The Last Scam

The Last Scam, by David Harris

No month stated, 1981  Delacorte Press

I first discovered this obscure novel, only ever published in this hardcover edition, some years ago while searching the Kirkus review archives for novels about marijuana smuggling in the ‘70s. Really! While the review was negative (as is typical for vintage Kirkus reviews), I still wanted to read the book, so ordered a copy through Interlibary Loan. I think this was about three or so years ago. 

When I got the book from the lending library – and curiously the book had never even seemed to have been opened before, let alone read – I flipped through the pages, and rather than seeing the pot-fueled madcap hippie dope smuggling fun escapist yarn I wanted, it was a barrage of Spanish language, Mexican locales, and hardly anything about marijuana smuggling at all. I returned the book to my library, which returned it on to the lending library, still unread. But I recently went on another of my random “I’ve gotta read a book about marijuana smuggling in the ‘70s” tangents, and found myself looking at that Kirkus review of The Last Scam again. And this time, I swore to all the trash gods, I’d read the damn thing. 

Once again the book I received seemed to be in perfect, pristine, never-touched shape, save for the fact that the dustcover had been removed. And I cracked open the uncracked spine and tried to read this 364-page monstrosity again. And realized within the first few pages why it sunk without a trace, never garnering a paperback edition – not even from a low-budget imprint like Manor Books! So again, there’s absolutely none of the ‘70s dope-smuggling fun escapism I wanted here in The Last Scam, not even anything approaching similarly-themed contemporary novels like Night Crossing and The Mexican Connection. Even the deranged and reactionary Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve was better than this slow-moving chore of a novel. 

So here’s the thing. That Kirkus review, while negative, actually makes The Last Scam sound better than it is. Those colorfully-named dope-world characters mentioned in the review turn out to be paper-thin ciphers who have no backgrounds or interests or personality – I mean, we don’t even learn why the main character, a veteran dope smuggler named Henry Amazon, even got into the drug game to begin with! And hell, other than an occasional puff of “motta” (again, Spanish words proliferate in the text), Amazon is straight-edged the entire novel, keyed up on the planning of the titular last scam. 

None of the cool period drug world stuff I wanted was here, ie stuff like in Smokestack El Ropo’s Bedside Reader. It’s all so bland and boring, with no mentions of the world outside of desolate patches of Mexico where Henry Amazon plans his final marijuana run. And yeah, “Henry Amazon.” Author David Harris has this annoying quirk of repeating the dude’s full name constantly in the narrative: “Henry Amazon,” over and over. But that’s not bad enough. The other names are just confusing. Like Ramon Ramon, Amazon’s former partner…but who turns out to really be a “gringo” like Amazon. I mean despite having a novel in which 90% of the characters are Mexican, author Harris even gives one of the few white protagonists a Spanish name! 

But then, The Last Scam is so “Mexico First” that there are parts where Henry Amazon, the friggin’ protagonist of the yarn, is referred to as a “gringo” in the narrative! This gets confusing because Harris will willy-nilly refer to Amazon or Ramon Ramon as “the gringo.” But then again, Harris is really bad with POV-hopping, by which I mean one paragraph we’re in one character’s perspective and in the next we’re in another character’s perspective, and there’s no white space or anything to warn us of the perspective change. One of my true pet peeves in books. It just generates confusion, confusion which is only compounded by all the similarly-named, cipher-like characters. 

I also suspect Harris was influenced by Joe Eszterhas’s series of Nark! articles for Rolling Stone in the early ‘70s, which were eventually anthologized as a hardcover by Rolling Stone’s publishing venture Straight Arrow Press. As in Nark!, the government agents are an unhinged, sadistic lot, particularly the Mexican ones. This brings me to a more interesting parallel. There are a lot of similarities between The Last Scam and the work in general of William Crawford. The overall grimy, dirty vibe (everyone seems to be dirty and greasy), the sadistic cops, the penchant for torture, the sudden eruptions of brutal violence, even the weird quirk of characters shitting themselves. Even some of the phraseology is similar: “drop his mud” is used here, as in someone giving away info, and the only other place I’ve seen that phrase is in Crawford’s novels. 

Now, I’m not saying David Harris was William Crawford, though I guess it’s possible (though I think Crawford died around 1979 or so). I’m just saying it’s an interesting similarity. Because William Crawford would’ve written a more entertaining novel, I’m sure. I mean comparatively speaking. The problem with The Last Scam is the unlikable, ciper-like characters who plod through its boring events with absolutely no escapist thrills for the reader to enjoy. It’s a humorless beat-down of a novel, the complete antithesis of the fun sort of dope smuggling yarn I wanted…like the more recent High Fliers. It’s also curiously devoid of any background detail on drug smuggling; as mentioned, why Henry Amazon or Ramon Ramon even became smugglers is not mentioned. And about the most we learn about either of them is that they were in ‘Nam together. That’s it. 

The novel opens with a prologue set in 1977, in which Henry Amazon and Ramon Ramon run into each other in some dingy Mexican restaurant – almost the entirety of the novel takes place in such locales. We quickly learn some background on the two; Amazon and Ramon were partners until 1971, when they had an acrimonious splitting of ways. This had something to do with a screw-up a third partner, The Patchouli Kid, happened to make on a scam (ie a drug run). Speaking of whom, here in this prologue Ramon casually mentions that the Patchouli Kid has been killed by the sadistic Federales, ie the Mexican cops. Amazon storms off, and I guess all this is Harris’s foreshadowing of how dangerous “scams” are becoming. 

We then pick back up in 1978…and we’re again in Mexico. And Amazon is planning another scam. And he’ll again run into Ramon Ramon. Here though we learn there was more to their falling out: years ago Amazon’s girlfriend Wanda Lamar (also an assumed name), ran off with Ramon. But even this is just muddled backstory; Wanda is mentioned infrequently, in particular that she eventually “went native,” living with the Indians in the Mexican jungle to the point that she came off like one. Or at least Amazon took her for one, last time he saw her. But the point is, Wanda even eventually left Ramon, however she turns up in the last quarter of The Last Scam to complicate the lives of both men. However, Amazon no longer even “feels anything” for Wanda, so any potential for some drama or fireworks is also neutered. As I say, David Harris does a thorough job of consistently ruining the potential of his novel. 

Oh and meanwhile there are the sadistic Feds, both American and Mexican. In charge of the latter is Cruz, who tortures with relish in some of the book’s more shocking scenes; there’s a bit in the middle where he tortures a captured American drug-runner with a flame-heated knife. In charge of the Americans is Purdy Fletcher, aka Purd, a fat moron of reactionary values who seems to have stumbled out of Eszterhas’s book Nark. Under Purd’s command is new Federal agent “Hog” Wissel, which of course made me think of Hog Wiley. These guys work with Cruz, though Cruz and Purd have an antagonistic relationship; on both sides, the cops are presented as bumbling psychopaths who don’t care so much about drugs as they do capturing, torturing, and killing their prey. 

But that’s about it so far as an underground vibe goes to The Last Scam. I mean there isn’t even any tie-in to when all this really started a decade before, with all the hippies running drugs across the border and whatnot…you know, the sort of stuff in Smokestack El Ropo’s Bedside Reader. No mention of the passing of time, or of the drug culture in general…nothing. It’s just a bland, dispirited, boring novel, which is mind-boggling when you consider it. About the only mention we get of any of that stuff is that minor character Beef Stew (another assumed name) was once a member of the Brotherhood of Love…a California-based LSD cult that was featured in, you guessed it, Nark. 

Otherwise David Harris’s focus is on the business end of the scam, the planning and the waiting. Oh, the waiting. There are so many parts in this nigh-on 400-page novel where Henry Amazon or Ramon Ramon just sit in a dingy Mexican motel room…and wait. Wait for their connection to drum up some money, wait for someone to call them on the meet. It’s just endless wheel-spinning. Midway through things pick up when Ramon’s scam with Beef Stew goes haywire, in violent fashion. Another thing: Ramon Ramon is himself close to being the novel’s antagonist, given how he’s supposedly blown away a narc and is now on the FBI’s most wanted list. But even this doesn’t pan out into anything memorable; Ramon manages to elude Purd and the others several times, but when this subplot reaches its conclusion it is very anticlimactic. 

Harris is also guilty of a weird, half-assed omniscient tone. Throughout the novel we’ll be told stuff like, “Amazon didn’t know it, but the car he’d just passed happened to belong to…” That sort of thing, where we are constantly being told things the character doesn’t know, or couldn’t know. But otherwise there’s no omniscient narrator voice to tie all this together. In other words, it’s half-assed, and of a piece with the POV-hopping. What I’m trying to say is, I really didn’t enjoy The Last Scam, and there’s no mystery why it didn’t find a greater readership. I think David Harris had a fine idea for a novel (he even dedicates it to the supposed “real” Henry Amazon, wishing him to stay safe), but he ruined it with such a humorless, boring approach. Decades later Robert Sabbag would take a similar plot and do much better with it, in Loaded.

Loaded (aka Smokescreen)

Loaded, by Robert Sabbag

No month stated, 2002  Little, Brown and Company

In 1976 Robert Sabbag published Snowblind, an account of a coke smuggler which was greeted with much critical acclaim; Rolling Stone excerpted it extensively, and no less than Hunter Thompson showered it with praise. Sabbag didn’t focus on “drug books” for a while after that; I think I read an interview with him where he stated he didn’t want to to only be known for drug-related nonfiction, so focused on other material. But in 2002 he returned to the field with Loaded (retitled Smokescreen for its trade paperback reprint), which concerns the much more interesting (to me, at least) subject of ‘70s marijuana smuggling. 

In the afterword to Loaded, Sabbag states that he almost wrote this book back in the ‘70s, and that it would’ve been an of-the-moment documentation of the era. It’s kind of unfortunate he didn’t. I’ve searched, and it doesn’t seem like there were many books published on dope smuggling in the ‘70s; you’d figure Rolling Stone would’ve done a story on it, maybe with Thompson himself or some other roving reporter tagging along with some dope smugglers on their DC-3 as they winged their way across the border from Mexico with a huge stash of Colombian Gold. I’ve searched my Rolling Stone: Cover To Cover CD-ROM and have been unable to find any such story…the closest thing would be the occasional “dope pages” updates from Charles Perry which ran in the early to mid ‘70s, but the majority of those were just news bulletins on happenings in the world of dopesmoking. 

My assumption is the smugglers were so under the radar they didn’t even want any publicity in Rolling Stone. It seems that the only place you can find stories about them from the era itself would be in the fiction of the day, a la Night Crossing and The Mexican Connection. (And let’s not forget a modern attempt at this subgenre, High Fliers.) Well anyway, all of which is to say that Sabbag could’ve dominated the field if he’d done this book back then, because as it is, it doesn’t seem like Loaded reached anywhere near the success (critical or commercial) that Snowblind did, implying that readers in the ‘70s were much more interested in drug-related nonfiction. There’s hardly much about this book online, either; part of it could be confusion over its retitling, which also implies it didn’t do as well as expected, thus a new title was devised for the paperback edition, to increase awareness or somesuch. 

Given that Loaded was written decades after the events described, there is an air of detachment to the narrative, which unfortunately robs it of impact. Also there is an air of a time lost. But on the other hand, at least this method allows the tale to fully be told, given that our protagonist escapes custody until the early ‘90s. Allen Long is that protagonist, a man who starts out in 1971 as a struggling documentary director, but who by the end of the ‘70s has become a kingpin of the drug trade. In a way he represents the era itself, starting off as your typical young hippie who is into the whole peace and love movement, but ending the decade as a guy who does deals with former CIA agents who carry along grenade launchers in case their coke deals go bad. 

Greil Marcus also gave Snowblind a laudatory review in Rolling Stone, in particular marvelling over the hardboiled style Sabbag employed in it. Sabbag doesn’t seem to go as much for the same vibe here, instead giving the narrative more of a snarky, or at least somewhat humorous tone. I guess the difference is that Zachary Swann, “hero” of the earlier book, was a coke dealer, employing all the heavy vibes of that trade, whereas Long is at times more in the Cheech & Chong spectrum of things. This is just the difference between the two drugs, personified; Long, like so many others who became smugglers (as Sabbag informs us), only got into the business because he enjoyed smoking dope, not because he wanted to get rich. Indeed, the wealth was basically a bonus. But whereas the world of cocaine dealing is a dangerous one, wraught with murder and burns and blackmail (as documented in the awesome period study Cocaine), the marijuana trade – at least in the ‘70s – was one of a closeknit group of peace-lovers who just wanted to get stoned on good grass. 

The novel opens with a taut, gripping sequence; it’s Fall of 1976 and Long’s just arrived in Colombia on his DC-3, along with pilot Frank Hatfield and Long’s partner Will McBride. Long, against Hatfield’s suggestions, has loaded the plane with marijuana despite the rough conditions; Hatfield is adamant the plane won’t make it. As usual it makes sense to listen to the pilot, as the plane does indeed crash – a grueling sequence that goes on for several pages. There’s about as much “flying material” in Loaded as in Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve (another of those dope smuggler novels published in the actual era), and I guess other readers would enjoy it more than I did. But this opening sequence definitely gets your interest. 

But Sabbag leaves us here with the protagonist’s fate in question and then cuts back to 1971, so we can see the rocky path which led Allen Long to this predicament. In ’71 he’s a young wanna-be documentary director, looking to ride on the success of the countercultural milieu with a documentary about smuggling – showing it actually happen, the people behind it, etc. Long has a private investor and has what he thinks is a great subject: El Coyote, a notorious big time smuggler who is given to boastful stories of his smuggling escapades and whatnot. Long puts together a crew and goes with Coyote down to Mexico to film the deal…only for Coyote to be informed by his usual contacts that it’s not the right season for marijuana, that it will be another couple months until product is available. Everyone’s stunned that El Coyote entirely forgot about this, and the big man heads back to New York in shame, never to be heard from again. 

Long stays in Mexico and meets up with various fringe-world drug characters. Sabbag throughout captures the shaggy freak vibe of the era, often documenting the fashions and hairstyles of the various characters. Long quickly bumps into another smuggler, Lee Carlyle, and figures this guy can be the new protagonist of his doc, particularly given Carlyle’s grandiose flourishes, like when he shows his last penny and proclaims he’s going to turn it into a million dollars. Which he does, in one of the more entertaining stories in the book, even if it happens mostly off-page; Carlyle goes through the novel means of smuggling marijuana via Greyhound Bus, and when Long meets up with him later in the US, Carlyle’s a wealthy man with a fancy sportscar, an actress girlfriend, and etc. Then his latest smuggling caper falls apart and Carlyle’s penniless again, and Long is once again back where he started so far as his documentary goes. 

When his independent backer says he’s finished, Long decides to become a smuggler himself, so as to raise the necessary $100k to finish the documentary. Curiously, his original plan will soon be forgotten as Long enters the big leagues of marijuana smuggling and just starts living the life. This takes us into the meat of the tale, with his meeting of McBride and Hatfield, as well as other associates in the drug biz. Some of these characters are more interesting than our protagonists, like JD Reed, a “practicing noble savage and sagebrush philosopher,” who starts each day with a full joint soaked in hash oil. A musclebound giant whose father is a contract killer for the mob, Reed is given to philosophical meanderings as he goes about his smuggling ventures, and he has a sort of “made for a movie” partnership with a science professor named Abe. The material with these two in their Cesna, plotting new smuggling ventures over fatt joints, is entertaining enough for a novel itself. But these are supporting characters, and not seen enough. 

The only time we get this sort of madcap fun from Long and crew is on their first big venture; they fly down to Colombia to handle a shipment to make up for one that was lost, courtesy a bust. On the several-hour flight back up into the US, they inhale copious amounts of marijuana and coke, drinking beer on the side. In various states of inebriation Long takes control of the plane, gliding along without a care in the world. It’s a surreal sequence, very entertaining, particularly the “pullover” that happens in mid-air when a pair of US fighter jets accost them – the pilots having to slow way down to keep abreast with the DC-3. Turns out Long and crew are over US military airspace. They respond with meek shrugs when the fighter pilots call for them over the radio – Long and crew pretending that their radio is broken. “Just some more drug smugglers,” they hear one of the pilots say over the radio. “None of our busines.” And the fighter jets just leave! 

But otherwise Loaded is comprised of straight-eyed recountings of Long’s various smuggling ventures, with little of this zaniness. More of the novel has to do with the machismo of the Colombians, who particularly value masculinity when it is combined with recklessness. This is most displayed when Long bluffs his way out of a bad situation by telling his Colombian partners that he wants them to give him a shipment of marijuana on credit, so he can sell it to pay them back for both it and the shipment he lost. When the Colombians ask how he will carry off such a plan, Long grabs his crotch and announces, “I have only my airplane and my balls.” This delights the Colombians so much they shoot off their guns in the air. But it really is a man’s world in Loaded, the only females a series of romances Long has along the way, from the daughter of a prominent Colombian smuggler to a swingin’ American chick whose pubic hair is trimmed into the shape of a heart – I really wanted to know more about her in particular, but the sleaze quotient is nil, more’s the pity. Again, the book is the product of the ‘00s, not the ‘70s. 

When we pick back up on the opening 1976 sequence, we find that Long has crashed into the sea, though everyone has survived. They are saved by the “deus ex machina” appearance of Tony, a Miami-based drug dealer who arrives on the scene on his boat. He’s not only familiar with Long, he’s more than happy to help him save his shipment. This new partnership leads into the latter half of the book, with coke making a bigger presence on the scene – Long smuggles some of it, but just can’t get into it, finding something evil about the drug. He’s very much a marijuana guy, and finds himself more and more out of touch with the times as coke becomes the drug of the late ‘70s, with all the violence and high-stakes dealing. Around 1978 Long gets a publicity job for Nemperor Records, but quits and gets back into dealing. The book ends rather anticlimactically with Long’s plan for one last big job – one that goes south, losing him 3.5 million dollars. 

At this point Tony, who has had CIA training, has moved on to greener pastures, leaving another CIA trainee, Jimmy, to handle his coke business. Jimmy comes off like the prototype of all the coke dealers you’d see on Miami Vice, down to convincing his partners to do jobs by holding guns to their heads. With Tony’s dealing in guns and grenades on the side, Long has had enough and says goodbye to the business. A brief epilogue gives us a rundown of the fates of the various characters, the majority of whom were eventually caught and did time. Long managed to evade capture the longest, not arrested until 1991. But given that so much time had passed since his smuggling, there was no interest in throwing the book at him, thus he only did 30 months in prison, the last several months in minimum security. 

Sabbag does carry the story along with panache and a definite skill, but at the same time something seems to be missing from Loaded. Maybe it’s because the reality of dope smuggling in the ‘70s wasn’t as fantastical as you would imagine…a lot of it comes off as boring, just a lot of planning and flying back and forth from South America. I get the impression that Snowblind will have all the elements I found lacking in Loaded, so I’m sure I’ll give it a read someday.

Istanbul (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #10)

Istanbul, by Nick Carter
October, 1965  Award Books

This was only the second volume of Nick Carter: Killmaster by  Manning Lee Stokes, but already we know what we’ll get – an ultra-macho Nick, an overstuffed plot, a good deal of padding, and a helluva lot of random exclamation points. This one’s a bit leaner and meaner than the other Stokes Killmasters I’ve read, and Nick in particular comes off as pretty bad-ass; there’s a part late in the novel where he goes through the wringer, takes a half-second breather, and then goes on the offense.

We’re informed it’s May of 1965, and Nick’s been sent to a D.C. hotel by AXE boss Hawk. Nick is instructed to wear a mask when he enters the darkened hotel room, and there he is briefed by another guy in a mask. This bizarre tidbit is never elaborated on, but the implication is that the masked man is an important politician who wants to keep his identity a secret. There are some parallels to From Russia, With Love in that the masked man references SMERSH, stating that a heroin ring operating out of Istanbul (another seeming From Russia, With Love reference) has its own pseudo-SMERSH execution wing, comprised of four individuals. Nick’s assignment is to go to Turkey, find them, and kill them.

First though, a final boink with Nick’s latest girlfriend, Janet. Nick’s realized the poor girl has fallen in love with him, so we can’t have any of that. Her response to his curt admission that he’s not coming back is excerpt-worthy:

“So that is that,” she said. “And damn you, Nick Carter. But before you leave you’re going to give me something to remember you by! Tonight I want you to do everything to me. Don’t hold off the way you do to keep from hurting me! You do hurt me, you know. I’m too little and you’re too damn big, but tonight forget it. Promise!” 

Folks, if I only had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that…

Anyway, Nick heads to Turkey and Stokes does a credible job of bringing the place to life, not hammering us with details. Instead it’s more on the tension and suspense angle, as Nick meets up with the sole AXE contact in Istanbul, a nerdish guy who hero-worships Nick: his name is Mousy Morgan, and he’s clearly coming unglued due to the heavy stuff going on with this heroin ring.

I figured it would be a long haul until we got to any action, similar to previous Stokes installments, but Nick and Mousy are attacked posthaste, as Mousy and a narcotics agent pick up Nick near the Istanbul harbor (where he’s been dropped off by a submarine) and row him to shore. Another boat attacks them, a machine gunner cutting loose. Here Nick employs a new gadget: Tiny Tim, a little metallic ball that’s actually a mini-atom bomb. It’s a bit hard to buy that Nick survives the blast, but what the hell.

From here Nick gets egregious background on the four men he’s to kill: Defarge, Gonzalez, Dr. Six (a former Nazi concentration camp doctor!), and the mysterious Johnny Ruthless, who seems to be more myth than man, but has a penchant for nearly beheading victims with his razor. There’s also Mija, a hotstuff Turkish babe who is a former “hophead” and has gone through the cure and now is helping Mousy take down the ring. There’s yet more seeming Fleming tribute with Mousy’s AXE base being hidden beneath a morgue, with Nick having to pass through a dank hallway with rotten corpses and whatnot – very similar to the underground passage sequence in From Russia, With Love.

There’s the usual random Stokes insanity; for one, to prove that Mija is really a recovering addict and not just a plant, Nick forces the girl to strip, all the way. This while she cries and pleads with him – and mere moments after he’s met her. His objective is to determine that there really are needle marks on her skin, and more importantly no fresh ones. Even crazier is a bit later, when Nick and Mousy go to a club that shows porn flicks, a club frequented by some of the heroin runners, and Mousy dresses up like a woman because only couples can get in. However Stokes doesn’t do much to exploit this, and Nick doesn’t even actually go into the theater – he and Mousy just hang out in the club, on the lookout for their prey.

Stokes got his start writing mystery novels (a la The Lady Lost Her Head), and that’s really the vibe of Istanbul. Nick keeps coming across corpses, ones with their throats slit so savagely that they’ve nearly been decapitated. All clearly the work of Johnny Ruthless, and Nick soon notes the telltale whiff of nail polish remover at the scenes of the grisly murders. Nick still has to figure out the workings of the ring, so he and Mija pretend to be a wealthy vacationing couple, Nick posing as a Southern salesman and Mija as his playmate; another setup that ultimately goes nowhere, save for the expected Nick-Mija coupling – which features more of Stokes’s patented bonkers sleaze:

Nick had forgotten everything in the universe but this red cave into which he must plunge deeper and deeper. He struggled frantically on now in love-hate and tender-hurt with a terrible obsession to cleave and rend and utterly subdue her.

The novel really picks up when Nick and Mija parachute into the no man’s region of Ankara. Mija’s presence is baffling but Stokes explains it away by Nick feeling that the girl won’t be safe if he leaves her alone in Istanbul. There are interesting parallels here to the modern day in that Nick has dropped into Kurd territory, and they are at war with both Syria and Turkey. (I seem to recall someone recently tweeting that this region has been at war for centuries.) And folks the Kurds don’t come off very well at all. In this book they are blood-crazed savages and Nick is very concerned about them, but regardless he disguises himself as one so as to slip into the fold: Gonzalez, the “Basque” uses the Kurds to transfer the poppy seeds, and Nick hopes to disguise himself as one of them for a chance at killing the man.

All this leads to a running sequence in which Nick is quickly caught, strapped to a donkey and sent over a mine field, and somehow manages to free himself, turn the tables on his Kurd captors, and ambush Gonzalez’s caravan. Another Tiny Tim is even employed, Nick once again defying reality by merely burying himself in the desert sand to escape the atomic wrath. But it gets even crazier, because Nick is shot by some Kurd who survives, and Stokes is so caught up in his own escalating pace that he forgets all about this and just has Nick waking up in a hospital along the Bosphorous, a kindly old German doctor at his side, and realizing it’s none other than Dr. Joseph Six. Nick’s in deep shit, because the good doctor is fond of experimenting on subjects.

Stokes would later bring a “Dr. Six” into his John Eagle Expeditor installment Valley Of Vultures (one of my favorites in that series), and there the character was a bit more elaborated. Here Dr. Six is a bit of a buffoon for a Nazi scum villain. He blithely informs Nick that he’s given him an overdose of morphine and Nick’s time is limited. Nick doubts this is true but slowly realizes he really is dying. Here’s where that bad-assery I mentioned comes into play. Dr. Six excuses himself to allow Nick to die alone (his first display of bufoonery) and Nick crawls off the bed, stumbles into the adjacent bathroom, and finds some bath salts in the cabinet. He drinks it, forcing himself to puke – and then drinks his own puke. All to get the morphine out of him.

Then he “accidentally” falls out the window into the Bosphorous below, waking up on the deck of a fisherman’s boat. After the men give him mouth to mouth, Nick jumps back into the water, swims over to Dr. Six’s fortress hospital, and storms the place, looking for revenge. Stokes pulls all this off with aplomb, however it’s a bit goofy that Dr. Six and his colleagues happen to be looking at Nick’s appropriated weapons when the Killmaster sneaks up on them. Even goofier that Nick pretends to be sick and Dr. Six rushes over to help him. But here we get to see gas bomb at Pierre at play, so the climax at least is entertaining.

But it still doesn’t stop. A dazed Nick escapes the hospital, only to almost be run over by a car. True to the genre, a smokin’ hot redhead from America is behind the wheel; she offers to give Nick a ride back to her place. The ensuing sex scene is so rushed over that I had to re-read the part to see that the two actually did have sex. But anyway Stokes is leading us into a surprising, even “shocking” reveal, as the lady has a deadly secret – however not to buzzkill Stokes’s efforts but I’d already seen it coming halfway through the novel.

All told Istanbul moves at a steady clip for Stokes and was probably one of my favorite of his Killmaster yarns. The egregious exclamation points get to be annoying after a while, and per the Stokes norm there’s a bit too much padding and stalling, but overall it’s a fun read, and here for once Nick Carter really lives up to his “Killmaster” title.

Death Of An Informer

Death Of An Informer, by Will Perry
November, 1974  Pyramid Books
(Original Pyramid edition July, 1973)

First published by Pyramid in 1973, Death Of An Informer received this ’74 reprint after winning an Edgar for best paperback mystery. After that it seems to have fallen off the map, as you can’t find much about it online. This is too bad, as the novel is very much in the vein of sleazy ‘70s crime fiction I enjoy, with the caveat that there’s hardly any action in it – I mean I was at least expecting a shootout or two, but about the most that happens is a guy gets pushed into the path of an oncoming train.

Will Perry was the pseudonym of a British reporter named W.J. Weatherby who was based in New York for many years and apparently covered the black community extensively. Thus there is a sense of authenticity to Death Of An Informer, which solely focues on the blacks who frequent “The Block,” ie the stretch of Forty-Second Street which runs between Seventh and Eight Avenues in Mahnattan. This is a “hell” (per the hyperbolic back cover copy) of strip clubs, hookers, pimps, hustlers, drug dealers, and everything else you could imagine, and in many ways the novel is a time capsule of a place and an era long gone. If I were to write a novel set in ‘70s Manhattan, I’d surely use this book for topical details.

This certainly isn’t a pulp crime novel, though. Weatherby seems to be shooting for the big leagues, and I’d say the novel has more in common with contemporary bestsellers like Report To The Commissioner than pulp paperbacks like, say, A Piece Of Something Big. But man, it still could’ve used at least a little action; Death Of An Informer really is a mystery, for the most part, so it didn’t win that Edgar by accident. It’s just that the sleazy inner-city setting cries out for more of a pulp-crime sort of yarn, particularly given how well Weatherby brings to life the lurid atmosphere of depravity and decadence.

It is odd though that the book was afforded such acclaim because its characters would have been considered very taboo at the time: gay black cocaine dealers. Well, not all of them are gay, but it’s implied that they all switch hit. And also one of the characters is white, but he’s also a drug dealer, and he’s also gay, and in fact he has a “sickness” for black men. This would be Charles De Gaulle Tyler, the “informer” of the title, whose death is promised on the very first page of the book; the novel opens on what will be his “last day.”

Tyler is 24, an army vet, born and raised in the south by less-than-understanding rich parents. We learn in brief flashbacks that even as a boy Tyler would go off to “consort” with the black men his family employed on their estate; one of his deepest relationships happened in the stockade while he was in the army, with a young black man named Boy Ronnie. Your classic “it happened one night in the stockade” sort of affair. When Tyler came to New York years later he ran into Boy Ronnie again; Ronnie was part of an all-black coke dealing gang, and their boss, a hat-wearing teenager dubbed The Kid, decided to give Tyler a job – as a white man, one of a privileged background, Tyler would be better suited to dealing with the gang’s Park Avenue clientelle.

We actually don’t get much detail on the cocaine business; the Kid keeps everything to himself, running the operation out of a hotel room. In addition to Tyler and Boy Ronnie, the gang is comprised of Sweetboy, Leroy, and Groove. We’re brought into all this by the reflections of Tyler as he goes about what will be his last day, dropping off coke to a few customers and bumping into Sweetboy, whom he has a crush on. Tyler considers himself a chronicler of the Block and thus large portions of the narrative are given over to his rhapsodies about this or that landmark or establishment; again, the book is very much a time capsule, even more so than the Len Levinson novels of the era because it is so focused on capturing the time and the place. In some ways it bears a similarity to Joyce’s Ulysses, if only in its similarity to Joyce’s declaration that his novel could be used to rebuild Dublin.

When Tyler goes back to the Kid’s hotel, he finds himself walking into a frosty reception – even Boy Ronnie refuses to meet his eye. It turns out Sweetboy has been arrested and Tyler was the last person to see him. As the only white man in the gang, Tyler is instantly suspect number one. He pleads his innocence, but panics and manages to escape. The rest of this section of the book concerns Tyler’s desperate attempt to get off the Block. Weatherby masterfully shows how this once-fantastical place has now become nightmarish for Tyler, and of course he can’t expect any help from the average New Yorker.

Grindhouse enthusiasts will appreciate the references to the plentiful moviehouses on Forty-Second; Tyler passes them by, but doesn’t even have a dime on him so can’t escape inside one for a few hours. Instead he finds his way into a bookstore, where he runs into Boy Ronnie – who tries to help him. However when Tyler tries to use the subway token Ronnie’s gotten for him, someone rushes up behind him and pushes him into the path of the train. All we know, from the testimony of the train driver, is that the assailant was black. The mystery of who killed Tyler is the main plot.

At this point Boy Ronnie becomes our protagonist. The literary asperations that peppered Tyler’s section are gone; Ronnie can barely read, and whereas Tyler at least had an apartment – cockroach-ridden as it was – Ronnie lives on the street, taking “baths” in the sink at the Port Authority and occasionally washing his few clothes at the Kid’s hotel. He’s 21, a former boxer, with a savage knife scar; we learn that he had an affair with his trainer’s wife, and nearly got killed for it. Instead, he lost the ability to box, so now he makes his living dealing coke for the Kid.

Ronnie is one of the switch-hitters on the gang; he had that affair with Tyler in the stockade years ago, but in the novel itself his sexual interests are demonstrated on a blonde girl. I should mention that the novel is not explicit in the least; none of the sex scenes, whether they be gay or straight, are at all detailed. In fact, when Ronnie goes to a grungy hotel with the blonde, he finds himself unable to rise to the occasion, bummed over Tyler’s plight. Later Ronnie has a second chance with the girl, and this time succeeds, but Weatherby leaves the scene off page.

As with Tyler we get the occasional digression into Boy Ronnie’s background, and here we learn the meaning behind his bizarre name; he informs the blonde that in the smalltown in which he grew up there was also a little girl named Ronnie. Thus he became “Boy” Ronnie to the others, and the nickname stuck. But this is a ‘70s New York of colorful nicknames and even more colorful wardrobes, so Ronnie doesn’t much stick out. In fact he thinks other people are weird, like a friend of his who is a would-be pimp, going about in wild fashion and looking for a new stable, despite the wife and kid he has waiting for him back home in the subburbs.

I was under the impression that with the narrative switching from the effete Tyler to the macho Ronnie we’d have an increase in the action quotient. However I was wrong. Ronnie mostly walks around the Block and ponders Tyler’s diary, which he discovered in Tyler’s apartment after searching it per the Kid’s instructions. There is though a nicely-done sequence where Ronnie runs into Tyler’s father, come here from New Orleans to collect his son’s body. The old southerner is numb with grief, to the point that he’s even willing to talk to this black man who claims to have known his son. Weatherby displays the casual racism of the older generations in a nicely subtle way, not banging us over the head with it as such a scene would be rendered today.

When the Kid is finally able to speak to Sweetboy through a lawyer, the Kid learns that Tyler couldn’t have been the informer; as mentioned the Kid keeps the workings of his coke business secret, so that his dealers aren’t privy to each other’s work. Sweetboy was caught by the cops while on a run Tyler couldn’t have known about, thus he was innocent – and shouldn’t have been killed, Ronnie argues. But neither the Kid nor the others care too much about Tyler’s loss. The Kid suspects Groove, and Ronnie is dispatched to round him up – more inexplicit lurid stuff where Groove first goes home with some white dude he just met and Ronnie waits patiently in the foyer for them to screw in the bedroom.

Ronnie feels himself becoming more distant from his “friends” in the gang, to the point that the Kid tells Ronnie to leave as the Kid and Leroy torture Groove – who swears he isn’t a snitch. Frustratingly, the novel seems to be headed for some action just as it comes to a close; Ronnie, adrift on Forty-Second, finds himself in one of those movie theaters as a Western is playing, and there sit the Kid and Leroy a few aisles in front of him. Ronnie immediately realizes which of them is the true informant, and sees himself as the sheriff who is about to take out the bad guy. And here the novel ends!

Weatherby’s writing is strong throughout, with a gift for capturing mood, character, and location. He also nearly succeeds in passing himself off as an American author. Only the occasional gaffe betrays his British background, such as minor things like, “He looked round the room.” Americans don’t look “round” anything – we look around them. And these inner-city black Americans tend to say “quite” a bit too much to be believable, but again, this is nothing major. However, I didn’t even realize “Will Perry” was a pseudonym until I subconsciously detected something “British” about the prose. 

While Death Of An Informant won the Edgar and got this second printing, I don’t see any other reprints and it appears that Weatherby’s few other novels, all bearing the “Will Perry” by-line, didn’t receive as much critical attention. They also appear to be relatively rare, at least judging from prices on the used books marketplace.

To Kill A Snowman

To Kill A Snowman, by Charles Miron
No month stated, 1978  Manor Books

It looks like after Airport Cop failed to get off the ground (clever pun alert) Charles Miron went on to publish several standalone crime novels for Manor Books…crime novels with some of the most psychedelic narrative you’ll encounter anywhere. Seriously folks, halfway through To Kill A Snowman it occurred to me that I had no idea what the hell was going on.

First of all, the cover art implies that this novel has something to do with heroin, but in fact it’s about coke smuggling, as evidenced by the title. I was hoping for a Cocaine-inspired sleazy ‘70s crimefest set on the mean streets of New York, but To Kill A Snowman actually takes place in…Sweden. This is just our first example of how skewed Mr. Miron is…not to mention that the plot, such as it is, is sort of ripped off from a subplot in his earlier Death Flight: a struggling filmmaker uses a coke deal to finance a movie. I mean, that’s what the plot’s supposed to be about. What actually happens in the book is a different matter.

For one, I don’t think Miron ever even informs us where in Sweden the novel opens; initially I thought it was taking place in Copenhagen, which of course is in a different country. Finally though “Sweden” emerges as the locale, and it would appear Miron must’ve visited the place, as he peppers the narrative with egregious references to Swedish words, places, and cuisine. Our hero is Jeff, a young American fillmmaker who has come here to Sweden because…honestly I don’t know why the hell he’s here. Apparently there’s like a screening of an unfinished documentary he made, or something like that…really, just like with the Airport Cop books, I spent the entirety of the novel feeling a sort of contact high, so a lot of the “plot” escaped me.

The novel opens with Jeff attempting to rip off some coke dealers, working with Lena, his Swedish girlfriend. If I understood it correctly, and I’m not sure I did, the plan is for Jeff and Lena to act as couriers for other buyers, but they intend to take the coke for themselves and sell it. I think. But Lena, after picking up the cocaine, doesn’t show at their prearranged meeting place, and Jeff starts to suspect he’s been had. Spoiler note for anyone who attempts to read this damnable book: Lena won’t return. I mean you’d think it would be a given that Jeff would have a reunion with her, at least for revenge, but nope – that’s not how Charles Miron rolls. I mean folks you can’t expect basic storytelling elements when your author turns out prose like this:

Wet film flooded over [Ulla’s] perfect marble-shaped eyes. “Puries” Jeff called them when he knelt as a kid outside round circles in the dirt where potfulls of gaily speckled globollas lay waiting to be knocked out from a three-finger heist.

What does that even mean?? Or how about:

Who understands the phalarope, his dreams or flights of fancy? Now [Jeff] drove masochistically through the nutcracker drill, football’s two-on-one suicide formation propelling a lone ballcarrier between a pair of Neanderthal shoulders with no necks, only blind desire to bust head, claw inside his birdcage face mask, using callous stumps for hammers, gouging his eyes before the body fell limply forward. 

“Girl, open your eyes, the ones you closed everytime we made love. Touch me, a bit of a user, selfish, but Christ, not the shadow of anyone’s mind blowing incomplete man.” 

Ulla watched as Jeff nervously picked loose skin from the corner of his cuticle. She tried remembering intimate details [her old boyfriend] Jurgen had left outside his window for her. Back of the hand over his left eyelid, as if the sun always shone too brightly for him.

Mind you, that’s exactly how those three paragraphs appear in the book – I mean that’s in sequence. And it’s like this through the book. Soon enough it devolves into a near-psychotic blur of senseless narrative. And speaking of psychotic, the infrequent violence comes out of left field and hits hard: when rounded up by the men who financed the coke deal, Jeff fools them into thinking he’s hidden the stash somewhere, and as they’re driving him to get it he uses a surprise “karate elbow” to knock a dude’s eyeball out of its socket! Bloody cord dangling down the guy’s cheek and everything. And previously Jeff’s been portrayed as a harmless movie-fan…though he did get “commando training” from his high school gym teacher(?!).

The “Ulla” of the excerpts above is Lena’s 18 year-old roommate, who professes no knowledge of where Lena’s run off to, and this after Jeff’s slapped her around a bit. She asks to come along with him, as apparently she’s attracted to him, and during the escape they get around to having sex: “I’m going to spunk you like you are a jungle goddess” being the unforgettable words Jeff initiates the act with. Oh and I forgot, at this point the two are on a ship, escaping wherever the hell the novel opened, and Jeff’s just taken a big shit! Yep folks, you read that right…we have a scene where Jeff sneaks into the restroom while everyone onboard is sleeping and tries to hide the sound of his, uh, “evacuations” with the flushes of the toilet. This takes place directly before the sex.

One would think Jeff would be a nervous man, with Swedish and American mobsters and the cops looking for him, but again, Charles Miron doesn’t roll that way. Instead our hero blathers endlessly about classic film, or makes obscure references to film or literature, and instead of hiding out he goes to a little village and works on his film script. Then one day he ditches Ulla and tries to get a boat to Copenhagen. Instead he’s caught by more drug-world denizens, but these ones are more professional and just want Jeff to work for them and find the cocaine he lost.

Instead Jeff makes off with Elizabet, sexy babe of this drug kingpin, and is right back to watching movies and talking about movies instead of worrying about his life. In fact the “climax” occurs at a screening of Jeff’s unfinished film, where the cops, thugs, and Mafioso who have been trailing him all congregate. Hopefully at this point no reader is expecting an action-packed finale, or even a sensible one. Jeff throws a “brick” of cocaine that turns out to be candy, and the thugs squabble for it, and the cops take custody of Jeff and lead him out, passing by the audience that wants to ask Jeff about his movie.

Honestly To Kill A Snowman was a hot mess, and I have to say I’m not sad that I don’t have any of Miron’s other Manor standalones.

Cocaine

Cocaine, by Marc Olden
July, 1975  Signet Books

This is basically the primer for Marc Olden’s Narc series, sort of the “nonfiction” version of it. I put that in quotes because for the most part Cocaine reads like fiction…many, many stories of drug dealers and the narcs who pursue them, with even the oddball “fact” coming off like fiction (like “the famous rock group” that was busted for coke possession and wrote a number one song about it, even sending the narc who busted them a thank-you note).

Like Narc, Cocaine started life at Lancer Books before moving over to Signet; this edition is “revised and updated” from the Lancer edition, which was published in 1973. But of course Narc was published under the pseudonym “Robert Hawkes” (even though each book was copyright Olden), so Signet lost a good co-sell opportunity. At least Olden’s Black Samurai series, also from Signet, gets a shout-out, though Narc would’ve made a lot more sense.

In fact, Olden’s main informant throughout Cocaine is “Jerry,” identified as an undercover narcotics agent for the DEA. Man how I wish Olden had gone all the way with it and named him “Jon,” ie Jon Bolt of fictional drugs enforcement agency D-3 in Narc. But I’m betting Jerry served as inspiration for Bolt; Olden thanks several people at the end of the book for their help in the research, with “Jerry” one of them, so I’m assuming he was a real person and that he factored into the creation of Jon Bolt.

Otherwise the contents of this book are identical to those in Narc, even with the same sort of arbitrary subplot-hopping. I’ve complained in more than a few Narc reviews how the narrative will abruptly jump into the almost stream-of-conscious thoughts of such and such a character. Well, that happens for the entirety of Cocaine. It’s basically one short-short story after another. And also Olden’s repetition is firmly in place – he’ll tell you the same thing at least three times.

But that’s cool, because this is one of the most “1970s” books I’ve ever read. I mean it could almost come with a pair of platform shoes. It’s all about hip black and Cuban coke dealers in all the fly fashions of the day, sticking it to the Man. And that’s another difference from earlier drug books, like Smokestack El Ropo’s Bedside Reader. Whereas that one was more of a countercultural book, looking at the pleasures of marijuana and hash, Cocaine is more about the crime and the violence. There’s very little here that would tell you why people were going so crazy over coke, nor much about the effects they feel when under the influence. And for that matter it’s not even so much about the dangers of coke, other than a few mentions of ODs and such. It’s really more about the crime-ridden underworld that has sprung up around the cocaine industry.

Olden does tell us a little about the drug users in the opening chapters – basically all the hip people of the day, from artists to rock musicians to swingers. Pretty much everyone, when it gets right down to it. But the high rollers are the biggest users, because coke isn’t cheap; Olden tell us that it’s $25 to $75 per spoon, and that’s for heavily cut coke. More pure samples are not only pricier but harder to find.

One thing I can say I learned from this book is how cocaine is harvested and manufactured. Previously it was kind of a mystery to me. Basically it’s taken from South America and enters the US via New York or Miami, cut up and processed in various mills. The Mafia doesn’t have much control of it given the South American source, thus has focused its interests on oldschool crime like gambling and hookers. But really Cocaine offers a look at the environment which would create the crack epidemic of the ‘80s; increasingly violent black gangs and Cuban gangs vying for dominance of the coke industry. Olden says there’s no question the Cubans are more violent, and I wonder if this book factored into Oliver Stone’s script for Scarface.

The book follows the same format for each chapter. Olden will introduce some aspect of the coke industry, ie Dealing or Ripoffs or whatever, then will illustrate each aspect with pseudo-fictional short stories. I was most interested in the section on the mills, which are generally in bad areas of town and overseen by women, who monitor a small group of people cutting up the coke, all of them in masks. The ripoffs material was also interesting, and very heavy in that ‘70s crime vibe – “ripoffs” being the term for coke dealers ripping each other off. And as previously mentioned the Cubans are much more vicious in their ripoffs, or when they track down a ripoff artist; blacks are more content to frame the ripoff artist so that he’s arrested.

Things occasionally get sleazy, like a random chapter on pimps, hookers, and coke (and Olden’s description of the outrageous pimp wardrobes just has more of that super ‘70s vibe). There’s the occasional tale of a drug dealer’s superhuman sexual powers, thanks to all the pure-grade coke he’s snorting. Here we learn of the mysterious “Tortilla” practiced by Cuban dealers behind closed doors; a “lesbian orgy” in which women are piled atop one another, occasionally the wives of the dealers even taking part. There’s also “My Hero,” as Jerry refers to him, a Cuban dealer with such machismo that even a mousy and prudish DEA typist gets turned on as she’s transcribing one of his tapped dirty phone conversations.

There’s also a lot on mules, who bring drugs into the country via various novel means, and informants, generally dealers who’ve been caught and decide to work for the Man for a lesser sentence. Olden published a novel titled The Informant in 1978, also a Signet paperback original (and incredibly overpriced, but luckily now available as an eBook), so I’d wager this section factored greatly into that later novel. It already reads like a thriller here, with Olden stressing how dangerous the life of an informant is; once outed by their drug world comrades they are shown no mercy.

There isn’t as much about the narcs themselves; the DEA was fairly new when the book was written, or so Olden informs us, and we even learn that the drug cops had just started carrying weapons. But obviously the men’s adventure vibe of Narc isn’t present here, these stories being true (or at least presented as true) and thus more realistic in the brief snatches of violent action; there is though a nicely-done shootout late in the book which unfortunately sees a young DEA agent killed in action. Otherwise the lot of the narcs is presented as a thankless one; they aren’t out to bust hippies or the occasional drug user, just the big fish, and to do so they have to sit around for long stretches of time before putting their lives on the line. There are also some interesting stories about undercover jobs. 

Overall I enjoyed Cocaine more than I thought I would. It definitely has that ‘70s crime vibe I’ve always enjoyed, and the pseudo-fictional approach makes it a lot more entertaining than a typical study on cocaine would’ve been. It’s even the same length as one of Olden’s Narc or Black Samurai novels, coming in at 172 fast-moving pages of fairly small print.

Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve

Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve, by Martin Caidin
December, 1973  Warner Paperback Library

Sporting an unforgettable cover that seems to have come off a sweat mag of the day, Maryjane Tonight At Angel’s Twelve is courtesy the author who created The Six Million Dollar Man. Possibly due to his famous creation, all of Martin Caidin’s novels are now scarce and overpriced, and this book – both the original 1972 hardcover and this paperback – is no exception. Luckily though I was able to get it via InterLibrary Loan.

This one’s a drug smuggling caper along the lines of Night Crossing and The Mexican Connection, but unlike those novels the plot here is more focused on the actual mechanics of flying; it’s my understanding Caidin was a professional pilot for some time, thus he has no qualms with shoehorning tons of “flying details” into the narrative. In this regard his writing almost reminds me of Mark Roberts, and this goes beyond the flying fixation. Given his success in writing I was under the impression Caidin would be, well…a better writer. I can see now why the contemporary Kirkus review was so harsh on this book. Stylistically, Martin Caidin is akin to William W. Johnstone, in particular the reactionary tone of his protagonist and of the narrative itself.

Whereas those other two dope smuggling books presented some of the dope smugglers of the day as at least counterculture heroes – I mean at least the guys flying in the grass were considered okay – in Caidin’s eyes they’re all criminal scum and deserve death. The dude’s about on the level of my wife, who considers heroin and hash equal in terms of vileness. This would be fine though if Caidin didn’t present us with a protagonist so unsuited to this reactionary agenda: Jim Brian, a blonde-haired ‘Nam hellraiser of a pilot who is only 28 years old but comes off like he’s at least twenty years older. Again, there is a strong similarity to a Johnstone-type protagonist, even down to the endless “now hold on a minute” discussions he gets into.

Eventually we’ll learn that Brian took part in over 300 missions in ‘Nam, flying into various hellzones and kicking Charlie ass, but after shipping home he hit on various hard times and now flies basically for whatever passengers he can get. When we meet him he’s flying a coke dealer and the coke dealer’s hotstuff babe, though it’s intimated Brian isn’t entirely sure the guy’s a smuggler. But it turns out to be a bust and the hotstuff babe’s actually an undercover cop – indeed, one whose name turns out to be Jacqueline Black and who is proclaimed a sadist even by her fellow narcs. Her own barely-explored backstory has it that her husband, years ago, went nuts after taking LSD, drowned their baby, and then tried to strangle Jacqueline! After which she dedicated herself to bringing down all drug dealers, as permanently as possible.

Yes, folks, Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve has the tenor of an Afterschool Special taken to absurd degrees; LSD can make you go Instantly Insane, and god forbid you take a “red” or some other pill. The book is stuffed to the gills with various characters running up and telling Brian or others that such and such character has just died of an overdose – this quickly attains humorous qualities, particularly given half the time that the victims are characters we haven’t even seen. But this is another instance of Caidin’s similarity to Johnstone; he doesn’t seem to grasp the basic tenet that action should be shown, not told.

Brian’s hauled before a gaggle of cops from various local, state, and federal agencies, all of them under command of a guy named Smythe, who offers Brian a chance to stay out of jail and clear his name: go undercover in the Cocoa Beach area of Florida (stomping grounds of Tony and Jeannie Nelson, btw) and help them catch bigtime drug dealers. Brian’s to just pose as a pilot, same as normal, and hope to run into some scumbags who want to use his plane for drugs. Jackie Black, who is one of the officers present, is violently against the idea, swearing that Brian was indeed aware that his client in the opening pages was attempting to smuggle cocaine, and that Brian should be locked up as well.

This sets up the almost psychotic antagonism between Brian and Black, but Caidin doesn’t go the expected route with it; ie the pulpy (and thus preferred) route of the two ending up in the sack. Instead, Jackie first attempts to bug Brian’s house and then tries to bust him and his girlfriend Ina (more of whom anon) several times, which has the ultimate effect of so angering Brian that he ends up beating the shit out of Jackie and strangling her until she pukes on herself(!). But after this Caidin drops the ball and Jackie, who indeed is a nutcase sadist, is delivered her final comeuppance by a one-off character…with Brian being informed of it by the now-mandatory exposition. But the part where our hero beats up a woman – even if she is a violent “bitch” (as he constantly refers to her) – comes off as a bit rough in our #metoo society.*

Brian’s first client is the aforementied Ina Joss, a beautiful brunette babe who hires him for a late-night flight to watch a rocket launch. She brings along a group of kids and, wouldja believe it, one of them has an LSD flashback trip during the flight. But Ina herself seems pretty straightaced, and meanwhile there are sparks between Brian and her, to the extent that they go back to her place that night and have some (apparently) hot sex. Caidin keeps all of it off-page, the prude. But we learn that they both had a grand ol’ time and soon enough Brian’s head over heels. A little too soon, for my tastes, as within a couple chapters of his intro the dude’s driving around Cocoa Beach and asking after Ina because he’s so crazy about her. Some toughguy ‘Nam vet!

Through Ina Brian’s put in touch with George Baxter, a wealty young high roller with long hair and all that jazz and yep he’s a drug dealer as expected. (It’s my understanding the recent nonfiction book Thai Stick, about smuggling in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, features a real-life sadistic drugworld criminal also by the name of “Baxter,” but surely this is just coincidence and Caidin wasn’t aware of him? Anyway I’m planning to read Thai Stick soon.) Brian suspects Baxter of being up to no good, as do his narc handlers.

More off-page sex ensues when Baxter, who hires Brian for a weekend flight to the Caribbean, literally gives Brian a girl for the trip. Meanwhile Baxter keeps two girls for himself! Now that’s my kind of high-rolling drug dealer. Brian feels bad about this unfaithfulness for a hot minute, and later on admits to it when Ina questions him about it (she’s a free-lovin’ Aquarian gal so doesn’t much mind). But her curiousity is more piqued by one of Baxter’s two girls; while Brian swears she is busty, Ina insists that the girl is flat-chested. In other words the lady got a boob job. And meanwhile Jackie Black has already stormed into Brian’s place, accusing him of smuggling in a load of heroin with his flight. Eventually he realizes he did, albeit unwittingly…the drugs were smuggled inside the lady’s “fake tits!”

Brian turns out to be as sadistic as the narcs he constantly butts heads with. When they ambush Baxter in his new amphibian craft – Ina along for the flight, Brian having admitted to her that he’s sort of an undercover agent – Brian does some ‘Nam-style flying to prevent his escaping, and crashes the amphibian. It explodes on impact and Brian’s elated, which came off to me as kinda harsh, not to mention that you’d figure the feds would want Baxter alive to figure out his pipeline. But it turns out some other dude was piloting the craft and Baxter has escaped. Also Baxter’s real name is revealed to be Krauss and he himself is a fancy pilot thanks to some self-financed aggressive pilot schooling at Embry-Riddle.

After his own plane is ambushed, courtesy a bomb someone’s hid in one of the engines, Brian gets a new one: an Excalibur. More aeronautical detailing ensues, taking us into the homestretch, which concerns an anticlimactic chase, most of it relayed via exposition and dialog: Brian trying to finally get the jump on Baxter/Krauss on one of his smuggling flights. This part is only salvaged by the .30 caliber machine gun Brian has installed on his Excalibur.  Meanwhile Caidin leaves the more interesting climax – Jackie Black’s fate – off-page. Her attempted bust of Ina has so angered the resident hippie community that one of them, a dopesmoking former ‘Nam helicopter pilot (yet another pilot in a book filled with them), devises a special torture for her.

The lurid cover painting actually details what happens, off-page, to Jackie Black…when he’s told about it at the end of the book, Brian says it’s an infamous VC torture technique. You take someone and tie them to an airplane with a three-blade propeller and gun it over and over. This acts as a centrifuge and mashes all the blood around in the victim’s head, making a “sponge” of the brain and rendering the victim into an almost vegetable state. This is what’s done to Jackie (after the hippies ply her with acid, we’re told), but again it’s all relayed via clunky exposition in the final pages. It’s interesting that the uncredited paperback cover artist realized there was more to exploit here than Caidin himself did, but as I say the majority of the book is more focused on explaining how pilots handle things and also detailing the rampant horrors of drugs.

*I’m so out of touch with social media that, I kid you not, I have always pronounced “#” the American way, ie “pound.” I’ve never “Tweeted” or followed a hashtag or any of that bullshit, so I honestly thought that “#metoo” was pronounced “pound me too.” Then I happened to say it aloud one day during a conversation with a coworker, and judging from their reaction I quickly realized my mistake…

The Mexican Connection

The Mexican Connection, by Alexander Mason
No month stated, 1977  Leisure Books

You’d never guess it from the cover, but this Leisure paperback original is a drug smuggling caper in the vein of Night Crossing and High Fliers. (In fact, “High Flying” is the back cover slugline.) I wonder if Ken Barr’s typically-great cover art was commissioned for something else, maybe for the Sharpshooter series, given how it misleadingly presents the novel as an action yarn. That being said, there is a sort of airplane shootout, and a jeep does crash into flames in the desert, so who knows.

No idea who Alexander Mason was; the book is copyright Leisure. There was another paperback credited to him in 1980 (Losers Keepers). My hunch is this was a real writer, maybe someone who shot for the hardcover market, failed, and ended up publishing via Leisure. Because really there’s a world of difference between this and the imprint’s typical books. It’s more of a novel, if you get my meaning, and not something quickly cranked out to meet an editor’s request.

Whereas Night Crossing is a sometimes-humorous buddy smuggling tale and High Fliers is a straight-up comedy, The Mexican Connection is more serious. For this it lacks the charm of the other two, and could’ve used a little levity. Also the rapport of the main characters is nowhere near that of the other two books. On the other hand, this one gives a bit more detail on the drug smuggling efforts of the day, even if it does lack the adventurous spirit one would expect, given that the smuggling entails night flying over the desert with federal agents in hot pursuit.

The novel has an effective opening, though: Steinman, our terse hero, is flying his Piper Navajo over the Mexico-US border when he realizes another plane is chasing him. This leads to an actual aerial gunfight, or at least sort of one, as the other pilot leans out of his window and starts shooting at Steinman’s plane. Later we’ll learn that this other pilot is crazed Federal agent John Roy Corrigan, infamous even among his fellow officers for the lengths he’ll go to enforce the law. Steinman and Corrigan have an intense personal rivlarly, due to the little fact that Steinman blew up Corrigan’s house(!).

Losing Corrigan, Steinman manages to offload the grass he’s flown over the border, then he heads on to his spartanly-furnished home in Barstow. The furnishings match Steinman’s personality; even we readers don’t learn much about him, or what brought him into the drug running biz. A brief background on him lets us know that the novel takes place in 1973 or so; we’re told Steinman began flying drugs in ’69, three or four years ago. His partner is Harry Crane, a guy who in somewhat-confusing backstory got into the biz thanks to someone else: Winnie Secker, a young surfer dude Harry met shortly after Harry got divorced, who made his living selling drugs.

Harry ended up managing the business with Winnie, building it up to the point that he ran everything on his own. Eventually he realized he’d need his own pilot, and this is how Steinman was referred to him. Since then the two have managed the business, with Winnie now relegated to a hanger-on. Also there’s a stigma about Winnie, given how he was recently abducted by Corrigan, who beat him unmerciful in the effort to get info on Steinman and Harry. Winnie was let go, but now Steinman and Harry are uncertain if they can trust him and wonder if he told the Feds anything. Particularly given that Steinman’s recent flight was almost blown – how could Corrigan have known he’d be crossing over at that time?

The titular Mexican connection is a drug dealer named Sanchez, who when we meet him is in the process of killing off his cousin. This is because the cousin was revealed to be an informer, and it was he who blabbed about this recent border crossing, not Winnie. Meanwhile Sanchez is planning a bigger deal: he’s going to heist a million quaaludes and sell them to Steinman and Harry, who figure they’ll make enough money out of it that they’ll be able to retire and go legit. Sadly though this is the sole bit of drug running we get; I was hoping for a few such scenarios of Steinman skillfully piloting a cache of good Mexican grass across the border. But they’ve learned they can make much more money smuggling these quaaludes, so this entails a lot of planning.

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t mentioned a single female character. That’s because there isn’t one! Not until the end, at least, and even she is reduced to just a few words and standing on the sidelines while Steinman deals with a traitor. Otherwise there’s no women involved, not even a lame eleventh-hour romance for any of our heroes. Instead, Mason builds up more of a suspense angle, with Steinman starting to believe Winnie is indeed innocent, and that someone else he trusts is really the traitor. To his dismay he will be proven correct, but the only problem is when the confrontation goes down it lacks much drama, given that we’ve barely even seen these two characters together. Hence the reader is not party to the camaraderie and trust that has been destroyed.

While Sanchez is sadistic, he’s no match for the cops, in particular one who is Corrigan’s Mexican counterpart. But the quaalude deal still goes down, and we finally have another aerial chase, with Corrigan again going after Steinman. This eventually leads to a car chase, with Corrigan, having been unable to find any drugs on Steinman’s plane, relentlessly shadowing our smuggling hero, certain that he dropped the drugs off somewhere (which he indeed did). The car chase passes by the San Diego campus of UCLA and eventually ends up with a flaming crashed jeep, as depicted on the cover. 

There’s action here and there, and the writing is as stated a caliber above the usual stuff you get from this publisher, but for all that there seems to be something lacking about The Mexican Connection. It’s as if Mason wasn’t sure how he wanted to write his book. It has a great idea, but too much of it is composed of Steinman sulking around, drinking beer, and plotting against people he’s certain are plotting against him. Most inexplicable of all, there’s no feel for the drug world; we’re not even told if Steinman himself smokes dope, and none of these characters have the countercultural flair you’d expect. None that is save for Winnie, who barely appears in the novel, anyway.

All this leads me to believe that Leisure purposely spun the book as “a tough narc versus druggers” action yarn, hoping they’d rope in easily-duped blue collar readers who were expecting to see a bunch of hippies getting their faces bashed in.

High Fliers

High Fliers, by Jim Esposito
December, 2016  CreateSpace Publishing

Mining similar territory as the earlier Night Crossing, High Fliers is a smuggling adventure comedy self-published by a guy who used to write for Creem and who, per his site, was once referred to by Grace Slick as “the weirdest person” she ever met. If that isn’t high praise I don’t know what is. I discovered this one during a random Google search for dope-centric novels set in the ‘70s(!), and I have to say I enjoyed it, other than for a few questionable parts.

The novel seems to be set in 1973, or at least no earlier than that – dates are mostly divined by the rock albums that are mentioned, and the latest one appears to be Lynrd Skynrd’s first, which was released in ’73. And Esposito does sort of capture the spirit of the era, with copious grass being smoked and coke being inhaled, though sadly there’s a bit more of the latter than the former; High Fliers is more of a coke novel than a dope novel, as our intrepid anti-heroes, The Ace and The Kid, seem to inhale a few tons of it. Kid’s recurring line of “Toot! Toot!”, asking the Ace for a snort, appears almost every other page, and while initially it’s funny it becomes tiresome.

But then this same criticism ultimately can be levelled at the novel itself, as its comedic, madcap tone eventually wears thin and you wish for a bit more meat to the tale, more depth to the characters. In this regard I suspect it’s probably better enjoyed in short doses, so to speak, and Esposito seems to have written it with that intention in mind, as each chapter is an “Episode,” sometimes starting off with a recap of the material we just read in the previous chapter. So maybe an “Episode” a week or such might yield a more rewarding read than tackling it all over a few days, which is what I did. 

Anyway the action takes place near Gainesville, Florida, and it’s sometime in the early to mid 1970s. The Ace and The Kid are former ‘Nam pilots who now make their living flying grass and coke across the border for a dealer named Wheeler. (“Wheeler-dealer,” I just got that…) Esposito has a habit of rarely describing his characters; about the most we get is that the Ace wears his “old Vietnam flight jacket.” But otherwise what these two look like must be determined by the reader’s own imagination. This was a curious decision on the author’s part, but also it’s an indication of the fable-like vibe of the novel, as we not only don’t get descriptions but we seldom if ever get a look into the Ace or the Kid’s thoughts.

There is a surreal vibe to the tale; again, it’s more of a comedy than a straight novel, and thus we have our heroes attacked in the Florida skies by a white Fokker D Triplane. This mysterious pilot, The Winged Crusader, has been shooting down drug-smuggling planes for the past few months, and Ace and Kid are his latest prey. They crash their Lockheed Lodestar (dubbed “The Flying Joint”), but there’s no tension or danger. Indeed they pull themselves out of the muck and run right into a sexy blonde – at least I assume so, as Esposito doesn’t describe her much, either. And the biggest indication that High Fliers was written in the tepid modern era and not actually in the free-wheeling ‘70s is that there’s zero exploitation fo the female characters; about the most we get is that this blonde, Dawn, wears her skimpy clothing “well.”

Despite having these two interesting lead characters, even though they’re ciphers and all, Esposito has this curious insistence upon filling up a goodly portion of the book with irritating, overlong sequences about the Fokker-flying pilot who shot them down. His name is Buck Jr. and he’s the son of a famous Christian minister. We get tons and tons of Christian bashing in the book, which is fine, I mean I know that’s a safe space for left-leaning authors (to complete the mandatory requirements, Esposito also mocks cops and makes the Feds look like imbeciles), but it does go on and on. And to make it worse, it’s annoying and seems to come from a different novel.

But then, there are huge tracts of High Fliers that abruptly switch over to Christian-bashing nonsense…most egregious being a part midway through where Buck Jr. is stranded in a small Florida town and we get this overlong dialog sequence where some hustler tries to get the local preacher to join a consortium of corporate-style churches or somesuch. I mean by this point we get it, you know? But beyond that it’s just a random and ultimately pointless flogging of an already-dead horse, and I say again it’s as if Esposito had two unrelated manuscripts, one a dope-smuggling adventure and the other a spoof of Christian ministries, and merged them into a single disjointed novel.

And all of it’s really strange because, minus this stuff, the novel is fun and does capture the vibe of the ‘70s, at least in so far as everyone’s either smoking grass or tooting coke while blasting the latest rock album. In that regard most mention is made of JJ Cale, but our heroes are also fans of Who’s Next. Deep Purple’s Machine Head is passed off as “too heavy,” and that friggin’ Lynrd Skynrd gets played a lot as well, while Ace and Kid hang out with Dawn near Gainesville – and, true to the madcap vibe of the novel, Dawn has a twin sister named Eve, so there’s a blonde for both our heroes.

But none of these characters are given even a modicum of personality. There are a lot of missed opportunities in High Fliers, and the fact that I even noticed this should be testament enough to the fact that the novel is so enjoyable that you ultimately expect more from it. I mean if it was pure shit, who’d care, but Espisito has delivered a fun concept, and he writes with a flair you’d expect from a veteran rock reporter. But then, he also spends way too much time with Buck Jr., at the expense of the infinitely more interesting Ace and Kid.

And Buck Jr. gets a lot of narrative time. He lives in opulence in the so-called Promised Land, ie the paradisiacal grounds owned by his famous minister of a father. Each section in the opening chapters is the same; Buck wakes to a beautiful day and waits for God to speak to him. And when he gets the divine word, Buck presses a button and descends into a Batcave-like lair in which his all-white Fokker Triplane waits for him. Buck dons his all-white pilot getup and becomes the Winged Crusader, and goes out to gun down dope-smuggling planes. It doesn’t take long for us to learn that Buck is dosed on a daily basis with acid and “God” is actually his DEA handlers, who use him to achieve their own ends.

Speaking of which, Esposito also features a crew of bumbling federal agents; there’s Michael d’Angelo, the chief of the district, and his underling Rickenbacker. These two are easily confused and they each take turns being the main villain. There are also lesser DEA agents, given jokey names (ie MacDonald & Douglas, etc), but they are all complete fools, ten steps behind their prey and incapable of doing anything right. They even goof up with Buck Jr., the guy in charge of him too busy playing chess with a vintage computer and not paying attention to Buck’s progress through his underground lair; ultimately this leads to Buck crashing, midway through the book, and ending up in an overlong subplot which sees him running a preachathon to drum up money to repair a local church(!?).

If you stick with the book mainly for the Ace and Kid material, it’s not bad, and does get better. Eventually we get to the main plot, such as it is – Wheeler wants the duo to fly over an incredible amount of coke from Mexico. Like a couple hundred pounds of it. There are some oddball comic touches here, like how Wheeler has a tanker filled with coke, and copious amounts of grass, but complains about the overhead and all the competition and etc, etc. Our heroes need a new plane, though, and end up coming upon a fully-armed B-25 bomber; here Esposito takes the opportunity to bash older conservative types, as the lady selling the plane claims it was owned by her WWII vet of a husband, and she’s so batty she doesn’t get it that Ace and Kid want to use the plane to haul drugs.

I forgot to mention – in one of the most head-scratching misses ever, we learn early on, in a clever bit of backstory, that Buck Jr. was actually Ace and Kid’s captain on a bomber in ‘Nam. But get this: Esposito does absolutely nothing with it. This reveal is so cleverly done that it promises something more, and I kept reading and reading, enduring all the irritating Buck Jr. sections, expecting for a big reunion between the trio – Ace and Kid introduced Buck Jr. to LSD, you see, dosing him during a bombing run – but it never happened. Instead about all we get is a jokey finale in which Ace and Kid, no longer in the smuggling biz, are offered a job flying for Buck Jr.’s new preaching-and-planes venture, but they never even meet him.

Action is sparse, because it isn’t really that sort of novel – upon getting their B-25 Kid and Ace get in a brief aerial skirmish with the Winged Avenger, but other than that we have a couple rip-offs, in which a mysterious group of masked men ambush our heroes. But really it’s all done more in a comedic vein. Speaking of which our heroes do have some goofy, memorable traits, like the “emergency joint” Kid always has hidden behind his ear, or the duo’s insistence upon always playing some classic rock tape or LP. So Esposito really does capture the ‘70s vibe, with the holy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, though to be sure the first one, ie the sex, occurs 100% off-page.

So really I’m on the fence. I appreciate Esposito’s attempt at capturing a story set “back in the day,” and his Creem background brings something special to the book, but I kind of expected more from High Fliers, mostly because it promised more than it delivered. Perhaps its greatest failing is that it wasn’t written and published in the ‘70s; maybe then it might’ve become a cult classic of sorts. But it was a fun way to pass the time at least, with the caveat that the arbitrary religion-bashing stuff just got old after a while, mostly because it had nothing to do with the story I wanted to read – namely, a fun adventure about “high flying” drug smugglers.