The Butcher #14: African Contract

The Butcher #14: African Contract, by Stuart Jason

April, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Well, first the good news: James “Stuart Jason” Dockery for once writes an installment of The Butcher that isn’t a retread of every other volume he wrote, meaning that we don’t have the recurring template that I’ve nauseatingly complained about for the past several reviews of this series. But that brings us to the bad news: African Contract isn’t very good. It isn’t very good at all. 

This is a shame, because once again James Dockery proves himself a pretty good writer. But man, his plotting is so bizarre that even Russell Smith would get frustrated by one of Dockery’s books. Because once again Dockery takes a novel about a former mobster turned government assassin – Bucher the Butcher, of course – and, instead of the inner-city action piece one might expect from that setup, he turns in a tale where Bucher goes on a safari in Africa…oh, and apparently gets married! 

The reader knows he (and I’m sticking with the old-fashioned “he” instead of “they,” ‘cause we all know there’s no woman anywhere ever who would read a book titled The Butcher #14: African Contract, don’t we? I mean, let’s be honest!) is in for a bumpy and unusual read when African Contract opens, not with the series template opener of Bucher in some unstated city being dogged by two colorfully-named Mafia goons, both of which Bucher will gun down before being briefly arrested by a slackjawed yokel cop…but instead, African Contract opens with Bucher already in South Africa, already on a job – and indeed, there is no part where he is stalked in some city and briefly arrested, etc. (BTW I was trying to see how far I could stretch out that sentence.) 

Granted, that part will come later, but this time Dockery grafts his usual recurring schtick within the storyline proper (such as it is). So we don’t get the customary scene of Bucher being arrested, the slackjawed yokel cop going on about how illegal Bucher’s silencer is, etc. This does not mean that African Contract is wholly new, though; there are trace elements of Dockery’s previous installments throughout. 

Most notably would be #7: Death Race, an earlier tale in which Bucher, would you believe, fell in love, and you get a no-prize if you guess what happened to the gal in question. This time Dockery throws an old flame of Bucher’s on us, with little in the way of setup; Bucher’s in South Africa, on his latest assignment, when there’s a knock at his hotel room door…and he’s shocked to see his old girlfriend, blonde beauty Franziska, a South African babe who “picked Bucher up” on the street in Paris, years before, and Bucher immediately went for the gorgeous young college student with her “plump breasts.” 

It seems that Bucher was already a White Hat agent when he met Franziska, as it’s stated he was “on a mission” when she threw herself on him in Paris; at any rate, she calls him “gunslinger” as a pet name, so she is aware of his mob background. But here’s the thing: Franziska was the most important woman in Bucher’s life (though obviously we’ve never heard of her)…but Bucher thought she was dead! There’s a hazy backstory that she flew back home to South Africa, but the plane crashed, and Bucher was devastated for days because he thought she was gone. 

But now here the blonde is, alive and well – and what’s more, she’s a doctor, now. (Dockery isn’t very specific on how much time has passed, btw). She explains that she got off the plane when they had a stopover, and she herself later heard of the crash; further, she claims she sent Bucher a cable telling him that she was still alive, but Bucher never got any cable…so he’s just staggered that Franziska is still alive, after all this time. 

But Franziska isn’t done with the revelations yet – she also says she was pregnant at the time, but did not tell Bucher…however, the baby was stillborn. I mean all of this is a lot to dump on a guy who thought you were dead (for how many years we do not know), but still one would think Bucher would be a little suspicious of Franziska…especially because it soon develops that the mob knows Bucher is here in South Africa, and they’re sending people to kill him! 

Oh and Franziska has become a doctor due to the loss of her and Bucher’s child, and Bucher takes her back into his arms, and she will be the sole female character in the novel. But, anyone who has read the previous Dockery novels will know he is a “fade to black” sort of writer when it comes to the sleazy stuff; there are zero sex scenes in African Contract, and, also as is customary for Dockery, there is zero exploitation of Franziska. About the most we get is a bit, bizarrely late in the novel, where Dockery suddenly decides to write about her boobs:

Another thing the veteran reader of The Butcher might note from the above excerpt is that Franziska talks like every other female character in the series. A very highfalutin, reserved, “I rarely curse or use contractions” sort of demeanor, so Bucher cleary has a type…not to mention this is another facet in the (eternally?) recurring plot of Dockery’s installments – every novel sees Bucher in a sort of purgatory in which he experiences the same sequence of events, meets the same sort of woman, over and over again. 

Another thing the cagey reader might’ve noticed from the above is that Franziska refers to Bucher and herself as “husband and wife!” And mind you, this is Chapter 10 of the novel, and this is how the reader actually learns the two have gotten married! Poor Bucher is really head over heels for this girl he thought was dead…this is after 9 chapters in which Franziska acts increasingly suspicious…like for example she takes Bucher on a trip into the jungle in her “bush buggy,” and despite being a doctor she’s got this tricked-out truck that’s positively stuffed with weaponry, from rifles to machine guns. And when Bucher questions her on the necessity of this stuff, she has an explanation for each thing, like charging rhinos and whatnot, and Bucher accepts her explanations, and you wonder how this guy became such a top mobster (not to mention special agent). 

The main plot has to do with Bucher trying to figure out if the Mafia has started up a “replacement parts” deal where they give new human organs to old and dying mobsters. What’s been happening is that high-level mobsters who were previously old and near death have suddenly shown up looking younger and healthier. And also one of them was about to turn state’s evidence, or something, and exploded, and the theory is that these replacement parts might be booby trapped or somesuch. 

But as usual with a Dockery Butcher, all this is just background detail. Dockery does cater to his recurring template, just a bit out of the typical order: two superdeformed goons do inevitably come after Bucher, in the jungle no less, but Bucher easily dispatches them. There’s also a lot of stuff with various tribes Bucher and Fraziska encounter in the jungle, in particular one that is led by a guy who speaks in perfect British English, courtesy an education abroad. 

There’s also a lot of “flying fiction,” which harkens back to #10: Deadly Doctor and #11: Valley Of Death, in which Bucher suddenly became an aviator – which might indicate that Dockery had read those two installments, which were courtesy Lee Floren. Here Bucher flies an STOL around the jungle…I mean folks the title is not misleading at all. This one’s really an African Contract, and it’s more about Bucher on safari than it is the gritty action tale you might expect. 

Action is infrequent and, as ever with Dockery, fairly bloodless. Honestly, The Butcher is an anemic series in Dockery’s hands, not to mention how little it has in the way of sleazy exploitation. That said, there is still a ghoulish vibe to the series, mostly courtesy the dark humor Dockery brings to his plotting. But the thing is, Bucher must consistently be made to look stupid, as he overlooks obvious things…and, once again, the finale is a nightmare of exposition as everything is patiently explained to Bucher. This too is part of the recurring template of Dockery’s books. 

Overall, there isn’t much to recommend African Contract. I mean, saying “at least it isn’t a retread of the previous volumes” isn’t the most sterling endorsement. But what we get in exchange is so lackluster that a retread would’ve actually been preferable. Also, someone entirely new to the men’s adventure series will suspect something is amiss with Franziska’s story, but Bucher has proven himself in past Dockery installments to be a fool when it comes to women. 

At this point, I am looking forward to when Michael Avallone takes over The Butcher, but that won’t be for many more volumes – not until #27, to be precise.

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.

The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance

The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance, by Stuart Jason

January, 1975  Pinnacle Books

At this point my enjoyment of The Butcher is relegated to spotting which previous installments James “Stuart Jason” Dockery rips off. In Blood Vengeance it seems to mainly be #4: Blood Debt that he’s rewriting, given that the book features characters from that earlier installment, but there are also elements lifted from #8: Fire Bomb. 

But then, Blood Vengeance is the same as every other Dockery installment since the first volume. The opening sequence with the deformed Syndicate thugs versus Bucher, the slackjawed cop who must let Bucher go, the briefing with the never-named White Hat director, the bustling about the globe on the “latest crazy caper” which becomes ever more convoluted as the narrative progresses. The very few action scenes, all of which are the same and feature Bucher’s fast-draw technique making our hero almost superhuman. The grand guignol finale in which all the characters get together for a sadistic send-off, with Bucher wandering off with “the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth…” 

All of it is here, as it is in every other Butcher written by James Dockery. The only difference with Blood Vengeance is Dockery’s sudden obsession with castration. This theme runs through the entire novel, with four characters castrated during the course of events; the finale is especially over the top, with three of them being emasculated at the same time. And in true “sweat mag” style the guy turning them into eunuchs is a sadistic “dwarf” who is so skilled at this particular “treatment” that he can castrate his “patients” before they even realize he’s started the procedure. 

All of which is to say Dockery’s dark humor is even more prevalent than normal this time. Also it seems clear that Dockery realizes his readers are in on the joke – that they know he’s just rewriting the same book over and over again, and he’s not fooling anyone. His deformed Syndicate goons are even more deformed this time around: just a few of them would be Warts, who has “large, ugly, horny seed warts all over his face and hands;” Mole, a heroin addict who looks like the animal of his namesake; and especially Spastic Sniggers, a goon who makes an unfortunately too brief of an appearance but whose bio takes the cake: 

Spastic Sniggers was a depraved psychopath who derived delicious enjoyment from watching others die. At the moment of death, at that instant when the soul fled the body, something deep in his fetid mind switched over to a wrong relay and he would be seized by fits of sniggering, all the while starting and jerking convulsively in limbs and body in the manner of a hopeless spastic. 

That made me laugh out loud when I first read it; it still makes me laugh out loud. So clearly The Butcher is for a special type of reader, as this sort of super-dark comedy runs throughout. And also, when I read something like that I realize there’s no way at all that James Dockery is on the level. His tongue is definitely in his cheek…which makes it all the more frustrating that he keeps writing the same book over and over. This is one of the more puzzling things in the world of men’s adventure, how a writer as talented as Dockery couldn’t be bothered to write an original story and just kept ripping himself off, volume after volume. 

To be honest, at one point I thought of extending the joke and making every one of my Butcher reviews the same, only changing the occasional particular – or rearranging them – but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just lazily churn out the same review over and over…and unlike James Dockery, I’m not even getting paid for this! 

Well anyway, for once we get some indication that time has passed in the series; early in the book, when Bucher is taken in by a cop per the template, it’s none other than Captain Handsome Staggers (what a name – up there with “Delano Stagg!”), a cop who apparently arrested Bucher in a previous volume, and knows from experience that Bucher will be let out – even though he carries a silencer “even God” would be arrested for. Checking my reviews, it looks like I failed to note the appearance of Handsome Staggers in that previous volume, which is surprising. His arrest of Bucher is stated as being “some months before” the events of Blood Vengeance, which by the way opens with a hapless stooge getting a phone call that Bucher’s here in Miami, and quickly getting out of town. 

From there to Bucher being stalked by the thugs Mole and Warts, with Bucher offing one of them – with the interesting development that the other will return to plague him, later in the novel. Usually these opening stalking thugs are one-offs, but this time Dockery integrates them into the overall storyline – which has nothing at all to do with the back cover. For the most part, at least. I’ll admit, I was fooled – the back cover notes that beautiful blonde Candy Merriman, one of the biggest stars on TV and the daughter of some bigwig, has been adbucted by a hippie terrorist-type group and held for ransom. I assumed we were going to get a take on the infamous Patty Hearst case. 

But as it turns out, Candy Merriman is a passing thought at best in the actual narrative; she isn’t mentioned until page 65, and even then only appears on a few pages. Rather, the villains of the piece are a left-wing Ethiopian radical group run by a guy named Egor Ginir, and comprised of Sudomics – a cult that is “the Thuggees of Ethiopia.” Working with another of Bucher’s old Syndicate colleagues, Sabroso, Ginir plans to kidnap children of wealth and hold them for upwards of fifteen million each, the money to be used to fund a revolution. But this isn’t enough for Dockery, and as per usual the plot becomes more and more convoluted until it ultimately involves atomic bombs and whatnot. 

Also as per usual Bucher almost immediately finds himself leaving the country, and as ever going someplace where Islam is the chief religion – Islamic culture is so frequently referenced in The Butcher that I assume James Dockery was either obsessed with it, or had worked in these areas and felt informed enough to refer to them. So it is that we get a lot of cultural stuff about Ethiopia, which is where Bucher immediately heads. And here we get more reference to a previous book, with Bucher shocked to discover his local contact is French-Arabic blonde beauty Barbe, who last appeared in the fourth volume, the events of which were “almost a year ago.” 

Checking my thorough review of Blood Debt, I see that Bucher and Barbe had a spatting relationship, and that Bucher referred to Barbe as “ugly.” Not so here, where she’s so gobsmackin’ hot that Bucher wonders why he never gave in to Barbe’s pleas in that earlier volume to get busy with her. But then, no one has yet gotten busy with Barbe; she’s a virgin, saving herself for the right guy. And guess who she’s decided it will be? Of course it is Bucher…leading to one of Dockery’s peculiar off-page sex-scenes. I’ve said it before and will say it again: it’s downright bizarre how Dockery will be so lurid and sleazy with his deformed villains and his focus on rape and torture…but will always cut away when Bucher’s about to have sex. Even the customary exploitation of the genre is curiously absent; there’s a part where Barbe and another hotstuff female agent get naked so as to distract someone, and Dockery can’t be bothered to give either girl even a cursory juicy description. 

That other hostuff agent babe is Eden Massawa, an Ethiopian woman who is related to the new prime minister. This volume is very heavy on the Ethiopian culture and whatnot – and this is where the castration angle comes in. Eden has a cousin who runs a slave trade or somesuch, and with just a call she’ll have someone over to castrate a guy into a new eunuch for such-and-such’s harem. This is actually the fate of two of the Syndicate goons who have tailed Bucher to Ethiopia…Dockery just giving us a taste of the sordid darkness to ensue when the guys are tied to a bed and then informed they are about to be castrated, and start screaming when “the doctor” comes in and lays out his tools. 

We’re often told how nauseated Bucher is by all the killing and torture, and frequently in the book he tries to stop it – but in every case he’s stopped by a woman. It’s an interesting subtext to the series, but otherwise Bucher is even more cipher-like than normal in Blood Vengeance, only getting in a few action scenes to boot. This has never been an action-heavy series, and the vibe is always more along the lines of a Western, with Bucher using his “kill-quick-or-die” fast-draw technique to blow away a handful of goons. And they’re always clean kills, too, with Dockery also curiously sparse with detail on the fountaining gore. That said, there is a humorous WTF? bit were Bucher calls one of the thugs “anus.” 

The other volume Blood Vengeance rips off is Fire Bomb; that one featured a letter Bucher was handed by another character, a letter Bucher put in his pocket and conveniently forgot about – only to read much later and discover that, if he’d read it sooner, he would’ve saved himself a lot of trouble. There’s a very similar bit here in Blood Vengeance where Barbe, who apropos of nothing has found out she has a degenerative eye disease that will leave her blind within a year(!), writes a letter for Bucher…and he puts it in his pocket and forgets about it until near the end of the book. 

But it’s Blood Debt that is most ripped off; that one also featured a famous TV personality who happened to be a hotstuff babe, Twiti Andovin, who ultimately turned out to be the main villain. Blood Vengeance rips all of this off in the form of Candy Merriman, who is first seen being executed – in an eerie foreshadowing of real-life Isis videos – on a tape the Muslim terrorists send to a US tv station. There we see (broadcast uncut on television!) a screaming Candy being forced to her knees and then her head chopped off by the High Priestess of the Sudomac cult – but Bucher suspects something fishy about the whole thing. 

Dockery is also pretty bad with pacing. Bucher hopscotches around the globe, from Miami to Ethiopia, back to Miami and then up to Yellowknife, Canada, but nothing much really happens. The final quarter is especially slow, with Bucher and Eden hooking up with a Canadian mountie and flying over an island Bucher suspects Egor might be hiding his atomic warheads on. But it just goes on and on and it’s clear Dockery is trying to meet his word count; the book would’ve been a lot more brisk without the convoluted plotting and a little more on the action front. 

That said, the sudden focus on castration is also puzzling. In a standard trope of the series, one of Bucher’s female conquests is brutally murdered – Bucher, as ever, almost casually sending the girl off to her grisly fate, completely mindless to her predicament per series template – and Bucher is all fired up to get vengeance on the sadist who “sodomized and garrotted” her. This entails one castration, but late in the novel Dockery introduces yet another go-nowhere subplot, one in which Ginir has also kidnapped a bunch of preteen girls to sell them as sex slaves, and Bucher rescues a fifteen year old who has been repeatedly raped by Ginir; she is insane with the desire to see Ginir castrated. 

The finale is especially dark, with Bucher and a few comrades assaulting Ginir’s island base, which of course has a dungeon where the villains can be strung up to be castrated; I mean James Dockery himself has gone castration crazy this time, with Blood Vengeance ending on the image of three men screaming as they are castrated, a group of people gleefully watching the spectacle. Not Bucher, though – he’s already walking away with that damn “bitter-sour taste of defeat” in his mouth. 

Overall, the castration angle really is the only thing unique about Blood Vengeance. Otherwise it is, like the volume before it (and the volume before that, and etc, etc), just a lazy rewrite of the first volume of the series. Here’s hoping that eventually Dockery will write something new, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death

The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death, by Stuart Jason

April, 1974  Pinnacle Books

I was under the impression I didn’t have this volume of The Butcher, but I was looking in the box where I store the other volumes of the series I have, and lo and behold…well, you can probably figure out where I’m going with this. There it was in the box! So anyway Valley Of Death was the second of two installments written by Lee Floren, who previously wrote #10: Deadly Doctor. 

It’s been a long time since I read Deadly Doctor, so I went back to check my review. I found it humorous that I referenced Russell Smith in it, because as I was reading Valley Of Death I kept thinking to myself how much it read like a Russell Smith novel. The same surreal vibe, the same writing style; only Smith’s patented exclamation marks were missing. But this one was written by Lee Floren, as it’s clearly a sequel to Deadly Doctor, the events of which are referenced throughout. I only have one other novel by Floren, an early ‘60s sub-sleaze PBO titled Las Vegas Madam (written as “Matt Harding”), but I’ve yet to read it. I’m curious if it too is as surreal and rough as his work on The Butcher. 

Because this is one rough novel. Again, it is almost identical to something by Russell Smith in that it’s clear the author is winging it from the first page to the last, and not taking anything seriously. Random events happen and only gradually does a plot come together. Like the previous Floren yarn, there is a definite attempt at mimicking the style of main “Stuart Jason” James Dockery. As James Reasoner and I discussed in the comments section of my review for Deadly Doctor, Dockery and Floren both lived in Mexico, so it’s likely they were friends and this is how Floren came to write for The Butcher, not to mention why he strived to capture the style of Dockery for his two contributions. 

So we have the “bitter-sour taste of defeat,” the “koosh!” for Bucher’s silencered Walther P-38, and the recurring character of the director of White Hat (his title, curiously, is never capitalized). Also the repeating Dockery motif of Bucher being arrested by a smalltown sheriff and then being let go after a call to White Hat. But Floren toys with Dockery’s ever-recurring themes. Also, he skips some stuff: there’s no opening moment, for example, where Bucher is stalked by two superdeformed Syndicate thugs he soon blows away. And Floren expands the smalltown sheriff character from the one-off of the Dockery installments into more of a presence in the narrative. A weird presence, it must be stated. 

For that is the main thing Floren captures in his Dockery-isms: the weird, perverted nature of Dockery’s average Butcher story. There is, as in the Dockery books, the feeling that none of this is real, that it is all taking place in some alternate reality; Bucher himself muses at the end of Valley Of Death that this latest caper has been “like a bad dream.” I’ve gone on way too much in previous reviews that the idea is almost like Bucher himself is dead and cast in some purgatory where he relives the same nightmarish scenario, again and again into eternity. Like the entire series is based on the final chapter of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, where the criminal protagonists are trapped in hell. Lee Floren captures that vibe in this novel, more so than he did in Deadly Doctor. 

Like a Dockery installment, the “plot” only gradually comes together. But basically White Hat tasks Bucher with figuring out why elections are not going the way the “experts” predicted they would, both in the US and abroad. Yes, folks, we have another vintage men’s adventure novel with a plot that is relevant today. I mean check this out – the only thing missing is the name “Dominion” for the voting machines: 

But what I love is that, even in this surreal, fictional world, there is still enough rationality that everyone acknowledges that the election results are suspect. Floren keeps his politics to himself but does go the expected route and make “the Conservatives” the bad guys in both the US and Poland; we learn there is a new right-wing party, with fascist ties (because of course), that is gaining ground around the world due to those voting machines. But folks there are a lot of parts in this one where Bucher sits around watching TV or listening to the radio as election results come in. In the US it’s the Democrats versus the Republicans, with new party “The Conservatives” faring well in cities but not in rural areas…a curious reversal of today, but then again this book was published in 1974. And in Poland the right-wing Conservative party, dubbed the Sons of something or other over there (I was too lazy to jot it down), have beaten the Communist-backed party, and Russia isn’t happy about that. 

Oh, and there’s also something about the ridiculously-monikered “World King,” this volume’s main villain who is behind the nefariousness. This turns out to be the lamest bit in the novel because Floren does nothing with it. Anyway Bucher’s sure, as ever, that the Syndicate is behind the plot, whatever the plot is. So, the way these things go, he flies a Cessna to the Mojave Desert. That’s another reminder of Deadly Doctor, where Bucher suddenly became a pilot. The “flying fiction” isn’t as egregious in Valley Of Death, but in addition to the Cessna Bucher also flies a helicopter and an F4 Phantom jet. This latter factors into an aerial sequence that seems to be inspired by Chuck Yeager’s near-fatal accident in the NF-104 (which Tom Wolfe later brought to life in The Right Stuff) – an incident Floren was likely familiar with, given that he also names a minor Syndicate thug Zeager. 

The Dockery inversions are most apparent with the slackjawed yokel sheriff, generally a one-off character in Dockery, but here expanded into a supporting character: Sheriff Julia Whitcomb. That’s right, folks: a woman!! Indeed, one with “high breasts…a healthy young female animal.” We’re also told she’s so hot that even usually-unperturbed Bucher is taken aback. But spoiler alert – and we learn this pretty quickly in the novel – but, uh, she is really a he. That’s right again, folks: a transvestite! Boy, Lee Floren was batting two for two in the “relevance for today” department, wasn’t he? This gender-bending switcharoo is revealed when “Julia” is in bed with a Syndicate flunky named Mario Niccoli. 

The villain of the piece, Niccoli is the brother of the two other Niccolis Bucher killed in The Deadly Doctor. Again, Valley Of Death is a straight sequel to that one, with the sole surviving Niccoli burning up to get revenge for the death of his brothers. But Floren further tells us this about Mario Niccoli: “A fag himself, his two brothers had in fact been his wives, for they too had lusted after men, not women.” This tidbit is casually dropped in the opening; again, just very Russell Smith in vibe. Later Niccoli is in bed with “Julia,” and it’s revealed that “no female breasts” are beneath “her” padded bra. 

But it gets even weirder. Adding to the surreal texture is that Bucher is constantly getting “updates” from White Hat which inform him of practically everything going on in the plot, and the backgrounds of the various characters he encounters. Actually it’s the director who gives Bucher these updates, giving the impression that the old man is omniscient – and now that I think of it, furthering the whole “purgatory” conceit of The Butcher, with the White Hat director serving as god to Bucher’s doomed soul. But Bucher is constantly being informed off-page about this or that, so that he is caught up with what’s going on, to the extent that his presence seems unnecessary. White Hat knows all, so why can’t it do all? 

Well anyway, in one of those updates Bucher is informed by the director that Julia Whitcomb is really a guy – curiously, Bucher is informed of this right after we readers learn of it via the scene with Julia and Niccoli, which again gives the idea that all this is a “bad dream” with info gathered and incorporated into the story in real time. So Bucher starts hitting on Julia, asking her out to dinner and making insinuating comments about getting her into bed, and Julia becoming increasingly excited at the prospect. Just weird, wild stuff. But again it’s like Floren is just winging it, or the booze has run dry as he’s been typing, because he drops all of it with Julia leaving Bucher’s room in a huff and the incident never being mentioned again. 

Bucher does get laid, though – by a woman (not that I’m a biologist, you understand, but Floren tells us she is). This too is on the strange “dreamlike” tip: her name is Sandra Stone, and she claims she is a reporter when she boldly approaches Bucher in Poland. (He’s come here, for no real reason, to get more evidence on those voting machines.) Bucher immediately knows Sandra is a Syndicate spy, but soon enough the two end in bed. This actually happens between chapters, so Floren gives us absolutely zero in the way of sleaze. Which, again, is reminiscent of the Dockery books. So too is the weird misogyny on display throughout – Bucher treats Sandra like shit, telling her to take off and leave him alone, even though he knows the Syndicate intends to kill her. Her (expected) fate is still shocking given how casually Floren treats it in the narrative – surely the most blackly humorous moment in a blackly humorous novel. 

Action-wise there’s a bit more going on than in the Dockery books, with Bucher often getting in shootouts. The gore is not as pronounced, though. And also Bucher is slightly more human; Floren’s Bucher still experiences fear, and reacts close to panic at times. He is not the “Iceman” of the James Dockery books, and he’s more prone to displaying his emotions. He does a bit of deducting in the novel but it’s very lame because it’s based on coincidence. Like when in the small town in the Mojave, he just happens to see some “scientist types” go into a building, after which a balloon rises from the building. Gradually Floren will tie this together with the voting machines, but it’s all so hamfisted that it’s just more indication that he was winging it from first page to last. 

This is further demonstrated by the non-event that is the so-called World King. As with a Dockery novel, it all ultimately comes down to the same characters Bucher has been dealing with since the beginning of the book, characters who are suddenly revealed as being more important to the Syndicate plot than we readers were led to believe. Bucher sees more action here – but I forgot to mention! Suddenly Bucher has become a field tester for various White Hat gadgets. In Valley Of Death, he has these pellets he fires from his P-38 which knock a man into a deathlike state that lasts for twelve hours. There are so many scenes of Bucher shooting someone with these – usually firing the pellets straight down their throat – and then watching TV later on as the news reports on the “dead men” found in such and such a place, who later wake up with absolutely no memory, and the doctors trying to figure out what’s wrong with them. 

Oh, and Bucher also has this pole with a choker on it, or some such contraption, which he uses to ensnare various bigwigs. So there’s a lot of stuff where he’ll capture people with this, then shoot them with the deathlike-amnesia pill…it’s just super weird, folks. I mean the whole novel is like a lost installment of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman, we’re talking that same weird, surreal, “booze-fueled first draft” vibe throughout. All of which is to say that Valley Of Death was kind of fun, in a deranged sort of way. Floren’s imagination is so off-kilter that I would’ve enjoyed more installments by him…the book might not be great, or hell even good, but at least it isn’t the same story over and over like James Dockery was doing for the series.

The Butcher #12: Killer’s Cargo

The Butcher #12: Killer’s Cargo, by Stuart Jason

September, 1974  Pinnacle Books

James Dockery returns to The Butcher after taking a few volumes off (his last one was #8: Firebomb), and he does the same thing he always does: he basically rewrites the first volume. At this point the “wash, rinse, repeat” nature of this series is insulting, that Dockery, series owner Script Associates, and publisher Pinnacle thought so little of their readers that they figured no one would notice that each volume of The Butcher was an echo of the one that came before. 

To wit, we’ll meet Bucher, aka Iceman, formerly known as The Butcher, in some unstated city as he’s being stalked by a pair of deformed Syndicate goons he used to know back in the day. He’ll kill them easily, get arrested due to all the shooting, and then be sprung, to the slackjawed amazement of the top cop who is about to throw the book at him. Then our hero will be briefed by the never-named White Hat Director on a Lear jet as it wings its way somewhere, usually Europe. Bucher will be informed of the latest globe-threatening plot that involves another of his former Syndicate pals. Bucher will investigate, usually a lovely female White Hat operator at his side. He’ll gradually find the time to engage that lovely female White Hat operator in some off-page lovin’, though Bucher will initially fend off her eager advances. Ultimately he’ll find himself either in Mexico or the Middle East, where the “goddamn crazy caper” will prove to have multiple strands, and also there will be the revelation that one of Bucher’s colleagues is actually working against him. Things will generally end on a grand guignol vibe, with the final scene taking place in a torture chamber or something similar. Also generally at this point Bucher will have to kill an evil woman, even though he’s “never killed a woman before.” And, of course, the final line will be a variation of “the bitter-sour taste of defeat,” as Bucher grimly walks off from this latest massacre…to go through it all again in the next volume. 

All of that is true for Killer’s Cargo, with only the most minor of deviations. For once Bucher does not go to the Middle East, but he does spend the entire second half of the novel in the jungles of Mexico. Otherwise it’s all here, even the “abritrary” pondering from Bucher that he’s never killed a woman before. All of it a complete lift/ripoff of previous volumes. It makes so little sense to me. How could a writer just do the same exact novel every single time – and how could the publisher not say anything about it? I guess Pinnacle just didn’t question it, as the series clearly sold enough to keep running through the ‘70s. Maybe Pinnacle figured their readers didn’t notice. But at this point I’d say that I like Death Merchant better than The Butcher. Hell, so far as Pinnacle publications go, I think I’d even say I like The Destroyer better, and that series bugs the hell out of me. 

About the only new thing this time is the cover art; gone are the sketch-like illustrations that previously graced the covers, replaced by staged photos. There was a photo cover on the second volume, but this new direction is a different design…and it must not have gone over well, as it only lasted a few volumes. I personally liked the sketch covers of the previous volumes; I thought the illustrations of Bucher perfectly captured the character, though I can see how they might have seemed repetitive, with Pinnacle concerned that readers might not be able to tell volumes apart. Hey, that just occurred to me – the covers of The Butcher were just as identical as the plots! But anyway, these photo covers are nice if for no other reason than that many years later they’d lead Zwolf to write, “Some of these books had a picture of a real guy on the cover instead of artwork.  Wonder what that guy's doing now.  Probably sitting in some nursing home telling people ‘I used to be the Butcher!’” For years and years now that line has popped into my head at the oddest of times and made me laugh. 

My favorite part of this series is always the opening, with Bucher being stalked by goons. It always gives the impression that James Dockery’s Syndicate is made up of inhuman freaks: they usually have “lizardlike tongues” and some physical abnormality, and of course they get off on killing people. The two this time aren’t as memorable as previous ones, but another notable thing about Killer’s Cargo is that for once Bucher goes up mostly against Syndicate freaks this time. Usually we just see them in the opening, and then Bucher will go off on his assignment. Bucher only kills a few people this volume, but all of his victims are Syndicate torpedos, all of them with either some physical deformity or some weird sexual kink, like Pierre, the guy who enjoys strangling women for a full hour. And as ever Bucher is familiar with all these guys from his past as a Syndicate bigwig himself; Dockery has never reconciled how Bucher was able to deal with these mutant freaks back in the day. Even though he too was a crook, it would appear that Bucher was always essentially good. 

Oh, and another recurring gimmick is that Bucher has a score to settle with one of these guys; in this case it’s Nick Ferroni, established early in the novel as being behind this latest plot. Bucher’s already vowed to kill the guy, given that Ferroni murdered a woman Bucher cared for, many years ago. So what is this latest plot? The usual series Maguffin; the White Hat Director informs Bucher of Professor Bruno von Kessler, a German scientist living in the US who has developed a tranquilizing gas called H(G) A-7. But Kessler and his daughter have gone missing – and it’s yet another recurring gimmick that the guy Bucher will be looking for has a hot daughter. In this case it’s Isabella von Kessler, and she will prove to be the novel’s main female character; she’s a hotstuff brunette Bucher first meets in Europe, though initially he thinks she’s an enemy. As ever Dockery doesn’t do much to exploit his female characters; Isabella’s most memorable physical quality is that “Maverick” is tatooed on her abdomen. 

Prior to Isabella, Bucher spends his time with Yvette, the template-mandatory lovely female White Hat operator Bucher meets in Paris. She’s a blonde of such beauty, with “full, ripe breasts,” that Bucher can’t stop staring at her. But again, Dockery is not one to exploit. Those “ripe breasts” are only infrequently mentioned, and even a seemingly-random bit where Bucher and Yvette visit a nude spa, Dockery does absolutely nothing to bring the sleaziness to life. Mostly Bucher just tells Yvette that the towel he carries with him isn’t just to hide his Walther P-38, but also to hide his, uh, tumescence. I think the adjective “jiggling” might be used here, but that’s about it – what I mean to say is, even though this blonde of gobsmacking beauty with an awesome bod is fully and completely nude as she walks around a Parisian spa, the reader could come into the scene late and not even be aware of it, for Dockery does precious little to exploit the situation. Indeed, one almost gets the impression that the nudity and “girl stuff” has just been added due to editorial pressure. 

And, par for the series template, when Bucher does get down to it with his female colleauges, Dockery leaves the entirety of the event off-page. It’s not with Yvette, though; Bucher’s attracted to her, but as usual is all business and fends off her open interest. Then he takes off for Mexico, leaving Yvette in Paris…and ends up with Isabella. She is Bucher’s comrade during the majority of the text, traveling with him in a Land Rover through the jungles of Mexico. She also soon begins throwing herself at him, even though initially she’s afraid he will “molest” her. But the tomfoolery is not at all described, and again seems like Dockery catering to a requirement. But pretty much the entire second half of Killer’s Cargo is comprised of Bucher and Isabella driving through the jungle, with intermittent action scenes – usually just Bucher quickly and easily dispatching some Syndicate goon who is involved with Ferroni’s plot. 

Another recurring element of The Butcher is the reliance on exposition. It becomes especially grating this time, with Bucher, Isabella, Ferroni, and others baldly expositing; the impression given is that Dockery paints himself into such a corner, with his endless spiral of plots, counterplots, and reversals, that his characters have to exposit in order to make sense of it all. So that’s true here, with Bucher working his way through a variety of underworld thugs who give him a progressive breakdown of the plot. And of course along the way Bucher will find out someone else is really behind it all, someone with a goofy code name; this time it’s the mysterious “Number One.” The veteran reader of the series will already know where this is headed when Bucher demands “Who is he?” when grilling some thugs on Number One’s identity, and the thugs look confused…the veteran Butcher reader, of course, will deduce from this that Number One isn’t a “he” at all. Plus, Bucher always ends up taking on a female villain, even though the series reset at the start of each volume causes him to forget this. 

No spoilers, but this volume does detour from the template in that Bucher does not kill that female villain; another character does, in ghoulish fashion, strapping her to a torture chair with an iron collar. But yes, that part of the template is in place – the torture chamber-set finale. Speaking of female characters, poor Isabella gets raped by a few Syndicate thugs in the last quarter, the event occurring off-page…and happening, of course, because Bucher’s left Isabella by herself. Every time Bucher leaves a female acquaintance she suffers miserably, but again the series reset causes Bucher to forget this. Well anyway, Bucher’s attempt at consoling Isabella comes off as unintentionally humorous in our #metoo era, given how unfeeling it is: “Don’t think about it and it’ll go away. You’ll forget about it time.” When Isabella starts to cry over the situation, Bucher scolds her, “You’re not the first woman ever to be forced.” To which Isabella responds, “Damn other women!...Do you know the definition of gangbang?” 

Compared to this sort of insanity, the climax itself is almost forgettable. As mentioned it features a villainous female character choked to death by an iron collar, and then another of the villains, crazed by the H(G) A-7 gas, trying to go after Bucher. But at this point my enthusiasm for the whole thing was at a complete nadir. Even the recurring final line (“The bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth”) did little to flag my spirits. I felt that I’d read this same sequence, or at least a variation of it, several times already. Perhaps Dockery’s intent was that the reader would feel as benumbed as Bucher by this Groundhog Day-esque repetition of events, volume after volume, but for me personally it made me question if I should wait even longer between volumes. At this point the repetition is just getting old.

The Butcher #9: Sealed With Blood

The Butcher #9: Sealed With Blood, by Stuart Jason
November, 1973  Pinnacle Books

The most interesting thing about this volume of The Butcher is that it clearly wasn’t written by usual series author James Dockery; nor was it written by Lee Floren, who turned in the next volume. This unknown writer seems to have been briefed on the series, but turned in his (or her) own take on it. Unfortunately, this new take results in a middling, boring installment in which hero Bucher comes off more like a government flunkey than the terse badass of the Dockery books.

At any rate I can attest from the get-go that this is not Dockery. For one, the narrative style is completely different. For another, Dockery’s usual repetitive plot is not here – though, curiously, this ghostwriter has retained Dockery’s penchant for setting tales in the Middle East. Otherwise, the usual Dockery flourishes are absent: no opening sequence with Bucher gunning down a pair of Syndicate mutants, no obligatory bit in which Bucher is jailed over his illegal silencer and then freed by a phone call from some local politician, no outrageous plot change in the second half of the book. And no “bitter taste of defeat” as the last line of the book. And it’s not Floren, either; it’s been a few years since I read his installment, but as I recall Floren was prone to referring to Bucher as “Butcher” in the narrative – something Dockery never does in the narrative, only in the dialog – and also there was more action in Floren’s book than there is in this one. And also Bucher didn’t come off like a bureaucrat in Floren’s installment, as he does here.

I almost get the impression this poor writer was given a half-assed overview by Script Associates, the outfit behind the series:

“His name’s Bucher, he was known as the Butcher when he was in the Mafia, and now he goes by Iceman and he works for the government. Sometimes his capers take him to the Middle East.” 

“Okay…does he work for any specific governmental agency?”

“You can just say ‘the government.’”

“Does he use any particular gadgets, like a special gun he favors or anything?”

“Uh…nah.”

And from there the poor bastard just winged it, coming up with his own team that Bucher works with, humorously enough presenting them without any background, as if we’ve encountered all of them before. In particular there’s Stanton, Bucher’s 27 year-old “Government” contact, who so far as this volume goes has enjoyed a long working relationship with Bucher…not that we’ve ever heard of the guy before. In a way I appreciated this ghostwriter’s brazen disregard for the fact that eight volumes preceded this one. That is, if the dude even knew there were volumes previous to his; as I say, I think he got a half-assed series overview. But anyway Stanton only ever appears via phone calls with Bucher, setting him up with info, orders, equipment, and partners.

That last regard is one of the bigger changes from the Dockery installments; here Bucher is always being partnered up with a team of “government” men. This would be fine, save for the curious element that he’s always explaining himself to them. I kid you not. Bucher, practically a monosyllabic glacier in Dockery’s books, runs at the mouth constantly in Sealed With Blood; even in shootouts with mobsters he has to explain to his men why he wants them to take up certain positions, or even why he wants to go after the bad guys in the first place. It’s the most extreme emasculation of a series protagonist since Richard Blade #9. I mean Bucher even declares – not just once but a couple times – that he values his life and wants to keep living and all this other jazz. While such sentiments are of course understandable, voicing them goes completely against the grain of the terse bad-assery Dockery presented in the previous volumes.

We know something’s up from the first pages, which concern a bunch of one-off “Organization” bigwigs discussing Bucher, and how to do away with him. There’s also mention of some business in the Middle East. From there to Bucher…not being shadowed by a pair of freaks, but simply snooping around an airport in New York. The muddy plot has something to do with farm cargo to Israel being used to transfer something of vital interest to the Mafia. Some shady types are working on the cargo and Bucher’s ordered by them to leave. He’s jumped by some thug, but turns the tables and beats the guy up…then talks him into taking a ride in a taxi so he can tell Bucher what’s going on(!?). It gets even more WTF?! when Bucher gets in a conversation about Manhattan traffic with the cabbie, all while secretly holding a gun on his captive.

Oh, and that’s another funny element: Bucher’s pistol is only ever referred to as “gun.” Actually, all of the weapons throughout the book are just “guns,” with no specific make or models given, save for an arbitrary part where Bucher reckons that a gun being trained on him is “foreign.” So clearly firearms are not a speciality of this particular ghostwriter. Nor is plotting; it takes a good forty or fifty pages for us to even find out why Bucher’s looking into this “cargo for Israel” scheme. Hell if I’m not mistaken, we’re not even told the opening action is in New York until the sequence is almost over. It’s all very generic and half-baked, with lazy detailing and plotting.

Eventually it turns out that gold and weapons are hidden in the cargo. Bucher’s not the brightest, though – after the opening bit, where he makes off with the beaten thug (who is killed in a drive-by shooting immediately thereafter), Bucher realizes that there might’ve been a bomb on the cargo plane, which meanwhile has already taken off. This folks makes for some of the most lame “suspense” I’ve ever encountered in an action novel; Bucher calls Stanton, our first taste of the incessant explaining Bucher has to provide the younger man so far as his reasoning and logic go, and begs for the cargo plane to be turned back around so the cargo can be checked for a bomb. Stanton’s like, let me get back to you. Then calls back and he’s like, nope, we lost contact with the plane. And this goes on for pages…only to eventually turn out that the plane had a minor electrical gaffe or something and the flight’s fine, and meanwhile it’s already halfway to the destination so let’s just let it keep on going. Oh and Bucher, why don’t you head on over to Israel yourself?

Seriously, our hero is bossed around relentlessly in this one, even by the one-off government agents who make up his team, from Waltstrom, who gets in constant arguments/discussions with Bucher, to Hamid, who is apparently new to the team or something. Action is infrequent, and not very gripping. Bucher and team get in a shootout in a building with some thugs in New York, and even here Bucher gets in intermittent arguments with his cronies. Violence is minimal, and there’s a curious focus on Bucher’s team members getting shot, Bucher fretting over them, and then Bucher later being informed that so and so will make it, after all. Actually “fretting” sums up Bucher’s entire demeanor in this installment; it’s like the real Bucher took a bit of a vacation and hoped no one would notice a stand-in had taken his place.

As noted the finale tries to retain the vibe of Dockery with the action occurring in the deserts of the Middle East; Bucher and his team get in intermittent firefights with Bedouins, who are being used to transport the weapons and gold smuggled in on the cargo planes. The only female character appears here: Aza, a hotstuff dancer who has worked undercover for one of Bucher’s government dudes before. Another example of this author’s lack of plotting skills, Aza contributes nothing to the tale, save for an arbitrary part where Bucher dreams that he’s about to have sex with her. Yes, seriously. In the last pages he finds her in the confidence of the Bedouin leader, meaning that not only is Aza a traitor but that she’s set Bucher and team up to be killed. But curiously Bucher is mostly okay with this, and basically sends Aza off with a stern talking to.

Honestly though, Sealed With Blood is a passable installment, having nothing in common with earlier or later volumes – unless this unknown contract writer turned in any others. No idea who it was, though early on I wondered if it might be our old pal Paul Hofrichter, particularly given the arbitrary discussions that occur throughout the novel. But there’s more action in Sealed With Blood than the typical Hofrichter book. Whoever the writer was, hopefully this will be the last we see of him (or her!) and this emasculated version of Bucher.

The Butcher #8: Fire Bomb

The Butcher #8: Fire Bomb, by Stuart Jason
October, 1973  Pinnacle Books

This time I’ll try skip my usual belabored overview of how this volume of The Butcher sticks to the same repetitive theme as the previous installments, with only the most minor of variations. Instead I’ll just bluntly say that at this point James “Stuart Jason” Dockery’s series is becoming almost a chore to read, with each volume coming off like a lazy rewrite of one that came before.

So we open, as always, with Bucher in some unstated city, being trailed by a pair of Syndicate goons out for the bounty on his head. These parts are always my favorite in the series, but Dockery doesn’t get as outrageous this time, other than that one of the goons goes by the handle Rum Dum Lagoona, but Bucher knows his real name is Percival Pinkham. Other than that it’s the usual “kill quick or die” from Bucher, who guns both down without breaking a sweat…on to the customary jail scene, followed by the customary “out of jail” scene thanks to some calls behind the scenes. This time we don’t get the customary “illegal for Jesus Christ to own” line about Bucher’s silencer, though.

Bucher’s already on his assigmnet: trying to figure out how big shipments of heroin are getting into the country. As ever it has something to do with a Syndicate bigwig he knew years before, when he too was a Syndicate bigwig. This one’s named Johnny Procetti and his nickname’s “Fireball” because he likes to douse women in gasoline and light ‘em up. And also we get “foreshadowing” that the plot will make its customary left turn midway through; Bucher just happens to see in the paper that some people in Mexico and the Southwest are coming down with radiation burns, and something in the back of his head is alerted by the news, though he ignores it. Of course, this will be brazenly shoehorned into the main plot before novel’s end.

First stop is Reno, where Bucher storms his way into a bar owned by another Syndicate associate of years past. He and Procetti were once pals but now the sleazebag reveals that he has a hit out on Procetti and hasn’t seen him in months. Bucher for some bizarre reason takes off immediately upon learning this, but runs into the “dowdy” hostess he just got fired from the bar, the owner pissed off that she allowed the Butcher to get past security. Her name is Anna Helm and she claims to know where Procetti is, but will only tell Bucher if she can come along: her sister was firebombed by Procetti and Anna wants revenge.

Bucher as ever is all business, even after Anna is revealed to be a smokin’ hot, built babe, whose “dowdiness” was really just a disguise. She claims it was defense against the notoriously-lecherous bar owner. As ever though Dockery does not exploit his female characters in the least; he refers to them in almost a romantic poetry vibe, with little of the “upthrusting” or “curvy” or even “jiggling” that this genre demands. And while Bucher is gobsmacked by this beauty to the point he doesn’t even realize it’s the same Anna Helm he agreed to bring along, he promptly gets back to worrying over the case, with absolutely zero thought on how to get her into bed posthaste.

The trip to Mexico is over in a few pages, only lasting long enough for Bucher to run into a quartet of infamous Syndicate hitmen who are humorously built up as being the most dangerous, vile group of killers in history – and then are casually dispatched by Bucher in just a few sentences. More importantly, here Bucher briefly runs into Blood Red Sal, an old Syndicate flame of his whose nickname comes from her penchant for eating raw meat to preserve her beauty. This bit goes nowhere other than for Sal to inform Bucher that Procetti is likely in Iraq – so in other words, once again Bucher is headed for the Middle East.

Here in Baghdad Bucher gets wind of the infamous Hashashin, aka those favorites of pulp writers everywhere – the mystical order of hash-lovin’ assassins who in Medieval times were sent out by the Old Man of the Mountain. Well, they’re back in business, and an always-masked personage dubbed “Ibn Wahid” is their mysterious leader. Bucher learns all about it thanks to Karamene, hotstuff mistress of disguise who, along with her brother, operates for White Hat here in Baghdad. Once again Karamene is described in terms having more to do with grace and beauty, and Bucher finds himself falling for her, to the point where he thinks he might be in love. Whoever guesses what happens to Karamene wins a no-prize.

Meanwhile Bucher does believe it or not get laid; Anna Helm has been throwing herself at him relentlessly, and Bucher finally gives in…and, as ever, the incident happens entirely off page. This is bad enough, but what’s worse is the lazy plotting Dockery presents us with; shortly after this Bucher remembers that Karamene had translated a message from White Hat for him – Bucher just put the note in his pocket and forgot all about it. Well, he remembers finally, reads it…and this letter he’s had all along in his friggin’ pocket tells him who Ibn Wahid is, what the plan is, and etc! And if he’d read the note a few chapters before certain characters would still be alive.

What’s crazy is Dockery is a fine writer, at least in his dialog and bizarre characters. But man he needed some help with plotting. Or who knows, maybe The Butcher was intended as a satire, one played so dead straight that no one noticed? Even if that’s so, the dude could’ve at least come up with something new each volume. As it is, Fire Bomb is nearly a direct ripoff of  #4: Blood Debt, even down to the “surprise” reveal of the main villain’s identity (and gender) – someone Bucher has become “close” to. But then, Bucher already knows who Ibn Wahid thanks to that note, thus the removal of the villain’s mask isn’t a shock to him. The strangest thing is that it’s mentioned here that Bucher’s never killed a woman, even though he did way back in #3: Keepers Of Death, where we were told it was the first one he’d ever killed.

I was really digging this series when I started it, but now it’s looking more like the later ones by Michael Avallone – of which I’ve only read one so far, #34: The Man From White Hat – might be better. Dockery’s stubborn insistence on sticking to the same damn plot, over and over with only slight variations, is quickly sinking The Butcher. Seriously, if you’ve read one you’ve read them all.

 Here’s the last paragraph:

Then slowly he turned from the scene of violence and death, turned toward the helicopter beside the runway a few yards distant, the weary slump in his shoulders more pronounced and the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth.

The Butcher #7: Death Race

The Butcher #7: Death Race, by Stuart Jason
July, 1973  Pinnacle Books

My assumption is Harlequin Books briefly took over The Butcher, at least for this one volume, as James “Stuart Jason” Dockery gives us a slow-moving yarn in which usually-gruff Bucher falls in love with a lovely young Eskimo gal, spends lots and lots of time pondering his feelings, and ultimately decides to quit White Hat and live here in Alaska happily ever after. At the very least, Dockery can be credited for finally straying outside the rigid template he has followed for the preceding six volumes.

I’ll skip my usual belabored rundown of the purgatory-esque sequence of events Bucher experiences in each and every volume: let it only be said that yes, the novel opens with him being tailed by two superdeformed Syndicate goons who knew him back in the day, and yes, Bucher makes short work of them. After which he is, once again, bailed out of jail by a slackjawed local yokel cop who can’t believe this grim-faced killer has such governmental clout. From there to the assignment briefing with the aged Director of White Hat, who has it that the Dewline defense system on the US-Canada border has been compromised.

In yet another similarity to a previous volume, duplicates of the thoroughly-vetted defense personnel are apparently being put in place by a mastermind (or “The Snake,” as Bucher eventually begins to think of him, apropos of nothing). Due to a random accident one of the dupes was outed, and now the Director is frantic that all of the remote Dewline outposts, each manned by one person, have been compromised by lookalikes. But as usual there’s nothing to go on, no leads to track. All White Hat has is a letter the sister of one of the personnel sent to the President, complaining that her brother was acting strange lately, probably due to all the pressure running his outpost. The Director suspects that her brother is one of the dupes.

Bucher flies to Alaska to investigate. It’s page-filling of the most egregious kind as we’re informed of all sorts of “life in Alaska” bullshit. I experienced a bad flashback to the similar page-filling “life among the Eskimos” stuff in John Eagle Expeditor #7. Dockery pulled similar stunts in previous books, usually with shoehorned detail about the Middle East or Egypt or whatever, so this time it’s at least a change of scenery. But it does go on and on, with zero in the way of action. It gets worse when Bucher meets Sonja Rostov, the sister who wrote that letter to the president about her brother – and it’s love at first sight.

The Butcher gets all lovey-dovey as our hard-assed hero finds himself acting like a smitten fool around Sonja. We’re informed she’s not classically beautiful, but appropriately hot, with a jawdropping but petite body. More importantly, there is a “primitive” look about her – she makes her appearance draped in animal skins and wielding a Bowie knife – and gradually Bucher understands that the two are very alike. Soon enough she’s giving him a leather band that symbolically binds them as mates(!). There follows lots of crap seemingly lifted from a RomCom as Bucher relaxes in a steam bath, shocked when Sonja and a female friend happen to see him nude, Bucher embarrassed and getting tongue-tied and etc, and you just wonder to yourself, “When, Lord, when will Bucher start killing people again??”

After an extra-long haul some action presents itself: Sonja is being hassled by two locals, and after an interminable sequence of setting the situation up they arrive in the village. Bucher goes out to confront them, first shooting their dog as a sign of his bad-assery. But other than this it’s anticlimactic as all get-out; Bucher whips out his Walther, and it’s “koosh-koosh,” goodbye both tough guys. We’re back to the romance stuff…and by the way, as ever Dockery is reluctant to provide any explicit material. About all we get is Sonja wrapping her arms around her stomach and murmuring how she feels she’s been “wifed” good and proper. And meanwhile Bucher has decided that this is his last job, he’s going to quit White Hat, stay here in Alaska, and get married.

But Dockery hasn’t forgotten the other mainstay of his series template: the mission Bucher’s been sent here on abruptly changes. Ostensibly he’s here in this backwoods Alaskan village waiting for Sonja’s brother to arrive; White Hat arranged for Rostov to be sent home on a temporary leave of absence, with the idea that Bucher would be waiting here for him and figure out if he’s the real thing or a dupe. Sonja for her part is certain the man she saw a few months ago was not her brother, which is why she wrote that letter. Okay, so we’re waiting for all this to happen. Then the Director swings into town and reveals that Sonja’s brother is not coming, and also it was all a mistake and there really were no “dupes” as such, just personnel who were pretending to be dupes, as part of a diversionary meaure to distract attention from the real plot of the mastermind behind all this!!!

And who is the mastermind? In some of Dockery’s lazier plotting, Bucher early on just happens to see an old photo of some village schoolkids, and one of them has a hideous birthmark on his face. Identical to a Chinese doctor Bucher once knew named Wu who was employed by the Syndicate but was finally retired due to the fact that he liked to strap people up and feed them to his trained dogs. Well guess what, folks. Wu is, believe it or not, the mastermind behind the Dewline plot!! The Director reveals as much, and also that Wu’s real plot appears to be the unleashing of an army of saboteurs into the US.

As if waving a big middle finger at his readers, Dockery then has the big climactic action scene occur off-page; the Director reveals that a team of Marines are right now converging on Wu’s hideout! Indeed, more priority is put on the “big revelation” that the Director’s real name is Sam White; he comments that he always wondered why Bucher never asked him what his real name was(!). So now Bucher’s job is to voyage out into the Alaskan wild and get the list of saboteurs from Wu’s training base, which is of course nearby, him being a hometown boy and all. Bucher will be assisted by an Amazonian White Hat agent named Olga. Sonja of course manages to bully her way into going along on what Bucher vows will be his last mission – he’s already tendered his resignation to the Director.

Now, anyone who even harbors a suspicion that Sonja might make it through Death Race alive is in serious danger of flunking Men’s Adventure 101 (and there is no remedial class!). As Marty McKee succinctly put it, “It comes as no surprise that Sonja doesn’t live to the end of the book.” So of course, she’s dead before the last page. But let’s take a moment to dwell on her murder, which Dockery delivers as expected, but in such a half-assed manner that I had to laugh at his bravado. I mean, Bucher has lost lady loves in previous volumes; it’s part of the template. But this time, we’re led to believe, it’s much different – he plans to marry Sonja, he plans to quit White Hat for her. Yet when Sonja’s assassinated by a sniper, just a few pages before the end of the book, we’re never informed who shot her!

Bucher’s kissing her goodbye, about to make his final assault on Wu’s lair, and Sonja’s shot at that moment. Bucher watches in a daze as she falls, dead…and then the next chapter has him storming in upon Wu, who’s in the midst of feeding a fresh victim to his dogs. Wu is shocked that Bucher is even here; the sadist has so descended into full-blown madness that he’s not even aware his main base has been attacked. Plus he hasn’t seen Bucher since his Syndicate days. We’re informed that Bucher killed off Wu’s two sole security guards on his way in, so that would mean it wasn’t either of them who shot Sonja – not only were they guarding the boss, but the boss wasn’t even aware Bucher was around! So it wasn’t Wu or any of his men who killed Sonja.

So then…who the hell was it? My guess is it must’ve been White Hat itself. In fact it’s the only possibility. The Director is initially startled that Bucher intends to quit, then brushes it off with a smile and something to the effect that he loves how Bucher is a man of his convictions and could make such a life-changing decision so quickly. In reality though, “Iceman” would be too valuable an agent to lose, so clearly Sonja Rostov must die. The more I think of it, I’m sure this was Dockery’s intention. Otherwise no info is given on who killed Sonja, and I’m betting no mention will be made of her in the next novel, which will see the usual “game reset” taking place.

But anyway as mentioned Wu, when we finally meet him, is about to feed an old Eskimo man to his dogs. And it still drives me nuts that Dockery creates these crazy, disgusting villains and never properly exploits them. I mean, Wu has two brains, one of them on his face, and he gets his jollies tying people up and setting his dogs loose on them! But as with all the other main villains in the series, Wu stays off-page for the duration, only showing up right before the very end – and only then to meet his expected fate: becoming dog food. At least Dockery goes full-bore with the graphic violence here, with Bucher feeling like he’s about to puke as he watches. Not that he stops watching it.

Here’s the last paragraph:

Bucher stared grimly at the grisly scene for a long half minute, then turned from it and headed out of the cave toward the cabin, the bitter-sour taste of galling defeat strong in his mouth.

On an unrelated note, only one post next week – it’ll be up on Wednesday.