Monday, July 6, 2015

Airline Investigator: Ryan's Flight


Airline Investigator: Ryan's Flight, by Howard Harris
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

First Airport Cop, now Airline Investigator: someone at Manor Books must’ve really had a flying fetish. Unlike the Charles Miron series, Airline Investigator only lasted for one volume, even though it seems pretty clear that it was designed to be an ongoing action series.

Also unlike the Miron series, this one’s about a private eye.  His name is Ed Ryan and he’s a tall, redheaded, former Air Force pilot turned commercial airline co-pilot. He served in this capacity for two years until being laid off; we’re informed this is a standard situation, with senior pilots getting to stay on while newer pilots are the first to go anytime there’s an economic hiccup. Ryan got sick of it and became a private investigator – in quickly-dispensed background material, we’re told that he’d already been making ventures into this arena, having studied with an old P.I. who was about to retire.

Now Ryan operates out of Queens and as the novel begins he’s looking to capitalize on his own flying background to hire out his P.I. services to airliners. The back cover tells us that “Howard Harris” is a pseudonym of a real commercial pilot who has used his insider info to give us an action-packed, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of airliners. I assume this is a lie and that the author was just someone under contract to Manor, but at any rate Howard Harris isn’t listed in Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms, nor is there any information in the Catalog Of Copyright Entries about the book.

But the author very well might’ve been a first-timer, as there’s an amateurish or at least rough quality to the writing, with characters for example who are “literally fuming” in anger. The author also has a strange tendency to refer to his female characters by their last names, even if they’re super-hot stewardesses. It’s like he doesn’t realize the last-name-only thing only applies to villains and tough-guy protagonists. The author also delivers some awkward sentences that in many cases can be easily misconstrued, such as this humdinger:

Flyod Kortum had died a month ago, and Ryan was just finishing the change-over to make the detective agency exclusively his. He had been the junior partner in the business three months before Kortum was involved in the four car collision on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. Eight days on the critical list, then surgery, then complications, then death followed shortly for the 63 year old private detective who was rammed from the rear.

Anyway, Ryan drives a Pontiac Grand Am and carries a .357 Magnum, and is almost immediately hired by an old Air Force commander, Leonard Manning, who now acts as Vice President of Trans-Continental Airlines, which operates out of LaGuardia Airport. A lurid murder opens Ryan’s Flight, with an annoying Trans-Continental co-pilot and his stewardess girlfriend being killed off by “Mr. B” and his cronies. The co-pilot was acting as a mule for Mr. B and was skimming the profits. For his treachery he and the stewardess are stripped and suffocated.

Now, a few weeks later, Leonard Manning is worried there might be more drug or whatever smuggling going on in his airline. Rather than bring in the cops he hires Ryan. Our hero instantly gets in a lust/hate thing with Manning’s “plain but attractive” secretary, Linda Volstead – referred to as “Volstead” throughout the narrative, instead of the more-sensible “Linda.” Ryan takes umbrage that the lady is initially frosty to him, but then she starts coming on strong, to the point where she’s propositioning him; cue an off-page sex scene.

To tell the truth, Ryan does pretty well for himself in a 190 page book with big print, banging just a few pages later another lady, this one a hot-to-trot stewardess named Karen Webber (referred to as, you guessed it, “Webber”). This bit is a little more explicit than the previous one, but nothing too major. In fact Ryan’s Flight is PG-13 at most, with even Ryan’s few kills being practically bloodless – which is a tough feat to pull off when you’re shooting someone with a .357 Magnum.

As for his P.I. skills, Ryan’s method basically amounts to asking a few questions and jotting down notes in his notepad. He quickly deduces that someone is running drugs and whatnot through the airline, and determines that stewardess Karen and a heavyset captain named Zello are behind it, but that they report to someone higher in the chain. This turns out to be Captain Jack Davenport, sort of the villain of the piece; there are several scenes of Davenport standing in his office in the terminal and watching Ryan run around down on the tarmac, trying to put pieces together.

Ryan gets in a few dangerous situations, such as a laughable bit where he’s almost killed – by a runaway baggage cart! His accomplices fare much worse, and Ryan doesn’t prove himself very sharp when Karen is clearly and obviously set up for a hit, once it’s learned that she’s blabbed to Ryan, but our hero tells her “don’t worry” and basically escorts her off to her own assassination. This plays out in a long car chase on the streets of Queens, with Ryan unleathering his .357 and shooting a few dudes.

The author does pepper the book with a lot of background detail about commercial airliners and airport life; Ryan is able to figure out how Davenport et al are smuggling stuff due to his own experience as a commercial pilot. The finale also plays up on this, with Davenport, Zello, and Mr. B meeting on a DC-9, the three of them the only people on board – save for Ryan, who has hidden in a lavatory. And when your hero is a former airline pilot himself, there’s no cause for concern when he blows away the dude flying the DC-9; all Ryan has to do is get behind the controls and bring the big plane in for a nice and easy landing!

There really wasn’t much notable about Airline Investigator: Ryan’s Flight, and it would appear either Manor or its readers felt the same, as this was it for Ed Ryan. The fact that the book was given a subtitle implies that it was in fact planned as the start of a series, but it wasn’t to be – Ryan’s first flight was his last.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen


Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen, by Sheila Brady
March, 1975  Pocket Books

My friends, it’s my pleasure to present to you another ‘70s sleaze masterpiece, one that comes off like a combo of Massage Parlor and Mafia: Operation Porno. And like that latter book, Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen is yet another production of Lyle Kenyon Engel’s BCI outfit, one of those standalone mystery/crime paperback novels he produced during the early-mid 1970s and published through various imprints. 

Purporting to be the “memoirs” of a young woman who is now hiding from the Mafia, thus using the “Sheila Brady” pseudonym, Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen is clearly a work of fiction, which is how it’s labeled on the spine and the copyright page. No idea yet who wrote it, as the Catalog Of Copyright Entries just states “Lyle Kenyon Engel, employer for hire,” and “Sheila Brady” isn't listed in Hawk's Author's Pseudonyms. It could’ve actually been written by a woman, who knows, but if I had to guess from the pool of Engel’s “regulars” I’d say it was either Allan Nixon or Robert E. Turner, who together co-wrote three of the Mafia: Operation novels for Engel and separately wrote a few standalones for him under their own names and pseudonyms.

Coming in at 238 pages of small print, Memoirs isn’t just a bunch of sleaze, though to be sure there’s tons of that. In fact “Sheila” opens the tale right on the action, so to speak, as she’s shooting her first hardcore scene. Her “co-star” is Jeff Burgess, Sheila’s seven foot tall and massively-endowed boyfriend. It’s Jeff who has led Sheila to this predicament, as Sheila never had any designs on becoming a “porno queen.” But rather than just settle for outright exploitation the author develops a nicely-done storyline in which our heroine gets mixed up with the Mafia – not to mention picking up a healthy heroin habit.

Sheila’s narration reminds me very much of that of “Jennifer Sills” in the aforementioned Massage Parlor, with that same sort of wide-eyed naivety. But Sheila’s no prudish shut-in, having slept around with her share of men in college. In her early 20s, Sheila has found love with Jeff, a star basketball player in college who will be a sure thing in the professional circuit. Sheila has had a rough life; in a darkly humorous sequence we learn that her father, a “famous industrialist,” lusted after Sheila, and in an outrageous cap-off to this sequence we are presented with the image of a father masturbating to the nude image of his teenaged daughter.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, friends; before Memoirs is finished we’ll have multiple scenes of hardcore sex, porno filming, lesbian interludes, and even a dash of besitality as our narrator gets it on with her Mafia boss’s doberman pinscher. Every single base one could think of is covered here, and none of it is shrouded in the purple prose or Burt Hirschfeld-style analogies and metaphors typical of some ‘70s trash fiction. It’s all clearly detailed and leaves nothing to the imagination, and is, as I wrote above, a goddamn masterpiece of sleaze.

It develops that Jeff’s brother, Roger, a handicapped ‘Nam vet, is the culprit behind Sheila and Jeff’s entry into the world of porn. The novel opens in January 1973, and then flashes back to the month before. Roger, having gotten hooked on heroin, inadvertently sets Jeff up with the Mafia, who has denied Roger his heroin due to lack of payment. If Jeff skims off a few points of an upcoming game, the Mafia will give Roger his dope. But it turns out that the Mafia is actually more interested in Sheila.

Roger, in addition to being a star basketball player, wants to be a director, and several months before sent out to Hollywood producers an arty film of a nude Sheila walking around the woods. This film ended up in the hands of Brendan O’Mahoney, a once-famous Hollywood director who is now a boozer reduced to directing porn under various pseudonyms. O’Mahoney himself is in deep with the Mafia, and as part of a convoluted scheme he’s told them that this busty redhead Sheila Brady would make for perfect porno queendom, especially given the fact that she has bombshell measurements combined with the face of a little girl.

So, long story short, the Mafia, as represented by Frank Cavaleri, leader of a California branch of the mob, forces Sheila and Jeff to have on-screen sex in a new O’Mahoney film, or else. The movie is titled Jackie The Giant Layer and plays off Jeff’s large size – and I don’t just mean his height. But Sheila finds that she begins to really enjoy shooting porn, and soon enough is secretly filming “loops” with O’Mahoney, ie having sex with various men for little films that will be shown in peepshows and porn theaters. She hides all this from Jeff, who has made it clear that he’ll only cater to the Mafia’s demands if he and Sheila “act” with only each other.

Sheila’s doing this not just because she enjoys the on-screen screwing, but because of the “vitamin shots” she’s been given her first day on set, courtesy Dr. Segadelli, Cavaleri’s heroin man. Sheila has an addictive personality and within days becomes a heroin freak, going secretly to Jeff’s brother Roger for her heroin fix. The author builds up a lot of good material with Sheila hiding her twin pursuits – loop-filming and heroin-shooting – without Jeff finding out. And it’s to the author’s credit that he (or she) is still able to make us root for Sheila, who despite it all comes off as a likable protagonist.

Our heroine gets more and more involved, even after leaving Hollywood to go back to the unspecified home state in which she lives with Jeff. Here the Mafia has more production facilities, and she not only does more loop material but also stars in more films helmed by O’Mahoney. In particular there’s Down On The Farm, which features the bestiality mentioned above, Cavaleri showing up on the set with his guard dog and informing O’Mahoney of his desire to have it screw Sheila in the film!

And Sheila herself, you won’t be surprised to learn, gets off on it all. She finds that she doesn’t need heroin when she’s screwing on camera, but once she’s between projects she needs a fix. This leads her into trouble; after getting caught shooting up in the restroom of a restaurant, Sheila’s put in a women’s detention center where she awaits trial. Jeff never visits her (she finds out later it’s because Cavaleri wouldn’t let him – the Mafia has been clear that Sheila is not to use heroin, so she’s been hiding this from them as well, and they’re pissed royally), so Sheila ends up cozying up with her pretty cellmate, Cindy.

More explicit lesbiana ensues when Sheila is escorted into the presence of the “head mistress” of the place, a foxy chick who wears lingerie and has her own private room. After Sheila pleasures her with a big dildo the two go at it full-tilt, with the outcome that Sheila now becomes the lady’s favorite. And meanwhile she’s kicked heroin, or has she? Because as soon as she’s free on bail, her Mafia-appointed lawyer getting her out scott free, Sheila’s already trying to score from O’Mahoney. She’s become a true whore, now, something she admits to us, as she begins to trade sex with the director for the heroin he can get her.

We get more porno material, like this weird-sounding project of O’Mahoney’s which is a “porno comedy” that involves cranked-up film speeds and a massive gang-bang where Sheila takes on several dudes at once (with some of the dudes going at it with each other, O’Mahoney somehow believing that this hetero mixed with homo material will go over well with his audience). But things get out of hand when Jackie The Giant Layer is released and in the ensuing backlash Jeff is kicked off his team and loses his scholarship. Now our couple is in dire straights, penniless, and it gets worse when Jeff, outraged when he discovers all the pornos Sheila has secretly filmed, burns down the Mafia’s porn warehouse.

Clearly, this is not a smart idea, and Jeff pays for it – his hands shoved into a meat grinder, lopping off his thumbs! We go into the homestretch with O’Mahoney aligned with Sheila and Jeff in a desperate attempt to escape Cavaleri’s clutches. The director has stashed money by skimming the profits of his films, and he has a ghost town in the Nevada desert that he bought years ago which no one knows about. The three ditch the Mafia and make a hellish trip across the desert. The director’s ghost town is almost idyllic, with a water supply and stashes of canned food. But O’Mahoney himself proves untrustworthy, wanting to kill Jeff and make off with Sheila alone…

Eventually Sheila and Jeff, on the run and in disguise, end up in “Sudden Falls, Iowa,” which Sheila informs us is her fictional name for the real Midwestern town they now live in. Running the only hotel in town under assumed names, they’ve found happiness. Sheila has finally kicked heroin after a nightmarish withdrawal process; when she comes out she learns from Jeff that her famous father has died, which Jeff learned on the news. Sheila realizes that her addictive drive for heroin and on-screen sex was all fueled by her daddy issues, and now that the bastard is gone she can live free and normally.

Sheila ends her tale on a note of worry – will Cavaleri’s stooges ever track her and Jeff down? She has an extra reason to be concerned now, especially given that she’s about to have a child as the novel ends. There’s more dark humor in this as she’s not even sure who the father is – it could’ve been Jeff, O’Mahoney, or any of the untold number of dudes she had sex with during her porno filming; in her heroin addiction, Sheila forgot to take her birth control. But Jeff, who may get back his dexterity with prosthetic thumbs, is super understanding and excited to raise a child with her. The end!

Friends, I had a helluva fun time reading this novel; besides the sleaze factor it has great dialog, believable characters, and a well-crafted, entertaining storyline. Also, it proves once again that Lyle Kenyon Engel was a master “producer” of ‘70s paperback originals. Not to take credit away from whoever actually wrote it, but Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen demonstrates how Engel excelled at divining what was hot in the fiction marketplace and turning out a product that not only was in line with it but surpassed it.

Like The Nursery, this is one of those sleaze masterpieces that begs to be quoted:

I was in front of a camera, before a small movie crew and financially interested spectators, performing film-recorded sex for the eventual satisfaction of movie-house masturbators, voyeurs, and other assorted come-freaks. -- pg. 11

“Keep ‘em rolling,” O’Mahoney ordered. “We can use some of this extraneous action in loops. All right, Jeff. When you come, be sure and let Sheila pull away. Our customers want to see that the actors are really making it. We want to see the semen spurt. Got it?” -- pg. 12

O’Mahoney smiled a smile that didn’t match the closed door of his eyes. “They should stop rerunning The Untouchables. There’s no such thing as the Mafia, silly baby, you know that, eh?” 

“Cavaleri, he seems to be the head one. And Segadelli, and that tough one, Santarpio. Italian names.” 

“So what? You anti-wop?” he said off-handedly, so off-handedly I knew he was lying. “I’m as Irish as you are. What about Sy Borofsky, the chief cameraman? A heeb. Ellisopulous, the sound man. As Greek as a cock up the ass.” -- pg. 33

“That’s when I started having lesbian sex.” -- pg. 46

“All right, you cooze-teaser, I beg you.  I beg you. Eat me!” -- pg. 68

When I awakened Jeff was gone; unfortunately the humiliation wasn’t. I was lying on a pee-soaked mattress and my stomach was fermenting with nausea. -- pg. 111

He insisted we meet in a downtown coffee shop. When I called, suggesting I come to his hotel, he was as nervous as a pregnant whore. -- pg. 113

When suddenly, of his own volition, the big dog mounted me, I was ready, willing, and able to take him! My original feeling of degradation had long since been washed away by the periodic tongue baths he gave me those three days. -- pg. 143

“When I’m not sucking cocks, I keep my mouth closed pretty good.” -- pg. 154

Monday, June 29, 2015

Kingpin


Kingpin, by Burt Hirschfeld and Edwin Fadiman
October, 1989  St. Martin's Press

One of the last novels Burt Hirschfeld published, Kingpin first came out in a hardcover edition in 1988; I don’t know much about co-author Edwin Fadiman other than that he himself published a few mystery and non-genre novels in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most of them paperback originals. I’m also not sure on how much these two authors collaborated, as the novel reads like everything else I’ve yet read by Hirschfeld.

Eschewing the trash fiction he specialized in during in the ‘70s, Hirschfeld here goes for more of a thriller or at least suspense sort of deal, though it’s still a slow-burner a la Fire Island and Hirschfeld’s other trashy tomes. The cast of characters is also much reduced, whittled down to a mere three: Jack Keveney, a tough New York narcotics cop, Napoleon Cruz, cocaine kingpin of the fictional South America country of Sixaola, and Nina Fuentes, the hitwoman/junior kingpin who becomes the lover of both. The novel spans decades, charting the rise of the two male protagonists, who both come from hardscrabble origins and make something of themselves.

The hardcover edition sported a blurb by none other than Harold Robbins, who called Kingpin “my kind of book.” And it really is, as one could almost look at Kingpin as a sequel in all but name to Robbins’s The Adventurers. Not that it features any of the same characters, but Sixaola is Adventurers protagonist Dax Xenos’s homeland of Corteguay in all but name. Hell, it could even be the same place at that, as we’re told it has gone through the usual turmoil of a banana republic, culminating in the ‘80s as one of the central hubs through which cocaine is imported into the States.

Napoleon gets the most text space of all of them, which is unfortunate, as I found his story the most uninteresting, not to mention the most cliched. Starting life as the penniless waif of a prostitute mother, Napoleon latches on to the drug czar of his little hometown, becoming the man’s errand boy. But Napoleon in his all-consuming desire to become someone is merciless, and after showing off his sadistic skills in getting money owed his boss he is promoted to a sort of enforcer status. But after taking out the man who is abusing Napoleon’s heroin-addicted mother, Napoleon sets his sights higher and soon shows up in the capitol of Sixaola.

Meanwhile Jack Keveney comes up on the streets himself, though most of the time he’s just posing as a hippie as part of his narcotics job. Hirschfeld employs that sometimes-annoying narrative thread schtick of his here, with the too-belabored subtext of Keveney’s Catholic upbringing. I think practically every time Keveney is featured we’re reminded of something the Sisters or Father Whatsisname told him as a young boy. And, to continue with the cliches, Keveney is conflicted by it all. The shame of it is that this detracts from the “tough cop” stuff you’d expect to read, especially given Keveney’s cred, taking down muggers and druggers and whatnot.

Napoleon grows his power thanks to a sleazy American middleman named Willie Hatch; Keveney, climbing up the ladder himself, falls for a left-wing reporter named Rosie and marries her, having a son with her. The kid I don’t think garners even a single line of text, and Rosie’s soon jettisoned from the novel too, as Keveney is more focused on his career and also a hot black police woman he’s having casual sex with. Eventually he’s offered a job by the Feds to head up a “high-tech, high-impact drug team” called D-Group, which of course reminded me a lot of the outfit D-3 in the Narc series.

And in a way, Kingpin comes off at times like Burt Hirschfeld writing an installment of that earlier Marc Olden series. Only whereas Olden would occasionally spice things up with action sequences, Hirschfeld and Fadiman are more content with the slow-burn. Making it even more of an uphill struggle is that years go by with little indication of when anything is taking place; the novel alternates between documenting Napoleon’s life and Keveney’s life, and sometimes when we reconnect with them again they’ve moved on to other things and we feel like we’ve missed out on something.

Again like his progenitor Dax Xenos, Napoleon hooks up with a leftist guerrilla squad and occasionally uses them as his private army. After pulling a daring heist on a bank owned by the Regents, ie the wealthy men who control all cocaine manufacture in Sixaola, Napoleon augments his personal staff with a few go-to specialists from the guerrillas, among them the breathtakingly beautiful Nina Fuentes. Soon Nina becomes Napoleon’s lover, but since he swings both ways, particularly to girlish young boys, she eventually becomes frustrated with him, seeking sexual relief on her assassination jobs:

You have worn me out,” Bustamente said without complaint. 

“Rest, Eduardo. You have done your best.” 

“The best is still to come, my dear.” He lay spread-eagled on his back, his breathing rapid and harsh, his eyes closed. He longed to sleep. He barely noticed the cold muzzle of the .25-caliber automatic when it was pressed up against his ear. “The best,” he repeated, before his world dissolved in pain and blood and endless blackness. 

Nina felt Bustamente’s body jerk, already dead. She took his cock in her hand and, as she knew it would be, it was pumped up in terminal tumescence. She pressed forward, her long, strong legs wrapped around the still warm corpse, pounding insistently against the curve of his hip, caught up by an excitement such as she had never before known. Spasm after extended spasm left her shaken and drained, still embracing Bustamente. Electric impulses made her flesh twitch and blinding lights went off behind her closed eyes, until she rested contentedly.

Unfortunately, this is the only sequence in the novel that goes this over the top, and Nina’s penchant for murder and necrophilia isn’t mentioned again. Indeed, that time-telescoping really neuters the characters; when next we encounter her, Nina’s become Napoleon’s roving salesperson or something, going about the Americas and posing as a seller of office furniture, but in reality a scout for possible coke-infiltrating locations. This is how Keveney meets her, though initially he knows her as Silvia Gutierrez, her cover name; regardless, Keveney’s D-Group boys have monitored the sexy woman’s voyages to and fro South America and have hard evidence of her drug dealing.

But Keveney’s got an instant hard-on for her and doesn’t just want to arrest her. Instead he poses as a mobbed-up dude in her apartment complex (?), hoping he’ll catch her eye. At length he does, though Nina’s all business; Keveney hires her to stock his “office” with furniture. This eventually leads to a relationship, with the authors getting down and dirty with that oldschool Hirschfeld style, with climaxes compared to cresting waves and peaks and whatnot. But it is a little ramped up for the ‘80s, with Nina pushing Keveney on an on, even into, uh, anal territory. But love arises amid the sodomy, and when Keveney’s group finally gets the lockdown on the lady’s meetup with a cocaine chemist, he sadly orders in the troops.

Thanks though to her smarts, Nina gets away scott free and returns to Sixaola, still not knowing that the man she was falling in love with was really Jack Keveney, top narc man who is committed to bringing her down. Napoleon (who becomes more distant to us readers the more powerful he becomes, to the extent that we’re denied any scenes from his viewpoint for long stretches toward the end) meanwhile has gotten detailed documentation on who Keveney is, and tasks Nina with his assassination. When she discovers it’s the same man she’s been screwing, she’s riled up good and proper. She’s now burning with her own lust – to track down Keveney and murder him for making a fool of her. Sounds like the buildup to a grand climax, doesn’t it?

But man, talk about a wasted finale. Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. But our authors, after spinning their wheels and slowly building up a storyline, blow the payoff in a major way. Jack’s in love with Nina, who has just been ordered to kill him. And Napoleon is plotting the death of the other Regents in an army-backed coup; meanwhile, Keveney is making plans to take out Napoleon. It all promises to lead to some major fireworks. Instead, just as soon as Nina has been given her mission from Napoleon, the army attacks Napoleon’s fortress, using weaponry they’ve gained from the CIA. Nina is anticlimactically killed off by a catamite who has been AWOL from the text for the past hundred or so pages, and Napoleon is arrested and sent to the US. After trading a line or two of text with Keveney in America, Napoleon is put in prison, where he’s killed by employees of the catamite. A depressed Keveney goes back to his ex-wife. The end.

So then, practically every thread the authors have spent 300+ pages developing just comes unravelled in the homestretch. Perhaps their theme is that, despite the maneuvering and planning of great men like Napoleon and Keveney, there are always greater forces at play. While this might be true in the real world it comes off as the dumbest shit ever in the world of dramatic fiction. How much better would it have been if we’d gotten the story they denied us – namely, of a vengeance-obsessed Nina hunting down Keveney, who is in love with her? Or of Keveney and Napoleon finally going mano e mano in a real confrontation?

Too much stalling, too much buildup, and too little payoff sums up Kingpin. It has the potential to be a great piece of thriller fiction, but the authors want to do too much, from documenting Napoleon’s Pablo Escobar-style lust for power to shady CIA deals with the Sixaolan ruling elite bringing to mind the Iran-Contra scandal. Even worse, the characters are all unlikable: Keveney is a dick, constantly bossing people around and griping about something, and Napoleon is too obsessed with his own magnificence to be much fun. Only Nina offers any enjoyment, what with her penchant for murder and necrophilia, but she’s only in about a quarter of the text.

In sum, Kingpin was kind of a letdown, but it did achieve the purpose for which I bought it: keeping me entertained during a recent trip to Tampa.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

The Vigilante #2: Los Angeles: Detour To A Funeral


The Vigilante #2: Los Angeles: Detour To A Funeral, by V.J. Santiago
November, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Picking up immediately after the first volume (and published the same month, too!), Los Angeles: Detour To A Funeral continues the story of Joe “The Vigilante” Madden, whose wife Sara was murdered not even a week before the events of this novel. But as we learned in that first book Madden has “found his own way” of dealing with his grief.

As I recall, New York: An Eye For An Eye ended with Madden heading out onto the streets of New York for one last go-round before leaving on a business trip for Los Angeles; as we meet him, he’s out on those streets, blowing away a pair of would-be “thrill killers.” Madden has gone total “Charles Bronson in Death Wish,” outfitted in a trench coat with upturned collar, his only weapon a .38 revolver. And let’s not forget his horrible facial scar, which still hasn’t fully healed – he just got it a few days ago, after all.

Returning from the first volume are the Grossman brothers, obese bastards who live up to their surnames and who are clients of Madden’s engineering firm, demanding clients at that. They run a printing firm out of LA and start blaming and threatening Madden as soon as he arrives the next day. Author Robert Lory wisely doesn’t waste much time with details of Madden on the job. Instead our hero just puts the prickish brothers in place, forming a sort of bond with their assistant, a guy named Prell.

Rather, Lory puts the focus on Madden’s vigilante pursuits. On his first night in LA he has a cabdriver drop him off in Watts; soon enough Madden encounters another would-be mugger/murderer, whom he dispatches with his .38. Madden’s brought the gun with him by stowing it in his package on the plane; there’s a very eerie 9/11 prescience here as Madden asks an airline rep how weapons can be transported, and she says that as long as any sort of weapon is stowed with the check-in bags, the airline could care less what you bring on a plane. This she says is so as to divert bombers. But what, Madden asks, could an airline do to prevent terrorists who are suicidal? 

Madden, not even a week into it, is fully committed to his vigilante life. Lory builds this theme where our hero occasionally asks himself if what he is doing is right, particularly when he becomes involved with a group of young women he saves. He wants things to be “neat” and “orderly,” per his engineering background, and getting involved with people could undermine that. But then he realizes that, had someone gotten involved the night his wife was killed on the subway, then perhaps he wouldn’t be here in LA, hunting criminals on the streets. Thus Madden gradually comes to see himself as a savior.

And he’s still merciless, too, even blowing away unarmed hoods who plead for mercy. Madden’s origin story dispensed with in the first volume, Lory is free here to get to the good stuff, with our scar-faced hero eager to put on his trench coat and plastic gloves and head out onto the streets of LA to blow away criminals. Worth noting is that Madden’s racist bent from that first volume is gone; true, he makes his first LA foray on the streets of Watts, where he kills black muggers, but otherwise there’s none of the talk of “animals” or other stuff from that first book. Instead, Madden just wants to murder anyone he deems a criminal, no matter their race – or their gender, either.

The meat of the story begins when Madden goes out on his second night, this time onto Sunset Strip. Here he comes upon a dude beating up a young woman. Madden surprisingly doesn’t kill him, but instead pistol-whips him to burger, despite the dude’s declarations of his karate skills. The girl Madden has saved is a 19 year-old heroin-addicted hooker named Koren Stuart. The story she tells Madden riles him up but good. Once a groupie for pop star Johnny O., Koren was eventually hooked on drugs and forced into prostitution. Madden swears vengeance.

In my review of New York: An Eye For An Eye, I wrote that the book came off like “a less sadistic take on Bronson: Blind Rage.” The same cannot be said of this second volume, which is just as over the top as Blind Rage, and just as good. In a subplot that reminded me of the obscure but awesome 1973 Lee Marvin movie Prime Cut, Koren and her fellow whore-captives are kept in a townhouse overseen by “Big Mama,” an obese lady who goes around in a black-and-white jumpsuit. As Lory describes her: “Big Mama, in addition to being a hefty pig in zebra clothing, was also a dyke.” 

Johnny O., a paunchy 25 year-old superstar whose music is described as “a combination of acid rock and country rock, with a little folk thrown in,” becomes Madden’s personal punching bag, as do Johnny’s O.’s two henchmen, Scotty and Bruce. Madden vows to take down the man’s white slavery ring; the singer uses up his groupies and then hooks them on heroin once he’s sick of them, making profits off of their ensuing prostitution. Lory adds some action here with Johnny O. at one point sending his two men after Madden – more quick work for our hero’s .38.

There’s a bit of dramatic stuff with Madden briefly connecting with four young women he saves from the Johnny O./Big Mama sex ring: Lisa, a lithe redhead, Marie, a plump brunette, and Joane, a “fine-looking blonde.” There’s also Koren Stuart, with Madden even going to the length of calling her parents in the Midwest and having them fly over to Los Angeles to collect her. The other girls he gives some money (stolen from Johnny O.’s wallet) and sends on their various ways; when Lisa tells him she has a bad heroin habit, thanks to Big Mama, Madden bluntly tells her she’ll just need to kick it!

Lory excels though with the Big Mama stuff. In her jumpsuit she looks “like a pregnant zebra,” and the most memorable part in the book occurs when Madden goes back to her cathouse for a little payback – a scene which features Big Mama pleasuring herself with a “smooth shank of ivory,” a Playboy centerfold propped open before her! And the lady’s past the stopping point, so to speak, unable to stop working that “shank of ivory” even though Madden has a pistol aimed at her head. Lory caps off this outrageous scene in the only way possible: Madden blowing away Big Mama in mid-orgasm!

Before her memorable departure Big Mama informs Madden that her heroin supplier is a dude in Torrance named Cord. This takes us into the homestretch as Madden plots the destruction of the man’s drug supply. While entertaining, this sequence again displays how Madden is just a normal guy, prone to stupid mistakes (like taking Johnny O.’s yellow Mercedes, which could easily be tracked). He’s also not capable of mass acts of carnage, like a regular men’s adventure protagonist. He’s only got five bullets left in his .38 and thus has to plan accordingly.

Oh, and you’ll be relieved to know that Madden, in his day job, is also able to turn around the profits of the Grossman brothers and take them out of the red. The dude sleeps like maybe ten hours in the entire week over which Los Angeles: Detour To A Funeral occurs. And he’s already rushing off to the next installment by novel’s end, having received another assignment from Mr. Chilton, his boss back in New York. There’s an engineer Chilton wants to hire in San Francisco, so why doesn’t Madden head on over there and interview him? Madden looks forward to killing more scum there.

With good action, dialog, and scene-setting, Los Angeles: Detour To A Funeral is even more enjoyable than the first volume, and hopefully is a sign of where the series will go. I loved it! Plus I never knew Lory was capable of such sleaze, and obviously I mean that as a compliment. The stuff with Big Mama and her heroin-hooked whores is just the most outrageous aspect – the novel is redolent with a lurid vibe, even with the tidbit that Johnny O. turns out to be a switch-hitter; cue lots of putdowns courtesy Madden.  There's no sex in the novel, to be sure, and the violence isn't overly graphic, but it's all very luridly handled nonetheless.

Lory’s writing is as strong as ever, and he’s able to pack a lot of action, introspection, banter, and sleaze into 183 pages of fairly big print. There’s no chaff at all, and somehow Lory succeeds in turning in a lurid tale that also has a bit of emotional content. Long story short, I was thoroughly entertained by this novel and look forward to reading the next volume.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Midtown North


Midtown North, by Mike Curtis
No month stated, 1976  Leisure Books

Credited to the same author as The Savage Women, Midtown North is clearly the work of another person; as I mentioned in my Savage Women review, we know from here that it was a guy named Myer Kutz who wrote Midtown North.

The novel is also an interesting case study in how Leisure Books would market their publications. The back cover copy, which I’m betting was written by Leisure editor Peter McCurtin, proclaims “Murder” in all caps, beneath which we are presented with the synopsis of a lurid-sounding plot about the “savage murders” of “young women.” Likewise, the ads for Midtown North in other Leisure Books of the day talked up the novel’s exploitative content, mentioning in particular how these “murders” were so repugnant as to make veteran cops sick.

My friends, Midtown North turns out to be a slow-moving character study of an older cop, Detective Ed Doherty, who works the Upper West Side of Manhattan, aka “Midtown North.” Rather than “murders” it’s “murder” in the singular, and rather than the outrageous, lurid elements hinted at on the back cover and in the advertisements the young gal is simply smothered by a pillow. I mean, not that this makes the act okay, but still – indeed, her murder comes off as almost accidental for the most part. But none of the exploitative aspects are present in the novel itself, which honestly could’ve been published by any other outfit than Leisure.

Rather than the hurried-off burst of sleaze expected from the imprint, Midtown North instead takes its time with developing its central protagonist and the case he’s currently working. There aren’t even any arbitrary “action scenes” to speed up the narrative. It’s just a police procedural based on solid research; Kutz even thanks the police of Manhattan’s Fifth Homicide Zone for their assistance with the book. The novel is filled with cop world details, Kutz leavening the tale with stories and complaints he’s picked up from the members of the NYPD he met with.

The poor young woman who is murdered goes without a name for most of the novel; when we meet her she’s drinking wine and eating cheese with some man (also not named) in her apartment on the Upper West Side. They put records on the turntable (lots of detail here about her high-quality turntable and stereo system, which I really enjoyed) and dance, and the guy thinks the girl is coming on to him when she starts rubbing her pelvis and thighs against him. But when he tries to take off her clothes she pushes him away. He snaps, and first is about to rape her, then instead jams a pillow cushion over her face and smothers her.

A few days later the landlord of the apartment building discovers a decomposing human body hidden on the top of the elevator. Doherty and his obese partner, Joseph Belotti, are called onto the scene. These two are true cops, not the photogenic types seen in movies of today, and again one can tell that Kutz has based his characters on his research. Doherty is the star of the piece, though, and he’s sort of a broken shell, his wife Brenda having left him six months ago. Doherty has been on the force for some unspecified length of time and wonders if he is losing his mind.

Doherty, unlike other cops in his precinct, actually lives in Midtown North. He’s watched as the area has went to hell over the past few decades (the back cover copy, again, oversells it, making it sound like a warzone), the affluent original residents being replaced by very noisy Puerto Ricans. The noise is what is driving Doherty insane, and caused his wife to leave him; Doherty resents the constant music the Puerto Ricans blast from the sidewalks outside of his apartment, and has resorted to various costly noise-suppressing countermeasures.

In addition to his own high-quality stereo equipment, Doherty also has these noise machines he’ll switch on to block out noises from the street, as well as sound-blocking curtains. Only, none of it works, and Doherty has become almost obsessive about the noise of the Puerto Ricans. This all reminded me of myself and my neighbor’s goddamn yapping little dog, which barks all the time. Note to all – those stupid little ultrasonic bark stopper things do NOT work on Jack Russell Terriers. I’ve found this out the hard way. (However the dog has become so scared of me that it immediately stops yapping as soon as I step out onto my back porch.)

The novel is more about Doherty than the case. It’s also filled with anecdotes about the trials and tribulations detectives would encounter in New York in the 1970s. It is as mentioned more of a character portrait thing so there is no action for the most part. In fact Doherty in all his years has only pulled his .38 twice, let alone ever shot anyone. But curiously for a character portrait there’s really no buildup or payoff; I thought Doherty would reunite with his wife or come to some sort of resolution, but none of that happens.

Instead, Kutz builds up a last-second deal where Doherty begins to identify with the murderer. This is exactly what Len Levinson did in Without Mercy, but Len did it better, mostly because he had more room to play with – Midtown North is a mere 156 pages. This means that characters and subplots disappear with no warning; Doherty’s partner Belotti, for example, just abruptly drops out of the narrative and doesn’t return. So do several minor characters, all of whom live in the building in which the girl’s murdered body was discovered.

Still operating on that real-life vibe, Kutz has Doherty find out the killer through good old police work. Also he nicely brings in Doherty’s audiophile nature; Doherty is a classical music buff, with a few thousand LPs. This interest provides the lead to who the killer is, as Doherty spots a record in the dead girl’s collection that surely wasn’t hers, and perhaps was placed there by the killer. By this time he’s discovered that the girl had the unusual name of Michael and was a recent divorcee who was staying temporarily in one of the apartments, thus she wasn’t one of the tenants and was therefore unknown to the owner, etc.

Doherty deduces that one of the tenants was the murderer, and again this is deduced via his fondness for music. But since he has no evidence Doherty begins visiting the guy for friendly chats, to try to instill some fear in him. Here the “Without Mercy” stuff comes into play, as Doherty finds that this dude too has a room filled with noise-blocking curtains and hi-fi audio equipment, all with which to block out the noise of the street. Also the guy, obviously, has problems with women, hence Doherty’s last-second “I’m identifying with a murderer” worries.

The briefest of action scenes serves as the finale, as Doherty takes the killer on an impromptu tour of the building, Doherty blithely telling the killer how he, Doherty, thinks the killer stashed the girl’s body with no one seeing him. This leads to a quick scuffle in which Doherty finally fires his gun, but it’s very anticlimactic and indeed the final image we’re given is of a victorious Doherty standing in his lieutenant’s office and trying to hide his tears. Why? Because of that murderer-identification aspect, of course, which I have to say rings hollow.

Not that it much matters, as here Midtown North ends, and as far as I’m aware Kutz never published another novel. While it was a bit slow-moving at times and more focused on thoughts and feelings than on action, Midtown North was still enjoyable for its period details, with squalid ‘70s Manhattan brought fully to life.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

The Avenger #3: Colombia Crackdown


The Avenger #3: Columbia Crackdown, by Chet Cunningham
July, 1988  Warner Books

After The Penetrator came to an end in 1983 (a very definite end, by the way) Chet Cunningham continued performing contract writing duties, but in the late ‘80s he authored under his own name the four-volume Avenger series. Judging from this third volume, it’s like a Drug War-era overhaul of Cunningham’s Penetrator work, only lacking the pulpy spark of that earlier series.

Hero Matt Hawke is notable because he’s a psychopath. Bringing to mind the protagonist of Barry Malzberg’s 1970s series Lone Wolf, Hawke is practically deranged and will murder with impunity. We’re informed that Hawke, who served as a Marine in ‘Nam, was once a highly-decorated DEA agent who lost it all when his wife Connie was captured by drug dealers who had been burned by Hawke; they tortured her over the course of three days, Hawke only arriving to save her as she died. He of course killed the torturers and then declared war on the drug dealers of the world.

Hawke soon became known as “The Avenger” in the San Diego papers as he ran roughshod over the men who had killed his wife. After this he headed on down to Houston to bust up some druggers there. Now he’s in Miami, following more cocaine-world leads, and we learn that all of this is occuring two short months after the death of Hawke’s wife. So in other words, “The Avenger” is relatively new to the world of lone wolf crimefighting, but he’s already racked up a hefty number of kills and has destroyed several important coke pipelines into the US.

Cunningham appears to have been attempting to create his own Executioner, as this book has the same feel as the early Don Pendleton volumes of that series. This goes beyond Hawke’s single-minded pursuit of bloody payback to little things like the term “turkey meat,” which is used throughout, Hawke often stating that this is what his wife was turned into by the sadists who killed her. Also Hawke like Bolan is rooted for by the government agencies of the US, despite being a wanted felon. He just lacks that likability of Mack Bolan, or for that matter of Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin.

Hawke when we meet him is busy killing off some dude who owns a surf board company but makes his real millions importing coke. Here we get the first taste of Hawke’s insanity as he trains a gun on the unarmed surfer, screams about how his wife Connie was hacked to pieces, and then condemns the surfer to death, shooting him in the forehead. Mind you, this surfer guy had nothing whatsoever to do with Connie Hawke’s death. But before killing any drug world bigwig Hawke will relive Connie’s last moments and start ranting and raving before pulling the trigger.

Hawke’s come to Miami to crack down on the drug-smuggling effors of Tony Labruzzo, whose uncle Vito is one of the top Mafioso from the old days. Cunningham juggles perspectives with what turns out to be the go-nowhere storyline of Sue Beth, a redneck virgin who is unwittingly used by Tony’s goons as a coke mule. When she finds out she’s being used, the goon in charge rapes her…and after like two hours of it Sue Beth shoots him! But the guy lives and has her gang-banged by several of his henchmen, then dropped off nude on the streets – ironically, right outside of the kosher deli which Hawke uses as his Miami intel headquarters.

Sue Beth’s shipped off back home and meanwhile Hawke investigates Labruzzo territory. Trying to meet Vito in the family’s main Miami building (they have several respectable businesses, naturally), he instead is introduced to an attractive young woman named Gina. Cunningham builds up a long-simmer relationship between the two, with Hawke becoming interested in Gina and vice versa, but he’s not sure how involved with the Labruzzo business she really is. He goes on offing various mobsters in Miami, planning to head on down to Latin America to cut off the supply at its source.

One thing Cunningham brings back from the Penetrator years is a female villain – Gina we learn is in fact Gina Labruzzo, one of Vito’s nieces and the ostensible ruler of the family’s American faction. In an arbitrary, unexplored tidbit we learn that Gina’s real fucked up – she enjoys slicing up her thighs and hips with straight razors! This is her way of getting mellow after a hard day. We also learn that she was repeatedly raped as a young virgin by one of her uncles, and now has a distrust of all men, or something. Cunningham doesn’t really elaborate on it too much, other than her constant dismissals of Hawke’s advances.

Hawke meanwhile takes on another female villain, an attractive assassin Gina sends after him. After the gal accidentally tumbles off a building frame Hawke flies down to Honduras and the book becomes a bit of a travelogue. Hawke meets up with a British expat named Preston Smith-Jones who claims to sell refurbished turbine props in Dallas; the man shows Hawke around, including yet another arbitrary part where he hooks him up with an American named “The Shooter” who handles security for a coffee plant. This guy and Hawke get involved in a brief skirmish with drug runners in a scene clearly placed there to add a bit of action.

Attention expats who have any knowledge of the drug world: stay away from Matt Hawke, as he will likely murder you. This happens twice in the novel, Preston being the first of two guys who shows Hawke around, being chummy with him, only to be summarily executed once Hawke learns that Preston is selling coke back in the States. And once again our psychotic hero starts screaming about his dead wife before he pulls the trigger. Afterwards Hawke continues his Latin America tour and goes to Bogota, Colombia, where he learns that all cocaine in the area is sold by The Grasshopper, an old drug baron who lives in opulence.

Gina is here too, and the whole “will they or won’t they” subplot makes no sense as we readers know Gina is a Labruzzo and has already tried to have Hawke killed a few times. Meanwhile Hawke just suspects something’s up about the girl but apparently he’s lost his faculties due to her awesome boobs. Hawke goes on more travelogue-esque tours of coke-processing plants, posing as a writer of “men’s action books.” He murders another expat, this one an American who shows Hawke one of the Grasshopper’s facilities and even offers him a job.

Hawke has a thing for fighting with unusual weapons: in Colombia Crackdown he kills one guy with an ink pen, he tears up another dude with a key padlock tied to the end of a belt, and in the novel’s most outrageous kill he blows up a guy with C4 plastic explosive on a flying model airplane. Otherwise he fights with a Colt .45 or any other gun he can get his hands on; unlike Mark Hardin, he doesn’t have a trademark weapon, like the Penetrator’s Ava dart gun.

Another callback to the Penetrator occurs in the finale, in which Hawke is captured and isn’t just shot in the head but is instead put in the sort of deathtrap Hardin might have encountered: a room with an electrified floor. In a too-long sequence Hawke is able to escape, which leads to a final confrontation between him and Gina. Here the lady’s fondness for blades comes into play, as she goes after Hawke with a poisoned dagger. Cunningham doesn’t deliver a single sex scene in the novel, but he does continue to play out this “it could be love” storyline between these two which never does come off as believable.

Otherwise Cunningham’s writing is of the same piece as his earlier work, with the action always moving and the resourceful protagonist always getting by on his luck or his wits. But as mentioned it just lacks the charm of his Penetrator material, and has too much of a “this is the ‘80s so this needs to be treated seriously” vibe inherent in men’s adventure fiction of the era. It’s also a little too heavy on the anti-drug rhetoric of the day (the back of the book even proclaims: “He says no to the drug merchants of death!”), but that’s to be expected given Hawke’s history.

Stupid but true bonus note: I was driving to work the day after I finished reading Colombia Crackdown and a white Honda CR-V got in front of me on the tollway. It had vanity license plates that said “AVENGER!”

Monday, June 15, 2015

Death Squad (Keller #4)


Death Squad, by Nelson DeMille
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

I lucked out and finally found a reasonably-priced copy of this fourth and final Keller novel, which in the late ‘80s was revised and updated to become the sixth and final volume of the “Jack Cannon” Ryker series. I’ve wanted to read Death Squad since I read Marty McKee’s review a few years ago, and I’m really glad I finally got to, as this was my favorite Keller/Ryker novel by far.

As Marty notes, Death Squad is clearly influenced by the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, as it’s about a secret police squad that acts as judge, jury, and executioner. Nelson DeMille wasn’t alone in taking off on this concept, as there was the similar Death Squad and Kill Squad series, not to mention a 1974 TV-movie titled The Death Squad. For that matter, Herbert Kastle even published a novel titled The Death Squad in 1977. So “cops gone vigilante” was a hot topic at the time, and many of the elements DeMille deals with in this novel are still relevant today.

Kastle is a good reference point, as even though both the Keller and the Ryker books were packaged as men’s adventure action novels, they have more in common with the crime thrillers Kastle was turning out at the time, like Cross-Country. They’re also very similar to the work William Crawford was doing under his own name and various pseudonyms, as they’re obviously based on extensive research and they’re grounded in a realistic-seeming cop world. But whereas Crawford had lots of police world details but lackluster storytelling skills (incidentally, I’ve recently learned that Crawford was indeed a cop himself), DeMille has a firm handle on both. (Except for when he has Keller screw a silencer onto a revolver….)

I’ve enjoyed every Keller and Ryker novel I’ve yet read, even though none of them (the DeMille ones, at least) have had much in the way of action. They are instead rather slow-paced, grim and gritty police procedurals, but the characters and the situations are so well defined and depicted that I’ve found them very entertaining despite the lack of thrills. Death Squad however turns out to be a little different – while it’s just as entertaining and well-written as the previous volumes, it actually has its share of violent thrills and action scenes.

DeMille proves this early on, with an opening clearly influenced by a scene in Magnum Force, as Keller sits in with a pair of stakeout cops who are hiding in an oft-robbed liquor store. Keller happens to leave just as a pair of black dudes walk in; Keller stumbles across their spotter outside, cuffs him, and then almost walks right in on the execution of the two would-be robbers. They’re shot point-blank by the stakeout cops, and Keller has gotten first-hand confirmation of what he’s suspected for a while: that there’s a “Death Squad” operating within the NYPD.

This leads into an entertaining and very ‘70s paranoia tale as Keller doesn’t know who on the force he can trust. It gets even worse when a rapist, jailed in the detectives’ squad room in Keller’s precinct house, “commits suicide” by hanging. When Keller later finds a needle beneath the dude’s fingernail, he gets yet more confirmation of foul play. The back cover hypes it that Keller doesn’t really mind the dirty deeds of the Death Squad, but in the book itself he’s on the fence, and can’t decide if he likes their actions or not. What most bugs him is why they haven’t asked him to join!

The only men on his squad Keller believes he can trust are series regulars Lt. Piscati (aka Fischetti in the Ryker books) and Sgt. Bo Liddy (aka Bo Lindy). He’s not sure about his new partner, a young ‘Nam vet with a leg wound named Paul Reuter. Meanwhile we readers get to see the Death Squad in action, and their efforts aren’t limited to crooks: they have grander designs, like for example taking out a notoriously-liberal circuit court judge. The Squad meets in an abandoned subway on the outskirts of town, their “Chief” sitting in the shadows and wearing a hood as his men surround him. More ‘70s paranoia continues with the details that an FBI agent and a CIA agent are part of the ruling board, as well as a retired Army general.

DeMille as ever excels in setpieces, from an arbitrary but disturbingly fascinating part where Keller watches as a corpse is embalmed to a long dialog exchange between the leaders of the Death Squad, who state that their prime targets will be liberal politicians. Grungy ‘70s New York City is again captured in all its tawdry glory, if not to the extent of the other Ryker/Keller novels. Most surprising of all is that DeMille actually bothers to write action material here, with a handful of gunfights occuring in the narrative. In previous volumes our “hero” rarely if ever pulled his gun, and never fired it once. (At least in the ones I’ve read – the only two I still need are The Sniper and The Cannibal.)

Finally the Death Squad goes too far, at least so far as Keller is concerned; when they kill off a friend (or at least what passes for a friend for Keller) our hero swears vengeance. “If they’re the Nazis,” he blusters, “I’m Attila the Hun.” Keller isn’t much for planning; instead he just loads up his Ruger .357 Magnum and his Police Special .38 (which he’s constanty screwing a silencer on, by the way) and charges in. This almost gets him killed in an ambush, but he’s saved by Reuter – a fact the two keep bickering and bantering about like a regular Razoni & Jackson, with Keller insisting that he could’ve saved himself.

The two are now on the run, hiding from cops, trying to interrogate men they have identified as members of the Death Squad. Here Keller proves himself as merciless as his enemies, killing in cold blood. But nowhere is safe for Keller and Reuter – they even have to sleep in the patrolmen’s quarters in the precinct house – and the final quarter of the novel is very tense as they’re in open conflict with the Death Squad and don’t know who they can trust. Finally Keller learns where the Squad meets, and with the aid of a surprise ally our two heroes (now a trio) make a midnight raid on the place.

The climactic action scene isn’t along the lines of The Executioner or anything, and indeed brings more to mind a ‘70s crime flick, with Keller and Reuter only having to deal with a few Squad cops in the dark subway. DeMille doesn’t go much for the gore, either, with people just getting shot and falling down. He does though deliver a very abrupt ending, with Keller and Reuter taking out the ruling elite of the Squad, at least most of them, only to realize on the final sentence of the final page that they’ve just let the leader of the Squad escape. But here the book ends, which is unfortunate, as the Death Squad has been set up as so far-reaching and widespread that the story almost begs to keep going on.

Instead, that’s that; I guess we’re to believe that Keller has chopped off the head of the organization and now it will fall apart. But at least DeMille gave us some action in the first place, and again his characters pop to life, as does grimy Manhattan. Keller here has developed a penchant for one-liners and snappy comebacks, and DeMille even employs movie-style setup and payoff dialog, like a recurring joke about “a five-letter word meaning meddlesome.” One thing missing for those keeping track on your trash scorecard is there’s no sex at all – in fact, there isn’t a single female character in the entire novel.

Death Squad confirms that this series was published (and maybe even written) out of order. In my review of The Smack Man, I mentioned that a certain character was stated as being dead, even though he was alive in later volumes. I won’t give this character’s name away in this review, as it would be a spoiler to anyone reading Death Squad, but that character is in fact killed in this novel, which means that The Smack Man takes place after Death Squad, even though it was the first volume of the Keller series! (And DeMille didn’t change the series order when he revised these books in the late ‘80s, so I guess this out-of-order sequence was intentional.)

But then on page 140 Keller’s new partner Reuter says that “rumor has it” that Keller killed a bad cop named Schwartz. My friends, this is a direct reference to the climactic events of…The Smack Man! So what the hell?? Did DeMille just figure to hell with it, no one would notice the continuity misfires anyway, or did he himself get goofed up? As mentioned, it would appear these mix-ups were present in the ’89 revisions as well, so either DeMille didn’t catch them again or he just figured “to hell with it” again. But as it stands, Death Squad takes place before and after The Smack Man. I thought maybe the novels might occur at the same time, but each takes place over the span of just a few weeks – and in different seasons, to boot.

Sadly, this was it for Joe Keller; meanwhile, his alternate-reality version, Joe Ryker, continued on to have a few more adventures over at Leisure Books, courtesy the group of writers who served as “Edson T. Hamill.”