Justin Perry: The Assassin #3: Born To Kill

Justin Perry: The Assassin #3: Born To Kill, by John D. Revere
October, 1984  Pinnacle Books

I needed some weirdness in my life, so I decided it was finally time to get back to Justin Perry: The Assassin. And if anything Hal “John D. Revere” Bennett turns in an installment just as flat-out weird as the others, with the added bonus that in this one we get to see an 8 year-old Justin Perry screw a chicken!! Even crazier: the sequence is masterfully written, insofar as it plumbs into our protagonist’s twisted psyche!

It seems something was going on behind the scenes at Pinnacle; this volume was published a full year after the previous one, and this time it carries the short-lived “Pinnacle Crossfire” label. However the events take place in October of 1983, which leads me to believe that the manuscript was held from publication for whatever reason…either soon-to-collapse Pinnacle was struggling to stay afloat and didn’t have the resources to funnel into this strange series, or they just didn’t want to deal with it and thus put it off as long as possible.

It becomes more and more apparent to me that Bennett really had something up his sleeve with Justin Perry: The Assassin, particularly in how each book plants seeds for the final volume. In fact something jumped out at me this time and I’ve got a hunch I’m right…Justin Perry, as we’ll recall, reports to the “Old Man,” chief of the CIA’s Special Assignments Division. In other words, “SAD,” though Bennett never refers to it as such. And Justin’s recurring enemy throughout the series is SADIF, aka The “Sons And Daughters In Freedom,” a more twisted version of SPECTRE. But as we discover in the final volume, SADIF is just a cover for the Halley Society, which hopes to take over the world with the passing of Halley’s Comet in ’86, using Justin’s, uh, seed to impregnate their women through the millennia. Justin learns his entire life has been a lie – he’s been groomed from birth for this special destiny, and the Old Man himself is the “Grand Halley” who has orchestrated the grooming. So anyway, here’s what just occurred to me: perhaps “SADIF” really stands for “Special Assignments Division Is Fake,” or “False.” Possibly yet another clue Bennett has been planting from the first volume.

Another thing that quickly becomes apparent is that with Born To Kill Bennett is doing a riff on the James Bond film Dr. No (yes, the film and not the original novel). We’ve got a Jamaica setting, a native sidekick for Bond, a SPECTRE-like evil organization, a duplicitous but of course ultra-sexy villainess, and a plot that hinges on a US space launch. The only thing lacking is the colorful main villain, but Justin himself is so whacked-out that we don’t really need one…I mean folks this is a guy who screws a girl and then tosses her to a bunch of sharks, later musing over the fact that he’s “still hard” as he thinks of her body being ripped apart. And he’s the hero!!

If our protagonist is messed up, the so-called plot is even worse. Bennett jumps all over the place in this one, to the extent that Justin himself sits around and mulls over what the “real” threat is he’s supposed to be stopping. We get our first indication of this straight off the bat – not to mention a healthy reminder of how weird and lurid this series is – when in the opening pages a young opera usher in Germany gets so excited via his sexual fantasies that he rushes off to the restroom to jerk off! And just as he is “shooting his milk into the sink” he hears a scream out in the theater…to find a German government official has been beheaded in his private box. The first thirty pages continue this trend, with various government officials around Europe and the UK getting their heads cut off in mysterious circumstances, the killer or killers never apprehended.

When we finally meet him, Justin’s in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, checking out the “exquisite English breasts” of Dr. Janice Madison, a British specialist in chickens and other fowls who has been called here to help Justin on his latest case. Plus sleep with him a bunch – this installment is noteworthy in that the sex scenes are not only more explicit, but for once they are not focused on Justin having sex with unattractive women, as previous volumes have been. Justin needs Janice’s expertise due to the rash of chicken attacks which have recently occurred here in Jamaica, with another happening in Florida – perhaps not-so-coincidentally, not very far from Cape Canaveral. The Old Man is worried that all this might have something to do with the Challenger launch, coming up the next week. 

Justin’s certain the chicken attacks, random European beheadings, and space shuttle thing are all connected, though certainly some of them are red herrings. In the meantime Janice Madison is blown up by a bazooka on her way to the airport, and then a Jamaican cop tries to kill Justin. He’s yet another undercover SADIF operative, and fellow CIA agent Lucas Waugh shows up just in time to see Justin kill the man – who by the way has a somewhat feminine form and shrieks “sexually” as Justin strangles him, just so we don’t forget for one hot second how deeply perverted this series is. 

Very much a Fleming sort of character, Lucas Waugh is a black Jew a la Sammy Davis Jr, one who has his own harem in the Bahamas, but quickly rents some time at the local cathouse so he and Justin can engage in a days-long orgy while discussing this latest caper. Also throughout there is a lot of focus placed on sperm – “I’m filled with come” is a recurring phrase, believe it or not, from both Justin and Lucas – which is doubtless yet another uh, seed-planting for the revelations of the final volume, where Justin’s sperm is so important to the Halley freaks that they bottle it up for preservation through the ages. Personally though if I was hanging out with guys who randomly announced they were “full of come,” I’d think it was high time to get myself some new friends. 

Meanwhile, a blonde babe in a sports car takes pot shots at Justin, and he mulls over this a bit, then heads on to Florida; he’s decided that the space shuttle factor is the true threat, with the chicken attacks a sort of bizarre diversion. And speaking of bizarre, folks…well, we get a random flashback where eight year-old Justin Perry decides one day, apropos of nothing, to “screw a chicken.” This he does, and the chicken promptly dies as soon as Justin inserts himself. I stand by what I wrote above – this entire sequence is masterfully done, despite how sick it is, and it is yet another indication of Bennett’s strengths as a writer. For we read as an increasingly-uncomfortable Justin, who at this time is staying on the farm of his grandparents, is served chicken and dumplings that very night, and he’s of course frantic that this is the very same chicken he just fucked to death.

And Justin’s mom has just shown up to take him back home, openly cavorting with her studly chaffeur; Justin sees them rubbing legs beneath the dinner table. Then months later Justin, back home now, is woken by his mother in the middle of the night; she happily tells him she knows how that poor chicken died, and what’s more if Justin tells anyone that she’s sleeping with her chaffeur, she’ll tell Justin’s dad about the chicken incident. Weird scenes inside the goldmine, folks!! And as we learned in the first volume – and are briefly reminded here again – Justin’s mom (and dad) were secretly members of SADIF. Again, practically every single person Justin knows is a secret member of this organization, only adding to the general head-fuckery of the series.

And yet this chicken-screwing is itself a repeating motif of the series; I mean not the chicken stuff itself, but how some bizarre, ghoulish thing in Justin’s childhood will be trolled out as an augmentation of the main plot. Last time it was weird stuff about a bunch of massacred cows; this time it’s a screwed-to-death chicken. Which is to say it’s all very thematic, but “thematic” in a way that would send an AP professor screaming in panic – that a writer as gifted as Hal Bennett would write shit as sick as all this is kind of funny. I mean I think it’s pretty incredible he even decided to wade into the murky waters of the men’s adventure genre…let alone the fact that his stuff is even more outrageous than the stuff that less-“skilled” but equally-weird writers like Russell Smith or Joseph Rosenberger churned out. (Anyone who could follow that sentence gets a no-prize; I sort of lost it myself halfway through.)

This “literary” bent is further displayed in another seemingly-arbitrary bit; first Justin, with no reason why initially offered to the reader, decides to stop in a male stripper club near Cape Canaveral. Here he muses over the housewives who pack the place and gawk at a couple men onstage with “infant-sized” units; Bennett goes off on a pages-long diatribe on what happened to the American female, and how the Kennedy era unleashed their sexual inhibitions, given their rampant fantasies about JFK. I mean it’s all like something out of, I don’t know, John Updike or whatever, the last thing you’d expect in a book titled “Born To Kill” with a cover illustration of the main character shooting a black guy in the back.

But then it gets even more bizarre, as top male stripper Garth Durant waltzes out, showing off his massive wang; he dances for the feverish women and ejaculates on them for the, uh, climax. Eventually we’ll learn Justin hasn’t just randomly stopped in here; the stripper is the nephew of the lady who was killed by chickens here in Florida. Justin interviews the dude in the very shed in which the lady was killed – and the chickens surround them and go in for the kill. They’re mutant chickens, baby – as big as dogs and rabid as Cujo. This time Bennett appears to have finally bothered researching guns, so that Justin’s earlier revolver (you know, the one with a safety and a silencer) is gone, replaced by a nifty 9mm auto; with it he blows away a couple mutant chickens.

The cover art is again faithful to the events (and yes, Justin does shoot a black man in the back at one point), with Justin finding a Jamaican guy with a bazooka lurking behind the shed, about to shoot at the Challenger as it launches! There with him is the mysterious blonde who shot at Justin back in Jamaica; turns out her nickname is “Tillie the Turd,” despite which she’s one of the most attractive women Justin’s ever seen, and he can’t wait “to get his dick up inside her” before he kills her…and kill her he will, because the Old Man has issued specific orders on this mission: no SADIF prisoners.

Justin drugs and interrogates Tillie and Durant on a yacht surrounded by sharks in a sequence which almost casually demonstrates the sleazy sadism of the series (and hero). Increasingly turned on by Tillie as he questions her – and Tillie increasingly turned on as well – Justin ends up screwing her to get her to talk: she reveals SADIF’s true plan. All the other stuff has been distraction; SADIF really is using gene-manipulation chicanery to breed prepubescent assassins! They even have women that give birth to litters of ‘em, and a fast-growth serum results in junior-aged killers in a matter of weeks. Cold and emotionless, but with innocent faces, they will be SADIF’s new secret weapon, and were already employed in Europe, where they decapitated all those government officials. So Justin learns all this during sex, after which Tillie screams “I love you!,” Justin says, “I’m sorry,” and then he tosses her still-orgasming(!) body into the ocean:

The sharks tore into her like she was raw garbage. Justin turned away from the stern, feeling quite strange. The sharks were eating his sperm too.

Well, at least he’d told her he was sorry.

But Justin isn’t all “screw ‘em and chum ‘em” this time around…Bennett tries, and pretty much fails, to develop a romantic element with Janice Madison…who by the way urns out to have been a fake, the real Janice’s corpse having been discovered at Heathrow. And also this fake Janice with her “exquisite English breasts” didn’t die in that bazooka attack…turns out there was no female corpse in the car wreckage. The problem is, we only meet “Janice” before she exits the narrative, and she doesn’t return until the very end (where she is of course revealed to be a SADIF agent, I mean who would be surprised?). Thus the occasional soul-plumbing bit from Justin on his feelings toward her come off a bit lame. However we do get some choice lines in these soul-plumbing bits, such as: “But what had [Janice] gotten out of him of him except an awful lot of dick and enormous quantities of sperm? And what had he gotten out of her, except for probably some of the best pussy he’d had in recent memory?”

At any rate, the finale is a rushed action scene in which Justin and Lucas, both wearing form-fitting black combat suits (a recurring series element is that Justin wears such a suit, a la the cover, in the climax), stage an assault on a remote jungle hospital in Jamaica. Here Bennett delivers one of his customary uneventful action sequences, with Justin gunning down a few random guards while Lucas does all the heavy lifting, planting bombs and etc. Instead the big finale is given over to the fake Janice, who turns out to be the head of this bizarre bioscience affair in which protoplasmic things are grown into human children. Bennett even cops out of his own suspence, with Justin struggling with the fact that he’ll have to kill Janice, but then lamely having “fate” intervene thanks to a stray bullet. 

Overall though I found Born To Kill pretty entertaining, with the caveat that it doesn’t have much action, it features way too much random pontificating, and also it’s just twisted to the core. I mean folks this is a men’s adventure novel in which the hero fucks a chicken. That alone says pretty much all there is to say about Justin Perry: The Assassin. There is nothing stranger than this series in the entire men’s adventure genre…so you’re either on the bus or you aren’t.

The Chinatown Connection

The Chinatown Connection, by Owen Park
February, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Of all the BCI crime paperbacks I’ve yet read, this one comes closest to being the first installment of a men’s adventure series that never was. “Producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel likely tried to pass it off as such, as The Chinatown Connection is unlike his other standalone crime novels of the day; this one is more along the lines of Dark Angel, with a bit of Mace thrown in for good measure, and leaves the possibility open for more adventures. Either the readers or Pinnacle didn’t bite, though, so the series never happened. But at least Pinnacle mainstay George Bush (H. or Dubya??) gave it a typically cool cover. 

Speaking of Dark Angel, I wonder if James D. Lawrence was behind this one; my only other guess from Engel’s stable of writers at this time would be Nat Freedland and Bill Amidon, who wrote Chopper Cop #3 for him. If I had to go out on a limb I’d guess it was the latter two, given the similarity of setting (San Francisco) and the general vibe of the book. Also, to get a bit lowbrow from the get-go, I think it might be Freedland and Amidon due to the use of the word “pussy,” which to my recollection I’ve only seen in one other 1970s men’s adventure novel – Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert. There is also the focus on making young kung fu-fighting Eurasian hero Tommy Lee hip and “mod,” which reminds me of the authors’s similar attempts at making Chopper Cop Terry Bunker a hip mod cat.

As mentioned our hero is named Tommy Lee; he’s “barely thirty,” the son of a Chinese father and Russian mother who Bruce Lee-style is American by birth even though he grew up in Hong Kong. Tommy has extensive intelligence world experience, drafted while still a teen into serving in ‘Nam; now he’s a successful private investigator who runs a global company called East-West Investigations, with branch offices all over the world and an army of investigators in his employ. While he is as expected a master of martial arts, he’s also prone to carrying a pistol with him and actually gets in more gunfights than fistfights. While Tommy identifies as Chinese – his mother is rarely mentioned, and he seems to have no interest in his Western heritage – the author(s) are at pains to let us know he’s a hip modern young Chinese, one who drives a white Jaguar XKE and wears mod fashions. His main EWI office, in a SanFran high rise, is decorated with “old Fillmore rock posters.” 

When we meet him Tommy’s in the process of beating the shit out of a couple Chinese punks on a dark San Francisco street. Tommy’s been hired as a guard to ward off this recent crop of violent young Chinese thugs; gradually we’ll learn they are members of the Thunder and Lightning gang, a new wave Chinese tong looking to corner the heroin market in Chinatown. Tommy gets wind of it when he learns his new employers – wealthy financier Bartlett Delmonico and his sexy daughter Lisa – are pulling a fast one on him. Delmonico is actualy a Mafia bigwig and he’s looking to crush the competition. And also Lisa’s actually his wife, not that this prevents her from engaging Tommy in frequent sexually-explicit sequences.

As with the third Chopper Cop, there seems to be two authors here: one who handles the intricacies of plotting and one who just wants to get down to the hardcore screwing. Lisa meets Tommy in his office, hiring him to find out who these Chinese toughs are who are threatening her “father’s” business; she and Tommy are in bed within hours of meeting, our author serving up the first of several such graphic scenes. How graphic, you may ask?

[Lisa] threw herself into sex like a berserk Venus, yet it was clear that her piledriving vaginal churnings were the result of a consciously willed plunge into erotic thrills, not a desire that had swept over her uncontrollably.

Or how about…

Tommy bent down and went into the classic sixty-nine position, thrusting his tongue deeply and actively to see if that was the best way to get her off. 

It certainly was, this time. Her muff throbbed up in his face and arched high as he cupped her globed buns from behind. Quickly she drew him into completion and swallowed the discharge. This seemed to be her final signal to shudder brokenly over the orgasm line herself.

And those are just two excerpts from similar scenes throughout the novel; all of them feature such memorably bizarre phrases. Lisa is Tommy’s sole conquest in The Chinatown Connection, with their casual bangs dutifully described every several pages; Tommy will go to Delmonico’s place, get some info, then rush off to a room with Lisa for “documents” or some other pretense. Otherwise there’s no main squeeze for Tommy this time, which I found surprising, though we do learn early on that he has a casual thing going with his sexy cousin, who wears tight Rolling Stones t-shirts and works as his secretary. While the two never break the taboo and have sex, they still provoke each other with racy dialog. Now that I think of it, this is the only other female character in the novel, and she only appears in the opening.

At 183 pages of small, dense print, The Chinatown Connection is a bit overwritten. The author does a capable job of keeping it moving, with frequent scenes of sex or violence, plus a little bit of sleuthing as Tommy tries to figure out who is behind Thunder and Lightning. But there’s just too much fat, in particular the background material on Chinatown tongs or the inner workings of the “Oriental” world. One thing I was glad not to see was a profusion of overly-detailed kung-fu fights, a la Mace. Tommy usually so outskills his opponents that he makes short work of them with a kick or two; his only real martial arts battle is with Hatchet Wang, a notorious axe-wielding thug who sports a silver nose due to an old injury. This fight goes on for quite a while, only for Hatchet Wang to be rendered an almost perfunctory sendoff in the climax.

Upon outing Delmonico as a Mafioso, Tommy is ready to quit, but Delmonico threatens to kill random Chinatown residents every few days until Tommy complies and finds out who is running Thunder and Lightning. Tommy brings in the tongs, resulting in a stalemate between the two forces – the tongs will prevent the Mafia scum from murdering innocents, but the tongs don’t want the T&L thugs around, themselves. So Tommy ends up doing the job, but sort of working with both forces. There is a fair bit of shuffling around, with the Mafia stuff more interesting than the tongs stuff, mostly because the Mafia stuff usually entails sleazy sex with Lisa Delmonico.

There is a bit of a pulp vibe in that Tommy has a host of toys at his disposal, from an armed and armored communications van that’s disguised as a delivery truck to a fancy underwater sled he uses in a climactic scuba sequence (actually this is the first of two or three climaxes – the book sort of doesn’t know when to end). He has all kinds of weapons stashed in safe places in his apartment and office, and can get a sportscar delivered to him on a moment’s notice from one of his army of employees. Even more on the pulp vibe is the late revelation that Tommy is also a master of disguise, and with a few cosmetic tricks can make himself look completely different. We see this in effect in a somewhat-arbitrary part where he stakes out a dingy bar in the hopes of encountering one of the few known Thunder and Lightning members, Tommy posing as a greasy-haired punk just off the boat. 

Action is capabaly handled if a little bloodless. Tommy blows away a couple goons, but mostly beats people senseless with his kung-fu skills. But we get a varied selection of action, from car chases to underwater demolition to protracted martial arts combat. We don’t get much of an idea of what makes Tommy tick, but again this is par for the course so far as the men’s adventure genre goes, and again my suspicion is The Chinatown Connection was conceived as the first installment of a series that never was. I’d love to know more about it, especially who wrote it, but as is typical with Engel’s BCI, it’s shrouded in mystery.

As for Tommy Lee, he went on to other things; word is he eventually became the drummer in an ‘80s hard rock band.

The Butcher #7: Death Race

The Butcher #7: Death Race, by Stuart Jason
July, 1973  Pinnacle Books

My assumption is Harlequin Books briefly took over The Butcher, at least for this one volume, as James “Stuart Jason” Dockery gives us a slow-moving yarn in which usually-gruff Bucher falls in love with a lovely young Eskimo gal, spends lots and lots of time pondering his feelings, and ultimately decides to quit White Hat and live here in Alaska happily ever after. At the very least, Dockery can be credited for finally straying outside the rigid template he has followed for the preceding six volumes.

I’ll skip my usual belabored rundown of the purgatory-esque sequence of events Bucher experiences in each and every volume: let it only be said that yes, the novel opens with him being tailed by two superdeformed Syndicate goons who knew him back in the day, and yes, Bucher makes short work of them. After which he is, once again, bailed out of jail by a slackjawed local yokel cop who can’t believe this grim-faced killer has such governmental clout. From there to the assignment briefing with the aged Director of White Hat, who has it that the Dewline defense system on the US-Canada border has been compromised.

In yet another similarity to a previous volume, duplicates of the thoroughly-vetted defense personnel are apparently being put in place by a mastermind (or “The Snake,” as Bucher eventually begins to think of him, apropos of nothing). Due to a random accident one of the dupes was outed, and now the Director is frantic that all of the remote Dewline outposts, each manned by one person, have been compromised by lookalikes. But as usual there’s nothing to go on, no leads to track. All White Hat has is a letter the sister of one of the personnel sent to the President, complaining that her brother was acting strange lately, probably due to all the pressure running his outpost. The Director suspects that her brother is one of the dupes.

Bucher flies to Alaska to investigate. It’s page-filling of the most egregious kind as we’re informed of all sorts of “life in Alaska” bullshit. I experienced a bad flashback to the similar page-filling “life among the Eskimos” stuff in John Eagle Expeditor #7. Dockery pulled similar stunts in previous books, usually with shoehorned detail about the Middle East or Egypt or whatever, so this time it’s at least a change of scenery. But it does go on and on, with zero in the way of action. It gets worse when Bucher meets Sonja Rostov, the sister who wrote that letter to the president about her brother – and it’s love at first sight.

The Butcher gets all lovey-dovey as our hard-assed hero finds himself acting like a smitten fool around Sonja. We’re informed she’s not classically beautiful, but appropriately hot, with a jawdropping but petite body. More importantly, there is a “primitive” look about her – she makes her appearance draped in animal skins and wielding a Bowie knife – and gradually Bucher understands that the two are very alike. Soon enough she’s giving him a leather band that symbolically binds them as mates(!). There follows lots of crap seemingly lifted from a RomCom as Bucher relaxes in a steam bath, shocked when Sonja and a female friend happen to see him nude, Bucher embarrassed and getting tongue-tied and etc, and you just wonder to yourself, “When, Lord, when will Bucher start killing people again??”

After an extra-long haul some action presents itself: Sonja is being hassled by two locals, and after an interminable sequence of setting the situation up they arrive in the village. Bucher goes out to confront them, first shooting their dog as a sign of his bad-assery. But other than this it’s anticlimactic as all get-out; Bucher whips out his Walther, and it’s “koosh-koosh,” goodbye both tough guys. We’re back to the romance stuff…and by the way, as ever Dockery is reluctant to provide any explicit material. About all we get is Sonja wrapping her arms around her stomach and murmuring how she feels she’s been “wifed” good and proper. And meanwhile Bucher has decided that this is his last job, he’s going to quit White Hat, stay here in Alaska, and get married.

But Dockery hasn’t forgotten the other mainstay of his series template: the mission Bucher’s been sent here on abruptly changes. Ostensibly he’s here in this backwoods Alaskan village waiting for Sonja’s brother to arrive; White Hat arranged for Rostov to be sent home on a temporary leave of absence, with the idea that Bucher would be waiting here for him and figure out if he’s the real thing or a dupe. Sonja for her part is certain the man she saw a few months ago was not her brother, which is why she wrote that letter. Okay, so we’re waiting for all this to happen. Then the Director swings into town and reveals that Sonja’s brother is not coming, and also it was all a mistake and there really were no “dupes” as such, just personnel who were pretending to be dupes, as part of a diversionary meaure to distract attention from the real plot of the mastermind behind all this!!!

And who is the mastermind? In some of Dockery’s lazier plotting, Bucher early on just happens to see an old photo of some village schoolkids, and one of them has a hideous birthmark on his face. Identical to a Chinese doctor Bucher once knew named Wu who was employed by the Syndicate but was finally retired due to the fact that he liked to strap people up and feed them to his trained dogs. Well guess what, folks. Wu is, believe it or not, the mastermind behind the Dewline plot!! The Director reveals as much, and also that Wu’s real plot appears to be the unleashing of an army of saboteurs into the US.

As if waving a big middle finger at his readers, Dockery then has the big climactic action scene occur off-page; the Director reveals that a team of Marines are right now converging on Wu’s hideout! Indeed, more priority is put on the “big revelation” that the Director’s real name is Sam White; he comments that he always wondered why Bucher never asked him what his real name was(!). So now Bucher’s job is to voyage out into the Alaskan wild and get the list of saboteurs from Wu’s training base, which is of course nearby, him being a hometown boy and all. Bucher will be assisted by an Amazonian White Hat agent named Olga. Sonja of course manages to bully her way into going along on what Bucher vows will be his last mission – he’s already tendered his resignation to the Director.

Now, anyone who even harbors a suspicion that Sonja might make it through Death Race alive is in serious danger of flunking Men’s Adventure 101 (and there is no remedial class!). As Marty McKee succinctly put it, “It comes as no surprise that Sonja doesn’t live to the end of the book.” So of course, she’s dead before the last page. But let’s take a moment to dwell on her murder, which Dockery delivers as expected, but in such a half-assed manner that I had to laugh at his bravado. I mean, Bucher has lost lady loves in previous volumes; it’s part of the template. But this time, we’re led to believe, it’s much different – he plans to marry Sonja, he plans to quit White Hat for her. Yet when Sonja’s assassinated by a sniper, just a few pages before the end of the book, we’re never informed who shot her!

Bucher’s kissing her goodbye, about to make his final assault on Wu’s lair, and Sonja’s shot at that moment. Bucher watches in a daze as she falls, dead…and then the next chapter has him storming in upon Wu, who’s in the midst of feeding a fresh victim to his dogs. Wu is shocked that Bucher is even here; the sadist has so descended into full-blown madness that he’s not even aware his main base has been attacked. Plus he hasn’t seen Bucher since his Syndicate days. We’re informed that Bucher killed off Wu’s two sole security guards on his way in, so that would mean it wasn’t either of them who shot Sonja – not only were they guarding the boss, but the boss wasn’t even aware Bucher was around! So it wasn’t Wu or any of his men who killed Sonja.

So then…who the hell was it? My guess is it must’ve been White Hat itself. In fact it’s the only possibility. The Director is initially startled that Bucher intends to quit, then brushes it off with a smile and something to the effect that he loves how Bucher is a man of his convictions and could make such a life-changing decision so quickly. In reality though, “Iceman” would be too valuable an agent to lose, so clearly Sonja Rostov must die. The more I think of it, I’m sure this was Dockery’s intention. Otherwise no info is given on who killed Sonja, and I’m betting no mention will be made of her in the next novel, which will see the usual “game reset” taking place.

But anyway as mentioned Wu, when we finally meet him, is about to feed an old Eskimo man to his dogs. And it still drives me nuts that Dockery creates these crazy, disgusting villains and never properly exploits them. I mean, Wu has two brains, one of them on his face, and he gets his jollies tying people up and setting his dogs loose on them! But as with all the other main villains in the series, Wu stays off-page for the duration, only showing up right before the very end – and only then to meet his expected fate: becoming dog food. At least Dockery goes full-bore with the graphic violence here, with Bucher feeling like he’s about to puke as he watches. Not that he stops watching it.

Here’s the last paragraph:

Bucher stared grimly at the grisly scene for a long half minute, then turned from it and headed out of the cave toward the cabin, the bitter-sour taste of galling defeat strong in his mouth.

On an unrelated note, only one post next week – it’ll be up on Wednesday.

The Vigilante #4: Chicago: Knock, Knock, You're Dead

The Vigilante #4: Chicago: Knock, Knock, You're Dead, by V.J. Santiago
May, 1976  Pinnacle Books

Three short weeks after the first volume and two days after the previous one, antihero Joe “The Vigilante” Madden heads to Chicago, where he can kill more criminal scum. At this point Robert Lory wants it to be clear that Madden is nuts; whereas before Madden at least made gestures toward protecting society and the like, now he’s practically a thrill-killer. This time his stated goal is to kill FALN terrorists who are targeting banks, but the somewhat messy plot has him ultimately taking on the merciless crime boss who finances them.

Madden’s back in New York for the first time in a few volumes, and we get to see how his coworkers at the engineering firm are just as casual about that whole “sorry your wife was brutally murdered” thing as ever. Instead it’s all about the job – Madden’s to be sent off to Chicago to help another client, a bank that’s looking for tips on video surveillance. Also, shortly after this Madden will be sent to Detroit, so we’re given a hint of where the fifth volume will take place. I’d imagine then that at this point Lory felt comfortable enough that the series would continue, thus was planting seeds for future installments. Unfortunately, the next volume would be the last!

This is most apparent in a subplot featuring Sgt. Leo Delancy of the NYPD, returning from the first volume. Delancy is the cop investigating the murder of Madden’s wife, the trio of punks who did it thus far having eluded capture. Delancy calls Madden into the station because his credit card, stolen that night, turned up, and Madden checks out a lineup to see if any of the men on display are the ones who killed his wife and stole his wallet. None are, however Lory here appears to develop a thread that Delancy might be coming after Madden himself.

Humorously enough, Delancy casually discusses the pile of cases he’s working on – one of which happens to be the stuff that went down in the second volume. This is because Madden has been doing his vigilante work with the same revolver he appropriated in the first volume, not realizing the bullets he left behind would eventually be matched up. Delancy tells Madden that whoever did all the killing in New York and Los Angeles surely wasn’t a professional, as a pro wouldn’t be stupid enough to use the same gun across the country. It’s not hinted that Delancy suspects Madden, but it’s definitely a setup for future developments.

Madden finally dumps the .32 in the Hudson and bullies an underworld fence to rassle him up some new guns. He still has the Mauser from the second volume, but this is a ‘70s crime novel, so a revolver is demanded; the fence gets him a .38 Colt, which Madden doesn’t like as much as he did the .32. We get more of those flashbacks to simpler times when Madden simply hides the guns in his check-in luggage for the flight to Chicago. Lory proves again he’s a savvy men’s adventure writer, not wasting much of our time with the whole “engineering” schtick; Madden appraises the situation, learns about recent FALN terrorist bombings in the Chicago area, and helps out with video surveillance setup.

Instead the focus is on Madden hunting down the terrorists on his own, but here Knock, Knock, You’re Dead sort of loses its way. That being said, this one’s pretty sleazy at times, so it has that going for it. This is demonstrated posthaste, as Madden follows a teenaged FALN bomber back to his place, makes him call his superior to arrange a meeting, and then blows the kid away. Later Madden stakes the meeting place out, watching from a dive bar where the blonde bombshell waitress, a former hooker named Jean, gives him free booze and makes interested remarks. Apparently that horrific scar Madden has across his face is quite the turn-on for certain women.

This unexpectedly leads to the novel’s first sex scene, and the most explicit one yet in the series – but not with Jean. Madden sees a sexy hispanic gal wandering around the meet place, then abducts her, takes her to a sleazy hotel, and starts slapping and punching her around for info. You guessed it, folks, this turns her on good and proper. Before you know it, she’s naked and begging Madden to do her. This he does, for a few pages of graphically-depicted sexual a-happenings, Lory actually detailing back-to-back bangings, like this was The Baroness or something. He also works in the “man’s conquest” theme he explored in the John Eagle Expeditor entry The Glyphs Of Gold, which also featured a sexy Hispanic babe “challenging” the hero’s masculinity by seeing how long he could last in the sack – or, as Lory puts it, “to see who drains who.” Of course, just like John Eagle, Joe Madden proves his worth, and then some.

Madden is increasingly becoming the most obnoxious “hero” in men’s adventure fiction; after boffing the girl, Juana, into wilting submission, he gets more info out of her about her FALN comrades – and when she relays that her kid brother was recently murdered, Madden happily informs her that he was the one who pulled the trigger! Also throughout the novel he bullies and bosses people around, even beating Jean’s boss at the restaurant to a pulp when he goes back there later on and insists she drop everything, walk out of her job, and go to a nearby hotel for some quick sex(!). Also, I wondered why Lory named his sole two female characters so similarly (Jean and Juana), but figured it must’ve been like a theme or some other sort of literary trick that escaped me. But the two characters never meet so it doesn’t get too confusing.

Part of Madden’s assholishness is just a play; for some reason he decides to bluff it that he’s a Mafia rep, and he’s cornering these FALN bombers because they’re hitting property that belongs to his “family.” It’s kind of goofy, but the terrorists, just kids, go for it. It gets even goofier when Madden meets the chief bomber in a park and bullshits the kid that he, Madden, has a sniper hidden in the distance with a bead on the kid’s head, and one wave of Madden’s hand and it’s bye-bye commie terrorist! But here’s where things get sloppy. The terrorist is really looking to branch out of the whole commie thing, and to auction off his bomb skills to the highest bidder, his most recent employer being a shady entrepreneur named Jake Pontis.

So we’ve bounced all over the place at this point – including even arbitrary bits where Madden goes out into the nighttime city to randomly kill creeps and crooks – but Lory has now settled on Jake Pontis, not the FALN, as being the main threat Madden’s up against here in Chicago. But here his bullshitting technique doesn’t work out. In the novel’s most tense sequence, Madden tries to bluff Pontis with the usual syndicate stuff, when Pontis immediately calls him out on it and declares that Madden’s just a phony, one whose time it has come to die. Then Madden finds himself in a desperate fight against a couple thugs and crooked cops, but it’s all in a pitch-black park and relayed more via the tension and fear than slam-bang action.

A recurring idea in The Vigilante is that Madden gets by on luck, but at this point it has worn a little thin. He of course manages to escape the park ambush but it’s really because the villains decide to turn on each other. At any rate it leads to another tense sequence, where Madden corners the FALN bombers, including Juana, while they’re on a job. Here Madden displays his cold roots, in particular so far as Juana is concerned. But still, something is lacking here, and I’m pretty sure it’s because Madden just doesn’t seem as driven. He’s out there killing crooks with the best of them, but there’s just no impetus for him to even be here – I mean this guy’s gone up against muggers and rapists and white slavers; why’s he suddenly taking on a big-time crook who plans to bomb his own factories for insurance payoffs?

But at least there’s a nice sleazy vibe throughout (even down to off-hand weird stuff like Pontis being described as looking “like a girl-type bitch”). Madden also finds the time to shack up with Jean, and here Lory builds up a growing relationship between the two, with Madden even wondering if he’s falling in love. It’s to Lory’s credit that, while he goes the expected route of Jean being abducted in the final pages, he doesn’t deliver the expected Death Wish-esque payoff. Instead, Madden gets to play the hero, and while it’s just him up against two thugs, it still packs more tension and entertainment than the typical “one man army” action scenes of the men’s adventure genre.

Overall I enjoyed Knock, Knock, You’re Dead, same as I have the other entries in the series, but this one seemed a bit muddled when compared to the previous books. Hopefully Madden will get back to his safe space next time. And finally, this is the first installment to feature a painted cover. Not the greatest ever, with Madden’s bizarre grimace and that massive tie he apparently borrowed from a clown. Bring back the bored-looking cover model!

The Penetrator #33: Satellite Slaughter

The Penetrator #33: Satellite Slaughter, by Lionel Derrick
September, 1979  Pinnacle Books (incorrectly states “1976”)

Despite the author’s note which proclaims that this installment of The Penetrator is based on fact, it’s clear that Mark Roberts either read about or saw the James Bond film Moonraker, which came out the same year – though given time between writing and publishing I’m wondering if it wasn’t just a coincidence after all. Regardless, this volume is very similar to the Roger Moore Bond film of that year – Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin goes into space, folks. I don’t think the Death Merchant even made it there!

As expected, there’s no pickup from the previous volume. (And another thing missing is the much-vaunted “Combat Catalog,” which appears to have already been scuttled just a few volumes after debuting.) When we reconnect with Mr. Hardin he’s sitting, bizarrely enough, in the press pen, listening to a commercial airline pilot talk about a recent UFO sighting(!). The pilot goes on to joke that perhaps this UFO is connected to the “freak weather” that’s been hammering the country, and this off-hand chance comment is the real reason why Mark is here in San Francisco.

The Penetrator is certain this freak, nonseasonal weather is the result of some chicanery on the part of some evildoers somewhere, and posthaste his wild hunch is justified – when he pays the airline pilot a visit, posing as a researcher, he finds the man murdered in his home. The killers are a pair of “Third World” types, and they’re still in the house when Mark arrives. Cue one of the novel’s few action scenes, as Mark makes quick work of one of them, but the other escapes. These hitmen are members of TWIS, a multi-ethnic spy ring made up of Communist Third World nationalities, and of course this group proves to be the main villain this time around. In other words, non-white Commies, the worst of the worst in the world of men’s adventure fiction.

Mark shuttles back and forth to DC quite a bit this time. He’s back in contact with Fed Dan Griggs, who basically hires the Penetrator to handle this threat, free to work outside the usual agency restraints. Griggs is also certain the Third World bastards have something to do with the weather, and he’s been working with some NASA folks who agree. Because it’s expected of the genre, Griggs hooks Mark up with a sexy female babe of a partner: Samantha Chase, a “rusty-haired” NASA security officer who ultimately proves to be useless to the plot, other than the expected hookup late in the game (which occurs entirely off-page!). Otherwise she just exposits on space research.

And folks, Satellite Terror is friggin’ mired in space research. Similar to the earlier installment Computer Kill in which Chet Cunningham wasted our time with endless programming code, Roberts here goes on and on about space travel and surviving in space and the like, even down to mathematical equations and calculations. This proves to take up the majority of the novel. Before that we have incredibly brief action flourishes, like Mark’s visit to a Third World agency in DC, which of course is the front for a hidden area in which leftist brochures and banners are printed for distribution to the revolutionary masses. Later Mark goes back and blows the place up. Take that, George Soros!

Early on there’s a bizarre “action scene” that’s unlike any other in the series. When tracking down leads on how these hardscrabble Third World people could even get funding for something as expensive as a space station, Mark discovers that wealthy westerners are secretly funding them. One of them is a left-wing banker, and Mark breaks into his home to grill him. Well, the guy’s entire family is there, two boys and a little girl, and Mark ends up shooting all of them with Ava, his dart gun – pretty strange indeed to see “The Penetrator” shooting an unarmed little girl with a sleeping dart. He even darts the dog! The boys put up a valiant fight to protect their dad, and Mark handcuffs them. At least he doesn’t kill their dad.

There’s also an ultimately arbitrary bit where Mark and Sam Chase go to Mozambique, again following leads. This part is developed to the point where you expect a good chunk of the book will occur here in Africa, but all told Mark is there and back within a few pages. What makes this part more interesting is it comes off like a prototype of Roberts’s later work on Soldier For Hire. Mark, under a fake name, has hired two mercenaries – each of whom are given inordinate, page-filling backgrounds – and hopes to filter out the secret TWIS base deep in the jungle. He’s begrundgingly brought along Sam. This part is kind of a waste, but it does show the merciless side of the Penetrator we don’t see very often anymore, when Mark kills two unarmed captives.

But from there it’s to deep in Texas where Mark is embroiled in some heavy-duty space training. Confirmation’s been gained that the Third World terrorists do in fact have a space station, and from there they are messing with the weather in the hopes of decimating the west. But that damn red tape still prevents any official action be taken, so it’s up to “Space Cadet Hardin” to go into space and wipe them out! Roberts tries to spice things up with the occasional action scene, like a would-be saboteur, but it comes off as bland, and the incessant exposition about space stuff doesn’t help. Roberts has done his research and by god, he wants you to know about it.

It's all cutting edge for the era, though; the space shuttle is so new it’s mostly referred to as the “Orbitter.” Mark is also trained in the newly-developed unit which will allow him to fly around on his own in space. Also here is where Mark and Sam become better acquainted; as part of a convoluted undercover scheme, Sam is posing as his wife, and Mark doesn’t waste time consumating the marriage. But as mentioned, for some inexplicable reason Roberts keeps it off page. I still feel some editorial mandate was behind the lack of sex and violence which befell The Penetrator in these later years, but hell, maybe Roberts and Cunningham just mellowed out.

Finally on page 134 Mark launches into space on the Enterprise shuttle; surprisingly, Sam doesn’t go with him. He exits on his own once they’re in orbit and pilots himself out into the depths of space, fixing his bearings on where they’ve determined the secret Third World space station to be. Roberts does not even attempt to capture the beauty of the heavens; no part where Mark looks off into the cosmos and ponders man’s inhummanity to man or other such bullshit. Nope, he just works his way through space via some calculations and figures, and that’s it. Even more incredible, Mark’s attack on the space station – that event the entire novel has been building toward – is as anticlimactic as you can get.

It’s over and done with in just a few pages as Mark uses a specially-designed “Gladiator sword” to break into the station, where he hacks up a few unarmed technicians. The villain is delivered a Moonraker sendoff, exploding as he attempts to escape. We get more space calculations and equations as Mark decides to orchestrate his own weather chicanery on the Third World itself before setting the place to blow. And honestly folks, that’s it – a quick wrapup with Mark and Sam spending some time in a Florida beachhouse.

Steel Lightning: Slash And Burn (Steel Lightning #3)

Steel Lightning: Slash And Burn, by Kevin Sherrill
January, 1992  Zebra Books

The never-titled men’s adventure series that I call “Steel Lightning” reaches its third and final volume, sporting basically the same cover as the previous volume (only with “Slash and Burn” lamely added beneath the title) and jumping over to the Zebra imprint, which at this point was the same house as previous imprint Pinnacle.

Like those earlier two books, Slash And Burn is just way too friggin’ long for the genre, coming in at 256 pages. And the helluva it is, most of it’s padding. For once again Kevin Sherrill keeps his main characters on the sideline for the duration, only occasionally livening things up with some action – but even then the action is a bit bloodless when compared to the previous volumes. A sort of blandness has settled on things, and there’s no mystery why there was never a fourth volume.

To make it worse, the opening of the book promises something a lot crazier than we actually get – we meet a teen girl as she’s tripping on Delight, the new drug that’s basically Ecstasy on steroids; pop a pill and you’re a living orgasm or something. Well this girl takes a bunch and prety soon she’s sucking and fucking away, right in the middle of a New York nightclub that’s blasting techno music (the book is very “early ‘90s”)…and then she goes into a massive seizure (one of those unfortunate Delight side-effects), a seizure so, uh, climactic that it makes her entire body seize up, so quickly and so savagely that she severs off the dicks of the guys who happen to be inside the various orifices of her body! And plus she’s dead, too, another of those unfortunate Delight side-effects.

Meanwhile hot brunette Barbara Cohen, former druggie-hooker-pornstar-legal assistant-rape victim(!), current “Street Machine” smurfette, is jogging through the hellzones of New York (it’s the pre-Guliani era, baby), hoping to lure out the latest group of reprobrates her brothers in the Street Machine urban combat unit can wipe out. She lures out some teens with bats and we’re constantly informed how clean-cut they look, how hard it is for Barb (or “Cohen,” as Sherrill arbitrarily refers to her; the dude as ever can’t stay consistent) to grasp that these kids are trying to rape and kill her. This goes on for quite a while and finally Street Machine come out to even the odds…only here does Sherrill realize that he failed to inform us that these kids are “all black,” whereas previously he seemed to be describing like a roving pack of kids just escaped from a rerun of Leave It To Beaver. 

But “sloppy writing” is the name of the game in the Steel Lightning series, so we’re prepared for this sort of thing. However we are not prepared for the endless dirge of dialog that ensues here, as the members of the team, all hoisting subguns and suited up in their black kevlar uniforms, argue over whether or not they should kill these hoodlums. Here we are quickly re-introduced to the team: there’s JD Dinatale, the gruff and unlikable leader; Moses White, aka “the black guy,” a pro football linebacker once known as “Dr. Pain;” Miguel Negron, aka “the Hispanic one,” a former jazz trumpeter or something; Joseph Vernick, the stout WWII vet; and finally Brian Benson, the wraithlike force of malevolence who was burned to a crisp in the first volume. And of course we’ve already met “Barb,” she of the checkered, hard-to-understand past.

As usual though, Sherrill refers to these characters by a host of different names in the narrative, often making it hard as friggin’ hell to understand who he is referring to. As I’ve mentioned before, “main character” Dinatale is referred to as “J.D.,” “Dinatale,” or sometimes as just “John,” and it’s even worse when new characters enter the fold. And Sherrill is very much a “you missed the earlier volume, you’re shit outta luck” kind of a writer, as he doesn’t much re-introduce any of these characters and just thrusts them at the reader, arbitrarily referring to them by a variety of names with little concern for reader comprehension.

You’d think by this point someone at the publisher would call Sherrill and tell him, “Mr. Sherrill, consistency is your friend. All this referring to your characters by multiple names in the narrative, particularly when you’ve just introduced the character and haven’t given him proper setup, is most confusing for the reader. Could you please consider just referring to your characters by one name in the narrative to avoid such confusion?” To which Sherrill would respond, “Hey, fuck you, man – I don’t need this shit. I’m Kevin Sherrill!! If I wanna refer to my characters by a hundred different names, I will! Now suck it!” “Yes, Mr. Sherrill, I’m sorry to trouble you,” the publisher would say, but he’d be talking to silence because Sherill had already hung up. At which point the publisher would call up his chief editor: “Look, we’re cancelling Steel Lighnting. I can’t take anymore of this diva Kevin Sherrill, not to mention his lack of consistency in character naming.” “Cancel Steel Lightning? Are you crazy?” The chief editor would explode. “We’ve got Sherrill all lined up for Carson – he’s gonna be one of the last guests!” To which the publisher would respond, “Listen, I’m Mr. Zebra – if I say Steel Lightning is cancelled, it’s cancelled! Now suck it!”

But anyway our heroes have lured out these creeps and now they’re all rarin’ to gun ‘em down, just clean this scum right off the face of the earth, but instead they get in a long debate about it. Just back and forth, right in front of the punks who moments ago were chasing Barb with the intent of raping and killing her. And it goes on and on…with Moses White figuring maybe the punks should get a break and Vernick agreeing, and even Barb agreeing, but Brian’s over there chomping at the bit to kill ‘em all. It’s up to Dinatale to come up with the novel idea of beating them all up to a pulp.

The book as mentioned is too bloated for its own good, so we don’t get to the main villain until later: his name is Levi Golden, he’s an old Jewish man who escaped to America from the Nazi horrors of the ‘40s, and he’s behind the Delight scheme. In a bit of continuity we also learn he was the boss of the main villain in the previous volume. But man, talk about sending mixed signals. The back cover hypes Golden as “sadistic,” but when we meet him we’re treated to an overlong backstory showing all the horrors and misery he endured…escaping Germany as a young man with his wife and coming to New York, where he found even worse horrors, his wife raped and his daughter turned a hooker-junkie and his son killed and his wife left a catatonic wreck – and I mean all this before it’s even 1947!

So are we supposed to hate this guy or feel sorry for him? At any rate in a “tribute” to The Godfather, Golden a la Don Corleone had to get tough to face toughness, thus resolved to becoming more monstrous than those who preyed upon him. He set up a mafia of other escaped Jews and now, in 1992 (and we’re told this is all in December of ’92, right before Christmas, in other words a few months after the book was published – the future!!), Levi Golden is a kingpin of crime. But he has no marks on his record, and indeed his cover is as a harmless New York tailor, and he’s so successful in this pose that when Dinatale visits his shop later in the book only Dinatale’s cop-born sixth sense tells him the harmless old man is anything but harmless.

Sherrill though just wants to bide his time for the majority of the book; we endure all kinds of padding, from more Delight-spawned deaths to arbitrary action scenes starring Golden’s top henchman, Turk. When we get back to the Street Machine themselves, it’s usually to encounter them in mundane aspects – again arguing over the justness of their cause (three volumes in!!), or like with Vernick pulling the plug on his vegetable wife, or Dinatale bullyng an old nemesis of his from the force named Reimer who is clearly set up as a dude who will attempt to take down the Street Machine in some future volume that never happened.

While Slash And Burn is padded to the extreme, to Sherrill’s credit he writes as if it’s ten years earlier and not 1992; which is to say, the novel’s as un-PC as one could demand from the genre. This is mostly relayed via dialog, in particular from Dinatale; for example there’s a part early on where Maitland, the millionaire who secretly funds Street Machine, tells Dinatale that his team has picked up the notoriety of Batman and Robin in the underworld. To which Dinatale gruffly responds: “Two flaming queens if there were ever any.”

Speaking of sleazy stuff, the moment you’ve waited for has finally arrived, friends – Dinatale and Barb do it. As we’ll recall, our former hooker-pornstar-rape victim-crook asskicker has been doubting if she’s truly a lesbian; the thought of a man touching her makes her flesh crawl, after the gang-rape she endured in the first volume…any man, that is, except for Dinatale. As we learned last time Barb was wondering if she wanted to say to hell with it and do the guy – this time, after a failed hit attempt on Dinatale and Barb by Turk, the two repair to Metro Meats, ie the towering Street Machine headquarters, and clean up each other’s wounds before giving in to temptation. Sherrill really stretches this way out, long-simmer to the max, but after lots of talk, including the two smelling each other (seriously!), when they finally get to the down and dirty screwin’ Sherrill cuts away: “It went on like that for hours.”

After this Barb is now “the leader’s woman,” but nothing much else plays out on this subplot. It’s made clear though that it’s true love between the two and they would’ve remained an item in future installments. And the others othe team take it all in quite pragmatically, which is to say there are no ripples caused. I guess the only change is the two now worry over each other in the action scenes – which, finally, we get to in the final quarter. So in that way Slash And Burn is identical in its construct to the previous two volumes: an opening action scene, lots of padding, and then a final harried climactic action scene. Gee, I wonder if the fourth volume would’ve followed the same path…?

And the big finale is more goofy than anything: Golden’s secret Delight-manufacturing location is a fortress of a building deep in Chinatown, which we are informed is a no-man’s land along the lines of Beirut or something – such a no man’s land that Dinatale tells his troops they can go in with guns blasting, no silencers needed this time. And hell let’s bring a couple LAW rocket launchers along, too! But just when it goes down it all gets super ridiculous…Moses’s knee goes out on him due to an injury he’s been dealing with the entire book, and his massive frame crashes into the garbage the team’s hiding in, alerting Golden, Turk, and their entourage that it’s an ambush. And meanwhile Barb, apropos of nothing, goes into a seizure and starts freaking out!

Golden doesn’t have like an army or anything, so for the most part it’s just the Street Machine hiding in refuse and springing up to fire off a shot or two. We do get just a bit of gun-porn, not as much as previous volumes though, and as mentioned the gore is much toned down. In fact it’s all so bland I can’t even remember if Golden is given a big sendoff. About all I remember is all this occurs on Christmas Eve, and the book ends with a lame “Bah, humbug” joke from Brian Benson, and that’s all she wrote for the Steel Lightning series.

I recall the thrill I experienced when I discovered this series a few years ago, trawling Amazon for anything published by Pinnacle in the latter ‘80s, in particular any obscure men’s adventure books. I remember seeing “Midnight Lightning” listed, with no details provided, and then researching further and realizing it was indeed a men’s adventure novel – and that there were two more volumes! But sadly the series just never amounted to much, and my only suspicion is that Sherrill was given poor direction by the publisher…the books are always promising to go all-out, but never quite do, as if the publisher wanted a “real” novel, and not just a crazy action spectacle.

Stryker #2: Cop-Kill

Stryker #2: Cop-Kill, by William Crawford
February, 1974  Pinnacle Books

As Marty McKee so succinctly put it, in this second volume of Stryker our titular ex-cop hero “busts some fuckers up.” William Crawford once again excels in sadism and hardcore violence along the lines of Gannon, but as ever lessens the impact with arbitrary digressions and character backstories. In many ways, Cop-Kill is almost a rewrite of Crawford’s earlier The Chinese Connection; the stories share many similarities.

It's around a year after the first volume, and Colin Stryker’s gotten lean and mean from riding horses and working all day on a farm or something. But he gets word that Sapper Kell, the killer who took out his wife and blinded and crippled his daughter – and humorously enough the daughter once again spends the entirety of the novel off-page, thus robbing any sort of dramatic impact – has himself been killed in prison. This upsets Stryker greatly, as he wanted Sapper to be raped every day in prison by “spade lifers.” Have I mentioned before that Crawford’s heroes are hard, mean bastards with little of the niceties of today?

So begins Stryker’s systematic search for whoever put the hit on Sapper, a search that entails the usual Crawford sadism and Crawford plot detours. Once again the dude appears unsure how to write a novel – no matter how minor a character introduced, we get elaborate background story about him or her, most of it ultimately having nothing whatsoever to do with the novel. As Marty also noted in his review, this sloppiness extends to plot construction – the character who pulled the hit on Sapper, Johnny Cool, is elaborately built up, only to be abruptly killed off-page, never even meeting Stryker. Meanwhile Stryker spends pages beating the shit out of the guy who killed Johnny; apparently it never occurred to Crawford to combine these two characters into one.

Stryker was once a decorated cop in New Mexico, but now finds that he is a “leper” when trying to talk to his fellow brothers in blue; cops go out of their way to avoid him. As mentioned before Crawford himself was a cop so he brings a lot of realism to these scenes. Stryker, who spends the majority of the text in Phoenix, keeps in frequent phone contact with his old partner Chino Bellon back in New Mexico. We also get arbitrary detours to other cop-world characters, like this page-filling bit about the FBI agent assigned to secretly monitor Stryker’s mom in case Stryker tries to contact her, given how Stryker breaks a bunch of laws in his gradual assault upon the mob and is soon wanted by the Feds.

Another missed opportunity is the character of Vic Antro, aka Vic Cave (no relation to Nick Cave, I assume), the Phoenix mobster who ordered the hit on Kell, and later the hit on Johnny Cool, ie Kell’s killer. He too is excessively built up only to be dispatched off-page, with Cave and Stryker never even meeting face-to-face. Rather, Stryker spends the majority of the novel tracking down, capturing, and torturing various Cave flunkies. But this isn’t “dark comedy” torture like in The Marksman. This is just plain dark, similar to Crawford’s other novels, in particular The Chinese Connection, with stuff like Stryker savagely stomping a guy and then nearly drowning him in a bathtub.

There’s a bit more action this time around, like an extended scene where Stryker takes out a car full of thugs who come after him – featuring a memorable hardcore bit where Stryker, knowing he’s being followed on a dark road, parks his car with the lights off in the middle of the road so that they ram right into it when they race around the blind curve. From these thugs Stryker gets some grenades and AR-15 assault rifles. These weapons are later used in an assault on a private runway, to take out Cave’s plane as it prepares for takeoff, but the mob boss isn’t on it.

Another added element this time is sex – Stryker gets laid, folks. This is courtesy Kitty, a hotbod teen(?) who was forced into prostitution by Antro’s thugs due to her heroin addiction or somesuch. I had a hard time understanding if she was still 17 or older now; Crawford isn’t very giving with the nitty-gritty details. It would appear so, as Kitty sleeps with the mobsters on demand due to incriminating photos she’s afraid will be turned over to her parents. Yet Crawford writes the character as if she’s in her 20s, with the maturity of an adult. Anyway she offers herself to Stryker after he comes through on his offer of giving her the photo negatives (which he got on one of his torture raids), so that she no longer has to worry about being blackmailed. “I know it’s been used and abused, but you’re welcome to what’s left,” she says, offering up her nude body. Stryker after a bit of uncertainty complies, leading to an off-page sex scene; Crawford, for all his sleaziness (Stryker for example has taken to calling his enemies “big cunt” this time around), always refrains from writing actual sexual material.

But otherwise the sleaze is on the level of Bronson: Blind Rage; the sick bastards Stryker is up against are ultra-creeps of the most deviant sort. In his vengeance-quest Styrker uncovers a sort of sexual slavery ring – complete with evidence of the women being tortured and mutilated as punishment – as well as a friggin’ baby-selling scheme, one that’s run by a vice cop at that. This would be Bowman, a big bad dude – “by far the toughest” man Stryker has ever fought – who is another of those minor characters who hijacks the narrative for several pages, given an overdone backstory of several pages. While Stryker is taking on this guy in a knockdown, dragout fight in a steam room – the same place where Stryker tossed the slave-ring runner onto burning rocks, leaving him there to die so that his sizzling corpse makes everyone puke – another Antro thug is on his way to New Mexico to kill Chino Bellon.

This elicits Stryker’s last run of vengeance; Crawford skillfully employs Stryker’s Scottish heritage, how his MaGregor clan was the very one ordered to be killed “by fire and sword” by the Queen. The finale features Stryker carrying out his vengeance by those very means: he sets a fire, traps his prey, and ends up decapitating him with a machete. It’s another grueling bit of darkviolence; Crawford should’ve garned a loyal following of readers who were into hardcore, no punches pulled violence, but it looks like he faded into obscurity, his final works turned out in a variety of pseudonyms for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. My assumption is he died in the late ‘70s, as there’s nothing by him I can find later than that.

The finale sees a burned-out Stryker heading to his mother’s place for some rest…apparently his daughter is there as well, though once again we’re only told about her. Stryker has taken out everyone behind the murder of his wife and friends, but has come upon the realization that perhaps he’s been put on earth to do this sort of thing – take out sick bastards. In particular he’s riled up by those photos of tortured and beaten women he found; he’s since discovered that many of the women were murdered. He’s certain there are other such sex-slavery rings out there, and by god he’s gonna smash ‘em. I’ll try to get to the next installment a lot sooner than I got to this one.

The Executioner #10: Caribbean Kill

The Executioner #10: Caribbean Kill, by Don Pendleton
February, 1972  Pinnacle Books

Perhaps best read immediately after the previous volume, Caribbean Kill finds Mack “The Executioner” Bolan landing in Puerto Rico just a few hours after escaping from the mob in Las Vegas. And the events in this book play out over two or three days, meaning that the two volumes comprise less than a week of Bolan’s hectic mob-busting life.

His plane ride is courtesy Jack Grimaldi, ‘Nam pilot turned Mafia courier; when I first read this series in the ‘80s, when Gold Eagle was publishing it, I never got a good grasp on who Grimaldi was – he just seemed to be some dude who sporadically appeared and flew Bolan around. But here he gets a bit of the narrative; he’s not a true Mafioso, just a guy back from ‘Nam who couldn’t land a job and ended up flying mobsters around to pay the bills. But he doesn’t carry a gun and doesn’t engage in mob antics, and Pendleton skillfully builds up and plays out the growing rapport between Bolan and him.

In fact, it’s the Bolan-Grimaldi relationship that forms the emotional core of Caribbean Kill, even though this is one of the rare installments in which Bolan gets laid. This comes courtesy a hotbod Latina cop who not only reminds the reader of the Latina babe in #4: Miami Massacre but reminds Bolan of her, too. He meets her in one of those men’s adventure moments that are only possible in this genre, and one of the reasons I love it – during an assault of the local mafia hardsite which Bolan launches immediately upon his arrival in Puerto Rico. Bear in mind, the dude’s fresh from an attack just a few hours before on the Vegas mob, and he hasn’t slept in “weeks.”

Bolan makes Grimaldi jump out over the water and ditches the plane, trying to fool the mobsters here at the Glass Bay hardsite that he’s killed in the crash. Then he takes to the jungle and engages them in a running battle. Bolan is again solely armed with the Beretta pistol he’s carried since #5: Continental Contract. Speaking of that earlier volume, we have here the return of a minor character: Tony Lavagni, a soldier in the mob army Bolan hit there in France, who has since been promoted to lieutenant and now runs this site in Puerto Rico. True to series template, we get a lot of scenes from Tony’s perspective as he and his men try to hunt and finally kill “that Bolan bastard.”

As for Bolan himself, he’s full-on Superman now, despite Pendleton’s many claims that Bolan is just a regular guy. Particularly when it comes to the scenes from Grimaldi’s perspective; the pilot lives in terror of the “big guy in black” (Bolan as ever in his commando “blacksuit”), and there are many humorous moments where Bolan will seemingly materialize out of the shadows, usually when Grimaldi happens to be thinking about him. Otherwise Bolan, despite only having a Beretta with a few clips, successfully manages to elude and turn the tables on the superior Mafia forces which hunt him through the jungle. This sequence is the highlight of Caribbean Kill, but only comprises the first quarter or so.

It's here that Bolan “meets cute” the lady mentioned above; having appropriated a jeep, Bolan’s making a successful escape when he catches sight of a hotstuff brunette babe being hauled into a building on the hardsite. He goes with his gut and postpones his escape long enough to blow away the goons who were in the process of beating her up inside. She turns out to be an undercover cop named Evita Aguilar who has been in Glass Bay for a few months, sleeping with the boss as part of the job – and Bolan doesn’t mind this, we’re informed, as he’s aware that in this dirty war the usual codes of morality no longer apply.

Pendleton is very good at making Bolan’s life seem all exciting and appealing to the (largely) male readership, then he has to go and gut the fantasy with various scenes of Bolan belying his bloody fate and envying people with normal lives. Such is the brief case of the young couple Evita has them hide out with; a young Puerto Rican and his pregnant wife. These parts are meant to humanize Bolan, yet at the same time they detract from the escapism of the series and genre, which I guess is the point. Anyway he quickly brushes off any such notions of quitting, as does Evita; Pendleton establishes that the two are of a same mind, natural born warriors who not only couldn’t stop fighting but ultimately have no desire to.

This leads to the genre-mandatory boffing which Pendleton usually denies us; while there are zero sleazy details, the soap operatic dialog Bolan and Evita trade pre-shag is jaw-droppingly goofy (“Find me, Mack! Find me!”) and would probably even be rejected by Harlequin Books (later owners of the series, incidentally). Simply put, no human beings on earth speak like this, at least (or perhaps especially) before having sex with one another. But it occurs to me that goofy pre-sex dialog is sort of a Pendleton staple; The Godmakers, as I recall, is filled with it.

All this led me to the realization that, in the men’s adventure field, it’s generally the woman who initiates sex, as is the case here. If you think about it, rarely if ever do we see the hero put the moves on some babe; it’s usually the hotstuff woman he’s saved or otherwise encountered in his action-heroing who eventually comes to him and offers up the goods. Now that I think of it, Len Levinson stands mostly alone in that he does feature men’s adventure protagonists who try to put the moves on women – and sometimes fail spectacularly, as is the case with Butler. But I guess this “woman making the first move” motif is part and parcel of the escapist nature of the genre; I mean, I personally can only think of a couple dozen women who have offered themselves to me in the past few weeks.

Anyway I digress. The two go at it, off-page as usual, and post-shag Bolan discovers a group of thugs infiltrating the area. This features a memorable bit where Bolan deduces, solely on a hunch, that these guys are not in fact cops; it’s all due to how one of them reacts when Bolan slips out of the shadows and puts a gun on his back. Bolan figures the guy couldn’t be a police officer, given his jumpy reaction, and commences massacring, but in truth the dude could just be jumpy. But again I digress. And this is pretty much it for Evita and Bolan, by the way; Bolan retains the services of Grimaldi and gets a flight to Haiti.

In one of the more arbitrary late-hour subplots I’ve yet encountered in the series, Evita abruptly tells Bolan about a local Mafia bigwig: “Sir Edward,” one of those new school executive types in the mob who operates out of nearby Haiti. Bolan, figuring providence has placed him here for some reason, decides he’ll fly on over and kill the bastard. Why not? This does bring Grimaldi back into the fold, though, and features one of those humorous encounters between the two. Also here Pendleton brings Grimaldi to life, and you learn he isn’t just a dumb Mafia pilot, and one gets the impression Pendleton’s planned this reveal all along, that he now understands this series might be running for a long time and he’s busy setting up recurring characters.

Given that we’re already in the final pages when all this goes down, the hit on Sir Edward is over and done with rather quickly. Bolan, again in blacksuit, sneaks in and takes out a few guards and then goes about that “role camoflauge” stuff he carries out practically every volume; he causes a blackout in the villa and bullies his way through the mob enforcers, pretending to be a bigshot trying to retain order in the sudden chaos. It’s not a grand finale, but a memorable one, as Bolan lives up to his “executioner” title, this time bluntly telling his prey that he is here to execute him. A nice, chilling reminder of how coldblooded our hero can be in his quest to destroy the Mafia.

We get a brief goodbye for Evita, who waves to Bolan from a boat as he flies over her, Grimaldi once again escorting him, but who knows if we’ll ever see her again. As for Bolan, he ends Caribbean Kill determined to at least take a day or two off before continuing with his war. Overall I enjoyed this one, maybe a bit more than its predecessor, but the series has definitely taken on a template at this point, and I’m missing the slam-bang violence and action of such masterful volumes as #7: Nightmare In New York.

I did some research and it appears that many years later, after the series went over to Gold Eagle and was handled by various ghostwriters, Stephen Mertz brought Evita back, in #48: The Libya Connection – just long enough to torture and kill her. Jeez, Stephen, thanks a lot!!

The Penetrator #32: Showbiz Wipeout

The Penetrator #32: Showbiz Wipeout, by Lionel Derrick
July, 1979  Pinnacle Books

After a couple misfires The Penetrator sort of gets back on track, though make no mistake this is a greatly watered-down take on the character, particularly when compared to the merciless incarnation of the earliest volumes. It was Chet Cunningham who gave us that merciless Penetrator (wow that just sounds terrible, doesn’t it), which makes it all the more humorous that in this one Cunningham has Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin practically walking on eggshells to only kill those who truly deserve it.

But at least this one rises a bit out of the torpor which seems to have settled over the series. That being said, Showbiz Wipeout is more akin to a private eye yarn, as Mark suddenly becomes all fired up about a potential creative agency monopoly in Hollywood – clearly the authors used this series to write about whatever their current fancy happened to be. Why this would be of any concern to the Penetrator is something the reader is encouraged not to think about. Even more goofily, Mark is appraised of the situation via the “bulletin board” in his Stronghold, ie the converted mine which serves as Penetrator HQ.

What really has Mark interested is all the random deaths and injuries going on in Hollywood; the book opens on an extended sequence of various notables either being killed, beaten, or swindled by thugs who work for Global Talent Agency. The goal of course is all the Hollywood bigshots under one roof, and the mysterious head of GTA will stop at nothing to achieve his goal. Humorously the LAPD doesn’t even appear to exist, and these murders – including even a staged car crash, as depicted on the cover – are carried out with little concern about running afoul of the law. 

Cunningham fully commits himself to his own goofiness; not only is the Penetrator suddenly interested in this Hollywood nonsense, but he also just happens to have an old college buddy who now runs a talent agency! This is Joey Larson, Mark’s old frat buddy. Mark calls him up, drives over to Los Angeles, and discovers that Joey is stressed out because he too is being hassled by GTA. They want ownership of Joey’s one star client, who just happens to have been the victim of the car crash mentioned above. GTA is also threatening Joey’s life, so Mark puts him up in a motel and insists that he hide there.

Mark poses as “Lance Lansing,” up and coming actor with regional theater exeperience, his headshot and resume prepared by Professor Haskins back at the Stronghold. He gets an interview at GTA, coming off like an ass to the head agent there, a nebbish chump with a “honkey afro.” Mark sneers at the lowball offer he’s given, puts down the agent, and then beats the shit out of the two thugs the agent calls in. Mark also ingratiates himself into the orbit of Lorna Luna, a onetime box-office draw but now “old” at 45. She takes a shine to hunky “Lance” at the party she holds in her mansion, though Cunningham doesn’t have Mark exploit it – and also we get a few random mentions that Mark is only 27 or so, which doesn’t seem right to me. The series has appeared to occur in a sort of real time, ie the first volume was in ’73, seven years before this one, and periodically we’re reminded of the passage of time in various installments…so are we to believe Mark Hardin was only 20 years old in that first one?

Anyway, while Mark passes on Lorna Luna, he does become involved with plucky private eye Angelina Perez, aka “Angie,” a hotstuff Latina who carries a piece in her purse and who was herself hired to look into GTA. Mark becomes so smitten with Angie, in fact, that he occasionally wonders if he should let her know he’s the Penetrator and make her his partner! The veteran Penetrator reader can’t help but wonder why Mark never felt this way about his casual girlfriend, Joana Tabler, who is basically the same as Angie, she too being a gun-toting agent of sorts. Now that I think of it, Joana hasn’t been seen much in recent installments, so maybe Cunningham is paving the way for a new casual girlfriend for our hero. Hell, Mark even ends up not having sex with her, so as not to ruin any potential for an actual romance in the future or something.

Action is infrequent, again keeping with the pseudo private eye vibe of the novel; Mark’s kills are only few, and his first victim is the GTA thug who murdered the girl in the car wreck at the start of the book. Otherwise Mark mostly makes use of dart gun Ava, which per the norm these days is only loaded with knockout doses. The first big action scene comes at an intended trap; the mysterious leader of GTA has figured out that the Penetrator is on the scene, thanks to those handy blue flint arrowheads he always leaves behind, and sets up a “jiggle girl” event which is really just a ruse to lure out the Penetrator. A “jiggle girl” is a new busty actress the studios show off for reporters; the event, which Mark himself realizes is a trap, takes place on the Universal Studios lot and features actors dressed up like Keystone Cops (as shown on the cover – again, the cover is faithful to actual events in the novel).

Again Mark mostly does his fighting with Ava or a .45 automatic. The Keystone Cops turn out to be more GTA thugs, and one of them almost gets the better of the Penetrator, pinning him down during a long chase through some empty studio lots. Here Angie comes to the rescue, blasting away with that gun in her purse, and again there is the blatant disregard for reality as one would normally expect in a Chet Cunningham novel. After the firefight, our heroes basically just drive off and grab a bite to eat. Angie has been digging around off-page, trying to determine the paper trail that will lead to who ultimately owns GTA: we readers learn it is a producer named Jeffrey Scott Duncan who was blacklisted years before, and now aims to get the ultimate revenge on Hollywood by taking control of all the major stars.

The climax takes place at a costume ball in an old villa that’s recently been used for a horror film. Duncan has rigged the place with various booby traps, again expecting the Penetrator will show. He does, dressed as Zorro; Angie goes as a “harem girl.” But by this point Duncan doesn’t have any goons left, so rather than the typical action denoument, we instead have this “tense” bit that goes on and on where Duncan, suddenly acting crazy, reveals that he has a bomb on the premises and intends to blow everyone up as his final act of revenge. Or something. Actually the part with the bomb reveal is kind of funny in a dumb way because Duncan straight-up tells everyone it’s a bomb and they’re going to die, but everyone thinks it’s part of an elaborate act, given that the entire grounds is done up with robotic actors and taped recordings of arguments, sex scenes, and other gimmicks.

The Penetrator again fails to actually kill anyone; Duncan’s fate is so ridiculous I had to read it twice to ensure I hadn’t missed something. (Spoiler alert – the dude’s eaten off-page by a tiger!!) Cunningham winds up the tale with Mark again puzzling over his growing feelings for Angie, wondering if he’ll ever give up the Penetrating life some day and get hitched – or maybe even bring on a partner. But he tells Angie so long and heads off for his next mission, which hopefully will be a bit more fun than this one. I mean, Showbiz Wipeout isn’t terrible – it’s probably the best we can expect from the series at this point – but it replaces the gory violence of the early volumes with a sort of goofy surrealism. Personally I miss the gory violence.

The Mistress Book

The Mistress Book, by Jim Deane
August, 1972  Pinnacle Books

Check it out, everyone: a book on the “fine art of picking up girls” by the guy who wrote the boob-obsessed Decoy series! I’ve wanted to read The Mistress Book for a while, as it promised to be one of those sleazy ‘70s “sex guides” I enjoy so much. One word of warning, though: the book really has nothing at all to do with “mistresses,” and in fact I’d wager that Pinnacle Books came up with this title, as Deane’s book is not actually a guide for married men to score a little extra on the side.

Rather, this is your basic average “how to meet chicks” book; Deane defines a “mistress” as “any girl who balls you regularly.” And Deane would be the expert on such things, as per his statements at the start of the book he’s “had several hundred women in the past twenty or so years.” Describing himself as 40 years old, “relatively old” but “highly sexual,” Deane further states that he’s not even the most handsome guy on the planet, and at one point implies he’s balding to boot. He’s not fat, though: one of the central edicts of The Mistress Book for guys who want to pick up chicks is that “YOU MUST NOT BE FAT,” written in capital letters and everything.

Deane’s goal is to share his experience as a “superior cocksman” so that others may reap the benefits of the things he’s learned in his many conquests. Not that he’s hanging up his hat or anything. Deane, who reminds us throughout that he’s never been married and never plans to be, intends to keep picking up the chicks: “I figure I have at least another thirty good years of sexing ahead of me.” His goal is also to have guys help guys, like a network of “cocksmen;” for example, if you meet a woman who is one of those types who just use guys and never give any sort of sexual reward, it’s your duty to drop her cold – and warn every other guy you know about her.

Speaking of types, this proves to be one of the main subjects at the start of the book. Deane has broken women down to a variety of types – like the “always on the go” girl, ie the type who is always jetsetting around with a different guy or group of people. Deane advises to avoid this type of girl like the plague, as more than likely she isn’t screwing any of those guys and is just using them for a free ride. We’re also informed that quiet-natured girls usually turn out to be tigers in bed, at least the ones Deane has known, and he also tells us that career-oriented women usually make for great lays, too, particularly because they “think like men” in regards to business, thus this viewpoint extends to their sexual activities. Deane also treats us to a three-page breakdown of statitics pertaining to the women he’s banged over the years – the number of “stewardesses” (by far his favorite playmates on earth), models, teachers, married women, etc.

Deane then goes on to let the would-be “cocksmen” out there know which cities around the world are the best – and worst – spots for picking up chicks. It struck a chord with me when he listed Dallas, and Texas in general, as one of the latter – bad flashbacks to my own experiences in that regard. I mean, I’m no Jim Deane, but I dated various girls prior to my move to Dallas…where I might’ve just as well been invisible, so far as the local ladies were concerned. As Deane notes, Texan women seem to only like Texan men. He states that he struck out constantly down here, and advises “cocksmen” to go elsewhere in their pursuits, unless of course they’re Texans. I mean consider it – I moved to Texas and my wife is from Malaysia! Actually most of the people I know are transplants (Dallas has changed drastically since the era in which Deane wrote his book)…in fact, one of the few real Texans I know is my son!! (It threw me for a loop when I got his social security card and the letter with it said, “Congratulations on your little Texan…”)

But how does one pick up chicks, exactly? Deane advises that the prospective cocksman must be an “expert” in something, as girls are drawn to men who give off an aura of confidence and knowledge. Deane further states that women really get off on guys who make them think – even if it’s some ultra-liberal women’s libber you’re pissing off with your “reactionary” views (the book by the way is filled with leftist bashing). Deane also suggets that you listen a lot, and try to understand the woman in question. Admitedly a lot of this stuff sounds kind of heartless – basically Deane tells you to make the gal think you are on the same wavelength as her, or at least are as devoted to your own causes as she is to hers, so you can ultimately bang her and then move on to the next conquest.

In the style of these sleazy how-to books of the day, The Mistress Book features periodic ruminations on the author’s part regarding past lays. For example we learn of a foreign babe who “subtly” let lucky boy Deane know she was sexually interested in him; she excused herself to the restroom, and when she came back she was clearly no longer wearing a bra beneath her sweater, showing off her “extraordinary breasts” for Deane’s viewing enjoyment. Oh and she was a fantastic lay, of course – Deane will often tell us how so and so of a gal just screwed him phenomenally, though he never gets into details.

When it comes to making the first steps in picking up these chicks, Deane advises to just ask for their phone number – and that’s it. Don’t offer to take them out, even for coffee, or to say something like, “I have an extra ticket for a show/game/etc; want to come along?” Deane makes the valid point that the chick might just take advantage of this offer to get a free meal or night on the town, while she in fact has no sexual interest in you. Deane rather advises to just call her, that’s it, and play it from there. 

But when it comes to the banging – well, how can you tell if the chick you’ve picked up is into it? No worries, as Deane rolls out a few tidbits he’s learned in this regard, though he stresses that it’s mostly a “hunch” sort of thing that he can’t put into words. But say you do get the gal into bed…what then??? No worries again, as Deane next doles out some sex tips, including some positions he favors. This part I admit was a bit off-putting…I mean the guy who wrote Decoy is suddenly instructing you how to orally please a gal! Later he also advises how you can nicely get rid of them, once you’ve banged them to your heart’s content; a prime way to do so, Deane says, is to introduce the gal to some of your swinger friends. “Pay her forward,” I guess you could say.

There are always going to be setbacks, though; Deane relates the story of the one woman he fell in love with, the one he actually planned to marry. She ended up hurting him badly, and Deane got revenge by stranding her at an airport, fooling her into thinking they’d take a vacation together – he says she called him countless times afterwards, but Deane ignored her. “Women need to be dumped on,” Deane informs us – if you treat them like princesses, as he did this particular gal, they’ll take advantage of you. But if you are emotionless with them, they will come running to you. From this Deane learned to never show his hand again – now, if he feels very strongly about a certain girl, he treats her the same as any other girl he happens to be casually banging.

For that matter, Deane states that, before sex, the woman has the power. But afterwards, the man has the power. This is to say the girl can hold off the man from what he wants, but once she’s given it to him, the man is in the dominant position. Because, having gotten to this point, the girl has let down her defenses and clearly wants to be with the man. So it’s up to you as a superior cocksman to keep her in line – Deane says the main reason he broke it off with the girl above was because he couldn’t go back to her and still keep his dignity; he says he will only go so far in allowing a woman to take advantage of him. So clearly the dude has never been married.

Speaking of which, Deane provides a chapter for the married men out there, consulting a few of his married pals: “all three of these guys are superior cocksmen, each with sexual production well into three figures.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but mostly we get recaps from a few of these dudes on the extracurricular banging they’ve accomplished. Mostly we are told how to avoid a wife’s suspicions; Deane stresses that you must never give out your address and phone number, as it will only lead to trouble. He actually repeats this a few times, in all caps. Here we get the sole part in the book that actually is about “mistresses,” at least in the classical sense – Deane talks about how a wealthy man might want to provide room and board for his mistress, as in olden times, but says this sort of thing isn’t much necessary anymore. You know, just bang ‘em wherever.

The book closes out with a few odds and ends, like one humdinger of an admission on Deane’s part that he once paid a seventeen year old girl a hundred dollars to have sex(!). This was at a resort in Aspen and the girl was cock-teasing him, and when Deane later overheard that she was sorely in need of some money, he capitalized on it – offering her a hundred bucks in exchange for “you know what.” This is what Deane calls “the fake prostitute ploy.” (She too was a phenomenal lay, he informs us.) However, Deane advises against ploys to get chicks in bed; despite which, he still outlines a few ideas, like setting up a phony “modeling agency” and banging all the would-be models who come to the casting call; because, Deane assures us from personal experience, models bang would-be employers at casting calls.

Oh, and a special thanks to Amazon reviewer Observer, who recently posted a review of Deane’s 1974 followup, The Fine Art Of Picking Up Girls. He confirms what I suspected in my review of Decoy #1, that this 1974 Pinnacle paperback is a retitled reprint of The Mistress Book, with just a little new stuff. And that appears to be all Deane published, at least under this name – he states in this book that he’s authored countless articles, particularly in sports magazines, and he even implies that he was the ghostwriter of a well-known sex manual. Otherwise “Jim Deane” disappeared from the paperback world at this point; here’s hoping he went on to enjoy those “thirty good years of sexing.”

But who knows, maybe there’s an 86 year-old Jim Deane still out there, practicing the fine art of picking up girls…

Bonus note: The front cover was “designed” by Tony “Mondo” Destefano, who around this time was also doing the covers for Pinnacle’s Richard Blade reprints.