantly has Robert Sand getting his ass kicked by characters who would’ve been killed by Sand within a page or two in earlier, superior volumes. 

There’s no indication this was the last volume of the series – Signet did not market it as such and the novel itself ends with Sand still acting as William Baron’s Black Samurai. However, intentional or not, there is a fitting conclusion to the series overall, as Sand honors his old master by anonymously giving the katana to the Japanese delegation in London, thinking to himself that he has honored his master – a nice callback to the first volume.

So then, why did Black Samurai end? Likely low sales, the killer of most every men’s adventure series. Or the changing whims of an editorial board. Or, if Michael Newton was correct in his How To Write Action-Adventure Fiction, it was the oil crisis of the mid-‘70s that killed off so many men’s adventure series; per Newton, publishers had to cut back on publications, and men’s adventure was always deemed the lowest of the low, so it was the first to go. (I’m making that my new personal slogan!) 

What’s also curious is that two years later the film adaptation was released…and meanwhile the series ended in 1975. As mentioned in my review, the movie is copyright 1976, but even then that was still a year after Black Samurai concluded. Obviously the film made little to no impact at the time, but it is curious that director Al Adamson pushed forward with his adaptation of a series that was no longer in print. Maybe if it had been made by a half-decent director, the film version of Black Samurai could have brough the book series back to life. 

But it was not to be, and after this Marc Olden turned to The Harker File (also published by Signet), as well as standalone novels, before finding a little more fame in the ‘80s and ‘90s as the writer of Eric Van Lustbader-esque crime novels with “Oriental” overlays…which of course I intend to read someday. 

Overall I did very much enjoy Black Samurai; when I started this blog back in 2010 it was one of the first series I meant to cover, but I ended up only reading and reviewing The Warlock (Here is my original review, from August 2010), and then I focused on Narc. 

With this series Marc Olden created a memorable, powerful protagonist…a sort of more believable and more human Remo Williams, but as mentioned a problem with Black Samurai is that too many of the books don’t really feature the Black Samurai. Olden’s strange tendency to focus on one-off characters for pages and pages is one of my biggest frustrations with his writing…yet oddly enough, he’s one of the better writers in the genre, capably bringing characters to life and delivering gripping action scenes. 

Oh, and I forgot to mention: yes, The Katana also follows the Marc Olden template with an action scene in Paris. For whatever reason, Olden has had a “let’s go to Paris” scene in literally every book of his I’ve read…the dude must’ve been obsessed with the place! And it’s the one place the globe-trotting movie version of Robert Sand didn’t go in Al Adamson’s film!

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….