The Thing! (aka Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The Thing!, by J.J. Madison

No month stated, 1971  Belmont Tower

(Originally published by Midwood Books as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The copyright page makes no mention that this grungy little paperback original was originally published by sleaze purveyors Midwood Books, but the title page does somewhat confusingly inform us that The Thing! was “first published as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying.” At any rate, the re-titling of this Belmont Tower edition bears no relation to the contents of the novel; The Thing! is not a monsterama creature feature, but is instead what Grandma would’ve called a “stroke book,” with the horror stuff only a secondary concern to the sleaze. 

Which is to say, I loved the hell out of the book. I loved it! But then, I’m a sucker for Belmont Tower at its most grungy. What made this most surprising was the authorship of the book. According to The Vault Of Evil, “J. J. Madison” was in reality British author James Moffat – from all accounts a notoriously “prolific” author whose books are often considered subpar. And yet, I have only read and reviewed one other Moffat novel, the Nazi She-Devil yarn Jackboot Girls, which I really enjoyed, so admitedly I am judging the guy based off of two of his (apparently) three-hundred published novels(!). 

I say this British authorship is surprising because, if you’ve spent any time here, you know I’m not the biggest fan of British pulp. I find it fussy, stuffy, and stodgy. (I just copyrighted that as the title for a new animated series for kids, fyi.) And yet if I had not known a British author wrote The Thing!, I would’ve guessed it had been written by any of the American authors in Belmont Tower’s or Leisure Books’s stable. There is absolutely nothing “British” about the novel, absolutely nothing to give this away, and indeed there is a familiarity with New York City (another commonality with many Belmont and Leisure publications) that gives the impression “J.J. Madison” is a native New Yorker. 

I know zero about James Moffat, but I do see he was born in Canada, so perhaps this explains why his pulp comes off, at least in the two books of his that I’ve read, as more American than British. Then again, a pair of British pulpsters also turned in the decidely “American” Cut around the same time, so who’s to say – these pulp writers were so prolific they could probably mimic a tone when they wanted to, and maybe Moffat’s direction from his editors at Midwood Books was to “sound American.” 

Anyway, I digress, as usual. The Thing! is awesome, truly so, coming in at the usual brief Belmont Tower length (186 pages of big print) and offering all one could want in a sleazy vampire yarn. But those looking for straight horror might come away dissatisfied. To be sure, James Moffat follows a “sleaze first, horror second” approach throughout The Thing!, and folks that’s just fine with me. In fact the sexual material was so frequent and explicitly described, with copious detail on anatomical functions, that I almost started taking notes for future reference. 

But then, there’s just as much time spent on photography, and camera lenses, and how to properly pose models for perfect photos, something the Vault of Evil forum-goers also noted. Moffat adheres to the time-honored method of pulp writers everywhere in how he meets his word count by writing about stuff he’s interested in, even if it has no bearing on the plot. Thus one must be prepared for a lot of detail about photography and proper light and shadow and developing prints and all this other stuff you might not want to read in a novel about a sex-starved vampire babe. 

This, apparently, is the titular “Thing” of the Belmont reprint: Myra Manning, a stacked blonde movie goddess of yore who has gotten a second life in a mega-successful daytime soap opera titled “Deadly Love” which is clearly modelled after Dark Shadows. In the soap Myra plays a vampire, and we readers already know from the back cover that Myra herself is a vampire. Now as as I’ve said before, hot vampire babes are at the very top of the “hot evil women” heap, even higher up than Nazi She-Devils, but friends everyone knows that a hot vampire babe should have black hair, not blonde hair!! 

However, given the zeal with with James Moffat indulges in utter sleaze, filth, and depravity throughout the novel, I was willing to let this one slide. And yes of course, there are exceptions to this rule – I mean good grief, just consider Ingrid Pitt in the 1970 Hammer Films production The Vampire Lovers – but still. It’s a time-worn pulp conceit that good girls have blonde hair and bad girls have black hair, and it’s interesting that Moffat decided to overlook that. 

The book moves fast and Moffat does a great job of making it horror, yet at the same time never explicitly states that there is anything supernatural about it; again, this could be disappointing for someone looking for a standard type of horror novel, but there is absolutely nothing standard about The Thing!. It’s a dirty, smutty, yet undeniably fun little book, mostly because I got the strong mental impression of Moffat drunkenly chortling to himself as he pounded at his typewriter. 

We know what we are getting from the start, as Moffat opens the novel on the set of “Deadly Love,” as an episode of the soap is filming, with Myra as a vampire biting a man – and, when the cameras are turned off, the man complains that Myra has really bitten him. Moffat also shows a Hollywood that is long gone, with hardbitten, foul-mouthed veterans of the studio age who bitch at each other with no concerns over the “inclusion” of today; Myra’s poor co-star is raked over the coals for being gay, and Myra likes to strip in front of the director, displaying her “heavy breasts,” and taunting the gawking director: “You’re about to come in your pants.” 

Next we are introduced to the hero of the tale: Ken Painter, a ‘Nam vet who has no qualms with hitting dogs and roughing up women – another reminder of how “unsafe” 1970s pulp is in our modern era. Our intro to Ken is a harbinger of the type of book The Thing! will be: a several-page sex scene that leaves no sleazy stone unturned as Ken explicity boinks a woman he’s shacked up with in the Midwest…a woman who runs a gas station her dead husband left her, and who came across a stash of cocaine that spilled on the highway after a pharmaceutical truck crashed(!?), and who now spends her days in a dark room with the TV running, in a cocaine daze…and Ken has blissfully joined her for a few days of rampant coke-fueled sex. 

Friends, this is how you introduce your protagonist. 

Ken (as Moffat refers to him throughout the novel) was a combat photographer in Vietnam, and now he wants to make his living as a professional photographer, but he’s a penniless vagabond. He leaves the coke-sex girl and heads for New York, where we have another protracted sequence where Ken jury-rigs some pay phones in the Port Authority, and then runs afoul of the mobsters who run the payphones. Again, none of this has anything to do with the horror genre, but it does bring to life the grungy, crime-ridden New York of the early ‘70s. 

But after running into Myra Manning in Central Park – where Ken mauls the woman’s guard dog and nearly drowns the poor animal, all because it ruined his shot and got water on his camera – Ken is given a new opportunity: to be the personal assistant for famous actress Myra, who promises she’ll get a publisher who will do a book of photos of Myra, photos taken by Ken. 

First, though, the two enjoy an exuberant sex scene that is only a precursor of the wild sleaze we will encounter as the novel progresses: 

Moffat foreshadows that there is more to Myra Manning than there seems: she’s a beauty with a perfect body, but Ken was a “kid” when she was a Hollywood queen and also there’s that pale-faced former assistant of hers with a bandage on his throat who slinks out of Myra’s penthouse apartment on Ken’s first day, trying to throw Ken a meaningful look… 

But really, at this point it’s a Hollywood novel, with a lot of stuff about the filming of Myra’s soap opera and the squabbling that goes on behind the scenes. That is, with a lot of material about photography…and a lot more explicit sex, as Myra begins to “initiate” Ken into something unstated, first by secretly dosing him with strychnine and then engaging him in yet more super-explicit shenanigans: 

But it’s not all drug-fueled super sex with the beautiful Myra who has almost superhuman control of her womanhood (cue those anatomincal notes I mentioned): in between the memories of sexual bliss Ken is haunted by scenes from “a nightmare,” with Myra wearing a “half-mask” with “canines,” and the feeling of blood flowing down Ken’s side as she feeds from his neck, but Ken is sure none of this could be real. Still, there’s this band-aid on his throat, and Myra’s insistence that he not remove it so that it can heal properly…claiming that Ken was so drunk he cut himself shaving… 

Then there’s Noire, Myra’s professor friend who is a mountain of muscle with a shaved head…the impression is he’s an Anton LeVay type after a few visits to the gym. He’s a specialist in all things vampire, and has been teaching Myra about it, and there’s a lot of stuff about historical vampires, and Noire’s insistence that such creatures existed…but, again, there’s nothing here that they are supernatural creatures, ie the living dead as you’d encounter in traditional vampire fiction. Instead, the impression Moffat gives is that these “vampires” are humans who drink blood to stay young. Moffat leaves it vague enough that the reader could take it either way, but the fact that Myra is a famous TV actress who often admires herself in the mirror should tell you right away that the traditional vampire lore is not being followed here. 

The “nightmare” stuff becomes more extreme as Myra continues dosing Ken with strychnine – which leaves him fuzzy-minded but super-aroused, capable of all-night action – and also throwing orgies where Ken witnesses such craziness as a young girl being ravaged by Noire’s massive “phallus.” As I said, the depravity is just off the charts. 

Only gradually does Ken realize what’s really going on: Myra is a vampire and she’s using him as a meal on legs. Ken finds salvation in another group who works on the soap opera, and with their help he escapes Myra’s clutches…and also he also helps a guy with some pointers on photography; even in the climax Moffat still indulges in page-filling, but it’s so well-written and quick-moving that I didn’t mind. 

More importantly, here Ken finds true love, courtesy brunette hottie Carol, an up-and-coming starlet on the soap who initially gave Ken the cold shoulder. Moffatt again displays his penchant for sizzling shenanigans when Carol gets Ken to do a nude photo session of her – for a play she’s interested in, naturally – and then she essentially throws herself on him, leading to a sex scene just as explicit as those with cougar Myra: 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this and the next four paragraphs if you don’t want to know the finale, but given the obscurity and scarcity of The Thing!, I thought I’d note what happens for posterity. Basically Myra and Noire go the expected route and take Carol prisoner, so like a true Belmont Tower hero Ken goes out for revenge. Yes, I know Midwood originally published the book, but Midwood was a Belmont Tower imprint, so it still works. 

So Ken goes after Myra and, having seen how she “ages ten years” in just a few minutes without her amphetimines (again, the connotation is that Myra is not a traditional vampire, but just a human who has vastly elongated her life by drinking blood and taking uppers), Ken strips Myra and ties her to a chair in the empty studio and then he essentially broils her with high-watt studio lights placed directly on her nude body. Curiously Moffat does not have Myra break, even as her body shrivels in the intense heat, and Ken at length even begins to respect her strength. 

From there to a brief confrontation with Noire, who is about to rape Carol with that massive phallus of his; a fight which sees Ken nearly get ripped apart, and features a finale that seems like a rip-off until you think about it and realize Moffat has pulled off a neat trick with proper setup. Essentially, Noire is about to escape with Carol in his car and he puts Ken’s face up against the exhaust, trying to smother him. Then Noire gets in his car, thinking Ken is dead – but Ken opens the door and pulls Carol out. We recall then the opening setup, in which we were informed that Ken was drummed out of ‘Nam because he’d developed a tendency to hyperventilate when nervous. Thus, when Noire was “smothering” Ken with the exhaust fumes, the carbon monixide was actually helping Ken control his hyperventilation! I’m not sure if the science is legit, but Moffat certainly writes it with confidence. 

That said, Noire’s sendoff is laughable – in his haste he barrells out of the parking lot and runs into a truck, killed by the steering wheel slamming into his chest! And at novel’s end we learn that the withered hag that was Myra Manning has “disappeared” from the world, and, safely knowing that her legend will live forever, she plans to dose herself with strychnine, rip out her teeth and cut off her fingertips, and then douse herself with gasoline and immolate herself “before the tremors” make muscle movement impossible! 

And meanwhile Ken and Carol head off for a happily ever after… 

End spoilers. Yes, the finale is rushed, but hell, what Belmont Tower doesn’t have a rushed finale? I was satisfied that James Moffatt even told us what happened to all of the characters. All told, I loved the hell out of The Thing!, but I will be the first to acknowledge that your own mileage will vary. 

Here is the cover of the original Midwood edition, from 1971, which does a better job than any of the reprints of depicting the actual contents of the book...though note the artist at least also agreed that hot and evil vampire babes should have black hair: 

And here is a link to Too Much Horror Fiction, where you can see a few other covers Belmont Tower graced this book with over the years; according to a comment Andy Decker made at the Vault Of Evil forum, the copy I read, the cover for which is shown at the top of the review, might actually have been from 1978. If so, the copyright page itself only states 1971. My assumption is Belmont Tower just took the actual Midwood Books printing from 1971 and affixed different covers to it over the years.

Bloody Sunday (The Marksman #21)

Bloody Sunday, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1976  Belmont-Tower

I would say that Lynn Munroe is once again correct with the theory that this volume of The Marksman was written by George Harmon Smith.* As Lynn notes, the style is identical to the series titles that have been identified (by Lynn) as ones by George Harmon Smith, like This Animal Must Die and Savage Slaughter. For once again we have a book that is wholly at odds with the typical Marksman yarn: 192 dense pages that are heavy with introspection and detail, with a literary flourish well outside the series norm. In past I’ve noted that George Harmon Smith was basically the John Gardner of the men’s adventure genre, and that is very apparent in Bloody Sunday; like Gardner (the American author who was briefly famous in the ‘70s, not the British author of the same name), Smith overwrites with abandon, making what is supposed to be a fast-moving novel instead come off like a laborious slog. 

Also, Bloody Sunday clarifies something I have long assumed: that George Harmon Smith was the author of Bronson: Blind Rage. In past reviews of Smith’s novels I was 99% sure of this; after reading Bloody Sunday, I’m 100% sure. I’ve only read a few books by Smith, including one non-series title (Bad Guy), but his style is unmistakeable, and all of his action stories feature a cold-blooded “hero” who tortures and kills without a thought and who is coupled with a headstrong, independent young woman who comes off as more human than the hero does. All these things are present in Bloody Sunday, just as they are in Bronson: Blind Rage, with the additional confirmation this time that here in Bloody Sunday George Harmon Smith uses the word “re-focussed,” instead of the more-typical spelling “focused.” Which is exactly how the word was (miss)spelled in Bronson: Blind Rage. I noted the unusual spelling of “focussed” in my review of Blind Rage back in 2012, hoping it would be a clue to the author’s identity…and Bloody Sunday was the payoff. When I saw the word “re-focussed” in this book it was the final confirmation of what I’d long assumed. 

But then, checking my review of Bad Guy from the other year, I see that I noted that “focussed” also appeared in that book, so it looks like even a few years ago I was 100% sure that George Harmon Smith was the mystery author of Bronson: Blind Rage. 

Also, I have a strong suspicion that Bloody Sunday started life as an installment of Bronson. That series ran three volumes, and George Harmon Smith only wrote the first volume. But I’m betting this Marksman book was originally going to be another Bronson offering from Smith. It has more in common with the Bronson series than the Marksman series, and just like Blind Rage was a lift of Death Wish, Bloody Sunday is a sort of proto-lift of the Death Wish sequels, in which Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey would dispense thugs in vengeance for wrongs done to others, not for wrongs done to himself. 

In other words, Philip “The Marksman” Magellan does not waste Mafia creeps in Bloody Sunday in his never-ending vendetta against the mob for the killing of his family. Rather, he spends the novel hunting down four wealthy men who, years ago, killed a young woman and got away with it, and Magellan, having met the young woman’s grandmother, has vowed to dispense bloody justice in the murdered girl’s name – even though he never even knew her. This storyline is much more at home in the Bronson series which, especially in George Harmon Smith’s Blind Rage, was concerned with “hero” Bronson taking out some wealthy “untouchables” who committed violent crimes with no reprisals. Bloody Sunday features the same storyline, only here the protagonist has not been affected by the crimes he is avenging. 

So my guess is, George Harmon Smtih wrote Blind Rage, then Len Levinson wrote the second volume and Joseph Chadwick wrote the third volume, but Bronson was cancelled while Smith was working on what would have been the fourth volume…and so he just turned it into a Marksman novel. It’s not even that preposterous of a theory; it’s not like this series is grounded in continuity or a theme that links all the titles. Just take a look at The Torture Contract, for example, which also comes off like an installment of an entirely different series, with Magellan reduced to secondary status, going about on the whims of a sadistic genius. The timing also works, with Bronson ending in 1975 and Bloody Sunday coming out in 1976, so George Harmon Smith clearly wrote Bloody Sunday shortly after he wrote Bronson: Blind Rage. 

Anyway, I rest my case. 

Only the opening of Bloody Sunday seems to come from your typical Marksman novel…sort of. Actually, it also serves as an indication of how George Harmon Smith just wasn’t suited to this genre…it’s an overwritten slog that, again, has more in common with something like John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogs than it does with an action series. We meet Magellan – only referred to as “he” for the first chapter – after he’s hit some Mafia creeps, but he’s been shot in the shoulder in the shootout, and he’s bleeding to death as he sits on a bus when the novel opens. Smith well captures Magellan’s plight here, but it’s way overwritten; even more overwritten than one of my reviews!! 

Here we’re informed of Magellan’s endless war on the Mafia, and how he just killed some of them in payback, though we didn’t get to see any of it…again, it’s like stuff grafted on to what was originally a Bronson plot. Magellan passes out in a dark alley (eventually we learn the city is Cleveland), and he’s found by an old woman named Zennie, a country-type who has a lot of Smith’s patented “headstrong woman” dialog. She nurses Magellan back to health if for no other reason than her country-born politeness, but more importantly there’s Zennie’s hotstuff young granddaughter, Janie (barely out of her teens, Magellan suspects), with her “small, jutting breasts.” 

Janie is from the same template as George Harmon Smith’s other female characters: very young, very independent, very outspoken. She goes on and on with a lot of dialog, but she’s got a lot of spunk because she’s just gotten out of juvie. She takes an instant “ownership” of the convalescing Magellan, and in fact soon learns who he is (“the badass of the badasses”). They start having sex, but as usual Smith keeps it off-page. Meanwhile Magellan has already decided to help out old Zennie, who has related in seemingly-endless exposition that almost all of her 11 sons (!) have died (and we get background detail on almost all of them!), but most importantly another granddaughter of hers, Wendy, died two years ago – and Zennie believes the girl was murdered by a quartet of wealthy businessmen who came into town and hired Wendy for her typing skills. 

On such shaky ground does Bloody Sunday stand: Magellan swears to avenge Wendy, if only because Zennie took care of Magellan and nursed him to health. Meanwhile he displays his bad-assery by taking out a black pimp-type who keeps scoping out Janie, pulling his silencered gun on him and later firebombing the pimp’s place with homemade napalm. It’s all crazy but this stuff too is written in Harmon Smith’s overwritten style, with the action less hard-hitting than it is overbearing. I mean it’s great writing, yes, but it’s not great for the genre. It’s inflated and ornate when it should be terse and fast. 

On page 64 the plot changes and here’s where I argue it is essentially the Bronson novel George Harmon Smith originally wrote. Magellan takes off in pursuit of these four men he’s never met, who never wronged him personally, to kill them one by one for Zennie. The first guy’s in New Mexico and Magellan scopes him out – he’s a laywer in a fancy building – and then goes in there on the pretext of a meeting and beats the guy around, causing him to have a fatal heart attack. But in the interrogation Magellan learns that Wendy was indeed killed by the four men, and from this lawyer Magellan gets the addresses of the other three he must kill. 

The next target takes up the majority of the narrative, if for no other reason than the motor-mouthed “chick” Magellan picks up: Cindy, a spaced-out Californian surfer girl who is turning tricks here in Topeka to get enough money to go back to California. She sashays up to Magellan while he’s scoping out target #2 and starts talking…and nearly a hundred pages later she’s still talking. George Harmon Smith does the same thing here that he did in Icepick In The Spine: namely, he replaces one “strong young woman” (Janie) with another “strong young woman,” and the issue is they both sort of run together for the reader. About the only difference I could tell was that Cindy was a little older, had bigger boobs, and talked a whole bunch more. 

In previous books I’ve really admired Smith’s penchant for bringing to life independent, fully-realized female characters in his men’s adventure novels, but I felt he really stumbled with Cindy here in Bloody Sunday, as she was more annoying than anything. And she has a lot of dialog and scenes here; there are endless scenes of her bumming a cigarette from Magellan or drinking beer – she informs Magellan she’d “only weigh seventy-five pounds” if she didn’t drink beer, and there are copious scenes of her buying a six-pack and downing it and “burping” afterward. Meanwhile the action stops dead as Magellan, a guy who in previous volumes could wipe out an entire Mafia squad in a handful of paragraphs, spends several densely-written chapters trying to figure out how to safely kill some rich businessman in Topeka!! 

Have I mentioned yet that I suspect Bloody Sunday started life as a Bronson novel? 

Because really, it’s fairly believable that a fromer architect, or whatever the hell Bronson was before he became a vigilante, might need endless chapters to figure out how to kill some random rich guy. But Magellan? Even in the previous volumes by Smith, the guy was essentially unstoppable. But man it’s kind of repetitive here in Bloody Sunday, with Magellan even getting Cindy in on the act, using her as bait for his target’s lesbian daughter(!?). Oh and meanwhile, the veteran men’s adventure reader will know where all this is going when Magellan goes from calling Cindy “chick” (among other names when she gets on his nerves)…to “darling.” Yes, Magellan and Cindy as expected become an item, with Smith as is his wont keeping all the dirty stuff completely off-page…usually just relayed, again as is his wont, via the female character’s never-ending exposition. 

Violence is also minimal for the most part. Magellan only makes a few kills in the book, usually dispensing someone with his pistol in bloodless fashion. And also when he takes out his targets it’s anticlimactic, especially given the inordinate narrative time given over to the setup for each execution. Indeed, Smith overwrites to such an extent that Magellan’s third and fourth targets are essentially rushed through, with the third target having the greatest ramifications for Magellan – what happens to Cindy is what happens to every other “strong, independent woman” in a George Harmon Smith novel, and won’t be surprising to any reader. Especially after Magellan starts calling her “honey” and whatnot. 

But this does bring Magellan personally into the vendetta at least – and here we get a very extended sequence of George Harmon Smith’s other hallmark: the “hero” torturing someone. This one really goes to town and might be the most over-the-top instance yet, as if Smith were intentionally trying to outdo his previous torture scenes. Magellan gets target number three and first puts a hook in his back, then drags him along behind his car in a field. Then he ties him up and whips him with a barbed wire whip. Then he throws “brine” on the guy’s bloody, lashed body. Then he burns the guy’s testicles off. Then he whips him again! By the end, we’re informed that the guy’s intestines are hanging out and etc. 

As Magellan warned Cindy earlier in the novel, “It’s going to get gross.” This I believe is the first knowing instance I’ve encountered in one of George Harmon Smith’s installments; Cindy nearly pukes when she sees Magellan stomp on some guy’s skull, and Magellan tells her things will only get more “gross” as he goes along. But man, after this extended torture scene, victim number four is hastily dispatched, as Smith has nearly reached his word count. Actually, I’d say he’s well exceeded his word count, as Bloody Sunday is a lot longer (and more laborious) than the typical Marksman installment. 

The book is curiously constructed, again harkening back to Icepick In The Spine, in that Janie is introduced as the first girl, then disappears from the text for like a hundred pages, replaced by Cindy…and then Janie returns at the end, when Magellan goes back to Cleveland. What’s interesting is that Smith does not mention that Magellan will soon leave her, or whatever…in fact, earlier in the book, before leaving on his vendetta, Magellan promises Janie that he will come back to her. And he keeps his promise at book’s end, George Harmon Smith ending the novel with the two walking off together. It almost comes off like the end of Magellan’s saga, which is curious. 

And as hard as it is to believe, we are coming near the end of The Marksman. There are only three more volumes in the series, and Lynn Munroe seems to indicate that George Harmon Smith wrote at least one more of them. So I’ll be curious to see if that one too comes off like a lost installment of Bronson. 

*As Lynn further notes, Bloody Sunday was reprinted a few years later, this time by sister imprint Leisure Books and credited to Aaron Fletcher. I agree with Lynn that this does not mean that Aaron Fletcher actually wrote the book. For one, the style here in Bloody Sunday is identical to the style in the Marksman novels we know for certain were written by George Harmon Smith…because Lynn Munroe was actually in contact with Smith’s relatives. I too was in touch with them for a while, and in fact received several nice emails from Smith’s granddaughter (which is interesting in hindsight, given this novel’s focus on two granddaughters, Wendy and Janie). So we know that George Harmon Smith indeed wrote many of these novels, especially Icepick In The Spine, as it’s one he would apparently mention facetiously to friends and family. And also, Icepick In The Spine was later reprinted by Leisure (as Icepick), where it too was credited to Aaron Fletcher. 

Aaron Fletcher was a real person, apparently, and thus one might guess that he really was the author of Bloody Sunday and Icepick In the Spine, and Belmont-Tower/Leisure merely reprinted those books under his real name once Fletcher gained success with his novel Outback. 

But remember…Belmont-Tower/Leisure was the same publisher that also published The Terrorists as by “Nelson DeMille,” even though it was really written by Len Levinson! So then, this grungy little publishing house had absolutely no problem with mis-crediting a novel to a more-famous name, even if the more-famous name didn’t actually write the novel! So the fact that “Aaron Fletcher” was credited as the author of these Marksman novels in the Leisure Books reprints probably doesn’t mean a damn thing, other than Leisure/Belmont-Tower’s typical lack of giving a shit. 

So finally, at long last, I rest my case again.

Murder Machine (The Marksman #20)

Murder Machine, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower 

Russell Smith turns in another volume of The Marksman that’s just as crazed as his others, with the added bonus that Murder Machine features what I’m sure is some intentional in-jokery, as well as a self-awareness that’s very unique for the series. My assumption is by this point the manuscripts Smith had written the year before were coming out in paperback, and he saw how editor Peter McCurtin was butchering them, changing them wily-nily into Sharpshooter novels, and for this book Smith decided to hell with it – he was just going to have some fun. 

Lynn Munroe apty summarizes Murder Machine as a “a schizoid read,” but he also detects the hand of fellow series ghostwriter George Harmon Smith in the work. I personally didn’t detect Harmon Smith’s style at all – to me his style is very noticeable, a sort of sub-John Gardner, with very literate prose but a tendency to overdescribe the most mundane of actions. See for example #18: Icepick In The Spine, which was certainly the work of George Harmon Smith. Murder Machine on the other hand has the stamp of the other Smith on the series: Russell, with the same loosey-goosey approach to plot, a bunch of lowlife loudmouth Mafioso who talk like rejected Jerky Boys characters, and a “hero” who comes off like a monster. I mean Russell Smith’s unique style is evident throughout the book, like for example: 

This excerpt, while displaying Russell Smith’s distinctive style, also demonstrates another new element with this volume: a constant reminder that Philip “The Marksman” Magellan will keep killing Mafia until he himself is dead. Again, I get the impression that, given that we’re already on the twentieth volume of the series, someone at Belmont Tower must’ve felt a reinforcement of Magellan’s motive was in order. There are frequent parts in Murder Machine where Magellan will resolve himself to the destruction of the Mafia, given their murder of his wife and son – an event which happened, of course, in the first volume of a different series: The Assassin. 

But speaking of how Philip Magellan started life as Robert Briganti in another series, and then turned into “Johnny Rock” for the Marksman manuscripts McCurtin arbitrarily turned into Sharpshooter installments, this brings us to the intentional in-jokery I mentioned above. I strongly suspect that, by the time he was writing Murder Machine, Russell Smith saw that McCurtin was publishing his Marksman manuscripts as a completely different series – see for example The Sharpshooter #2 and The Sharpshooter #3. I say this due to nothing more than an otherwise random comment early in the book. When the mobsters in New York start freaking out that Magellan’s in town, one of them says, “You remember that Sharpshooter guy from last year? Magellan’s his name?” 

Now, never in a Marksman novel has Philip Magellan ever been incorrectly identified as “Johnny Rock.” It’s only in The Sharpshooter where the “Magellan” goofs appear, or where Rock, the Sharpshooter, is incorrectly referred to as “The Marksman.” Because, of course, those novels started life as Marksman manuscripts, and poor copyediting resulted in a mish-mash of protagonist names. But after this early “Sharpshooter” mention, Magellan is consistently referred to as “The Marksman,” even in the narrative. Magellan also frequently thinks of himself as “The Marksman,” ie “the luck of The Marksman was with him” and etc, as if Smith were doubling down on the fact that he was writing a Marksman novel, but with that sole “Sharpshooter guy” bit he was acknowledging his awareness of the situation. 

There’s even more subtle in-jokery in Murder Machine: there are characters named Frank and Peter, ie “Frank Scarpetta” and “Peter McCurtin.” But I think the biggest indication here that Russell Smith was in on the whole twisted joke is that Murder Machine shows the first signs of self-awareness in the series. Another minor Mafia stooge later in the book goes over Magellan’s modus operandi, noting how the Marksman generally just shows up in a city, with no particular purpose, but somehow gets involved with the Mafia – usually due to their own stupidity – and then Magellan doesn’t leave town until he’s killed everyone. In other words, the “plot” of every single Russell Smith installment. The stooge basically implies that Magellan is a supernatural force who gets by on luck, something Magellan himself realizes. Bonus note – the stooge apparently tangled with Magellan “a year ago” (and lost an eye in the fight), in “New Brunswick,” a reference to the earlier Russell Smith entry #14: Kill!. 

Another new element in Murder Machine is the sudden focus on sleazy sex. Russell Smith has turned in some sleaze in prior installments, but this time it’s really over the top. Lynn Munroe speculates that this material is “grafted in from some porn novel,” but again it is similar to the sleaze material in previous Smith installments. Personally I just thought it was a quick (and dirty) way Smith figured he could meet his word count. Because of all the Smith books I’ve read, Murder Machine most comes off like a first draft that was cranked out over a single weekend, the author fueled by a steady stream of booze and amphetimines. Again this could be more indication of a “who gives a shit?” sentiment, given Smith’s recent awareness that his manuscripts were being butchered during publication. 

And just to clarify, this is all my impression – Lynn Munroe could be entirely correct that Murder Machine is a collaboration between the two Smiths, and the sleaze stuff is indeed grafted in from a different novel. Lynn performed a herculean task of figuring out the development of this series, and who wrote what volumes. To me though it just seemed like every other volume of Russell Smith’s I’ve read, with none of the literary flourishes of GH Smith. 

Well anyway, there’s of course no pickup from the previous volume, which was written by a different author. Curiously there seems to be a pickup from an earlier Smith installment, possibly #15: Die Killer Die!, as when we meet Magellan he’s flying back to the US, returning from a trip to France. That was the most recent volume of the series Russell Smith wrote, so it seems likely that Murder Machine picks up after it. As I’ve written before, Russell Smith’s books – from both series – could be excised into their own separate series, with even a bit of continuity linking them. Otherwise though there’s no plot per se, and Murder Machine is a lift of every other Russell Smith installment, following that same setup mentioned above: Magellan goes to New York, literally bumps into a Mafia thug on the street, and then starts killing them all off, ultimately wiping out a heroin pipeline. 

But Magellan’s practically a supporting character. As with most Russell Smith installments, there’s a big focus on one-off characters, all of them mobsters. There’s also a convoluted subplot about a triple-cross involving a bank robbery, heroin, and bombs. It’s hard to keep up with all this because these characters all talk the same and there’s a lot of flashbacks that jumble up the forward momentum. Also it soon becomes clear that the author himself is not paying attention to his own plot. As usual though Magellan has nothing to do with any of this, but he acts almost like a divine force in how he just screws up all the carefully-laid plans…without even expressly planning to. 

The central characters here would be Frank Savago, Manny Weintraub, and Leah Castellano – who per Lynn’s note is abruptly referred to as "Lily” for several pages later in the book, demonstrating how sloppily it was written and edited. There are a ton of run-on sentences and typos throughout, but there’s also an undeniable energy; I mean just look at the excerpt above. Oh and we learn this time that Magellan has spent “years” searching for a mysterious figure in the Mafia – indeed, a figure whose legend almost matches that of the Marskman’s: a shadowy figure called “Mister Lee.” But Smith doesn’t even bother to play out the mystery because it’s quickly clear who “Mister” Lee really is. 

Now let’s take a look at the sleaze. It runs rampant in the novel, and again could be evidence of some in-jokery. For one, there’s Manny Weintraub, aka “Manny Wein,” an apparently older and heavyset Jewish mobster who has a young hotstuff wife…who, in every scene, is giving Manny a blowjob. Even in the parts where Manny is with other characters, he’ll be thinking about his wife’s blowjobs. Oh and meanwhile we’re informed that while she is performing her oral duties, the wife herself is being orally pleased by some naked woman. All of them sitting on a big round motorized leather couch Manny has specifically purchased for sex. Actually oral sex is the most frequently mentioned topic here, particularly on the female end of the spectrum; there’s a several-page sequence where Leah has hot lesbian sex with her live-in “winsome Negress” maid (who in true ‘70s fashion smokes a joint before the festivities). 

Russell Smith takes us into a whole different world of sleaze when Leah indulges in a bit of necrophilia. Per that triple-cross mentioned above, Leah finds herself in possession of a ton of money and heroin, and she buries it all in the cellar of a desolate mansion upstate. Then she murders the brawny stooge she’s used to do all the labor…ahd has sex with his corpse: 

Magellan himself even gets laid this time, a rare event to be sure, but it happens off-page. It’s courtesy an Asian hooker Magellan gets in his hotel (as with every other Russell Smith installment, the majority of the tale features Magellan checking into and out of various hotels)…who, apropos of nothing, tries to lift Magellan’s wallet the next morning. But Magellan is only pretending to sleep, and catches her in the act. He drugs her with his usual assortment of syringes, shaves her head and “pubic mound,” and then even more randomly tapes her “from ankles to thighs” with adhesive tape, “like a mummy,” and tosses her uncoscious form in the elevator and sends it to the lobby! Just another ultra-bizarre scene of random sadism, but that’s what we expect from Russell Smith. Oh and Magellan secretly watches the lez action with Leah later in the book, getting super turned on: “It was an incredible orgy scene Magellan would not soon forget. He’d not seen anything like it in his life!” 

As ever Magellan totes around his “artilery case.” For the first time ever (I believe), we’re given a list of its contents: 

In addition to this we’re informed that a photo of Magellan’s wife and son are on the inside lid of the case, as if “guarding” his weapons. As stated there is a big focus in Murder Machine on the loss that made Philip Magellan become The Marksman in the first place. This I assume is there to explain away his sadism, but as the drugging and shaving of the hooker would indicate, the guy’s just nuts – I mean the hooker has absolutely nothing to do with the Mafia. 

As expected, everything “climaxes” exactly how every previous Russell Smith installment has: all the villains do Magellan the courtesy of conveniently gathering in one location so he can blitz them from afar. Smith shows no mercy in his rushed finale – no mercy for the reader, either, telling us almost in passing of the bloody deaths of his various one-off characters. The most notable bit here is the “eerie calm” Magellan always feels after one of his massacres, which fills him with a sort of profundity. 

Man, what a crazy one this was – almost like a “greatest hits” of Russell Smith’s work on the series. It went through absolutely zero editing and you get the sense that they just printed everything straight off of his typewritten manuscript. But for that reason alone it was pretty entertaining. Oh and finally, Ken Barr’s cover illustration actually (sort of) illustrates a moment in the book; during an action bit where Magellan finds out that a private eye force is closing in on him, he goes up on a rooftop and knocks out a would-be sniper. Russell Smith pointedly mentions the “door” on the roof, which makes me figure we have here another instance of editor Peter McCurtin directing his author to include a specific scene, so there would be a part in the book to match the already-commissioned cover art – a la McCurtin giving Len Levinson a similar direction for Night Of The Assassins, in a bit Len later spoofed in The Last Buffoon.

The Syndicate

The Syndicate, by Peter McCurtin

January, 1972  Belmont Tower

In the early ‘70s Peter McCurtin turned out a series of standalone crime-thriller paperbacks through Belmont Tower (ie Omerta), and this was one of them. All of the books were related to the Mafia in some way, and the title of The Syndicate would indicate that it is as well. But in reality the title is a fakeout, and the novel is more about a professional assassin being hired to kill a neo-fascist in Ireland. The Mafia trappings are only in the assassin’s background, and otherwise The Syndicate is just an action-thriller with a decidely hardboiled bent, if only due to the narrator. 

The most interesting thing about The Syndicate is the narrator…who is none other than Philip Magellan. But not that Philip Magellan; this one’s the son of an Italian immigrant who changed his name from Filipo Maggiora to “Philip Magellan” when he tried to pursue a legal career in New York. Our narrator is the son of this Philip Magellan, and while it’s never outright stated it is implied that he has the same name; he is the Junior to Philip Magellan Senior. In point of fact, Magellan Junior – who as mentioned narrates The Syndicate – goes by various names; the back cover has it that his name is James Broderick. This is the name he uses for the majority of The Syndicate, but we know from the start that the real James Broderick died in an avalanche in 1970(!) and it’s just a cover identity used by our narrator…whose real name is Philip Magellan. 

A year after The Syndicate was published, McCurtin started up The Marksman at Belmont; as documented elsewhere on the blog, The Marksman itself started life as The Assassin, which was published by Dell Books, but for reasons unknown McCurtin moved over to Belmont, changed “The Assassin” to “The Marksman,” and also changed the name of the series protagonist from Robert Briganti to Philip Magellan. Clearly then he just liked the name, and truth be told “Magellan” is hardly mentioned in The Syndicate, and only has any relevance in hindsight. Readers with no knowledge of The Marskman probably wouldn’t even notice that the narrator’s real name is Philip Magellan. 

But man, for a professional assassin whose uncle is a Mafia don, this particular Magellan has a narratorial voice that is more becoming of, say, a literature professor who has delusions of being Raymond Chandler. Throughout the book “Magellan” will refer to obscure books and poetry, yet relayed through a voice that sounds like someone mimicking Humphrey Bogart. The delivery just fails, is what I’m trying to say, and I had a hard time buying it…it would have made a lot more sense for The Syndicate to be in third-person. Also another issue I had is that McCurtin here has taken what is basically a short story and padded it out to 153 pages, and unfortunately we aren’t talking entertaining padding. The Syndicate is dull for the most part, and even the finale – which the entire novel builds toward – is lackluster. 

The Mafia stuff only comes up in the very beginning; Magellan is summoned by his uncle, Don Eduardo. We get vague backstory that Eduardo was brothers with Magellan’s father, but Magellan Senior never made a name for himself because he never went into crime, and died at a young age. Eduardo paid for Magellan Junior’s schooling and whatnot, but Magellan craved action, so he went to ‘Nam and after which he became a professional killer for his uncle. So now the old man has a new job for Magellan: kill C. Alex Ritter, a neo-fascist who himself is really an Italian but who has given himself an English name. In quickly-relayed setup we learn that Ritter’s father was pals with Mussolini, and ended up the same as the dictator, but now Ritter Jr. has gotten hold of the family fortune and he too believes in fascism. 

So there’s subtext here of two men who are sons of Italian fathers but who go by English names, one of the men a modern-day Mussolini and the other a paid killer, but McCurtin doesn’t do much with this similar-background setup. In reality, he just writes a simple suspense tale. His biggest sin is that he fails to make Ritter seem like a viable threat. I mean we’re told the guy is wealthy and has his own army, and has been kicked out of various countries for his fascist blather…but man that’s really all he’s got. When he finally appears in the text, very late in the novel, he just rants and raves and comes off more like an idiot than someone the Mafia would want dead. And also why exactly Don Eduardo wants him dead is a mystery…he essentially gives Magellan a quick rundown on Ritter’s Italian background, says he’s sick of the way the world is going, and tells Magellan to kill the would-be dictator. That’s it, and Magellan’s off for Dublin. 

As you can see, we aren’t talking a densely-plotted thriller here. And McCurtin will only proceed to spin his wheels for the duration of the novel, which sees Magellan talking to various Irish characters and tyring to ingratiate himself into Ritter’s orbit: in true dictator fashion, Ritter lives in a castle in the Irish countryside. Magellan’s plan is so cliched the villains even make fun of him for thinking it would work: he goes around Dublin and environs and starts ranting about right-wing issues, getting in fights with “communists” in bars, so as to make a name for himself – and hopefully catch the attention of Ritter’s men. He gets thrown in jail after one bar fight, but otherwise this sequence is pretty tepid and is composed mostly of one-off Irish characters talking about Irish stuff. If I wanted that I’d read James Joyce, not a novel titled The Syndicate. 

Eventually Magellan finds himself in the countryside, where he is abducted by the very people he’s been seeking: Ritter’s goons. He starts a bar fight with a Ritter thug named Doolin, after which Doolin and a sadistic former British officer named Sir Anthony abduct Magellan. Along for the ride is Nora, a pretty psychiatrist who is also aligned with Ritter. These three will serve to represent Ritter’s apparently-vast fascist empire. They take Magellan back to the dungeon in Ritter’s castle where they proceed to beat him unmerciful. Somehow they know that “James Broderick” is a false name, and Magellan finally admits that his “real” name is “Dorf.” This of course made me think of Dorf On Golf. He convinces them he’s a professional assassin, and says that he was hired by some unknown party to assassinate Ritter, but changed his mind and decided to join Ritter instead. 

So in other words, despite the ridicule Magellan’s plot works exactly as intended. But as you can see with just three characters and all the dialog and vibe-setting, The Syndicate is more of a hardboiled yarn than the action tale you might expect. Also the back cover is very misleading in that a “girl” will distract Magellan in his kill-quest; this presumably refers to Nora, who only exchanges dialog with Magellan in the novel. There’s zero sex, and even the genre-customary exploitation is absent. Even Ritter isn’t properly exploited; when the would-be Hitler finally appears, all he does is stalk around his castle while he rants and raves. It’s hard to imagine him posing a threat to anyone. But then the “highfalutin hardboiled” style in which McCurtin has written the novel doesn’t help: 

Even the finale is underwhelming. Rather than a slam-bang ending with Magellan as a one-man army against Ritter’s thugs, it continues on the hardboiled angle, with Magellan cagily playing factions against one another. But by “factions” I mean just those same three characters: Sir Anthony, Doolin, and Nora. We only get a quick glimpse of Ritter’s army in the harried finale, and as for the fulfillment of Magellan’s mission it’s only relayed in the very final sentences of the book. It’s as if McCurtin hit his word count and said that’s that. I get the impression that he too was unsatisfied with The Syndicate, hence he salvaged the one memorable thing about it for a future series: the name “Philip Magellan.”

The Torture Contract (The Marksman #19)

The Torture Contract, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower

There’s no volume number on the cover, but this was the 19th installment of The Marksman. The first page of the book mistakenly states that it’s “volume #18,” but no doubt editor Peter McCurtin realized the 18th volume was the previous one, so at least he kept the goof off of the cover. From here on McCurtin or whoever else at Belmont Tower just decided to play it safe and put no further volume numbers on the books. They must’ve been really confused, because there weren’t just 19 volumes of The Marksman, there were actually more – let’s not forget all those earlier installments by Russell Smith that got turned into Sharpshooter novels. But all of these books were published in the span of like two years, so no doubt the hectic pace – and arbitrary transitioning of manuscripts into a different series – caused a lot of behind-the-scenes confusion. 

According to the Catalog Of Copyright Entries, The Torture Contract was written by series newcomer Steve Sherman. This would be his only contribution to the series. I can’t find much info about him; I can only find one novel he published under his own name, a 1977 Western PBO titled The Hangtree that was published by low-rent Major Books. I’ll say one thing about Sherman: he wasn’t afraid to experiment. In fact I’m tempted to say that The Torture Contract is the Sicilian Slaughter of the Marksman series, in that it’s such an anomaly. But then it’s not like there’s much continuity in this series to begin with, so in a sense every volume of The Marksman is an anomaly. But still, The Torture Contract is just plain weird. As Lynn Munroe aptly put it, “This is a bizarre entry, not much like any other Marksman book.” How bizarre is it? Well, Philip “The Marksman” Magellan kills someone with a laser rifle in it. And also Magellan’s female companion is put into a sex research clinic straight out of The Sex Surrogates, complete with the scientists attempting to make a sex “machine” out of her. 

How Sherman came onto the series and how editor McCurtin allowed him such freedom will have to be a mystery. My assumption is that it was that aforementioned hectic publishing schedule. When you’ve published 19 volumes of a series in less than two years, thoroughness and exactitude probably aren’t your top concerns. McCurtin was probably just happy he received Sherman’s manuscript on time. And Sherman isn’t a bad writer at all; his style is very humdrum, very meat and potatoes a la Ralph Hayes…but man he scuzzes things up. There’s just a grimy vibe to the book, like one of the grindhouse/drive-in flicks of the era. To be sure, it’s not overly explicit; Magellan only makes a few kills, and they aren’t nearly as gory as in the other books, and the majority of the sex occurs off-page, with the one sex scene toward the end over and done with in a few sentences. But Sherman pulls no punches with some of his dialog and narrative, as I’ll demonstrate in the excerpts below. Sherman also knows a lot about different subjects, baldly expositing about various arcane research subjects via this volume’s villain, the Professor – who himself seems as if he’s stepped out of some other series. He’s a brainiac megavillian with his own fortress, one that’s secured by deadly traps, and not much like any previous character in the series. 

As Lynn Munroe also notes, Magellan here “has suddenly turned into a different kind of character, a private detective.” I totally agree with Lynn on the first half of that statement, but I don’t think it’s so much that Magellan acts like a private eye in The Torture Contract…it’s more so that he becomes totally under the thrall of the Professor. As in, reporting to him as if Magellan were just another of the Professor’s lackeys. Hell, there are parts where Magellan is straight-up afraid of the Professor. This so goes against the grain of the character that I’m surprised editor McCurtin let it slip. What’s weird though is that in the first quarter of the novel, before the Professor appears, Magellan is his usual bad-ass self, not giving a shit about anyone and eager to taste Mafia blood. This is certainly McCurtin’s influence; Len Levinson has told me that Peter McCurtin’s editorial insight on The Sharpshooter (which McCurtin also edited) was that protagonist Johnny Rock “killed in cold hate.” I would imagine this same editorial direction extended to Philip Magellan in The Marksman. 

We meet Magellan just as he’s arrived in New York, beckoned by “society page female” Angela Peabody. We’re informed that “two years ago” Magellan helped Angela’s father, wealthy businessman Johnathon Peabody, with a Mafia problem. Now Angela has called on Magellan to help her, and even though Magellan has “never liked” the attractive young woman he meets with her in her art store in Manhattan. In an opening sequence we’ve read as two hoods, one named Johnny Sin and the other named Logosa, heisted a Renoir from a museum. Now Angela has bought a sketch of this Renoir, but has learned it’s a fake. She bought it from Johnny Sin for $5,000 and she wants her money back. So this setup is already unlike any other in the series. However the novel itself will only proceed to become more unusual. 

As mentioned Magellan is very much in typical form here, busting heads and checking leads in the dingy areas of the city. He gets a tip from a guy who runs a whorehouse that Johnny Sin might be in Los Angeles. So Magellan gets an American Airlines flight (Sherman mentions the airline so many times you wonder if he was getting a kickback) and heads over to California – with Angela in disguise following. When Magellan learns that Johnny Sin, a former Mafioso, is now working for the Professor, the book begins to really get outside the series template. Magellan and Angela head to Palos Verdes, where the mysterious Professor lives in his fortress in the woods. Magellan and Angela watch as a guard dog rips a man to shreds on the grounds. All of this is a game for the Professor, who comes out to jovially greet his guests. He’s an older man with silver hair, and he’s a “billionaire,” operating an underground “laboratory of forgerers.” 

The fake Renoir Angela got was produced in these underground labs, and she and Magellan are given a grand tour of the place, with the Professor expositing on the various projects – people recreating Stradivarius violins, finishing an incomplete Elizabeth Browning poem, even working on mummification in the exact style of the ancient Egyptians. A vast enterprise of specialists in their various glass-walled chambers, working on counterfeits so exact that even experts would be fooled. Angela, who is almost more of the protagonist than Magellan is, really takes to it all. Except for the sex research part: the Professor also has three scientists working on “simultaneous orgasms” with a lifelike female sex doll, all of course with the help of some local whores. I mean it’s all really like a James Bond film, only with that grimy grindhouse vibe; the Professor is totally in the Bond villain mold, an evil supervillain with arrogance to spare. 

Which begs the question why Magellan decides to work for him. The Professor propositions our supposed hero; the Professor says that the Mafia is trying to horn in on his operation, and he needs help killing them off. He knows with his omniscience who Magellan is, and offers him several times the amount Angela is paying him: all Magellan has to do is kill Mafia for the Professor. Magellan eagerly accepts, but from this point on he’s working for the Professor. It leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. Magellan is a lone wolf mob-buster…he works for no one! And what’s worse is he’ll never push back against the Professor; indeed, Angela Peabody acts more like the hero in this regard, as she begins to resent – and fear – the clearly insane Professor. As Lynn Munroe notes, a lot of the novel takes place in the Professor’s fortress, with a lot of exposition on the various counterfeit schemes. Through it all Magellan is a silent bystander as the Professor blabs away; Magellan’s almost a supporting character in his own book. 

What’s worse is that Sherman tries to work an action scene into the novel midway through, and it just demonstrates how weak his version of Magellan actually is. The Professor orders Angela to head back to New York and steal a valuable coin from her socialite friend. And Magellan, Johnny Sin, and Logosa are to go along. They pull the heist easily, but afterwards they find themselves tailed by four mobsters. In any other Marksman novel, Magellan would waste these guys with no problem. Here, though, he’s barely able to take on just one of them. That’s one lesson Sherman failed to take from McCurtin. Another thing Len told me was that in his first two Sharpshooter novels, The Worst Way To Die and Night Of The Assassins, he inadvertently made his Johnny Rock “too neurotic” and too concerned. This is when McCurtin stepped in and told him the “kill with cold hate concept,” that Johnny Rock wouldn’t survive long if he was worried all the time. But Philip Magellan comes off as too concerned here…which is strange, given how he came off like a badass in the first quarter of the book. 

Things get even weirder when the Mafia stages an attack on the Professor’s fortress later on. But still, one wonders why the Professor even needs Magellan; he takes Magellan and Angela up to a room at the top of the fortress and gleefully goes about cornering and killing the Mafia team that has infiltrated the grounds, employing a host of remote-controlled hidden weapons. One of the weapons you can control up here is a laser gun, and as mentioned Magellan gets to fire it: 

Meanwhile the Professor kills off other Mafioso with an electric fence, and even more crazily he has a trapdoor that drops a few of them into acid. And he laughs and laughs like a madman throughout, Sherman doling out the lurid weirdness in that bland style of his, just blunt declrarative statements, which only makes things even weirder. But anyone can plainly see the Professor is nuts. I mean he literally rolls on the floor in laughter when mobsters are killed, and later on he forces one of his lackeys into becoming a live subject of vivisection – the corpse to be mummified by resident expert Penword Suite. But the novel proceeds to get even weirder. Angela has taken it upon herself to propose to the Professor that she, Magellan, and Johnny Sin should become “partners” with the madman. Angela was very excited during the Park Avenue heist (indeed, we’re even bluntly informed that she, uh, got wet during it – again, the grimy vibe predominates), and now she wants to work permanently with the Professor…only as an equal. This has unexpected repercussions, and Angela finds herself forced into those sex experiments in the Professor’s lab. As she later relates to Magellan: 

Yeah, crazy shit for sure. “They’re making a machine out of me,” Angela tells Magellan, and the reader can’t help but wonder if Angela means this in the figurative sense, ie the three scientists are, per the dialog above, screwing her constantly like a veritable sex machine, or if she means it literally – that the artificial female the Professor hopes to create and sell is actually being based on Angela. Unfortunately we will get no resolution on this. Instead, Angela is desperate to escape…and Magellan, who has somehow become emasculated in the Professor’s employ, cagily seems to want to help her escape, though he too as mentioned is now scared of the Professor, so Magellan doesn’t want to rock the boat. The guy who in previous volumes would cut off Mafioso heads and carry them around is now afraid of a ranting old psychotic! But our lame hero does manage to propose to the Professor – over dinner! – that Angela be sent out of the fortress on some errand, and the Professor agrees.  

This takes us into the climax, though we don’t even realize it’s the climax: the Professor has it that a Hollywood-based Mafia don named Fiori was behind the attack on his fortress, and he wants Magellan to kill him. But Angela will be used as bait, and apparently if she does well she can go free. So Magellan and Angela leave the fortress, and only here does Magellan notice what a sexy broad Angela is, now that she’s dressed all slutty to catch the sleazy Fiori’s eye. But Angela herself has realized how hot she is…and take a gander at this bit of ‘70s-style female empowerment: 

I’ll refrain from spoilers here, but even in this sequence Magellan is emasculated. Angela is to lure Don Fiori off to some secluded spot for sex, and Magellan is to swoop in for the kill. And yet Magellan, for reasons never explained, just disappears while Angela rides off with the don, still not even showing up while Angela’s having sex with Fiori on the beach – the sole sex scene in the novel, and not even that explicit. When Magellan finally shows up, even here it takes him forever to take out of Fiori and his men, and the Mexican Standoff with Don Fiori at the climax is insulting to anyone who claims the title “The Marksman;” Magellan literally just holds his Beretta on Don Fiori and keeps telling the mobster to drop his gun, “The Marksman” apparently unable to get a clear shot. This whole bit seems to go on forever. 

Now we’re going to get into some spoilers, so skip this paragraph and the next if you don’t want to know. Sherman again shows how fearless he is in his approach to the series. When Magellan learns via a panicked Angela that she offered Don Fiori a deal (ie for Don Fiori to give Angela protection if she gave him information on the Professor in exchange), Magellan solves the problem of not being able to get a clear shot at the don: he shoots Angela, I mean shoots her dead, and then blows away Fiori. So this is acceptable because we readers already know Philip Magellan himself is insane, and Sherman has worked up the angle that our sadistic hero hates anyone who has anything to do with the Mafia…even for something as relatively minor as offering to make a deal with the Mafia. Okay, whatever. But we readers are still waiting to see the Professor get his own comeuppance, or at least to see what happens next in the Magellan-Professor relationship. Instead, the novel just ends! 

Now this has happened before, both in The Marksman and The Sharpshooter. Abrupt, “what the hell just happened?” finales are pretty much standard for this series, so I shouldn’t have been too put out this time. But dammit! I mean I wanted to see Magellan finally confront the Professor…maybe even brave his torture-trap fortress to show the old madman who the real top dog was. But it doesn’t happen, and the book literally ends right as Magellan blows Don Fiori away. And since this was the sole volume written by Steve Sherman, I’ll hazard a guess that the Professor will never be mentioned again. This is what I meant by the Sicilian Slaughter comparison; that Executioner novel too featured a main villain who was never seen or mentioned again, leaving readers to forever wonder what was supposed to happen next. And I mean so much is not explained, like for example the Professor’s omniscience – not only does he already know who Magellan is, but there’s also a bit where he’s managed to swipe a Beretta Magellan keeps hidden in the Los Angeles airport. How did the Professor even know it was there? 

Well, I went into all this detail because I have to say one thing about The Torture Contract: it kept me wondering what would happen next. Sherman certainly puts the reader as on edge as Angela Peabody, sticking his characters in a remote fortress with an insane madman. The setup was so outside the series template that I actually enjoyed it all – to the extent that I wish there had been more of it. But as mentioned this was, for whatever reason, Steve Sherman’s only novel for the series. Who knows, though…maybe someday someone might write a pastiche sequel that finally tells the rest of the story.

Trashing

Trashing, by Ann Fettaman 

No month stated, 1972  Belmont-Tower 

First published in hardcover in 1970 by Rolling Stone Magazine’s short-lived imprint, Straight Arrow Books, Trashing is the veiled autobiography of Ann Fettamen, aka Anita Hoffman (aka Abbie’s wife) writing under a pseudonym. I'm not sure if it was well-known that Hoffman was the author; the blurbs on the hardcover dust jacket make it clear that “Fettamen” is a cover name for a “well-known troublemaker;” one of these blurbs is even provided by Abbie himself. I've read somewhere that Abbie and Anita went on a cross-country booksigning tour, as Abbie’s Steal This Book was released at the same time, so both husband and wife had a book to promote – meaning Anita was making it clear she had written Trashing. So if Hoffman really being Fettamen was a well-known secret, then why even bother with the pseudonym ruse? Anyway, I digress. 

Readers of Abbie’s afore-mentioned Steal This Book will remember Anita from the photos of her therein. A tall and slender brunette with a fondness for stealing groceries and smashing apart the machinery of the Man, she poses throughout the book in the latest insurrectionist fashions. 

Besides being a primer on what Anita must’ve hoped would become the new model of American citizenry, Trashing is also pretty much the love story of her and Abbie. Only here Anita becomes “Ann” and Abbie becomes “Danny,” with the only change being Abbie’s trademark afro turning into shaggy blond locks. Other than that it’s the Abbie Hoffman you remember from your History Channel specials, spouting off about anything and everything and causing trouble for the establishment. Ann, who narrates the novel, meets Danny on the first page, and you'd be forgiven for thinking the novel’s some Harlequin Romance for the counterculture set; Anita writes about him in the most rhapsodic prose this side of Danielle Steele. They meet, Danny spouts some rhetoric, Ann swoons. They’re married a few pages later. 

Trashing comes off as a manifesto of the Yippie movement. Published in 1970, it belies none of the cynicism which later set into the counterculture/revolutionary movement. Instead, the characters (and our narrator) talk blithely and at length about the coming war against The Man, how life will be so splendid once the Man has been destroyed. Stealing is fine, as long as it’s from those in power – which, according to the novel, even includes the youthful rich, as one disgusting scene features Ann stealing as many purses as she can at a socialite party, only to be congratulated by Danny. Hoffman writes the scene in heroic fashion – yet another blow against the empire! – but really it shows the backstabbing treachery which eventually killed the hippie movement. 

Anita’s writing is pedestrian at times (lots of turgid dialog, pointless scenes), at others fantastic. One nightmarish setpiece involves her walking home from a friend’s place, through a dark alley, only to be kidnapped by three neo-Nazi thugs. A graphic, minutely-detailed, several-pages-long rape scene ensues, Hoffman writing with the precision and clarity of an objective observer. I’m unfamiliar with Anita’s life story, so I can only hope this portion of Trashing is pure fiction; no one deserves what her character goes through during these horrifying pages. But then a strange thing happens. The setpiece ends with a switch-up that makes me suspect the whole situation is a literary trick. Because, a few days after the incident, Ann feels well enough to be with Danny again. He’s distant, surly, obsessed with finding the now-disappeared neo-Nazis. Ann seduces him, and the words and descriptions Hoffman employs for this scene are mostly the same as those she used for the rape sequence. It’s fantastic how she thus toys with the reader. Is it a spot of literary innovation, light years away from the writing Hoffman otherwise displays in the novel? Or – more likely – is it just peacenik Hoffman’s way of bookending a scene of brutal sex with an act of actual lovemaking? 

Things proceed in an episodic fashion. Ann and Danny go about a number of “happenings,” most of them Danny’s idea. These include impromptu plays in the park, throwing red dye in the city’s fountains on President’s Day, and in the longest “let's freak the straights” sequence, mailing a joint to 3,000 random people. This scene involves Danny and Ann requesting financial backing from a wealthy rock group manager. This scene is nearly laughable, all these decades later. Danny and Ann berating the rocker for not backing the “true” revolution (that is, fighting against the man in the streets), the rocker claiming that his revolution is “in the consciousness.” 

From here we proceed to a Valentine’s Day orgy (now there’s an idea for Hallmark), exuberantly attended by Danny and Ann. Again, Hoffman’s detail here is as graphic as your average trash fiction. It’s like she wrote portions of the book with Penthouse Letters in mind. Was she just trying to spice up the manuscript? Did Rolling Stone demand the book be filled with as much sex as possible? I think maybe the idea is we’re to witness how Ann “grows” from a straightlaced conformist to a wanton, uninhibited rabble-rouser whose unafraid of anyone or anything. 

The book culminates in Ann gaining revenge upon those neo-Nazi rapists, beating them to a pulp with Danny and a fellow revolutionary at her side. This is another tautly-written scene, with chain whippings and stabbings and boots to the face. After this things are rosy, until a friend of the couples’ posts a complete list of local narcs in an underground newspaper, with names and addresses (ie proto-doxing)...and everyone’s shocked when the cops arrest him and proceed to beat him to near death. Ann and Danny try to raise cash for his too-high bail, but when it proves unfeasible they instead plan to bomb the local precinct as a warning. This leads to some intrigue and suspense as they discover a co-plotter is really an undercover Fed. The novel ends with Ann and Danny escaping to Canada, leaving their fellow revolutionaries detailed plans on how to destroy the US economy (a plan which hinges upon corrupting the computer that runs the ticker machine on Wall Street). 

It seems that Trashing was very much a product of its time, a forgotten period early in the radical movement when optimism still held sway. I have a feeling it was already dated the moment it was published. Hoffman wrote no other novels, and her only other publication was a collection of Abbie’s letters in the mid-seventies. She divorced him shortly after. It's a sad end to their tale; one can tell these two were truly in love, but with Abbie off in hiding and Annie raising their child “america” all by herself, it's not a surprising end. 

Abbie died in 1989 (by suicide, though this is debated by those who knew him), and Anita died in 1998 (of breast cancer), but the world she depicts in this novel had died long before.