A Bullet For The Bride

 
A Bullet For The Bride, by Jon Messman

No month stated, 2022  Brash Books

(Original Pyramid Books edition 1972)

Big thanks to Lee Goldberg and Brash Books for sending me a review copy of this, a trade paperback reprint of a novel Jon Messmann published under his own name through Pyramid Books in 1972. Just missing the men’s adventure series glut by one year, A Bullet For The Bride does seem to be Messmann’s attempt at starting a new series, and bears some similarities to his later Jefferson Boone, Handyman. (Which has also been reprinted by Brash Books, by the way, along with most all of Messmann’s ‘70s output.) 

But hero Ed Steel did not cause much stir in the publishing world – indeed, his name is misspelled as “Ed Steele” on the back cover and in the Afterword (by Roy Nguyen) of this Brash Books edition, so the poor guy still hasn’t made much of a stir. It’s not hard to see why, as A Bullet For The Bride is not the most auspicious beginning for any series; the plot hinges around Steel working for a spoiled little rich girl who has Daddy Issues. So far as character motivation for a series opener goes, it’s not exactly up there with the Mafia killing your kid. 

Steel is essentially Jefferson Boone meets Travis McGee…or perhaps that should be Jedediah Killinger, if we want to stick to a purely men’s adventure comparison. He’s a vet of Korea who has done odd jobs for the Agency and now he lives on a boat, and when we meet him he’s lazing in the sun along the Florida coast. Here’s where the spoiled brat comes in: her name is Cam Parnell, she’s in her early 20s with “small, high breasts,” and Messmann will annoyingly refer to her by her full name, “Cam Parnell,” over and over again, through the course of the novel. But then Messmann does the same with his hero; it’s frequently “Ed Steel said this,” or “Ed Steel said that,” and the reader’s like, “I know the hero’s name, I’m not stupid!” 

But then, Messmann has his recurring quirks. Namely, poor treatment of female characters. Messmann’s protagonists are complete and total dicks with women; it’s one of the author’s most notable quirks, to the extent that you wonder if he had some sort of latent anger toward them. The typical scenario will have the hero baiting the girl, talking down to her, mocking her, occasionally even slapping her…and then bedding her when he has sufficiently tamed the shrew. The scenario with Cam here in A Bullet For The Bride is the same as in every other Messmann novel I’ve read: Steel treats her like shit from the moment he meets her, essentially telling her to take off when she asks to hire him, and then going on to talk down to her and constantly criticize her. 

But then again, Messmann’s female characters kind of deserve it, for the most part. We aren’t talking strong, sassy female characters like you’d get in a George Harmon Smith novel. A Messmann female character is usually kind of dumb (which I guess again factors into that “latent anger” angle), and Cam for example angrily tosses a bucket of chum on Steel when he sends her off in the opening sequence. Actually this whole part seems to be a riff on the finale of It Happened One Night, where Clarke Cable goes off to the wealthy father of Claudette Colbert with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for; Steel cleans himself up and heads to the home of Cam’s super-wealthy father with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for (cleaning the boat of chum, the cost for “lost business” during this time, etc). 

After this “meet cute” Steel of course begins working for Cam. Sorry, for “Cam Parnell,” as Messmann refers to her again and again in the narrative. And so begins the mean-spirited bickering and bantering between the two. There’s a lot of it throughout the novel; Messmann’s protagonists are also unusual in that they maintain their hostile tone even after having sex with the girl in question. But then, Messmann’s characters always tend to be an argumentative and unpleasant bunch, with Messmann doling out his usual dialog modifiers like “he bit off” or “he threw out” and the like, to the extent that it sounds like these people aren’t having a conversation so much as they are a food fight. 

Steel is into boats and whatnot, which means that a lot of A Bullet For The Bride reads like nautical fiction. This is proven posthaste as Cam gets Steel to compete in a boat race against the woman Cam is certain is trying to pull a fast one on her father: Grace White, a lovely brunette in her 30s who has moved in quick on the wealthy Parnell. Messmann either did a fair bit of research or was just a boating enthusiast, and so he really brings a lot of veracity to the race…but for me personally, it just seemed to go on and on. One gets the suspicion that if Ed Steel’s adventures had continued beyond this novel, the “boat stuff” would’ve become a part of the series schtick. 

Surprisingly, Grace White – and yes, Messmann constantly refers to her as “Grace White” in the narrative – does not factor into the novel as much as one might expect. Rather, it is her older sister Betty who does. Just kidding. Grace is sort of a peripheral character, and Cam does the heavy lifting as the novel’s main female character. However Grace is the titular “bride,” as she becomes engaged to Parnell and Cam wants to stop the wedding before it’s too late. As mentioned the entire thing hinges around Cam’s “female intiuition” that Grace is up to something nefarious, but the issue is she’s cried wolf about all of her father’s previous female interests, so no one really believes her. 

And boy, do we learn all about this. I couldn’t believe it, but Messmann devotes a goodly portion of the opening half to Steel researching Cam’s past accusations, even up to and including the women who were involved with Parnell before breaking it off due to Cam’s interference. Steel’s research leads him to conclude the girl is nuts, a comment which of course infuriates Cam and leads to their initial sex scene. Messmann does remember to properly exploit his female characters, and while his raunchy scenes are usually more metaphorical than explicit, he at least lets us know something is happening instead of fading to black. 

Not that this makes Cam and Steel much more of a working team. The bickering and bantering only increases, though we’re to understand that Cam is developing feelings for Steel…and perhaps vice versa. But Cam sort of goes away and Steel’s co-star for the second half is Domino, a Hispanic dude who has done some work for Steel in the past. This entails more nautical stuff; Cam swears Grace meets with an unmarked boat on certain nights, and so Steel and Domino go on a stakeout. Action, by the way, is infrequent; other than an early part where Steel walks into a honey trap and is nearly beaten to death on the docks, A Bullet For The Bride for the most part operates as a mystery novel…the same that can be said of Messmann’s later Handyman series.

The only difference is that Ed Steel is a bit more brutal than any other Messmann character I’ve yet read, though you’d never get that idea until the very final pages of A Bullet For The Bride. Without venturing into spoilers, or the overly-comprehensive vibe of some of my earlier reviews, it develops that Cam’s suspicions were, of course, on the money – otherwise, this really wouldn’t have been an auspicious opening to the series. The plot is fairly preposterous and seems more out of one of Messmann’s earlier  Nick Carter: Killmaster installments, but long story short it involves a mysterious island that is run by Commie villains. There is a crazy part toward the very end where Steel slices the throats of several guards, killing them in their sleep, and Messmann conveys an effective image of a gore-covered and grim-faced Steel going from cabin to cabin with a blade as Cam watches in horror. 

So in other words, all the action occurs in the final pages of A Bullet For The Bride, and this climax seems to come out of a contemporary men’s adventure magazine. It’s a taut, brutal sequence that sees Steel and Cam captured and condemned to a dawn execution, before Steel manages to turn the tables and go on a kill-spree to even the odds. If the entire novel had maintained this pace, perhaps A Bullet For The Bride would’ve been the start of a series, and not just an obscure one-shot in the prolific career of Jon Messmann. 

It’s super cool that Brash Books has brought this and other Messmann books back into print. They all look great and are professionally packaged, but as I stated before, I think it would be so much better if these reprints were done to the dimensions of a 1970s mass market paperback, which is how Tocsin Press does it. I mean, I love men’s adventure books more than anything, but they should never be made to look “upmarket.” That said, the Brash Books cover is certainly better than the Pyramid Books original, which was downright lame – and certainly had to play a little part in the lack of this “series” going past one volume. I mean who in 1972 would’ve grabbed a book with this cover off the rack and headed for the cash register?