Love Me Tomorrow

Love Me Tomorrow, by Robert H. Rimmer

December, 1978  Signet Books

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a hotstuff poet “in the Sylvia Plath tradition” who once starred in a porno flick cryogenically freezes herself in 1980 so she can wake up and screw her way through the Brave New World of 1996! Yes, folks, that is the plot of Love Me Tomorrow, “a novel of Future Shock Sex” per the awesome cover slugline (the best kind of future shock, if you ask me). The only problem with this bonkers setup is that the book was written by Robert H. Rimmer, he of The Harrad Experiment and The Premar Experiments, and he once again delivers a turgid crawl of a “novel” that’s filled with navel-gazing and bald exposition. 

Speaking of Future Shock, I wonder if whoever at Signet wrote that slugline realized how accurate the comment was, on two levels; for, not only is Love Me Tomorrow clearly influenced by Alvin Toffler’s nonfiction bestseller, but Rimmer himself also appeared in the bizarre 1972 documentary which was based on Future Shock (and hosted by Orson Welles!). Rimmer is fully on board with a progressivised future, and as demonstrated in The Premar Experiments he is wholly devoted to socialism. In this way Love Me Tomorrow is the antithesis of another book of the day that was influenced by Toffler: Lawrence Sanders’s The Tomorrow File. But the main difference between these novels is twofold. For one, Sanders’s novel is immensely better – but then, Sanders actually writes a novel, with drama and characterization and tension. Rimmer on the other hand writes an exposition-laden treatise. The other big difference between the two novels is that Sanders clearly sees the horrors of a fully-progressivised society, whereas Rimmer presents it as a utopia of sorts. (Guess which of the two progressivism is proving to be in the real world?) 

Actually a third difference would be that The Tomorrow File received an initial hardcover edition, whereas Love Me Tomorrow, same as The Premar Experiments, was a paperback original. It’s also a bit shorter than Sanders’s novel, though Love Me Tomorrow isn’t a short novel by any means: 430 pages of small, dense print. In reality it turns out that only 414 pages are comprised of the narrative, with the remaining pages given over to a bibliography. This should give you an idea of what you are in for; Rimmer has for the most part written an expose on his intended socialist utopia of the near future, based on the ideas and research of progressivists of the day, and has tried to pass it off as a novel. Like I mentioned in The Premar Experiments, Rimmer is like the antimatter universe version of Joseph Rosenberger, in that he has his characters baldly exposit on arcane books or research papers they’ve read…but whereas Rosenberger is clearly a right-winger Rimmer is very far to the left. 

He's also pretty humorless (befitting someone far to the left, one might argue), and this is evidenced throughout the novel, which is incredibly dry and incredibly talky. In essence, Rimmer was inspired by an obscure 1800s novel titled Looking Backward, by a utopian named Edward Bellamy, and here in Love Me Tomorrow has attempted to do a similar sort of novel. But he couldn’t just write a novel inspired by Bellamy; instead, Rimmer fills his own novel with rampant exposition about Bellamy’s book, quoting it and summarizing it (in addition to sundry other books, research papers, and magazine articles), and he overlooks such little things as characterization and drama and plot. He also totally fails on the “future shock sex” angle, with pathetically few sex scenes in the novel…and those sex scenes we do get are repugnant, like “mother having sex with her own son” sort of repugnant, more on which anon. 

The biggest slap in the face is that Love Me Tomorrow is boring. I mean it’s like Lustbader’s The Ninja, which took a novel about a ninja and turned it into a slow-moving excess of boredeom – this is a book about a former porn actress who freezes herself for sixteen years and wakes up in a slightly psychedelic and very progressive future, and it’s boring as hell. And like Sanders’s The Tomorrow File this is indeed a psychedelic era, with even a drink similar to Sanders’s “Smack:” C&C, a carbonated beverage that includes cannabis and coke among its ingredients. And just like Sanders’s projected 1998 was wildly progressivised when compared to the 1970s (or even today), so too is Rimmer’s 1996…but then only so far as the societal impacts go. While Sanders’s 1998 was suitably “futuristic,” thanks to its society of drug-taking young geniuses, Rimmer’s is more low-tech hippie, with the biggest innovations being a sort of immersive television and helicopter-hotel things. 

One similarity between The Tomorrow File and Love Me Tomorrow is that both novels are written in first-person. However the narrator of Rimmer’s novel is a woman…which means that Love Me Tomorrow is one of those strange (to me, at least) novels in which a male author writes explicit sex scenes from the perspective of a woman. Kids, don’t try this at home! But as mentioned there isn’t much sex at all in the novel; instead, there’s a ton of navel-gazing introspection…humorless navel-gazing introspection at that. This is the sort of book where our narrator, 33 year-old poet, porn actress, and cryogenic test subject Christina “Christa” North, will say, without even a hint of humor, stuff like, “If [Mory] had married me, I would have sucked him into my Stygian nothingness.” 

It takes a helluva long time to get to the future, too. The first hundred-plus pages of Love Me Tomorrow are a nightmare of psychoanalysis, as Christa North tells us of her sordid history. Long story short, Christa is now in an experimental cryogenic facitilty in 1980, sent here due to her frequent attempts at suicide. She’s 33, married to a wealthy older industrialist, and has two kids – whom she clearly doesn’t give a shit about. (Not that this stops her from screwing her son in the future section…but we’ll get to that…) But Christa sure does care about herself, as she blathers at us incessantly for a good hundred pages, detailing her life up to that point, complete with pedantic, verbatim discussions she had with a college boyfriend named Mory in the late ‘60s who thought he was the reincarnation of Edward Bellamy and vowed to become president one day. 

The navel-gazing is horrendous in this opening section as Christa’s narration hops from 1980 back to the late ‘60s, with periodic detours about her bestselling “dirty book,” The Christening Of Christina, which was about her sexual awakening and whatnot. Vaguely we are informed a film was made of this, somewhere in the early ‘70s, starring Christa herself – and it was one of those mainstream porn films of the era, complete with Christa giving blowjobs and having sex on camera. After this Christa became a famous “sword swallower” a la Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat, but she soon escaped that life, marrying older man Karl, having two children with him, and trying to make her name as a poet. And also trying to kill herself, and she recounts each failed attempt in total self-obsessed detail. 

As with Rimmer’s other books, most of the action occurs in Boston, so we get a lot of flashbacks to Christa’s Harvard days. There is a ton of exposition here from Christa’s boyfriend Mory, on how in the year 2000 people will be so different the US will need a new constitution and a “philosopher” President, ie Mory himself. Again, very similar to The Tomorrow File, so similar that I wonder if Rimmer borrowed some ideas – Sanders’s novel projected a radically altered Unitied States, alterations which had been spearheaded by “the first scientist President.” Mory endlessly talks as he screws Christa and roommate Jenny, just on and on talking – yes, there’s even exposition during the sex scenes. Mory’s goal is to get “the liberal wing of the Republican party” to vote for him when he runs in 2000 (ie RINOs, who curiously do control the party today, but for how long is the question). 

In between the rampant flashbacks we have the “main” storyline in 1980 with Christa in the clinic, and it all finally culminates in a big business deal Karl is trying to achieve on his yacht, and Christa gets super drunk, leading the other wives in some skinny dipping, after which she tries to screw one of Karl’s business partners – and kill him along with her as she pulls their fornicating bodies down into the dark sea. After this Christa is sent off to the funny farm, only it’s a special type of funny farm, as she’s become the unwilling guinea pig in a cryogenic experiment. Why Christa? Given the high rate of failures, the clinic is looking for subjects who are prone to suicide…in other words if the cryo fails, no big deal, because the subject planned to kill himself anyway! It gets a bit creepy when Christa sees her own obituary in the paper; the false story has it that she’s drowned, leaving behind a husband and two prepubescent children. 

Rimmer pulls an interesting narrative trick, so far as when exactly Christa’s “autobiography” is being dictated, and around page 130 we come to the future portion of the novel. And here the exposition becomes even more incessant. Rather than bring his progressivised, vaguely sci-fi 1996 to life via action, suspense, or drama, Rimmer instead has a variety of characters baldly exposit on all the changes that have occurred in the 16 years Christa has been asleep. What makes it humorous is that most of the characters are men, so therefore according to current sentiments the novel is a barrage of “mansplaining.” But then Love Me Tomorrow is yet another indication of how Leftism has changed over the decades; Rimmer’s version of it is essentially the late ‘60s projected into the ‘90s, with “Love Groups” of open marriages and wanton hedonism, with the expected sex and drugs…even psychedelia courtesy lightshows people go to see in large arenas. There is none of the straightjacketed wokeism and identity politics that defines the Left today…but then again the “future” Rimmer depicts here is nearly 30 years in the past. 

The only real tension occurs soon after Christa awakens; she tries to escape from the clinic, only slowly realizing that it’s now 1996. This entails a cool scene where she wanders into a cryo room and sees a bunch of dates on the sleeping forms that range from the 1980s through the ‘90s; in other words, to paraphrase Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, it’s not 1980 anymore. Here too Christa sees that David, the head scientist in the cryo project, has gotten much older since she last saw him a few “days” ago, but there’s not much else in the way of drama. And keep in mind, Christa has two kids who now would be in their 20s; Christa is so obsessed with herself that she doesn’t even think to ask about them until many, many pages detailing various incidental societal changes have gone by. 

Rather, it’s an onlsaught of “mansplaining,” with David even giving Christa specific “don’t have sex” instructions: 

This proceeds immediately into a discussion about abortion: 

And keep in mind, Christa has yet to ask about her kids! But hey, at least Rimmer has his leftist priorities in order…I mean sex and abortion should be discussed before finding out what’s happened to your children in the 16 years you’ve been sleeping. Good grief! 

But speaking of children, Rimmer’s progressivised 1996 has also achieved that (un)holy grail of the left, same as in The Tomorrow File: the sexualization of children. Christa is taken back to David’s Love Group, which is like an extended “family” of communal living…and the kids are free to walk around naked and sleep with their parents, as bluntly exposited for us by an 11 year-old: 

And still our heroine fails to ask about her own kids, or even about her former husband. But then, she did try to kill herself, so I guess Rimmer assumes Christa wouldn’t be much concerned with them anyway. It’s just an example of the author’s complete lack of understanding when it comes to writing a compelling novel. Hell, when Christa does finally ask about her kids, she’s told in like two sentences that they’ve grown up and gone on to relatively normal lives…and then we get three times as much detail on how toilets operate in this future: 

You might note the strange words in the above excerpts. Fully committed to his own nonsense, Rimmer has the people of his 1996 even employing a language called Loglan, which we’re informed via more exposition was invented some years ago. They’ve also taken words from an obscure book on some Himalayan tribe or somesuch, referring to wealthy people as “iks” or some other such bullshit. It’s all so stupid and mundane. And the cool groovy “future shock sex” stuff you want is minimal at best: we learn that see-through blouses are all the rage among jetsetters, and you can watch fullblown sex on TV (another similarity to Sanders’s vastly superior novel). For that matter, there’s an arbitrary attack on sci-fi; it’s mansplained to Christa that science fiction isn’t very popular in this 1996, as reality is so much more futuristic than anything some hack author could conceive, and from there Rimmer goes into a puzzling attack on Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, mocking the “patriarchal” vibe of it. So yeah on that point Rimmer’s certainly in touch with the real future; lots of Love Me Tomorrow comes off like the Twitter feed of some easily-triggered leftist of the modern day, ranting and raving at that goddamn patriarchy. 

This is also one of the first novels I’ve ever read where a footnote informs readers that we can jump ahead 32 pages if we want to skip the narrator’s rundown (“in an ongoing way”) of Mory’s book, Looking Backward II. I mean it’s nothing but info-dumping from beginning to end, and the sleazy stuff is off-putting. Back to the sexualization of children, on page 270 Christa kisses a teenage boy’s dick, wondering why mothers don’t teach their sons about sex…by actually having sex with them, and then later in the book Christa does this very thing. Her son, now a handsome young man in his 20s, is campaigning for Mory, ie Christa’s old Harvard boyfriend, and Christa is posing as some woman Mory has met – and the reunion between Christa and Mory is underwhelming at best. But then Rimmer fails again and again to add any impetus to the novel; it’s all just dry exposition with no emotional content. Mory is aware from the start that this mysterious woman is indeed Christa, but the truth of her having been cryogenically frozen is hidden from the public. 

So Christa decides to put the moves on her own son, Christa playing it sly that she might be his mother, and next thing you know he’s going down on her. This of course made me think of William Hegner’s unforgettable line “Kiss where you came from,” in The Ski Lodgers. (Some people quote Shakespeare; I quote trash.) From there it proceeds to full sex…I mean all the way, son screwing his mother, with the added sickness that the poor guy doesn’t know it’s actually his own mother he’s screwing. And of course nothing much comes from any of this. Instead more focus is placed on Christa campainging for Mory, complete with a sex tape they make together which is played on TV and of course only serves to make Mory even more popular. 

Curiously the novel is written with the conceit that it’s being read by someone in 2000. In the finale we learn that the nation pretty much resets in January of 2000, upon the last election of the country, and Christa is one of the prime movers of this new United States. Of course the name Rimmer has given the character, a female play on “Christ,” is our allusion to this from the get-go. But unfortunately Rimmer has not given us a novel in which we can read with anticipation as all this plays out. Instead it’s a soul-crushing block of deadened exposition which spells out every incidental detail of this “future” while ignoring all of the drama. 

In sum Love Me Tomorrow was one of the most disappointing novels I’ve read in a long time…the book I wanted, the “future shock sex” novel about some progressivised future, is not the book I got, and readers in 1978 must have been just as disappointed in it, as Love Me Tomorrow appears to be entirely forgotten these days, and justifiably so.

The Troubleshooter #2: The Black Hearts Murder

The Troubleshooter #2: The Black Hearts Murder, by Ellery Queen

No month stated, 1970  Lancer Books

An early attempt at packaging a mystery series like men’s adventure, The Troubleshooter only ran for 3 volumes and each volume was written by a different writer, though the series was credited to Ellery Queen. This second one was by Richard Deming, a veteran crime writer; searching the blog it looks like so far I’ve only reviewed some of his short stories in various ‘60s crime digests and also his Good Guys Wear Black novelization. Deming’s The Black Hearts Murder is pretty much the same as the other material of his I’ve read: a workmanlike mystery with not much pizzaz to it. If it is indicative of the other two volumes of Troubleshooter (the first by Gil Brewer and the third by Edward D. Hoch), then there’s no mystery why the series didn’t last. 

But then “mystery” pretty much sums up the vibe of the novel. The Troubleshooter is similar to later paperback mystery series like Hardy and Renegade Roe in how it is misleadingly packaged like gun-toting men’s adventure. In point of fact, titular Troubleshooter Mike McCall doesn’t even carry a gun! It’s interesting though that Lancer Books was already jumping on the men’s adventure series bandwagon; in that regard, The Troubleshooter must be one of the earliest instances of a publisher trying to follow the success of The Executioner…which only around 1970 was beginning to pick up steam. (Per Don Pendleton in his interview in A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction, it took a handful of years for The Executioner to become a successful series.) In fact, The Troubleshooter has all the hallmarks of a venture by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel…and indeed the series setup is so similar to later Engel venture Chopper Cop that I wonder if Engel was inspired by this series. For, just like Terry Bunker in Chopper Cop, Mike McCall is a lone gun who reports directly to the Governor…but whereas Bunker’s boss is clearly identified as the Governor of California, McCall’s boss is the Governor of some never-identified state…which clearly seems to be California. 

Another similarity to an Engel venture is the slugline that The Troubleshooter focuses on “top-of-the-news” subjects; very similar to Engel’s concurrent Now Books For Today’s Readers pseudo-series of unrelated standalone novels. The hot topic covered in The Black Hearts Murder is, as the title and cover should inform you, the civil rights movement. Mike McCall, whose official title is The Assistant To The Governor For Special Affairs, is sent by Governor Holland to a city called Babury in this never-named state, where racial tensions are high. The novel is an interesting relic from an earlier era; McCall and Governor Holland are the even-headed rationalists who embrace progressivism so far as black people should have the same rights as white people. But also it is interesting that in this novel both sides of the debate are given equal weight, complete with the concern that the whites might riot – in other words, the racists are given equal voice on the public platform. It is indicative of the sea change of the past few decades that such a thing would be inconceivable today – and these are real racists, mind you, not because they merely disagree with the party line but because they are wholly against blacks having equal rights. Today of course the “racist” accusation is tossed around so much that it has lost all meaning, but The Black Hearts Murder is from an era when some white people really did march against civil rights and whatnot…don’t think you’ll find too many of those whites today, despite the media/government’s obsession with “white supremacy.” 

Deming doesn’t get too preachy; McCall’s position as mentioned is more rational than impassioned. His is the voice of reason as he confronts the various racists in Banbury…and “voice” is pretty much all Mike McCall uses in the book. That and his rugged good looks. For the most interesting thing about The Black Hearts Murder is that, even if it’s progressive in the race-relations arena, it is so backwards in the gender-relations department that Richard Deming would automatically be cancelled in today’s woke era. That is, if he could even get published. (Tocsin Press would take him!) McCall, who has an athletic build and rugged good looks, indulges so frequently in what is today called “the male gaze” that it’s actually humorous – twice in the book he so stares at good-looking young women that the women become uncomfortable. 

But only a little uncomfortable, that is, because both women end up throwing themselves at McCall. The novel is almost an exercise in wish-fulfillment, as literally every single person in Banbury has heard of “the famous Mike McCall,” and his name opens doors for him everywhere. And the women are all aware of McCall’s notoriety as a lady-killer…and are plumb eager to add themselves to his list. The first is an auburn-tressed beauty who works as a secretary, and Deming has no issues with filling in incidental background detail about McCall; it would be interesting to see how this jibes with the other two authors who worked on the series. Anyway, Deming’s McCall has a thing for auburn hair, even though “his mother did not have auburn hair.” This was one of the more peculiar Freudian slips I’ve ever encountered in a book…like what the hell does McCall’s mother have to do with his longtime attraction to auburn-haired women? 

McCall’s second conquest is a blonde-haired mega-babe who happens to be a cop. When McCall oggles her it’s another unintentionally humorous bit, as he flat-out tells her she’s too hot to be a cop. And of course, later in the novel when the lady’s cop-skills might prove necessary, she instead turns to McCall for help…later admitting that she’s “mostly just a secretary” at the precinct. McCall’s rugged virility appears to be a big gimmick with the series, and I assume is just as focused on in the volumes by Brewer and Hoch. Also he manages to score with both women, with the novel ending on the certainty that he’s about to score with a third – and these are literally the only three single women in the entire novel, so McCall gets them all. But it must be noted that Deming is very much a “fade to black” author. In each case the chapter ends pre-boink, usually with the sentence, “McCall spent the night there.” And then next chapter will open the next morning and McCall’s saying goodbye to the babe to head off onto the next lead in the case. 

Unfortunately The Black Hearts Murder is a dud when it comes to the suspense angle as well. McCall basically just drives around Banbury and engages various characters in conversation. The setup is that Harlan James, the leader of a militant black movement called The Black Hearts, has been indicted by a racist district attorney, but James didn’t show up for his court date. James’s disappearance and the complicity, or lack thereof, of his fellow Black Hearts takes up the first half of the novel, and it’s a slow-grind of boredom. But then suddenly on page 94 something happens – another of Banbury’s racist political figures, who intends to launch a national movement, is assassinated during a rally…by a black man dressed all in black and wearing a domino mask. This is the part where Beth, the hotstuff lady cop, just goes into panic mode and McCall is the only one who gives the assassin chase. 

I mentioned that McCall doesn’t carry a gun. About the only thing he has weapon-wise is his training in judo, which he uses sporadically in the text. He isn’t the most capable of heroes, though, as the novel contains two separate scenes in which McCall is captured, put in a car, and driven off to his death. This is what I mean about Deming’s workmanlike plotting; the author himself seems to be bored with it all. The first “being driven off to his death” scene is the highlight of the novel, as the black man in the domino mask captures McCall and drives him out to a desolate part of the countryside. Here the man holds a pistol on McCall and has him lug a tire chain down to a river, so as to drown him. But McCall manages to escape, leading to a tense chase – pretty much the only tense moment in the entirety of The Black Hearts Murder. 

Otherwise the novel is just a lot of talking and time-killing, as we’re told incidental details like McCall going back to his hotel room and eating and brushing his teeth. I mean it’s all just so mundane. And it’s also funny that, despite civil rights being the subject of the novel, there are hardly any black characters in it. During the course of his investigation McCall meets a few of the Black Hearts, including Harlan James’s wife, but the black characters are mostly on the periphery, with more time spent on the various Banbury government officials who are aligned against the Black Hearts. There’s also a lot of stuff about a local radio station that plays messages Harlan James has left for them. The most puzzling thing is why Mike McCall’s character even exists; he demonstrates nothing special about himself in this particular installment, and his even-headed manner could have been supplied by any number of the governor’s functionaries. 

This lack of anything special extends to The Troubleshooter itself, so if The Black Hearts Murder reflects the vibe of the other two installments, it’s not suprising that the series never caught on. It seems as if Lancer wanted to jump on the action-series bandwagon but at the same time didn’t want to fully commit to it. And on that note, it also seems that Lancer concurrently published The Troubleshooter through its Magnum Books imprint, only minus the volume numbers on the covers, which would indicate they weren’t exactly sure what sort of series they wanted The Troubleshooter to be.

Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry, by Phillip Rock

No month stated, 1977  Star Books

(Original US edition 1971)

Phillip Rock, who wrote the awesome Hickey & Boggs novelization, handles the tie-in for the first Dirty Harry flick, and it’s another good book. It doesn’t come off like an entirely new story, like his novelization of Hickey And Boggs did (likely because Rock was working from Walter Hill’s original screenplay for that one). Instead, Rock’s Dirty Harry is pretty much the prototypical film novelization, serving up mostly the same story as the film but with minor variations. 

This slim UK paperback seems to be a direct lift of the text that was originally published by Berkley Books in the US in 1971. There are US-style double quotation marks instead of UK-style single quotation marks, and there doesn’t appear to have been any tinkering by Star Books. Initially I wondered if the f-bombs had been removed, as sometimes we’re informed that Dirty Harry might utter a “short, harsh, four-letter word,” and I suspected skittish British editors might have bowdlerized Rock’s original text (because they don’t use the f-word over there in England, btw). But then later in the book the word “fuck” appears, so there went my suspicions. The strangest thing though is why Dirty Harry was even reprinted in the UK in 1977. This was a year after The Enforcer was released, which was the last Dirty Harry movie until 1983’s Sudden Impact. 

It's been 7 or 8 years since I last watched Dirty Harry, but overall the difference I noted between the film and Rock’s novel is that, mainly, there is more characterization of the villain, Scorpio, in the novel. Here we see how much of a whackjob he truly is; he has forgotten his real name and spends most of the time looking up at the sky, wondering where the stars are. He’s very much into the astrology scene, and Rock puts the occasional horroscope for Scorpio in the book. There is more of an attempt by Rock to make Scorpio a rounded figure than there is in the film itsef, and the same holds true for Rock’s take on Dirty Harry. In the novel it seemed to me that Harry – whose full name, we’re informed, is Harry Francis Kallahan – is a bit more of a team player, and a lot of the book is comprised of him doing standard police detecting instead of making quips and busting heads. 

We’re also informed that Harry has been a cop for nineteen years and that he’s from San Francisco; he grew up in the apparently-rough Potrero Hill neighborhood of the city. I don’t know anything about San Francisco, but Philip Rock certainly seems to, as Dirty Harry is peppered with topical details about the city, to the extent that you assume Rock must have had more than a passing familiarity with the place. It’s one thing for the film to show famous locales, but another for Rock to tell us precisely where things are taking place; he even shows familiarity with San Francisco’s public transit system, down to the exact stops. Given this, I felt more of an awareness of San Francisco in the novel than I did in the film itself. I also thought it was interesting that Rock so tied the locale into the setting, given that the Dirty Harry men’s adventure novels, part of Warner Books’ “Men Of Action” line in the early ‘80s, often took Harry outside of his city. 

As mentioned Rock follows the film pretty faithfully, so I assume he must’ve gotten to view a workprint or a final draft; if I’m not mistaken, Dirty Harry was in development hell for a long time, with such actors as John Wayne supposedly at one point slated to star in it. The book even opens the same as the movie, with Scorpio up on a roof and sniping a beautiful young woman as she swims in a hotel pool. But as ever with tie-ins, we are brought more into the minds of the characters, from the insane thoughts that propel Scorpio to the thoughts of the girl in the pool – who’s here, we learn, because she’s having an affair with some lawyer she plans to marry. We also learn that her “last thought on Earth” concerns “what her breasts looked like as she drifted across the pool.” (It’s nice to know that even girls think about boobs all the time!) 

The setup here also shows how Harry comes into the fold; he simply answers the phone in the inspector’s room at his precinct because the other inspectors are busy. Whereas the film had that great time-lapse bit with the murder followed by the investigation, here it’s a bit more drawn out with Harry getting the call and heading over to the hotel. One thing to note is that Rock makes Harry a bit cheaper than in the film; indeed, we’re told he’s “a tall man, but whip-thin” and that he looks like “an overworked cop in a cheap suit.” You almost get the impression Harry's “whip-thin” because he doesn’t have the money to eat; we’re also informed that, when Harry bums a cigar from a fellow cop, he carefully pinches it out and puts it in his pocket to smoke later. 

But as mentioned, Harry comes off more as a “realistic” cop here in the novel than the one-man army he was in the film. That said, the famous opening with the bank robbery is here in the book. Same setup too, with Harry enjoying a hot dog and noticing how no one seems to be coming out of the bank across the street, even though people keep going in. The ensuing gunfight even plays out the same…save for Harry’s famous line. Here, when he holds his .44 Magnum on the lone surviving bank robber, Harry does ask whether he fired five times or six, but we get the added detail that “regulations” say he should only have five bullets…and the question is whether he’s gone against regulations and put a sixth bullet in the chamber. The film made a very wise decision in cutting out this detail; it sounds a lot more badass to just leave it as “how many times did I shoot?” Another change – instead of the more powerful “it’ll blow your head clean off” of the film, here in the novel Harry says his .44 Magnum will “turn your head into hash.” 

I should watch the movie again, because it’s the middle portion of Rock’s Dirty Harry that seemed different to me. First of all Harry’s given a new partner, whether he wants one or not: new inspector Chico Gonsales. The two begin canvassing leads, and here in the novel there’s much more of a procedural vibe than I recall the film having. Here again Rock brings San Francisco to life, with Harry and Chico driving around various neighborhoods and asking about any suspicious characters. And also here Scorpio is certainly given more inner depth than he was in the film, with periodic bits where he’ll wander around the city, often trying to hit on women who ignore him, or looking up at the sky and wishing for a place where he can view the stars. But still even here I didn’t feel that his astrological gimmick was fully worked into the plot; I mean the movie has it that he’s a psycho, which is obvious, but Rock tries to integrate the horoscope stuff into it – all of it no doubt inspired by the Zodiac Killer. 

Harry runs the case and a lot of the plot hinges around him bucking the stupid higher ups who want to string Zodiac along…in particular “The Mayor,” as memorably portrayed by John Vernon in the film. One of Harry’s biggest ideas is to lure Scorpio to the one building not guarded by the cops, Harry correctly guessing that Scorpio’s arrogance will prevent him from realizing it’s a trap. Harry, armed with an “elephant gun,” gets in a shootout with the serial killer, but Scorpio manages to escape, and a cop dies in the melee. But this will be it on the action front for a good while; instead it’s back to Harry and Chico canvassing the city and looking for leads. There’s also no sleazy action for Harry, though we learn in a minor aside that his wife was killed in a car accident, though they hadn’t been married long and “it was a long time ago.” 

The action returns in the final quarter. First, there’s the famous sequence where Scorpio makes “bag man” Harry run around San Francisco from payphone to payphone. Rock really brings home how much misery it would cause to run around with a suitcase filled with $250,000 in small bills; Harry only belatedly realizes he should’ve gotten a backpack. This leads to yet another shootout, and Harry employing a switchblade – something he’d insisted on bringing along, despite the reservations of the Chief of Police. And, same as in the film, Scorpio’s cleared because Harry has trampled his rights in the gathering of the incriminating evidence…yet it’s kind of hard to believe that a guy who has been a cop for 19 years wouldn’t have thought of any of that. 

Rock also captures the ravaged horror of Scorpio’s face after he pays a boxer to beat him up…so the “assault” can be blamed on Harry, who has been following Scorpio around. But this subplot doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, same as the film it all climaxes in Scorpio taking hostage a school bus. This sequence in the film, by the way, features what I consider the highlight of Lalo Schifrin’s score…the “Scorpio Theme” played on a very mean fuzz bass. Even here it all plays out mostly the same as the film…with one minor but important difference. Proving out that the producers couldn’t decide which way the finale would go, Harry here in the novel does not throw his badge into a lake, though he briefly considers it. It’s my understanding that Clint Eastwood is the one who pushed for the “badge toss” finale. I always thought Magnum Force should’ve opened with Harry scuba-diving in search of his badge. 

Speaking of Magnum Force, that has always been my favorite of the Dirty Harry movies. I know this first one gets all the acclaim, but the second one just does more for me. However Philip Rock didn’t write the novelization for it; this was the only Dirty Harry novelization he wrote. And he does a fine job, bringing the characters and their inner turmoils to life. So again I say Dirty Harry is pretty much the template for a movie tie-in, as there are no glaring differences from the actual film, and mostly it just gives a more complete look at the characters themselves.

New Book Available At Tocsin Press

Just wanted to let you all know that a new book is listed at Tocsin Press – Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers, by Nelson T. Novak. Here’s the cover: 

Joe Blitz is a tough cop in 1970s New York who totally shouldn’t be confused with Joe Ryker, Joe Keller, or Joe Blaze! In The Psycho Killers Blitz deals with a rather grisly rape case. 

This one’s uber-sleazy and should come with a warning on the back cover, a la Gannon or Death List. As an Amazon reviewer aptly put it: “This was so disgusting…it almost made me vomit!” I couldn’t think of a better blurb than that…  

Please head over to Tocsin Press for more details!

The Cobra Kill (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #47)

The Cobra Kill, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1969

Within a few pages of this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster, written by series veteran Manning Lee Stokes, I realized that it was actually sort of a sequel to an earlier Stokes yarn, possibly The Red Guard (1967). I am assuming that earlier volume, which I haven’t yet read, features Nick (as he was referred to in these earlier volumes) in Hong Kong, up against the Red Chinese and some Chinese tongs. The Cobra Kill opens with Nick once again in Hong Kong, this time on vacation, but his cover’s been blown and he’s on the run from various Tongs and Commies who are out to get him – as revenge for the incidents in that previous volume.  Or maybe it was another Stokes volume...maybe even one I’ve read but have forgotten! 

After this establishing setup, though, The Cobra Kill becomes its own novel, with no further references to the events of The Red Guard. In fact the reader doesn’t even need to have read the earlier book; it’s not like the plot of this one hinges on anything that happened in it. Nick will be out of Hong Kong and on into Indonesia and Malaysia for the majority of the novel. But actually it’s not even “Nick” this time…sadly, friends, we’ve now moved into the first-person years of Nick Carter: Killmaster, which would last until the mid 1980s. Nick Carter himself tells us the story, and thankfully he doesn’t prove to be as much of a bore as he was in the other first-person Killmaster novels I’ve read by Manning Lee Stokes, The Red Rays and The Black Death. The action pretty much keeps moving, with Nick not slowing down the proceedings with his incessant asides like he did in those other two books. But then we do get a fair bit of jungle travelogue in the novel, which gives The Cobra Kill more the vibe of something like Joaquin Hawks. 

Before I get into it though I wanted to note some things I’ve belatedly noticed about Stokes’s take on Nick. For one, Stokes doesn’t refer to Nick’s customary trio of weapons by their goofy nicknames: Wilhelmina the Luger is just “the Luger,” Hugo the stiletto is just “the stiletto,” and Pierre the gas bomb…actually the gas bomb isn’t even mentioned in The Cobra Kill. I can’t recall if Stokes used the weapons nicknames in the third-person Killmaster novels he wrote. Another thing is that Stokes’s take on Nick is that he’s purely an assassin; Stokes takes the “Killmaster” title literally, in that Nick Carter is only ever sent out on assignments that require someone to be killed. So this is sort of like the 007 setup of James Bond, but whereas “007” just means Bond has the approval to kill, Nick Carter is straight-up an assassin…something Manning Lee Stokes makes quite clear in The Cobra Kill. 

In fact Nick is certain that the fact he’s a professional assassin scares a particular AXE contact this time out. As mentioned though when we meet Nick he’s on vacation in Hong Kong, but it’s as if we’ve missed another story entirely, as we’re informed that within the past few hours Nick has run afoul of Tongs, Commies, and the cops, and he’s hiding in a US embassy…just as a call comes in from his boss David Hawk. Nick is to leave Hong Kong and proceed to Indonesia, where he’ll eventually go to Malaysia; the Malaysian government has worked out a secret deal with AXE for Nick, top AXE Killmaster, to kill commie rabble-rouser Lim Yang, aka The Red Cobra. This Mao-type leader has put together a guerrilla army of red insurgents in the Malaysian government, and since the government has never acknowledged him, they want him quietly killed by an outside party. It’s a bit of a belabored setup, but it’s Nick’s job, so he’s on the case – again, he is a professional assassin, and his job isn’t saving the world, it’s killing a communist leader. (I wonder if Nick has a celll phone number where I can reach him?) 

Seriously though, the anti-communist invective is strong throughout The Cobra Kill; Nick even notes in reluctant admiration how the Red Cobra has gone after college kids in Malaysia, knowing they’d be susceptible to his message, given how they’d want to go against their parents. But Nick, AXE, the Malaysian government, and practically everyone else realizes that communism is a bad idea, so there are no niceties in play; the job calls for the Red Cobra’s death, which would kill off the movement. Nick pays an expat – a former newsman who killed his wife and moved to Hong Kong, we’re informed randomly enough – to safely get out of Hong Kong. Once Nick’s in Indonesia the plot kicks in…the major portion of The Cobra Kill is Nick trying to find the Red Cobra, and most of it takes place in the jungles of Malaysia. The short sequence in Indonesia is pretty much the only part of the novel where Nick’s in civizliation. 

Nick, posing as a boisterous vacationer in a plush hotel, gets a gander at his AXE contact…who of course is a hotstuff babe. Indeed, a sultry “Malay-Chinese” who really turns on the Killmaster. Nick delivers a paean to this girl’s legs that I just had to share: 

The quota for Nick Carter: Killmaster was that Nick would bang at least three broads per book. Stokes as we know would often veer from templates – per Will Murray in his 1982 article on Killmaster, Stokes often went off-course from the setups series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel provided. But of course this leggy Malay-Chinese contact, whose name turns out to be Mora, will be our narrator’s first conquest in The Cobra Kill. Stokes isn’t very explicit this time; again, Stokes’s first-person installments are altogether more tame than his third-person ones, both in the sex and the violence departments. While there isn’t much sleaze, we do learn after the fact that Mora is sort of a nympho…I mean, not a full one, at least per Nick’s post-boink assessment, given that Mora can at least achieve orgasm. She’s just cock crazy is all…not that Nick uses those exact words, being a gentleman and all. Humorously enough, Nick offers to set Mora up with “Doc Saxe, the AXE headshrinker!” 

Nick heads to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Stokes clearly did his research on the flora and fauna of the country – and he wants you to know it. Have I mentioned before that my wife is from Malaysia? I thought about showing her The Cobra Kill to have her vet the details, but then figured the hell with it. One thing I noticed though was that Stokes seems to imply that everyone in Malaysia is Muslim, and this certainly is not true. But then again it could just be the characters Nick encounters. Otherwise Stokes really brings to life the humid green hell of the country, particularly when Nick gets into the jungle with its chittering monkeys, crops of durian, and random cloudbursts. Stokes really did his research on durian, a local fruit which, per Nick, “smells like a sewer” but tastes like heaven. I’d never even heard of durian until I met my wife – she and her family went on about how it was notorious for its bad smell but good taste, but honestly I didn’t think it smelled that bad. 

Actually, Stokes makes one goof: he has Nick flying into Kuala Lumpur Airport. I learned from my own research years ago, during a project I was working on, that there was no major airport in Kuala Lumpur (or “KL,” as the locals call it) until the 1990s – until then all flights went to an airport in Subang, a nearby city. So Stokes, despite his voluminous research, must’ve just winged it (lame pun not intended) when it came to the aiport. But then his intent is to get Nick into the jungle asap. The stuff in KL is over quickly; Nick finds that a colleague has been murdered, and the Killmaster makes his own first kill on page 61 when he bashes the assassin’s head in with the butt of his Luger. This leads to a brutal fight with another assassin, in which Nick “blinds” the guy by jabbing his fingers into the guy’s eyes – though Stokes apparently forgets this incidental detail, as when Nick takes the unconscious assassin off to be interrogated, the guy wakes up and starts “look[ing] around.” 

From here The Cobra Kill gets into the jungle, and will stay there for the duration. Stokes really excels at capturing the vibe of the locale, and as usual he serves up very evocative sequences – like when Nick comes across an abandoned village during a sudden squall, and soon discovers that he’s not alone. But Manning Lee Stokes as ever understands exactly what we expect from the genre: the mysterious figure darting around the ghostly village is a hotstuff native jungle girl named Siti who will serve as Nick’s partner for the remainder of the tale. And of course also per the template, they’ll ultimately get down to some jungle love – with jungle girl Siti (who refers to herself in third-person) insisting that Nick take her from the rear for their first boink: “This way, my way, Siti is comfortable and have all of you, Tuan. All!” 

A curious thing about Stokes’s first-person Killmaster novels is that Nick Carter comes off as a bit obsessive in them. Obsessive about some very unsettling things. In The Red Rays, for example, narrator Nick was obsessed with the fact that, early in the novel, he’d had sex with a triple agent who had been condemned to death; that Nick had, essentially, “screwed a corpse.” This led to periodic asides in the text where Nick ruminated over his bout of necrophilia…even wondering at times if the poor girl was dead yet. Indeed Nick came off as quite the creep in that one. So screwing corpses was his obsession in The Red Rays; in The Cobra Kill his obsession is latrines, and shit. Literal shit. “I went into the latrine and looked at the turds” is an actual line from the book, and in fact I was going to start off the review with that quote but thought it might be a little too off-putting for the more sensitive readers of the blog. 

And why is Nick so obsessed with shit this time? Because he’s tracking the Red Cobra’s guerrilla army through the dense jungles of Malaysia, and by “checking the latrines” of the recently-vacated campsites Nick can get a gauge of how recently the Red Cobra’s army has been in the area. At one point he even goes into a latrine to poke “the feces” with a stick to judge the freshness! He’s also quite interested in how the Red Cobra puts lime on his latrines to cut down the stench. It gets to be a bit much, and honestly made me miss the days when Nick would obsess over screwing a corpse. But this sort of thing makes up a large portion of The Cobra Kill; I mean it’s a lot of jungle travelogue, but Stokes capably captures the setting and brings it to life. Anyway this “latrine checking” is how Nick gradually closes in on the Red Cobra, who despite his colorful name is actually a bland character, an older Malay Chinese with a professorial air. 

But even though he looks harmless, the Red Cobra is truly sadistic, known for wiping out entire villages. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Nick Carter is that he’s a professional, a calm and cool killer, but this time he is driven to hate his target, and for the first time (so Nick tells us), he can’t wait to carry out his assassination. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Killmaster novels is that he’ll take Nick through the wringer, and he certainly does here. Given that the Red Cobra is Chinese, he’s “naturally devious,” and isn’t content to just shoot Nick in the head. Instead, Nick is outfitted with a scuba tank that only has an hour of air in it, and is sent down to a sunken “Jap” sub from WWII (“Jap” is used repeatedly throughout the novel); if Nick can find his way out of the sub, he can live. But of course all avenues of escape from the sub are closed off due to the wreckage, and the Red Cobra has scuba-suited men patrolling the water with spearguns. This is one of the most tense climaxes Stokes has ever delivered for the series, to the extent that the reader himself feels as if he’s running out of air. 

Other than this thrilling climax, there’s nothing really noteworthy about The Cobra Kill, and it almost appears that Stokes pushed himself through the writing by doing a lot of research on Malaysia and jungle survival. Again per Will Murray, it’s quite clear that Stokes was burned out with the series at this point. Whether or not this is true, The Cobra Kill turned out to be Manning Lee Stokes’s penultimate volume of Killmaster. The following year he turned in the aforementioned The Black Death, and that was it for him on the series. It’s easy to see why, as at this point he was also writing Richard Blade and The Aquanauts for Lyle Kenyon Engel. And one can see the kernels of both series in The Cobra Kill: simple jungle sexpot Siti could be any number of the simple barbarian sexpots in Dimension X, and the tense climax with the sunken sub and the empty scuba tank could’ve just as easily featured Tiger Shark as Nick Carter.

Overload #7: Rolling Vengeance

Overload #7: Rolling Vengeance, by Bob Ham

October, 1990  Bantam Books

“I love men’s adventure novels – and I love truckin’!” said no one ever, yet regardless the Overload series, which combined men’s adventure with trucking, ran for several volumes in the late ‘80s. I’ve only got three of those volumes, and the only other one I’ve read was #2: The Wrath, but this isn’t a series where I’m desperate to fill in the gaps in my colletion. In truth I found Rolling Vengeance tedious, “overloaded” with “gee-wiz” high-tech trivialities and way too many characters…and way too many pages. At 238 pages, the novel’s too damn long for a men’s adventure novel. But then per the cover it’s a “Super Edition,” which I assume was Bantam’s attempt at making the books stand out. 

Actually the marketing department at Bantam was on point with this one. Graphic Audio, which years later would do audio adaptaions of several men’s adventure novels, supposedly did very well with…truck drivers. So perhaps truckers made up a significant segment of men’s adventure readership in the ‘80s, too. Of course it would be hard to read and drive your truck, so maybe Graphic Audio does so well with truckers because all you have to do is listen as the miles roll by. Bantam at least tried to keep the men’s adventure flame burning in the late ‘80s, as the genre was dying out…though Rolling Vengeance itself points the way to the bloated “techno-thrillers” that would soon be occupying the bookstore shelves that men’s adventure novels once did. 

So I’m missing a bunch of volumes since the last one I read, but it’s no big deal. About the main development in the series is that co-protagonists Marc Lee and Carl Browne now work for the government…indeed, they work directly for the President of the United States! “Shall we send in the Marines, Mr. President?” “No – get me those two truckers!” As we’ll recall, Lee and Browne run Leeco, a bona fide trucking outfit…but now they also have an armada of souped-up rigs and whatnot. Their main one, at least this volume, is an “offroader” that’s completely bulletproof, run by a computer, and armed with a friggin’ rocket launcher. Not to mention the “HDTV videotape” it can record on its front-mounted high definition cameras. Author Bob Ham will demonstrate this and other souped-up vehicles in action throughout Rolling Vengeance, in dry copy that could just as easily have come out of Popular Mechanics. 

And see that’s the thing. Because folks we have here a novel about two former Delta Force commandos who have an armed and armored truck and go around the country busting up criminals for the President, but Ham writes the novel with his tongue nowhere in the vicinity of his cheek. In fact, he seems straight-up serious about the whole thing, and that seriousness extends to the narrative…which means that Rolling Vengeance isn’t much fun at all. It’s dry, saddled with too many characters and way too much exposition and technical detail, and again seems more like something that should have “Tom Clancy Presents” on the cover instead of a drawing of a guy and a girl blasting away. The novel is humorless, is what I’m trying to say, with Ham treating everything with a sort of gravitas. There’s none of the fun wildness you would expect given the setup. Perhaps this too is evidence of the change men’s adventure went through in its death-throes; no longer could the genre be the gory, sex-filled escapism it once was…now it must be “serious,” with characters more prone to ponder and much less prone to engage in sex…because there isn’t a single sex scene in the book, nor even any of the genre’s customary exploitation of the female characters. 

Because the female characters are empowered now – another indication of the way things would soon be going. Another change to the series since The Wrath is that Marc Lee’s girlfriend Jill is now a kick-ass commando herself, thanks to a “Federal training center in Georgia” which taught her how to handle combat and whatnot. She takes part in the climactic action sequence, but since she’s still a girl and stuff she does get a little upset over how she’s killed a few men. That presumably is her on the cover, but there’s another empowered babe in the pages of Rolling Vengeance: Allison Riker, “a highly attractive and feisty blond truck driver” who brings Lee and Browne onto this latest case. And note too the spelling of “blond,” which was spelled “blonde” in earlier, more testosterone-driven times; indeed, “blonde” is now considered an offensive spelling, along with about two billion other previously-acceptable words. 

Allison runs an outfit for independent truckers, and she comes to Leeco for help with a guy named Luis Partida, who is horning in on her outfit. Now the back cover has it that Luis Partida is a coke kingpin, but the novel itself makes more issue out of how Partida runs illegals up from Mexico. He is intended to be the villain of the piece, but for some curious reason Ham spends the entire novel showing Partida trying to save himself from a group of truckers who are trying to kill him. What I mean to say is, Partida is constantly being attacked and left for dead, and Ham will end the section on a cliffhanger, as if we readers are desperate to know whether Partida has survived. But he’s the villain, a guy who when we meet him has just got out of prison, and we also know he’s bad because in an early sequence, when Partida is running away from the first group of truckers who try to kill him, the bastard blows away a poor little black kid – for no other reason than the innocent kid helpfully picked up a suitcase filled with Partida’s money. 

That’s one thing that remains from the previous volume I read, the constant cutting to and fro. In my review of The Wrath I described this as “cinematic,” and that really seems to be the vibe Ham is going for. The entire book is like that…we’ll cut from scenes with Allison to ones with Partida to ones with Marc Lee or Carl Browne, to ones with the teenaged daughter of an FBI agent who is target number one in Partida’s revenge scheme. So much of this stuff could’ve been cut and the book would have benefitted. And yes, despite being under the gun literally from his introduction into the text, Partida himself is attempting revenge – on the FBI agent who sent him up the river years ago. This would be Harvey Harrison, presumably a series regular in that he is aware of Lee and Browne and has worked with them before. 

But it’s Harrison’s daughter Lisa who factors more into the narrative. In what is an unfathomable waste of pages, Lisa Harrison features in constant cutaway sequences in which we see her be abducted, escape, be chased, end up with another group of men who intend her harm, etc, etc. I had bad flashbacks to the second season of 24, which featured the same go-nowhere sort of subplot, with Jack Bauer’s busty blonde daughter being captured, chased, etc. But in its own way this tiresome material with Lisa Harrison is indicative of the problem overall with Rolling Vengeance: an overly “serious” attempt at suspense as the poor girl tries to get away from her various captors. Again, it’s the sort of thing that would be more at home in a padded-out thriller novel….not in the seventh installment of a series about “gun-totin’ truckers.” 

All these various characters and subplots gradually – very gradually – weave together. Partida carries the brunt of the action in the first half, seeing as how he dodges attempts by a group of truckers who want to kill him. This entire bit is ludicrous because Partida is supposed to be the villain! Yet we constantly see him in danger! Meanwhile Lee and Browne do their own research of Partida, running into various thugs and whatnot, in particular the street gang he has employed to do his dirty work. There’s only one somewhat badass part in the book, where Browne confronts some drug-dealing punks and makes one of them eat a fistful of “crack rocks.” Given that Browne’s the muscular black dude in the series, it almost has the vibe of Blaxploitation…but Ham doesn’t do much with it, as things devolve into a gunfight. And the gore is pretty much nonexistent. This is very much a “get shot and fall down” sort of novel, with the mandatory violence of the genre having been, uh, gutted. 

Instead, we get endless exposition detailing the capabilities of the various gizmos Lee and Browne’s trucks have been outfitted with. I don’t exaggerate when I say a lot of the book is given over to this sort of thing…I mean it’s like sleaze for people with a truck-tech fetish: 

This dry, tedious vibe extends to the action scenes: 

And yet for all this striving for a serious vibe, Ham still doles out lines like, “The Highway Warriors got up on their knees and turned to stand.” I don’t know why, but that line cracked me up. You could say it “crack rocked” me up, but that would be lame. But then “lame” would be the sole word I’d use to summarize Rolling Vengeance…a novel so misguided that the villain is constantly shown as being in jeopardy, and which features countless pages in which a 17 year-old girl, who has nothing to do with the series overall, runs and hides from various thugs. 

How Overload ran for 12 volumes is anyone’s guess. I’m sure there are those out there who might enjoy it – heck, people had to enjoy it for the series to run so long – but I can’t say I’m one of them.

Announcing Tocsin Press

I’m interrupting the usual review schedule to let you all know that Tocsin Press is up and running – those two awesome novels The Undertaker #1 and The Undertaker #2 are now available for purchase. 

A quick background note…the books are slightly different than the versions I reviewed. Not in content, but the actual paperbacks themselves. John Doe wanted to follow the same “handcrafted” aesthetic of the copies he sent me – printed on actual pulp paper like an oldschool men’s adventure paperback – but it proved to be impossible. For one, the pulp paper he originally used is no longer available. And secondly, it would’ve been unfeasible for John Doe to handcraft every single copy he sells…printing and assembling each book, gluing the binding, shipping the books out, etc. A pretty serious time commitment for someone who already has a fulltime job! 

So in the end, Mr. Doe has decided the Amazon route makes the most sense, and the Buy Now buttons on the Tocsin Press site will take you to the individual Amazon pages for each title, where you can preview contents and order a copy. He’s gotten the books as close to the look of the original handcrafted editions as possible: glossy covers, the same physical dimensions as a ‘70s men’s adventure paperback, and typesetting that looks very close to the print in those ‘70s paperbacks. 

I’m only providing this behind-the-scenes info because I raved about the pulp paper of the handcrafted editions John Doe sent me a few months ago, and I didn’t want anyone to be disappointed that the versions they’ll receive from Amazon are a little different. The important thing is that the text has not been changed…and folks Death Transition and Black Lives Murder were two of the best novels I’ve read in years. I give them my highest recommendation. 

Currently there’s one other title available at Tocsin, by a different author: John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth. Here’s the cover: 

You could think of this one as a “lost” installment of John Eagle Expeditor – perhaps even the novel that The Ice Goddess should have been… 

So currently there are three titles at Tocsin Press, and I am certain you all will enjoy each of them! But like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s “more to come,” so when more titles are listed I’ll do another post here on the blog. 

And if you read any of the books, please leave a review on Amazon or drop a note here to let us know what you think!