Monday, September 7, 2015

Web Detective Stories, October 1960 (Volume 3, Number 3)


Very similar to (but not as enjoyable as) the issue of Two-Fisted Detective Stories I recently reviewed, this October 1960 issue of Web Detective Stories features a handful of lurid crime stories with EC Comics levels of dark humor and “twist” endings you can see coming a mile away. No surprises there, as despite not carrying the Reese Publications imprint logo, this mag was also edited by publisher Bud Ampolsk, who turns in my favorite tale in the magazine.

“The Triple Cross” by Richard Deming starts things off; this one’s narrated by Deming’s recurring character Manville Moon, a private eye who has an artificial lower right leg, something only given cursory mention in this story. Since getting on my recent hardboiled kick I’ve seen Deming’s name quite often, but I don’t as yet have any of his novels and this is the first of his work I’ve read. The story isn’t bad but seems pretty quick and underdeveloped, which is true about most every story here – this certainly isn’t Manhunt magazine.

Moon’s hired by Henry Sheffield, a mega-rich guy whose young wife Sylvia was murdered a few months ago. Local hoodlum Eddie Dallas is the prime suspect but the cops can’t pin it on him. Sheffield thinks he’s next on Dallas’s list and hires Moon to protect him. Eventually they visit Dallas in his penthouse apartment, and as they check out the mobster’s collection of vintage weapons Dallas professes his innocence. Then the hoodlum later calls Moon, blaming him for stealing his WWII trench knife. Moon didn’t do it, which leaves only one other candidate. That night Dallas turns up dead in Sheffield’s home; the story Sheffield gives is that Dallas tried to break in and kill him with the knife, but Moon knows that Sheffield had the knife and Dallas was merely coming to get it from him – in other words, Sheffield just murdered the guy.

“Model Of Murder” by Christopher Mace is more along the goofy, EC Comics-esue vibe these Ampolsk-edited digests were known for. It’s about a sculptor named George Carlton who lives off of a heavyset wealthy lady named Bernice. Meanwhile George has a nice thing going with blonde hotstuff Yvonne, secretly shacking up with her in his artist’s loft just off from the main house. Yvonne pushes him to divorce Bernice, but George can’t do it, he needs the money. So he decides to kill Bernice, coming up with the most bizarre method you’ll ever read.

Sculpting a realisitc hand, he stores it in the fridge for a while and then dips the cold marble in chocolate and ties it to the pull-chain for the light in the bedroom closet. That night when Bernice comes home George makes up a story he claims to have read in the paper, about a maniac loose on the streets who chopped up someone and made off with the bodyparts. Bernice, aghast at the tale, goes into the closet, grabbing for the light-pull – and grabs hold of that “severed hand.” She has a heart attack and dies, and George figures her two million is now his. Only he forgot to factor in Goldie, Bernice’s equally-obese maid; she says she knows what George did, and unless he marries her she’ll turn him in to the cops.

“Daughter of Darkness” by O.W. Reynolds is a short nasty about Margaret, a pretty 17-year-old who works as a waitress in a dive somewhere. With a mother who whores herself and a long-gone father, Margaret yearns to get the hell out of town. She puts down the constant proposals of various men, until one night she decides to get in the car of some random guy who pulls up alongside her as she walks home. He tells her she can be his partner on a cross-country con game. Margaret, who hates men, gets in. Their first job will be to rob a diner; the guy will go in, rob the joint, and then run back to the car, Margaret driving them off. Instead Margaret runs him over and drives off to a new life in a new town. The end!

“Dumb Bull” by Flip Lyons concerns Rosie Haver, high-class hooker for bigwig crook Tony Marchione. Teddy Landon, a junior cop, arrests Tony while he’s in the middle of doing the deed with Rosie, something his superior bashes him for – he should’ve nabbed Rosie instead and tapped into her knowledge about the Marchione crime family. Back Landon goes to Rosie’s place, figuring someone’s likely about to kill her – and of course, a few Marchione thugs are on the way to her place. Features a lackluster finale with Rosie running for safety across the rooftop of her apartment building and Landon, whom she’s called “a dumb bull,” showing up to blast the thugs and save the day.

“You Can’t Cheat Death” by Earle Smyth is like I Know What You Did Last Summer a few decades early; a guy named Smathers has just run over someone, out driving around late at night with his busty mistress Caroline. Now Smathers, who runs a fashion company in New York, is desperate to keep it all out of the papers, lest he be ruined. This long tale then goes into a flashback on how Smathers hired Caroline, who showed up one day willing to both model his lingerie and work around the office. Lots of “spicy” stuff here with details on how Caroline would waltz around in “wisps” of lingerie for department store buyers, the men oggling her curvaceous bod and buying Smather’s lingerie in bulk.

This leads somehow to an affair between Smathers and the girl; I say “somehow” but any idiot can easily figure that Caroline has something up her sleeve. This goes on for a few months and then one night the two are driving back to Caroline’s place and Smathers, as usual, has had a few too many, and he runs over some guy in the gutter. Caroline checks the body, says the man is dead, and Smathers panics. They keep it quiet but the next day Smathers receives a threatening note; the sender claims to know what Smathers did and demands payment to keep quiet. A panicking Smathers has Caroline do all the dirty work for him, answering the blackmailer’s calls, taking the demanded payment to him. Who will be surprised when the blackmailer turns out to be the man who was in the gutter – ie Caroline’s partner in a long-running con game?

“Lust Isn’t Funny” by Fletcher Flora has one of the goofiest titles ever. Flora’s like Deming, a hardboiled writer who’s name I see a lot but haven’t actually read…until now! This short tale probably isn’t the best indication of his writing talents, though. Leo Baldwin, “a publicity bloated punk comic with a sponsor,” likes to frequent the club owned by Clay Cooper. Baldwin is a notorious prick who picks up women with ease, due to his fame and wealth – all while his wife sits right there. Gilbert, the club’s headwaiter, complains that Baldwin treats his wife like shit, just openly pawing women while she sits there beside him. After Baldwin’s wife tries to commit suice that night – Gilbert having saved her – the headwaiter decides to do something about it. He spikes Baldwin’s drink with his wife’s poison and then blithely informs Cooper later that the annoying comic is dead. 

“Mistress of Evil” is by Bill Ryder, aka Bud Ampolsk himself, and it’s very much along the lines of the sort of thing he’d write for the sweat mags he also edited and published. In a way this one’s almost like a “part two” to the Nazi Horror tales he edited/wrote for those sweat mags, such as the type seen in Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood; it’s about Gustave Himmelman, a pyschiatrist in an American city who is really taken to task by his latest client, an attractive young woman named Margery Coleman. Margery’s problem is that she gets off on being hurt, especially being whipped, and it’s driving a wedge in her marriage because her husband doesn’t get it.

As Gustave sits and listens, breaking out into a sweat, Margery goes into a long backstory over the many times she’s gotten off on pain. Starting with her father, who whipped her (much to her enjoyment), to the boy who took her virginity, Margery basically demanding that he beat her up before, during, and after the act. And let’s not forget about her sorority sisters, who as part of hell week stripped her down and whipped her, something which made Margery actually pass out, due to the power of her orgasms. What she wants from Gustave is not psychoanalysis but instead for him to whip her! If not, she’ll make up a story that he raped her.

But what we learn in the last moments is that Gustave was really a medical officer at Dachau, and is a wanted Nazi, “Himmelman” just being the name he took up when he fled Germany. He also knows that this gorgeous young sadist will be “the end of him,” because, once he starts whipping her, he won’t be able to stop. Whereas the title makes you think Margery is going to be the evil one, it’s actually Himmelman, and all she has done is unleashed the evil he’s blocked in himself this past decade and a half. He begins whipping her nude body, knowing he will whip her until she is dead – just as he whipped to death so many other women at Dachau.

“As Hot As Ginger” by Art Crockett rounds out the mag. This first-person tale doesn’t feature Crockett’s recurring character Juan Kelly; it’s narrated by a 21 year-old petty thief named Petey who when we meet him is watching as his fellow burglar, 17 year-old Big Sal, is punching some woman in the gut. Crockett goes to town detailing how savagely the woman’s been uppercut, so hard that the “squishy” sound of it makes Petey figure the gal will be puking her guts out for the rest of the week. He and Sal are in the midst of robbing the woman’s apartment, only to be surprised when she shows up – and they’re even more surprised when she produces a .38 and, despite being half-dead from agony, blows a few holes into Big Sal. 

The lady passes out after that and Petey makes a run for it. The next day on the news he hears that the lady was actually a policewoman named Ginger and she’s given Petey’s full description to the force. Now all the cops in the city are out looking for him, even the ones with the day off. A frantic Petey attempts to escape, only to be caught in a traffic jam – and to find that Ginger is the policewoman directing traffic! He abandons the car and hightails it for a barbershop, where he gets a buzz cut; next he gets a pair of glasses. Getting some books so he’ll look like a student, Petey’s almost home free when some cops yell at him. He runs for it, falls, wonders how they figured he was the guy from the break-in; turns out they were just yelling at him because they assumed he was a truant, but they’re sure glad to hear they’ve just nabbed the guy who had the audacity to rob a policewoman’s apartment.

EDIT: As Walker Martin mentions below, Peter Enfantino also reviewed this issue of Web Detective (as well as all of the others) at the Barebones e-zine blog; you can read the review here.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Hot Prowl


Hot Prowl, by Herbert D. Kastle
No month stated, 1965  Fawcett Gold Medal

This was the last novel Herbert Kastle wrote for Gold Medal Books and he certainly went out with a bang. It was also the last novel he published with the “D.” in his name; after this he’d just be “Herbert Kastle” and he’d begin writing Harold Robbins-esque blockbusters, starting with the 1968 bestseller The Moviemaker. And in a way Hot Prowl, while nominally supsense fiction as expected from Gold Medal, points the way to Kastle’s later, more unhinged work.

I couldn’t find any info online regarding what this novel was about, and the back cover wasn’t much help either, just a snatch of dialog from the book itself. Same goes for the first-page preview. But Hot Prowl turns out to be Kastle’s take on Death Wish, or Bronson or The Vigilante to use more obscure comparisons; it’s about a 36 year-old New York PR guy named Ted Barth whose life was destroyed ten months ago when his wife and nine-year-old daughter were murdered by a young punk who broke into their Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night – a “hot prowl,” as such cases are known, where the perp breaks into a residence knowing there are people inside.

Now Barth roams the mean streets of New York in the middle of the night, seeking “the boy,” whom the cops have been unable to find. We’ll eventually learn that Barth was sleeping on the couch the night of the break-in, as his relationship with his wife Myrna was in no way idyllic, and he caught a fleeting glimpse of the kid as he ran from the apartment, jumping out the window and running down the fire escape. The kid’s face is burned in Barth’s brain and now he’s hungry for vengeance, the many months since the murders doing nothing to dull his anger. But unlike the men’s adventure novels that would follow within the next several years, Barth goes out without any weaponry, save for his own hands. Like a regular Jason Striker our hero is a judo expert and relishes the thought of killing the boy with his bare hands.

However, this is a Herbert Kastle novel, and Ted Barth is in no way, shape or form a white hat hero. As is typical with a Kastle protagonist, the guy is royally fucked up. And this isn’t just fallout from the loss of his family, as we learn he’s always had a few screws loose. Within the first few pages he’s already lusting for some woman, staying with his brother-in-law Wallace at a cabin retreat in upstate New York for a week’s vacation. Barth watches from the shrubs as the young girl, a worker at the retreat, spurns the advances of another young man, and then he pounces on her, hoping to talk her into going back up to his cabin. But when another coworker tries to stake his claim on the girl, Barth beats the shit out of him with his judo, enjoying it; the girl runs away from him.

One thing typical about Kastle’s “heroes” is how they fight with everyone. In every Kastle novel I’ve read the protagonist is a dude in his 30s or 40s who has been beaten down by life, realizes he’s missed out on everything, and is goddamn determined to catch up on lost time, no matter who he has to step on. This generally takes him into darker realms of the psyche, and as is common with the typical Kastle protagonist, Barth is more than willing to make the journey. In the 160 breezy pages of Hot Prowl Ted Barth beats up multiple people, runs afoul of the cops, gets kicked out of his judo class for being too savage, assaults and maims former coworkers, sleeps with multiple hookers (including one who is thirteen years old), stalks a woman, and roams the streets starting fights. And then he stars doing really bad stuff.

So in other words there isn’t much heroic about the guy, which again differentiates him from the men’s adventure protagonists who would arrive on the scene within the decade. Barth has been horribly wronged but you realize he’s more about his own satisfaction than about righting any wrong; it gradually develops that “the boy” has just become Barth’s outlet for the wrong directions he took in his life, and Barth’s thinking is that if he can find him and kill him Barth can start a new life in a new city. He’s long ago stopped relying on the cops, much to the dismay of Lt. D’Andrea, who heads up the investigation into the murder of Barth’s family. D’Andrea is getting sick of Barth, particularly how he’s been hauled in by the cops so many times for wandering around the tougher parts of the city late at night and causing trouble.

Meanwhile Barth is also fixated on Susan, a pretty young blonde who works in his PR firm (Barth is on an extended leave of absence, by the way). He goes on friendly dates with her and is determined to take it to the next level, but Susan enjoys playing the field and appears to be getting serious with a guy her age named Arthur. But Barth keeps pushing her, asking her on dates and not getting the hint when she frostily tells him she has plans with Arthur. Soon he’s stalking her, even planning to beat Arthur nearly to death so that Susan will have no choice but to fall in love with him. A madman’s plan, but Barth is a madman, the most psychotic protagonist in a Kastle novel yet.

In between the Susan-stalking and street-prowling Barth gets involved in a lot of memorable moments. He takes on various thugs with nothing more than his fists and feet, and to slake his lust at one point he hires a pair of hookers, one black and one white. Kastle doesn’t go into as much detail in the sex scenes, none of which are as explicit as the ones he’d be writing in just a few years, but they certainly aren’t vague. As usual though it’s the dark comedy that’s more potent, like how the black hooker tries to make away with Barth’s cash box without him noticing it, and he gets in a brawl with her, knocking her flat with his judo skills and apparently having sex with her afterwards – another hallmark of a Kastle protagonist is that violence turns him on.

More hooker sex follows later in the book in a more descriptive passage, all the more shocking because the whore is only thirteen. This is in a desolate patch of Manhattan mostly occupied by blacks in tenement buildings; the hooker is bait and tries to lure Barth into an abandoned building. He follows her, knowing someone will be waiting in the shadows to jump him and take his money. He happily beats the dude nearly to death with his judo and then calls the “infant” over to look. She again offers herself to him, and Barth does the prepubescent right there on the wall. Meanwhile it’s back to the search for that guy who killed his wife and daughter; Barth haunts the many pawn shops in the New York area, the clues he seeks being the tape recorder, film camera, and wedding ring the thief stole that night.

The lead which brings the hot prowler out into the open is when the cops turn up the stolen tape recorder in a Long Island pawn shop. The old man there is a fence who does business with the kid. When Barth goes down to the precinct to identify the tape, there follows a heartbreaking moment where he plays the tape that’s still in it and hears the voice of his daughter. Kastle proves again his mastery by understating this scene. Whereas today it’s all about overstatement, with a scene like this requiring a teeth-gnashing hero bawling his eyes out, Kastle understands that understatement is more powerful. Barth merely plays the tape, listens, and then shuts it off because he can’t take anymore. 

Things come to a head when the punk kid begins stalking Barth. He comes home one night to find a threatening note slid beneath his door, and soon after begins receiving calls from the kid. Barth doesn’t tell D’Andrea and begins leaving his door unlocked at night, basically inviting the kid inside. He also soon realizes the kid is following behind him on the streets, and this leads to several chases. Finally he gets the kid, who tries to jump him one night. Barth is only able to use a savage arm lock on the kid before D’Andrea and the cops show up – they’ve been shadowing Barth too, knowing he was setting himself up as bait for the kid, who turns out to be a punk named Arhtur Brest.

Here is where Kastle begins to toy with the narrative and with our thoughts of it so far. The kid is interrogated and insists that he didn’t kill the wife or the daughter, that they were both alive when he ran out of the apartment. This is why he was stalking Barth now, because he was afraid Barth was going to make him take the fall for those murders. D’Andrea tells the kid he’s nuts, that no one would suspect that Barth himself killed his family. But here’s the thing – the reader sure as hell suspects it, because we’ve seen what a nutcase Ted Barth truly is. At this point nothing’s sacred in the novel, as we begin to wonder if Barth really did kill Myra and little Debbie. But the cops aren’t privy to how crazy the dude is, and D’Andrea is certain Brest will crack soon enough and admit it all – the kid is a heroin addict and is in the early stages of withdrawal.

Things spiral from here, along with Barth’s sanity. He’s desperate to get Brest to admit to the slayings, but the kid won’t budge. Mostly Barth just wants some time alone with the kid, and convinces D’Andrea to let him near the kid in his cell. Barth of course plans to kill Brest, reaching through the bars, but D’Andrea is as always two steps ahead of him and has Barth thrown out. Now openly sick of Barth, the cop tells him it’s time to get on with his life – the perp has been caught, the murderer of Barth’s family will pay. So, given that the villain of the piece has been captured, you’d think our protagonist would be happy, but again this is a Herbert Kastle protagonist we’re talking about, so what does he do? He gets serious about beating Susan’s boyfriend to death and then fucking Susan silly.

I’d advise skipping to the last two paragraphs of this review if you’d like to avoid spoilers. Get prepared for an uncomfortable read in the final chapters; Barth talks Susan into a trip to the beach, during which he hassles her, making his interest clearly known. She turns him down again and again; she’s never felt that way about him, she declares. Barth sulks but then realizes that “the Susan of the flesh” can still be his, even if the Susan of his dreams can’t be; he’s become fixated on her as the solution to all his ills, that they could run away and live together in a new city. She invites him in to her place back in the city and Barth excuses himself, then breaks into the bathroom as she’s taking a shower and gets in it with her. He beats her around a little with his judo, tells her to yield to him, and then rapes her on the bathroom floor.

It only gets darker. Barth threatens Arthur’s life – if Susan tells the police he raped her, he will kill the young man. Susan, beaten and terrified, swears she won’t say anyting. Barth leaves, satisfied with his victory over both the woman and his feelings for her – it was only lust after all, not love – only to find D’Andrea and another cop lurking in the apartment complex foyer. Turns out D’Andrea had heard Barth was stalking someone in this area (Susan’s boyfriend Arthur, of course), and had come by to check on him, given how unhinged he’s become. This leads to a desperate fight in which Barth unleashes his full judo skills on the two cops, during which we get to see what really happened that night of the “hot prowl.”

As the reader has already begun to suspect, it was Ted Barth himself who killed his wife and daughter – his wife because he was sick of her, sick of his stultifying married life with her, and used the break-in that night as a cover to murder her. But his daughter Debbie saw him do it, and he “had no choice” but to kill her, too. Having sliced both their throats with a steak knife, Barth broke the blade in pieces and flushed it, and “that Ted Barth never left the bathroom.” He had a psychic break, and in his mind he only came to when Bresk ran from the apartment; only until this moment he had forgotten about the fact that he himself was the murderer of his family. All this is relayed as Barth lies dying from a gutshot courtesy the cop with D’Andrea; without being aware of it he tells D’Andrea what really happened that night, and then dies, “leaping” into the abyss.

In a way this really is a cheat; you’re presented with this character whose life has been destroyed and you want to take him at face value. But Kastle’s interests as ever lie elsewhere. His theme isn’t how terrible events can destory a man, but that the man was terrible in the first place and the events just made him worse – events which he caused himself. I know the Fugitive TV show pulled this same trick, with the hero turning out at long last to have really been the murderer all along, but Kastle’s novel predates that. However Kastle’s reveal likely wasn’t as suprising to readers, as nowhere in Hot Prowl is Ted Barth cast in a heroic light. He’s ready to blow from page one. And boy does he.

Now as for Kastle’s writing – as usual, it’s superb. I realized as I read Hot Prowl that Kastle is one of those rare writers who turns out great prose, with just the right dialog, phrasing, and composition, yet he also has that ability where you become immersed in the narrative to the point where you don’t even realize the quality of his writing. In other words he pulls you into the fictive dream, which is the goal of every author but is achieved only by the best. It’s just yet another reason why Kastle should be remembered today, but he’s been forgotten.

The guy is definitely one of my favorite authors and one of these days I intend to track down the short stories he wrote for various crime magazines at the time, in particular the two issues of Manhunt which feature his work.

Monday, August 31, 2015

Invitation To Death (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #246)


Invitation To Death, by Nick Carter
February, 1989  Jove Books

Jack Canon turns in yet another volume of the seemingly-neverending Nick Carter: Killmaster series, which at any rate did end about a year after this one was published. Like the earlier Canon installment Blood Raid, this one’s in third-person and comes off like a Robert Ludlum-esque Europe-trotting espionage affair, overly “realistic” and methodically paced, as compared to the pulpier volumes of the series’s earlier years.

We meet Nick Carter already on his latest mission, in London and looking up what turns out to be an old colleague of sorts – a dark-haired beauty who now goes by the name Lola and runs a strip club. But we quickly learn this lady is actually Serena, who last appeared in the Canon installment The Satan Trap, published ten years before. As we’ll recall Serena was a con lady and almost got Carter killed a few times – that is, in between banging him a whole bunch. Canon refers back to that earlier volume a few times and makes it seem pretty clear that this is the first Carter has seen Serena since then; he’s kept up with her shady underworld adventures, though, and has sought out her assistance for this job.

One wonders why Canon even bothered to bring back such a minor character ten years after creating her, especially when Serena is referred to as “Lola” from here on out (and will be in the review as well). She’s practically a different character anyway, so it doesn’t make much sense. Their previous adventure is only given cursory mention, but then Nick Carter by necessity is a blank slate of a protagonist due to the army of ghostwriters who control him. The most important thing, really, is that Lola/Serena is smoking-hot and super-stacked and she enjoys dressing ultra-slutty to the jawdropping enjoyment of all red-blooded men. She’s also Carter’s sole bedmate in this novel, which is pretty surprising, but then the AIDS paranoia was in full effect at the time and even James Bond himself was reduced to sole bedmates in his own adventures, like in The Living Daylights.

“N3 leads a high-tech gang of thieves on a top secret heist!” proclaims the cover, and while that does sum up the central plot of Invitation To Death, it takes about a hundred pages to get to it. This is standard of the Canon novels I’ve read; lots of wheel-spinning until the rushed finale. But as I’ve mentioned before, one bonus of these later installments is the more explicit sex scenes, which always increases the trash quality; Carter and “Lola” get it on posthaste after being, uh, reconnected after all these years. (Though to be sure, nowhere is it implied that the previous adventure occurred a decade before; this is part and parcel of that whole “blank slate” situation.)

Carter’s trying to get info on the whereabouts and plans of Gerhard Rouse, a terrorist/thief who usually works for the Russians. Vague intel has it that Rouse is planning some major heist, but of what? Eventually we will learn that it’s of the plans for top-secret space weapon technology. Rouse’s target is a young American who is transporting the documents into London; Rouse hires a team of London low-lifes to ambush their car, kill everyone, and abscond with the documents. In the melee the young American is able to use a special lighter that shoots long bursts of flame to scorch off half the face of one of the low-lifes.

Meanwhile Carter’s several steps behind, and by the time he figures out what’s going on Rouse has already left London. Here Carter is informed what exactly Rouse has stolen, and so begins the “heist” portion of his mission. Rouse was hired by a billionaire named Charmont who lives in a palatial residence “near Arles, on the Rhone River;” Charmont intends to sell the documents to the Russians for an exorbitant amount. To ensure he alone has the wealth Charmont even sends his hotstuff female assassin off to London to kill Rouse. And talk about a huge miss: the lovely lethal lady basically disappears. I figured it would be a given that she’d meet up with Carter, but nope, Canon apparently forgets all about her.

Instead, more focus is placed on Carter’s recruitment of his heisters. Carter’s mission is to retrieve the documents, but since Charmont is a world-famous celebrity the theft must not only be kept secret but cannot be tied in to US intelligence. Thus Carter must recruit actual criminals. He and Lola go about Europe picking various dudes: a safecracker, a demolitions man, even a studly young Spaniard whose job will be to pose as a famous matador. The heist will go down at Charmont’s villa while a grand party is happening; Charmont hosts frequent major affairs and so Carter and team will go in while the festivities occur and steal the documents, hopefully before the Russians arrive.

We get a lot of ultimately-pointless digressions from the point of view of the Russian commander who is trying to find Carter; the Russian’s wife, also in the KGB, will be at Charmont’s to broker the deal. The final quarter sees a lot of training in Carter’s camp, with the only problem being the young Spaniard who constantly bucks Carter’s authority. Finally, at long last, the heist goes down. Carter and team suit up in black with facepaint, berets, and masks, and infiltrate the villa at night, while the rich are partying within. Carter’s accomplices think this is merely a regular heist, and know nothing of the documents, so to ensure the cover story Carter takes part in robbing the various elite, taking their cash and diamonds.

The entire novel is pretty bloodless, with Carter insisting that no one be killed in the heist. He and his team use stun guns, and Carter only shows his customary “Killmaster” techniques when one of his team goes rogue and when Charmont refuses to reveal where he’s stashed the copies of the documents. The finale is particularly bizarre, with Carter taking captive that Russian commander’s wife and using her as blackmail to ensure their freedom. This all gets real weird when Carter ties the woman onto the grill of his car and drives up through snowswept mountains, confident that the lurking Russians won’t shoot when they recognize the woman he has strapped to the grille(!?).

And that’s that, Carter destroys the space weaponry documents and tells Lola so long; she says she might change her name to “Tereza” and Carter intimates they might see each other again someday. Her character by the way turned out to be more enjoyable than Carter himself, always thinking of money and bantering with Carter.

All told Invitation To Death was marginally entertaining, but it’s seeming more apparent to me that the best volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster were those published in the ‘60s, when Lyle Kenyon Engel was in charge of the series.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

The Trigger Man


The Trigger Man, by Richard Posner
May, 1974  Fawcett Gold Medal

Richard Posner wrote a trio of novels for Gold Medal in the early ‘70s, and this was the last of them. I found it so enjoyable that one of these days I intend to seek out more of Posner’s work. This is a big, meaty novel, filled to the brim with underworld characters and their Machiavellan scheming against one another. It’s also everything The Godfather Part III should have been.

The titular triggerman is Marugo, a middle-aged Mafia hitman known for his professional thoroughness. Stocky and bald, always wearing sunglasses, Marugo sets off the events of the novel by deciding to go to New York and take over one of the five families. He’s sick of always being the underling, and with his seniority in the Mafia and the savagery of his cunning he wants to take what he feels is his due. He pounces on Don Sgambati, now pudgy and soft from his years of easy living as the don of Manhattan. The two were childhood friends in Sicily and fought in the war together. Now Marugo asserts himself within Sgambati’s rubric, whether the sleazy slimeball likes it or not.

Sgambati is in the middle of a cold war with the other four families of New York. They’re all sort of held together by Don Pietro of Long Island, an elderly type who unites the familes as godfather. But the man is old and has handed over most of his decisions to Sabatino, his equally-elderly consiglieri, and Johnny Russo, a young hothead recently appointed to a sort of junior don status for having saved Don Pietro’s life. Yes friends, all of it almost exactly like Michael and Vincent in The Godfather Part III, only better.

Because importantly, Posner understands the turmoil the Mafia was going through in the ‘70s, and this is central to The Trigger Man. Whereas the third Godfather movie digressed into Vatican corruption, this novel explores how the Mafia was losing its hold on crime in the turbulence of the 1970s. Whereas the old Sicilians had previously run the rackets and the drugs and the extortion schemes, now it was going over to the blacks and the Hispanics, who were finally uniting together into their own little Mafias. The dons of the five families are now scrambling to retain their hold on crime, branching out into pornography and other avenues; the last thing they need is a war among themselves.

But a war is exactly what Marugo intends to start. Within a day of his arrival he’s blown off the head of old Don Pietro, shotgunning the dude as he sits in the back seat of his Lincoln. Johnny Russo assumes control of the family and vows bloody vengeance. This all serves to get his girlfriend, Don Pietro’s young niece Mary Adorante, all hot and bothered. Posner delivers a few fairly explicit sex scenes here and there, and Mary, who grew up cloistered in the world of the Mafia, wants to hitch herself to a rising star like Johnny and rule through him. She’s now in college and she’s both smart and sexy, and most every male character is enamored with her. She also enjoys slapping Johnny and getting slapped by him before they have sex.

Meanwhile a cop named Elliot Cohn is working deep undercover, posing as a dirty cop and offering his services to one of the smaller dons of New York. Elliot offers secret intel in exchange for cash, and while he’s already gotten enough to imprison his current target he’s certain that this could provide the lead to a bigger score. In particular he could get an in with Don Pietro through this current target, and from there, posing as a dirty cop, he’d be able to gather enough evidence to bring down all five families. But Don Pietro’s murder throws this out of whack, and besides, Elliot has gone so far undercover that he’s getting the feeling that maybe he wants to join the Mafia for real. 

Sadly our protagonist, as Elliot turns out to be, is a complete dick. We’re informed that he was a juvenile delinquent as a kid in the ‘50s but got turned around by a stern but good-meaning uncle. Elliot became a cop, got married, has two young kids, lives in a nice house out in Long Island. But now he lusts for more – in particular he lusts for Mary Adorante, having gotten a glimpse of her in her bathing suit the day he went to Don Pietro’s estate to meet with the man, not knowing that he’d been assassinated that same day.

Elliot’s potential swaying over to the dark side proves to be a central theme of The Trigger Man, but it’s not a compelling one, as Elliot is not a likable character. In fact you grow to hate him, as the dude has a perfect life, with an understanding and attractive wife, two kids who are capable of doing their own thing and don’t need constant parental guidance, and a nice home. But he starts to get resentful that a life of crime was stolen from him, that he could’ve become a don himself, that a girl like Mary should be his girl, and he becomes more and more obsessed with the lady, who throws him a few interested looks.

Meanwhile Marugo in his relentlessness pushes Sgambati to greater acts of sabotage and murder, wiping out the other dons and their underlings. While it never escalates into a full-scale war, there are a handful of shootouts, from both sides of the conflict. It gradually develops into Johnny Russo and the remnants of Don Pietro’s clan up against Sgambati’s soldiers. Johnny gets the upper hand first, killing off one of Sgambati’s top heroin manufacturers. But Johnny is not only a hothead but also a sadist, and wastes a few precious moments of the ambush to savor his kill. This ends up getting one of his top boys killed and Johnny in further shit with Sabatino the consiglieri, who doubts Johnny’s leadership abilities and wants to follow the dead don’s plans for peace.

Mary, a regular Lady MacBeth, continues to push Johnny, and Posner with his writing skills makes the girl not seem like a manipulative shrew but more as a capable woman trying to make her way in a man’s world. However she’s just as heartless as Johnny. Elliot sees through what he thinks is her false “tough girl” veneer and manages to successfully court her, taking her out to Montauk one day and engaging in another explicit sequence with her in a hotel room. Meanwhile Elliot’s been suspended, the commissioner suspecting – rightly – that he’s become too involved with the Mafia and is goofing off instead of truly working. Elliot could care less and is convinced he’s going to become Mary’s man and take over one of the families.

Posner is a good writer and his characters are three-dimensional. Just when you think Mary might be a nice girl after all, she brags late in the novel about one of Johnny’s hits, which took place at a wedding, several innocent people (including the bride) getting killed. This wedding by the way provides the source for the cover illustration, however it doesn’t play out as the way depicted. I assume the older, heavyset guy in the tux with the gun is supposed to be Sgambati, but it’s his neice who’s getting married; it’s young Johnny and his thugs who pull the gun on her in the firefight. As for Sgambati he also gets his kicks in, like a hit in an Italian restaurant in which all of Johnny’s pals are gunned down as they sit beside him, Sgambati leaving Johnny alive as an insult.

Another thing Posner is good at is taking the narrative in unexpected places. The characters meet fates much different than expected, sometimes not in the most dramatically fulfilling ways. Sgambati for example suffers an 11th hour heart attack that takes him out of commission, and Johnny Russo suffers payback from Sabatino himself, who is sickened by the wedding hit. (This is another memorably sleazy scene, with the consiglieri gunning Johnny down while he’s getting a blowjob from Mary!) Speaking of Mary this also serves to cow her, effectively destroying her plans of becoming a Godmother. And meanwhile she’s spurned Elliot’s advances, telling him their afternoon sex was just a moment’s fancy. Elliot really gets the message when Johnny Russo, shortly before his death, beats the shit out of him.

The problem with The Trigger Man is that it’s too long, too wordy. It’s very much in the Burt Hirschfeld mode, with almost the same effected sort of narrative style and over-description. Practically every scene begins with elaborate scene-setting, which while bringing the locale to life (this is sleazy ‘70s New York in all its glory, fully captured) also serves to slow down the pace and make the novel seem a lot longer than it really is. But what makes it even worse is the quick denoument, as if Posner realized he was hitting his word count and decided to barrel through a finale, pulling some tension out of nowhere to make it all more dramatic.

In a prefigure of the cheesy, copout finale of the later novel Hellfire, we get this lame sort of climax in which Elliot, suddenly stupid, figures Marugo is going to make a hit on a massage parlor. In one of the novel’s many subplots we’ve seen the assassin dealing with one of Sgambati’s many ventures, a Times Square massage parlor with a gorgeous masseuse being groomed for porno stardom. In another sleazy action scene midway through Marugo blew away a Sgambati flunkie who had just raped the girl and was in the process of beating her. Now Marugo will likely kill the girl, as she has seen his face – a central mystery faced by all the characters in the novel is who exactly is planning all these attacks for the otherwise-ineffective Don Sgambati.

But instead of going to the massage parlor, Marugo heads to Elliot’s house and kidnaps his wife and kids. The same wife and kids Elliot has turned his back on, by the way, having told his wife he wants a separation and moving out. Now we’re to believe it that Elliot is burning and yearning to go save them. (To his credit, Posner has Elliot’s boss snidely make fun at him for the very same thing!) But it all culminates with a lame action scene as Elliot rushes back to his home to talk Marugo out of killing his family, and the treacle gets even thicker when the last page has Elliot reunited with his wife and kids and telling his wife he was stupid to leave her and he wants to come back, and oh by the way I screwed a hot Mafia princess but all that’s in the past, honey.

And that’s that. The majority of The Trigger Man is great, with real novel stuff, deep characters and their intricate thoughts and schemes and awesome topical details of gritty ‘70s New York. Posner also has a gift for memorable scenes, like a hit that goes down in a zoo. And as mentioned he’s not afraid to sleaze it up once in a while, with lots of sleazy massage parlor and porno movie material. He also doles out plentiful gore in the action scenes, with copious descriptions of exploding faces and brains and even in one memorable part a pumping heart visible through a just-blasted-open chest cavity.

The problem is, this stuff is so good that eventually it overwhelms the novel, with too many characters and too many subplots, so that the various threads are almost perfunctorily wrapped up in an unsatisfying finale. But don’t get me wrong, because The Triggerman is still a recommended read, and definitely has me wanting to read more of Posner’s work…and you wish Puzo and Coppola had maybe read it before they began work on the last Godfather movie.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Blood #3: The Cat Cay Warrant


Blood #3: The Cat Cay Warrant, by Allan Morgan
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

Billed on the back cover as “a new kind of action series,” Blood only ran for three volumes and, judging from this final volume, was like a combo of Award’s Killmaster series and a sort of Travis McGee-esque mystery thing. And it’s also very clear why the series only ran for three volumes; The Cat Cay Warrant is a dud of the first order. 

The series was credited to Allan Morgan, which according to Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms was a house name used by an author named Marilyn Granbeck. One of the very few female writers to work in the men’s adventure field, Granbeck also co-wrote with Arthur Moore the Peacemaker series (as “Adam Hamilton”) and also delivered a volume of the Killmaster series, 1976’s Assignment: Intercept.

Judging from her entry in Hawk’s, Granbeck had a preference for mysteries, and that’s exactly what she writes with Blood. The series is written in first-person, which in my opinion is not a style that meshes well with the genre. No matter who or what your narrator is, the tale will come off like a hardboiled private eye yarn, as is the case here. Our narrator Mark Blood is a ‘Nam vet turned professional assassin, but in reality he’s a complete and utter idiot. Seriously, this book reads like an entry of the Killmaster series, only with Nick Carter replaced by Jason Striker.

Not that Blood’s a judo or martial arts master – no, he’s just Striker’s equal in the moron department! And that isn’t just me criticizing him. At least two characters in two separate situations tell Blood “you’re a lousy agent,” and boy they aren’t kidding. In the course of 203 pages Blood is caught unawares, knocked out, gotten the drop on, fooled, poisoned, abducted, stranded, kicked in the balls, sabotaged, ridiculed, betrayed, and even fired from his assignment. He blindly overlooks clues, eagerly trusts people who are clearly hiding ulterior motives, and proves himself the most ineffectual men’s adventure protagonist you could imagine. Hell, it takes the “professional assassin” 160 pages to even kill anyone.

But so far as Mark Blood is concerned, he’s a primo shit-kicker, the best professional assassin money can buy. Like a regular Jason Striker he pompously narrates his middling story, apparently not realizing how moronic he comes off. About the most he does is smoke cigarettes; this dude smokes more than even Alexander Jason, which is saying something. The novel is almost a paean to smoking, how relaxing cigarettes are, how they help take the edge off even in crisis situations. Anyway, usually in cases like this I’d figure the author was having fun and it was all intended as a spoof, but I don’t get that vibe here. It seems to me that Granbeck really was trying to deliver a quality men’s adventure novel, she just didn’t understand the genre very well. 

The book opens with a chapter written in third-person, which details the grisly hijacking of a train in London that’s transporting half a million pounds in gold. While it opens slowly, what with the old conductor and his thoughts on life, it becomes very violent once the hijacking occurs. Overseen by an older man with Italian features but a (fake) American name, the heist goes off flawlessly, with everyone dead but the Italian criminal. Granbeck disproves the notion that a female action author might refrain from too much gore with lots of descriptions of heads blowing up when shot and etc. Also the old man behind the heist, gradually revealed to be a former Mafia hitman named Edward Sorrento (not “Nick,” as claimed on the back cover), is merciless, killing off his underlings with casual savagery.

Then Chapter One rolls along and it all goes downhill. Mark Blood becomes the narrator of the novel, having been flown over to London. He’s offered the “warrant” from Scotland Yard, who tell him Sorrento’s background. A sadist of the first order, the old bastard’s so cruel that even the Mafia was sickened by the way he’d take out innocents in his hits. In particular Sorrento was ousted for killing some kids during a hit at an amusement park. All of this background detail really makes the reader hate Sorrento and want to see him get his comeuppance. Unfortunately our author forgets all about Sorrento and indeed he basically disappears from the text.

Instead, the book is more about the foolish exploits of Mark Blood. Within moments of arriving in London he’s already almost dead. Buddying up with an airline pilot named Charlie, Blood heads back to the guy’s hotel and hammers a few beers with him. Blood you see is a beer man, which should already tell you something of his quality as a men’s adventure protagonist. I mean, I love beer myself, but seriously, if you’re a professional assassin you might want to consider upping your alcohol game. But after a few bottles Blood’s woozy and next thing he knows he’s on the ground. 

Here the novel would end, as Blood’s been fatally poisoned, but some Yard investigators just happen to show up and pump his stomach. Throughout the novel Blood is being saved by people who just happen to show up; this is only the first such instance. The Yard officials explain that Sorrento has absconded with the half-million pounds to Cat Cay, a British-owned island in the Caribbean. Blood’s mission is to kill the man and return the gold, of which he’ll be entitled to a five percent commission. Immediately after this Blood’s almost killed again, this time by a raising bridge in London; immediately after that he’s briefly taken captive by a Mafia boss, who tells Blood how he too wants Sorrento dead.

Blood’s next easily-avoidable death sees him on a cargo plane bound for Miami; he’s hitched a ride with hotstuff stew Helen, Charlie’s former casual bedmate. (Charlie by the way is dead from that poisoned beer.) The cargo plane’s main passengers are a bunch of dopesmoking rockers, and this entire section reminded me for all the world of something you’d read in a Thomas Pynchon novel, in particular Vineland and it’s subplot about the groovy airline the main character once worked for. But anyway Blood soon learns that both pilots are dead (later we learn they too drank some of that damned poisoned beer).

Now Blood has to land the plane in the water, talked through it by air control. Here’s where we learn that cigarettes can help soothe the nerves, even when you’re piloting an airliner that’s about to crash into the ocean. Oh, and everyone does die in the crash, save for Blood, who emerges unscathed, and Helen, who loses one of her eyes and gets her face smashed up. Blood later almost pukes when he sees her in the hospital (he’s constantly almost blowing chunks when he sees something gory, yet another knock on the guy’s men’s adventure worthiness). He bullies the doctor into performing plastic surgery, no matter the cost, and says he’ll foot the bill.

And he still hasn’t even gotten to Cat Cay! Coincidence continues to abound, as the world in which this novel occurs seems to only have a few people in it. One of them is Carl Malden, a friend of Blood’s from ‘Nam that Blood just happens to run into here in Miami. Malden is a longtime conman and seems to have something going on. Meanwhile Blood hooks up with Merinda, wife of the man who was supposed to be his contact, but who turns out to be dead. Merinda informs Blood that her husband was hacked up by someone and tossed in the ocean; as proof she takes her husband’s left arm out of the tacklebox on her boat! She knows it’s her husband’s arm because, “I bought him the watch last Christmas!” The watch she ends up giving to Blood.

Oh, and speaking of exclamation points, our author is very fond of them. They pepper Blood’s narration throughout the novel, usually for no reason at all. Like this! Or this! It all just further serves to make Mark Blood seem like a ninny. He’s also constantly spurning the advances of women, though he eventually gives in to Merinda, after conceding to her demands that she be allowed to take him to the remote isle of Cat Cay. It’s a sort of swinger’s paradise and only couples can go. Merinda by the way is a stacked Cuban beauty who used to make her living walking the streets, something that’s constantly mentioned by everyone.

Well, the two are making it on a deserted little island in the middle of the ocean when Merinda’s boat explodes. At a recent port Blood had been informed that some mystery man had briefly gotten on the boat while he and Merinda were out and about; of course, our dumbass protagonist never thought to check the boat out. But now it explodes, and Blood and Merinda are not only stranded on a remote island but naked to boot. But don’t worry, the next day a Coast Guard plane just happens to fly over and Blood’s able to get the attention of the pilot. But wait – it’s carrying a Yard official, one who is here looking for Blood!

Yes, this guy just happens to be flying around this remote section of the Caribbean, looking for Blood. Further, he informs Blood that he’s fired from the assigment, due to how poorly he’s doing. No shit! Blood beats the guy up and demands that the pilot leave him on the island!! Now he and Merinda get to Cat Cay…where Blood only now realizes that he’s basically walked into the lion den. You see, the few people on this tropical isle are either swinger tourists here to get high and orgy or mobbed-up Sorrento employees who have been expecting Blood’s arrival. I mean hell, someone calls him “Mr. Blood” moments after he signs the register under a false name, and it takes like several moments for Blood to even realize it!

Well anyway, it all just keeps stumbling along. Blood’s been informed his Scotland Yard contact here is named Margo, and after sending off Merinda (Blood by the way having gotten sick of her, given that she peddled her ass to that Coast Guard plane crew mere moments after they arrived on the island she and Blood were briefly stranded on), he gets busy with her. Margo has been hiding for the past week, Sorrento’s people having uncovered her as an agent and tortured her. But she escaped and has managed to survive, but more importantly she’s gotten real horny living alone there in the jungle. 

I should mention here that Branbeck usually fades to black in the sex scenes, though sometimes she gives a bit of the juicy details. It’s not full-on explicit but it’s more than nothing, and she has no qualms with describing the female anatomy. She even goes the extra mile by occasionally referring to “breasts” as “tits.” So clearly she was making the attempt to cater to the demands of the genre. And yet for all of that you can still detect something afoot, as Blood appears to develop feelings for most every girl here, and indeed tells us he can’t have sex if there are no feelings involved – what more proof do you need that the writer was a woman??

Blood only kills a handful of people in the novel, the first a pair of would-be hitmen who attack Margo the morning after she sleeps with Blood. But then Blood’s caught when he tries to sneak to Sorrento’s mansion, deep in the jungle – only for his captor to turn out to be Carl, who beats Blood up and then throws him in a locked room on his huge boat with the mutilated and beaten Merinda. Carl’s certain Merinda knows where that lost gold is…her husband apparently stole the gold from Sorrento. I mean, what?? It’s like this entire goddamn novel started out being about one thing but changed its mind and became something else.

Merinda dies right after Blood sees her, and after choking on his gorge a bit at her ghastly sight, Blood finds himself stranded in the locked room with her. Oh but wait – there’s a bunch of dynamite in here!!! Seriously! Yep, Blood makes use of the dynamite that just happens to be in the locked room and blows his way out. When later he sneaks again to Sorrento’s mansion, he finds the old Mafia sadist bedridden and comatose. Blood perfunctorily shoots him in the face. My friends, I cannot tell you how unsatisfying all of this is. We started off the novel seeing how cruel Sorrento is, then waited and waited and waited to see him get his just desserts, only for the author to change her mind halfway through and basically forget about him.

Sorrento dead, Blood now goes after Carl. But the dolt still hasn’t figured out who has been duping him all along, even though an idiot would’ve long ago realized it was Margo. But it all plays out more on suspense and scene-building, with Granbeck in no hurry to get to the climax, such as it is. The final moment of the book is at least memorable, with Margo hugging Blood and Blood literally stabbing her in the back. Why? Because Margo is revealed as the true villain, the person who had Merinda and Merinda’s husband killed, who was behind Carl; she also has the gold, now, the location for which was scrawled in the watch of Merinda’s dead husband.

Blood ends the tale telling us he’s gonna go see if stewardess Helen is better yet, ‘cause he’s hoping to get a little lovin’ from her. Oh, and if another Sorrento-type comes along, Blood will kill him, ‘cause that’s his job. I guess no further “warrants” (as Blood refers to his contracts) were ever issued him, as this was it for Mark Blood. This is the only volume of the series I have, but I don’t see myself seeking out the other two.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Two-Fisted Detective Stories, October 1960 (Volume 2, Number 3)


I’ve been on a hardboiled pulp kick recently and discovered that a lot of good material was published in the ubiquitous digest-size crime magazines of the time (roughly 1953 to 1965 or thereabouts). Then I discovered that some of the more lurid crime digests were published by the same twisted folks who also turned out the various sweat mags of the time, ie the stuff that was anthologized in Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood. In particular Two-Fisted Detective, Web Detective, and Off Beat Detective, and I got a few volumes of each, luckily for acceptable prices.

This October 1960 issue of Two-Fisted Detective is the first of them I read. At 113 pages of double-columned stories, it basically amounts to a paperback-sized anthology. Some stories were okay, others just middling. While entertaining it was nothing mindblowing, with each of the stories short, snappy, and heavy on the torture/lurid vibe. I’m betting the more famous (and respectable) Manhunt magazine didn’t feature so much torture and bondage! Practically every story in here features a woman being tied up and slapped around by a thug.

“Kill Me With Kisses” by Art Crockett, the lead story, is a case in point. Narrated by recurring protagonist Juan Kelly, a private eye with a talking parrot in his office, the story sees Kelly hired by wealthy Mrs. Southwell to find her daughter Barbara, who has run off with some damn beatniks. In reality “Babs” has been abducted by Charlie Sleeper, a rough pimp who keeps the young girl tied up in a room for his clients who are into rape scenes. Our hero Kelly when we meet him is surrounded by several of Sleeper’s gorgeous hookers, each armed with a dagger. He is very much in the Mike Hammer mold, dishing out punishment with his fists.

When Kelly finds Babs he takes her back to his place, only for Sleeper to call and say he’s sent in all of his clientele – all of whom would want Babs permanently silenced. The finale is pretty good, with Kelly and Babs running across rooftops, being chased by the bloodthirsty creeps, though the finale is perfunctory with Kelly merely blowing Sleeper away and the others running for it. Of course Kelly must inform us that Babs, who has been bound and raped for the past week or so, demands they go back to his apartment so they can have sex.

“No Escape” is by Don Unatin, which according to Philsp.com was a pseudonym of Reese editor (and owner?) Bud Ampolsk, who also wrote as “Bill Ryder.” Ampolsk I’m betting wrote many of the stories that appeared in the sweat mags he edited, and according to Bob Deis at Mens Pulp Mags, Ampolsk was also the guy who devised the crazy, torture-focused covers Norm Eastman would paint for the Reese mags. So then it’s safe to say Ampolsk had a quite fevered imagination. It’s at work here in this short, breezy tale written in third-person about a girl named Ronnie who keeps getting calls from a horny sadist named Duke who claims he got her number off a payphone, where someone had written that she offered a great time.

The calls have become more and more aggressive, with Duke even figuring out her address. He says he’s coming over for a little loving, and might even rough her up a little because he likes that, too. And don’t bother calling the cops ‘cause they’d never believe you, or something like that. Finally Ronnie talks him into meeting her somewhere. They meet at a hotel where, surprisingly, Duke actually does have sex with her, though obviously it’s an off-page event. But as he’s lying there afterward Ronnie takes an icepick from her purse and jams it into his brain. Turns out Ronnie is a killer, putting up her own number on payphones so as to root out and kill off “lust crazed animals.” 

“Hell School” by Pete McCann returns to the first-person narration and concerns Craig Bradman, a gym teacher at deadbeat Southside High, which is populated by “duck-tailed punks” and promiscuous young women who are hookers in all but name. The narrator’s wife wants him to move on to a better job in a better school, but Bradman wants to stick around. On his way into the school one day he comes across one of the punks having sex out in the open with one of the gals. Bradman isn’t surprised when later he’s called into the principal’s office and there’s a cop there, having busted them. Also the cop found dope in the backseat. The principal convinces the cop that they can handle it – turns out Bradman earns his living by beating the shit out of the punks who break the rules! As a double ironic twist we also learn Bradman is the supplier for the punks, hooking them up with drugs and using them as salesmen so he can eventually get his wife out of the hovel in which they live. 

“Save Her For A Passion” by Grover Brinkman is narrated by Joel Vance, an enforcer hired to pull a hit on Diane – who turns out to be the wife of Joel’s boss, Jud. He’s about to assassinate her along a beach but the lady gets the drop on him, coming armed with her own gun. She talks Joel into teaming up with her against Jud, who doubtless will send Joel up the river for doing this job, anyway. She reminds him what a bastard Jud is, like that innocent girl Jud raped and got hooked on drugs in New Orleans. The narrator goes along with it, absorbed with Diane’s great breasts, and the finale sees a quick fight on Jud’s drug-transporting ship. But then Diane shoots Joel in the gut and leaves him: that innocent kid in New Orleans was her sister, and Joel’s the one who snatched her off the streets for Jud.

“Mistress of Mayhem” by Al James is another third-person tale with an ironic twist ending you can see coming even with blinders on. Mira is a hotstuff 19 year-old married to deadbeat Phil, 23 and unemployed, a former car mechanic. Mira is having an affair with Jim, 40, and hopes to marry him, but Phil won’t give her a divorce. Al James appears to have written sleaze paperbacks in the ‘60s and that’s quite apparent here, as the word “breasts” is used more than all the other stories in the issue combined; Mira must be quite stacked.

Mira demands Phil leave to look for a job and then when Jim comes over for their daily rendevous (cue a sex scene that isn’t as vague as the others), she tells him she wants him to kill Phil. There’s a red-gloved bandit going around the neighborhood, attacking people in their homes, and they can set Phil up so Jim shoots him, mistaking him for the bandit. Can you see the ironic twist? Yes, Phil turns out to be the red-gloved bandit, and the tale ends with Jim dead and Phil revealing his true identity to Mira, as well as his knowledge of her affair with Jim; it’s intimated he’s about to strangle her. 

“Come-On Cutie!” by Flip Lyons has a hell of an opening: a con man named Bennie beating the shit out of his female accomplice, Jodi. He bashes her in the stomach, the face, beating her to the floor. Why? Because he came into a hotel room and caught her packing her luggage with ten thousand bucks she just conned from an old millionaire named Hollingsworth. Battered and bloody, Jodi tells Bennie he’s an idiot; she packed his bag, too. Hollingsworth, whom she knocked out with a sleeping pill, is on his way with the cops and they need to leave town. Further, she and Bennie are now through; she refuses to stay with a guy who beats her. After cleaning up – during which she shows Bennie her breasts and tells him he’ll never see them again! – Jodi takes off…only to immediately be snatched by Hollingsworth and the cops.

Feeling bad about it, Bennie tries to con Hollingsworth so Jodi can be freed. But then he finds out that Jodi really stole 90 thousand from the guy. He springs Jodi from prison and tells her he’s going to beat her to a pulp this time – that is, right after she tells him where she hid that ninety thousand. Jodi talks him into a last meal at the local diner, where she of course slips a mickey in his drink. A bizarrely light-hearted finale sees Bennie, that woman-beating maniac, merely falling asleep at his table as Jodi announes her plans to go live like royalty in Europe with the 90 thousand!

“Lust Holds The Gun!” by Gil Grayson concerns Spandau, a con who came up with his latest idea in prison; he’s going to rob Marie Rodgers, a high-class madame who makes monthly payoffs to a mob boss named Rodman. Spandau became pals with one of Rodman’s men in the slammer and learned how Rodman’s men collect from the various madames. This tale definitely has the feel of a vintage men’s mag story as it’s all about the bondage and the breasts. Spandau, wielding a .38, sneaks into Marie’s office building at night, an hour before the scheduled money pick-up, and barges in. He roughs her up, which she seems to enjoy. Also she’s certain Rodman won’t believe that she’s been robbed, so she wants him to hurt her.

So Spandau ties Marie up and then, because she seems eager for it, rapes her. (She apparently enjoys that, too…) Afterwards he burns her with cigarettes, all so as to get the safe combination. Finally Marie gives it, and Spandau absconds with twenty-five thousand bucks. The story features a typical EC comics-style twist with the greasy, obese elevator operator being a pickpocket who ends up lifting Spandau’s wallet. This third-person story is written in a goofy hardboiled style, with such enjoyable lines as, “The elevator door finally opened, revealing a sallow faced man whose bald head looked like something you might step on in a graveyard at midnight.”

“Dark Hunger” by Jay Richards is the shortest story in the book and the goofiest. It’s also very much in the EC Comics vein. Marty is a serial killer who strangles women, and he’s set his sights on a lovely young lady named Erica as his latest kill. With the opening lines of “She was young… Lovely… Stacked…”, you know this one also upholds the Reese Publications standard, and thus there’s a definite lurid vibe throughout. Mostly the dark comedy comes through Marty chastisizing himself that his last kill was named Loreta, which blew the A-B-C nature of his previous kills; if only Loretta had been named “Doris!” He takes Erica home, ready to strangle her – and who will be surprised when Erica herself turns out to be a serial killer, pulling a knife from her purse and killing Marty? The lurid vibe continues with the vague detail that Erica orgasms when she kills. And now she’s on the hunt for a new man…

“Don’t Tempt Murder” by Jim Arthur is another dark comedy piece; this one’s about Alfie, a would-be “professional bleeder” who has just gotten his first job from mob boss Turk. Alfie’s been ordered to kill Turk’s old flame Sue Martin, who is about to turn state’s evidence. Alfie goes to Sue’s apartment with a .38 Special that only has one bullet in it, so as to fool the cops into thinking an amateur was behind the kill (professional bleeders we’re informed use six slugs on their hits to ensure death, an industry standard).  But Sue turns the tables on him, opening her door fully nude. The dark comedy ensues as Alfie gawks at her awesome bod and keeps telling her he has to kill her. She offers herself, he reluctantly refuses; somehow he shows her he only has one bullet, and then he spins the chamber and it’s like Russian roullette, with the girl passing out with each blank shot. Finally the cops show up and it turns out Sue is under police protection and she also took the bullet out of Alfie’s gun, so it was empty the whole time!

“A Darling For The Devil” is by Lawrence Stone and rounds out the magazine. This “novel”-length tale is narrated by Charlie, a chaffeur for a sadistic kingpin named Bugs Martin. We watch as Bugs beats some hapless diner owner nearly to death, then moves on to a local nightclub. Along the way our narrator informs us how Bugs gets his rocks off whipping women with a studded belt. This story is very heavy with the sweat mag vibe. The nightclub has a new act – a hotstuff lady named Francie who turns out to be the childhood sweetheart of our narrator. Bugs gets the immediate hots for her, and due to his span of influence the club owners turn away as he basically abducts Francie. She fights back and now he’s all hot and bothered, just ready to whip the shit out of her.

They go to a cottage outside of the city, where Bugs has his fun, and when the narrator can take no more he ends up getting bashed in the face by Bugs. It culminates in a bizarre ending where the narrator finds some spiders on a milkjug and throws it at Bug’s feet, after he’s been whipping Francie for a good long while – Bugs freaks out (turns out he’s afraid of bugs, hence his nickname!), and in the chaos Charlie picks up his .38 and blasts him. The story does not feature the expected denoument in which Charlie gets lucky with the gal; instead, he carries her home and he tells us he never heard from her again. Jeez, wonder why?

Monday, August 17, 2015

Another Time, Another Woman


Another Time, Another Woman, by Walter Kaylin
March, 1963  Fawcett Gold Medal

It’s hard to believe that for a guy who cranked out so many men’s adventure magazine stories from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, Walter Kaylin only published two novels: this one, a Gold Medal paperback original from 1963, and The Power Forward, which came out in 1979 and never received a paperback edition. But this was Kaylin’s only crime novel, which is very puzzling, given that he even published a few stories in the legendary Manhunt magazine; you’d figure he would’ve been a Gold Medal regular. 

In the Kaylin anthology He-Men, Bag Men & Nymphos, editor Bob Deis features an interview he recently conducted with Kaylin, who is now in his 90s. This is all Kaylin had to say about Another Time, Another Woman: “It was pretty cheesy, but I got $2,500 for it. And $2,500 was a lot of money when you were getting $300 for writing a story, so I was very pleased with that.” Given that Kaylin wrote the book 52 years ago, you can forgive him for not having much more to say about it – and sad to say, but Another Time, Another Woman really is mostly forgettable. It only runs to 128 pages, and you keep waiting for something to happen, but unfortunately nothing much ever does.

I don’t mean to imply that Kaylin’s not a good writer; in fact it’s because he was so prolific in the pulp realm that you expect more of him. The aforementioned He-Men anthology opens with a short story titled “Snow-Job From A Redhead,” which appeared in the June 1956 issue of Male but is more the sort of thing you’d expect to read in Manhunt, just a very hardboiled crime story with plenty of action and thrills. Given this I expected Another Time, Another Woman to be along the same lines, but instead it’s more of a slow-boil thing that, well, never gets to the boiling point.

The first issue comes with our narrator, a 32-year-old jazz pianist named Harry Quist, who turns out to be a heel of the first order. Harry, we gradually learn, got in a head-on collision with another car three years ago, killing the entire family in it and also injuring his wife, Mildred, who was eight months pregnant at the time. The baby died shortly after. Harry wasn’t drunk or running from the mafia or anything; he was just being negligent, speeding through the Pasedena hills in the middle of the night. And rather than taking responsibility for his actions he covered up the accident and took Mildred to his old pal Dr. Emmett Gregg, knowing the guy would fix her up and keep it all hush-hush.

So yeah, our narrator is an asshole. But even worse is the way he tells us his tale. Somehow Kaylin must’ve decided he’d try his hand at like “beatnik hardboiled” or something. Being a jazz pianist, Harry is already “cool,” or at least thinks of himself so, and blabs his story to us in a breathless rush of pseudo jive talk that really comes off as pretentious more than anything else. For example:

Now you take fear. Fear hangs inside you like a deflated basketball bladder brushing so easily against heart, lungs, kidneys and intestines there are times you don’t even know it’s there. Not until it begins to inflate. Begins to press. Begins to crowd. Now try breathing. Try moving your bowels. Hard, ain’t it? Hurts, right? That’s because you’ve got something solid as a bowling ball in there and it’s squeezing the pee/paste/puss (five points f’r each k’reck answer) out of everything you own.

I just chose that example at random out of the book, but it’s like that throughout; what starts as an interesting paragraph or thought soon spirals into contrived nonsense. Actually, the biggest impression I get is that Kaylin was just trying too hard. And who knows, maybe after writing so much pulp for the men’s mags he was having fun letting his hair down and turning out a story that, for once, wasn’t about some square-jawed American soldier in WWII. But the cumulative effect of Another Time, Another Woman is weariness; at least it was for me. Harry’s way of telling his story got on my nerves quick. But then, he is an asshole, so maybe that was Kaylin’s point.

Harry’s wife Mildred, now ex-wife, is the titular woman of the novel (though the title could in fact refer to two other women, as mentioned below). A shell of her former self, she’s now married to Dr. Gregg, ie Harry’s old pal who saved her. She whores herself out to man after man in the hopes that someone can get her pregnant again, despite the fact that the crash Harry got her in has rendered her infertile. This is dark stuff, obviously, and it’s typical of Gold Medal that this aspect was hyped on the front and back cover (which refers to Mildred as a “slut”), making it sound a lot more salacious than what it really is – downright depressing.  Mildred also turns out to be the character on the cover; we are informed that Emmett has a painting of a fully-nude Mildred which hangs in their home.

Harry informs us that after the crash that night he left town, Mildred obviously wanting nothing to do with him due to the loss of her baby, but eventually he came back because he loves Hollywood. Now he plays in a nightclub, torch singer type stuff, with a new girl named Jessie doing the vocals. That Jessie doesn’t work the audience and play up on her natural sex appeal is something the owner of the club is constantly bitching about, and Harry’s always being nagged at to tell her to sex it up. But Jessie’s sort of a prude due to the fact that she’s already a widow in her early 20s, her husband, a writer, having contracted a rare disease and dying a year before. Now she cuts off her emotions and is constantly shutting down Harry’s advances. Hence Jessie was also “another woman” in “another time.” 

The novel occurs over a few days and starts off with Harry being called away from the club in the middle of the set by Mildred, whom he hasn’t seen in years. He’s aware of her infedility, though, having kept in touch with Emmett, who himself is a bit of a lothario at the local hospital. Mildred was in the act of entertaining Sidney Flake, husband of the wealthiest woman in town, Vivian, but now Sidney is dead in the guest house, an icepick in his head. Mildred tells Harry that Emmett came home earlier than expected, caught her with Sidney, and the two men enganged in a brawl, this being the outcome. 

Now Mildred demands that Harry hide the body and ensure Emmett doesn’t get in trouble. If he does get in trouble, Mildred will go straight to the police and tell them about that fatal car accident Harry caused three years ago and then covered up. So Harry is blackmailed into it, though he soon finds out there’s more going on than this simple story. Harry goes back and forth, meeting with Emmett (who’s hiding in his hunting lodge and then in the woods), being pressured by Mildred, and being interrogated by the Gary Cooper-esque Sgt. Combs, a cop who goes around with a little pet monkey named Baked Beans that he keeps in his pocket.

This is not an action-packed tale by any means. In fact there isn’t a single shootout, fistfight, chase, or even sex scene in the entire novel. It’s all about style and mood, and as stated your mileage will vary. Kaylin does come up with some goofy characters, like Sgt. Combs, as well as the so-called Father Zosimus, a lunatic who preaches a bizarre off-shoot of Christianity which demands that you “wound God” by harming likenesses or representatives of Jesus, the idea being that to truly suffer you must hurt that which you love most. Zosimus has gotten his hooks in rich Vivian Flake, whom we’re told lives in a cave on her own expansive property and has for the most part gone insane. She then is yet “another woman” in “another time,” like Mildred and Jessie a shell of her former self. 

Gradually Harry learns that there is more to the story than a simple act of a husband’s rage; Combs employs an old drunk, the man who discovered Flake’s body in Emmett’s guesthouse, and the old man reveals that Flake wasn’t dead when Emmett staggered away after the fight. As for Emmett, he’s certain Mildred did it, as it’s revealed that Sidney Flake had a sadistic streak and was known for mercilessly beating and maiming women who ran afoul of him. So Emmett’s certain that Mildred, fearing that she would suffer reprisals from Sidney once he recovered from the beating Emmett gave him, took matters into her own hands and murdered him. Now Emmett presses Harry into his service, pressuring our narrator to help him set up fake clues that will exonerate Mildred – and put the blame on Vivian Flake.

Emmett wants it to look like the rich lady, who is insane anyway, secretly followed Flake, discovered him in bed with Mildred, and then took the opportunity presented to her and drove an icepick into Flake’s head as he lie there insensate in the guesthouse after Emmett beat him up. Harry goes along with all of this…only to eventually learn that this isin fact what happened, and Emmett has stumbled onto the truth without realizing it. However none of this is played out in any dramatic fashion, with Harry relegated more to the role of a reporter or something, just shuttling around Pasadena and Hollywood and meeting an assemblage of odd characters with affected personalities and habits. 

Indeed the tale is so in Harry’s thoughts that the main plot culminates in a depressing murder-suicide that happens off-page and is given no buildup or payoff. Instead more narrative space is given over to page-filling tactics, like when Harry reads a short story written by Jessie’s dead husband and Kaylin actually writes out the entire story, which takes up a few pages. More page-filling is handled by long chants and prayers courtesy the followers of Father Zosimus. I forgot to mention that there are no chapters in the novel, only white space to break up the various sections. But still you get the feeling that there’s either too little story here to justify 128 pages, or that Kaylin just left out too much of it. 

He does however end on a bit of a lighter note. Harry manages to break through Jessie’s hard shell, talking her into staying in Hollywood with him. But even here there is a touch of uncertainty, as a part of Harry wishes she would just leave and he wouldn’t have to worry about her – yet another indication that our asshole of a hero has still not learned to be responsible for himself or his actions. Have I mentioned that throughout the novel Harry doesn’t once show any remorse for his actions of three years ago?

I can’t give Another Time, Another Woman a ringing endorsement, either for Walter Kaylin fans or for fans of Gold Medal in general. As a crime story it’s lacking and as a character study it’s frustrating because our main character apparently learns nothing. However the theme of the three ruined women is skillfully played out by Kaylin and indication of the caliber of his writing, and the goofy characters are all memorable. But the contrived pseudo-hipster jive talk of our narrator quickly grates, and makes you glad when you’re finished the novel and can move on to something more rewarding.