Showing posts with label Joe Rigg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Rigg. Show all posts

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Trouble Is My Business


Trouble Is My Business, by Jay Flynn
No month stated, 1976 (incorrectly states "1967")  Leisure Books

This was the second of two novels Jay Flynn wrote about tough San Francisco street cop Sgt. Joe Rigg; the first one was Blood On Frisco Bay. And like that previous book Trouble Is My Business is for the most part a listless affair churned out by a drunk and disinterested author, a book that ranges from endless digressions on inconsequentialities to super hardcore sex scenes straight out of Penthouse Letters.

Flynn constantly refers back to the events in Blood On Frisco Bay, so one would do well to read that first before reading this book. At any rate Rigg’s life is mostly the same, he still works the docks in San Fran and still only wants to be a street cop, despite having been “technically” promoted to a lieutenant after what went down in the previous book. We also learn that Rigg is best buds with “The Cowboy,” aka the new President of the US, clearly implied here as being Ronald Reagan (he’s a stern Conservative Republican who used to star in Westerns), which I found interesting given that in reality Reagan wasn’t elected for another four years.

Really though the book is almost a complete retread of Blood On Frisco Bay, but if anything even more listless and unconcerned with forward momentum. At least that previous book livened things up every once in a while with violent action scenes that had no relation to the main plot. Trouble Is My Business doesn’t even have that, instead focusing more on Rigg’s mundane daily life. But yet again like that first book, this one starts off with a bang, as Rigg witnesses a cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, on a busy street, as a dude with a Bowie knife hops out of a car and chops off a lawyer-type’s hand, snatching the guy’s attache case and squealing off in his car before anyone can react.

After discovering that the murdered man, Blackton, was a CPA who handled hush-hush deals for wealthy clients, Rigg just sort of moves on with his life…instead of delivering a taut, blood-soaked thriller, Flynn instead thinks that we want to hear all about the new litter of puppies just delivered back on Rigg’s Trumpy houseboat! Along with that he gives us more scenes with Annie Dale, Rigg’s now live-in girlfriend, who actually has much less narrative time in this one. The puppies are courtesy a dog the Cowboy gave to Rigg, knocked up by Croc, Rigg’s massive Irish Wolfhound “partner.”

Eventually the book takes on the tone of a police procedural, just a really boring one. Rigg goes around tracking clues and meets up with various of Blackton’s clientele. Flynn here works up a massive land-buying conspiracy scheme that almost makes the plot of Chinatown seem easy to follow, but it all fizzles out into a basic scheme – namely, Cuba-funded counterfeit US dollars. It takes forever for Rigg to discover this, though, but in the meantime he’s too busy getting orally pleasured by the daughter of one of Blackton’s clients and a super-hot and super-horny female Treasury agent who is working undercover as the man’s maid.

I should mention here that all the women in this novel are super-hot and super-horny. Flynn has what appears to be an obsession with three-ways time out, with Rigg constantly being propositioned by two girls at once. And if he’s too tired or spent to handle them, they’re more than happy to go at it with each other! I would imagine though that all this is just a recurring joke…serioulsy, there are numerous scenes where the girls will want to do Rigg, who sends them away because he’s exhausted or needs to work, and Flynn will go into great graphic detail on how the girls will just flop on top of each other and go at it.

But if it’s an in-joke, it gets old quick. It got boring fast to see how one-dimensional the women were. I understand and even appreciate the fact that these old pulp novels trade on the conceit that women are mostly there just to look sexy and screw the protagonist…and in fact I want to bang my head against the wall when I read all the lame, whiny-assed complaints about ‘70s novels you will encounter in reviews on the internet, where modern-day losers will bitch about the “misogyny” and “racism” of 1970s novels. You get the idea that these people would be better served watching shit like Dancing with the Stars or How I Met Your Mother instead of venturing into the choppy waters of ‘70s pulp, but I digress. Long story short, even I got a little annoyed with how the women in Trouble Is My Business were only there to proposition Rigg or to go down on one another.

Meanwhile the main plot drags on with little (non-sexual) action. Other than one hilariously arbitrary scene early on where Rigg stops a convenience store robbery, the only action sequence Flynn delivers is one right after Rigg’s been blown by the undercover maid and the client’s daughter, as someone pulls off a driveby shooting at the client’s house. Rigg, naked, chases after and fires at the car with a heavy-caliber pistol. But that’s it, that’s all we get on the action front, until the climax of the book.

And again like the previous book, Flynn kills more time with the unwelcome presence of the Cowboy, who despite being the President just heads on over to SanFran to hang out with Rigg on his Trumpy! And returning with him is Tina Holmes, Rigg’s callgirl friend who is now the Cowboy’s main squeeze (she informs Rigg with delight that she’s finally gotten the Cowboy to give it to her via rear entry, by the way). And guess what, Annie and Tina are immediately propositioning Rigg, only to go down on one another when he tells them he needs his rest.

Even the (anti)climax is a recursor to Blood On Frisco Bay; not only does the main villain turn out to be a gorgeous foreign lady, but Rigg is again called in at the last second so as to stage a half-assed raid on the villain’s just-discovered lair. In this case the lady is Catarina, a beautiful Cuban woman who is the ex-wife of Blackton’s land-developing client; the entire attache case mystery turns out to be a MacGuffin, as the counterfeit US currency was the true evil here…apparently Blackton had photos of the printing plates in his attache case, and Catarina wanted those photos back. Instead her goons killed Blackton, thus getting Rigg on the case.

Flynn does deliver a fairly good fight between Rigg and the Bowie-wielding maniac, who actually appears in maybe five pages of the book. (I was under the impression that Trouble Is My Business was about a knife-wielding “sex killer,” so I guess I must’ve confused it with some other sleazy ‘70s cop novel.) But the finale is over and done with posthaste – and Catarina, the mastermind behind it all, gets maybe three pages narrative time and is only introduced into the text toward the very end. She has none of the memorable (or sadistic) qualities of the female villain in the previous book.

This was it for Joe Rigg, whose adventures ended with this second volume. Though honestly one could argue that his adventures never even really started – these two books were snoozefests for the most part, not even saved by the XXX-rated stuff. However it must be said that Flynn actually can write, especially when it comes to dialog, as he has a particular gift for funny lines. But man if he’d only combined that writing skill with a good, forward-moving plot, he really would’ve had something.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Blood On Frisco Bay


Blood On Frisco Bay, by Jay Flynn
No month stated, 1976 Leisure Books

This was the first of two volumes Jay Flynn wrote for Leisure Books about San Francisco police sergeant Joe Rigg. According to Bill Pronzini’s excellent bio of Flynn, the novels were churned out during a low ebb in Flynn’s career, while the author was fueled on booze and bitterness. This is normally something I demand in my pulp fiction writers, but unfortunately I can see why Pronzini referred to the Rigg novels as the "worst.” While Blood On Frisco Bay starts off strong, it eventually loses its way and becomes a sort of padded and dull affair…indeed, the sort of thing you’d expect to be churned out by someone too drunk to notice or care.

Rigg is a tough cop very much in the mold of Nelson DeMille's Ryker, and it’s easy to believe that Leisure was starting up a whole new series based around the character. At this time Leisure (and parent company Belmont Tower) dropped both series titles and volume numbers from their series fiction, but for all intents Blood On Frisco Bay could be titled Joe Rigg #1.

Driving around in an unmarked station wagon (which is built on a Checker frame) with his “partner,” an 8-foot tall Irish Wolfhound named Croc, Rigg is in his late thirties and has no desire to move up in the police world. He doesn’t want to be a detective because he hates paperwork. He gets by on his wits and is friendly with the “harbor rats,” the whores, the smalltime drug dealing riffraff, the hippies and the junkies, in order that he can get things from them when he needs to. He carries around a Bowie knife, a 9mm Walther, and keeps an Uzi in his station wagon. Plus he lives on a “Trumpy,” an old gangster-era floating palace which he reminds everyone he bought at a vast discount and can barely afford to keep afloat.

A gorgeous young socialite is found strangled in a bar, and Rigg arrives while the scene is still hot. He chases after the culprit, a young Vietnamese woman, and within a few pages of the novel’s lurid opening Rigg is already calling in backup so he can storm into “The Muff,” a lesbian bar! Yes, there’s nothing like a mid-‘70s Leisure novel. The suspect, whom we later learn is named Francine, is hiding in the bar, and Flynn delivers one of the novel’s few action scenes as Rigg nearly gets hold of “the bitch” before he’s attacked by some cleaver-wielding cook; Rigg chops the man’s hand off with his Bowie knife.

Rigg becomes a sort of honorary detective, leading the case; the rest of the force is busy guarding the President-elect – referred to as “The Cowboy” – who happens to be in town. After some searching for Francine, including the questioning of her former employer, a millionaire named Keller who was married to the murdered young woman that started this whole thing, Rigg sort of gets involved in all sorts of unrelated stuff, most of it through coincidence.

For example, after stopping in a bar and meeting yet another of his lowlife friends, a truck driver, Rigg just happens to later see the guy’s truck driving down the road, and when Rigg can’t get him on the CB he figures something must be up. This develops into an endless sequence where Rigg trails after the stolen truck, which heads on down into California; eventually he learns that it’s hauling gold and that the truck is owned by one of Keller’s subsidiaries. Oh, and along the way Rigg also wastes a few hippie-terrorist bank robbers, who have absolutely nothing to do with anything.

His social life is just as frantic; Rigg has a casual sex thing with Annie Dale, a pretty young girl who cleans the boats on the harbor, and occasionally sleeps with Rigg. Then there’s also Tina Holmes, a high-dollar hooker who as you’ll expect is in love with Rigg; Tina, as part of her job duties, once “made it” with Francine and Keller’s now-dead wife while Keller himself watched on, so after Rigg is attacked in Tina’s apartment by hoods he figures he needs to put her away in a safe place.

So now Tina lives on Rigg’s boat, butting heads with Annie – not that this stops them from both doing Rigg at the same time. (A scene Flynn curiously leaves vague…but as for the other sex scenes, they’re pretty graphic, including one between Rigg and a super-horny Tina which includes the unforgettable line: “Not there, Joe! I want you in my ass!”)

But as the novel proceeds it loses its thrust, and comes off more as Rigg just sort of wandering around from one coincidental event to the next. Oddly enough the novel is fairly well written, and comes off as masterful when compared to the genre average. The dialog is good, the characters are fun, and the tone is strong; all of which makes the novel’s failings all the more pronounced. The entire middle half just spins its wheels, with Rigg chasing trucks, having sex with Annie and/or Tina, or even giving Annie love advice (she finds herself growing attracted to Tina and worries she might become a “les.” Rigg’s advice? “Give it a try!”).

The “plot” of the novel – Rigg trying to crack the Mrs. Keller murder case and catch Francine – is lost, and you keep wondering what happened to it. Especially when the climax really gets weird, with Rigg playing chaperone to the Cowboy. This is the most “coincedental” part yet, as Rigg and Tina drive by the President-Elect’s motorcade, and Rigg just happens to spot a dude who emerges from the crowd with a bazooka! Rigg takes out the guy with his car but one of the secret service cars is destroyed in the blast.

Somehow this entails the Cowboy coming to stay with Rigg on the Trumpy boat…and plus the guy already knows Tina, as he was another of her “clients.” Now we have long scenes of Rigg and the future President sitting around on the boat and shooting the shit, knocking back plentiful amounts of brandy. Eventually we learn that the would-be assassin was part of a hippie terrorist network (unrelated to the hippie terrorist bank robbers from earlier)…and in a very rushed denoument (Rigg is literally called while hanging out on the boat with the Cowboy and informed that Francine has finally been tracked down), we also learn that Francine herself is involved with the terrorists, and the murder of Mrs. Keller was all part of their scheme.

Flynn is sure to pack the novel with tons of lurid detail, just as we’d expect from a ‘75/’76 model Leisure book – a time when, it seems to me, the imprint got even more lurid. Francine, who unfortunately doesn’t have much “screen time,” is set up as one sick, sick woman, into the torture and s&m world, even making brutal films. This entails a sequence where Rigg watches an underground sadomasochism film in which Francine brutalizes an unfortunate woman (who turns out to be Mrs. Keller); Flynn writes up all sorts of harrowing stuff, going on and on, and ends the sequence with the in-joke punchline that Rigg always thought such things could only happen in bad novels by hack authors.

So while there’s a lot of explicit sex, there isn’t much action…Rigg as mentioned chops off a hand and shoots a few hoods, blowing off their heads in grisly detail, but otherwise he spends his time talking and drinking. As for his “partner,” Croc, Flynn carries out the goofy partnership pretty well, with most everyone terrified of the dog as soon as they see it, but Rigg always telling them he’s “harmless.”

The novel definitely captures that mid-‘70s “shag rug” sort of feel, and actually comes off a bit like the Shannon series, only less goofy. Don’t get me wrong, Blood On Frisco Bay is definitely goofy, but in a different way…the books are mostly alike in how they capture the decadent spirit of the era and feature protagonists who are more interested in screwing and drinking than solving crimes.

There was one more Rigg novel, Trouble Is My Business, which sounds even more lurid, about a “sex killer” who chops off heads with a knife. I’ll be getting to it eventually.