Super Cop Joe Blaze #1: The Big Payoff

Super Cop Joe Blaze #1: The Big Payoff, by Robert Novak
February, 1974  Belmont Tower Books

I forgot that I even had this first volume of  Super Cop Joe Blaze. A little over three years ago I read the third one, which was by Len Levinson, and three years before that I read  the second volume, which was by some unknown author. It’s been too long since I read that one, so I can’t say if The Big Payoff is courtesy the same author. It seems to be, at least judging from what I wrote about the second volume. The same style is here, a rather bland police procedural only livened up when it comes to the exploitative description of the mauled female corpses detective Joe Blaze encounters in the line of duty.

First though a pedantic note – I think this is the novel I was confusing Trouble Is My Business with. In my review of that one I mentioned I had been under the impression it was about a “knife-wielding sex killer,” and figured that I “must’ve confused it with some other sleazy ‘70s cop novel.” As I read the lurid cover slugline of The Big Payoff (“The girl had been pretty before a sex killer worked her over with a knife”), I had the belated realization that this was the book I’d been thinking of when I read Trouble Is My Business back in 2013. How sad that I would remember something so trivial seven years later, but that’s just how my mind works. Anyway the editor of The Big Payoff (aka Peter McCurtin) liked that “sex killer” line so much it’s also repeated on the back cover.

And as with The Concrete Cage this novel is truly lurid when it comes to the copious descriptions of murdered and violated female bodies. In this regard I suspect it probably was the same author. Whoever it is has a pretty humdrum narrative style, with a lot of pages padded with incidental dialog and arbitrary plot digressions. Unlike The Concrete Cage, there are also random action scenes, just stupid stuff clearly put there to actually have something happen, like when Blaze goes into a bar to ask some questions and two guys storm in and try to knock the place over. The author was likely one of the Belmont Tower/Leisure regulars, and if I had to guess I’d say it might have been J.C. Conaway – who I still think was the mystery author of The Savage Women.

The novel opens with a feel for cop-world realism, a la William Crawford; we meet Joe Blaze while he’s on the take, picking up his illicit pay. We’re bluntly informed that some cops “just live with” being on the pad, and Blaze is one of those cops. Only later in the novel will we learn that he’s using the money for vaguely Robin Hood-esque purposes. This serves up a subplot which eventually ties into the main plot; Blaze goes to his precinct, where he’s told by his boss, Lt. Danny Coogan, that one of Blaze’s pad, a hooker named Doris, has given some guy at the U.N. the clap and needs to be brought in for questioning. Coogan advises Blaze to personally handle it, given that she pays Blaze for protection thus could get pissed off to suddenly find herself arrested…and turn Blaze in for collecting bogus “protection” pay from her.

Also appearing is Blaze’s partner, Ed Nuthall; both he and Coogan were also in The Concrete Cage, which might be another indication it’s by the same author. And unlike Nelson De Mille’s Ryker, Blaze has a friendly rapport with his colleagues, even referring to the Lt. as “Danny” in their frequent dialog exchanges. Indeed, Coogan is aware of Blaze’s pad, even though he isn’t supposed to be, given that it’s illegal and all, and goes out of his way to protect him. As for Nuthall, he doesn’t do much to gain the reader’s awareness, and thinking back on the book I can’t even recall a single thing he does. For the most part, Coogan acts more as Blaze’s partner, the one who brainstorms the case with him.

I almost thought some stuff had been cut out of the text, because Coogan tells Blaze to round up Doris at the bottom of one page, then at the top of the very next page Blaze is suddenly at an upscale apartment building on 69th Street…and finds a bunch of patrol cars outside of it…and goes in to investigate the murder scene within! And the murdered young lady is not Doris, and Doris isn’t even mentioned for several more pages, so the reader is really confused for a while…because it gradually develops that, as coincidental as can be, some other woman has been killed in Doris’s building and Blaze just takes over the case, completely forgetting that his original task here was to collect Doris. This will have repercussions later.

Here we have the first of what will be a few murdered young women, Blaze casually inspecting the mutilated and no doubt raped corpse, the killer using a knife to slash the poor young girl’s throat. Here’s where it detours from the other cheap Belmont/Leisure cop thrillers, because Blaze doesn’t go by the book and we don’t just get a dry procedural. First he tracks down a notorious pimp who works 69th Street, cornering him in a subway station on 42nd Street, and proceeds to beat the shit out of him for info. Immediately after this Blaze is almost mugged, and proceeds to beat the shit out of his would-be mugger. This is the first of the random action scenes Novak will use to spruce up the otherwise-boring narrative.

Blaze isn’t done slapping people around. From the pimp he learns of a moving van that was outside the building on 69th Street before the murder. Before Blaze can research there’s another body found, in an apartment building on East 51st between Lexington and Third. After viewing the latest mauled female corpse (in which the girl’s eye has popped out, nearly causing Coogan to barf), Blaze finds out one of the tenants discovered the body…and starts slapping the witness around for info. But it’s okay, because the guy’s a heroin addict and was in the process of preparing a fix. Getting into it, Blaze also slaps around the guy’s girlfriend and, apropos of nothing, says she might be the next victim of the mysterious killer! He gets more info from them on the possible perpetrator of the crimes.

“Talking, talking talking – half [Blaze’s] time seemed to be wasted in talking,” rants the narrative, and the reader can only respond, “No shit!” There’s too much talking in The Big Payoff. Blaze visits crime scenes, engages witnesses in interminable conversations. He goes back to the precinct, engages Coogan in interminable conversations. And things only pick up when there’s an arbitary action scene, like when Blaze – at the expense of more pages-filling dialog – gets a lead on the moving van at the scene of the kills, and finds it abandoned in the city. He goes into a nearby bar to see if anyone inside glimpsed the driver of the van…only for a black guy and a Hispanic guy to storm in with guns drawn and attempt to rob the bar. Blaze pulls his service .38 and takes them both down, shooting one in the leg and the other in the gut, getting winged in the shoulder in the process.

This serves to make Blaze a hero, with his story in the paper and the other cops at the precinct applauding him. It also serves to protect him from the shoe that’s about to drop; Doris, the whore Blaze was supposed to round up at the start of the book, got hauled in by some other cop and immediately threw Blaze under the bus – she pays him for “protection” so as to keep her out of jail for her whoring, and what good did it do her? Now Blaze is under investigation, and Coogan hopes the heroic act will play in his favor. Unfortunately it doesn’t, and Blaze is suspended for being a pig on the pad. Meanwhile we readers have learned, via another of those arbitrary scenes that seemingly exist only to fill pages, that Blaze gives his pad collections to widows of cops.

In his review, Marty McKee complained that there was no titular “big payoff” in the book, but what I think it might refer to is that Blaze “pays off” his debt to Doris. But again it’s handled as arbitrarily as can be. First Blaze captures the killer, a slim moving company guy named Jerry Laughlin, who per Blaze’s suspicion already has a mile-long record of assault and rape charges, yet has been let go due to slimy liberal lawyers. Blaze and Nuthall engage Laughlin in a massive, nigh-endless car and foot chase that spans along the East River and outside of Manhattan, with a few civilians and cops killed in the process. When Blaze finally gets Laughlin he beats him to a pulp…and that’s that, the novel’s ended. But it’s only page 129 and the book’s 173 pages!

So as to that titular payoff…right after collaring the killer Blaze is suspended due to his pad activities. And what’s worse, Laughlin’s been let off the hook, again due to liberal lawyers. So Blaze is walking along in desolation, and finds himself outside that building on 69th Street, where this whole sordid mess began – not just the kills, but also Doris, who has gotten Blaze fired. Blaze starts to get the vibe that something’s wrong in there, and bullshits his way past the door guard…and up to Doris’s floor, where he hears screaming in her room. Yes, folks, Jerry Laughlin, for no apparent reason, just happens to be in Doris’s room and is trying to kill her!

This leads to another pages-filling action scene that has zero spark despite the amount of words poured into it. Laughlin, even though he’s meek and thin, gets the better of Blaze, beating him up and almost throwing him out the window to the pavement 60-some floors below. Blaze finally remembers he’s supposed to be savage and both bites Laughlin and pokes his eye out, then throws him out the window…and a rescued Doris of course drops her charges against Blaze. Thus I propose that “The Big Payoff” refers to this climactic action scene.

Not that it much matters – The Big Payoff is fairly boring and slow-moving, and definitely lacks the lurid fun of Len’s contribution to the series. And this was just the first volume!! You’d think McCurtin and Leisure would’ve come out of the gate with something a little more entertaining. I didn’t dislike the book as much as Marty did – I always enjoy a look at sleazy ‘70s New York City – but there certainly was room for some improvement. You can see already why the series only lasted three volumes, because I don’t remember The Concrete Cage being much better.

Anyway, no idea who actually wrote it, but I’ll stick with my J.C. Conaway theory (another guess would be Ralph Hayes). The knowledge of Manhattan and its sleazier environs is one clue, as is the page-filling dialog. Not much is known about Conaway, but I did read – from an Ebay listing many years ago, where someone was selling all of Conaway’s personal author copies, shortly after Conaway died – that he never learned to type, and thus dictated all of his books. I find this image very funny…I can just see a grizzled pulp writer reclining in his Archie Bunker chair with a can of Schlitz and a cheap cigar and shouting lurid copy for some poor female typist to take down: “‘The girl had been pretty before a sex killer worked her over with a knife.’ Ya got that, toots?”

The Pleasure Principle

The Pleasure Principle, by Peter McCurtin
December, 1974  Leisure Books

Peter McCurtin tries his hand at some contemporary Harold Robbins-esque trash fiction in this obscure Leisure Books paperback original; actually, a better point of comparison would be the sleazy paperbacks Dell was publishing at the time, a la Sexual Strike Force, Michelle, My Belle, Making U-Hoo, and The Secret Sex Curse Of Bertha T. (one I never reviewed because it was so bad, despite the great title and cover!). The Pleasure Principle is similar to those Dell books, what with its risque cover photo (look closely and you’ll see some nipple action from our uncredited cover model), its salacious back cover copy…and its unfortunately-“comedic” narrative style.

Yes, folks, those Dell books were for the most part sex comedies, squandering their exploitative potential with “goofy” plots and scenarios. Most of them, judging from the ones I’ve read, also employed a pseudo-omniscient tone, to the point that I assume a certain editor at Dell was behind the line of books and had specific guidelines for the authors to follow. McCurtin so closely follows the style of these Dell sleaze paperbacks that I wonder if he actually wrote this book for that line, got rejected, and just published it through Leisure. (McCurtin was in fact publishing with Dell at this time, with the three-volume Assassin series, so it’s possible.)

The novel takes place over a few days in the summer of 1969 and is set in Chapmans Corners, a fictional beachside hamlet in Maine. McCurtin hopscotches across a diverse group of characters, and honestly he doesn’t have much of a story to tell; a plot doesn’t really start to build until near the very end of the novel’s 142 big-print pages. As with those Dell books McCurtin employs an omniscient tone, jumping wily-nily into the thoughts of his various characters, telling more than he shows. The first thirty or so pages in particular are hard going, at least for the poor reader who just wants a book with a basic plot to follow: it’s a succession of characters, all of them in the act of jerking off, with random asides on their personalities, backgrounds, and past sexual experiences.

Yes, this round-robin masturbation motif does indeed open the novel; we meet uber-wealthy Rudolph Zabriskie, who I guess is the closest we get to a “main protagonist” in the novel, in the process of jerking off…to a photo of JFK. He’s unable to rise to the occasion, thus resorts to a photo of Richard Nixon. Figuring he’s the first person in history to do such a thing, Zabriskie beats off to a photo of Nixon in a glossy magazine propped on his silk-cushioned bed. Unfortunately, “Richard M. Nixon ha[s] no come-quality,” and Zabriskie still can’t achieve orgasm. So next he goes into a pages-long fantasy about screwing a young boy in his native Poland! (“Without further ado, [Zabriskie] commenced to bugger the boy.”) Now folks I’ve read strange opening chapters in my time, but this one might take the cake – jerking off to two presidents, then into a bunch of hardcore gay fantasy action…!

McCurtin is just getting started. Meanwhile Paul McAngus, a middle-aged, middle-income dude who lives a few miles from Zabriskie’s mansion, is also masturbating…and also having a hard time of it. Mostly because his wife, Martha, is so loudly masturbating in the next room, playing with herself as she imagines the hot French actor on TV screwing her. So hard-pressed is Paul that he gives up on jerking off and instead goes into the room with his wife. McCurtin renders the ensuing oral sex from Martha’s point of view – Paul isn’t very skilled at the whole thing, but at least Martha can pretend it’s the French actor down there. Curiously though McCurtin leaves the ensuing sex mostly off page, ending the chapter with the unforgettable line, “Paul waved his white ass like a castaway signaling for help.”

Next we meet Gardner Dettrick, a portly wanna-be jetsetter who fantasizes about partying with Herman Goerring. He’s in the process of hosting a party in his house, also in Chapmans Corners, a small party only attended by Sally, Gardner’s ex-wife, and Herbert Blaney, a somewhat-successful novelist. Blaney’s latest novel has been optoined by Hollywood and Gardner gets off on parading the new celebrity around town as his “best bud.” Also at the party is Blaney’s hot girlfriend, Peggy; we learn incidentally that both men screwed her as soon as the party started, and now the action centers around Dettrick getting Sally drunk enough that she’ll lay there willingly while Peggy goes down on her. They almost succeed in this until Dettrick blows the moment, after which he gets out his whip and chases a nude and screaming Sally out into the street. Curiously McCurtin forgets all about Sally and last we see of her she’s huddled, naked and crying, beneath a car in the street in the middle of a thunderstorm.

The only real enjoyable part of the novel occurs soon after; the next day Chief Kinch, 62 and soon to retire – and in the pocket of Zabriskie – finds out that yet another pair of hippies have been found in Chapmans Corner. One of his deputies hauls them in; they were caught “fucking in the dunes.” One’s a surly young black man and the other’s a pretty young blonde who insists her name is “Beautiful One.” Eventually we’ll learn her name is Mary and the guy’s name is Bobby. This is discovered by Zabriskie, who hears that Kinch has collared a couple hippies and demands the loyal cop bring them over to his mansion, on the pretense that Zabriskie’s cat has gone missing and the hippies might have stolen it.

This is of course just a ruse, as Zabriskie wants to have more fun at the expense of the hoi-poloi. Kinch busy with the big breakfast the maid has prepared for him, Zabriskie is free to harras the two young hippies for his own amusement. Telling them that he owns the town and that they’d better please him or else, Zabriskie goes right into the hardcore sex questions, demanding to know if Bobby ever goes down on Mary. After this it’s onto the next topic, “Now, Mary, this big black cock of Bobby’s – do you ever suck it?” Once his fun is done Zabriskie has Kinch take the hippies away, telling Kinch he thinks they should be let go without charges, to which Kinch of course agrees. After this Zabriskie snorts coke and plays old tunes on his viola; the back cover incorrectly states that Zabriskie plays “pop songs” on it.

We’re now in the last third of the novel and only here does McCurtin go about the motions of fashioning a half-assed plot. While soaring on coke and playing violin, apropos of nothing Zabriskie remembers how Paul McAngus once “refused the honor” of sucking Zabriskie’s dick. This occurred at one of Zabriskie’s parties, several years ago, and now Zabriskie feels he must get revenge. He calls up his fascist friend Gardner Dettrick and insists the portly sadist have another of his parties tonight – and to be sure and invite Paul and Martha McAngus. Meanwhile Garnder himself invites the hot little number who works at the local grocery store, a teenaged girl named Mary-Ann, who gets her own chapter in which she tries to figure out what to wear for the party.

Humorously, McCurtin pretty much says to hell with it at this point and takes the novel into a wholly-unexpected dark climax. Gardner gets progressively hammered and the party takes on an increasingly deranged atmosphere, with Gardner’s “scratched records” from the ‘50s blasting on the stereo. While Blaney, who is also in attendance, gets cozy with Martha McAngus, Zabriskie gets Paul so drunk that he passes out…and then sodomizes his unconscious form. Meanwhile Dettrick takes Mary-Ann up to his room, apparently gets rejected by the young girl, freaks out, and throws her off the balcony. Then he goes into his room, gets a gun, and starts shooting everyone. This appears to be another of those scarce paperbacks – and probably for good reason – but if you don’t want the finale spoiled skip to the next paragraph. In the span of a few nonchalant sentences McCurtin kills off practically the entire cast of characters, with only Zabriskie and Blaney still alive after Dettrick’s crazed gunplay – and when Chief Kinch shows up on the scene, Zabriskie snatches his service revolver and blows Dettrick away!

And on this sour note The Pleasure Principle comes to an abrupt close, featuring one of the most jarring finales I’ve encountered in a long time. I forgot to mention, but Zabriskie also gives us the meaning behind the title; it’s a phrase of his own coin which means that “anything that gives pleasure is good.” I guess perhaps McCurtin’s intent was to play this principle out through the various characters, clearly trying to show the dark side of total pleasure indulgence, but at 142 pages of clunky narrative it just doesn’t pan out. The abrubt, “screw it” climax implies that McCurtin himself got tired with the whole thing and just threw in the towel.

Mace #7: The Year Of The Cock

Mace #7: The Year Of The Cock, by C.K. Fong
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

It’s curious that with this seventh volume of Mace Manor came up with a new house name: C.K. Fong replacing Lee Chang. I say curious because Bruce Cassiday, the writer who took over the series with this volume, clearly strives to mimic the style of Joseph Rosenberger, who served as Lee Chang for the first five volumes, whereas Len Levinson, who also served as Lee Chang in the previous volume, did his own thing. I know from Len that he never read any of the previous Mace novels, nor even knew who Joseph Rosenberger was (his succinct answer when I asked him: “I never heard of Joseph Rosenberger”), but it seems clear that Cassiday not only read Rosenberger’s Mace installments but went out of his way to replicate his style. 

All of which is to say The Year Of The Cock is ersatz Rosenberger; Cassiday successfully captures the flavor of JR’s clunky, soul-crushing narrative style, but he misses the oddball touches Rosenberger afficionados would expect. But the bland plotting, the egregious bios of one-off villains, the interminable action scenes that don’t have a single spark of excitement – all of it’s there. If I hadn’t known going in that Cassiday was Fong, I would’ve assumed it was Rosenberger on an off day. I don’t know much about Cassiday, and so far on the blog I’ve only reviewed one of his novels, the earlier psychedelic cash-in The Happening At San Remo. I have several other paperbacks of his, ranging from historicals to sleazy crime, so I assume he must’ve been pretty prolific and capable of changing his style to match the content.

In any event, Len’s novel is basically a blip and, in case there was any doubt, has nothing to do with the series itself, best judged as a standalone novel about some other half-Chinese kung fu wizard named Victor Mace. Because Cassiday gives us the same guy that Rosenberger did, a “Kung Fu Monk-Master” who works for the CIA and is capable of superhuman feats but has the personality of a thumbtack. Cassiday might give us a slightly more “human” Mace, in that this one actually has a libido (usually a much-lacking feature in a Rosenberger protagonist); there’s a part midway through where he falls for a honey trap scenario and has some (off-page) sex with a young Chinese babe. I don’t think the Rosenberger version of Mace would’ve had this experience.

It’s straight to the action and the egregious backstories for one-off opponents as we meet Mace in Galveston, Texas, where he’s busy tying himself to a motor boat that’s speeding across a dark bay. Mace we’ll learn is on his latest CIA assignment, looking into the nefarious presence of a Red Chinese cell here in Texas, one that’s led by a dude named Major Fong (who is compared to both Hitler and Frankenstein!). Curious too that “Fong” is the name of the villain as well as the name of the (fictional) author, leading me to believe that Cassiday was unaware that the house name for the series would change. But then, this opening action scene takes place at “Bruce’s Fishing Charter,” which is likely some in-jokery from Cassiday, so who knows. Oh and there’s the possibility that Fong might’ve killed Mace’s father, who we learn in brief backstory was American – it was his Chinese stepfather who sent Mace to the Shaolin school – but Cassiday basically drops this angle.

Mace quickly learns that it’s a setup, and the thugs on the boat have known he was here all along. They corner him and it goes straight into the Rosenberger-style action, with random asides detailing the goofily-named opponents Mace is about to crush. As with Rosenberger this results in a clunky, pseudo-omniscient tone, a tone Cassiday employs throughout the book:

Nick Bartolomew was next to join the surging attack on the Kung Fu Monk-Master. Armed with a twelve inch flyssa, a Moroccan sword characterized by a single-edged blade engraved and inlaid with brass, Bartolomew slid it histily[sp] from the scabbard he wore around his waist and came at Mace with a wild glare. 

“Your last breath on earth, you chink son of a bitch!” he yelled, and slid the deadly blade upward toward Mace’s groin. But the Kung Fu Tung-chi had anticipated the black-haired ex-con’s move with the blade, and countered by whirling around with a simple Korsi Tu Minga kick to the crotch. 

Shrieking in agony, Bartolomew sagged to the deck, his sexual apparatus a mass of jelly instantly radiating pain from its ruined center to every nerve ending in his body. As he fell, the ugly flyssa impaled him in the heart as he sank down face first. He twisted and tore at the deck plates with his bleeding fingernails as he slowly lost consciousness and died in the lashing rain.

Or this example:

An ex-hood named Pinky Desnoyers was the next who reacted with dispatch. An albino, he dyed his hair red to make himself presentable to his fellow man. Desnoyers went nowhwere without a snubnosed S and W .45 caliber revolver clipped to his shoulder holster.

Or:

“Make sure he’s dead!” yelled Sam Riley, known as One-Ball Riley ever since he had been partially maimed by the disgruntled husband of a floozie he had been caught with in bed one eventful evening.

One thing Cassiday actually outdoes Rosenberger on is the racial slurs. Not since the first volume has “chink,” “slant-eyes,” and sundry other racial putdowns appeared so many times in a Mace novel. Cassiday even comes up with wholly new ones, like “noodle-nibbler.” In fact there’s a long stretch where an Asian slur appears on every single page, as if Cassiday were trying to outdo himself. And it’s not just the villains coming up with the slurs, it’s everyone – cops, fellow CIA agents, etc. This opening action scene is our intro to this, as the seemingly-endless parade of thugs come up with slur after slur before Mace’s feet or fists pummel them into bloody burger. But as with Rosenberger there’s no joy in the action, and it just comes off like an interminable barrage of description from a martial arts how-to book. Cassiday does though try to retain the occasional goofy cap-offs for his action scenes, a la “The goon woke up and found himself in hell,” sort of thing you’d find in a Rosenberger Mace. Like this, from a later action scene:

The goon in the middle stormed in to deliver a Karate chop to the back of Mace’s neck. His hand connected, and Mace rolled with the punch. Immediately he recovered, forcing his muscles and his psyche to regroup in a positive chi effort. Instantly he was clear-headed and alert, backing around, wheeling slightly, and clobbering the man called Hank Grogan with a Dragon Foot snap kick in the solar plexus. The ball of the foot and the heel slammed into Grogan’s nerve centers, paralyzing him instantly and sending him crumpling to the ground. His abdominal wall collapsed and he was bleeding internally when they finally put him in the ambulance and sent him to Houston General. He recovered seven weeks later, but he was on soft foods for the rest of his life.

So as you can see, one could easily be fooled into believing this was the work of Joseph Rosenberger, and Cassiday does an admirable job of aping his unusual style. But sadly he is so successful that The Year Of The Cock (the working title of my autobio, btw) is just as boring as a legit Rosenberger book, 222 whopping pages of spirit-deadening blocks of prose and hardly any narrative momentum. There’s plentiful kung-fu fighting, though, but as with Rosenberger’s books it just comes off like dry textbook descriptions of outrageously-named moves being employed on outrageously-named thugs – thugs who spout outrageous racial slurs moments before their faces meet Mace’s feet.

The plot gradually centers around a Red Chinese plot to destroy the offshore oil rigs off the Houston coast. Mace sits through interminable meetings with his CIA comrades, the only memorable one being Benny Jaurez, the Houston chief of station. This too has the ring of Rosenberger, with the spooks sitting around in their humdrum office over cups of lukewarm coffee and trading exposition on the spy life (why a CIA ring is called a “pod,” etc). Eventually it comes to light that one of the various intelligence agents is a traitor, and there’s also an elaborate sting operation where Mace tries to out him. This bit leads to a surprise climax in which Mace, pursued by a dogged Houston cop who himself turns out to be a villain, is “rescued” by a hot young Chinese babe who pulls up in her sportscar and offers Mace a lift.

In what is as mentioned a departure from Rosenberger’s more cipher-like version of the character, this Mace actually goes back to the broad’s place and ultimately has sex with her. Her name’s Moon Chu Lingdoo, and she claims to be a string reporter for Time, currently working for the local PBS station. She says she’s “hopelessly Americanized” and there follows a lot of dialog between the two, concluding with Moon throwing herself on Mace, as she claims to be lonely. Off-page sex ensues, and Mace wakes up to discover, of course, that it was a setup – Moon is gone but some thugs have slipped into her darkened apartment to get the drop on him. Of course he kills them all and escapes without breaking much of a sweat.

In a laughable sequence Mace, again hanging out with Juarez, employs his total recall to review every single thing he glimpsed in Moon’s apartment, in particular the photo of a man on one of her tables. Mace and Juarez already know there’s a deep undercover spy for the Chinese government here in Houston, and Mace is certain this man in the photo is that undercover agent: Tom Galey, the director of programming for the Houston PBS station. I guess in 1975 it would’ve sounded crazy – maybe even impossible – that a member of the American media could be an undercover Red China asset. In 2020 it sounds downright timely. Mace of course is correct, and meanwhile Galey, who lives in a fortified compound, is busy arguing with Major Fong over how to carry out the operation on the oilwells, and also over whether or not they should kill Moon for failing in her mission. She attempts to escape, only to be raped (off-page) by a guard who captures her.

This leads to probably the “best” action scene in the book, with Mace infiltrating Galey’s compound and taking out a few guards, as well as some guard dogs with some hypodermic needles. He also manages to rescue Moon, aka the woman who nearly got him killed. Moon claims she didn’t know Mace was going to be attacked, etc, but she does give him and Juarez the info on the oilwell attack. This leads to the finale, with Mace and the CIA agents staging an assault on the PBS station, where it turns out Galey has set up a transmitter on the broadcasting tower. A signal from it and the offshore rigs will blow up. The climax is a bit gory, too, with Mace ripping out Galey’s eyes and shredding his throat, and another character performing some heroic sacrifice to both wipe out the transmitter and kill Major Fong.

And with this, thankfully, the book concludes…it’s too long, too wordy, too bland, but as I say it’s at least a successful mimicking of Joseph Rosenberger’s patented style. Only without the quirks that make the real Rosenberger’s work occasionally so memorable. Cassiday also turned in the next volume, which would prove to be the last of Mace.

CenterForce (A Reappraisal)

CenterForce, by T.A. Waters
December, 1974  Dell Books

About ten years ago I first reviewed T.A. Waters’s CenterForce, and clearly I didn’t like it very much. But Waters is the guy who wrote The Psychedelic Spy, after all, which I consider one of the best standalone novels I’ve read in the past several years, and definitely one of my favorite books I’ve ever reviewed on here. So I’ve been meaning to go back to CenterForce and give it another shot, especially now that I’ve again become interested in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s counterculture, a milieu which Waters projects into the “near future” for this slim paperback original.

First though a note on the cover; as mentioned in my original review the “Roger Dean-esque” artwork is not representative of the novel. The art, which I like a lot, isn’t credited, but I’m guessing it’s by Peter Lloyd, an artist who was doing similar work at the time for rock albums, like Jefferson Starship’s Dragon Fly (1974) and Starcastle’s Fountains Of Light (1977). An airbrushed pseudo-Silver Surfer seems to have been Lloyd’s schtick, and that’s exactly what graces the cover of CenterForce. But again it has nothing to do with anything in the novel itself; the titular CenterForce patrol does have somewhat high-tech vehicles at its disposal, and we are informed that CenterForce soldiers wear “special helmets,” but none of it is described like what is shown on the cover. And if that’s supposed to be our hero, it’s really wrong, as main protagonist Ben Reed is a long-haired outlaw biker in his thirties who rides a 1971 BMW R60 motorcyle. In other words, something like this:

This is another of those obscure novels where you wish some enterprising producer had bought the rights to make a film version. AIP or some other drive-in purveyor could’ve easily made a cool movie out of it. It could’ve been done on the cheap, too, as most of CenterForce plays out in the desert or on hippie communes, and hell a skilled hand like Sutton Roley could’ve found some inventive methods of handling the occasional “science fiction” element on a shoestring budget. I’m not sure why I’m even bringing this up; I guess mostly because CenterForce very much has the vibe of an early ‘70s counterculture film, and I’m not just saying that because some of the chapters are written in screenplay format. It’s got the fractured, post-psychedelic vibe of many films of the era, like Vanishing Point or Peter Fonda’s Idaho Transfer, which had a similar storyline of hippies being hunted in a nightmarish future.

Waters doesn’t get exact with the timeframe, but we learn through various communiques, interrogation excerpts, and other materials that the novel is likely set in the 1980s; it’s post 1976, at least, for we learn that in that year New York City became the capitol of the US. One of the things I didn’t like about CenterForce when I first read it is that Waters refrains from using a standard narrative style, which is unfortunate because the setup has all the makings of a pulp classic. And it’s doubly unfortunate because Waters proved he could write a pulp classic in a standard narrative style – and damn well – in The Psychedelic Spy. But he clearly had grander aspirations for CenterForce; chapters are short and trade off between straight plot material concerning Ben Reed’s trip through the Utah desert and random communiques which are intended to elliptically fill us in on this future world. But all of it, no matter the format, is egregiously artsy, often to the detriment of forward momentum.

Worse yet, Waters’s fragmented narrative style prevents the reader from fully connecting with the characters and the plot developments. Ben Reed’s portions carry the brunt of the narrative, but we’re constantly cutting away from him to some excerpt from a StarChild Commune newsletter, or a report on some action elsewhere in the country, or even letters written by minor characters to their families back home. Also this is confusing because we don’t even learn who has written each of these letters, or where the excerpts are taken from, until the end of each chapter, so this causes reader confusion when you start each non-Ben chapter…you have no idea who is suddenly writing these first-person letters and communiques. It’s jarring and it’s something Waters should’ve realized in the editing stage: the names/origins of the pseudo-dispatchs should’ve been stated at the start of each chapter. 

But Waters’s biggest transgression is his failure to exploit his own material. There’s too much telling and too little showing. The opening promises much, though; Been Reed, on his bike in the middle of the desert late at night, has just killed a man with his Remington shotgun. We’re told that bounty hunters can legally hunt and kill hippies and bikers in this unstated future, but incredibly enough Waters does nothing further with this – you’d think the image of a bunch of slackjawed corncobs tearing around in a truck and hooting and hollering as they try to blow away a couple bikers would be too much for a writer to resist. But other than this opening action scene – which indeed begins after the action itself has occurred – we’re only told of these hippie-hunters.

At least we get a little more elaboration on the CenterForce patrols, which venture around the desert in armored buses. Ben gets in a fight with one of these directly after killing the bounty hunter, hiding in a ditch and blowing the thing up by shooting at its gas tank. But this isn’t elabroted much either, with more focus on the high-tech Big Brother methods of the CenterForce. There are prescient parallels to the drone technology of today, with mobile CenterForce command posts helmed by desk jockeys who activate heat-seeking missiles that are housed in an orbiting satellite. The entire midwest of the US has been blasted by various nukes and the like, all as part of the breakout of revolutions and civil strife after the ‘60s movement, and these CenterForce personnel monitor their screens for signs of any “home-soil hostiles,” much like military personnel of today monitoring the deserts of the Middle East on their screens for signs of terrorists.

But Waters doesn’t do much to bring the outlaw counterculture to life, either. We know they do drugs – Ben takes peyote immediately after this opening firefight, tripping as he continues his drive through the desert – and apparently they listen to rock, given the occasional “chapter” that’s composed of overly-wordy rock lyrics. But the lineage of the hippies and counterculture gurus of the ‘60s to this unstated future era is not elaborated on. In short, Waters just fails to bring his world and his characters to life, and it’s a shame because there’s a lot of opportunity for both. Instead he tries to go for more of a smallscale approach by focusing on minor characters and events, like Jill, a young runaway who now lives at the StarChild commune, in Arizona, writing letters to her mom back home. She’s underage, we know, and very small, almost childlike, which makes it pretty strange that Ben falls hard for her, late in the novel.

We readers must do the heavy lifting when it comes to piecing together the storylines; rather than a straight narrative, random things will be mentioned in one section, then referenced in another communique or letter, and lots of “big stuff” happens veritably off-page. Waters causes confusion with similar subplots; there’s young Jill at the commune, who is almost raped by a gang of bikers who show up at StarChild (she’s saved by the late arrival of their leader, Grogan, who kills the would-be rapist – one of those incidents which, unbelievably, occurs off-page), then later another young runaway girl at StarChild is indeed raped (off-page) by another group of bikers, ones who are never identified. This girl is the daughter of the former sheriff of Marble Fork, the small town outside of StarChild, and sets in motion the “climax” of the novel, where the guy tries to shoot down Ben, assuming he is the biker who raped his daughter.

Otherwise we have a minor plot about a senator working out of the “Government Building” in New York who plans an amnesty bill that will repair the country, and is assassinated immediately thereafter (by whom Waters doesn’t state). There’s also a fun piece about a hippie who is captured by CenterForce but so high on LSD that he thinks it’s all a trip. But this too leads to repetition – strange that there’s so much repetition in such a slim book – because later, we have a repeat of this “save a captured hippie” scenario. With the same guy taking part in the rescue! This is Big Tex, one of Ben’s comrades, a lanky dude who drives a Land Rover with a machine gun mounted in the back. When one of their pals is captured, Big Tex and Ben, along with biker boss Grogan, go to the rescue – a scene that could’ve been much more exploited. Waters even skips out on the chase scene, with a chapter ending with the CenterForce patrols coming after them in their armored vehicles!

The bigger story though is that Ben falls in love with Jill at first sight, but it’s hard to buy. He’s come here to StarChild assuming he’ll hook up with Trina, an old flame who is now Grogan’s mama. There’s subtextual evidence that Trina is an undercover Federal agent, or at least working with them. But again, nothing is elaborated upon or properly explained. In fact Ben gets shot by the ex-sheriff, and Waters doesn’t even bother to tell us he’s still alive until a few chapters later…just nonchalantly placing him in the scene with a cast on his arm. Ben and Jill decide to leave for Mexico, and meanwhile Jill’s pregnant; all as revealed, lamely, in another letter Jill writes her mom. And that’s it…other than a vague final chapter about a thermonuclear strike on San Francisco and Atlanta, two of the last counterculture hotspots or somesuch.

As mentioned in my original review, CenterForce is short, coming in at just 175 pages. It’s too short, that’s all – another hundred pages or so and Waters could’ve fully fleshed out his story. But then he might’ve wasted the additional pages on more communiques, rock lyrics, and poetry – I neglected to mention it in this review, but as stated in my original review there’s a lot of bullshit poetry padding the pages, poetry which turns out to have been written by a computer. Just as annoying are the screenplay sequences, randomly spliced in the narrative. If only Waters had stuck to a straight narrative, as he did in The Psychedelic Spy, he might’ve had another pulp masterpiece on his hands. Unfortunately, a la Captain America in Easy Rider, “He blew it.”

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #2: The Game Of Terror

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #2: The Game Of Terror, by Jon Messmann
June, 1973  Pyramid Books

Well, it’s been four years since I read the first volume of Jefferson Boone, Handyman, and really I meant to get to the series sooner, but given that I was also reading The Revenger I guess I just didn’t want to mix my Messmanns, so to speak. Because really both series are written so similarly, Messmann going for this pseudo-Burt Hirschfeld style, with overly-introspective heroes and plots that hinge more on suspense than violent action. What makes Jefferson Boone, Handyman slightly different is the James Bond vibe, with “Jeff” (as Messmann mostly refers to him in the narrative) going around the globe in the capacity of a freelance troubleshooter.

This one’s a little more action-centric than the first one, but not by much. This is mostly due to the threat Boone faces: a consortium of terrorists who have come up with the novel idea of blackmailing the people they’re about to attack. “Terror for profit,” as Jeff thinks of it. Again we get a sad reminder of how terrorism wasn’t so commonplace at one time; early in the book, when hired by a trio of British, German, and Israeli intelligence directors, Jeff sits through a lecture – complete with slideshow! – going over the history of the terrorism movement, with a focus on the then-recent Munich Olympics disaster. Obviously this long-running sequence is here to fill pages and meet the word count, yet at the same time Messmann’s cleary trying to inform his readers on who terrorists are and how they operate.

Before that though we get a taste of the sub-Hirschfeld vibe Messmann employs for this series; Jeff is at a lush spa in Austria, summoned there by a mysterious telegram. He has been getting friendly with a hot American tourist named Judy, but there’s been no hanky panky yet. All of it is written like a trash fiction paperback of the day. Finally we get the blood and guts we’ve been waiting for when a visiting orchestra turns out to be a bunch of terrorists in disguise, gunning down innocent spa-goers. Jeff gives chase in his red Mustang – which he transports around the globe with him on cases, so the thing must have a helluva lot of miles on it – leading to a nicely-done action scene of him blowing away the two terrorists with his .357. After which we get a reminder of why I called Jefferson Boone “Frasier Crane meets James Bond” in my review of the first volume, as Jeff rumintes, immediately after blowing away the two thugs:

Senseless things were only senseless to those restricted by the normal, conventional framework of thought. It was one of modern man’s problems, the language of ideas and the language of words, too often an uneasy fit. Words, he grunted, willing accomplices to the deceits of the mind, more often than not protecting the rigidities of our own concepts and definitions.

I mean you ponder thoughts like this over a snifter of brandy, not when you’re driving away from a violent gunfight in your red Mustang. It gets even more goofy, as Judy pouts that Jeff abandoned her, basically calling him out as a coward. Once she overhears the management discuss “the crazy American who chased the terrorists,” her thoughts have changed – and into Jeff’s bed she hops for some long-delayed sex. But like last time Messmann continues with the Hirschfeld vibe even into the sex scenes, relaying it all via metaphor and turns of phrase, save for errant mentions of “the warm wetness of her” and the like. Oh and humorously, the ladies here all fall hard for Jeff’s custom-made “Handyman” business cards, immediately figuring it has something to do with international espionage. Not a single one of them think that it means he’s an actual, you know, handyman.

The men who summoned Jeff to the spa finally arrive, apologizing for the slipup on dates – they wanted to prevent the terrorist hit at the spa, which they’d gotten intel on, but it happened sooner than they could arrive. These are the three intelligence directors mentioned above, who treat Jeff to the slideshow while they relate the latest terrorism menace. They believe it’s affiliated with Black September, but Jeff will gradually learn that the terrorists are from all over the globe, running into Japanese ones, Irish ones, and your standard-model Arabic ones. Jeff doesn’t want the job, as he doesn’t “do” terrorism, so to speak, finding it too big a job for one man. But he keeps flashing on that attack at the spa, the innocents killed, and he changes his mind – and by the way there are lots of condemnations of terrorists in the book, but Jeff’s admonishments of them as “dirty bastards” and the like just doesn’t have much bite.

There are parallels to the Stark series this time, what with Jeff shuttling around Europe in his Mustang. The guy puts some serious mileage on the car. He acts in the capacity of a freelance terrorism-stopper, or such; the only lead the directors have is that a travel company owner named Jim Costa, an expat American on the French coast, might be a target of the terrorists, given that he ignored one of their threats. So Jeff drives on over and we get another Hirschfeld bit where he comes across a beautiful brunette trying to save her boat from being smashed at the docks during a fierce thunderstorm. They have a quiet moment in the nearby cabin and bat eyes at each other, and next day Jeff discovers that the babe is the daughter of Jim Costa. Her name is Angelique, and Messmann skillfully brings her to life, but he’s guilty of that hoary old cliché; she could be The One who captures Jefferson Boone’s heart after all these years of unshackled cocksmanship.

Speaking of which, the expected sex scene is slightly more risque, but again on the “intellectual” tip, with mentions of “curled flocces” and the like; I admit, that one sent me to the dictonary. Meanwhile Jeff just sort of walks around Costa’s premises to make sure no terrorists are attacking him. He also finds the time to have friendly philosophical arguments on the nature of terrorists with Costa’s Egyptian second in command, Aran. You’d think that an Egyptian guy arguing over the viewpoints of terrorism might set off alarm bells for Jeff, but nope. Instead we get more ruminations like:

The idea [of organized terrorism] assumed too much. It assumed the simultaneous existence of a single idea on the part of essentially diverse groups, the existence of a concept, a sick, perverted, horrifying concept but a concept nonetheless and he didn’t see these [terrorists] as conceptual thinkers. It couldn’t be entirely discounted but it didn’t fit, either…

Good grief, just kill someone already! We do eventually get a nicely-rendered sequence where Jeff’s called to another part of the French coast where a potential attack might happen. He oversees security of the beachside party, unable to find any weak spots…realizing too late he’s completely overlooked the friggin’ ocean. And like a second after his realization a retrofitted PT boat comes along and starts shooting at the partiers. Jeff again gives chase in his Mustang, following along the hilly roads with his lights off, and gets the terrorists when they’ve stopped to refuel. Again we have a rather bloodless but suspenseful scene as Jeff kills a handful of men with his .38. This part features the odd capoff where Jeff apparently considers taking a piss on the corpses:

He reached a hand inside the little pocket at the front of his trousers, held it there for a moment and then withdrew it. No one would come for them. They would lay unclaimed, all of them, and the gesture that had crossed his mind would be wasted.

Oddball moments like this are otherwise few and far between. For the most part it’s very much on the trash fiction tip, with verdant description of the Eurotrash surroundings, and lots of ponderings about the nature of terrorism and the like. But Jeff isn’t the sharpest, folks, because it soon becomes clear to the reader exactly why no one’s yet come to kill Jim Costa. Yet Jeff continues with his security detail, falling hard for Angelique on the side. What makes it all particularly lame is that Jeff has nothing to do with the finale, by which I mean he isn’t on the scene. Long story short, the terrorists take over a school in Bonn, threatening to kill the kids if demands aren’t met. But our hero’s all the way over on the French coast and all this is relayed via phone – a lame, copout “climax” for an action novel. 

Instead it continues on the suspense angle, as Jeff has finally figured out who is behind the terrorist ring. He ends up holding a gun on this person, but when his threats are laughed at, Jeff leaves with his tail between his legs…then realizes two can play at the terrorism game. In what is intended to display that Jefferson Boone’s just as tough as his enemies, Jeff kidnaps Angelique and threatens to kill her if the terrorism in Bonn isn’t called off. This leads to a lame denoument in which the main villain’s killed off by someone else, and Jeff gets in a brief fight with his underling. By novel’s end Angelique informs Jeff that he’s just as much a bastard as the terrorists he claims to hate – we’re to understand the two were in love, so this is supposed to be crushing, but at this point the novel has become a wearying read and you just wish everyone would go away, already – but Jeff shrugs it off and hops on a plane. Next stop America, for some more sex with Judy, from the opening chapters.

The Game Of Terror just sort of goes on and on, and in that regard as well it’s similar to Stark. I still say the Revenger books are superior because they’re at least shorter, but ultimately Messmann’s wordy, literate style is at odds with the fire and brimstone the men’s adventure genre demands. And I’m starting to think he didn’t write the almighty Sea Trap; maybe he did the initial manuscript and series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel hired some unknown contract writer to fix it up into the pulpy, depraved masterpiece it became – because honestly I have a hard time believing that the same author turned out this slow-churning book.

Bad Guy

Bad Guy, by Nicholas Brady
No month stated, 1977  Belmont-Tower

“Nicholas Brady” was a Belmont Tower/Leisure Books house name used by a variety of contract writers; Len Levinson served as “Brady” for Inside Job. Bad Guy isn’t by Len, though, and although the identity of the author has never been officially confirmed I’m fairly certain it was George Harmon Smith. Thanks to the trailblazing research of Lynn Munroe we know that Harmon Smith was a contract writer often used by BT/Leisure editor Peter McCurtin, and the narrative style of Bad Guy is identical to those installments of Marksman and Sharpshooter (ie This Animal Must Die, Savage Slaughter) that Lynn has designated as being by George Harmon Smith: literary but very overwritten.

To wit, Bad Guy opens with some weatherbeaten redneck deputy in Georgia, maintaining law and order at a stock car race, and as with those other Smith books it just goes and on and with the pointless detailing of every single thing the hayseed does. I mean the writing’s good and all, it’s just flabby, and the author clearly doesn’t know when some judicious editing is necessary. That being said, this opening does feature the oddball moment of the deputy shoving some guy’s face into a pile of shit; this sort of random nastiness is another George Harmon Smith hallmark, as evidenced by his other books, and I’m even more certain he might’ve been the mystery author who wrote Bronson: Blind Rage – which by the way is still one of my very favorite novels I’ve ever reviewed on here.

As Zwolf so succinctly put it, Bad Guy is a “Grade-B sleazy crime novel,” clearly catering to the spate of Southern action films going on at the time; you could easily see Burt Reynolds (or Joe Don Baker if you don’t have the budget) as protagonist Jake Colby, shit-kicking stock car racer and former Syndicate stringer. Actually he has a much darker side than any Reynolds character; the BT house ads claim Jake Colby is “in the tradition of Gator McCloskey [sp],” ie the “hillbilly hoodlum” Reynolds portrayed in White Lightning (1973) and Gator (1976). But he’s a stone-cold killer with a sadistic streak. Harmon Smith (I’m just going to proceed with the theory that the novel truly is by him) implies that Colby’s casual mercilessness is due to his wife and toddler son being killed in a car bomb six years before, a car bomb that was meant for Colby. But damn, that’s not nearly enough to explain away some of the sadistic stuff he does in this novel.

To tell the truth, the hicksploitation stuff really isn’t much exploited nor integral to the plot. There are no “Southern” quirks to Colby and he comes off no different than any other Belmont Tower anti-hero. The action mostly occurs in Georgia, the Bayou, and Vegas, but other than a couple Creole characters there’s no real attempt at making this a Dixie-fried actioner. The opening sequence is the closest approximation to this, with an overly-detailed stock race in Georgia serving as our introduction to Colby. This will be the only stock car race in the book, but it displays the same style Harmon Smith brings to the rest of the novel: inordinate scene-setting and word-painting, but with very good characterization and dialog. Seriously, the guy was like the John Gardner of BT/Leisure (I mean the John Gardner of Michelson’s Ghosts, not the British John Gardner who took over the James Bond books in the ‘80s).

Before we get into the meat of the review, I’d like to clarify that I really did enjoy Bad Guy. It’s certainly more entertaining and better written than the majority of the blockbuster crime novels of the ‘70s, or at least ones that were published in hardcover and received industry reviews. I mean it’s a lot more enjoyable than The Devalino Caper, The Anderson Tapes, or Golden Gate Caper. The main characters are three-dimensional and there are memorable oddball touches to most of the minor characters that you remember long after you’ve finished the book. It’s just that the damn overwriting sinks it; the Gardner comparison again comes to mind. Anyone who has read (or tried to read) Nickel Mountain or The Sunlight Dialogs will know what I’m talking about; just an insurmountable barrage of needless topical description. Each and every chapter begins with elaborate scene-setting, and every menial gesture or action of the characters is stated; Colby smokes about a bujillion cigarettes in the novel, and we’re told every single time he tosses aside a butt and lights a fresh one. This makes the book seem like a slog at times, because it gears up to be so great, then stalls with unecessary bouts of page-filling. 

Anyway when we meet Jake Colby he’s a stock car racer in the south, a mostly-broken guy who is ready to blow into violent action at any moment. He’s approached by two hoods, Scalise and Blaustein, who claim to be representatives for Peaches Angella, Colby’s old boss in the Syndicate. Gradually we’ll learn that part of Peaches’s portfolio was heroin, which Colby ran for him. Then some interloper named Gazzara came onto the scene and started taking over Peaches’s territory, killing off his various underbosses. This is how Colby’s wife and son were killed, blown up in a car bomb meant to take out Colby. But that was six years ago, and Colby’s out of the life, and Peaches is calling in old favors and wants Colby to come out of retirement for one last job.

Before that we get a taste of our hero’s sadism; he meets Scalise and Blaustein at a bar, and after the two thugs leave, Colby is hassled by a couple corncobs who give him a hard time for drinking soda instead of beer. Rather than walk away, Colby wades into the three of them, beats them to burger, then lines them up and drives over them. All because they said a few curt words to him. It’s insane, and again all very similar to Bronson: Blind Rage in its tone of ruthless brutality. So too is the relationship Colby eventually forms with a young Creole girl, their dialog very reminiscent of the dialog Bronson has with the young Latina girl in Blnd Rage. And finally, the word “focussed” appears here, same as in Blind Rage, so my proposition is that the same author wrote Bad Guy, and that author was George Harmon Smith. Or it was Aaron Fletcher, who also served as “Nicholas Brady,” but I’m going with Smith because the book is too similar to those Marksman and Sharpshooter installments Lynn Munroe identified as being by him.

But after this random bit of sadism Colby’s legacy of brutality sort of simmers for the rest of the novel, as he’s more busy putting together the getaway portion of Peaches’s job. Peaches you see wants to hit Gazzara where it hurts, robbing the vault in his Vegas casino and making off with as much of the two million therein as possible. Colby will be in charge of getting the heisters to freedom, and to that end he has basically a blank check to have a hopped-up car put together for him. Colby also suggests the use of “chunkers,” ie the bottom feeders of the underworld – people so poor they actually jump in front of cars, acting as decoys. As with most heist novels the plotting and planning of the actual heist takes the brunt of the narrative, with the heist itself occuring over a few frantic pages toward the very end of the novel.

What makes Bad Guy so interesting is the otherwise-arbitrary situations and characters Harmon Smith introduces into the text. For example, shortly after meeting with Peaches, Colby’s relaxing in his hotel room when there’s a knock at his door. It’s a gorgeous, well-built brunette named Ginger who has been sent over by Peaches to keep Colby company. But what would be a throw-away hardcore scene in a lesser novel is here built into a fuller relationship, with Ginger not a hooker but a housewife whose husband is in the hospital with some disease and she’s desperate for money, so she took the job. And Colby’s gruff with her, not wanting any sex tonight – there’s already been some off-page hanky-panky earlier, with Colby doing, and them dumping, some never-named woman he’s been living with the past couple months. But Ginger in her innocence brings Colby out of his shell, with the author successfully doling out three-dimensional characterization for both of them. In particular for Colby, as we see he suffers recurring nightmares of the day his wife and son were killed.

And then…Colby leaves the hotel next morning and Ginger’s never mentioned again. (And also the sex between them is off-page, for anyone out there taking notes – all the sex is off-page in this one, curiously.) There are all these random bits of characterization throughout the novel which are given so much initial focus and then unceremoniously dropped. The stuff with the clunkers is another case in point. Colby heads into Harlem to hire a renowned clunker, a smashed-up black guy who lives in a tenement building and is so poor that his kids rent out their rooms to local hookers. This guy brings in two more clunkers, both of them just as memorable: one of them, also black, speaks in overly-formal terms, and the other, a Hispanic guy, is so brain-addled from his clunking that he’s become a mindless robot for the woman who controls him. There’s more of that random sadism as the poor guy eagerly bashes his own head into a hotel room wall at the woman’s order. All these characters and more – even the inside man on the heist who has “the unmistakable drawl of the homosexual” – are built up at the expense of dense paragraphs, and then dropped from the narrative with little fanfare.

My favorite of all these arbitrary characters and situations is the bitter old Mafia consigliere Colby visits a little past the halfway mark of the book. Confined to home care with a “crazy woman” serving as his nurse, the old man is filled with hate, particularly toward Colby – as it turns out that Colby’s dead wife was the consigliere’s daughter. The old man blames Colby for the loss of his daughter and grandson, but Colby, undeterred, bullies the old man into getting some info. Through various plot developments, Colby has learned that there might be more to this heist than Peaches has let on, and the old consigliere would be able to find out with his connections in the Syndicate. Harmon Smith’s tongue is firmly in cheek as the consigliere gets increasingly irrational and furious with Colby, culiminating in the unforgettable line: “Go die, so crazy woman can pour my shit and piss on your grave.”

Colby heads into the Bayou for the getaway car, hiring a poor Creole auto repairman to build a custom vehicle. But the man’s niece turns out to be more important to the narrative: Camille, a hot-tempered Creole girl in her twenties who speaks poor English and who has waist-length black hair. With her fiery temper mixed with her innocent nature, she is as mentioned very similar to the girl in Bronson: Blind Rage. As is the budding relationship between her and Colby, which is almost G-rated given the tone of the rest of the novel. The old auto mechanic is glad to get rid of the quarrelsome girl, but Colby finds himself falling for her – again, unexpected character depth and character building. That being said, man there’s a lot of padding with Colby and Camille. Even late in the game, right before the heist we’ve been waiting a couple hundred pages for, there’s an interminable sequence of them going camping in the Bayou. But it’s true love, Camille even giving Colby her virginity – as we learn after the off-page sex scene.

Colby’s trick car is cool but doesn’t get exploited enough. Per his specific demands, it’s a junked-up old Chevy that has the guts of a Jaguar, and we get a lot of gearhead dialog about the various modifications to the engine and whatnot. Cooler yet are the touches the mechanic adds from his days of doing up cars for moonshiners, like a bucket filled with nail-balls that can be dropped into the path of pursuing vehicles. Colby also goes to various lengths to plot out the getaway, including getting a machine gun and stashing out a boat and a second getaway car in a place Peaches doesn’t know about. For as the back cover has so brazenly spoiled for us, Colby’s planning his own cross, having learned that the entire thing is a setup courtesy Peaches.

The heist goes down in just a few tense pages, but here Harmon Smith is lean and mean with the prose. And humorously whereas before we were informed almost relentlessly of pedantic actions and gestures, here bigger revelations are spun out with nonchalance – like the fact that Camille is a stone-cold killer. Colby’s brought her into the heist due to her ability to scale and climb obstacles, a needed skill in the heist of Gazzara’s vault. But once her part’s done Camille’s brought out a revolver and is blowing away cops and guards with ease. In fact she kills several police officers in the final pages, toting the M-16 Colby has acquired. Colby, his heist double-cross carried out with finesse, heads up the getaway, and this too is a fun, tense scene, complete with those nail-balls in use. But Harmon Smith seems to forget about the Chevy’s changeable paint job that he so heavily built up in the narrative; another of the old man’s tricks, a plastic sheen will fly off the car when the speed gets up to fifty m.p.h, with a different-color paint job beneath.

It appears that Bad Guy is relatively scarce and overpriced, but I’ll try to refrain from total spoilers. I will say the novel heads for the exact conclusion the reader expects; there’s already been skillful foreshadowing throughout, like Colby’s admission that he’s afraid to die. But once the heist is done, Harmon Smith decides he wants to do more of a Bonnie and Clyde thing. Even though he and Camille have the chance to get away scot-free, with all the money, Colby can’t let Peaches go unpunished; of course, he’s learned that Peaches was responsible for the death of Colby’s wife and son. So Colby and Camille stash the cash and slip into Peaches’s fortified mansion for a little revenge. This is another tense scene, which might play out a little too quickly, but then when you’re dispensing bloody payback with a .357 Magnum, like Colby is, there really isn’t much opportunity to draw out the kill.

But as ever Harmon Smith is unpredictable, with Colby’s vengeance sated but having a surprise conclusion, and the climax itself involves a tense standoff between Camille and the cops. In other words we’re headed for that mandatory downer ‘70s ending, but then it was only expected given that our “heroes” just wasted several cops in the heist and chase. Harmon Smith instead focuses again on Camille’s childlike love for Colby, even while bullets are flying around them. It’s an effective, memorable finale, and again reminiscent of Bronson: Blind Rage; indeed, Bad Guy features the exact sort of ending Blind Rage seemed to be headed for, but of course didn’t, because it was the start of a series and all.

Overall though I really enjoyed Bad Guy. It’s certainly too long, with way too much flab that could’ve been cut, but at its core it’s a mean, tense ‘70s crime thriller that should’ve received more attention. And the author, whether it was George Harmon Smith or not, is definitely skilled, giving us a lot more character depth and random plot quirkiness than might be expected from a Belmont Tower publication about a “hillbilly hoodlum.”

The Iceman #4: Sunday Fix

The Iceman #4: Sunday Fix, by Joseph Nazel
July, 1974  Holloway House

Joseph Nazel phones it in for this fourth installment of The Iceman; I knew going in that Sunday Fix probably wouldn’t be of much interest to me, given that its plot concerns pro football, but man, I didn’t think the novel would be boring. It’s more Banacek than Shaft as Henry Highland West, aka “The Iceman” (though usually referred to as “Ice” in the narrative), mostly just makes phone calls and sits around in his various opulent domiciles, offering homespun philosophy and pondering man’s inhumanity to man.

The novel opens in Los Angeles, where Ice is watching his newly-acquired pro football team, the Rattlers, getting their asses kicked by the Rams. Ice puzzles over this because his team’s made of good players but it seems they are intentionally fumbling plays. All very strange because Ice has hired “the best Black coaches” in America to handle the team. Oh and curiously, “Black” is always capitalized when referring to black people, yet “white” is never capitalized when referring to white people. Pretty racist if you ask me. And of course the villain’s a white guy, too, a sports-betting honkie named Reggie Owens who, Ice reflects, seemed all too willing to bet $40,000 on the Rams…as if he knew the Rattlers were going to lose.

After the game Ice visits the team along with his constant companion, colorfully-wardrobed Christmas Tree, who berates the players for their jive plays. Ice is more hesistant – and indeed will continue to be for much too long of the narrative. Even later, when he receives a panicked call from the coach, Stewart, Ice doesn’t think too much of it. Meanwhile we readers know that Stewart has been pushed into a bad situation by team manager Ray Hubbard…the Syndicate has moved in, and is offering Hubbard, Stewart, and any willing players $10,000 each to lose games. Hubbard himself isn’t for it but believes the white bastards have some dirt on him, so he’s forced to play along. But Stewart has had enough, mulling over his troubles as he drinks – seriously folks, Ice is practically a guest star in his own novel – and finally calls the boss man to meet.

But three Syndicate goons ambush him as he’s driving up the twisty canyon road to Ice’s seaside home in Malibu, or wherever it is. Ice is already in his “blue Ferrari” (his schtick is that everything he drives, flies, or wears is blue) and racing down to meet Stewart, wondering why it’s taken him so long to get here. He arrives just in time to see Stewart shot dead, then Ice has his .38 in hand and is in a firefight. Nazel greatly reduces the gore of the earlier volumes, with the goons just getting shot and falling down – previous installments had brains blasted out and whatnot. That being said, Ice does take down one goon with a kung-fu kick that comes straight out of Mace. It’s goofy, though, because Ice wastes the three goons…then Ray Hubbard shows up on the scene; he was also tyring to prevent Stewart from telling Ice what’s been going on. Ice suspects Hubbard of hiding something, but just sort of brushes it off…even after Ice has found an envelope with $10,000 in it beside Stewart’s corpse.

After this it’s to the slow-burn…Ice heads back to his palatial desert home, The Oasis, and cooks up some soul food for his usual entoruage: Tree, Kim (aka the Chinese one), Solema (aka the African one), and Jan (aka Kim’s sister, stated as being “the newest member” of the group). There’s also Maria, the sexy programmer for the Oasis computer, named Matilda. As ever Nazel doesn’t much bring the female characters to life, nor does he even much describe them – and also as ever, for a guy who runs a high-dollar cathouse (which is what the Oasis technically is), Ice himself shows little interest in women. There’s even a “hmmm” moment where we’re told that Maria’s revealing dress “would turn any man to her side…any man but Ice.” However later Ice does get busy with Solema, who as ever is presented as Ice’s main woman, but Nazel leaves it off-page, same as he does with all other sex scenes in the series.

Action is minimal; after the firefight with the goons who come to kill Coach Stewart, Ice doesn’t do much of anything. Even by page 160 there still hasn’t been much in the way of action (as usual the novel runs to a too-long 221 pages). Ice makes calls from the Oasis to try to get leads; one of his contacts is Numbers Nate, an older street hustler in Harlem who is “like a father” to Ice. Due to the many scenes that cut away from Ice (again, the poor guy’s a guest star in his own book this time), we know that “jive honkie” Reggie Wilson, the gambler from the opening chapter, has come up with the idea of getting the Mafia into the pro football scene, taking his idea to a capo named Roman Touletti. This gets its own too-long subplot, with Wilson often meeting with Touletti and going over strategy. There’s also lots of page-filling about Hubbard, the team manager, and a new Rattlers player fresh out of college who struggles with this whole “fumble plays for ten thousand bucks” scheme.

Things don’t pick up until near the 200-page mark. First Tree is almost ambushed by three Mafia thugs in Vegas, but Tree’s wise to them; when the decoy offers info for twenty bucks, Tree’s inistantly suspicious that someone would want such little pay for what he claims to be important info. So Tree whips out his .45, takes the guy to a remote location, and ultimately gets into a firefight, one in which Tree gets knocked out but still manages to kill his would-be ambushers before falling unconscious. At the same time Ice choppers out into the desert on his personal ‘copter to meet with Owen, who has called him with an offer – Owen’s learned that Touletti plans to kill him and wants thirty thousand dollars from Ice and safe passage to South America in exchange for all the info on the blackmail scheme.

This leads to the memorable scene of Ice, on the ground, wielding a .44 Magnum in one hand and a .38 revolver in the other as he takes on a small plane in the desert, the Mafia killers onboard having come to take out Owen before he could blab to Ice. It’s a cool scene, one of the moments depicted on the cover, but again Nazel dials back on the violence – Ice manages to hit the guy with the automatic rifle in the head with his .44, and later lands his ‘copter on top of the plane and crashes it. Meanwhile Tree’s gotten captured and taken to Touletti’s Vegas lair, so the finale features a rushed climax in which Ice leads his doll squad of blacksuited fillies on an assault of the compound. If only the entire novel was like this! We’ve got Kim and Jan taking out goons with kung-fu, Solema blowing ‘em away with a shotgun like a regular Coffy, and even Ice getting in on it with some knife-throwing skills.

But overall I found Sunday Fix to be very boring, and as stated above I get the impression Nazel phoned this one in. I mean he was churning these books out, so it’s only understandable he’d lose a little steam after a while. It’s kind of fun for the topical blaxploitation vibe, though, with Tree’s colorful pimp wardrobe squarely placing the book in the early ‘70s. Also Ice and his companions almost constantly use the phrase “Whatever’s fair!,” so I assume this must have been the hip black (sorry, “hip Black”) phrase of the moment. Also “What you say!” gets repeated a lot. And Ice himself continues to be the epitome of ‘70s cool, doing “Nogare breathing exercises” before practicing his karate moves, then fixing himself a Highball and pondering over the toughness of the world and how he’d kill just to see another beautiful sunset from his palatial desert home.

The series ran for three more volumes, ending in 1975 with the seventh installment, but currently this and the first two installments are all I have. In fact I was surprised to even discover this and the second volume sitting together in the “Rare Books” section of the downtown Dallas Half Price Books back in 2012 (for three bucks each!). But to tell the truth, The Iceman just leaves me cold (lame pun alert), so I don’t plan to seek out any of the volumes I’m missing. I’d say if you want a little blaxploitation with your men’s adventure you’d be much better off seeking out Dark Angel.