Bloody Sunday (The Marksman #21)

Bloody Sunday, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1976  Belmont-Tower

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I rest my case. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murder Machine (The Marksman #20)

Murder Machine, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Torture Contract (The Marksman #19)

The Torture Contract, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Marksman #18: Icepick In The Spine

The Marksman #18: Icepick In The Spine, by Frank Scarpetta
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower

“The reason I write under a pseudonym is because I don’t want to be remembered as the author of Icepick In The Spine.” 

-- George Harmon Smith

A big thanks to Lynn Munroe for the above quote; as I mention in most all of my Marksman and Sharpshooter reviews, Lynn is owed a huge debt of gratitude for the research he did on these series. It’s due to him that we even know who George Harmon Smith was; a sort of fix-it author for series editor Peter McCurtin, who eventually went on to authoring his own installments, this being one of them. While Icepick In The Spine was one of the few Marksman volumes to have an attribution in the Catalog Of Copyright Entries, where Aaron Fletcher is credited as “Frank Scarpetta” (the book was also later reprinted under Fletcher’s own name), as Lynn successfully argues this was probably due to some mistake or behind-the-scenes nonsense. Icepick In The Spine is clearly the work of George Harmon Smith. And, as Lynn also points out, there’s that quote of Smith’s, above; it comes from Smith’s nephew, who specifically recalled this title as being one his uncle talked about.

As I think I’ve written in all my other reviews of his novels, George Harmon Smith was a great writer, very literary, delivering strong characters – particularly very strong, fully-realized female characters. But in many ways he was too good for the genre. By that I don’t mean he was a better writer than others in this genre, I just mean that he didn’t understand when to reign in the literary flourishes. Like all the other Smith Marksmans, Icepick In The Spine is just too damn long; 204 pages of small, dense print, most of it comprised of excessive topical details or description of menial actions. It’s hard to convey exactly what I mean other than there’s a lot of “baggage” in Smith’s work…you mentally slash entire paragraphs of abritrary, unnecessary (but very well written) material so as to keep the pace moving. These kinds of books should not have excessive baggage; also, as I’ve written before, Smith was basically the men’s adventure version of John Gardner, ie the American author of Sunlight Dialogs and such. Their narrative styles are very similar, even down to the excessive wordiness.

And as I’ve also mentioned in just about every George Harmon Smith review I’ve done, I am becoming more and more certain that he was the author who delivered the almighty Bronson: Blind Rage. There are too many parallels with the other books of his I’ve read; Icepick In The Spine in particular has a lot of similarities, from the insane “hero” to the strong female accomplice, not to mention the periodic detours into extreme sadism and torture. As with Blind Rage, and the other Smith novels I’ve read, there’s also an almost surreal vibe of dark humor, like real dark humor – for example, in this one Philip “The Marksman” Magellan briefly encounters a 16 year-old girl who sells herself for heroin money. She tries to spark up conversation with Magellan in a diner, questioning the purpose of life. Magellan gives her ten bucks and she leaves – only to immediately be run over and killed by a car. Magellan meanwhile can’t even be bothered to get up from his table and keeps right on eating. 

There’s also a sleazy dose of torture porn straight out of the sweat mags of the day; late in the novel Magellan stages an assault on a Mafia-controlled “school” in Arizona which is used as a training facility for girls smuggled into the country from Mexico. Here they are apparently trained to become good whores or somesuch, but really the place as presented is a nightmarish facility of torture and punishment, complete with about two hundred fresh graves outside the place of previous girls who didn’t properly buckle under authority. Smith pulls no punches throughout the horrific sequence, which starts off with a mob “turkey doctor” torturing a poor bound girl and ends with the freed girls running roughshod on their former captors, tearing them to pieces with their bare hands. Even here though Magellan displays he’s not your typical hero, or even a “hero” in any sense – when the freed Mexican girls ask him what they’re supposed to do now, where they should go, Magellan’s curt response is, “I don’t give a fuck,” and he just leaves them to their own devices.

George Harmon Smith is like another series author, Russell Smith, in that he knows without question that Magellan is a psychopath. As Lynn has pointed out, Harmon Smith likely edited many of Russell Smith’s manuscripts, so perhaps he was inspired by them; series creator and editor Peter McCurtin never presented Magellan as nuts as either of the two Smiths do. But a big difference is that Harmon Smith at least attempts to convey a sense of loss and desperation driving his version of Magellan; Russell Smith’s is just plain crazy, and hardly ever does he reflect on the events that put him on the path to becoming the Marksman. Harmon Smith occasionally does, bluntly informing people that his course was set when his “son’s brains were blasted out” and his wife was killed. But also Harmon Smith makes it clear that none of this justifies Magellan’s descent into sadism; he’s such a natural murderer (and he really does murder in this one, not just kill) that you wonder if this dude was ever “good” to begin with. Again, very much like – in fact, identical to – Bronson in Blind Rage.

There’s of course no pickup from previous volumes, nor any indication how long Magellan’s been at it. There are seeming repercussions for future volumes; Icepick In The Spine ends with the intimation that the heads of the Mafia have banded together to finally do something about the Marksman, and also Magellan has himself a female accomplice at novel’s end, one who wishes to help him wage his war. Judging from previous volumes, I’m gonna bet we’ll never hear of either of these things again. But for what it’s worth this one is a very entertaining read, giving you all you could want from sleazy ‘70s crime pulp, with the caveat that as usual Smith’s excessive wordiness kind of kills the enthusiasm factor. Sort of like my reviews! But man this one’s really overwritten, another hallmark of Smith’s work; every menial or trivial action is described ad naseum. Small stuff to be sure, but it piles up over the course of the 200+ small-print pages. To get back to that other Smith, ie Russell – his installments might’ve been messy, barely even “plotted,” but they certainly moved.

The back cover has it that in this one Magellan goes up against a capo who retains a squad of ‘Nam vets. This sounds promising but unfortunately there’s nothing like it in the book. In the early pages Magellan gets word that Bello, a sadistic young Mafia capo who served in ‘Nam, has gotten into sex slavery south of the border; we’re told Bello has a group of commando vets at his disposal, but we never get to meet them. And Bello himself doesn’t even appear until like the last three pages. He’s more of a white wale that Magellan hunts throughout the novel; the narrative is more focused on the sex-slave angle, with multiple detours…not to mention Magellan sort of falling in love not once, but twice! Another thing that separates George Harmon Smith from his fellow men’s adventure authors is his strong female characters – I don’t mean “strong” in the modern cliched meaning, like they can do backflips while firing 9mm pistols with each hand, but “strong” in that they are fully-developed, believable women who seem to exist outside the boundaries of the novels. That being said, the second female character in this one probably could do backflips while shooting guns; she’s presented as a serious asskicker.

After venturing down to Mexico to research the situation – and to beat up and murder a crippled guy at the Texas border – Magellan briefly holes up in El Paso to figure out Bello’s operation. He’s bringing in beautiful girls from Mexico and dispersing them across the US; eventually we’ll learn they’re smuggled around the country in big vans, and the soldiers carrying them around have orders to kill them if anything goes wrong with the job. This happens in the course of the novel, while Magellan’s tailing a “shipment,” and honestly Magellan’s “sickness” over the massacre is hard to buy given his sadism this time around. I wonder if Smith’s Goldfinger allusion is intentional; while checking out one of the Mafia staging areas in the woods Magellan runs into a hot young thing with a rifle, here to get a little vengeance of her own. Magellan’s response is typical; he beats the shit out of her, slapping her around and almost breaking her nose. All to keep her quiet.

As expected, the girl, a Latina named Anna, falls in love with Magellan soon enough. Anna is the first of two strong female characters we’ll get. There follows a domestic scene where Anna takes Magellan back to her apartment – after wiping the blood off her nose and stuff – and makes him burgers and fries, leading to one of Smith’s typical off-page sex scenes. He’s not one to much exploit his female characters, either…we’ll get like one or two mentions of nice breasts and that’s it. Anna’s cousin was abducted by the sex-slavers and she wants to find out what happened to her and get revenge (a subplot that is never resolved). She proves to have just as sadistic streak as Magellan; our lovable hero captures a Mafia goon and tortures him, setting his hair and feet on fire. The “fire torture” being another similarity to Bronson: Blind Rage, by the way. After this he blows the guy’s head off. Anna acts distant on the way home, not talking…only to later reveal that she was so turned on by the whole thing that she was afraid she’d jump Magellan’s bones right there if he’d said anything to her!

The problem with Icepick In The Spine is that it seems to be two manuscripts stuck together; perhaps this explains the “Aaron Fletcher” misattribution for the novel. Maybe he turned something in and Smith almost wholly rewrote it. At least Magellan’s characterization stays consistent throughout – he’s nuts from beginning to end. I also enjoyed his recurring penchant for calling all mobsters “motherfuckers” and all women “chicks.” Speaking of which, we don’t get to see Anna for the entire novel; I don’t want to spoil anything but she leaves the narrative shortly after telling Magellan she loves him. But after her departure we get to that seeming second manuscript – for the first half Magellan’s tracing Bello’s sex-slave ring, and it culminates with a shootout with the guys running the latest van filled with women. But after this we’re suddenly in Phoenix, it’s nine days later, and Magellan is posing as a bum on Skid Row, living in filth and squalor so as to fully hide from society and make Bello think everything’s clear so he can get back to his sex-slavin’ stuff.

Now the plot becomes something else entirely; Magellan reads in the paper about an old doctor being abducted, and he immediately deduces that this guy was probably kidnapped by Bello’s mobsters to look after the latest shipment of Mexican girls(!?). So he goes to the guy’s address…only to find a hotstuff statuesque babe (also described as Amazonian). This will be our second strong female character and she’s very memorable, very much in line with the action-prone female protagonists of today. Her name’s Julia, she’s in her 20s, and she’s unfazed when Magellan slips into the apartment, holding a gun on her. She’s not even afraid of the gun, and Magellan feels as if he’s lost control of the situation. It turns out that her father’s been returned secretly, but Julia’s not to tell anyone for a few days. And yes, the Mafia took him, apparently to inspect the anatomies of some women.

Eventually Julia will become Magellan’s latest partner in action and in bed. And she also falls in love with him, with Magellan feeling the same, despite his early protestation that “Not two weeks ago another girl with me was killed.” When Magellan hesitates about taking Julia with him, because she’s a girl and all, Julia responds, “The only thing a woman can’t do is catch clap from some whore.” She’s basically a female Magellan, anyway: an expert archer, she ends up nailing mobster scum with a bow and arrows later in the book. Unfortunately though the early parts with Julia come off like a carbon copy of the initial parts with Anna; she cooks him a meal, gives him some beer, they watch TV and then have some off-page sex. To the extent that you wonder why Smith didn’t just combine the two female characters into one.

Anyway I’m going on way too much again. The finale as mentioned piles on the sick sleaze; Bello’s “school” is in the woods and Magellan and Julia infiltrate the place, watching in disgust as a turkey doctor abuses a bound girl (Julia begs to be the one to kill this guy) and soon freeing all the women. It’s more lurid than action-packed, and indeed the climax itself is rushed; Magellan and Julia fly to San Diego, where Magellan intercepts Bello’s limo as it’s leaving his fortress. Magellan’s delivery of justice is rendered almost anticlimactic given how rushed it all seems – however the finale is memorable because Magellan flat-out murders Bello’s blonde floozy. I mean usually the “hero” will let the villain’s girl go, but not our Magellan. He says “Sorry, chick,” and shoots her in the throat! 

Also as mentioned, the novel ends with promises of future developments – Bello sneers that the Mafia has “plans” for Magellan, and Julia tells Magellan she’s coming along with him whether he likes it or not. They decide to head for Florida, for the hell of it; Magellan knows he’ll find Mafia business no matter where he goes. Here’s guessing if this plot thread ever picks up, but I’m not holding my breath. At least if past installments are any indication. At any rate, Icepick In The Spine is a fun if overlong slice of lurid ‘70s crime action, probably one of the best volumes in the series yet. However I have to tell you – there isn’t a single “icepick in the spine” in the entire novel!

The Marksman #17: Killer On The Prowl

The Marksman #17: Killer On The Prowl, by Frank Scarpetta
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower

This volume of The Marksman seems to have been written by a committee, one that couldn’t agree on anything except that the book should be written in English. In one plot Philip “The Marksman” Magellan is in New York to take out a notorious Mafioso, and in another plot a trio of smalltime crooks kidnap that very same Mafioso for ransom. In a third plot the Mafioso’s “family” engage in internecine warfare to determine the new leader. And seldom do these three plots meet.

Once again a big thanks to Lynn Munroe, who revealed that Killer On The Prowl started life as a manuscript by Paul Hofrichter but was rewritten, perhaps by George Harmon Smith, a writer often used by series editor Peter McCurtin to fix up manuscripts. Harmon Smith’s presence is a guess on Lynn’s part, but the writing doesn’t seem to me the same as that in supposed Harmon Smith offerings, like Savage Slaughter.

Whereas Harmon Smith was given to almost literary flourishes, especially when compared to the genre average, the writing in Killer On the Prowl is stilted and bland, given over mostly to flat, declarative sentences. Lynn spoke with Hofrichter, and had him look over the novel. What’s strange is that Hofrichter remembered some of the stuff in Killer On The Prowl as things that had interested him at the time – rocket launchers, one of the settings, and such – but he didn’t recognize much in the book as being his own writing. So one wonders why his manuscript was even used…for example, the novel opens with Magellan in California and hating it; he wants to get back to action. Then he sees in the paper that infamous Mafia boss Vito Narducci is about to make a deal with the army on some new rocket launchers.

And yet, this is never mentioned again in the narrative; Magellan recognizes Narducci’s name and decides to head back East and kill him. First though he mails his guns to himself so he doesn’t have to worry about getting busted carrying them. The front and back cover copy refer to Narducci as “The Animal,” and have it that he’s been sicced on Magellan to finally take him down. But in the novel, Narducci comes off more like a businessman, running his empire from behind a desk. The author(s) clumsily inserts a reference to him being called “The Animal” by other mobsters, but this comes off as editorial emendation.

Narducci’s given an elaborate background overview first courtesy Magellan, who does his research on his target, and then in the section featuring the three punks who have decided to kidnap him. All this stuff seems to have come out of Mario Puzo and perhaps might be the work of some other writer other than Hofrichter or Harmon Smith; it’s certainly not the former. We also get inordinate backgrounds on the kidnappers, one of whom is a jockey – cue more page-filling stuff about one of his races.

Magellan is at his most cipher-like here, going about his motions in a matter-of-fact, almost robotic nature. Surely the intent is to make his actions appear even more savage, because this time Magellan does some crazy stuff, perhaps even more so than in the average Russell Smith installment…for even Russell Smith never had Magellan gun down defenseless women in cold blood. He also literally “fondles” his guns in the comfort of his hotel room. In other words he’s a deranged freak, and this author doesn’t even waste our time by introducing a female companion for him…this version of Magellan is more Terminator than human.

We learn Magellan’s been fighting the mob for two years. He doesn’t have the usual “artillery case” this time, but he’s got a ton of goodies, from pistols to submachine guns. He’s also got a “knee mortar,” one of the things Hofrichter told Lynn Munroe he was studying at the time; this is a WWII mortar that got its name because some soldiers mistakenly thought they could prop it on their knees or thighs when firing. Later Magellan gets some explosives from a dealer who operates out of a grocery store. There’s a lot of gun-talk and info on plastic explosives, as well as lots of detail on the scuba gear Magellan buys at a sports store for an underwater raid. 

However it must be said that Magellan rarely appears in the book; it’s really given over to Narducci, the kidnappers, and various one-off characters. The trio of losers who kidnap Narducci are given the most narrative, followed by the underlings in Narducci’s family who vie for power. When Magellan appears, he’s in total robot mode, planning hits and buying the supplies needed for them. The author(s) studiously avoids giving Magellan any personality; we’re given modicum details about when or where he eats, or what he’s thinking. But we’re with him step by step as he haggles for plastic explosives or buys scuba gear for his hit on one of Narducci’s boats.

And as mentioned, Magellan is more ruthless than ever in this one. He starts assaulting Narducci’s places and possessions, not aware that the man himself has been kidnapped…blowing up those boats, shotgunning one of Narducci’s lieutenants in a drive-by, starting a fire in one of his sleazy hotels (though at least here Magellan gives the innocents a fighting chance for survival). It’s still surprising though when Magellan blows away a gaggle of hookers in Narducci’s employ as they walk across the street:

When [the hookers] were passing a group of darkened stores in the middle of the block, [Magellan] swung directly across the street towards them, lifted the machinegun and aimed it at them, as he used one hand to steer the car along. 

The girls looked at him in amusement, thinking him to be a john, until they saw his submachinegun and screamed and began to scatter. 

He fired in short bursts, watched them twist and turn and fall as the bullets chewed into their perfumed flesh. The girls fell down on the sidewalk and turned it red. He continuted to fire until his clip was empty. Then the car swung away from the lane in which it was in and went back into the lane in which Magellan had been driving. As he sped off, he looked into his rearview mirror. At least half a dozen bleeding forms lay on the sidewalk. He smiled. 

When news of this got around no more dirty, little whores would be coming around to work for Vito Narducci.

Those poor hookers!! But seriously I think this is the most vile thing Magellan’s done in the series, which is really saying something. And of course note how he fires until he has an empty clip and then smiles…you don’t have to be Dr. Phil to realize the guy’s a fucking nutcase. And he’s the hero of the series! It’s for reasons like this that I’ll always prefer ‘70s men’s adventure novels to the ones from the ‘80s…they’re just so much crazier and more lurid.

Everything proceeds in the usual Marksman template, with unthrilling “action scenes” that entail Magellan shooting unarmed mobsters or blowing places up. This includes the “climax,” in which he takes care of a ton of guys with that knee mortar. But it’s all rendered so blandly that you could yawn and miss important events. Here’s a late action sequence, which demonstrates the meat and potatoes, “see Spot run” vibe of the prose – not to mention how “important characters” are so anticlimactically killed:

They saw Magellan and fired at him. He fired back. They sought cover. The two Mafioso saw them and assumed they were with Magellan and offering supporting fire. They turned and began to fire at the police. 

Dunn lifted his pistol and fired two shots at them. Royden lifted his gun and fired. A lucky shot struck Dunn in the chest. He fell. Stemmer was at his side, pulling him towards the bushes as Wimark crouched and fired at the other men. 

But Dunn never made it, he expired before they reached the bushes. Stemmer dropped him, shouted the news to Wimark and they ran into the bushes and up the street to take up a more favorable position.

And on it goes, with no dramatic thrust or impact upon the reader. This same sort of lifeless, juvenile prose marred Roadblaster, which makes me assume Hofrichter was responsible for a lot of the book, or at least the Magellan parts. And finally, any action series author who uses the word “expired” to describe a bad guy’s death needs to be sent to men’s adventure remedial school.

The Marksman #16: This Animal Must Die

The Marksman #16: This Animal Must Die, by Frank Scarpetta
March, 1975  Belmont-Tower Books

I definitely have to agree with Lynn Munroe that this sixteenth installment of The Marksman is courtesy George Harmon Smith, as it’s very much in the vein of another Smith novel: Savage Slaughter, which thanks to some tinkering from series editor Peter McCurtin became an installment of The Sharpshooter (apparently without Smith’s knowledge!). In fact, I’d go further and say that This Animal Must Die was written as a sequel to Savage Slaugher – which happened to be published the month before.

To recap, that Sharpshooter yarn, which clearly started life as a Marksman yarn, featured “Johnny Rock” doing a job for the CIA. Well, This Animal Must Die continues the trend, with Philip Magellan arriving in Naples when we meet him, wondering where his CIA backup is – and also he’s here thanks to a “63-page document” the President(!!) has given him. We’re never told what exactly this document says, but boy we’re often reminded that it’s sixty-three pages long. Why Smith came up with such an exact number is just yet another baffling mystery in the Marksman/Sharpshooter universe. But anyway the President himself has tasked number one wanted criminal Philip Magellan with taking out a Mafia boss in Italy.

It’s cool to read this one because you get George Harmon Smith’s unfiltered manuscript, with stuff that was apparently cut out of Savage Slaughter to make it fit into the Sharpshooter mythos. For one, we get the Spider-esque gimmick of Magellan often referred to as “The Marksman” in the narrative, ie in italics, which of course brings the flair of an oldschool pulp. But Smith tries to temper Magellan a bit; he keeps the psychotic rough edges of the Russell Smith installments – and Lynn Munroe is likely again correct in his hunch that Harmon Smith edited many of Russell Smith’s manuscripts – but he often has Magellan psyching himself up to do them. Like, even when he has to drug someone and stash ‘em in the trunk of a car, this version of Magellan “hates” it, whereas the Russell Smith version had all the emotional content of a Terminator.

After an aborted mob hit in which Magellan makes quick, gory work of his enemies with a Browning pistol (his choice gun this time around), our hero is whisked away by a hotstuff blonde. Her name is Toni and she’s very mysterious but Magellan’s certain she works for the CIA. In fact she works for an Italian-American who wears a mask, operates out of a cathouse, and tells Magellan that he was extradited from the United States years ago but wants to come back. He figures if he can help on this hit of Frank DiCarlo – ie the Mafia chieftan the President wants dead – then he might get passage back to the States. Interestingly, Magellan has made his way here hidden in a coffin as it’s hauled in a hearse through the countryside – perhaps some sort of sub-“literary” trick per Harmon Smith, certainly the most literary of all the Marksman authors. Don’t believe me?

At the roadside, peasants crossed themselves dubiously as the hearse rattled past. The quick dabs of their gnarled fingers across chests and foreheads were more in the nature of signs warding off ill luck than symbolic affirmations of the Christian faith. 

At the end of the valley the hearse began to climb as the road, curving upward in great loops, left the fields and orchards, the vineyards and little towns that lay scattered like toys on the valley floor to bask away the last of their long, hot, breathless Italian afternoon under the westering sun.

That’s right, folks, that’s taken from a Marksman novel.

But literary flourishes aren’t all Smith brings to the table – he brings a heaping helping of sleaze too. This Animal Must Die is the most explicit volume yet in the series, filled to the brim with that lurid mid-‘70s vibe I love so much. Now, Magellan as we know isn’t the most “sensuous” of men’s adventure protagonists, and in most volumes is a strictly business before pleasure type of guy. But the mysterious masked guy offering to help him (the mask being yet another pulpy touch) as mentioned runs out of a cathouse, the best damn cathouse in Naples – indeed all of Italy – and so he sets Magellan up with a steady stream of free tail.

In fact Smith doesn’t just bring us sex – he makes it sleazy and wildly pre-PC as hell; Magellan’s first “gift” is a black hooker who introduces herself, “Black can be beautiful. Do you like to fuck?” To which Magellan responds, “I don’t care to fuck you!” One of the stranger statements you’ll ever hear a men’s adventure protagonist utter. It gets even weirder, and wilder, with it turning into a hate-fuck thing, the hooker first throwing blood on Magellan so he has to take off his clothes(?!), then playing on Magellan being a “Southern Man” (ie of the Neil Young song type). And Magellan plays it right up for her, doling out the dreaded N-word a few times and calling her “slave” before finally screwing her good and proper. It occurs to me that the whole bit could almost be seen as a spoof of the torrid Plantation Lust subgenre that was big at the time – given that Smith was an editor and clearly had some writing chops, I wouldn’t be surprised. Either way, it’s some crazy shit.

Later we’re informed off-hand that the masked man sends Magellan a new woman every night, though we don’t have another “in-depth” sequence until the man takes Magellan up on his (apparently) joking concept that he “wants virgins.” That night Magellan is gifted with a sixteen year old beauty named China Doll who is a veteran whore, and likely this is Smith again catering to the prurient demands of the sleaze reader of the day. First Plantation Lust, now Jailbait Lust. Meanwhile Magellan keeps lusting over Toni, the blonde who rescued him in Naples. Smith keeps this sex scene off-page, only letting us know at the end of the novel it’s a sure thing; otherwise Magellan’s main fling here is the jet-setting wife of none other than DiCarlo, ie the man Magellan has been brought here to kill.

That’s just the sleaze angle; Smith also introduces this bizarro subplot that could come straight out of the other Smith who worked on the series – namely, Russell Smith, whose Magellan (and Sharpshooter) manuscripts were touched by a special kind of madness. The masked man puts Magellan up in the famous “Magellan Castle,” run by batty old women and a loony uncle who is locked in his chamber and howls at the moon every night. This ridiculous cover has Magellan posing as a wealthy Sicilian or somesuch who has come back to take over the “family castle.” Complete with Magellan dressing like a wealthy Italian gadabout and conducting tours of the crumbling castle(!). All this is wacky to say the least and easily could’ve been cut from the novel, but Smith at least tries to pass it off as Magellan going to all this trouble so as to find – and abduct – gorgeous Crocifissa, the never-seen wife of DiCarlo.

This is another callback to the Russell Smith books, as Magellan hoodwinks her into going up to his private chamber and then locks her in there – even though he “hates” doing stuff like this. Sure he does. He’s banging her that very night, but don’t worry, the lady’s hot for him too – we’re told she’s a passionate-blooded Itallian babe and she’s constantly compared to Sophia Loren, only she’s hotter and has a nicer rack. Smith builds up a relationship between the two, with Crocifissa knowing Magellan wants to kill her husband, but Magellan’s so good-looking and so great in the sack, what can she do? Magellan for his part threatens DiCarlo with Crocifissa’s torture and death, vowing he’ll chop off bodyparts and kill her if the mob boss doesn’t give up, and it’s clear that our hero will actually do it if necessary.

There’s a lot of stuff here that brings to mind previous Marksman and Sharpshooter books – like a hit on the laundry owned by Chinese agent Wing Quong. Magellan tortures him before killing him in a scene very similar to one in Smith’s previous Savage Slaughter. The “action climax” is along the lines of the ones Russell Smith and McCurtin would give us – no real dramatic resolution, just Magellan blowing people up from afar. Gore is given a slight more prominence than in other volumes, particularly when it comes to mentioning the “fecal matter” that blows out of gutshots. So far as the sleaze goes, there’s also the usage of the curious term “v-tuft,” ie female pubic hair, and the only other place I can recall encountering this term was in The Marksman #6 – which could be an indication that George Harmon Smith edited some of Peter McCurtin’s manuscripts as well.  Or maybe just that Smith read that McCurtin installment and latched onto the term, who knows.

Otherwise Smith’s writing is very good, with the caveat that he relies too often on adverbs and his characters are prone to exposition. There are some parts where Magellan and Toni exchange “philosophical” quips that are particularly aggravating. Also he lacks consistency in character names in the narrative, which is one of my pet peeves – our hero goes from “Phil” to “Magellan” to “The Marksman” all on the same page, which is pretty sloppy. I mean the characters can call him a host of names, but the narrative voice should stick to just one. Or at least that’s what I think.

But that’s just minor stuff; This Animal Must Die actually comes off like a masterpiece when compared to the other books in the series, most of which seem like speed and booze-fueled first drafts – most likely because that’s what they were.