Showing posts with label Holloway House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holloway House. Show all posts

Monday, June 21, 2021

Radcliff #3: Double Troube


Radcliff #3: Double Trouble, by Roosevelt Mallory
January, 1975  Holloway House

HE’S BIG, HE’S BLACK, HE’S BAD – HE’S RADCLIFF 

 -- From the back cover 

Holloway House cornered the market on action and crime novels featuring black protagonists, and Radcliff ran for four volumes right at the height of the Blaxploitation genre. This is a few volumes less than The Iceman, so either readers of the day didn’t take to it or the author, the wonderfully-named Roosevelt Mallory, moved on to other things. This is the only volume of the series I have, and judging from it Radcliff is a lot less “Blaxploitation-esque” than The Iceman, coming off for the most part like a series from Pinnacle or Pyramid or any other ‘70s imprint, one that just happens to have a black protagonist. 

So then, jive-talk is kept to a minimum, cops are referred to as “policemen,” and the sex and violence are tame – very tame when compared to the ‘70s men’s adventure average. Actually The Iceman isn’t very explicit in the sex department either, at least judging from the two volumes I’ve read. One thing both series have in common is the capitalization of “Black,” whereas “white” is never capitalized. Actually this has also crept into modern journalism (so-called); I’ve read the justification for it, but it only makes sense if you’ve been completely brainwashed. Or if you get your news from the sort of people who capitalize the “b” but not the “w,” which pretty much amounts to the same thing as being brainwashed. 

Another thing this series lacks is a strong impetus for the hero. Joe Radcliff (whose real name appears to be Jason Washington) is a ‘Nam vet who realized he was killing VC for free for Uncle Sam and decided to farm out his specialty to the highest bidder. He’s now a top “pro hit-man,” per the cover, with a talent for killing mobsters and the like. He’ll be hired by one Mafia bigwig to kill another Mafia bigwig, and Radcliff makes a fortune off it…enough to keep him in some styling threads with a few ladies at his side. So in other words, Radcliff’s only in it for the money. His customary getup includes a pair of rose-tinted glasses and he sports a stylish “Natural” (aka afro) and goattee…though he only has the Natural for the first few chapters of Double Trouble. His customary weapons are a dual pair of .38s; like most ‘70s crime fiction, revolvers are the main choice of weaponry in Radcliff

As mentioned I’m missing the previous two volumes, but it appears that Mallory has tried to inject a bit of continuity into the series. When the novel opens Radcliff is on a cruise through the Caribbean (having picked up two women along the way, “a Black and a Mexican-American”), and in fact he stays off-page for a bit too long. Rather the focus is on a pair of cops who are trying to track down a cop-killer. This would be the “double” of the title; the novel has an unsettling opening in which a ringer for Radcliff guns down an LA cop at his breakfast table, even going to the lengths of killing the man’s seven year-old daughter. Mallory doesn’t keep the kid’s death off-page, either, which makes for an unnecessarily grim opening. At any rate, the killer leaves a witness – one who will be able to relate that someone named “Radcliff” did the killing. 

A local cop named Gene Clark (not that Gene Clark) was friends with the murdered policeman and investigates the murder. The reader assumes Clark will be an important facet of the narrative, but the reader will soon be proven wrong, as Clark basically just disappears. Next we meet another cop, this one from New York, named Lt. Sam Hanson. He’s flown in from New York given his familiarity with Radcliff, having encountered him in one of the previous volumes. In the meantime the fake Radcliff has killed another couple cops. And once again made it a point for a witness to be able to peg the killer as someone named Radcliff. Of course Clark and Hanson are not aware this is an imposter, but Hanson is adamant that Radcliff is a “pro” and wouldn’t go around killing cops or innocent people…something the real Radcliff has never done. 

Meanwhile the real Radcliff is blissfully going about his cruise, but when he returns to port he’s almost blown away by a cop. This sets off the narrative drive of Double Trouble, as Radcliff scurries around Los Angeles while trying to evade the cops and figure out who is behind the frame. The vibe of Blaxploitation really is not present; Radcliff seems to have almost a professional respect for “policemen” and we know he’s never killed one. There are several parts where he has the opportunity but always goes out of his way not to. In fact he doesn’t kill very many people at all in Double Trouble. Mallory tries to inject realism into the story, with Radcliff presented as a supreme bad-ass, but not a superhero like other men’s adventure protagonists. 

Radcliff unwittingly predicts future fashion trends when he shaves off his afro – or “screwing up a masterpiece,” as he thinks to himself. With his “clean face and equally clean-shaven head” Radcliff sounds more like a ‘90s action protagonist than one from the ‘70s. Mallory was clearly familiar with Los Angeles as he brings the city to life, with Radcliff shuffling all over the place, including into Watts. Radcliff has various safehouses around the city, as well as contacts, some of whom turn out to be traitors. There’s a bit of a private eye vibe in the middle section of the novel, as Radcliff starts looking around for any local black hoodlums who have come into sudden money; his gambit is that such a person might be the ringer who was paid big bucks to impersonate Radcliff and kill a few cops and Feds. 

Truth be told this middle half is a bit hard-going, as Radcliff chases one red herring after another. Meanwhile we have a lot of business about him getting new papers and ID and etc, Mallory again striving for a crime underworld realism as Radcliff meets with various criminal contacts. Actually this whole bit has the vibe of a “black Parker” or somesuch. That said, Mallory clearly had an unwieldy wordcount (the book’s way too long at 224 pages of small print), as there’s a fair bit of padding at times; most egregious of all would be an arbitrary game of basketball Radcliff gets into with a group of kids in Watts while he’s waiting to meet the contact with his new ID paperwork. 

Mallory does inject some action into these red-herring chases, including an unexpected bit where Radcliff busts out some kung-fu to take on a guy who tries to get the drop on him. There’s also a go-nowhere bit where he finds himself talking to a stripper “with two huge breasts” named Brandy. While she disappears from the novel, Radcliff does find the time to sleep with the jilted wife of one of the suspects, but Radcliff just goes through the motions (Mallory literally writes “he went through the motions of making love to the woman”), because the lady’s clearly expecting to get lucky with him, and Mallory keeps the majority of it off-page. Speaking of which Radcliff appears to have a steady gal with whom he’s in an open relationship; a redhead beauty named Angie who only appears in the last two pages of Double Trouble. Anyway, the husband of the jilted wife Radcliff sleeps with does indeed turn out to be the fake Radcliff; while snooping through the drawers when the woman’s asleep, Radcliff finds a fake goattee and other parts of the “Radcliff” disguise. 

Radcliff can be pretty badass, though. He abducts the Mafioso who hired the fake Radcliff, torturing the mobster’s henchman to make him talk. After which Radcliff doesn’t leave any witnesses, despite his promise to take them to a hospital. Throughout we are to understand that Radcliff is supremely pissed at the situation, not concerned or worried. Mallory tries as well to give Radcliff some Jim Brown-esque dialog to convey his anger; there’s a humorous part where Radcliff tells one thug, “I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve pissed off an already highly pissed off man.” But again the drive just isn’t there, or Mallory doesn’t sufficiently convey it. Radcliff’s more angry that his name has been sullied; even here there is no burning drive to get revenge on the men who have murdered innocents so as to frame him. 

The action briefly moves to Mexico, where the fake Radcliff is hiding. Meanwhile Radcliff discovers that an infamous professional hit man is also tracking the guy: the Scorpion, who is much built up but almost perfunctorily dealt with. Also, Radcliff doesn’t even show much divine wrath when he gets hold of the imposter, basically just handcuffing the guy and getting him back to the US so he can exonerate Radcliff. I expected a few bitch-slaps at least, but for the most part Radcliff is all business. The finale lacks much spark as well, with Radcliff getting in a quick shootout with some Mafia goons, Radcliff using a .22 with dum-dum shells. 

The finale has Radcliff’s reputation restored, and he’s back with Angie. According to this insightful essay at Crime Reads, Angie would meet her own fate in the next volume, which happened to be the last. Overall Double Trouble was fairly entertaining, but came off as too blasé compared to some of the more outrageous Blaxploitation paperbacks of the era, like Dark Angel or the awesome Coffy novelization. I do love how Radcliff and Mallory are presented as one and the same on the cover; that’s Mallory’s photo (which is reproduced on the back cover) there on the Wanted poster behind Radcliff. It’s both cool and corny how Holloway House tried to make their authors come off as bad-ass as their protagonists.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

The Iceman #4: Sunday Fix


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, February 20, 2020

The Hellcats


The Hellcats, by Robert F. Slatzer
No month stated, 1968  Holloway House

If The Hellcats is remembered for anything, it’s for being featured on an earlier episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But it warranted its own paperback tie-in courtesy writer-director Robert Slatzer, who per the back cover bio was “not new to writing” and got his start in Hollywood thanks to Bob Hope! One wonders if Slatzer gave Hope a copy of this novel, because folks that “adult reading” tag on the cover isn’t publisher hyperbole: Hellcats is straight-up sleaze, about on the level of the average Beeline porn novel of the day.

I should admit up front that I’ve never actually seen The Hellcats; I’ve got the MST3K DVD release, but haven’t watched it…or if I did it was many years ago and I no longer remember it. I’ll try to rectify this situation as soon as possible. In the meantime I can only judge the book on its own merits. And as mentioned it is unrepentant sleaze, clunkily written sleaze at that: exposition reigns supreme, the author consistently tells instead of shows, description is practically nonexistent (other than when it comes to sex), and character/plot arcs are hamfistedly executed. There’s also lots and lots of stuff that should’ve been cut; the novel runs to an unwieldy 312 pages, and my only assumption is that this exorbitant page length was mandated by Holloway House. Because it’s clear Slatzer doesn’t have enough story to actually warrant such a length; there’s a lot of repetition throughout, a lot of arbitrary detours that have no relevance to anything.

One thing to also clear up posthaste is that the cover – which was also used for the theatrical release – is a lie of the first order. The Hellcats is not solely a female biker gang; it’s made up of men and their mamas, and right now the gang’s led by one of the mamas: a redheaded beauty named Sheila. At least I assume she is pretty; Slatzer seems incapable of much describing anything, and it’s not even for a while that we learn Sheila is a redhead. Anyway Sheila was the mama of former Hellcats boss Big Daddy, whose funeral opens the proceedings; the Hellcats rip and roar on their choppers through a cemetary while a young man and woman secretly watch from afar.

These two will be the main protagonists of the tale: the hunky dude is Monte Chapman, back here in California on special leave from a tour in Vietnam; the pretty young blonde with a “full bosom” at his side is Linda Watkins. They’re here watching the Hellcats because they both have a score to settle with the biker scum: Monte’s brother Dave was an undercover cop trying to figure out how the gang was involved in a heroin pipeline, and he was recently murdered while on the job. Linda was Dave’s fiance. Now they’re here to get revenge, certain that one of the Hellcats killed Dave.

The flashback to Dave’s murder is one of the most hilarious sequences I’ve ever read, because my friends he was killed by a sniper immediately after Linda gave him a blowjob! I’ll pause so you can reflect on this. In fact, let me just go ahead and provide an excerpt, because this is truly one for the ages:



I kinda suspect none of that’s in the movie! Well Linda – who despite burying Dave just a week before – is already getting all hot and juicy thinking about her last day with her beloved, and plus she can’t help but notice how studly Dave’s brother Monte is. Thus when Monte announces his intention to go undercover himself with the Hellcats and to find Dave’s killer, Linda asks to go along with him. Monte’s dialog here is also particularly excerpt-worthy:


Monte and Linda’s transformation into renegade bikers is humorously simple, I mean we’re just to assume that they both know how to handle a chopper. But by next chapter they waltz into the Moonfire Inn, a dive near Los Angeles frequented by the Hellcats; Monte’s now sporting outlaw attire, his face unshaven, and Linda’s his mama, both of them posing as hardbitten outlaw bikers. Absolutely no description is provided of their choppers or of any other chopper in the entire novel; for example we only learn via an off-hand comment that one of the Hellcats (a male one) rides a pink chopper. But for that matter it’s not even until page 80 that we even get a scene of anyone actually riding a motorcycle; the entire novel up to that point is comprised of Monte and Linda immersing themselves into the world of the Hellcats.

Slatzer follows the usual cliché of how you join a gang of bikers: you saunter into a dive they frequent, act all cool and mysterious, give vague non-answers to any questions about who you are or where you came from, and then knock out the gang leader with a solid punch to the jaw. All this Monte dutifully performs within moments of entering the Moonfire; the Hellcat he knocks out is a narrative nonentity named Snake who is temporarily acting as gang leader given the recent death of Big Daddy. But Snake basically disappears after this – save for a brief subplot about him harboring resentment for Monte for that punch to the face – and it turns out that Sheila is the true boss.

She isn’t the only sexy one in the group: there’s also eyepatch-wearing Rita, a busty blonde who immediately comes on strong to Monte. There’s also a couple other gals in the gang, but they really fade into the narrative woodwork, as indeed do the male members. So far as the novel is concerned, the only Hellcats of any importance are Sheila and Rita, who we eventually learn despise one another – in fact, Rita casually informs Monte later in the novel that Sheila knocked her eye out in a chain fight a few years back. This was a fight over the attentions of the mysterious Mr. Adrian, a powerful figure who – Monte learns quickly and easily enough – uses the Hellcats to run heroin in from Mexico.

The helluva it is, despite the exposition, the lack of description, the exorbitant length, The Hellcats is actually a lot of fun to read. But make no mistake, it’s a sleaze novel. This is proven posthaste, as Monte realizes that he can use his natural male mystique to score with these Hellcats women, and to, uh, pump them for info at the same time. So even though he’s got a thing going with Linda – the act itself taking up a few pages of hardcore description when it finally occurs, around fifty or sixty pages in – he capitalizes on the attention he’s shown by horny Sheila and Rita. Oh and I forgot to mention, but none of the female biker chicks actually act like female biker chicks. Rita in particular, despite the eyepatch and the general bad-assery, comes off like the heroine of a Gothic novel, constantly afraid that she’s going to give in to her “female nature” and fall in love with Monte. There’s even a part late in the book where Rita and Sheila tell Monte they’re engaged in “girl talk!”

The confrontation with Snake plays out in a bit where the pseudo-boss challenges Monte to a Hellcat trial: lay between a pair of big three-wheeled choppers and hang on to the axles of each for the count of fifteen; if you can’t do it you get your ass dragged around the track. Well, Snake makes the challenge and can’t do it, but of course Monte can. After this he gets his “award:” sex with Sheila. And it’s done out in the open, too, with Linda forced to watch – true to the era, Linda isn’t allowed to hobknob with any of the male Hellcats, given that she’s Monte’s woman, but Monte himself is free to do whoever he wants. (Oh and by the by – that bit in the excerpt above where Monte says he’ll let one of the male Hellcats do him if it means helping him catch Dave’s killer, well that never pans out, and as mentioned the male Hellcats are nonentities.)

As if marking off his sleaze novel to-do list, there’s also a gang rape early in the book; Monte and Linda ride off with the Hellcats to another hangout area, and on the way they pass by an artist and his model, who is posing nude here in the countryside. The male Hellcats beat up the artist and then gang-rape the woman, all while Monte and the female Hellcats watch on. Monte throughout proves himself to be a rather despicable “hero,” telling a shocked Linda that this is the price the rape victim plays for being a beautiful woman! In fact Monte’s kind of a dick; he constantly refers to Linda as “mama” and gives her frequent pep talks in which he reminds her that he’s going to keep on banging as many of these Hellcat babes as he needs to, whether she likes it or not.

Rita will turn out to be the only other one he spends time with; as mentioned she has an immediate attraction to Monte and is game to tell him anything she can about the secret workings of the gang. It’s through her that Monte learns basically everything: Mr. Adrian uses the gang to run heroin, getting it from some grungy Mexican named Scorpio, and Mr. Adrian retains a pair of flunkies named Dean and Pepper. Monte also comes to the conclusion that Pepper, a sadist who gets off on torturing women, is likely the person who murdered Dave. Rita gives Monte all this info, waiting for the “right time” in which they can finally have sex. And when it happens, it’s another of those moments for the ages, as Rita apparently has mutant nipples:


But it isn’t all bland exposition and hardcore pornography: occasionally Slatzer cuts over to arbitrary, pages-filling scenes with Mr. Adrian, a fifty-something man of wealth who lives in opulence in LA. But Adrian we learn is impotent, and these days gets his kicks hanging around with “dirty women” and giving them baths and then dressing them in expensive clothes(!). So we get a lot of stuff about him and his current mistress, a former Hellcat named Hilde, and then later there’s a lot more stuff about Adrian contemplating the idea of making Rita his new mistress. Actually Rita by far gets the most narrative time of any female character in the novel, so I guess it makes sense that she graces the cover of the novel (and film poster), but still these long sequences with Mr. Adrian clearly exist so as to fill pages.

What makes it even more goofy is that Monte figures everything out before we’re even halfway through the novel – the Hellcats run heroin for Mr. Adrian, and Pepper killed Dave at Mr. Adrian’s orders – but it keeps on going. This is because the cops, who are humorously blasé about Monte and Linda going undercover on their own, pick up Monte and Linda one day after they’ve been choppering around the countryside (and having more explicitly-rendered sex) and tell them they’ve been drafted. The cops will use them for any new info on the heroin pipeline, which the cops of course are well aware of, they just don’t have any concrete info to pin down Adrian. Thus Monte and Linda get secret police backing, but Slatzer doen’t do much with it until the very end of the novel. 

Things don’t really pick up until toward the end. Monte figures out that the female Hellcats do all the heavy lifting so far as the heroin smuggling goes, running across the border late at night under the idea that, as women, they won’t get hassled like male bikers would. Linda gets drafted into such a run and Monte secretly follows them down into Mexico, where he finds the women about to be abused by the increasingly-psychotic Scorpio. Monte comes to the rescue, beating the dude to a pulp, and here learns the truth about what the Hellcats are up to, clearing up any details Rita left vague. But this will be it so far as Monte’s two-fisted heroism goes, as Slatzer basically neuters him in the climax.

For one, we seem to be heading for the finale here, but Slatzer again page-fills to egregious lengths, with more stuff about Adrian – including a goofy part where he even gets Rita a glass eye. There’s also another sleaze novel list check-off with some old fashioned necrophilia; Adrian winds up killing his mistress Hilde and then screwing the corpse, actually able to “get up” for the perverted act. Actually Slatzer’s so caught up in all this other stuff that the big finale’s upon us before we even realize it; Monte coaxes Rita into showing him where Adrian lives, and then sneaks onto the guy’s property – and is immediately caught. And knocked out. He’ll be knocked out twice more before the novel’s over.

Slatzer seems oblivious to the fact that he’s rendered his protagonist useless; Monte’s tied up and Adrian decides to kill him by burning down his own house. Adrian’s gotten sick of the current setup and is going to leave the Hellcats cold – we’ve learned that he blackmailed them into the whole heroin thing, and now he’s gotten to leave them high and dry. Then Rita shows up and frees Monte, and Sheila’s there, too…and then Adrian shows up again and catches all three of them! And Monte’s knocked out again! Instead it’s up to Sheila to struggle against her bonds and call the Moonfire Inn, begging the Hellcats to get here asap before they all burn up in the house fire.

Monte is still relegated to sideline status in the finale, which plays out along the docks, Adrian trying to escape on his boat. Our hero stands and watches as the Hellcats run roughsod over Adrian and his two henchmen: some unknown Hellcat drives his bike over Adrian, killing him, and Sheila guts Pepper with her switchblade…killing the person Monte’s been waiting to kill for the entire friggin’ novel. So Monte must console himself by beating up otherwise-meek henchman Dean, prevented from killing him by the cops who finally show up on the scene.

Slatzer gets even more hamfisted in the final chapter: there’s no final moment with either Sheila or Rita, and we only learn via dialog that they’ve been arrested but will likely be let go without charges. All this is relayed by the cops, who also tell Monte and Linda they’re free to go. The two of course decide they’ll sell their bikes and go off to a veritable Happily Ever After, and this my friends makes for the spectacularly unsatisfying conclusion of The Hellcats. One of these days I’m definitely gonna check out the movie to see how much it differs from the novel, if at all.

Indeed one wonders why Slatzer even thought his story justified a tie-in novel. The tale is barebones simple and the characters are ciphers. Maybe he just wanted to deliver all the hardcore sleaze he couldn’t in an actual general-release film? I mean nothing here cries out “This story must be told!” Yet as mentioned it’s entertaining in its own clunky way, and Slatzer’s writing is so unhinged that it’s on the level of Ryder Syvertsen. Actually if I didn’t know Slatzer was a real person I’d go off on one of my wild theories that “Slatzer” was just another pseudonym of Syvertsen; that’s how similar the writing styles are.

But anyway, The Hellcats is yet another scarce and expensive paperback, one I luckily got for a nice price several years ago, and my overlong review is intended to prevent the otherwise-innocent reader from spending the time and money tracking down a copy.

Monday, February 5, 2018

Black Against The Mob


Black Against The Mob, by Omar Fletcher
No month stated, 1977  Holloway House

This Holloway House paperback mines the same territory as the Iceman series – its characters are black and proud, baby! Omar Fletcher, who appears to have been a real person, turns out a fast-moving pulp crime novel (with touches of horror) that comes off very much like the literary equivalent of a Blaxploitation film. But speaking of which, disregard the misleading cover, with the Pam Grier-esque babe; the cover artist and blurb writer very much oversell the “sensuous voodoo goddess” angle.

This is quite possibly the angriest book I’ve yet reviewed on the blog. Anger against whites, Italians (aka “guineas”), America, you name it. The kind of book where the “hero” actually considers raping an otherwise-innocent mob secretary because his own woman was raped (and killed) by mobsters. Racist invective runs throughout the book, like how the protagonist, angry black criminal Malcolm Lemumba, thinks of Italians as, “Guineas! Jive mothers somewhere ‘tween white folks an’ gorillas!”

Not that Malcolm doesn’t have reason to be an angry young black man. In background material that is only hinted at, we learn that his wife and kid were “accidentally” killed by white cops during the riots of the late ‘60s. Now Malcolm hates “all whites,” though this doesn’t stop him from occasionally banging a white chick. In backstory that’s just as vaguely sprinkled throughout, Malcolm’s next round of hardship came just recently, when a girlfriend of sorts was raped and killed by mobsters out for revenge; Malcolm and his group had been knocking over mob-run establishments, culminating in a war between the two groups, with Malcolm even retaining the services of some “black Muslim brothers” in the fight.

Now, only Malcolm and his friend Omar Nusheba are still alive; even the Mafia don who was after them has been killed. Malcolm is known for a pair of pearl-handled Lugers, and he stashed these at the crime scene back in New York, hoping the two black Mulims with blown-apart faces would be confused with him and Omar, and the mob would think they were both dead. The two plan to drive to Los Angeles and fly to Hawaii with the cash they lifted, living out their years in paradise far from the Mafia.

Promptly the two get in a bar fight in LA with some whites who don’t cotton to how Malcolm and Omar are throwing money around, especially the way the two hot blonde waitresses keep responding so eagerly to them. The babes end up going back to their hotel room, but Fletcher is not an author to dwell much on sleaze – to be sure, there are some jawdropping phrases here and there, but as for actual hardcore stuff, nothing at all. Meanwhile our two heroes have indeed been spotted by the mob, and next day they are already running for their lives again. Malcolm puzzles over the how quickly this turnaround has occurred in one of those jawdropping phrases, “It was almost as if [the Mafia] had eyes in the pussy he had fucked the night before.”

Thanks to what appears to be an underground network of blacks who protect one another from “the Man,” Malcolm and Omar are able to evade the pursuing mobsters and get some guns from a dealer in Watts. Malcolm even gets a Luger, leading him to ponder over how fated all this seems to be. There are gunfights here and there, and Fletcher does dole out the gore, to a certain point, but nothing too extreme. There is some unintentional humor (at least from a modern perspective) when the Watts dealer has a master plan to get Malcolm and Omar’s guns onto the plane for Hawaii; all he does is stage a fight with some of his guys in the terminal, as a diversion, and then tosses a bag with the guns to our heroes as they pass by the security gate!

Near the halfway point the action moves to Oahu, Hawaii. However the mob is here, too, having found out Malcolm and Omar’s destination. The narrative often cuts over to Don Marco, in New York, consigliere to the previous don and still out for the blood of Malcolm and Omar. He wants to continue the vendetta. But our heroes are not without friends, themselves. The Watts gun-dealer told them to seek out Papa Loa in Oahu, a Haitian voodoo “hungan” who operates deep in the jungle, far from the “white man’s world.” The narrative treads an uneasy line between voodoo superstition and mob-busting action. Papa Loa has a group of followers, one of whom is Luani Kei, she of the vacant eyes and freezing cold skin; the “sensuous voodoo goddess” of the cover who barely even appears in the actual novel. Fletcher toys with the idea that Luani and many of Loa’s followers are actually zombies (of the voodoo sort, not the brain-eating sort).

The book is always entertaining, and Fletcher is a good writer, but it does settle into a repetitve rut…Don Marco heads on down to Hawaii to oversee the vendetta, and there are several parts that follow the same setup – Malcolm and Omar will sneak into the don’s high-rise hotel, threaten him or kill some of his goons, then head back to the plantation to talk to Papa Loa. This sequence of events repeats a few times. And these two are straight-up ‘70s mob-busters along the lines of The ExecutionerThe Revenger, or myriad others – only black!! Seriously though, these guys bust up some serious Mafia shit, making it all look easy.

The supernatural elements get stronger as the novel progresses. For one, Malcolm begins to wonder over how easily everything begins to happen for him – he sneaks to Don Marco’s hotel, for example, and it turns out the goons forgot to a lock a window, etc. In this way he suspects that Papa Loa is on to something, and that the voodoo gods are aiding he and Omar in their war against “the white man.” Also Malcolm is both infatuated and repulsed by Luani Kei, though Fletcher is maddeningly oblique about the repulsion part. There are a few parts where Malcolm sees Luani in daylight and something about her visage makes his flesh crawl. Again the insinuation is that she is a zombie. Also, Malcolm seems to forget what happens on the nights he spends with her, though it appears he does not have sex with her.

The climax is very much on the supernatural tip; Papa Loa vows to Malcolm that the voodoo gods have already deemed that Don Marco will die. Malcolm grudgingly waits to see what happens. The finale plays out with various mobsters either getting strangled or decapitated (by machete-wielding zombies!). Malcolm, who sort of stands on the sidelines while the final payback is being dished out, once again plants evidence that he and Omar died in the skirmish – and then the two bid Papa Loa adieu and head off for the “hidden island” of Nihau.

As mentioned, Fletcher’s writing is good, staying locked in Malcolm’s perspective for the majority of the tale, and thus filtering the proceedings through his rage. He doesn’t deliver much on the sleaze, other than the occasional oddball line, but he’s up there in the Joseph Rosenberger levels when it comes to the racist invective. I mean I even started to hate whitey while I was reading the book! However one can’t judge Fletcher for this, as the sequences with Don Marco are as anti-black as those with Malcolm are anti-white.

As I say, it’s an angry book, filled with the black and proud rage of the era’s Blaxploitation flicks, and if you like those then you will certainly like this – think of it as sort of a combo of Across 110th Street and Sugar Hill, filmed on the same location as Hawaii Five-O. Soundtrack by Isaac Hayes and Don Ho.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

The Iceman #1: Billion Dollar Death


The Iceman #1: Billion Dollar Death, by Joseph Nazel
1974, Holloway House

Henry Highland West, the Iceman: Harlem-reared entrepreneur who grew his pimping business from a smallscale affair on the streets of the ghetto into a veritable kingdom of pleasure. He now operates out of a high-tech fortress/casino in the desert outside of Las Vegas, surrounded by his loyal army of "bitches," a multinational assortment of beautiful prostitutes who each know kung-fu, how to handle weaponry, operate the complicated machinery which runs the casino, and have sex with the patrons.

Sounds like the makings of a villain, doesn't it? But the Iceman is actually the hero of this series, created and written by Joseph Nazel and published by Holloway House on rough, super-pulpy paper. Man, I thought The Baroness series was expensive to collect, but it took extensive searching to find a copy of Billion Dollar Death at a reasonable price. But really, price mattered little: I've been on a Blaxploitation kick lately, and I kept running into mention of the Iceman series. From the makings it appeared to have all I could want, with a hero seemingly amalgamated from The Mack, Slaughter, and Shaft, with a little Black Belt Jones thrown in for good measure.

But if only the writing were up to par with the concept...

Nazel, a black author who churned out a lot of black-themed pulp, was apparently very prolific, but Billion Dollar Death is not the output of a writer who has honed his craft. The book reads like a first draft -- a hastily-written first draft at that. Every character speaks exactly the same, each narrative point-of-view is the same as the one before it, and no one behaves in any believeable fashion. Iceman himself comes off like a blank slate; we know he's supercool (because the narrative reminds us often), we know that everyone loves him, that his ladies adore him, but despite the adoration he's showered with by all the characters, he does nothing to gain the reader's respect. Not only that, but he's so superheroic that he's rendered bland.

Iceman's high-security casino is infiltrated; a bomb goes off in the middle of the night, killing a mob boss and one of Iceman's best women. The rest of the narrative follows Iceman trying to figure out what's happened. Long story short: an African prime minister is working with a US senator to smuggle a large cache of guns, with which he hopes to instill a revolution in his home country. Along the way the mafia gets involved, as does an old friend of Iceman's who, due to the helping hand Iceman has long given him, has become jealous of the man and wants him dead.

But it all goes down so ineptly. I mean, the prime minister also happens to be in Iceman's little casino paradise, as if it's the only place in the United States to be. Iceman flies around in his personal attack 'copter (he's richer than Howard Hughes, it appears), looking for clues, but instead it comes off like him wandering into one sneak-attack after another.

Along the way Iceman's two stalwart companions are Kim and Solema, prostitutes from his stable, the former an Asian martial artist, the latter a black weapons specialist. (Other than that the women are identical -- indeed, I couldn't tell a single one of the women apart throughout the novel.) Iceman also has a pal in Christmas Tree, a jive-talking hustler whom Iceman asks for help early in the narrative, but disappears until the very end -- where he's conveniently already on his way to the final showdown. But that's how Billion Dollar Death operates throughout: there's no real thought into the proceedings; shit just happens.

For a novel about a pimp surrounded by gorgeous women, there's zero sex in the novel. Sure, we have a few descriptions of female parts on display, but when it comes to the goods Nazel cuts to another scene. He does provide a fair amount of action scenes however, and despite their redundancy (basically just duck and shoot, duck and shoot), Nazel's sure to give us a generous amount of gore. For each bullet-hit we get a sentence or two describing the blood and brain matter which showers across the surrounding area.

But really, this is only a middling effort. It's poorly constructed and plotted, filled with spelling errors (Nazel doesn't appear to know the difference between "past" and "passed"), and it's just underwhelming on the whole. It's nowhere in the league of Marc Olden's superb Black Samurai series, so if you're seeking a little Blaxploitation with your men's adventure thrills, then look there.