Prime Cut

Prime Cut, by Mike Roote
No month stated, 1973  Award Books

A big thanks to my man Marty McKee who sent me a DVDR of Prime Cut six or so years ago; I’d only just discovered the movie, it shames me to admit, and Marty hooked me up with a copy. And man, what a movie it is – I’d rate it at the very top of the list of ‘70s crime films (either it or Charley Varrick, another unjustly obscure one).

I saw that there was a novelization of the film, but didn’t pick it up, because it was by Mike Roote, pseudonym of veteran film novelist Leonore Fleischer. She also wrote the Enter The Dragon novelization, and from my years of Bruce Lee obsession (I even got married on the 29th anniversary of his death! Okay so it was a coincidence, but still!) I knew that Fleischer’s novel treatment wasn’t held in high regard. But I finally got it and I’m glad I did, because it appears that the Prime Cut novelization has recently gotten a bit too pricey on the used books market.

And I’m also glad to see I was wrong to dismiss Fleischer’s work without ever having read it myself, because simply put her Prime Cut novel is great. It captures the vibe of the grim, exploitative film perfectly while adding a few touches. In my reading experience I’ve found two kinds of film novelists: those who turn in what comes off like original novels and those who turn in near-transcriptions of the film, with only a few additions. Fleischer I would say is the latter type of novelist, with the caveat that her writing is strong, she adds a depth to the characters that film won’t allow, and her additions to the tale are not obtrusive. 

Years ago I checked out a book about Film tie-ins from Interlibrary Loan, the name of which escapes me, but I recall there was an interview with Fleischer in it. She stated that, like most film novelists, she either worked from an early draft of the script or a rough cut of the film, the latter usually in the presence of film critics who, Fleischer suspected, were laughing at her behind her back. She also shared the humorous story of how she once went to a screening of a Woody Allen film, one that featured a line poking fun at film novelizations, and she knew the critics around her were silently laughing at her.

In this case I’m betting Fleischer saw a cut of the film that was close to final, as there isn’t much different here than what you’d see in the actual movie. I guess this would’ve been a blessing in those pre-VHS, pre-cable days; if you wanted to remember a movie, you had to read the book. So in that regard her novelization is a success. But in this era of Blu Rays and DVD and etc, the modern reader hopes for a bit “more” in an old film novelization, the hint of missing and now lost scenes, or perhaps even an entirely different plotline, as was the case with the Rambo III novelization.

But that’s not the case here; the only “new stuff” I noticed was the occasional dip into the past of main character Nick Devlin, portrayed in the film by the ultimate tough guy Lee Marvin. Fleischer also develops – without outright describing – a longstanding grudge between Devlin and Mary Ann, sadistic Midwestern mobster memorably portrayed in the film by Gene Hackman. There’s also a part, which I wonder was filmed, where during the drive from Chicago to Kansas City Devlin’s limo passes a cattle car, and inside it Devlin thinks he sees a bunch of caged women instead of cows. He’ll later discover his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.

I’m getting ahead of myself; anyone who has seen Prime Cut will know it’s one of the more exploitative movies to ever be released by a major studio. The plot’s about a hitman for the Irish mob being sent to Kansas to exterminate a dude who auctions sex slaves and who turns his enemies into sausage! To me, Prime Cut is the closest anyone’s ever come to capturing the lurid vibe of a Sharpshooter or Marksman novel. You could easily see “Nick Devlin” as being a stand-in for Johnny Rock, wiping out a particularly nasty Midwestern branch of the Mafia. He even uses pretty much the same weapons: a pair of Beretta 9mms and an M76 submachine gun he carries around in an attache case, similar to the weapons case Philip Magellan always lugs around.

The opening follows the film, even the entire credits sequence, which sees Mary Ann’s meat processing plant in action. Here Mary Ann’s muscle-bound moron of a brother, Weenie, temporarily handles the conveyor belt that propels freshly-killed cattle into the various rippers and choppers – just as a pair of human feet come into view, stashed in there with the cows. We follow the process until this unfortunate victim is turned, literally, into sausage links, and then mailed to Chicago.

Devlin’s intro is one of those parts where Fleischer is free to wax creative; it’s a bit more elaborate here, with an Irish mob boss pulling up to a bar in Chicago, going inside with his latest hotstuff babe, and scoping out a too-cool-for-words Devlin, who sits at the bar with his ever-present chaffeur-bodyguard, Shay. And also here Devlin is a bit more resistant when offered the job, however his interest is captured when he’s told he’ll finally get the chance to punch Mary Ann’s ticket. There’s also a bit more setup here – again without an actual explanation – of a woman named Clarabelle, who apparently was once Devlin’s but is now married to Mary Ann.

Again it’s clear Fleischer saw the film and transcribed it dutifully; even the long limo drive to Kansas City is featured, but here Fleischer takes the opportunity to dip in and out of Devlin’s thoughts. In the film he’s presented as a cipher, Lee Marvin’s badassery more than enough to bring the character to life. Fleischer captures that tough vibe in the novel, but augments it with Devlin’s occasional thoughts of his hardscrabble past and how he fought his way up in the Chicago mob. She also brings a little more to life Shay and the three young Chicago enforcers Devlin’s brought along.

More importantly, she greatly brings to life the grungy, white trash brothers Mary Ann and Weenie. She also implies there’s a bit “more” to their relationship, mostly conveyed via an impromptu wrestling match that is a bit more rough than necessary and features Mary Ann telling Weenie how much he loves him. Also Mary Ann as described is a bit brawnier than Gene Hackman, but I believe Fleischer has done this to convey a more threatening nature to the situation. I mean, Lee Marvin versus Gene Hackman?

Mary Ann’s slavery operation is also slightly more developed, with the additional sicko tidbit that he “owns” a bunch of little boys. The majority of the film and novel takes place during a county fair, and in the film we see a group of boys getting first place for their steer. In the novel we learn that these boys “belong” to Mary Ann, and presumably are part of the human beings he has “raised special,” same as the women he sells off for sex. This latter part is where all the exploitation comes in, with Sissy Spacek getting the main female role as Poppy, one of Mary Ann’s sex slaves.

Mary Ann’s intro follows the film, same as everything else, with a bit more elaboration. Devlin barges in on Mary Ann’s massive farm just as one of those sex-slave auctions is underway, “healthy Midwestern types” walking around and casually inspecting nude young women as they lay in an opium stupor in hay-covevered pens. This is also where Poppy is introduced, and Devlin takes her on “account” for the half-a-million Mary Ann owes Chicago. But also he takes her because he sees a spark in the doped girl’s eyes and feels something for her – this is an element Fleischer captures much better than in the film, where the relationship is harder to buy.

Fleischer here does add something new; in the film, Devlin wraps Poppy in a blanket and carries her into his hotel, telling the clerk to send up clothes for her. Fleischer gets a bit more outrageous, and I wonder if this was in the rough cut she watched, but I doubt it. Here, Devlin carries Poppy’s still-comatose form into the hotel clothing store, tells the lady behind the counter he wants clothes for her, and when asked for Poppy’s size Devlin merely takes off the blanket, displays Poppy’s nude body, and tells the lady to guess her size!

Given that Fleischer also dips into Poppy’s thoughts, the budding romance between the two characters is easier to buy than in the film. Here we learn that Poppy is young, like just out of her teen years, and grew up in an orphanage with other girls – an orphanage owned by Mary Ann which is run expressly for his slavery operation. Devlin is the first “real man” she’s ever seen, and he’s saved her to boot, so she’s instantly in love with him. Devlin for his part sees a totally innocent human being in Poppy, and this attracts him more than he could’ve expected. Plus she’s hot and all.

An interesting thing about Prime Cut, the film, is that it’s not overly sleazy, despite the subject matter. While Sissy Spacek gets fully nude, the camera does not dwell on her nor the other naked girls who are up for auction. And the violence is not overly bloody, despite the fact that characters are sometimes literally turned into hamburger. This I think adds an extra impact to the film, as it’s so professionally staged and shot – it’s like any other big budget crime film from a major studio, only with an horrific extra nature. Whether by accident or design, Fleischer’s writing follows suit: she does not exploit the nude bodies of the women, and Devlin-Poppy’s expected sex scene takes place off page. As for the violence, this is very much a “get shot and fall down” sort of novel; Fleischer doesn’t indulge in any gore.

As with the film Fleischer saves all the action for the final third. It begins with a visit to the fair, where Mary Ann has promised to give Devlin the money he seeks. Instead Mary Ann sends in a bunch of shotgun-toting blonde farmboys (more of Mary Ann’s oprhanage kids?) who try to blow away Devlin and comrades during a turkey shoot. This features the memorable “movie moment” of Devlin and Poppy being chased by a massive thresher, which ends up eating Devlin’s limo instead. 

The finale is even better, with an M76-toting Devlin and his surving comrades staging an assault on Mary Ann’s farm. However this scene is not as action-packed as in the film, and Devlin’s confrontation with Mary Ann and Weenie is a bit anticlimactic when compared to the movie. That being said, the end I think is handled a little better than in the film, where it’s made clear that Devlin and Poppy have freed the kids and young women in Mary Ann’s orphanage. We also get the implication that Poppy in her own way is as tough as Devlin.

I really enjoyed this novel. It’s well written, much better written than you might expect. Fleischer especially excels at capturing the bitter vibe of Devlin’s thoughts and impressions. While it’s pretty much exactly what you see in the film, and of course could never serve as a replacement for the film, it’s still an entertaining read, and adds a slight extra dimension to the story.

Room At The Bottom (Jeff Tyler #2)

Room At The Bottom, by J.L. Potter
No month stated, 1962  Chicago Paperback House

In a parallel to Ennis Willie’s Sand, Jeff Tyler was a hardboiled pulp series that was published by a sleaze imprint that grossly overhyped the exploitative elements. Unlike Sand, this series, which I think ran for three volumes, hasn’t gotten its due; I could hardly find anything about it online. I don’t even remember how I came across this volume.

Jeff Tyler, who narrates the books, is a WWII vet (a frogman in the Pacific action) who now operates the Loafalong, a reconditioned sea-air craft that’s over 80 feet long. He makes his living as a salvage consultant and his home base is New Orleans. Writing wise the series comes off like Mike Hammer guest-starring in a Travis McGee novel. Mickey Spillane is a bigger influence on the series than John D. MacDonald (not to mention that the McGee books hadn’t even started yet), with Tyler a hard-hitting, two-fisted ladies man who answers to no one but himself.

First a note of confusion. I can only find three books in the series. This one, which is numbered “A103” by the publisher; Or Murder For Free, which is numbered “A104,” and Kill Sweet Charity Kill, which is numbered “A109.” All three are from 1962. The numbering would imply that this one, Room At The Bottom, is first in the series. However, the back cover says it’s “the latest saga” about Tyler, and further, the back cover copy of Or Murder For Free seems to introduce Tyler. Thus I’ve concluded that Or Murder For Free must be first in the continuity, followed by this one, with Kill Sweet Charity Kill being the last volume; I can’t find any others listed, but it looks like Potter did a non-Tyler novel for Chicago as well, Jambalaya Loverman, published in 1961.

Anyway, this is a very hardboiled novel, as evidenced in the very beginning. Tyler when we meet him is in a deep diving suit, salvaging an old wreck outside New Orleans. Later we’ll learn the boat sank “15 years ago,” specifically 1942, when it was on a New Orleans-Liverpool run for WWII. Curiously this would set the action of Room At The Bottom in 1957, but then there are no topical details in the book to speak of, and at any rate the ‘50s setting just gives the novel even more of a hardboiled vibe. 

Tyler’s air is running low, and then he’s trapped by a steel beam in the collapsing ship. He talks to his tender, “the kid,” up on the boat way above. (Later we’ll learn the kid is named Jimmy, but we don’t get much detail about him.) Tyler tells the kid his oxygen will be gone very soon and to call the Navy, etc. All very calm. Then the kid comes back on and says the closest Navy guy is 5 hours away and there’s no help anywhere else.

Here’s how Tyler responds to this veritable death sentence: “Looks like supper’s a long way off.” That’s how hardboiled the novel is. Tyler has similar toughguy quips and retorts throughout the novel, which really gives the impression of Mike Hammer.

This opening sequence was my favorite part of the novel. Jimmy the kid, against Tyler’s stern admonishings, gets on his scuba gear and comes to the rescue. But he quickly runs out of air, so now a freed Tyler has to get both himself and the kid back to the surface, and they’re now both out of air. 

It’s all very tense and conveyed with none of the overwrought atmosphere you’d get today. Tyler is a professional and drowning is just one of the potential hazards of the job. He of course manages to get them to safety, after which he berates the kid for refusing orders to stay topside – and then thanks him for saving his life. Meanwhile Tyler has even more problems: he was hired to get a couple hundred thousand dollars from the safe of the sunken ship. But the safe was empty, save for the log book. Tyler suspects someone else has been down there in the past 15 years, or else Tyler’s been set up.

He figures it’s the latter when he visits the office of Laird’s Casualty and Marine Insurance, the outfit that hired him for the job. Goldbaum (or “Goldpop,” as Tyler refers to him, saying that Goldbam doesn’t make that big of a noise in his book – admittedly, one of Tyler’s lamer smart-ass lines) flat-out accuses Tyler of taking the money himself, hiding it on the ocean floor, and planning to collect it at a later date.

The majority of the narrative features Tyler going around New Orleans seeking out the survivors of the crash, all those years ago. In this regard the novel works like a private eye yarn, and the Loafalong stuff doesn’t return until the end of the tale. I forgot to mention, Tyler has a crew that follows him around, but they don’t take much part in this particular adventure: in addition to Jimmy, there’s Jack Price, the “red-headed first mate,” deckhand Stuke a “brawny Polack,” and also a cook whose name I’ve forgotten, who is sort of cowardly when it comes to the guns and action and stuff. 

The cover overhypes the sleaze quotient by a country mile. Tyler gets laid a lot but Potter keeps it all off-page. Even the customary exploitation of the female characters and their ample charms is minimal…even more minimal than the average pulp publication of 1962. Kind of makes you wonder why J.L. Potter even published with Chicago House in the first place; with a more reputable publisher and better distribution it’s possible Jeff Tyler might’ve been more successful, or at least better remembered.

Tyler’s first score is the sexy roommate of a woman who is married to one of those shipwreck survivors; Tyler heads over to their apartment to interview the latter, finds she’s at work (dancing at a strip club), and ends up getting cozy with this lady; her name is Daisy and she too is a stripper, but also a fortune teller and other odd jobs to pay the bills. Later Tyler will score with the other roommate, who’s husband is in prison.

It’s certainly not an action-packed novel. Tyler sort of drives around New Orleans and gets in conversations with various shipwreck survivors. The first, the old captain of the ship, proves to be the most fruitful, at least so far as Tyler’s love life is concerned; he takes an instant shine to the man’s sexy young daughter Ellen. You know she’s going to be the main female character because Tyler doesn’t immediately have sex with her. Instead they go on a couple romantic dinners and Ellen constantly begs off before the dirty deed can be done.

But par for the course in hardboiled pulp, Tyler runs afoul of various thugs. At one point he’s accosted in his trailer home (which impresses the ladies!) by a duo of torpedos, who punch him around a little bit; he later manages to get some payback with help from Ellen. Here the plot gets all twisty because the dude who pays the thugs is named “Goldbaum,” same as the name of Tyler’s boss at the insurance company, and gradually we’ll learn this is the stepson of that older Goldbaum…and also was a passenger on that wrecked ship. There’s also a little lurid stuff late in the game, when Tyler comes back to his trailer home and finds the strangled, nude body of one of the women waiting for him. Another attempt at a setup courtesy the villains.

Tyler carries a .38 but uses it sparingly, most memorably during a nighttime chase featuring those two torpedos from the earlier scene. Throughout he doles toughguy smartass quips that would have Mike Hammer red with envy. Oh and I forgot to mention that Tyler is sort of famous now in New Orleans due to events that happened in the previous novel (I assume), which I guess took him to Nicaragua. Anyway his crazy escapades there are the source of much conversation, and he even bothers to tell others what happened to what I presume was that volume’s leading lady (they’re taking a break or somesuch), so there was definitely a bit of continuity in the series.

The climax takes us back to where we started, with Tyler and crew (this time with two of the female characters in tow) heading back out to the wreckage site. Here Tyler and Ellen finally consumate their budding romance, but as ever it’s totally off-page. This features a humorous cap-off in which the girl tells the guy this was just a one-time thing! She’s engaged and just wanted to sow her wild oats with Tyler, who comes off as so dashing and handsome and whatnot.

The underwater sequence isn’t as gripping as the one at the opening, but that being said this time Tyler’s attacked by a scuba diver at the wreckage site. Here he finds out what’s been going on (basically, a rotten deal between the two Goldbaums back in 1942) and turns the tables on his enemies (planting an explosive on the underside of their ship). After which Tyler gets his name cleared and is free for more adventures – of which as mentioned there was at least one more.

I wasn’t blown away by Room At The Bottom but I suspect if I’d read it during my hardboiled kick a couple years ago I might’ve enjoyed it a lot more. J.L. Potter (I believe his first name was also “Jeff”) is no Ennis Willie, and Jeff Tyler’s no Sand, but I do like the sea adventure vibe of the series, so maybe someday I’ll seek out the other volumes.

Deadly Companions

Deadly Companions, by Bob Sang and Dusty Sang
No month stated, 1977 Belmont Tower Books

To address the elephant in the room straightaway, Ken Barr’s cover clearly rips off the poster for Diabolik, one of the cooler films of the ‘60s. And while Barr’s art is as great as ever, unfortunately it does not convey the true vibe of this novel, which is more of a light caper sort of thing. The main character at no point dons black garb nor totes a submachine gun, and the main female character isn’t even a blonde. However diamonds do play into the plot, so that at least is accurate.

The novel almost comes off like an installment of a series that never was. Protagonist Jacob Pendleton isn’t given much setup – not even much of a description – but we’re informed his various past adventures have become almost legendary in his home base of Chicago. He has a circle of friends, one of them being the commissioner of police, which lends the novel the vibe of a ‘30s pulp. Otherwise we’re not given much info on Mr. Pendleton. He has a penthouse with a view of the Chicago skyline and he’s got a luxury yacht; he’s got a chaffeur/bodyguard named Willie who’s like a karate master. He picks up ladies with ease due to his dashing looks and ruggedly virile charm – take note, though: there’s zero in the way of exploitative stuff, with the violence minimal to the point of PG and the sex strictly off-page.

The Sangs (not to be confused with the Spangs) toss us right into the story with little setup or explanation. We meet Pendleton as he’s coming out of a concert, his palm bleeding; his heavyset pal C.S. Barnes just introduced him to a lovely young lady named Nadia O’Connell, daughter of fellow adventurer Charlie O’Connell, and when Nadia took Pendleton’s hand she sliced his palm open with a serrated fingernail, then happily walked away. Now Pendleton’s left the concert early – he detests the sight of his own blood, we’re told – and retreats to his limousine, where chaffeur Willie tells him some dudes came by to deliver a note: Stay away from the girl.

This bizarre setup will only be repeated throughout the novel – this is one of those books my friends where I didn’t have a clue what was going on most of the time. Pendleton quickly deduces that the palm-cut and the letter were tests courtesy Nadia’s father; he’s a notorious hardcase and likely is testing Pendleton’s mettle before offering him a job. This apparently is what Pendleton does for a living – he goes around the world on various exotic jobs. He frequents a bar tended to by an old man and his grandson and both discuss how “you can always tell” when Pendleton’s about to go on a new affair because of a look in his eye. Again the whole thing is like an installment of a pulp series that never was; the reader really feels as if he’s missing backstory.

 Pendleton has already arranged to have dinner with Nadia the next night, where she admits that the whole palm-cutting deal was an idea of her father’s. Her dad wants to pay Pendleton half a million to fly around the world and visit various banks; O’Connell has diamonds in each and he wants Pendleton to merely check and ensure they are there. This whole job had me so confused I had to re-read the section a few times. The important thing is Pendleton takes Nadia back to his yacht and has sex with her – all of it off-page, even the traditional exploitation of Nadia’s body. Bummer! Indeed all of Pendleton’s frequent scores will be off-page.

But this leads to more of that bizarre shit the narrative does little to explain. While Pendleton and Nadia get busy in the main cabin, Willie tools the yacht around the harbor. He sees a fishing boat in distress and goes to help, but the guys hit him with a tranquilizer and storm the boat. Then someone alerts the cops and this brings police comissioner Joseph Grimboldi onto the scene. Pendleton’s ship is a mess; Willie’s still tranqued out on the deck, and Pendleton’s cabin suite is destroyed and covered in blood, with imprints of Nadia’s curvaceous form in the blood. Jacob himself is passed out on the bed, also drugged.

This is all very strange and sordid…so imagine the reader’s shock when Charlie O’Connell shows up the next day and says his daughter is fine and it was all yet another test! And Commissioner Grimboldi is basically like, “Okay – I know that’s how you roll, Charlie.” It’s all so preposterous and weird; it’s like the authors had these visuals in mind – a yacht cabin covered in blood with imprints of a girl’s body everywhere! – but had no idea how to convey these visuals in the novel itself. And Nadia is okay, the whole contrived scenario an attempt to fool…who? Eventually we’ll learn Charlie O’Connell is having Mafia troubles, but this elaborate scenario serves no purpose in this regard. I mean folks it was at times a surreal experience reading Deadly Companions.

And for that matter, I don’t even know who the hell the “deadly companions” are supposed to be! Despite all common sense, Pendleton goes on the job anyway, but he flies around alone (picking up the odd stewardess or two), and Nadia isn’t his “companion” on the job. Perhaps it refers to young Peter Garabaldi, nephew of old Mafia godfather Dominic Garabaldi; he shadows Pendleton around the globe, checking the diamonds after Pendleton leaves the bank and ordering the occasional assassination attempt on our hero. But Peter and his grandfather are what pass for enemies in the novel, so they’re certainly not “companions.”

At length we’ll learn that O’Connell was pressured by the Mafia to start selling stolen diamonds as well as heroin, but it’s all so twisty and relayed so off-the-cuff that I had a hard time following the plot. What it boils down to is O’Connell, without giving Pendleton all the info of what’s going on, keeps sending our increasingly-addled hero around the world to visit these banks, and at each bank he meets not only Peter Garabaldi but also the same damn clerk. At each bank around the world. The novel quickly attains a repetitive tone, and it’s not helped by the lack of action. In Geneva someone takes a shot at Pendleton – on Peter’s orders – but misses, and another minor character sacrifices himself for Pendleton at one point. But our hero himself doesn’t pull a gun or fight anyone or anything. Mostly he just smokes his pipe and reads Nero Wolfe.

Women certainly go for his rugged charm, though; he picks them up with infinite ease, but there’s no naughty stuff at all. Nadia sort of emerges as the main female character, and she comes back into the narrative once Pendleton’s settled again in Chicago and trying to figure out what’s been going on for the past 150 or so big-print pages. At this point the authors kill off a character off-page – I spent the rest of the book assuming it was a fake story, only for it to turn out to be the truth – and finally Pendleton confronts old Dominic Garabaldi. This leads to a pages-long exposition from the godfather on what O’Connell was up to, why the charade of Pendleton flying around and always seeing Peter there (his job was to ensure the heroin was in the packets or somesuch).

Other than an eleventh hour car chase, in which Willie does all the work, there’s no big action finale. Actually there isn’t much of a finale at all. We learn that some strings are pulled and Peter Garabaldi will be arrested, but otherwise the novel sort of drifts to a muddled close. Pendleton heads back to his frequent watering hole, where the bartenders chuckle, “With Pendleton, it’s never over!” Referring again to his knack for action and intrigue. But it really was over for Jacob Pendleton, and I can’t say the reading public has suffered from the loss. The novel wasn’t terrible and it wasn’t great – it was just sort of blah, really, and more confusing than anything.

Chase

Chase, by Norman Daniels
No month stated, 1973  Berkley Medallion

Chase was a cop show that lasted a single season, running from September of ’73 until spring of ’74. I never saw it, mostly due to the fact that I hadn’t been born yet. And I probably never would’ve even heard of it had it not been for this paperback novelization of the pilot episode, courtesy Norman Daniels, the author who gave us the Man From A.P.E. series and tons of other books, most of them paperback originals.

But I of course had heard of series creator Stephen J. Cannell; probably any guy around my age will remember his name, if anything due to The A-Team, which Cannell created about a decade later and memorably featured that goofy bit at the end of each episode with him yanking the latest hot page off his typewriter and tossing it. I remember in college in the ‘90s my friends and I had recurring jokes on what Cannell was typing and throwing away – this was back before cell phones and the internet was still dial-up (plus it was for geeks anyway), so it’s not like we had much else to do or talk about. 

A little research shows that Cannell wrote this two-hour pilot, but then per network tradition the concept was altered before the actual series began – pretty much the same thing happened with The Six Million Dollar Man. It’s a wonder the show even got off the ground, because it has one of the most ridculous concepts I’ve ever encountered. Basically a police inspector in some unstated city wants to start a “secret” cop squad (gee, what could go wrong??), and when he can’t get the idea approved, he moves forward with it anyway…but it’s all so off-the-book that the squad members will have to cover operating costs out of their own pockets. And there are no promotions and no recognition. So this is like the one job that would be worse than being sent to Vietnam.

The novel opens with what will turn out to be the sole death in the novel; an undercover cop named Dan Freeman finally collars a thug he’s been chasing named Traynor, but Traynor gets the drop on Freeman and blows him away. He then stashes Freeman’s corpse and plants a gem on it, giving the implication that Freeman was dirty and on the take. This is the incident Inspector Dawson uses to make his “secret police force” a reality. Actually the concept wasn’t Dawson’s idea – it was Captain Chase Reddick’s, a “heavyset” cop “well into his 40s” (Daniels by the way seems to mean “stocky” by “heavyset,” as he uses the word a few times throughout). But Reddick had been drinking at the time and didn’t think Dawson would take him seriously.

So it’s all off the books and Reddick is to put together a top-secret team, one which will conveniently enough be called “Chase,” even though Reddick didn’t come up with the name and doesn’t like it(!?). Freeman himself was working on a secret case (one wonders what the hell is going on in this nameless city) and no one knows what it was, but due to the gem planted on him his widow and kids are being screwed out of his pension – as expected, the stupid city officials are more than willing to believe the cops are dirty. As expected, they also turn down Dawson’s “secret squad” idea in the opening, but their reactions are more sensible than Daniels intends to convey – I mean, a secret police squad, accountable to no one and totally off the books, could lead to nothing but trouble.

But to hell with sensibility! Reddick takes the job of leading the squad, even though he won’t get extra pay, the hours will be lousy, the danger will be high, and there will be no recognition for his deeds. Hell, there won’t even be any backup if he gets in too deep. It’s even more incredible that three younger cops join him, all of them “chosen by computer:” Fred Sing, a Chinese guy who is an expert biker (and it’s pretty cool that Daniels doesn’t constantly remind us Sing is Chinese, so the book’s kinda modern in that regard at least); Norm Hamilton, a pilot who flew tons of helicopter missions in ‘Nam; and finally Steve Baker, the top driver on the force.

I mean it’s ludicrous – we gotta find out why this undercover cop was killed, so we’re gonna need a motorcycle, a helicopter, and a fast car! Oh and we gotta pay for all of it ourselves. Anyway I digress. Baker has history with Reddick; hazy backstory has it that Baker and his partner were on the scene during a bank robbery or something, and Reddick barged in, causing the crooks to kill Baker’s partner. This backstory was kind of hard to get a handle on but the long and short of it is that Baker hates Reddick’s guts and instantly wants off the Chase squad. Oh, and that’s the other bullshit thing – you can’t quit!! Even though the squad doesn’t officially exist and all that jazz, if you’re assigned you’re assigned, and if you want out your only option is to quit the force.

Sing and Hamilton are all for joining, but Baker resents the transfer and spends the rest of the novel bitching about it and sending in transfer requests (which Dawson constantly denies). The Chase squad is set up out of an abandoned fire station, which reminded me of another cop novel I recently read: Killer At Large by Manning Lee Stokes, which also featured a new squad operating out of an abandoned fire station. The coincidence of this was too much; Stokes was likely writing Killer At Large when Chase was on the air, so I wonder if he ripped off the idea from this show. Well, I’ll just pretend like he did. I always enjoy these little synchronicities which have no meaning to anyone but me, but then that’s the very definition of a synchronicity – they only matter to the person who notices them, per Jung. (I’ve waited nine years to use “per Jung” in a review.)

I’m really digressing now. Reddick’s first order to the three men is to get some mangy clothes and grow their hair long – to look “disreputable and hippie.” Even Reddick goes for a long-haired grungy look, much to the ribbing of Inspector Dawson. Meanwhile Baker is tasked with souping up an ordinary-looking car and Sing is tasked with souping up a motorcycle. Hamilton meanwhile calls in on a favor an old friend offered him and gets a helicopter for a cheaper rental fee. Dawson even offers to pay for expenses out of his own pocket. It’s all very, very hard to believe, particularly given that the “disreputable hippie” look serves no purpose other than occasional jokes. 

A glaring problem with the book is that too much of it is comrpised of exposition, usually informing us of stuff we just saw happen. But its even worse in the action scenes. The first one sees Baker and Sing chasing a suspect in their souped-up car and motorcycle, Hamilton following from above in his helicopter, and the entire scene is relayed through dialog. Reddick, in a regular car and unable to keep up with the others, must listen on his radio as Hamilton reports on everything as it happens, as if he were a sports announcer calling plays. As for the straight-up expository stuff, as mentioned it’s usually Reddick meeting up with Dawson and going over the current status of the case. Material we readers already know. Clearly this is Daniels’s attempt at filling out the pages, but man, the book’s a mere 160 pages of fairly big print. He could’ve expanded on Cannell’s script and added more fireworks.

Because it’s clear that Cannell’s pilot suffered from the constraints of a TV budget. A concept like this needs to be wildly over the top; Chase and team should almost be like a commando squad, with constant firefights and chases on the ground and in the sky. But as it is, there’s absolutely no need for a motorcyle, a helicopter, or a souped-up car when you’re researching a homicide, and Cannell tries as hard as he can to make it work, as does Daniels. Who actually has a tougher job of it, because he can’t rely on visuals and a soundtrack to keep his readers from noticing all the problems with the concept and story.

Another thing missing, as expected, is any adult stuff; the sole female character in the novel is a lady named Barbara who was supplying Freeman with info. It’s intimated that Barbara was a hooker, but this being the novelization of a 1970s TV movie, it’s not very clear. She turns out to have more up her sleeve, though, working with Traynor, the thug who killed Freeman in the opening pages. These two characters are plotting to screw over wealthy criminal Quentin Mackenzie; Reddick discovers, through hard-to-believe means, that Freeman was very interested in an upcoming motorcyle race that starts in Tijuana and goes across the border into the US. At length we’ll learn Traynor is competing in this race and will be hiding diamonds or heroin in his bike, moving the stuff for Mackenzie, but secretly planning to make off with it on his own.

Finally the concept is worked into the plot, sort of; Sing heads to Mexico and tries to get in the race, having to break into the sign-up office to do so. This gets him arrested and into the orbit of Lt. Salizar, an old colleauge of Reddick’s. Now working with the Mexican police the Chase squad attempts to bring down Traynor and Mackenzie, with the highlight of the novel being the race. However again it’s mostly relayed via dialog. The other big action scene has Reddick and Hamilton chasing after Mackenzie as he tries to escape in a plane. No bullets are fired, though – in fact the heroes never fire a single gun in the book, which I guess is nice so far as keeping down the costs goes, but kinda sucks if you’re an action-starved reader looking for a cheap thrill.

The book ends with a “Special Note to Readers” which informs that the series itself will see Reddick in more of a behind the scenes capacity, with some new guy out in the field with Sing, Hamilton, and Baker. Plus there’s gonna be a dog. So the show was experiencing the usual post-pilot network retooling; it’s my understanding that further retooling occurred late in the season, with Sing, Hamilton, and Baker removed from the series entirely and replaced with three new guys. Not sure if this is indication that the show was doing poorly and the recasting was an act of desperation, but as for Chase the novelization, it seems to have fared pretty well, garnering two editions.

The Red Horse Caper (Renegade Roe #1)

The Red Horse Caper, by L.V. Roper
No month stated, 1975  Popular Library

Here we have another mystery series that was packaged as men’s adventure by Popular Library, same as Hardy and Cage. Renegade Roe didn’t last as long as either of those; the first page lists a handful of “forthcoming books” in the series, but only one more volume was published: The Emerald Chicks Caper. Having read this first book, I can see why the series didn’t resonate with readers, but at the same time it’s still a lot better than Hardy, so it’s a mystery why it didn’t last longer.

The awesome cover art had me expecting the series Dakota promised to be – a kickass American Indian protagonist with fast-moving plots involving babes and bullets. But instead it’s along the same lines as those other two Popular Library series: a slow-moving mystery with very, very little in the way of violent action or steamy sex. I mean friends series hero Jerry “Renegade” Roe doesn’t even own a gun, so there goes the cool cover painting. There is however a blonde in a white bikini, but she barely even says hello to our hero.

Anyway the series is set in New Orleans, but there’s really not much effort to bring the city to life; it’s not like we’re talking A Confederacy Of Dunces or anything. Jerry Roe (I think the “Renegade” nickname is only mentioned once in the very beginning; Roper just refers to him as Roe) is a 35 year-old private eye of Cherokee descent. His background isn’t much elaborated; it seems that his grandmother or great-grandmother had a child with an Irish man or somesuch. Otherwise we get no info on Roe, whether he’s a vet, how he got into the private eye game, etc. He co-runs a P.I. agency with Stuart Worth, a married guy who is one year older than Roe but acts like a more mature, responsible adult in comparison and thus is the straight man of the duo.

Roe plays up on the “wild Indian” image with shoulder-length hair and his customary “Indian” attire, complete with deerskin moccasins and headband. Or, as Worth refers to his look: “a mod hippie with a pigmentation problem who can’t grow a beard.” There’s a lot of un-PC banter throughout, and it would appear L.V. Roper might’ve been a little inspired by the similar racist-baiting banter of Razoni & Jackson. Hell, within the first few pages Roe’s already doling out the hoary “White man speak with forked tongue” line. We also learn via Fran, the long-suffering young lady who serves as secretary for the two P.I.s, that Roe hopes to impregnate every white woman he meets, so that he can make “America a red race again.” Not that Fran has indulged; she makes it clear to her boss that she’s never had sex with Roe. Actually this whole conversation is hilarious in today’s era of #metoo and whatnot; Fran says she puts up with Roe’s constant advances because “he can’t help himself.”

With his new Mustang, crazy wardrobe, and brazen nature, Roe promises to be a much more, uh, “colorful” protagonist than he ultimately proves to be. Here are just a few of the “badass” things Renegade Roe does in the course of this novel:

Drinks endless amounts of Maker’s Mark bourbon

Says he never carries a gun because he’s afraid of them

Relentlessly hits on his partner’s wife; she politely puts up with the harassment

Relentlessly hits on his secretary; she politely puts up with the harassment

Gets abducted and tortured by thugs, who use pliers to rip off two of his fingernails; he’s rescued by his partner

Kicks an unarmed guy in the balls and on the jaw while his partner holds a gun on him

Stands in clear view while spying on people with his binoculars

Talks out loud to himself while hiding from enemies who are just a few feet away

Gets abducted (again) and imprisoned on a boat, manages to free himself and jump in the water, then paddles there uselessly; he’s rescued by his partner

Goes on a date with the client’s secretary, hits on her relentlessly; she politely puts up with the harassment

Cracks the case by hiding in a closet all day

Rushes off to confront the main villain, once again without a gun, and is instantly captured; he’s rescued by his partner

This is another of those times where I honestly don’t know if the author intends this as parody or if he really has no idea that his “badass” character is actually a loser. Anyway as mentioned we don’t get any background on Jerry Roe and Stuart Worth…how they became partners, past cases they’ve handled, etc. We do learn that Roe has a bit of a name about New Orleans due to his brash actions and all the hot women he usually has at his side, but again, we don’t see anything of the sort in this volume. The two seem more content to drink beer in their office and have secretary Fran answer the phone. And Worth is the total straight man, constantly bitching about Roe’s wardrobe, how he’s late for work, how he drinks all the time, and all that jazz.

Roper is guilty of doling out every single “Indian cliché” he can in the course of the novel; Roe is constantly drinking and is mocked by other characters as being the stereotypical drunk Indian. And Roe for his part doesn’t help things, trotting out “paleface” rejoinders. It gets to be a bit much, particularly the humor about his drinking. Also Roe deals with his share of bigotry; their client in this book is a wealthy guy named Langden who demands that Roe not be allowed to work on the case because he doesn’t want to deal with a drunk savage. Of course Langden relents: his story goes that his business was retained by the government to develop experimental fuel for “the new piggy back space shuttle program.” The fuel is called “Red Horse,” and some of it’s been stolen.

Langden is certain his young new secretary, Lisa, stole the fuel, and now she’s missing. He can’t go to the Feds because his company will lose the Red Horse contract. So it’s up to Roe and Worth to find it. Our heroes tour Langden’s facility and Roe hits on his original secretary, an attractive 40-something named Ethyl who is filling in now that Lisa’s missing. Langden says that Lisa is involved with a shady entreprenneur named Lon Brandon (it’s so, so confusing to have characters named “Langden” and “Brandon”) and Langden’s betting Brandon is behind both her theft and her disappearance.

Sure enough, Roe runs into some thugs of Brandon’s, and after a meeting aboard the guy’s ship Roe agrees to drop the case in exchange for a few crates of Maker’s Mark and ten thousand dollars. This is because Roe has already found Lisa’s corpse, strangled by a lamp cord in her apartment. Later on Roe will be captured by more thugs; these ones only appear in this sequence and are led by a scar-faced sadist who has two of Roper’s fingernails ripped off by pliers. Worth shows up to save the day, toting a revolver, but his sole shot doesn’t hit anyone; the scene also serves to introduce Lt. Ken Marshall of the New Orleans police. He has a longstanding feud with the two detectives but agrees to give them 48 hours to solve the case before he steps in.

Roe’s sole action scene comes toward the end, when he’s again captured by Brandon’s men and taken aboard his ship. Escorted to a holding area by a massive “Negro,” Roe manages to hoodwink the guy and beats him up, making an escape. Otherwise he doesn’t do anything else; Worth does all the heavy lifting when it comes to guns and rescuing people. Before his capture Roe saw Ethyl, Langden’s original secretary, carrying a picnic basket off Langden’s ship. Sure enough, while hiding later in Ethyl’s closet, Roe will find some Red Horse cannisters – and also that they store “a horse of a different color,” aka heroin. The whole thing’s a convoluted heroin import scheme, and the whole “experimental fuel” bit is just padding. This is another of those books where the “climax” is composed of our heroes expositing for pages and pages about the villains’ motives.

Incredibly, Roper keeps the arrest of all the villains off-page, Worth and Roe having sicced Lt. Marshall and the Feds on them. Meanwhile the main villain has managed to escape, so as mentioned Roe rushes off to get him, having deduced where he’s hiding. This leads to another scene that’s heavier on dialog than action. Roper pulls this throughout; there’s a lot of stuff in the book that has no meaning other than to fill pages, and when it gets to the good stuff Roper breezes through it. For example, several pages are wasted on Roe bartering for the rental of a boat, hiring a young punk to sail him out to Langden’s ship one night. But after all this buildup, Roe ends up on the ship without any need of the kid’s boat, and later on tells the kid “thanks anyway.”

So as stated it’s not too surprising that only one more volume followed, but again there’s nothing here as lame as in the Hardy novels, which are even more misleadingly packaged, promising sex and violence when they’re really more about what Hardy eats and watches on TV. I’m not too familiar with Roper but other than the second Renegade Roe I have another paperback he did for Popular, Hookers Don’t Go To Heaven, which has a pseudo Donald Pleasance on the cover and promises all kinds of sordid sex. I’m going to imagine though that this is once again some creative license from whoever wrote the cover blurbs for Popular Library.

Killer At Large

Killer At Large, by Don Bannon
July, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Back when I was collecting these BCI Crime Paperbacks I tried to find out who had written this one, but no info was available; “Don Bannon” wasn’t listed anywhere, even in Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms. So I assumed it was written by William Crawford, given the similarity to Crawford’s BCI crime paperback The Rapist. Now, finally having read Killer At Large, I can say with complete certainty that it is the work of Manning Lee Stokes. It’s his style, with solid prose but padded plotting, ten-dollar words, recurring phrases and situations from previous novels, and even the trademark in-joke character names (“Doctor Engel,” ie book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, and “Superintendent Stanton,” ie Stokes’s pseudonym “Ken Stanton” on The Aquanauts). 

Trading on the same sleazy vibe as the other BCI crime paperbacks, this one’s about a serial rapist named Billy Starret who breaks out of prison and goes on the hunt for one of his previous victims, a policewoman named Marion McManus. She collared Starret five years ago, getting raped and her back broken in the process (it happened in the subway, and she fell down some stairs while trying to escape). Starret vowed revenge at the trial. Meanwhile, in the undisclosed city in which all this occurs (we learn at least it isn’t New York or Los Angeles), Marion heads up a newly-formed Sex Crimes Unit that’s intended to get a handle on the city’s increasing number of rape cases.

The main protagonist is 27 year-old Sgt-Detective Rick Preston of Vice, fairly new to the force but rising quickly in the ranks. We’re informed he’s a hunk of a man with tons of women at his disposal, and at novel’s beginning he’s wondering if he should give it to the clearly-willing new policewoman in his precinct, Priscilla Foxx. A pretty blonde with a small-but-shapely figure (we’re often reminded), Priscilla is the one who tells Rick about the new SCU team and also that she’s heard on the grapevine that Rick is going to be co-running it, which is news to our hero. She also begs him to transfer her to the unit, as she was raped as a teen and wants to help crack down on the rapists out there.

Preston brings along his current partner, grizzled Charles Kuttner, but argues with his captain when he’s ordered to also bring along Tom Varantz. New to this particular division, Varantz has a bad rep and is seen as a problem; he was basically kicked off his previous unit. Preston’s captain wants to get rid of Varantz by sending him along with Preston to the SCU. In addition there’s a towering, muscular policewoman named Cordellia who might be in love with little Priscilla Foxx, and who berates Preston for putting such a “green” female cop in the unit. And commanding the SCU is beautiful but icy cold Marion McManus, of the “stiff manner and even stiffer back.” Oh, and Marion’s partner that night she was raped five years ago was none other than…Tom Varantz, who sent her out to waltz along the subway as rape bait and then went off to get drunk, not providing the cover he’d promised her.

Yes friends, this motley crew of misfits is intended to reign in the rape epidemic; one gets the impression they’d spend most of their time fighting each other. SCU HQ is an old fire station, with the men on the first floor and the women up on second, with even the pole still there for them to slide downstairs. Surprisingly though, Stokes does very little with the actual SCU setup, as the novel quickly becomes more concerned with two intertwined elments: Rick Preston falling in love with Marion McManus upon first glimpse of her, and Billy Starret’s escape from prison and the gauntlet formed to protect Marion from him. There’s also an arbitrary subplot about Rick going out on a limb to help an old friend of his, a black high school teacher named Ray Foster who has been accused by a slutty white trash student of grabbing her boobs. This stuff is so incidental to anything that you wonder why Stokes didn’t fill those particular pages with more-appropriate material like, you know, the SCU handling rape cases. But then that’s Stokes for you. I was more impressed that this time he actually resolved this particular arbitrary subplot, even tying it into the main plot.

Killer At Large features all those typesetting tricks Stokes employed in his latter novels: bulletins, various memorandums, teletype twixes, transcripts. Some of it, as usual, is as egregious as can get, like when Rick reads a pages-consuming report on the objectives of the Sex Crimes Unit. But anyway I mention this here because the novel opens with a lengthy digression on Billy Starret’s past, all courtesy the prison psychiatrist who brefriends him. But again surprisingly Stokes actually works this stuff into the narrative, much later on, in particular the nugget of information that Starret has a security uniform stashed in his parents’ home. It by this novel means that Starret will be able to elude the police dragnet out looking for him; we’re informed many times that the average person develops a blindness to a man in uniform, automatically seeing him as a cop.

We find out Starret has escaped in the first quarter of the book, and initially I was surprised because it seemed as if Stokes left the event off page. “That’s not the Manning Lee Stokes I know,” I thought to myself. Sure enough, the next chapter reverted to Starret’s perspective and spent 31 whopping pages detailing his escape, step by step. Long story short, Starret makes a box kite and flies it off the prison in the middle of a blizzard, almost killing himself in the process. He kills a guard and later rapes and kills a woman whose house he breaks into, seeking refuge from the blizzard.

I always get the impression Stokes was chomping at the bit to get sleazy, back when he was writing in the ‘40s and ‘50s (like in The Lady Lost Her Head); here he goes Full-Bore Sleaze, because the unfortunate woman happens to be a hotstuff horny housewife whose husband is away for work, so she gets drunk, dresses up in garter belt and stockings, and screws herself with a cucumber in explicit detail…and Starret happens to come upon her house, sees the light inside through a window, and starts watching her. Stokes keeps the rape-murder off page, however, but word gets to the SCU and they know it’s the work of Starret.

Stokes doesn’t get lost in the details of police beauracracy, yet at the same time this isn’t an action-packed roller coaster like Crooked Cop. In fact, Rick doesn’t even pull out his gun until the final pages. We get a few brief summaries of some rape cases the SCU handles, but for the most part the focus is on Rick’s sudden love for Marion, a love he keeps to himself. When word gets out that Starret has escaped and Rick learns she was raped by him five years ago, he pulls strings to be put in charge of the case. At this point the subplot about Rick’s old friend, Ray Foster and the white trash girl who has accused him, sort of falls by the wayside. Here Rick also learns, again via Kuttner, that Varantz was Marion’s partner the night she was raped – and meanwhile Kuttner’s found out why Varantz is so hated by fellow cops. He’s a coward, as Kuttner found out first-hand during an off-page collaring of an armed rapist.

As with practically every other Stokes novel I’ve read, I realized over halfway through Killer At Large that hardly anything had happened in the narrative, yet regardless I was sufficiently caught up in it. I get the impression Stokes put a bit more of himself in this one. He certainly doles out some memorable lines: “Now let’s go see if we can find the character who likes to cornhole little boys,” “…a guy can’t chase freelance cunt all his life,” and this jawdropper: “So what’s it going to be, Lisa? Drop the charges and forget the whole thing? Or let your parents find out you suck cocks in a junkyard?” Special mention must also be made of this line, which is one of the greatest I’ve ever encountered, both silly and profound, both stupid and cool: “He was now less than a minute from his future.”

Things all come together during the climactic search of the aforementioned junkyard, where Stokes resolves both the Ray Foster and Tom Varantz subplots. The former via the deus ex machina discovery that white trash “victim” Lisa is such a frequent visitor to the junkyard, sucking off various guys, that the proprietor has started charging the guys who come see her; this elicits the unforgettable line above, as Rick successfully blackmails her into dropping the charges against his friend Ray. However Stokes leaves it a mystery whether Ray really did grab her, as Lisa sticks to her story despite being outed as a cheap whore. As for the Varantz subplot, Rick takes the opportunity to beat him up and tells him he’ll beat him up every day until Varantz quits the force!

Stokes dwells in more uber-sleaze in a later chapter which sees a member of the SCU making a heroic sacrifice, after which Starret’s uniform is ruined. We barrel right through the finale, with Rick and Marion racing to bring down Starret before he can rape Marion’s sister as a proxy for Marion herself, and to do it rogue before the rest of the force finds out this is what he plans to do. In other words they both want to kill him, not arrest him. However the climax is a bit too harried, and I would’ve preferred a slower payoff on Starret’s comeuppance.

This was an enjoyable one, better than some of the other BCI Crime Paperbacks I’ve read and certainly one of Stokes’s better novels. Here’s hoping he wrote some more of these for Engel – I still haven’t been able to figure out the authorship of all of them, so some of them might turn out to be more Stokes yarns.

Heir

Heir, by Roger Simon
July, 1970  Dell Books
(original hardcover edition 1968)

Roger Simon, who later in the ‘70s would have a hit with The Big Fix, the novel that introduced his dopesmoking PI Moses Gunn, here turns in more of a literary sort of affair – actually it storms right over the “literary” line and right on into the pretentious zone. I’ve never read the Moses Gunn books but they have to be written in a different style than the self-conscious, overly “artsy” vibe of Heir.

Purporting to be the journal of Marcus Bottner, the “heir” of the title, the novel is told in an almost stream-of-conscious style as Marcus, in his early 20s, informs us how he’s just accidentally killed his 18 year-old girlfriend, Jennifer. This happened because he gave her a shot of heroin to counteract an overdose of amphetimines. Now Jennifer’s corpse sits in a tub of ice in Marcus’s bathroom in his apartment overlooking the Hudson here in New Jersey. The “journal” takes place over a few days as Marcus deals with his new life as a criminal – an idea which attracts him – while trying to figure out how to dispose of the corpse.

The only problem is, Heir sort of comes off like it’s narrated by Niles Crane from Frasier. Marcus however doesn’t even have a single likable quality, so from the outset the reader is already annoyed with him. Luckily the book’s short, just barely over 150 pages, so we don’t have to put up with him too long. Marcus we’ll learn was born into vast wealth, mostly due to the inheritance left behind by his racketeering grandfather, Max. Marcus, a rich kid with literary aspirations, feels akin to William Burroughs, who similarly was born into wealth thanks to the Burroughs typewriter.

And there’s the other whammy – not only is Marcus an annoying effete, but he also wants to be an important author, and studied writing and all that jazz. So there’s this self-reflective, self-conscious vibe to the whole book, which again is mostly just comprised of Marcus’s journal, which he hopes to sell someday under a pseudonym, or perhaps move to another country and have it published there. But otherwise Heir is filled with pretentious stuff like Marcus writing about something and then stating “Excuse me a moment,” with the next sentence being written “later” and with an explanation of what disturbed him as he was writing.

To make it worse – hardly anything happens. Marcus (or should I say Simon) constantly stalls forward momentum with digressions about how he met Jennifer, his relationship with her over the past two years, his childhood, or various other incidents in his privileged past. Only occasionally do we cut back to the main plot of the tale, but even here it’s a slow-going affair – mostly talks with his cousin, Selma, who does PR for rock groups, and Ornstein, his childhood friend who similarly has literary aspirations and who is writing a play about a character modeled after Marcus.

Oh and Marcus keeps his room at near freezing levels, but when this proves unfeasible he hides Jennifer’s corpse in an antique harpsichord – he’s taken it apart, stashed the corpse in there (covered in a sheet and spritzed with perfume), tossed out the “guts” of the harpsichord with the trash, and re-assembled it, all off-page. This leads to the novel’s sole bit of humor when Selma and a psychiatrist she’s retained visit Marcus in his freezing apartment and he bluntly tells them he’s killed his girlfriend and hidden her body in the harspsichord; a confession that’s taken as delusional fantasy. 

But as mentioned the meat of the book is more concerned with arbitrary, digressional flashbacks on Marcus’s time with Jennifer in Europe, his past experiences with her; turns out she was a bit of a bitch, hitting on guys and sometimes taking them home right in Marcus’s presence. There’s also a bit on their growing fondness for drugs, with Jennifer introducing Marcus to grass – more elaborate backstory on how he scored a big haul to impress her early in their relationship – and later to heroin. The drug stuff isn’t as prevalent as the cover implies, though Marcus does shoot up during yet another lunch date with his cousin Selma.

Marcus I guess is intended to represent his generation – something he ponders in his navel-gazing narrative – but it does get to be a bit wearying to accompany him throughout the novel. He puts on the expected show of judging the older generation, protesting the war (he even goes to an anti-Nam rally with Ornstein) and supporting all the new liberal ideas of his youthful generation, yet at the same time of course he’s a self-obsessed murderer and heroin junkie. Of course this is likely Simon’s intention, but as I say the schtick wears thin after a while. The novel too clumsily straddles the line of social commentary and crime thriller.

Eventually Marcus truly confesses to Ornstein (another important moment kept off-page) and gets his support in dumping the body; Ornstein’s suggestion is the Hudson. This leads to a comedy of errors as Marcus stashes the corpse in the trunk of his car and pulls up to an isolated spot, only to be confronted by a group of Hell’s Angels who try to rob him before a cop shows up. A panicked Marcus drives off on various interstates and is again stopped by the police for not paying a toll. This cop in particularly is almost humorously anal-retentive, going on about how important it is for motorists to pay tolls, but Marcus is eventually able to drive off, Jennifer’s corpse undiscovered in the trunk, which is where he decides to keep it.

Toward the end we learn all this takes place in June of 1967, and there is one part that taps into the cool stuff of the day – namely, a heroin-high Marcus finds himself in a bona fide “psychedelic discotheque!” Here he dances with a “Eurasian girl” while colored lights splash on the walls and floor and whatnot. Speaking of good-looking gals, Marcus is curiously asexual…there’s zero exploitation of the few female characters and his flashsbacks of Jennifer are all sexless. Otherwise Marcus has no interest in the modern era and doesn’t like rock music or anything; again, the image is more of a young but still stuffy Niles Crane.

To make it all even worse, even the climax is rendered off-page; the last entry of Marcus’s “journal” is an excruciating bit of stream-of-consciousness that comes off like Rudy Wurlitzer’s Nog or Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot In The Head; unfortunately, here all the “big” stuff happens, like Jennifer’s corpse finally being discovered and Marcus being arrested, yet the gibberish prose sucks out all the drama and suspense. After this we get an even more excruciating chapter, this time courtesy Ornstein who relates how Marcus’s trial goes down and whatnot, but it too is so self-conscious and intentionally “literary.” But basically Marcus is arrested and tried on grounds of manslaughter and will spend the next few years in prison and under psychiatric care.

Anyway, Heir I guess is promising so far as the author’s talent goes, but the novel itself is unsatisfying; perhaps this is why the book fell out of print after this paperback edition and has, apparently, stayed that way. And speaking of which, this is another one that seems to go for absurd prices these days – I don’t even see this paperback edition listed anywhere – but I’d say the high prices are not justified by the actual content. Just get the original hardcover via Interlibrary Loan if you really want to read it.

Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve

Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve, by Martin Caidin
December, 1973  Warner Paperback Library

Sporting an unforgettable cover that seems to have come off a sweat mag of the day, Maryjane Tonight At Angel’s Twelve is courtesy the author who created The Six Million Dollar Man. Possibly due to his famous creation, all of Martin Caidin’s novels are now scarce and overpriced, and this book – both the original 1972 hardcover and this paperback – is no exception. Luckily though I was able to get it via InterLibrary Loan.

This one’s a drug smuggling caper along the lines of Night Crossing and The Mexican Connection, but unlike those novels the plot here is more focused on the actual mechanics of flying; it’s my understanding Caidin was a professional pilot for some time, thus he has no qualms with shoehorning tons of “flying details” into the narrative. In this regard his writing almost reminds me of Mark Roberts, and this goes beyond the flying fixation. Given his success in writing I was under the impression Caidin would be, well…a better writer. I can see now why the contemporary Kirkus review was so harsh on this book. Stylistically, Martin Caidin is akin to William W. Johnstone, in particular the reactionary tone of his protagonist and of the narrative itself.

Whereas those other two dope smuggling books presented some of the dope smugglers of the day as at least counterculture heroes – I mean at least the guys flying in the grass were considered okay – in Caidin’s eyes they’re all criminal scum and deserve death. The dude’s about on the level of my wife, who considers heroin and hash equal in terms of vileness. This would be fine though if Caidin didn’t present us with a protagonist so unsuited to this reactionary agenda: Jim Brian, a blonde-haired ‘Nam hellraiser of a pilot who is only 28 years old but comes off like he’s at least twenty years older. Again, there is a strong similarity to a Johnstone-type protagonist, even down to the endless “now hold on a minute” discussions he gets into.

Eventually we’ll learn that Brian took part in over 300 missions in ‘Nam, flying into various hellzones and kicking Charlie ass, but after shipping home he hit on various hard times and now flies basically for whatever passengers he can get. When we meet him he’s flying a coke dealer and the coke dealer’s hotstuff babe, though it’s intimated Brian isn’t entirely sure the guy’s a smuggler. But it turns out to be a bust and the hotstuff babe’s actually an undercover cop – indeed, one whose name turns out to be Jacqueline Black and who is proclaimed a sadist even by her fellow narcs. Her own barely-explored backstory has it that her husband, years ago, went nuts after taking LSD, drowned their baby, and then tried to strangle Jacqueline! After which she dedicated herself to bringing down all drug dealers, as permanently as possible.

Yes, folks, Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve has the tenor of an Afterschool Special taken to absurd degrees; LSD can make you go Instantly Insane, and god forbid you take a “red” or some other pill. The book is stuffed to the gills with various characters running up and telling Brian or others that such and such character has just died of an overdose – this quickly attains humorous qualities, particularly given half the time that the victims are characters we haven’t even seen. But this is another instance of Caidin’s similarity to Johnstone; he doesn’t seem to grasp the basic tenet that action should be shown, not told.

Brian’s hauled before a gaggle of cops from various local, state, and federal agencies, all of them under command of a guy named Smythe, who offers Brian a chance to stay out of jail and clear his name: go undercover in the Cocoa Beach area of Florida (stomping grounds of Tony and Jeannie Nelson, btw) and help them catch bigtime drug dealers. Brian’s to just pose as a pilot, same as normal, and hope to run into some scumbags who want to use his plane for drugs. Jackie Black, who is one of the officers present, is violently against the idea, swearing that Brian was indeed aware that his client in the opening pages was attempting to smuggle cocaine, and that Brian should be locked up as well.

This sets up the almost psychotic antagonism between Brian and Black, but Caidin doesn’t go the expected route with it; ie the pulpy (and thus preferred) route of the two ending up in the sack. Instead, Jackie first attempts to bug Brian’s house and then tries to bust him and his girlfriend Ina (more of whom anon) several times, which has the ultimate effect of so angering Brian that he ends up beating the shit out of Jackie and strangling her until she pukes on herself(!). But after this Caidin drops the ball and Jackie, who indeed is a nutcase sadist, is delivered her final comeuppance by a one-off character…with Brian being informed of it by the now-mandatory exposition. But the part where our hero beats up a woman – even if she is a violent “bitch” (as he constantly refers to her) – comes off as a bit rough in our #metoo society.*

Brian’s first client is the aforementied Ina Joss, a beautiful brunette babe who hires him for a late-night flight to watch a rocket launch. She brings along a group of kids and, wouldja believe it, one of them has an LSD flashback trip during the flight. But Ina herself seems pretty straightaced, and meanwhile there are sparks between Brian and her, to the extent that they go back to her place that night and have some (apparently) hot sex. Caidin keeps all of it off-page, the prude. But we learn that they both had a grand ol’ time and soon enough Brian’s head over heels. A little too soon, for my tastes, as within a couple chapters of his intro the dude’s driving around Cocoa Beach and asking after Ina because he’s so crazy about her. Some toughguy ‘Nam vet!

Through Ina Brian’s put in touch with George Baxter, a wealty young high roller with long hair and all that jazz and yep he’s a drug dealer as expected. (It’s my understanding the recent nonfiction book Thai Stick, about smuggling in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, features a real-life sadistic drugworld criminal also by the name of “Baxter,” but surely this is just coincidence and Caidin wasn’t aware of him? Anyway I’m planning to read Thai Stick soon.) Brian suspects Baxter of being up to no good, as do his narc handlers.

More off-page sex ensues when Baxter, who hires Brian for a weekend flight to the Caribbean, literally gives Brian a girl for the trip. Meanwhile Baxter keeps two girls for himself! Now that’s my kind of high-rolling drug dealer. Brian feels bad about this unfaithfulness for a hot minute, and later on admits to it when Ina questions him about it (she’s a free-lovin’ Aquarian gal so doesn’t much mind). But her curiousity is more piqued by one of Baxter’s two girls; while Brian swears she is busty, Ina insists that the girl is flat-chested. In other words the lady got a boob job. And meanwhile Jackie Black has already stormed into Brian’s place, accusing him of smuggling in a load of heroin with his flight. Eventually he realizes he did, albeit unwittingly…the drugs were smuggled inside the lady’s “fake tits!”

Brian turns out to be as sadistic as the narcs he constantly butts heads with. When they ambush Baxter in his new amphibian craft – Ina along for the flight, Brian having admitted to her that he’s sort of an undercover agent – Brian does some ‘Nam-style flying to prevent his escaping, and crashes the amphibian. It explodes on impact and Brian’s elated, which came off to me as kinda harsh, not to mention that you’d figure the feds would want Baxter alive to figure out his pipeline. But it turns out some other dude was piloting the craft and Baxter has escaped. Also Baxter’s real name is revealed to be Krauss and he himself is a fancy pilot thanks to some self-financed aggressive pilot schooling at Embry-Riddle.

After his own plane is ambushed, courtesy a bomb someone’s hid in one of the engines, Brian gets a new one: an Excalibur. More aeronautical detailing ensues, taking us into the homestretch, which concerns an anticlimactic chase, most of it relayed via exposition and dialog: Brian trying to finally get the jump on Baxter/Krauss on one of his smuggling flights. This part is only salvaged by the .30 caliber machine gun Brian has installed on his Excalibur.  Meanwhile Caidin leaves the more interesting climax – Jackie Black’s fate – off-page. Her attempted bust of Ina has so angered the resident hippie community that one of them, a dopesmoking former ‘Nam helicopter pilot (yet another pilot in a book filled with them), devises a special torture for her.

The lurid cover painting actually details what happens, off-page, to Jackie Black…when he’s told about it at the end of the book, Brian says it’s an infamous VC torture technique. You take someone and tie them to an airplane with a three-blade propeller and gun it over and over. This acts as a centrifuge and mashes all the blood around in the victim’s head, making a “sponge” of the brain and rendering the victim into an almost vegetable state. This is what’s done to Jackie (after the hippies ply her with acid, we’re told), but again it’s all relayed via clunky exposition in the final pages. It’s interesting that the uncredited paperback cover artist realized there was more to exploit here than Caidin himself did, but as I say the majority of the book is more focused on explaining how pilots handle things and also detailing the rampant horrors of drugs.

*I’m so out of touch with social media that, I kid you not, I have always pronounced “#” the American way, ie “pound.” I’ve never “Tweeted” or followed a hashtag or any of that bullshit, so I honestly thought that “#metoo” was pronounced “pound me too.” Then I happened to say it aloud one day during a conversation with a coworker, and judging from their reaction I quickly realized my mistake…

The Godfather Killer

The Godfather Killer, by Dan Brennan
November, 1973  Belmont Tower Books

This grubby paperback is courtesy veteran pulp writer Dan Brennan, who here turns in what appears to be the first volume of a series that never was. This is for the good, as the “hero” of the piece is a modern-day cowboy type who really doesn’t do much of anything except kill unarmed women. I’m betting editor Peter McCurtin did some behind-the-scenes tinkering, as the back cover copy definitely seems to be his work, and I also suspect McCurtin re-titled Brennan’s manuscript. There isn’t any godfather-killing in the entire damn book…despite what the back cover hypes, the novel is ultimately concerned with a KGB plot(!).

Taking place in South Dakota, The Godfather Killer concerns Jack South, one of the least-described protagonists I’ve ever encountered. We get hardly any info about this guy other than that he’s “the meanest sumbitch in Oriente, South Dakota,” and has come here to Chippewa City, SD to get revenge for the murder of his dad. He’s over six feet tall and wears denim and cowboy boots, but otherwise we get no info on how he became such a primo shitkicker, save for a vague mention of being in a “war.” But as stated despite talking tough, Jack’s main m.o. is gunning down defenseless women in cold blood.

Brennan’s in no hurry to give us the setup and throws us right into the tale; South (or “Jack South” as Brennan constantly refers to him in the narrative, which ultimately takes on a hypnotic effect for the reader) has just arrived in Chippewa City and looks to make a name for himself as a guy here to bust some heads. Thus he beats up a cabbie who works for the crooks who run the town; gradually we’ll learn South suspects the criminal kingpins of Chippewa set up his father and ultimately caused him to commit suicide. South’s dad was mayor of Oriente or somesuch and was wealthy from graft and corruption and all that jazz, and someone outed him to the government. Mayor South went to jail for a spell and then killed himself in shame.

Now South’s here to track down Janet Hall, his dad’s former secretary-mistress and the woman South thinks set his dad up. It’s all sort of Parker-esque with South’s relentless pursuit of the woman, only this is a Parker no reader could root for. I’d like to think Brennan intended for South to be an anti-hero, but there’s no indication of this. And as mentioned the novel ends with the possibility of a series or at least a sequel, with South being hired by the government to root out Commie spies. It’s not as if an unlikable protagonist would’ve prevented Belmont Tower from launching a series, so either Brennan wasn’t interested or sales sucked. (Actually that never stopped BT either.) 

Brennan’s writing has that usual pulp vibe, just giving us what few details needed to keep the story moving, but sometimes his reluctance to explain South’s mindset results in confusion, or even unintentional laughter. Like when early in the book South is jumped by some dude, knocked out, wakes up and vomits…and then arbitrarily runs into a group of locals and spends the night hanging out with them. Even stranger for the reader is when South takes a woman back to his hotel room, and she gets nude…and South tells her to get dressed and leave.

Actually South doesn’t seem to be too bright; he sort of waltzes around Chippewa City without much of a plan. He has a private eye working for him – Brennan doesn’t properly introduce the character nor explain when South hired him – who helps him track down Janet. South blows into her house and grills her for a bit, and two “swarthy” men come after him, resulting in South’s first kills in the book. Brennan isn’t exploitative in the least, for either the violence or the sex. He also doesn’t really capitalize on the potential with Janet, a slightly over-the-hill beauty who was apparently forced into setting up South’s dad; she meets her fate off-page, thus ruining whatever chance there was for any sort of potential to build up her plot.

We do however get a lot of stuff about a guy named Stutz Gandler, who turns out to be the local Mafia bigwig in Chippewa. Through Stutz we learn that the mob actually had nothing to do with the setup and death of Mayor South. Nope, folks – it was the Russians! (You can blame them for practically anything. Try it sometime!) In particular it’s Leon Bolkov, who operates out of Chippewa and has insinuated himself into Dakotan business and politics over the past several years, posing as a Greek. This of course explains all the various “swarthy” guys South keeps seeing around…guys he’s sure (somehow) aren’t Arabic or Italian or whatever. They’re friggin’ KGB agents! 

South definitely has a mean streak about him. While having a confrontation with Stutz, South gets the drop on a bigtime KGB assassin who moves in too early for the kill – an assassin whose schtick is just plain shooting people, so I didn’t understand what was so topnotch about him. In a bit that would appear again in the following decade’s Justin Perry #2, South ties the poor bastard to a roped tree and lets it loose, cutting the bastard in half. Stutz and his personal whore, Mona, both witness the event and either pass our or puke.

Speaking of Mona, South uses her as bait for yet another KGB killer. This one, again posing as a businessman, phones her up for an appointment; his mission is to kill South and Stutz, and figures the girl’s the best way to get either of them. But South is already there (we learn through belabored backstory) and gets the drop on yet another much-ballyhooed KGB assassin. And here’s where we get our first indication (well, second, if you count the tree-tying bit) that our hero’s a nutjob. With zero setup or explanation courtesy Brenann, South pulls out a gun, shoots the assassin, and then shoots Mona. You know, the unarmed hooker who has been helping him. Brennan doesn’t explain away this act or follow up on it.

But our hero’s just getting started so far as the woman-killing goes. Next up he confronts Leon Bolkhov in his Chippewa office, and when the KGB boss won’t talk South starts beating up his secretary. But it’s okay because South has been assured she’s part of the KGB plot, too. In another Parker moment, South gets Bolkhov to call his superior in order to get more money – but instead South blows Bolkhov’s brains out once he’s seen the number dialed. He then proceeds to murder the (unarmed) secretary as well. The Godfather Killer!!

Following the tangled KGB web, South is put on the trail of a lovely New York-based ballet teacher named Syssis; the Russians insist that she was behind the plot against Mayor South. Surprisingly, South doesn’t kill her outright; he suspects the Russians are lying, and of course they are. A hardbitten spy with years of undercover service, Syssis reveals that the KGB wants to get rid of her, so they have set her up as a patsy. Together she and South take out the various KGB assassins who are lurking around, leading up to the novel’s sole action scene – complete with a car chase and Syssis throwing grenades (in Manhattan!).

This also leads to the novel’s sole sex scene, as South and Syssis get jiggy with it, as the kids say (or said). Brennan gives a little detail, but nothing explicit. I kept waiting for South to just plain shoot her – murdering unsuspecting, unarmed women with little narratorial setup being the guy’s specialty – but instead it develops into more of a relationship. But Syssis takes off, leaving South to dole out his final revenge on the Russians…sort of.

In one of the more inexplicaby anticlimactic finales, South tracks down the main money man for the Russians in South Dakota, and takes care of him (and his secretary, of course!!) almost perfunctorily. I mean, was this the guy who set up Mayor South? I don’t think we even find out. I mean it’s the moment the entire novel has led to but it’s delivered almost as an afterthought. Very puzzling. Even more puzzling is the finale, in which a ranking Mafia boss admits to the FBI that the KGB has infiltrated the mob around the country – and Jack South’s services are needed to stop them!

On this goofy note The Godfather Killer shambles to a close, neither Brennan nor Belmont Tower following up on the idea of a government-empowered Jack South taking on KGB spies. But this is nothing to get hung up about, as the book kinda sucked. And no idea what the hell the cover’s about (I’m pretty sure it’s lifted from a movie poster), as nothing like it occurs in the novel.

In Hot Blood

In Hot Blood, by Mercer B. Cook
No month stated, 1966  Challenge Books

This lurid, sleazy cash-in isn’t to be confused with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood at all. The similar titles are just a coincidence, of course. In fact, in the “Author’s Introduction” Mercer B. Cook sniffs that the “nonfiction novel” is nothing new, and that this particular nonfiction novel is about the growing threat of…well, something…and if, well, something isn’t done about it, the country’s gonna suffer!

Well anyway, thanks to Hawk’s Authors’s Pseudonyms I know that “Mercer B. Cook” was a pseudonym of that erstwhile pulp author Robert Turner. While the book is copyright Challenge Books, we are informed from the outset that “Cook” is the pseudonym of a Los Angeles-based author who has written a variety of genres, with a focus on mystery and crime. I wonder why Turner didn’t just publish the novel under his own name and be done with it. Likely it was a publisher demand, or maybe Turner just didn’t want to be ridiculed for this cheap ripoff of In Cold Blood.

I’ve never read Capote’s book, I’m unashamed to admit, but I’m aware of it. Given that it was published the same year, my assumption is this one was rushed out to capitalize on it. In the breezy 150 pages of this book we read as a trio of sadists descend on Elmorra, South Carolina one July night in 1965 and kill and rape several people. It’s not the feel good book of the year, that’s for sure – it’s pretty grimy and lurid, particularly given the publication date.

Turner writes this book as if it really is true crime…there’s lots of page-filling, from arbitrary breakdowns of how Elmorra is layed out to impromptu psych evals of the three hoodlums: Fitz, Townlee, and Parsons. We gradually learn they met in the clink and banded together upon their release into an unsuspecting society; now they drive south in an Olds posing as businessmen and hit random business offices at night, stealing the checkbooks and writing exorbitant amounts to themselves. This is of course elucidated for us at length…Turner, the old pro, leaves no page-filling stone unturned, and as is his usual wont he info-dumps a helluva lot. The book is almost all show and too little tell.

The opening, titled “After,” is a case in point. We have this long, digressive intro in which an Elmorra teen is shacking up with an older guy who travels through town on business. Lots of detail on her background and whatnot; Turner will pull this trick throughout, as he has in every other book of his I’ve read, but here at least the info-dumping isn’t as egregious, given that it’s presented as a nonfiction novel. Well anyway, this gal has some hot off-page lovin’ with the dude, and meanwhile she’s prepared a cover story with her chunky galpal Vangie…but after that aforementioned lovin’ the gal falls asleep, wakes up from a nightmare in which someone was screaming her name…and yep, she’s got ESP, and she knows some bad ju-ju has gone down in Elmorra. Soon enough she learns that Vangie and another girl, as well as a few teens and an adult, have been murdered…

Then Turner jumps back to “During” and tells us how all this sordid stuff went down. Long story short, Fitz, who strangled a cat as a kid, is the boss of the other two guys on their cross-country crime spree: Townlee’s a big bruiser who constantly giggles, and Parsons is the handsome Elvis lookalike who reads Westerns and is the most sadistic of the bunch. Fitz orders that they lay low when they stop in each town, but on this night of July 28 in Elmorra, Townlee and Parsons succeed in getting Fitz to slacken off on his strict “no booze” rule. Then they slip him some speed along with it.

Earlier, Townlee and Parsons, out getting the booze when Fitz was asleep in the motel, ran into a group of teens who were on their way to a meeting at the home of CL Hinkelman, a widowed bachelor in his late 40s, for a Church steering committee or somesuch. Vangie, the pudgy gal in the group, stupidly invited these two older strangers over to Hinkelman’s…just trying to be “right friendly” with these out of towners and all that. Now, back at the motel, the two sadists urge Fitz to go to Hinkelman’s – Parsons has the hots for Vangie and he’s sure Fitz will go nuts over the brunette teen who was with the group.

Soaring on the speed and booze, Fitz agrees. Here we go straight into drive-in trash territory; it’s a shame a cheap, black-and-white exploito film was never made of In Hot Blood, for of course eventual skewering on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s super-insane as the three just show up at Hinkelman’s house, and of course the dude has no idea who they are or why they’re here. But Vangie’s invited them, and it’s the neighborly thing to do…pretty soon they’ve knocked the guy over and are ransacking his pantry for food and booze. The vibe is almost that they’re vampires who have been welcomed into a home, and now they’re free to cut loose.

Turner pulls no punches in the ensuing grim sequence, which sees Hinkelman’s rifle put to use – conveniently just sitting in his kitchen. Hinkelman and the two teen boys are almost perfunctorily dealt with, and then Parsons and Fitz set on the two girls. Turner at least doesn’t go full-bore with Vangie’s rape, providing just enough exploitative elements of her clothes being ripped off before cutting away. Meanwhile Fitz ends up strangling the other girl while raping her. He then orders Parsons to go back in the bedroom and shoot Vangie, who’s passed out! So it’s safe to say these three are the villains.

After this the novel goes into free-fall; Turner page-fills with abandon, including an egregious bit where we read the pscyh evaluations of Fitz, Parsons, and Townlee, written during their prison terms years before. We learn how the people of Elmorra deal with the tragedy, and how the girl who opened the book – the one with ESP who was screwing a married man – has to leave town in shame. Occasionally we cut over to the three killers, who continue their way south, knocking over businesses. They begin to go crazy, apparently from their vile deed in Elmorra, and when Parsons rapes another girl and blabs to her about having killed someone, the cops get their first lead.

There’s a nicely-developed tension as the novel grinds to its close; Fitz, Townlee, and Parsons are now in Clearwater, Florida, oblivious that the cops have found out who they are and are closing in. But when the police stage their ambush the crooks end up turning on each other; one kills the other two, for being cowards, and then he himself dies a few weeks later when trying to escape police custody. But not before he’s told his story of what happened in Elmorra.

Overall this is a fairly quick, sleazy read, though a bit hamstrung by the intermittent narrative rambling. There’s just too much info-dumping about random characters or places, with the forward momentum constantly stalled. It’s for this matter that I prefer Turner’s short story work, as collected in Shroud 9.