Showing posts with label Soldato. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soldato. Show all posts

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Soldato #4: Murder Mission!


Soldato #4: Murder Mission!, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1973  Lancer Books

Gil Brewer turns in his second and final installment of Soldato, once again proving that, despite his talent as an author of hardboiled mystery yarns, he really couldn’t cut it as a men’s adventure writer. I can only assume he didn’t understand the genre – not that the genre is very complex or anything – and that he did his best to wing it over the course of 190-some pages. I mean folks the “climax” of this one features Johnny “Soldato” Morini hiding a room…for like 15 pages. 

Actually Morini is a former soldato, aka Mafia soldier, and Brewer again does a swell job of reminding us of his past and how he’s still hooked on the girl he was married to back in the earliest volumes. Brewer does at least invest the series with a lot more emotional weight than the genre average, but really is that what any of us are here for? Morini in Brewer’s hands is too pensive, too given to self-doubt and uncertainty; he’s comparable to Len Levinson’s interpretation of Johnny Rock in the first two Sharpshooter novels he wrote, The Worst Way To Die and Night Of The Assassins. Then editor Peter McCurtin gave Len the advice that his version of Rock wouldn’t last, that Rock must be more driven, more prone to violent action – that he must “kill with cold hate,” a phrase that spurred Len into turning in one of the better installments of the series, Headcrusher.

I guess there was no editor on Soldato to give Brewer any such advice. Thus we must endure Morini’s frequent anxieties, and while we’re often told of his burning hatred for the Mafia, very rarely does he do anything about it. In fact he goes out of his way not to kill at times. More unintentionally humorous though is his supposed helper slash “best friend,” Riley, the lawyer who set Morini up in his current capacity of one-man army for a cancer-ridden old Mafia don who wants to wipe out his former brothers. Riley does absolutely nothing to help Johnny (as Brewer refers to his protagonist, so I’ll start doing the same) for the majority of the tale, and most of the time tells Johnny not to call him! There’s a ridiculous amount of antagonism between the two, particularly in how Riley expects Johnny to do everything on his own and acts like it’s a huge pain in the ass to even answer his occasional phone calls.

There’s no pickup from Brewer’s previous volume, and when we meet Johnny he’s in New Orleans, already having established himself as “Bacchi” for local Don Marno. The gist of the series is that Johnny goes undercover in various Mafia families, busting them up from within; his operating parameters seem to be “kill everyone,” as Riley and his Justice Department cronies aren’t really looking for arrest warrants or anything. Johnny’s got a lot of problems this time, and one of them’s that the real Bacchi, a Chicago soldato, is in prison; Johnny’s pretending to be the guy, the story going that he busted out of prison and is now looking for a job with Don Marno. Of course, before novel’s end the real Bacchi’s Don will come down to New Orleans to hook up with Don Marno, adding a bunch more tension to the tale.

And as if that weren’t enough, the photo taken of Johnny in the previous volume has been destroyed, but L.A.-based Don Sesto got a drawing made of it, a drawing by a professional artist, and he’s flying around the country to show the various families this drawing. I mean he can’t mail it or anything. I mean the dude’s literally walking around with a single drawing, the thing covered in protective glass and everything, and showing it to other Dons across the country. The whole subplot is so ludicrous you have no choice but to just go along with it. Johnny manages to fix this guy, though, in one of the novel’s more tense scenes: Don Sesto just happens to fly into New Orleans after midnight, and Johnny chases him along a deserted highway before crashing him into a lake and getting in a brutal life or death struggle with him. A curious capoff here is that, when Riley belatedly arrives on the scene, he insists on taking the drawing instead of destroying it, like Johnny wants to. Given Riley’s general half-assery throughout, I almost wondered if Brewer was developing a subplot that Riley would eventually sell Johnny out, hence his keeping this drawing that could cost Johnny his life.

We get a quick reminder that this isn’t your typical men’s adventure series; the opening sequence introduces us to Don Marno and his orbit of followers, including his heroin-addicted brother Milo. There’s also a six year-old kid the Don treats as his own; the boy’s mom is Helena, Marno’s disowned daughter. There’s a subplot about Marno having killed Helena’s husband because he wasn’t worthy, and also Helena is hooked on heroin and etc. To Brewer’s credit, none of this goes where you’d expect: while Helena is introduced in a scene where she screams at her dad to be able to see her son again, she wants to be accepted back into the family and still has Mafia in her blood. Also, despite being the prettiest woman Johnny’s ever seen, our hero doesn’t get lucky – Johnny’s really a sad case when compared to his men’s adventure brethren, friends – other than a quick kiss. Indeed, Helena will go further than any other character to do away with Johnny…not that he does anything to get her out of his own way, even once he’s figured out what a threat she poses to him.

But this opening bit with Don Marno lets us know what we’re in for: a lot of talking, a lot of scheming and plotting. Don Marno is up against two rival local Dons: “Fats” Faturo and Logari. As with previous volumes, Johnny will try to engineer a war between the families…at least, that’s how it starts out. Instead the onus of the plot becomes more about Johnny trying to protect his identity, with more time placed on his fretting – and eating in restaurants and diners – than on action. The back cover even promises that in this one Riley will be taken captive, which hints at some action or at least tension; instead, the subplot’s over and done with in about twenty or so pages. A couple of Fats’s men get the jump on Riley, Johnny as “Bacchi” hears about it, and that night – after a big meal – Johnny puts on black clothes and springs Riley from the warehouse where they’re holding him. Riley doesn’t even thank him!

Speaking of meals, the novel is very much of a different era. Johnny’s constantly smoking or pouring himself a drink; before any action he’ll hit a very heavy meal, like a couple steaks and etc – plus “five different vitamins.” In fact Johnny seems to drink quite a bit in the course of Murder Mission, to the point that I wondered if it wasn’t some in-jokery courtesy Brewer…that it was more of an indication of how much Brewer himself was drinking as he ground out the manuscript. It’s clear though that he struggles with the basic tenents of this genre; the action scenes, for example, are almost dashed off, with more focus on the talking, the scheming, and the introspection. And Johnny is much too consumed with guilt for a men’s adventure hero; we’re even informed he sometimes sees the faces of the men he’s killed in his sleep – even the men he killed in self-defense. 

For that matter, Brewer fails to grasp basic action-telling principles. I mean no one could ever confuse Johnny Morini with Mack Bolan. For one, Johnny’s only ever armed with a Colt Cobra .38. Not that there’s a problem with this, I mean .38 revolvers were pretty much the standard firearm for ‘70s crime fiction. But the problem is the way it all goes down. For example, there’s a part where Johnny abducts Helena and ties her up in an abandoned building, to be collected by Riley (who of course bitches that Johnny has troubled him with this task). But Helena manages to get herself loose, call Milo (Marno’s junkie brother), and has him come over with some soldiers. So Johnny’s standing there in the room, sees three guys walking down a hallway toward him…and he runs away! This leads to a tense chase, at least, but still – dude, you’ve got a gun, and they’re all just walking toward you, conveniently bunched together. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but our hero instead desperately rushes for the window.

Even worse is the supposed finale. As “Bacchi” Johnny manages to talk Marno into hosting the rival two Dons – as well as the real Bacchi’s Don, from Chicago – on his yacht. Johnny gets some explosives from Riley (cue more bitching – seriously) and secretly sets them up…then for some belabored reason, he boards the yacht and must be present until right before the explosives go off, I guess to ensure everything works or something. But since he’ll quickly be outed as an imposter when the Chicago Don sees him, Johnny pretends to be sick and sequesters himself in a stateroom. This goes on for pages and pages. The ship moves further into the ocean, heading for the Gulf of Mexico, and hours later Johnny’s finally confronted by drunk goombahs who demand to see “Bacchi.” He manages to jump off the yacht as they start shooting at him; at least Riley proves his worth here in the finale, arriving on the scene in a helicopter to pick him up just before the ship blows.

I brought up The Executioner and again, as I mentioned in my review of the previous volume, I finally got confirmation that Gil Brewer was the mysterious author who was hired by Pinnacle to write the followup to Sicilian Slaughter (which was by William Crawford). I’ve read before that Don Pendleton often mocked an unpublished Executioner manuscript, one that had been sent in by some contract writer, and I’ve often wondered if it was Brewer’s manuscript Pendleton was mocking. While the writing itself is fine – the introspective stuff does add depth to the storyline, even though it’s unnecessary depth – the basic stuff you want from this genre is lacking. I mean imagine Mack Bolan hiding in the stateroom of a yacht for twenty-some pages in the climax of a Don Pendleton novel.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Soldato #3: Strangle Hold!


Soldato #3: Strangle Hold!, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1973  Lancer Books

Gil Brewer takes over the Soldato series with this volume; he’ll remain for the next one. It’s clear he read the previous two installments, courtesy Marvin Albert, as Brewer often refers back to the events of the first and second volumes. I was curious to see how Brewer would handle men’s adventure, and for the most part he turns in the same sort of book he was known for: a hardboiled yarn heavy on suspense and tension, with little in the way of the action or thrills you’d get in, say, the average installment of The Executioner

Speaking of which, Brewer wrote a never-published volume of The Executioner in the ‘70s, and it was always my suspicion that he was going to be Pinnacle’s next “Jim Peterson,” following on from William Crawford’s Sicilian Slaughter (aka the infamous sixteenth installment of the series which creator Don Pendleton never even read). The other year I had my suspicion confirmed when I discovered that Brewer’s unpublished manuscript was indeed titled Firebase Seattle, a title Pendleton himself eventually used, given that Pinnacle had already come up with a cover for it (as Pendleton relates in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction). However Brewer’s yarn would’ve been the true sequel to Sicilian Slaughter that we never got, and I’d love to read it…but it costs a whopping $200 for a jpeg copy of the 240-page manuscript which currently resides in the Gil Brewer collection at the American Heritage Center.

Judging from Strangle Hold, though, those two hundred bucks might be better spent elsewhere; while Brewer’s writing is fine, delivering much more character depth for titlular Soldato Johnny Morini than previous series author Albert ever did, the story ultimately fizzles out into too much stalling and repetition, and Brewer constantly fails to exploit his own material. The book is also much too long, coming in at 222 pages of small-ish print – however Brewer is too much the pulp veteran to turn in a slow-moving tale. Even though not much happens, it always seems that something is about to.

But the first half is really nice because as mentioned Brewer gives Johnny a lot of depth. We meet him as he’s still holed up in Los Angeles, drinking more than he should, and still thinking about his ex-wife, last seen in the first volume. Johnny even goes to the trouble of visiting her, only to be told by her mother that she’s not home; a cool scene here as the phone rings, Johnny’s ex mother-in-law answers it, and it turns out to be for Johnny. Brewer captures the general paranoid vibe of the ‘70s here, with Johnny constantly being monitored by Riley, his ex-Fed handler; Riley later even informs Johnny that his ex was upstairs all along, and her mom was lying to Johnny.

This thread is dropped, though…and folks believe it or not there’s zero female companionship for Johnny in the entire novel. In fact Brewer doesn’t even deliver any exploitation of the novel’s sole babe; from Play It Hard I assumed we’d at least get a bit of that, but Brewer’s very conservative here with the sex and the violence. For the most part Strangle Hold is just a Mafia novel, with Johnny going deep undercover as an L.A. bigwig, sent down to Tampa to oversee the activities of the Florida mob. 

Riley doesn’t appear much, this time. He summons Johnny to a dingy hotel in New Jersey, turns him over to another handler, and heads out. Johnny’s assignment is to fly back to L.A., take out a guy named Frank Lott, and head down to Tampa to bust up Don Remo Paragluci, who seems to be putting together a combine with two other Florida dons. Lott is a member of the Syndicate Committee or somesuch, basically the corporate wing of the Mafia which ensures all the various “franchise” families stay in order. Then Johnny’s new handler is blown away – the novel opens with Paragluci knowing that the Feds are onto him, and sending someone off to kill Riley – and Johnny runs from the cops, who think he’s the one who pulled the trigger.

Once Johnny’s captured the real Lott, interrogated him, and left him tied up for Riley to collect, our hero flies down to Tampa…and here the novel loses its frenetic pace. As “Frank” Johnny bulldozes his way through Don Paragluci’s domain; Johnny’s idea is that it’s “expected” he’ll be a hardass, given that he’s from the Committee, so he pushes boundaries at every opportunity, constantly testing the old don’s temper. He also runs afoul of little Nevito, Paragluci’s creepy younger son; Paragluci’s older son has recently been blown away during an attempted hit on soldatos from a rival Tampa don. 

This guy’s widow provides the babe quotient for Strangle Hold; she’s a hotstuff beauty named Lucia who likes to go around in her bikini. Even though her husband’s been dead just a few days, she’s throwing looks at “Frank Lott.” But Brewer ignores this element and goes for a heavy suspense vibe; Don Paragluci, who is prone to sitting around in his office and staring at a print of a Picasso painting he much admires, is planning to get together with two other dons and start up a combine, whether the Committee approves or not. There’s a ton of talking and scenes of fat old Italian guys going over plans for the takeover and whatnot.

Despite the threat of a war with another family hanging over the proceedings, nothing much really happens. Johnny gets reproachful looks from Nevito and continues to bully old Don Paragluci. Then things get weird. Nevito gets jealous when Lucia decides to go to dinner with “Frank,” and Nevito rapes and kills the poor girl off page…this like a day after she’s buried her husband. And what does Johnny do when he finds out? Tells Don Paragluci, who basically shrugs it off as yet another indication of his young son’s growing insanity. I mean there’s no part where Johnny takes up his .38 revolver (which he’s somehow able to screw a silencer onto) and vows revenge, mostly because he’s too concerned about blowing his cover. One hopes Mack Bolan wasn’t similarly emasculated in Brewer’s unpublished Executioner.

But it gets more weird…almost a dark comedy in that Nevito keeps trying to screw over Johnny, suspecting somehow that this Frank Lott is an imposter. Yet in every case someone else saves Johnny’s skin, all of them turning in Nevito’s duplicitous actions to either the don or to Johnny himself, so as to stay in good with the Committee. And it’s very messy, too; Brewer introduces one soldato, mentions that he’s a serial killer, and intimates that he and Johnny might be matching up soon…then the serial killer soldato goes to “Frank” to tell him that Nevito’s up to no good! After which the character is brushed back under the narratorial carpet.

Only in the final pages is there any tension. This comes through two acts: first Nevito snaps a photo of “Frank” and sends it to LA to ensure this is really the right guy. Secondly Johnny decides to heist the real Picasso Don Paragluci loves so much(!?). Conveniently, it happens to be at a nearby Tampa museum. This happens after Nevito has failed to steal the painting, desperate to impress his dad, and is nearly caught in the bargain. Another incident the don decides to forget. So Johnny goes off on his own and steals the painting in a tense but protracted and arbitrary sequence, particularly given that it happens toward the very end of the novel.

The absolute worst part is that Johnny is a bystander in the climax. Riley’s shown up and attempts to stop the mail and prevent Nevito’s package of photos from getting through, but fails, and now the clock is ticking. Johnny quickly sets up the various dons so that they converge on a restaurant, then works Don Paragluci up into a lather and sends him and his boys off to wipe them out. Johnny gets in a car chase, trying to prevent a group of thugs from getting to the restaurant before the don – lamely enough, they just got a phone call from L.A. telling them “Frank Lott” is an imposter.

But all the various villains gun each other down while Johnny watches from afar. Even little prick Nevito, who we’ve waited for Johnny to blow away the entire novel, is rendered his comeuppance by a squad of cops who show up on the scene, having been summoned by Riley. After this Johnny hops in a car with Riley and heads home, bitter about the life he leads…perhaps not nearly as bitter as the reader for having endured such a subpar but initially-promising book.

Don’t get me wrong, Brewer’s writing is fine, save for a strange fascination with the recurring phrase “beneath the wheel” every time a character gets in a car to drive (ie “Johnny got beneath the wheel”). This phrase was a new one to me; I mean I can see “behind the wheel” as making sense, but “beneath” makes it sound like all the characters are midgets. Anyway, here’s hoping Brewer’s next one is better.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Soldato #2: Death Grip!


Soldato #2: Death Grip!, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1972  Lancer Books

The second volume of Soldato is further evidence that this series is more Parker than The Executioner, and Marvin Albert (aka “Al Conroy”) is more intent on writing a crime thriller than an action yarn. That being said, there’s actually more action here than in the first volume, as Johny Morini, former Mafia soldato (aka “soldier”), is fully set on the path of a full-time mob buster.

It’s a couple months after the previous volume, and Johnny (as Albert refers to him, likely cause it’s easier to type all the time than “Morini”) has become a hardscrabble drunk, whereas he was a driven family man in the previous volume. This is because Johnny’s wife has divorced him after losing the child she was carrying – Johnny figures the miscarriage was caused by all the turmoil she endured. So all that messy business taken care of, Albert has given us a Johnny Morini who is free to become the protagonist of a running series, with nothing to tie him down in his all-consuming quest to destroy the Mafia.

I like the setup Albert has concocted: Johnny is contacted by Riley, returning from the previous volume, where he was Johnny’s handler at the State Dept. But now Riley has gone into the private sector, and his legal services have been retained by wealthy Sicilian immigrant Pannunzio, whose brother was killed decades ago by the Mafia. Now old and enfeebled, dying from leukemia, Pannunzio wants to start dishing the Mafia bastards some payback in the short time he has left. He wants Johnny to be his one-man army and will set up a trust fund, managed by Riley, that will fund Johnny’s efforts for years to come.

Johnny debates the offer for a hot second and takes them up on it (otherwise the series would’ve been even shorter!). His first assignment sends him to Pennsylvania, where the story goes down in more rural environs than one might expect. As with the first volume, this appears to be so Albert can work in the extended “man hunted in the wilderness” setpiece he doled out in the previous book, only whereas it was Johnny hunted by two guys in the desert last time, this time it’s Johnny hunted by two guys in the woods.

But anyway Johnny when we meet up with him again has gone through the trouble of setting up his cover identity with the local yokels, posing as a career criminal looking for a big score – the novel seems to occur over a long stretch of time, at least a couple months, but Albert doesn’t much elaborate. Johnny’s target is Don Vigilante, who operates out of Philadelphia. A big failing with Death Grip is that neither Don Vigilante nor his co-ruler/enemy Don Aldo are presented as being overly evil. In fact I don’t think we ever even get a proper understanding of their criminal enterprises. But regardless, they’re Mafia scum and they must be destroyed.

Johnny becomes friendly with a hot but bitter blonde waitress named Laura who soon engages Johnny in some off-page sexual shenanigans; Albert as ever is not one to get sleazy. He does though bring in just a touch of emotional content (to quote my man Bruce Lee); Johnny drinks to forget about his ex-wife and lost child, the path his life didn’t take. To his credit Albert doesn’t schlock this up with the treacle that would be mandatory in today’s fiction; I mean, it’s not like Johnny’s sadness keeps him from banging hot truckstop tramps. Albert certainly doesn’t dwell on any treacle; Johnny sort of develops feelings for hardbitten Laura, whose ex-husband is part of the local mob, but when Johnny finds out she’s being used against her will to spy on him, he hits the road without looking back.

Instead, the crux of the novel is Johnny being hired by Don Vigilante’s men to get himself a job with Don Aldo’s men, so as to foster discord within their ranks! So basically Albert just writes a variation on the main plot of the novel itself; even Johnny must contain his laughter at this development. So Johnny poses again as a career conman looking to get a little family backup, the same bait that worked for him with Don Vigilante’s hoods. He ends up playing the two sides against each other, starting fights when the opportunity arises. A late subplot has Johnny being requested to take part in a heist run by the sadistic Doyle, known for killing cops and innocents in his jobs, not to mention losing most of his own men.

This part seems to be a fake-out – Johnny learns of the job, which involves a hit on a gem run, then says to hell with it and leaves – but comes back pages later when Johnny rips off Doyle and his sole surviving accomplice. This leads to the mandatory “men hunt Johnny” sequence, as Doyle, bearing an M-3 Grease Gun, and his equally-sadistic comrade, bearing a Garand rifle, hunt Johnny through the woods. Unlike last time, Johnny’s better armed here – he has an M1 carbine and a .38. This is a taut, gripping scene, and I’d say better than the similar one in the previous book, most likely because this one’s much shorter and thus more intense.

One thing that makes this sequence stand out is that Johnny’s a central part of it. There are too many sections of Death Grip where our hero steps aside and lets the criminals do one another away. True, it’s due to situations Johnny’s set up, but at the same time I prefer to see my ‘70s lone wolf vigilante blowing out his own mobster brains, not getting someone else to do it for him. For example there’s a climactic shootout between the two families in which Johnny doesn’t even appear. Instead, it’s back to the “tense” tip for the climax, as Johnny’s ambushed by a couple hoods who have figured out his game and have tracked him down.

This is another effective, taut sequence, playing out in a junkyard of battered and smashed cars. It’s a bit ruined by the deus ex machina appearance of a timed explosive Johnny apparently set up beforehand. But after this justice is again dealt from afar, and Albert stays true to the “Johnny Morini the shadow” vibe, with our hero “fading into a limousine” at the close of this assignment and heading off to the next one. He’s become a man without any real identity except as a mob-buster. Pannunzio, we learn in a brief epilogue, has several more missions planned for Johnny, however Albert would sit out the next two volumes (which would be courtesy Gil Brewer), not returning until the fifth (and final) volume.

And is that a tiny Al Jolson on the surreal cover being squeezed to death by the giant disembodied hand? “Mammy!!”

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Soldato #1


Soldato #1, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1972  Lancer Books

Starting off a five-volume series, Soldato! reminds me a lot of The Revenger #1 by Jon Messmann, both in plot and how it comes off like a standalone book…one that just happened to initiate a series. The novel is credited and copyright Al Conroy, which is one of the many pseudonyms used by Marvin H. Albert (aka Nick Quarry, Ian MacAlistair, etc). He wrote the first two volumes and the fifth one; volumes 3 and 4 of Soldato were written by another old hardboiled author, Gil Brewer. I’m looking forward to those.

The titular character of the series is only referred to as a “soldato” (aka Mafia soldier) in passing; his name is Johnny Morini, and he hasn’t been in the mob for a while, thus the title of the book (and series) is a bit of a misnomer. But I guess “Soldato!” has more of a ring to it than “Morini!” Johnny, now 29, was raised in the mob; an orphan who grew up on the tough streets of New York, running various “kid-gangs.” Eventually he became the top soldier of Don Renzo Cappellani of Manhattan. 

But now Johnny (as Albert refers to him throughout) is living in the Witness Protection program, hiding out as “John Hawkins” in a desolate Utah town. Don Renzo desperately wants to find him – and kill him. For some reason Renzo doesn’t understand, Johnny “went crazy” a few years ago, turned against the don, and actually served as a witness in a trial against him; a trial which was ultimately thrown out of court. But Don Renzo looked bad, despite getting off, and wants to kill Johnny as an example.

Eventually we’ll learn that the don, via one of his many underlings, killed off Johnny’s sort-of foster father, and also had his sort-of foster sister gang-raped (she later jumped off a roof and killed herself). This is how he unwittingly incurred Johnny’s wrath. Johnny vowed revenge, killing off the murderer of his foster father and setting his sights on the underling who had ordered it. When he was arrested in the attempt, a Federal lawyer named Riley offered Johnny the chance to take down the grand poobah himself, the man who’d been behind it all from the top: Don Renzo. Johnny agreed to testify that he took part in Don Renzo’s murder of a rival don five years ago.

Even though the trial failed, thrown out when Renzo’s lawyers made a mockery of “star witness” Johnny and his troubled, crime-ridden past, the government upheld its bargain and set Johnny up with a new life in a new town. Meanwhile a former cop turned private eye named Charles Moran has been doggedly seeking Johnny for the past year, paid well for his efforts by Don Renzo. After much trouble – which is elaborated on a bit later in the novel – Moran has tracked various Federal receipts and come upon a “John Hawkins” here in Utah, who owns a country store and lives on a small home near a factory. The novel opens as Moran confirms it is in fact Johnny Morini. (And yes, it does get a little confusing that two of the main characters are named “Moran” and “Morini!”)

As for our hero, he takes a while to appear, and truth be told Albert doesn’t spend a lot of the narrative with him – and doesn’t do much to bring him to life, either. The fact that Johnny was a murderous young punk is sort of glossed over. He’s fearful that Don Renzo will someday find him, not that this has prevented Johnny from marrying a sexy young gal from California named Mary. To again differentiate from the men’s adventure norm – and another parallel with The Revenger – is that Mary is three months pregnant. She has no knowledge of Johnny’s past, only a fake story that he “owed money” to some bad people and the government set him up with this new life here.

Moran comes into Johnny’s store one morning and Johnny suspects something as soon as he sees this stranger; this is one of those places where everyone knows everyone. Also, it occurs to Johnny that night when he can’t sleep, Moran has “cop eyes,” something Johnny learned to spot long ago. He’s gotten paranoid before but he’s certain Moran is the person he’s been afraid would come here someday. And of course he is; after a phone call to Don Renzo, a pair of guys who look like “cowhands” are sent to Moran. These are professional hunters of men.

The majority of the text is given over to a practically endless chase these two put Johnny through in the desert; pages 59 to 107 of the novel, in fact. Johnny, urging Mary to leave town the next morning, spots an unfamiliar car coming down the road and hops in his Mustang with Mary, the hunters in pursuit. Johnny ditches Mary and takes off on foot through the rough terrain. The two hunters pursue. Luckily Johnny has a .38 and a rifle for this very occasion, but the hunters have carbines with telescopic sights.

What with the drawn-out suspense of man hunting man in the harsh desert, this entire sequence has the vibe of a western, particularly with the carbines and rifles being used. You can almost hear the Sergio Leonne music. While it’s all suitably tense and thrilling, personally I prefer more gun-blazing sort of action; I felt this bit just went on and on. City-boy Johnny has spent the past year learning the area, hunting with the locals, and due to his newfound knowledge of the desert he’s able to (gradually) turn the tables on his hunters, so that hunter becomes prey. Also to note is that Albert doesn’t dwell much on the violence; this is one of those novels where people just get shot and fall down – no exploding fountains of gore or geysering jets of cerebrospinal fluid, more’s the pity. 

Actually, Soldato! is really just comprised of a sequence of chase scenes. Immediately after this long chase is over, we get another, as Moran, who was waiting for the two hunters to return, spots Johnny escaping town and gives his own chase, gradually tailing him all the way back to New York. Johnny has decided to take the fight to his old boss; only with Don Renzo’s death will he be free. Moran remains in the narrative, appearing sporadically; he gets more money from Don Renzo, and even when he loses Johnny in the city he tracks him down via Mary, who, against Johnny’s orders, ends up phoning her mother from the boarding house in Hackensack, New Jersey Johnny has deposited her in.

Meanwhile Johnny runs from shadow to shadow in New York, hunted by the don’s endless legions of men. Albert to his credit doesn’t give the book an ounce of sap; while Johnny knows all of these men, and indeed some of them were his “sidekicks” in that old gang, there’s none of the “but we used to be brothers!” bullshit there would no doubt be in a modern take on this story. These guys are out to kill Johnny, period, and Johnny’s out to kill them first.

But he has grander designs for Don Renzo. Calling up Riley, that old Justice lawyer, Johnny claims he’s going to “get” the don for real this time. Not kill him, but something else. What Johnny does is bust up another old acquaintance, this one a drug dealer, and makes off with all of his coke. He then breaks into a dry cleaners with the Don’s clothes and sews the packets into one of the jackets. Johnny also gets in a few more chases from various Mafia goons, including the occasional shootout, one of which leaves Johnny half-dead, with a shot-up left arm and a bullet in the ribs.

The most unusual character in the book only briefly appears: Doc Miller, a fallen-from-grace doctor who now operates out of a flophouse with a pair of nude teenaged girls at his beck and call! He patches Johnny up, tells him he’s gonna die soon – but be sure to pay up first – and gives him a handful of codeine pills. And this is our hero for the last few pages; rather than the slam-bang action finale we might’ve expected, we instead have a practically comatose, zombielike Johnny camping out in the dingy apartment he’s rented, across from Don Renzo’s headquarters in Brooklyn, watching through binoculars and waiting for the day the don shows up wearing one of those special jackets.

It’s pretty trying, for sure…page after page of Johnny stumbling in a dying funk from bedroom to bathroom, praying that this is the day the don shows up in a coke-lined jacket. Johnny lives off grungy tap water and codeine pills, his left arm numb and every breath killing him. Thus it is as big a relief to the reader as it is to Johnny when the don finally shows up in one of those jackets and Johnny calls Riley – who, realism be damned, swoops in with a bunch of cops and whatnot and summarily arrests the don on the spot, even if it’s clear he’s been framed as a drug-runner.

The novel ends with a flashforward to two months later; Johnny’s mostly recovered, if a bit battered and bruised, and he and Mary head off to a new life, with a new name, in Denver. Johnny’s been saved, in a very nice bit of character-redemption, by none other than Charles Moran, who, upon finding out Don Renzo has been arrested, quickly figures out that whoever called the cops had to be someone within viewing distance. In this way he’s come upon Johnny, lying mostly dead in his apartment, and it’s Moran who calls the cops for him, something Johnny is never to learn. Moran’s even hiding there in the airport as Johnny and Mary fly off.

This would appear to be the end of Johnny Morini’s story, but four more volumes were to follow. I figured something had to happen to Johnny’s wife and kid, otherwise why would he get back into mob busting? And sure enough, checking Marty McKee’s review, I see that in the next book Albert “discard[s] the wife and child via divorce and miscarriage!” Well, that’s….depressing.

Overall I enjoyed Soldato!, which is written in that firm, assured manner of an old hardboiled/pulp master. But while his writing is economical and fast-moving, Albert is an unrepentant POV-hopper; one paragraph we’re in one character’s perspective, and the next, with no warning or white space or anything, we’re in the perspective of someone else. This is particularly annoying in the chase scenes – we’re with Johnny as he desperately races through a canyon, then in the very next sentence we’re in the perspective of the men chasing him. This commits the ultimate author affront of pulling the reader out of the fictive experience, and to this day I still can’t understand why some writers don’t realize it!