The Last Shaft (Shaft #7)

The Last Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman

January, 1977  Corgi Books

(Original UK hardcover edition 1975)

Well, the Internet Archive fixed itself and this final volume of the Shaft series, only ever published in the UK, is now back online. A big thanks to the person who scanned and uploaded their precious hardcover copy, as The Last Shaft is incredibly scarce and overpriced, either the orginal 1975 UK hardcover or the 1977 Corgi paperback. It’s surprising the novel still hasn’t been published in the United States. 

And also a big thanks to Steve Aldous, who notes that Shaft creator Ernest Tidyman intended this as the final novel in the series from the outset, and tried to get it published in the US. I’d love to know why he was unable to; it sounds as if Tidyman was courting upscale (read: hardcover) imprints, which is odd, given that the previous two Shaft novels – Shaft Has A Ball and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers – were paperback originals. Had Carnival Of Killers and Shaft Has A Ball sold so poorly that Bantam passed on The Last Shaft? Or was it that Bantam (or other US imprints) passed on The Last Shaft due to Tidyman’s insistence on making the title of the book literal? I guess we’ll never know. 

The helluva it is, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is the book that should’ve been passed on in the US, with The Last Shaft coming out instead. Carnival Of Killers, written by Robert Turner, was incredibly tepid, whereas The Last Shaft, written by Philip Rock (who turned in the awesome Hickey & Boggs tie-in), is for the most part fantastic – a pulpy slice of ‘70s crime, served up just the way I like it. And Philip Rock is a much more talented author than Robert Turner; there is no part where Rock seems to be winging it, banging out the words to meet his quota. The Last Shaft moves at a steady clip throughout, maintaining tension, characterization, and good dialog. In fact it comes off at times like Hickey & Boggs, which itself was a fantastic piece of ‘70s crime-pulp. 

There’s no pickup or mention of the previous book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft is even more bitter and worn-down when we meet him this time, looking out the window of his Manhattan apartment in the very early morning hours and wondering if he wants another belt of vodka. We are told Shaft is sick of New York, and wonders if it is time for him to go. Philip Rock maintains the world-weary characterization of John Shaft that Ernst Tidyman gave the character, as Robert Turner also did, but Rock manages to make Shaft likable, whereas Turner didn’t. Also we are often told Shaft’s a big bruiser, and, given the amount of action in The Last Shaft, I more so saw Jim “Slaughter” Brown as Shaft than I did Richard Roundtree. 

But then, The Last Shaft could just as easily have been the novelization of the third Slaughter movie we never got. It has more in common with the Blaxploitation action movies of the early-mid ‘70s than it does the hardboiled P.I. yarn Ernst Tidyman gave us in the original Shaft novel (which I really need to go back and read to completion someday). In this one we have Shaft beating people up, gunning them down, blasting away with a machine gun, and even blowing a place up and napalming stuff. We’re often reminded how he’s “Big, Black, and Bold,” per Billy Preston’s awesome “Slaughter” (which curiously was never released in its complete form until 2009’s Inglourious Basterds soundtrack.) 

Overvall, The Last Shaft sees John Shaft essentially becoming another Executioner or Revenger, or any other of the proliferation of mob-busters who showed up on the paperback racks in the mid-‘70s. Which again makes it curious that this novel did not come out as a paperback here in the US. Regardless, Shaft here turns into a one-man commando squad who takes on the underworld, even outfitted with a trick vehicle that’s stuffed to the gills with all manner of firearms and explosives. He even manages to get laid while kicking some Mafia ass, which is also par for the course for these ‘70s mob-busters. 

The plot is basically a Maguffin that allows Shaft to become a vigilante. He gets a visitor despite the early morning hour, none other than Captain Vic Anderozzi, a recurring series character. Anderozzi has come here with a guy named Morris Mickelberg, who per Anderozzi is the guy responsible for all the payoffs and whatnot going on in the city. Anderozzi has also brought along a massive box that contains all the dirty secrets – names, payoff dates, receipts, etc. It’s kind of a goofy setup, but Anderozzi’s reasoning is that Shaft is the only guy he can trust – the captain’s goal is to take Mickelberg and the box to the District Attorney first thing in the morning, and he just needs someplace safe to stay in the interim. 

Shaft’s reaction makes him seem a wholly unattractive character, which gave me bad flashbacks to Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft essentially tells Anderozzi he’s crazy and immediately grabs a shotgun and takes off – Shaft realizes “half the city” will be out to kill the captain, kill Mickelberg, and get that box. So Shaft leaves his “good friend” in the lurch, but to Shaft’s credit he has a change of heart while escaping; Shaft sees two men on the roof of his apartment building, one of them wielding a machine gun, and he swoops in to the rescue. As mentioned, Shaft does a fair bit of killing in The Last Shaft, blasting these two would-be hitmen apart with his shotgun. Philip Rock doesn’t dwell much on the gore, but he capably handles the action, a gift he demonstrated as well in Hickey & Boggs. 

Ernst Tidyman foreshadows his intention of making the title of The Last Shaft literal with the offing of a major character here in the opening, an occurrence which sends Shaft on his rampage – and furthers the “one-man commando Mafia buster” connotations of the novel. (I say Tidyman and not Rock, as per Steven Aldous the novel is based on a storyline Tidyman gave to Rock, with Tidyman also editing Rock’s final draft.) This death serves to be Shaft’s impetus for the rest of the novel: to get revenge on the killers and see that they all burn, handing off Mickelberg’s papers to the proper authorities. But Shaft is from this point a hunted man, with assorted crooks, mobsters, and corrupt cops out to get him. 

If there’s any failing to The Last Shaft, it’s that Rock (and Tidyman, I guess) introduces a deus ex machina conceit, a character who is randomly introduced into the narrative and will prove, again and again, to have just what Shaft needs for any given situation. This character is named Willie, a seemingly-inconsequential character who is introduced when Shaft checks himself into a hotel in the city. Willie, we’re told, has a “peculiar face,” one that is “striated,” and his hair is goofy, too. Another character mentions that Willie’s wife works at a salon and she “experiments” on Willie for practice. It’s an altogether curious intro for a character who will ultimately play a huge role in The Last Shaft, indeed serving as Shaft’s sidekick. Again, one can see this as a novelization of a movie that never was. 

Willie, as it turns out, is aware of who Shaft is (our hero giving a fake name when checking in and also covering himself with a hooded parka), and offers his help. This begins a gag that runs through the novel; Willie has decided he wants to be a private eye, and has been taking correspondence courses on it. But as the novel progresses, it turns out to be more – much more – than this. Willie not only knows all the tricks of the trade, but also has a delivery truck that is outfitted with virtually every firearm (up to and including machine guns), a mobile phone, and even C4 plastic explosive. (Not to mention napalm!) Rock clearly knows all this is a bit too much, and to his credit he has Shaft initially shocked by this, until finally accepting all of Willie’s vast bag of tricks with nonchalance. 

But seriously, if Shaft needs to shoot at someone, Willie has a machine gun for him. If Shaft needs to get some people out of a building they’re holed up in, Willie has napalm for Shaft to douse the parking garage with, flame-roasting the people within. (A sequence that has an eerie bit of prescience to it; Shaft and a random New Yorker stand on the street and watch the building burn, wondering how long the people trapped above have to survive, much as real-life New Yorkers would 26 years later as they helplessly watched the Twin Towers burn on 9/11.)  If Shaft needs to do some detective work and get a phone number, Willie knows just the things to say to the operator on his mobile phone. And yet at the same time we are to understand that Willie is naïve, an amateur who looks up to Shaft; there’s a big of a Hickey & Boggs vibe here, with the bickering and bantering black-white duo, but Willie is not Shaft’s equal on the action front, and acts more as the straight man. 

Willie also acts as a chaffeur, driving Shaft around town in his delivery truck, which is disguised as a bakery truck. And if that disguise is uncovered, not to worry; Willie has also taken a course on how to quickly paint the truck so that it looks like something else, like for example a yogurt delivery truck. Meanwhile Shaft sits in the back of the truck, formulating his plan of action; the second half of the novel is comprised of a series of assaults Shaft stages on the New York underworld, again operating in the same capacity as a Mack Bolan or a Ben Martin – like Bolan, he even takes to calling his targets moments before hitting them. 

Shaft also finds the time to pick up Sandra Shane, Morris Mickelberg’s hotstuff ex-wife, a former topless dancer Mickelberg picked up years ago. Now she’s determined to get the money her ex never gave her, becoming sexually excited over Shaft’s promises to get it for her. Rock doesn’t do as much to bring her to life, but at least Sandra Shane provides the series with some genre-mandatory spice, something that was completely absent in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. That said, the Shaft-Sandra conjugation is not much dwelt upon, though we learn that Shaft, uh, gets hs rocks off a few times. Our author has more fun with another secondary character, Rudolph Gromyck, a dirty New York cop who tries to outwit the Mafia and his fellow cops and find Shaft – so he can get Mickelberg’s papers and become rich off them. 

There are a lot of one-off mobsters yammering at each other on the phone before getting blown away by Shaft; our hero kills a fair number of people in the novel, again like Bolan or any other ‘70s men’s adventure protagonist. Rock also provides a little comedy with Willie fretting over Shaft using all those weapons in his truck – goofy, particularly when you consider that Willie himself is the one who stocked his truck with all of the weapons. But given that the novel moves so quickly, the reader doesn’t have much time to ponder over all of the plotholes. 

Unfortunately, the reader does have time to ponder over the ending of the novel, which is guaranteed to upset everyone. SPOILER ALERT, but The Last Shaft, as mentioned, lives up to its title. In a humorously tacked-on ending, we read as Shaft finally returns to his apartment building after successfully wiping out all the criminals who have been hounding him the entire novel. And on the way into the building the poor guy is mugged by a random thug and shot dead. This brief sequence, likely written by Ernest Tidyman himself, does not flat-out state “Shaft died,” but otherwise it’s clear as day – the mugger shoots, and we’re told the metal of the gun “became a blossom of flame…but only for the shortest moment known to man, that moment before dying.” Granted, the character dying could be the mugger; Shaft has already proven himself to be quite a resourceful individual, and might have pulled out a holdout gun and shot the mugger before the mugger could shoot him. I mean, Tidyman (or Rock) doesn’t specify who is dying in that last sentence, so it might not even be Shaft. And yet, I don’t think so; Tidyman’s intended irony here is that Shaft has spent the entirety of The Last Shaft cleaning up the city – of the bigwig mobsters and other high-level crooks – and then he is shot down by a random mugger. 

As mentioned above, perhaps it’s this lame ending that kept The Last Shaft from being published in the US. If so, it’s strange…I mean the publisher could’ve easily removed it before publication. As I say, this brief finale is tacked on, and comes off as the literary equivalent of the similarly tacked-on surprise ending of contemporary action flick Sudden Death: a downbeat, nihilistic cap-off that seems thrust on the reader more so for shock value than for any dramatic intent. 

Overall, I did enjoy The Last Shaft, and it’s too bad Tidyman didn’t get it published in the US…and change the finale along the way, opening the series up to be the continuing adventures of Shaft and Willie. But likely Tidyman considered himself above such pulpy things, and preferred offing the character that had made him famous. 

I’m reading the Shaft books way out of order; next I will likely read Shaft Has A Ball, but one of these days I will read Tidyman’s original Shaft novel.

The Executioner #20: New Orleans Knockout

The Executioner #20: New Orleans Knockout, by Don Pendleton

November, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Don Pendleton has his template for The Executioner now and he’s sticking to it: New Orleans Knockout covers all the staples, from Mack “The Executioner” Bolan announcing his presence to the local mob via an introductory ambush, to lots of surveillance and head-games with said mob, to the local cops who secretly root for Bolan…even the now-standard phonecalls between Bolan and undercover Federal cop Leo Turrin, who provides Bolan with insider Mafia info. We even get the new-to-the-template staple of Bolan about to get laid at story’s end. But this time Bolan’s got a motor vehicle that fires rockets, man! 

Really, I enjoyed New Orleans Knockout a lot, even though Pendleton still pulls the same copout as in previous books – another recurring staple, now that I think of it – where we are constantly teased with this big, climactic action scene that never happens. To wit, this is the umpteenth book in a row where Bolan finds out a ton of Mafia hardmen are converging on the titular city he happens to be in…but the huge battle never happens. I guess this is Pendleton’s way of showing us how Bolan gets by with his wits rather than his firepower, but this too is getting to be a bit much; at this point in The Executioner, one gets the impression that taking down the mob is as simple as making a few threatening phone calls and impersonating an enforcer. And having a motor home that fires rockets. 

As ever we open with a preemptory hit as Bolan makes his presence known in New Orleans; a cool opening in which Bolan, clad in black and his skin painted black, infiltrates the grounds of fashion-forward capo Carlotti. Again Bolan is presented as almost superhuman; the sequence is told from Carlotti’s point of view, and Bolan just appears in the man’s home, holding a gun to his head, despite there being armed guards everywhere. This leads to a crazed part that prefigures the ‘90s flick Speed where Carlotti drives into the compound of another New Orleans capo, but Carlotti can’t take his foot off the accelerator, or the bomb Bolan has wired there will go off. Pendleton well relays, mostly via dialog, how painful this is for Carlotti, who has not been able to move his leg for so long that it’s gone numb; I started massaging my own leg muscles in sympathy. 

We get the usual stuff with a local cop who soon learns the Executioner is afoot in his city, and receives random phone calls from the man himself, secretly offering this most wanted “criminal” assistance. In other words, the usual thing; I almost wonder if we’ll ever have a future installment with a Sheriff Buford T. Justice-type who is determined to bring Bolan down no matter what. Otherwise what’s interesting this time is the cop is named Jack Petro, and so of course I just assumed he was related to Kathy Petro. 

The biggest news in New Orleans Knockout is that Bolan has now acquired a massive GM motor home that he’s spent over $300k in mob money on, $100k of which was dedicated to outfitting the “war wagon” in state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, as well as the aforementioned rocket-firing system, which comes out of the rooftop with the press of a button. Curiously, we learn the motor home is not armored, and the windows aren’t bulletproof. Also, I didn’t get a good mental image of how the vehicle operates, particularly some of the weapons stuff. For example, we’re told Bolan doesn’t even use his hand to fire the rockets, and does it all with his leg, moving the sighting system and whatnot and then “slamming” his own leg with his fist to fire the rocket. Honestly this gave the entire scene some unintentional humor, as I just pictured his madman sitting in his huge motor home, watching a viewcreen and then randomly hitting his own leg. 

Another notable development in New Orleans Knockout is the return of future Able Team members Pol Balancales and Gadgets Schwartz. However they really aren’t in the book that much, and are just an extra plot Maguffin; in reality, Bolan spends more time with Pol’s sexy “kid” sister, Toni Balancales, in her early 20s and spectacularly built, though Pendleton as ever doesn’t dwell much on naughty stuff. It is nice though that he’s finally decided to cater to genre norms and give us a willing babe each volume. Toni too falls into the template, as she has the plucky, “I’m tough but I’m still a woman” demeanor as most other Pendleton gals. 

Speaking of unintentional humor, there’s a lot of it with Toni and Bolan. As we all know, Mack Bolan’s trademark phrase is “Stay hard,” and, well…Bolan keeps telling Toni to “stay hard,” leading to Toni to respond, “I’ve got to get hard…you stay hard!” It’s all quite goofy and funny, and it’s clear Pendleton doesn’t realize this (but then, maybe he did). But also, what with this plucky girl saying she needs to “get hard,” it all has a bit of a postmodern ring in our “gender is fluid” modern day. 

I got the impression Pendleton had recently read – or watched – The Anderson Tapes, as quite a bit of New Orleans Knockout concerns bugging and surveilling mobsters, with Bolan often sitting in the “command chair” of his motor home and listening to people talk far away, Pendleton delivering it all like a transcript much as Lawrence Sanders did in his best-seller. But Pendleton has certainly done his homework on surveillance. Toni informs Bolan that Pol and Gadgets started up “Able Group,” a private eye outfit that specializes in bugging places, typically working for companies that want to surveil other companies, and we get a lot of detail on the hardware they use. Recently the two were approached by a “Mr. Kirk,” who claimed to be a fed and tasked them with bugging one of the New Orleans Mafia bigwigs. Now Pol and Gadgets are missing, and Toni is close to panic as it’s been a week. Bolan quickly deduces that “Mr. Kirk” was none other than mobster Carlotti, looking to bug a rival don. 

Not to worry, though, as taking down the Mafia is essentially a cakewalk. It’s such a breeze for Bolan that there is no moment where he seems out of sorts or caught unawares. He slips in and out of Mafia hardsites pretending to be a troubleshooter from the organization, once again falling on that “Ace of Spades” gambit where he flips a poker card over as a sign of who he “really” is, and of course the mobsters blab freely, not knowing it’s the Executioner himself standing before them. Bolan at this point is toying with them; his goal seems to be to get all the families to kill each other, and to do so he plays mental tricks – like using a sniper rifle to blow apart a golf ball just as a mob chieftan is about to swing at it, and then calling him later to taunt him. 

Gil Cohen’s typically-great cover is both accurate and misleading. Accurate because the climax does take place during Mardis Gras, but misleading because neither Bolan’s prey nor the girl he’s holding at gunpoint are wearing costumes. Bolan however is wearing his blacksuit, so Cohen got that part correct. Getting to the climax, though, there really isn’t much in the way of action. Really, at this point Bolan takes down the mob mostly via phone calls and listening in on conversations. We’re often told of enemy forces encamped around the area, but Bolan slips in and out of their base camps with no problem; Pendleton is so focused on suspense over action that he even casually informs us that Bolan hits a couple places during his travels around the area, leaving these action scenes entirely off-page. 

Instead, Pendleton saves the fireworks for the finale, as Bolan takes his motor home onto the insanely-crowded streets of New Orleans just as Mardis Gras begins. This part alone is the most unbelievable element in the entirety of New Orleans Knockout, but Pendleton spends enough time on it that he makes it seem believable: Bolan, his motor home disguised as a mobile TV news station, creeping along the streets while engulfed by a human tide of partiers. Cohen’s cover art illustrates a scene that occurs here, as Bolan goes out into the crowd to rescue Toni, who has briefly been taken captive – even this happens and is resolved so quickly that, again, it all seems to be so easy for our hero. I mean Bolan just blows the mobster’s brains out, even though the guy’s holding a gun to Toni’s head and his twitching nerves might cause his finger to jerk on the trigger. 

Anton Chekhov would have been well pleased, as Pendleton follows the “gun on the mantleplace” dictum of Chekhov, or whatever it Chekhov called it; after teasing us about the rockets on the motor home throughout the narrative, Pendleton does indeed have Bolan employ them in the novel’s climax. This is on an assault of a fortified mob hardsite, Bolan blasting the shit out of the place with three rockets and then dispensing mercy shots to the flaming, screaming victims of his assault. For once Bolan comes close to the murderous, cipher-like vibe of imitators Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan, in an ending scene that has him gunning down a defenseless old man…and then briefly feeling bad about it, but brushing it off because the old man was a Mafia boss, so he deserved it. 

Pol and Gadgets stay off-page, and instead it’s up to Toni Balancales to see Bolan off…another humorous bit where she calls Bolan on his motor home’s mobile phone and demands that Bolan pick her up so she can give him some good lovin’ before he leaves town. And Bolan keeps trying to talk her out of it! Again though, Pendleton has finally decided to acquiesce to the genre and has Bolan ultimately decide to pick Toni up so he can bang her brains out…off-page, of course, as the novel ends here. 

All told, I enjoyed New Orleans Knockout quite a bit, but at this point The Executioner is almost becoming cartoonish with its breezy disregard for reality. Not that I have a problem with that, it’s just that Pendleton’s overly-serious narratorial voice clearly indicates that he himself doesn’t see it all as cartoonish, which is kind of crazy. I mean, at least the uncredited ghostwriters of The Sharpshooter and The Marksman knew their protagonists were psychopaths.

Women Of The Green Berets

 
Women Of The Green Berets, by Rand Michaels

No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

I have to admit, I never would have thought of combining Robin Moore’s The Green Berets with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley Of The Dolls, but obscure author Rand Michaels thought of that very thing. Or perhaps it was publisher Lancer Books who came up with the genre mash-up and slapped a blurb on the back cover of Women Of The Green Berets, who knows. The important thing is that this paperback original of 223 pages does a fairly good job of juggling hellish ‘Nam battle sequences with soapy melodrama – the only problem is, there’s zero in the way of the exploitative stuff you might expect, with the novel ultimately coming off as rather anemic on the trash front. 

The novel also doesn’t really live up to its title, as it is more so concerned with the Green Berets themselves, instead of their women. Also, I was surprised that the entire novel is set in Vietnam; I assumed there would be stateside material with those lonely and sex-starved Green Beret women playing the field. Rather, there’s only one wife in the book, her name Evelyn, and she’s come to Saigon to see her husband, 27 year-old Captain Mike Colby. Otherwise we have a native woman who is involved with Ken Hubbard, another guy on Captain Mike’s force, and also a hotstuff doctor named Nina Field, who is involved with yet another of Captain Mike’s men, Dave Lawlor. And yes, “Captain Mike;” author Rand Michaels for the most part refers to all characters by their first names. 

It's Eveyln who serves as the main female protagonist, and Michaels takes her through hell over the course of the book. The plotting has you expecting that soap opera stuff, and what’s funny is the author seems to be catering to it…only to go in an entirely different direction. Long story short, Evelyn comes to Saigon to see Mike, but due to the war and all they’re unable to meet. Evelyn nearly gets picked up by another white guy here in Saigon on business, but he ultimately turns her down because as it turns out he is married, too, and wants to be faithful. So Evelyn then is determined to have some extramarital sex. She goes into a bar to get picked up, only to get drugged by yet another American here on business, one who thinks he’s accidentally killed Evelyn with an overdose, and thus orchestrates leaving her body to be found. As I say, the plotting is all over the place in this one. 

It only gets more frenzied, as it turns out Evelyn did not die of an overdose, just passed out. A kindly native kid takes her back to his home so she can change into clean clothes (the “faked death” orchestration entailed putting Evelyn’s “corpse” in a crashed car)…and then the kid’s dad comes downstairs, pulls Evelyn back up to his room, and rapes her all night! Actually, this does have a bit of a dark Jacqueline Susann vibe to it. Shockingly, this is I think the only sex scene in the entire novel, though its of course up to debate whether a rape scene even counts as a sex scene. Personally I’d say it doesn’t, but I’m only noting here because this is it so far as the sleazy stuff goes…and all of it occurs entirely off-page! 

So yes, folks, this is one of those curiously “dirty” books that isn’t dirty at all. Rather, it is as mentioned the war stuff that takes more of a focus in the narrative. Captain Mike can’t meet with Evelyn when she comes to Saigon because he’s been tasked with starting up a new base out in the ‘Nam hinterlands, and must put together an A Team to helm the base. So he spends the majority of the novel in the field fighting Charlie. Rand Michaels certainly has an understanding of the nightmarish life of an American soldier in Vietnam, with Mike and team alternately bored out of their wits or vastly outnumbered by an entrenched enemy. Michaels also has no qualms with killing off major characters in these battle sequences. 

Michaels also has no qualms with dropping potentially-interesting subplots. Nina Field, the hotstuff doctor who works the base and handles the injured GIs, has an early subplot that I thought was the most interesting thing in Women Of The Green Berets. She’s kidnapped early on, by the thugs who work for a native who is clearly wealthy, and taken to a place where a VC bigwig demands that Nina do plastic surgery to his injured face. Nina does so – and Rand Michaels displays some plastic surgery knowledge here, again giving the book the vibe of a Susann et al potboiler – but she also permanently disfigures the guy’s face with a “V” and a “C” on each cheek, so that he will be unable to hide his true nature. Nina manages to escape, and tells the military authorities…but nothing else is done with this. I envisioned a plotline of a guy with “VC” on his face coming after Nina for revenge, but it never happened. 

Instead, there is a lot of stuff about Mike and his crew out in the Vietnam jungle trying to get a base started while fending off frequent VC attacks. There is a definite air of defeatism to the battles, so this certainly isn’t a gung-ho combat novel. And yet, there’s no real violence, either. Mike and crew will “shoot down” VC and occasionally we’ll read of someone “blown to bits” by mortar or bomb traps. So this isn’t The Black Eagles, is what I’m saying, and is more of a prefigure of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, with the author managing to convey the nightmarishly surreal atmosphere of combat in ‘Nam. 

In this regard there’s a lot of material about Captain Mike and team trying to fortify the base while winning the hearts and minds of the natives. “Pacification” is the concept Mike keeps drilling into his team. This is an especially hard lesson for Dave Lawlor, sort of the “Animal Mother” of the group, for those of who have read Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers…or seen the film version, Full Metal Jacket (which pales in comparison to the source material). Even here, though, Rand drops potentially-cool subplots. There’s a part early on where Mike and team get some R&R in Saigon, and Lawlor goes out with a sexy native babe he’s fairly certain is a VC honey trap. He goes along with her, pretending ignorance, laughing to himself how she’s so clearly leading him into a trap…and ready to kill her VC pals with his bare hands. 

And the reader keeps waiting to get back to this section – in true potboiler style, Rand Michaels tells Women Of The Green Berets in a sort of snapshot style, jumping from character to character – and the reader is disappointed. Ultimately we do not see any of it happen; when finally Lawlor returns to the narrative, it’s from the perspective of Nina Field, and she has to mend the beaten-up Lawlor who is carried into her operating room. Only through dialog does a bloody but grinning Lawlor inform us that he did indeed kill those VC scum with his bare hands. Strange decisions like this ultimately sink Women Of The Green Berets; it’s like the author cannot fully commit to either a soapy melodrama or a violent war yarn. 

On that note, Mike and wife Evelyn handle the brunt of the melodrama stuff. They spend the majority of the novel separated, until briefly reconnecting during another of Mike’s infrequent R&Rs, late in the book – and here again all the lovin’ is off-page. The soapy stuff is all from Evelyn’s perspective, as after the rape she’s decided she will divorce Mike, due to shame or somesuch, but after a week together with Mike she apparently changes her mind. But Rand throws another plot curveball and things pan out much differently than Evelyn suspected – and the author doesn’t even bother to give us a resolution to this subplot, as the last we see of Evelyn she’s flying back home to America. 

Meanwhile Women Of The Green Berets ends on a big battle scene – we’ve already had a long sequence detailing a Khe Sahn-like siege the base endured – with the Green Berets withstanding a big VC attack. We get more “Animal Mother” stuff with Dave Lawlor cruelly toying with his prey before killing them, and also more on the hell of war with VC “kids” being gunned down in the crossfire, even after the American soldiers have let them go. And here Women Of The Green Berets comes to a close, the titular “women” long forgotten about and ultimately inconsequential to the narrative. All of which leads me to conclude that it was in fact Lancer Books that slapped this “The Green Berets meets Valley Of The Dolls” tag on the back cover, because as it turns out that is not the novel Rand Michaels actually delivers.

Black Dynamite (The Comic Book Series)

Black Dynamite, by Brian Ash, Jun Lofamia, Ron Wimberly, and Marcello Ferreira

February, 2015  IDW Publishing

Somehow I was completely unaware that there was a Black Dynamite comic book tie-in published several years ago, shortly after the release of the movie. I knew there’d been an animated series on Adult Swim, but I never watched it, and likely never will, as judging from the clips I’ve seen it’s nothing at all like the movie. And really, as the years have gone by, Black Dynamite has become one of my all-time favorite movies, if not my favorite ever. It’s a perfect spoof of a poorly-produced, low-budget “Blaxploitation” film of the early ‘70s, while being a very funny movie in its own right. Somehow the producers were able to walk that line, and they did so perfectly, from the “goofs” expected of the former (boom mics showing up in shots, actors blowing lines), to the straight comedy of the latter (the part where Black Dynamite and his pals have a brainstorming session in the diner in particular). 

Sure, Black Dynamite isn’t perfect; I’ve never been fond of the finale, which I think goes too far outside the self-imposed constraints of the film. Black Dynamite fighting Richard Nixon in the White House might sound funny, but it’s not something you’d see in a legitimate Blaxploitation film. Indeed, I’m always ticked that the main plot – a black politician working with a greasy mobster to sell drugs in “the community” – is hastily dispatched in the final quarter, as if the producers decided they needed a bigger finale. The deleted scenes on the Blu Ray even indicate that this storyline was indeed the finale, up to and including a bevy of Dolemite-esque hookers-slash-kung-fu fighters taking on the mob; this scene lasts a mere few seconds in the final film, the producers rushing through it to get to “Kung-Fu Island” and Richard Nixon. 

Then again, the imperfection kind of adds to Black Dynamite’s charm. The biggest mystery is why it wasn’t a hit, and why it isn’t better-known today. Director Scott Sanders wonders the same thing in the Introduction he provides for this trade paperback, which collects five comic books that were published by two different imprints from 2011 to 2014. This intro, which is the highlight of the book, is very insightful, as Sanders explains the origins of Black Dynamite (essentially, it was an idea of star Michael Jai White’s), as well as the writing of the script (White with the concept, collaborating with Sanders and fellow star Byron “Bullhorn” Minns, who per the intro is the one who ensured they got all the Blaxploitation tributes/parodies correct). 

Sanders tells us how an early cut of the film got a lot of industry attention, and how the final film was expected to do so well. And then, “crickets” upon the premiere…and Black Dynamite only even played in a few theaters. Sanders is clearly at a loss to understand what happened, and conveys this in his intro. He does try to find a silver lining; he tells us of a special showing in a Hollywood theater, sometime after the film’s general release, where he and Michael Jai White were the featured guests, and the two were surprised to see that most of the audience came dressed up as characters from the film. I wonder if this special showing Scott Sanders is referring to is the one at the Red Vic, for which an artist named Dave Hunter created a blacklight poster – a poster which I have and showed here on the blog fourteen years ago. (And for the past fourteen years, that blacklight poster, framed and ready to be hung, has been in the exact same spot on my study room floor, leaning against the wall and waiting to be hung up!) 

Scott Sanders also finds silver lining in how Black Dynamite has become both a cartoon and a comic book character, even speculating that he maybe should’ve been a comic character all along. Unfortunately, it appears that even Black Dynamite the comic bombed, as the “series” only lasted 4 issues, with a one-shot coming out before it, and this trade paperback is out of print and overpriced on the used books marketplace. Again it is curious that Black Dynamite didn’t resonate more. I concur with Sanders that it seemed like a pre-packaged success, even down to Adrian Younge’s pitch-perfect soundtrack. One can easily get wrapped up in the world of Black Dynamite, and the producers even gave us fun stuff that should have further guaranteed social media interest, like those PSA spots. These comics should have just added to that. Maybe it’s just a case that Black Dynamite came out at the wrong time. 

I’ll say right now though that the comic does not, and could not, compare to the film. Black Dynamite works mainly due to Michael Jai White’s performance, and the conceit that White is “really” a former pro footballer named Farrante Jones who has become an actor. (Furthering this conceit is the idea, which I read somewhere, that “Farrante’s” football career was cut short due to a neck injury, hence why Black Dynamite has such stiff upper-body movement – again, it is things like this, things you wouldn’t even notice until your fourth or fifth viewing, that make the movie so special.) The writer of the comics, Brian Ash (who apparently also wrote and produced the animated series), clearly has his work cut out for him, trying to mimic this “serious but not serious” vibe. His failure is that he even tries. That said, I did appreciate how Ash tried to stay true to the “Farrante Jones” conceit, with fake ads throughout the book of Michael Jai White as Farrante Jones, sporting some product. 

To me, the biggest failing of Black Dynamite the comic is that Brian Ash doesn’t play it straight. He should’ve just written a straight Blaxploitation caper featuring a studly and virile black protagonist, and left the funny stuff to the dialog or to the characters. Instead, Ash occasionally goes for humorous plots, or will have characters making fun of plot developments, which is never a good idea. Again, it works fine in the movie – one can clearly see Michael Jai White as “Farrante Jones playing Black Dynamite” struggling with the dumb-ass script and terrible lines he’s been given, not to mention the bad actors he has to work with – but in a comic it doesn’t work very well at all. 

Curiously, Ash also has a strange tendency to take Black Dynamite out of his element. Surprisingly, only one of the five comics here features Black Dynamite in his typical urban environment. The first three issues of the series, in fact, don’t even seem to take place in the ‘70s, and have him traveling around the world and fighting the Illuminati; the third issue in particular is head-scratcher, featuring Black Dynamite up against genetically-bred giant insects and lots of gore. Humorously, it’s as if Ash realizes he’s lost the plot, as despite ending on a cliffhanger, the events of issue three are ignored in issue four (which was the final issue). And of all the stories here, #4 has the most in common with the movie. Indeed, the fourth issue even sort of rips off the movie; whereas Black Dynamite concerned an evil white plot to contaminate malt liquor, Black Dynamite #4 concerns an evil white plot to booby-trap tennis shoes. 

But of all the comics in the collection, it is the first one, the one-shot Black Dynamite: Slave Island, that is the best; it was originally published in 2011 by Ape Entertainment. And no wonder this story is the best in the collection, as per the credits the plot is courtesy none other than Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders! So then, Slave Island may give an indication of what Black Dynamite II might have been like. If so, then perhaps Brian Ash isn’t the one to blame for consistently taking Black Dynamite out of his element in the ensuing comics, for White and Sanders set the trend here. Slave Island is essentially a take on the “slavesploitation” films of the ‘70s (Arthur “Roots” Haley himself even has a cameo in the comic), with Black Dynamite pointedly referred to as a “Mandingo” at one point. 

The concept is interesting, but perhaps a little too one-note for a film, so maybe it isn’t fair to judge Slave Island as a movie that never was. It concerns Black Dynamite becoming aware of an island off the coast where black people are still held as slaves. He gears up and heads there, only to end up being washed up on the coast sans all of his equipment. From here it’s Black Dynamite in a loin cloth – again, the funky ‘70s trappings are for the most part gone in the comics – as he attempts to lead a rebellion among the cowed slaves. And it turns out “Slave Island” is actually a tourist spot, with wealthy white vacationers paying to come here and see how “things are supposed to be.” 

None of the slave characters get much of a chance to breathe, what with Slave Island only being around 48 pages. The slave who gets the most attention is a sexy, scantily-clad Pam Grier-type who harbors rebellious tendencies, but she isn’t in the story nearly as much as she should be. Black Dynamite, who is quickly caught and thrown in with the slaves, will spend the rest of the story taunting the white owners of Slave Island that a revolution is brewing – that is, when he isn’t being bid off to a wealthy white matron who engages the “Mandingo” in several nights of off-page lovin.’ Oh and I should mention here, despite looking exactly like a 1970s comic, Slave Island features rampant cursing and even a little nudity, just like the movie Black Dynamite. It also features the wonderfully economical plotting of a ‘70s comic; unlike modern-day comics, where an entire issue or more can be devoted to plot setup, Slave Island tells the beginning, middle, and end at a rapid clip. 

There’s a lot of stuff here that one could imagine making its way into the movie sequel that never was, like Black Dynamite punching a shark after being capsized in the ocean. Also his leading the slaves in revolt is pretty cool, but again a little rushed, as is typical for a comic. But Slave Island is mostly interesting in how creators White and Sanders apparently wanted to broaden the character of Black Dynamite, taking him out of the inner-city; unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t give much background info on Slave Island in his intro. It’s interesting to wonder if he and White did indeed conceive of it as a potential storyline for Black Dynamite II. 

Another big thing going for Slave Island is the artwork, courtesy Jun Lofamia. Per a brief, uncredited postscript at the end of the trade paperack, it’s noted that the goal for Slave Island was for it to look exactly like a comic from the ‘70s, and it was a struggle to find a modern artist who did not have a modern comics style. But, as it turned out, Lofamia was a comic artist in the ‘70s, thus his style here is identical to something you might’ve seen in a Marvel comic of the ‘70s. It’s great, and one can tell that the book was a labor of love on this front, down to the muted color palette and the faux-yellowing of the pages. Slave Island is also good because Brian Ash refrains from too much spoofery, other than occasional “humorous” stuff, which usually involves dialog; one of his recurring shticks is having characters misunderstand each other. 

Unfortunately, Black Dynamite the series is a whole ‘nother thing. Published by IDW, the series only ran from 2013 to 2014. Given that Brian Ash was involved with the animated series, I have to wonder if his Black Dynamite comic series is a take on that; even the artwork of the first three issues is similar to the cartoon, courtesy Ron Wimberly in issue #1 and Marcello Ferreira in issues #2 and 3. Their artwork has that same “street” look as the cartoon, and I don’t like it at all. Apparently the concern over finding an artist who was not influenced by modern comic art was not a concern for the series, as it had been for the Slave Island one-shot. And not only is the artwork “modern” in these first three issues, so too is the storyline, which bears no similarity to Black Dynamite the movie. 

Actually, what the storyline of Black Dynamite #1-3 most reminded me of was the COMCON mini-series Gerald Montgomery wrote in 2000 for The Executioner. As with that Mack Bolan storyline, here Black Dynamite discovers a secret organization of evil white people that is heavily equipped and intent on taking over the world. The brevity of Slave Island is gone, with Black Dynamite #1 essentially nothing more than setup for the ensuing two issues – and it’s clear that more than two issues were intended for this storyline, as the “Illuminati” plot abruptly (and thankfully) comes to a halt after issue #3. 

Things get off to a bad start with an opening in which Black Dynamite is kicked out of “the community,” the very same community he saved from drugs in the movie. One thing going in this first issue’s favor is that the time is clearly stated (1976), and also the events of both the movie and Slave Island are mentioned. But otherwise there is no feeling of continuity. Black Dynamite is asked to leave by the locals because his ass-kicking has caused unintentional consequences for the people of the community, and they just want him gone. So, like Cain in Kung-Fu, Black Dynamite sets off to walk the Earth. 

One suspects he walks a helluva long time, because almost all the 1970s trappings of Black Dynamite are gone from here on out. The funky fly threads are gone, and Black Dynamite’s afro is even shorter. The villains all seem to have stepped out of the ‘90s; their leader is a bald white guy in a black three-piece suit, as if Lex Luthor has come over from DC Comics. (Actually the villain, dubbed “The Man,” looks a lot like famed comics writer Grant Morrison.) If Slave Island was a broadening of the Black Dynamite canvas, then the storyline in Black Dynamite #1-3 is a shattering of it. Tellingly, neither Michael Jai White nor Scott Sanders are credited for the plot of this storyline; it’s all the work of Brian Ash. 

Wandering the world, Black Dynamite is confronted by a squad of black-armored goons who take him off to a secret, high-tech facility. That’s the entirety of issue #1; so much for the economical storytelling of Slave Island. In issue #2, Black Dynamite meets “The Man,” the aforementioned Lex Luthor/Grant Morrison lookalike, who gabs that this high-tech army is part of “The Illuminati” that secretly runs the world, and what’s more they want Black Dynamite to join. But Black Dynamite picks up a bazooka that is conveniently lying there and blows the place up. After this he hooks up with a multi-ethnic resistance group – none of whom are named, but one of them is a sexy Asian gal – and he becomes a fighter against the Illuminati. 

With the Illuminati stuff and the ragtag band of guerrilla fighters, the parallells to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles are very evident. In fact, what with the Morrison lookalike as the villain, I wondered if Black Dynamite #1-3 was intended as a spoof. But it doesn’t work, and what’s more it’s all rushed (the Asian gal isn’t even given a name, I believe), and The Man is not an interesting villain. And the plots are wholly unlike what one might expect from a Black Dynamite storyline.  And Ferreira’s art more so conveys the ‘90s. Again, like The Invisibles. 

The third issue is where it gets real puzzling, with Black Dynamite going to the Himalays and encountering a temple of monks who have these genetic insectoid monsters at their disposal; for some reason, Ash and Ferreira decide to add a bunch of gore to the world of Black Dynamite (and yes, I realize the film had a few gore affects as well), with the insectoids tearing people up and exploding. The finale is especially gory, with The Man having his head surgically implanted onto the neck of a black man (and then ordering the black man’s head gorily sawn off); certainly a tribute to the Blaxploitation movie The Thing With Two Heads. 

Fortunately (and humorously), Black Dynamite #4 ignores all that bullshit and gets back to what readers want: a story that feels like Black Dynamite. Also fortunately, Slave Island artist Jun Lofamia is back, again turning in artwork that seems to have come right out of a 1970s comic, once more even replicating the muted colors and the yellowed pages. Whereas issues #1-3 took place (presumably) in 1976, the fourth issue is stated as being in 1972. No mention is made of the previous three issues, as if Brian Ash himself wants to forget about them. 

Shockingly, this is the only story in the collection that has an inner-city setting. Black Dynamite is in the audience as a famous, Dr. J-type basketball player does some stunts on the court – and then the b-baller somehow explodes. While the news lies about what happened, Dynamite – after “balling” the guy’s sexy widow (lame pun alert) – investigates and learns that it’s all an Anaconda Malt Liquor-style plot. Evil Whitey is tricking out a new shipment of sneakers in the latest plot to take down the black man, and Black Dynamite kicks some ass. This one is a self-contained storyline, not as good as Slave Island, but certainly better than the Illuminati storyline. The only problem is that Brian Ash treats too much of issue #4 as a comedy. 

And thus Black Dynamite the comic comes to an ignoble end. This trade paperback collection is only notable for the insightful intro by Scott Sanders, and the tantalizing possibility that Slave Island might have been the plot for Black Dynamite II. And now that I’ve written so much, here are some random pics of the pages – take note particularly of Jun Lofamia’s pitch-perfect 1970s comic artwork recreation. 

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (Shaft #6)

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, by Ernest Tidyman

September, 1974  Bantam Books

To this day I still have not read Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft, and I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve seen the more-famous film adaptation. Of course, I have Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack on vinyl, as to me Shaft has always been more of a music thing than a movie or novel thing. (Not sure if that sentence even made sense.) Many years ago there was a cool overview of the Shaft novels on Teleport City, and of them all it was this installment, the paperback original Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, that caught my attention. Only now, like 20 years after reading that Teleport City article, have I got around to reading the book. 

First of all, a big thanks to Steve Aldous’ World Of Shaft site, which provides a lot of great background info. Basically, Ernest Tidyman wrote a handful of Shaft novels in the early ‘70s, then farmed the series out to ghostwriters for a few paperback originals.  Carnival Of Killers, then, was actually written by pulp veteran Robert Turner, working off an unproduced non-Shaft script Tidyman had written years before about a private eye in Jamaica. But, according to Steve Aldous, Turner not only took a long time to turn in his manuscript, but Tidyman also deemed it subpar when Turner completed it, and Tidyman ended up rewriting the majority of it. 

Now, finally having made my way through this deceptively slim, 136-page book, I can only say that Robert Turner’s manuscript must have been really bad. Indeed, it gave me flashbacks to a novel Turner published the following year: Scorpio. Like that book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers was a chore to read, with Turner taking what should have been a sure shot of a concept and turning it into a middling, overly-digressive banality in which super-cool John Shaft is reduced to a bumbling fool, always ten steps behind his opponents. Indeed, Shaft – and the reader – spends the entire narrative just trying to figure out what’s going on. My assumption is Robert Turner was a Mystery writer at heart, as that is all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers really is: a tepid mystery, with hardly anything in the sex or violence categories. It’s so lame that Shaft even bungles the chance for a three-way with a pair of sexy white chicks, instead getting drunk and passing out. 

In this one, John Shaft is taken out of his element; when we meet him he’s lazing on the beach in Jamaica, taking a rare vacation. Not much effort is placed on establishing the character or referring to previous adventures, so I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything by reading this sixth volume before the others. Turner’s style is clearly apparent – but then, so is Tidyman’s. Above I mentioned I’ve never read Shaft, but I did start to read it once upon a time, and was surprised at the hardboiled narrative tone Tidyman employed. The fact that Shaft was black only came up in the occasional descriptions of him, but otherwise there was nothing that really differentiated Shaft from umpteen other tough guys of the time. But I guess the same could be said of the film, as Shaft the movie isn’t really “Blaxploitation” per se; it’s just like any other early ‘70s crime movie, only with a black protagonist. But the same could be said about every Blaxploitation movie; they aren’t so much “exploitation” as they are urban action movies with black characters. 

The same is doubly true of Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Shaft could be replaced with pretty much any other standard tough-guy P.I. in the book. Even the fact that he’s black doesn’t make much difference, which is odd, given that Jamaica is a country with a black population. Periodically Shaft will ruminate on the plight of the black man, but otherwise there is no focus on any sort of black unity or anything. In fact, Shaft constantly butts heads with the natives, and soon learns to hate Jamaica. 

Turner throws us into the action (or what passes for it) posthaste; Shaft’s beach picnic is ruined when a pretty young girl (“taffy-skinned, long-waisted, high-hipped, and very roundly bottomed with conical leaping breasts”) is accosted nearby by a pair of goons. Shaft only intervenes when the goons kick sand in his face, chasing after the girl, and knock over Shaft’s picnic setup. Our hero beats up the guys, but the girl runs away, and Shaft is taken to the local police precinct…where he learns that the two goons were undercover police officers. 

Here begins the incessant stalling and repetition that will make up the brunt of the novel’s narrative. Shaft meets Chief of Detectives Alex Ashton, an eyepatch-sporting native who speaks in a clipped British accent and who will spend the rest of the novel baiting and bantering with Shaft. The story goes that the “taffy-skinned” girl, Marita Dawes, was serving as the private secretary of the Prime Minister, Sir Charles Lightwood, and the cops were trying to round her up on suspicions of her involvement with a planned assassination attempt on the PM. Ashwood tries to lean on Shaft – as he will continue to do through the novel – but Shaft don’t take no guff and has Ashton call up his cop pal in New York, recurring series character Captain Anderozzi, who puts in a word for Shaft. 

And really, that’s all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers proves to be: a continuous cycle of characters playing head-games with Shaft, using him as help or as bait as they try to figure out who is planning to kill the Prime Minister. The idea is that Shaft, a private eye, will help Ashton figure out who wants to kill Lightwood, in exchange for Shaft himself not being sent to prison. The only problem is, Shaft suspects that Ashton himself might be behind the assassination plot, as do many other characters – including Marita Dawes, the girl from the beach. In one of those “pulp novel” moments, Shaft comes back to his hotel room that night to find the scantily-clad beauty smoking dope in his room, practically begging Shaft to join the cause. She claims to be a fervernt supporter of the P.M., and indeed thinks Ashton is the one who wants to kill him. But our surly hero kicks her out. 

This will be the start of a disturbing trend in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Robert Turner – and presumably Ernest Tidyman – seems intent on keeping John Shaft from getting laid. Our studly hero goes without for the entire novel. There’s sexy Marita, who makes herself available but is spurned. Later, there’s the PM’s hotstuff but ice-cold wife, a black beauty who scorns Shaft, and who in a better pulp novel would probably engage him in some hate-sex. Then, as mentioned, there are the two white gals from America, teachers here in Jamaica on vacation; Shaft, pretending to be a prince from Trinidad who does not speak English (in one of the novel’s more bizarre subplots), takes them up to his room and gets them drunk…then watches as they strip…then ponders over the etiquette of a three-way (ie, wondering which to take first)…and then Shaft ends up passing out, along with the girls, thus squandering our third and final opportunity for any seventies-mandatory sleaze. 

Action is slightly more pronounced, but not much. Shaft gets in a few scuffles here and there, generally taking his opponents down without much fuss. Robert Turner has a tendency to make his action scenes hard to follow, as seen in Scorpio, and that is apparent here; I still find it humorous that Turner, who edited The Spider toward the end of its run, had dissmissive things to say in Robert Sampson’s 1989 study The Spider about main Spider writer Norvell Page, sneering at the frequency of action in Page’s manuscripts. Maybe Turner was just jealous, aware on some subconscious level that Norvell Page was a better writer than he was.  (I provided Turner’s quote about Page in the comments section of my Scorpio review, for anyone who is interested.) 

There’s also a little in the way of gunplay. Toward the end of the book Shaft gets hold of a Colt Python Magnum, and in the climactic action shoots down a thug, “[giving] him a new navel about the size of an ostritch egg.” Otherwise this is not a gory novel by any means, nothing like contemporary Blaxploitation pulp paperback series The Iceman, and as mentioned it’s more of a standard mystery than a pulp-action thriller. Robert Turner even squanders what few pulpy conceits exist in the novel; one of the thugs in the book is a friggin’ hunchback who uses a blowgun that fires poison darts, but the character is treated so conservatively that there’s nothing novel nor memorable about him. 

In fact, Turner is guilty of that hoary copout: having his protagonist knocked out by the bad guys but conveniently not killed by them when he’s out cold. This happens a few times in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, one instance in particular involving Shaft getting hit by one of those poison darts. Later on there’s a part where he crashes his car while chasing some bad guys. In each instance Shaft comes to later on, swearing revenge, apparently not realizing that his enemies could very easily have just killed him while he was lying there unconscious. But then, maybe Turner just doesn’t want his readers to realize that. 

The novel is mostly comprised of Shaft chasing one red herring after another, and getting nothing but conflicting signals from the locals he meets with. This is one of those novels where the hero is constantly befuddled and uncertain, making for a very trying read…again, so similar to the following year’s Scorpio. One can tell where Tidyman might have tightened things up at times; there are parts where Shaft will abruptly seem more like the John Shaft one expects. I also suspect Tidyman was behind the occasional veiled references in the book; we’re told, apropos of nothing, that Shaft doesn’t like moustaches, implying of course that he himself doesn’t have one – which, of course, is pretty surprising, given that Richard Roundtree sported one in his iconic portrayal of Shaft. There’s also a part where Shaft, watching those goons struggle with Marita Dawes on the beach, decides that it’s all “a lot better than that shit on television,” and I wonder if this was a veiled dig at the much-disliked Shaft TV series. 

Curiously, there is a focused attempt at knocking John Shaft down a few pegs throughout the novel, with the author(s) making him altogether disagreeable and surly…and stupid. There’s also a strange quirk in the final pages to imply Shaft is fat; for muddled reasons, the climax takes place during a costume ball, and Shaft appropriates the guise of a toreador. But the costume doesn’t fit him and everyone keeps telling him he’s “too fat” to pose as a toreador. Shaft consoles himself that there isn’t “an extra ounce of fat” on him, but otherwise he picks over his food in the climax…and yes, that’s how lame Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is: the “thrilling” climax features Shaft picking at his meal during the costume ball and still trying to figure everything out. 

Even the very end of the novel continues with the novel’s confusing vibe: Shaft happily gets on a plane back to New York, and drifts off to sleep…only to be woken by a woman screaming that she has a bomb. It’s none other than Marita Dawes, that “taffy-skinned” beauty who started the whole caper, and I guess we are to take it that she’s one of those hippie terrorists who were so fashionable at the time. But Turner (and Tidyman, I guess) is determined to maintain the goofy vibe of the book, thus Shaft closes his eyes and forces himself to feign sleep! Whether he’s dreaming all this or not is unstated, but given the madcap tone of the book, one must imagine he is not. 

As it turned out, this was it for the adventures of John Shaft – in the United States, at least. Presumably Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers sold so poorly that Ernest Tidyman was unable to secure a publisher for the following – and final – installment of the series, The Last Shaft. That one was only published in the UK, in hardcover and paperback, and is now exceedingly scarce; a scan of it was, however, up on archive.org, but who knows when it will be back online now that the Internet Archive has been hacked. 

About the only thing that would make The Last Shaft worth reading is that it wasn’t written by Robert Turner; it was written by Philip Rock, who also wrote the incredible Hickey & Boggs novelization. It also sounds like the closest the Shaft series ever got to men’s adventure, with a well-armed Shaft taking on various criminals in New York. And it apparently lives up to its title, with Ernest Tidyman having grown so sick of his famous character that he wanted to do away with him. Judging from the harsh, rude, surly, and just plain grumpy character featured in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, I can’t say the literary world suffered much of a loss.

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.