Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons

Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons, by Dane Hartman

September, 1981  Warner Books

This first volume of the Dirty Harry series basically encapsulates everything that is wrong with Warner’s “Men Of Action” line: while it has the right intentions, the execution leaves much to be desired. In short, Duel For Cannons was a chore to read, and I constantly had to give myself pep talks to keep reading it. I mean think about that – a story about Dirty Harry that’s a chore to read. 

What makes this surprising is that Ric Meyers wrote Duel For Cannons, and he was one of the few Men Of Action writers who understood the men’s adventure genre. I know it was Meyers who wrote this one due to the words of Meyers himself; once upon a time there was a website devoted to Dirty Harry, which exists now only on The Wayback Machine. In 2001 the site proprietor, J. Reeves, interviewed Ric Meyers, and Meyers not only took credit for Duel For Cannons (as well as five other volumes of the series), but he also ranked it as one of his favorites! And for posterity, because that website was notoriously hard to navigate, here you will find J. Reeves’s brief reviews of all 12 volumes of the Dirty Harry series. 

It's crazy to think Meyers personally rated this one so high, but it’s cool that he did. I personally could barely finish it and found it to be a mess, with Harry thrown out of his element and featuring protracted action scenes that were more exhausting than thrilling. In fact I was under the impression that another of the Men Of Action writers – either Stephen Smoke or Leslie Horovitz – wrote the book, until I remembered to check the old dirtiest.com site. But in hindsight I realized it was obvious Ric Meyers had written it, as not only was the book filled with references to the Dirty Harry films, but Duel For Cannons also opened with a super-long chapter in which a one-off character met his fate in very protracted fashion; a Meyers staple for sure, with the caveat that this time it was a male character getting wasted (gradually). 

This, as the belabored backstory has it, is Boris Tucker, a sheriff from San Antonio who happens to be friends with none other than Harry Callahan, and is here in California on vacation with his family. This opening scene takes place in an amusement park and has the sheriff, who has brought his gun with him on vacation, defending himself against a mysterious assailant who wields a .44 Magnum. But at great length the poor sheriff is blown away, as is an innocent bystander. This brings Harry onto the scene, butting heads with the cops who have jurisdiction on the case. The official story is that Sheriff Tucker shot the bystander and then himself, but Harry knows there’s more to the story. 

Meyers brings in characters from the franchise, like Harry’s chief, Lt. Bressler, from the first film. He also often refers to the movies, sometimes in goofy ways – like Harry thinking of the rogue cops in the second film as “the Magnum Force” cops. Did they actually call themselves that in the movie? I don’t think so. Even goofier is a part later in the book where, for protracted reasons, Harry agrees to be a deputized sheriff in San Antonio, to enforce the law against crooked cops, and thinks to himself how he also became an “enforcer” once before, leading to the death of someone he cared about. I mean good thing Sudden Impact hadn’t come out yet, or we would’ve gotten a goofy reference to that one, too. 

I don’t mean to be so harsh, as I think Meyers is a good writer, and he certainly was the best in the Men Of Action line. But he gets the series off to an ungainly start; as I said, Duel For Cannons demonstrates in its slow-moving 173 pages all that was wrong with this ill-fated Warners line. Meyers’s attempts to mix random action scenes in, like early in the book where Harry gets in a protracted gun fight with a group of rapists, come off as sluggish. But protracted is really the name of the game; not since Terry Harknett have I encountered such ponderous action narrative: 

Acting on instinct, Harry’s finger tightened on the Magnum’s trigger. He immediately loosened his trigger finger for two reasons. First, he remembered that he was not shooting on home turf at a local scumbag. Usually that reason was not suficient for Harry to let someone shoot back at him, but the second reason he didn’t shoot was the more important and the more pressing. Namely, Harry didn’t know whether the keg Thurston was huddled behind was fully or empty. 

If empty, Harry’s bullets would go through like they went through almost everything else. But if it was full and under pressure, it could explode with the force of a frag grenade, sending hunks of sharp metal and gallons of beer everywhere. Under normal circumstances, Harry might have tried it, but these weren’t normal circumstances. He was fighting in front of an innocent crowd and had no cover. 

I mean, just shoot the fucker already! But it’s like this throughout. There is a ton of deliberation on Harry’s part throughout the novel, particularly during the action scenes, bringing them to a dead halt. And beyond that it’s just so excrutiatingly drawn out: 

Callahan ducked down while calculating Thurston’s speed. As soon as he thought the guy had reached the rear door, he shot diagonally through the kitchen door. His aim was good but his timing was a smidge off. The bullet punched a hole midway up the kitchen door and blasted outside, narrowly missing both Thurston’s back and the swinging back door. 

Immediatley afterward Harry was up and out the kitchen door himself, almost tripping over the beer keg Thurston had kicked aside. After noticing that the kick-back man was still hustling across the back porch trying to find a way out of the yard, Harry hefted the metal cask up. It was empty. He carried it with him as he cautiously neared the back door. 

And it just goes on like this, for pages and pages. But at least we learned the keg was empty!! Seriously, this is straight out Harknett’s equally-ponderous The Revenger/Stark series. Even when we branch out of the typical gunfights it’s just as slow-going; there’s a positively endless part halfway through where a handcuffed Harry gets in a boat and is chased by the bad guys. What could have been a fast-moving action scene instead becomes a head-beating for the reader, just going on and on with extranneous detail that slows down the action. 

The non-understanding of action fiction even extends to the names of the characters – or, at least, to the name of the badass .44 Magnum killer of the opening scene. Meyers intends this guy to be the dark reflection of Harry Callahan, a merciless hitman who works for the bad guys and is as good with his .44 as Harry is. And Meyers names this evil badass hitman…Sweetboy. He names him Sweetboy! There’s also a lot of stuff about main villain Nash – who in reality is a Mexican immigrant who has given himself a new last name. This elicits some race-baiting on Harry’s part that might be a little out of line for the character, but then Nash does spend the book trying to have Harry killed. 

Humorously, just as the action scenes are protracted to the point of boredom, the sex scene in the novel is woefully anemic. That’s right, sex scene – Harry gets laid, folks. By the most unexpected babe: the widow of Sheriff Tucker! Here at least Harry only spends a hot second deliberating on his actions, sleeping with the widow of his recently-murdered friend, but Meyers keeps it all as vague as, “They made love,” and that’s that. At this point I was ready to shoot the book…but of course I didn’t know if the book was empty or full, because if it was full… Never mind, stupid joke. But still, the book annoyed me. 

Meyers also wrote #3: The Long Death, which was much better than this one. So again it’s curious he liked Duel For Cannons so much himself. Maybe because it was new for him at the time, and he was excited about writing a new Dirty Harry story. But that excitement does not extend to the novel itself, and at least for this reader Duel For Cannons was a trying, wearying read. 

Finally, there’s the compelling question of who did the cover art; note that in the interview I linked to above, even Meyers didn’t know who did the artwork for the series. As I mentioned in the comments section of a previous review, my guess is that the artwork for the Dirty Harry series was done by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who was soon to make a name for himself in the superhero comics field with his work on Marvel’s The New Mutants.* This cover and the other Dirty Harry covers all look so much like Sienkiewicz’s work that, if they weren’t by him, they were by an artist who was trying to rip him off. I actually contacted Sienkiewicz via his official website prior to writing this review, asking if he did the art for this series, but didn’t receive a response. That he didn’t respond makes me suspect that he did handle the art, but for whatever reason doesn’t want to acknowledge it. But then, I admit I’m conspiracy-minded; it could be that the guy just didn’t feel like responding. 

*I picked up two of these New Mutant comics at the time, issues #23 and #24, and they essentially blew my 9-year-old mind; I had no idea that comics could be so weird. 

Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry, by Phillip Rock

No month stated, 1977  Star Books

(Original US edition 1971)

Phillip Rock, who wrote the awesome Hickey & Boggs novelization, handles the tie-in for the first Dirty Harry flick, and it’s another good book. It doesn’t come off like an entirely new story, like his novelization of Hickey And Boggs did (likely because Rock was working from Walter Hill’s original screenplay for that one). Instead, Rock’s Dirty Harry is pretty much the prototypical film novelization, serving up mostly the same story as the film but with minor variations. 

This slim UK paperback seems to be a direct lift of the text that was originally published by Berkley Books in the US in 1971. There are US-style double quotation marks instead of UK-style single quotation marks, and there doesn’t appear to have been any tinkering by Star Books. Initially I wondered if the f-bombs had been removed, as sometimes we’re informed that Dirty Harry might utter a “short, harsh, four-letter word,” and I suspected skittish British editors might have bowdlerized Rock’s original text (because they don’t use the f-word over there in England, btw). But then later in the book the word “fuck” appears, so there went my suspicions. The strangest thing though is why Dirty Harry was even reprinted in the UK in 1977. This was a year after The Enforcer was released, which was the last Dirty Harry movie until 1983’s Sudden Impact. 

It's been 7 or 8 years since I last watched Dirty Harry, but overall the difference I noted between the film and Rock’s novel is that, mainly, there is more characterization of the villain, Scorpio, in the novel. Here we see how much of a whackjob he truly is; he has forgotten his real name and spends most of the time looking up at the sky, wondering where the stars are. He’s very much into the astrology scene, and Rock puts the occasional horroscope for Scorpio in the book. There is more of an attempt by Rock to make Scorpio a rounded figure than there is in the film itsef, and the same holds true for Rock’s take on Dirty Harry. In the novel it seemed to me that Harry – whose full name, we’re informed, is Harry Francis Kallahan – is a bit more of a team player, and a lot of the book is comprised of him doing standard police detecting instead of making quips and busting heads. 

We’re also informed that Harry has been a cop for nineteen years and that he’s from San Francisco; he grew up in the apparently-rough Potrero Hill neighborhood of the city. I don’t know anything about San Francisco, but Philip Rock certainly seems to, as Dirty Harry is peppered with topical details about the city, to the extent that you assume Rock must have had more than a passing familiarity with the place. It’s one thing for the film to show famous locales, but another for Rock to tell us precisely where things are taking place; he even shows familiarity with San Francisco’s public transit system, down to the exact stops. Given this, I felt more of an awareness of San Francisco in the novel than I did in the film itself. I also thought it was interesting that Rock so tied the locale into the setting, given that the Dirty Harry men’s adventure novels, part of Warner Books’ “Men Of Action” line in the early ‘80s, often took Harry outside of his city. 

As mentioned Rock follows the film pretty faithfully, so I assume he must’ve gotten to view a workprint or a final draft; if I’m not mistaken, Dirty Harry was in development hell for a long time, with such actors as John Wayne supposedly at one point slated to star in it. The book even opens the same as the movie, with Scorpio up on a roof and sniping a beautiful young woman as she swims in a hotel pool. But as ever with tie-ins, we are brought more into the minds of the characters, from the insane thoughts that propel Scorpio to the thoughts of the girl in the pool – who’s here, we learn, because she’s having an affair with some lawyer she plans to marry. We also learn that her “last thought on Earth” concerns “what her breasts looked like as she drifted across the pool.” (It’s nice to know that even girls think about boobs all the time!) 

The setup here also shows how Harry comes into the fold; he simply answers the phone in the inspector’s room at his precinct because the other inspectors are busy. Whereas the film had that great time-lapse bit with the murder followed by the investigation, here it’s a bit more drawn out with Harry getting the call and heading over to the hotel. One thing to note is that Rock makes Harry a bit cheaper than in the film; indeed, we’re told he’s “a tall man, but whip-thin” and that he looks like “an overworked cop in a cheap suit.” You almost get the impression Harry's “whip-thin” because he doesn’t have the money to eat; we’re also informed that, when Harry bums a cigar from a fellow cop, he carefully pinches it out and puts it in his pocket to smoke later. 

But as mentioned, Harry comes off more as a “realistic” cop here in the novel than the one-man army he was in the film. That said, the famous opening with the bank robbery is here in the book. Same setup too, with Harry enjoying a hot dog and noticing how no one seems to be coming out of the bank across the street, even though people keep going in. The ensuing gunfight even plays out the same…save for Harry’s famous line. Here, when he holds his .44 Magnum on the lone surviving bank robber, Harry does ask whether he fired five times or six, but we get the added detail that “regulations” say he should only have five bullets…and the question is whether he’s gone against regulations and put a sixth bullet in the chamber. The film made a very wise decision in cutting out this detail; it sounds a lot more badass to just leave it as “how many times did I shoot?” Another change – instead of the more powerful “it’ll blow your head clean off” of the film, here in the novel Harry says his .44 Magnum will “turn your head into hash.” 

I should watch the movie again, because it’s the middle portion of Rock’s Dirty Harry that seemed different to me. First of all Harry’s given a new partner, whether he wants one or not: new inspector Chico Gonsales. The two begin canvassing leads, and here in the novel there’s much more of a procedural vibe than I recall the film having. Here again Rock brings San Francisco to life, with Harry and Chico driving around various neighborhoods and asking about any suspicious characters. And also here Scorpio is certainly given more inner depth than he was in the film, with periodic bits where he’ll wander around the city, often trying to hit on women who ignore him, or looking up at the sky and wishing for a place where he can view the stars. But still even here I didn’t feel that his astrological gimmick was fully worked into the plot; I mean the movie has it that he’s a psycho, which is obvious, but Rock tries to integrate the horoscope stuff into it – all of it no doubt inspired by the Zodiac Killer. 

Harry runs the case and a lot of the plot hinges around him bucking the stupid higher ups who want to string Zodiac along…in particular “The Mayor,” as memorably portrayed by John Vernon in the film. One of Harry’s biggest ideas is to lure Scorpio to the one building not guarded by the cops, Harry correctly guessing that Scorpio’s arrogance will prevent him from realizing it’s a trap. Harry, armed with an “elephant gun,” gets in a shootout with the serial killer, but Scorpio manages to escape, and a cop dies in the melee. But this will be it on the action front for a good while; instead it’s back to Harry and Chico canvassing the city and looking for leads. There’s also no sleazy action for Harry, though we learn in a minor aside that his wife was killed in a car accident, though they hadn’t been married long and “it was a long time ago.” 

The action returns in the final quarter. First, there’s the famous sequence where Scorpio makes “bag man” Harry run around San Francisco from payphone to payphone. Rock really brings home how much misery it would cause to run around with a suitcase filled with $250,000 in small bills; Harry only belatedly realizes he should’ve gotten a backpack. This leads to yet another shootout, and Harry employing a switchblade – something he’d insisted on bringing along, despite the reservations of the Chief of Police. And, same as in the film, Scorpio’s cleared because Harry has trampled his rights in the gathering of the incriminating evidence…yet it’s kind of hard to believe that a guy who has been a cop for 19 years wouldn’t have thought of any of that. 

Rock also captures the ravaged horror of Scorpio’s face after he pays a boxer to beat him up…so the “assault” can be blamed on Harry, who has been following Scorpio around. But this subplot doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, same as the film it all climaxes in Scorpio taking hostage a school bus. This sequence in the film, by the way, features what I consider the highlight of Lalo Schifrin’s score…the “Scorpio Theme” played on a very mean fuzz bass. Even here it all plays out mostly the same as the film…with one minor but important difference. Proving out that the producers couldn’t decide which way the finale would go, Harry here in the novel does not throw his badge into a lake, though he briefly considers it. It’s my understanding that Clint Eastwood is the one who pushed for the “badge toss” finale. I always thought Magnum Force should’ve opened with Harry scuba-diving in search of his badge. 

Speaking of Magnum Force, that has always been my favorite of the Dirty Harry movies. I know this first one gets all the acclaim, but the second one just does more for me. However Philip Rock didn’t write the novelization for it; this was the only Dirty Harry novelization he wrote. And he does a fine job, bringing the characters and their inner turmoils to life. So again I say Dirty Harry is pretty much the template for a movie tie-in, as there are no glaring differences from the actual film, and mostly it just gives a more complete look at the characters themselves.

Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death

Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death, by Dane Hartman
December, 1981  Warner Books

Ric Meyers wrote this third volume of Dirty Harry, and unlike whoever wrote the sixth volume, he was clearly familiar with the franchise. The Long Death is filled with references to the first three Dirty Harry movies (Sudden Impact hadn’t been released yet), and in many ways it’s almost a sequel to The Enforcer, with characters from that third film making appearances.

But despite the strong sense of feel for the franchise and the careful continuity, The Long Death is jarring when compared to its film predecessors, as for the most part Meyers has written a horror novel. There is a horrific vibe here, from women being abducted and forced into sexual slavery to copious amounts of gore in the plentiful action scenes, and all of it seems out of place in the Dirty Harry mythos. But in a way Meyers here shows the direction the franchise could have taken in the ‘80s; he’s very much aware of the horror boom taking place in the film world (and even has a character discussing the phenomenom at length), and shows how it could be paired up with the cliched “tough cop” genre.

In fact for long portions of The Long Death I thought I was reading one of Meyers’s Ninja Master books, which he was writing at the same time for Warners. That same dark vibe runs throughout, with a focus on the depredations of women; Meyers must’ve been a big fan of the torture porn that ran in the latter sweat mags. He writes very long (very long) sequences of innocent young women being captured, subjugated, bound, beaten, and raped, before their ultimate murder, and usually he writes these scenes from the woman’s perspective, so we can witness her reaction to each and every horror. I have to admit, this sort of stuff isn’t my thing, but I also must admit that Meyers excels in this regard, and at the very least makes you eager to see the villains get their final comeuppance.

We see this horror element in the opening chapter, which features a young female student at Berkley captured on campus grounds and tied up, subjugated, brutalized…on and on it goes, giving the reader a clammy, grimy feeling of unease. As I say, it is like nothing ever depicted in the Dirty Harry films, but very much akin to the horror flicks of the day, or even the sleazy Italian slasher movies of the ‘70s, which are later mentioned in the text. Meyers tries to have his cake and eat it too, with frequent condemnations of ultraviolence in horror films and how Harry himself doesn’t like gory films. So it’s safe to say there’s a bit of in-jokery going on throughout.

Speaking of Harry, we meet him in a prolonged action scene that is very well done, but again more spectacular than anything in the films. Here Harry has become more like a one-man army of the sort soon to be featured in ‘80s action movies; throughout the novel he finds himself up against multiple heavily-armed opponents, Harry dishing out bloody payback with his customary .44 Magnum. And Meyers doesn’t cheat on the gore, with copious heads exploding under Magnum impacts – again, more violent than anything in the films.

Meyers does pull the same stunt the mysterious author of the sixth volume did: Harry’s working on a case when we meet him, he’s yanked off it by his “stupid chief” boss, put on another case…and soon discovers the two cases are related. Anyway Harry is introduced in an over-the-top action sequence which has him taking out a trio of child pornographers who are hiding in a big aquarium. The shootout goes all over the place, Meyers incorporating the setting into the action; of course one of the bastards becomes shark bait. The recurring joke of Harry’s heavyset partner Fatso Devlin always being ten steps behind Harry – and never surprised by the violence and gore that trails in his wake – is introduced here as well.

Harry is very much in the vein of his film counterpart; Meyers doesn’t try to expand on his emotions or feelings or anything. He’s just a grizzled cop with a healthy disrespect for authority; there’s a lot of traded barbs with his chief, Captain Avery. About the only thing that doesn’t ring true is the eleventh hour development of romantic feelings between Harry and a pretty Vice cop named Lynn McConnell. Meyers introduces her early in the book, has her bantering with Harry and giving as good as she gets, then later on brings her into the main case and having Harry worry over her. However, there’s no sex for Harry and Lynn spends the majority of the novel off-page.

Capt. Avery insists that Harry be taken off the child porn case, which is run by a mysterious individual known as “The Professor,” as he’s reportedly a teacher of some sort. Harry is instead put on a case involving the black militant group Uhuru which is run by Big Ed Mohamid, as seen in The Enforcer. Meyers doesn’t do much to expand on this, with Big Ed reluctant to talk to Harry – the corpse of a young white girl has been found in Uhuru’s headquarters, and of course it’s the young girl we readers saw abducted and killed in the first chapter. Harry immediately suspects something’s going on, and ultimately he will be proven correct – the true villains of the plot are trying to bait Uhuru into starting a race war so as to divert attention from their kidnapping-white slavery setup. And of course Harry is alone in his convictions, with Avery insisting that Big Ed and Uhuru are the culprits who raped and killed the girl.

Bringing in this militant radical aspect allows Meyers to incorporate more gun-blazing action than you’d expect in a cop novel. Sometimes in surprsing ways, like when Harry visits a film class at Berkley and, after a lot of exposition from the teacher on the films of Dario Argento, finds himself ambushed by a trio of black militants with assault rifles. There’s also another action scene where Harry races into the Uhuru building while it’s being attacked by the cops, so he has to dodge bullets from both the militants and his own colleagues. It’s all entertaining but a lot of these action scenes just go on too long, with too much detail on Harry doing this or that – sort of like in Stark, where the overwhelming narrative description slows down what should be fast-moving action.

Meyers has a little fun playing with the Dirty Harry mythos; when Harry has a confrontation with one of the main villains in a packed disco club, the villain asks Harry, “Do you feel lucky?” To which Harry will ultimately respond: “That’s my line, punk.” And speaking of a disco club, bizarrely enough this is what the white slavers operate out of, their leader being a flat-chested woman (flat-chested = evil: men’s adventure 101, folks). The finale however plays out at their separate headquarters, a remote villa on an island which turns out to be a house of traps. Again the horror feel is strong, as the place even has a torture chamber with an iron maiden. And again Meyers incorporates the setting into the action.

Overall The Long Death is an action and gore-filled yarn with horror elements, and Meyers keeps the story moving. He does introduce too many concepts he doesn’t much exploit – Lynn McConnell being one, to such an extent that we don’t even get to see what happens between her and Harry at novel’s end – but he definitely takes his job seriously and doesn’t just phone in a middling “tough cop” yarn a la the guy who wrote the lame sixth volume.

Dirty Harry #6: City Of Blood

Dirty Harry #6: City Of Blood, by Dane Hartman
May, 1982  Warner Books

Here’s another series I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve also never gotten around to collecting all twelve of the volumes in the series, and doubtful if I will, for Dirty Harry is one of those series that’s priced too high on the used books marketplace…I’ve seen some of these offered at insane prices. But anyway this was another Warner Books “Men Of Action” title, and as with Ninja Master Ric Meyers  was one of the writers, though he didn’t write this one.

As typical with this line, it’s uncertain who other than Meyers wrote what. My hunch is that Stephen Smoke, who reportedly wrote Ninja Master #1: Vengeance Is His, wrote this book. Like Vengeance Is His, City Of Blood is saddled with a bland, boring protagonist, bland, boring prose, and overall is quite lifeless, save for a few unexpected moments of sadism; it’s also written in a needlessly-convoluted style, as if the author is constantly tripping over himself. The writing is the definition of perfunctory, coming off with a sort of passive style that is wholly unacceptable for this genre, as I’ll show in an excerpt below.

And yes, you read that right – Dirty Harry is bland in this novel. Dirty Harry! It takes a writer of a certain caliber to make the most famous tough-ass cop of all bland, but Smoke, if indeed it be he, has done it. The Harry of the movies has been replaced by just your average everyday cop; we’re told that Harry’s boss, Lt. Drexler, can’t stand Harry for all his rule-breaking and bad-assery, but it’s very much a case of tell not show. Harry in fact is even polite not only to witnesses and potential suspects, but even to the latest partner he’s been saddled with. As Marty McKee notes, it seems evident that this ghostwriter had never actually seen a Dirty Harry movie.

The unfortunate thing is that City Of Blood is one of the sicker men’s adventure novels I’ve read, but then that seems to have been a common thread in all the Men Of Action books; take for example Ninja Master #6, which seemed to relish in describing the gruesome murders of children. This book features a “sex killer,” per the hypberbolic back cover copy, one who likes to decapitate his victims after engaging them in graphically-described sex scenes. This stuff is as lurid as the men’s adventure novels of the previous decade (it seems to me that the genre, for the most part, was a bit sanitized in the ‘80s, at least in regards to the perverted stuff, replacing regular old porn with gun-porn).

But if only we had a suitably deranged protagonist to navigate us through this sleaze! Instead, City Of Blood is like, I don’t know, Bronson: Blind Rage if it had starred Killinger. The novel is also poorly plotted, jamming two separate subplots in a wild disregard for narrative construction. Okay, we open with one of those sick-o sequences, where “Teddy” avidly screws a pair of high-class hookers in a sleazy San Francisco hotel, then hacks them up into hamburger. From this to Dirty Harry Callahan, called onto the scene. But instead of chasing down this killer, Harry is instead ordered to track down another serial killer: the Mission Street Knifer, who has murdered sundry bums and thus far eluded capture. 

How tracking one serial killer will put Harry on the trail of another serial killer is something the ghostwriter hopes we won’t dwell upon too much. Anyway, Drexler sets Harry up with a new partner, much to Harry’s chagrin. This is Drake Owens, actor turned cop(!); he carries a “.356 Magnum.” (Well, the novel is fiction.) The ghostwriter doesn’t really articulate it, but Owens seems to get the gig due to his disguise abilities; much like the short-lived later men’s adventure series Decoy (not to be confused with the ‘70s Decoy), Owens can capably change his whole being through costuming and makeup and etc, and thus poses as a bum on loooong stakeouts in the hopes of baiting the Knifer.

In another parallel to Vengeance Is His, this ghostwriter seems to just want to turn out a generic, soapy novel about ritzy people doing ritzy things, and doesn’t want to bother with the blood and thunder expected of the genre. To wit, we have parts where Dirty Harry visits Drake and his wife at their home, accepting their offer of a homecooked dinner, and there’s even an overlong visit to the set of a movie, where Drake’s wife works as a seamstress or somesuch. However this does ultimately have something to do with the plot, as it’s her expertise which figures out the clothing on the hookers murdered in the opening section (unidentified due to their missing heads) came from expensive boutiques – a hunch that results in the humorous development of Harry visiting expensive clothing stores. However it must be stated that the author again fails to capture the dark comedy that would naturally ensue were such a scene to ever feature in one of the films.

The Mission Street Knifer subplot is not only ridiculous but poorly handled. After lots of padding with Drake as a bum and Harry on stakeout, it finally leads up to an endless part where, on Halloween night, Drake gets a hunch that this tall, mysterious figure dressed like the Grim Reaper (complete with a skull mask) might be the Knifer. And he just follows after him…and follows after him…and on and on. I forgot to mention, there are huge chunks of City Of Blood where Dirty Harry just disappears, and Drake Owens becomes the hero. But this guy is in fact the Knifer, and we do at least get a memorable climax, with the massive, robed figure seemingly impervious to bullets – even those fired by Harry’s infamous .44 Magnum.

Drake is nearly killed in the fight, and we thereafter have parts where Dirty Harry sits around and worries about him. I’ll just let that statement speak for itself; it pretty much says all there is to say about this novel’s handling of the character.

Now as for the main plot, “Teddy” continues to screw and kill with aplomb, including another sleazy bit where he goes to a club with his latest babe, and hacks her up while she’s having sex with some other dude. Now, in this particular ghostwriter’s usual penchant for sloppy editing, early in the book Harry and Drake are called onto the scene of some random shooting, an action bit that sees them taking out terrorists who are gunning for wealthy CEO William Maxim-Davis outside his corporate headquarters. This inrecibly lazy, coincidental plotting serves to bring Maxim-Davis into the plot, and Harry meets with him occasionally while tracking leads, and well…guess who Teddy turns out to be. 

Action is only infrequent, always bloodless (save for Teddy’s gruesome kills), and usually arbitrary, like when researching leads Harry and Drake stay with the uncle of Drake’s wife, and an assassin tries to take them out in the middle of the night. Unbelievably, Drake actually survives the novel, though the poor uncle is blown away. This bit takes us into the climax, which is straight out of a cliffhanger serial; Harry confronts Maxim-Davis in his office, and with the push of a button on his desk the CEO opens up secret passageways into his office, and in come a couple dudes toting guns! Off Harry’s taken in the bastard’s limo, a henchman pointing a gun at his head, when those same terrorists from early on attack again. But even here in this climactic action scene the prose is bland and lifeless:

[The guns held by Davis’s henchmen] contained a clip of eight rounds each, which would mean that before Harry could get out his own weapon and do much of anything with it, he would very likely find his body riddled with sixteen rounds. 

This prospect did not strike him as a very pleasing one, and, even as he cursed himself for blundering into Davis’s trap he tossed aside his .44, complying with the order Davis had just given him, almost casually, for he was still working on his contracts, signing his name over and over again as though he wanted to prove just how meaningless he had ever viewed the threat that Harry had posed. 

Harry remained seated, saying nothing – what was there to say with two guns targeted at your head? – waiting for Davis to conclude his business and get to the point which, he supposed glumly, was his imminent execution.

Folks, don’t write your action novels like this. Especially don’t write a Dirty Harry novel like this.