The Hook #3: Hate Is Thicker Than Blood

The Hook #3: Hate Is Thicker Than Blood, by Brad Latham
December, 1981  Warner Books

A big thanks to Darren Heil, who recently posted a comment on my review of the first volume of The Hook that the series was in fact not written by David Schow. And also Schow himself left a comment on the review, also stating that he wasn’t “Brad Latham,” so thanks to him as well – I must’ve missed his comment when he posted it back in 2017.

Darren Heil confirms what I started to supsect after the second volume; namely, that The Hook was written by at least two authors. That second volume was so out of line with the first one that it should’ve been clear as day to me when I read it; I mean the first one traded off between gumshoe action featuring oddball gangsters and incredibly explicit sex scenes, whereas the second one didn’t feature much of either. Per Heil, this is because an author named Richard O’Brien wrote the first, third, and fifth volumes of The Hook. I guess it’s still a mystery who wrote volumes two and four. Hey, maybe it was David Schow!! Oh, wait…

As with The Gilded Canary, Hate Is Thicker Than Blood is a busily-plotted private eye yarn occuring in a 1938 Bronx populated by misfit gangsters and uber-horny women. I mean these ladies will screw at the drop of a fedora, and damned if O’Brien doesn’t document each and every bang in full-on detail. I don’t mean this as a complaint; I’ve said before I think this genre should start where “over the top” ends, but at the same time something about the book seems sluggish, even though it’s only around 160 pages. But then like those other Warner “Men of Action” books, it’s got some very small, very dense print, so the page number is a bit misleading.

It's clear that O’Brien didn’t read the previous volume, which as stated has a totally different vibe than this one. Humorously in Sight Unseen Bill “The Hook” Lockwood fell in love with a woman, planned to marry her and etc, couldn’t believe he had finally found “the one” and etc…and the same scenario occurs here, with nary a mention of the previous volume’s babe. The veteran men’s adventure reader will of course know what happens to both these women. A proposal in this genre is practically a death contract.

Speaking of babes, the hardcore sex makes a huge return here, pretty much all of it on the level of the “Put it in me!” raunch of the first volume. Lockwood does pretty well for himself, scoring with four sexy women over the course of a couple days. I honestly never knew 1930s women were so damn horny. But they throw themselves at “The Hook” with wild abandon: a sultry female doctor; an old flame of Lockwood’s who is now a heroin-addicted mob floozie; a widow (whose sex scene, believe it or not, is completely off page – yet inexplicably this scene is spotlighted on the first-page preview); and finally a virginal but smokin’ hot babe who is the sister of the murdered Mrs. Nuzzo. O’Brien details each slam in full glory (save for the bit with the widow), featuring almost as memorable phrases as the first volume. My favorite: “Her fluids were hot on his phallus.” Almost sounds like slash fiction about Herbie the Love Bug.

Curiously though the violence, when it happens, isn’t nearly as exploited. Lockwood kills several goons, blowing them away with his customary .38 revolver, but there isn’t as much detail when it comes to the exploding fountains of gore and guts. Actually the action is kept on mostly a hardboiled sort of level, with Lockwood getting in as many fistfights as shootouts, taking a bit of damage along the way himself. There’s a tense bit where he’s captured and forced into a chair while a sadistic mobster tortures someone for info, and Lockwood gets punched around himself. Actually Lockwood’s captured a few times, which I guess is part of the hardboiled template but makes him come off sort of stupid sometimes.

The plot is muddled despite being ultimately simple: Bill “The Hook” Lockwood is called in by his cantankerous boss Mr. Gray at TransAtlantic Underwriters to look into an “easy” case: a Mr. Frank Nuzzo of the Bronx is calling in the insurance he had on his wife’s necklace, which has been stolen. That Mrs. Maria Nuzzo was killed in the robbery seems incidental; Mr. Nuzzo is more concerned with cashing in on that stolen necklace. Mr. Gray has no idea that “Frank Nuzzo” is really Frankie Nuzzo, an infamous mobster. Of course Lockwood is familiar with him, and instantly suspects that Nuzzo offed his own wife so as to collect on the insurance.

This leads to the first of many confrontations Lockwood has with Nuzzo; Lockwood gets in a ton of scrapes, chases, and shootouts in the book. And he encounters the usual parade of mobsters with goofy monikers: Wall-Eye Borowy, Fish Lomenzo, Willie the Weeper. From the start Lockwood’s certain Nuzzo hired someone to stage a robbery and murder his wife; eventually Wall-Eye Borowy (so named because his eyes look in opposite directions) is outed as the man who pulled the trigger. But things get more muddled, as the autospy shows that Mrs. Nuzzo was shot by two different guns.

It gets even more twisted when it turns out Mrs. Nuzzo was having an affair, and this would appear why Frankie Nuzzo offed her. This brings in Fish Lomezo, a sadistic hood who happens to be Maria Nuzzo’s brother, and now he’s out for revenge. Lockwood follows all these clues around, usually staying one step ahead of the mobsters. Soon he encounters Gina Lomenzo, Maria’s kid sister, a virginal beauty who is so dropdead pretty and innocent that Lockwood falls for her instantly. And of course she’s Fish Lomenzo’s other sister, but claims no knowledge of Fish’s criminal activities.

It just sort of churns on, Lockwood getting in and out of scrapes without batting an eyelash, complete with wrecking a carfull of hoods into the Hudson. And of course, banging a bevy of willing babes – the widow being the unsettling moment in this regard. At Maria Nuzzo’s funeral Lockwood overhears a Bronx lady talking about Maria’s whoring, and he goes to see the lady next day…she turns out to be a widow, her husband having killed himself due to the Depression, and she’s nice and horny. After some off-page lovin’ she gives Lockwood the dirt on Maria…and next day Lockwood reads in the paper about a Bronx widow’s mutilated corpse being discovered by the cops. Her throat’s been slashed and her tongue’s been cut out, a clear warning of what happens to people who talk. Lockwood doesn’t seem much bothered about it.

Instead, he’s too busy planning to marry Gina Lomenzo! He suffers from total amnesia that he was planning to get married in the previous volume as well. Even a glue-sniffing kid will know this romance isn’t going to end well, but at least O’Brien keeps the narrative interesting with oddball sleaze, like an arbitrary visit to a “floating cathouse in the financial district” where Lockwood tracks down the elusive Wall-Eyes Borowy. We also get a return appearance of bullish police chief Mad Dog Brannigan, which further gives The Hook the vibe of an amped-up ‘30s pulp.

The plot twists all over the place, as if O’Brien were trying to rewrite Chinatown, even though at the end it turns out Lockwood was right from the very beginning: Nuzzo really did do it, but the question is who fired the other gun that killed Maria Nuzzo. In one lame moment Lockwood even accuses Dr. Susan Venable, the hotstuff doctor he had fullblown sex with in the opening pages. This accusation is just forgotten in the finale, in which Lockwood is shocked – damn shocked, I say – to discover the other shooter was…well, you can probably figure out who it was.

The finale features all sorts of “tragic” reveals and reversals as Lockwood learns the truth behind the Nuzzo-Maria-Gina triangle, complete with Lockwood basically walking off a gunshot wound and managing to crash the car his would-be killer is driving. And while we are to understand Lockwood is heartbroken and devastated, a sort of apathy has long since set upon us, perhaps due to the crushing weight of the various plots and subplots we’ve endured. What I mean to say is, the problem with this series as I see it is that Bill Lockwood is lost in the shuffle, and there’s otherwise nothing that registers on the reader’s awareness, save for the ultra-kinky sex scenes.

Oh and how about this random bit of geekery…now we know that most of the series was written by Richard O’Brien, and as I mentioned in my review of the first volume, “Bill Lockwood” sounds like “Hugh Lockwood,” aka the main character of the obscure 1973 TV series Search. And Hugh Lockwood, my friends, was portrayed by Hugh O’Brian, thus bringing it all full circle. I’ll pause as your heads explode.

The Hook #2: Sight Unseen

The Hook #2: Sight Unseen, by Brad Latham
September, 1981  Warner Books

William “The Hook” Lockwood returns for another caper, a few months after the previous volume (though published the same month); this one sees him going up against some Nazis who have stolen a top-secret experimental bombsight. It’s the late 1930s, America still considers Germany and Japan its allies, and Lockwood spends the whole novel disbelieving that America will get into another world war.

At 180 pages of small, small print, Sight Unseen just sort of drags on and on. Not that the first volume was a rollercoaster or anything, but still in comparison it was a lot more fun, what with the bizarre assortment of underworld types Lockwood interacted with. But this time the Hook’s purely in insurance investigator mode, dealing with Treasury Department agents (aka “T-men”), scientists, and most importantly a redheaded beauty.

Whereas the first novel traded off between lots of boring “investigation” stuff and super-hardcore porn, this one focuses more on the former and really tones down the latter. In fact there’s such a disparity between the explicitness of the sex scenes that I wondered if maybe some editor at Warner might’ve gotten freaked out by some of the stuff in The Gilded Canary Caper and asked the author to lessen the impact this time. Who knows. But sadly, that ultra-hardcore stuff was about the only enjoyable aspect of the previous novel, mostly because it was so crazy and so weird and most importantly because it jolted the reader out of the stupor he’d fallen into.

So while there’s some sex in Sight Unseen, particularly with the redhead, who turns out to be the head of research on the bombsight project and is named Myra Rodman, it’s nowhere as graphic as in the previous book. I believe this is so because Lockwood actually falls in love with Myra over the course of his investigation, which takes a few weeks; long parts of this book are like a romance novel, as Lockwood courts the beautiful young lady, taking her out to dinner and dancing and whatnot. But then later in the book, when also as part of his investigation, Lockwood sleeps with a hooker, this scene too isn’t very explicit, which again makes me suspect “Brad Latham” (supposedly David Schow) was asked to tone down the naughty stuff.

Anyway, Myra Rodman works for Northstar, a company in Long Island founded by Dr. Josef Dzeloski initially as a refrigerator manufacturing company, but due to (too long) backstory we learn the military eventually started using the company as a weapons contractor. Now Northstar has made a 500-pound bombsight, which is so top secret that Transatlantic, Lockwood’s employer, has insured the item without even knowing what it is. But the thing’s somehow been stolen out of Northstar’s windowless, single-entry plant in Long Island, and Lockwood must figure out if it was an inside job or if a foreign power stole it.

The novel is more of a private eye thriller than the previous book, with much of the narrative given over to Lockwood ambling around and interviewing this or that suspect. There’s Pops, the elderly guard who was on duty that night, Guy Manners, the engineer on the project, even Dzeloski himself. But as mentioned most importantly there’s Myra, who Lockwood starts falling for pronto. There are also several T-men afoot, a dude named Guy Manners in charge of them; he and Lockwood immediately get in a contentious relationship, but eventually Manners makes Lockwood a temporary Treasury agent to help with the investigation.

There’s no action at all – that is, unless you count the parts where Myra takes the train into New York City and goes out to the hottest restaurants and clubs with Lockwood. There’s a Casablanca riff going on, as Lockwood refuses to get involved with the anti-Nazi sentiment sweeping across “the liberals” of America; Myra is very political and is desperate for the US to step in and do something about Hitler and his legions, otherwise all of Europe will be engulfed in war. Lockwood starts to suspect the lovely lady is correct, particularly when he comes across the intel that some Germans might’ve stolen the bombsight.

In addition to fighting with Manners, Lockwood also periodically argues with his boss at Transatlantic, Mr. Gray , who demands that Lockwood find the bombsight so TA doesn’t have to pay. Lockwood mostly uses his underworld contacts to find out where the bombsight might’ve been spirited away to, but every time we think there’s about to be an action scene, like when Lockwood and friends sneak up on a warehouse, it fizzles out, with the place being empty. There’s only one action scene in the book, really, and that’s later when Lockwood leads some junior T-men on an ambush of a Nazi hideout, but it’s over quick, and Lockwood even gets shot.

Another too-long sequence has Lockwood investigating the German girlfriend of Heatherton, a secret Treasury agent who poses as a Nazi. This lady throws herself at Lockwood, but he turns her down, caught up in his growing love for Myra. After all, he’s already feeling guilty for having screwed a hooker named Barbara Wilson, a suspected Nazi spy, earlier in the novel, all so as to secretly get some info out of her as part of the investigation. Yes, Lockwood is totally in love with Myra, even thinking what it will be like to marry her and to begin “a new adventure” in his life, with kids!

So my friends, I think it’s plainly obvious what fate is in store for poor Myra Rodman. What action reader will be surprised when, just a few paragraphs after thinking about having children with her, Lockwood discovers Myra’s corpse? It’s such an expected “shocking moment” that you have to laugh out loud. What makes it all the more humorous is that, other than a burning desire for revenge, Lockwood doesn’t act much different afterward; he isn’t too heartbroken or devastated. Of course, the novel ramps up to the finale within the next twenty or so pages, but I’m betting Lockwood will barely even recall Myra by the next volume.

For the finale, Lockwood impersonates an American Nazi and goes out to a U-Boat that’s docked off New York to get the bombsight. Even here the author tends more to dialog and suspense, with Lockwood planting an explosive and hightailing it out of there before she blows. Lockwood himself takes some damage this time, getting shot in the novel’s sole gunfight and having to recuperate in the hospital. He rarely busts out the boxing moves which gave him his nickname, only at one point using his famous “hook” on an old man who turns out to have been Myra’s assassin – but since the guy was only following orders and gives Lockwood the desired info, Lockwood lets him live(!?).

Anyway, Sight Unseen wasn’t too great. It was boring, padded to the extreme, and suffered from the diluted naughtiness – the previous volume was boring, too, but at least it had crazy, Harold Robbins-esque moments of sleaze to sporadically liven things up.

The Hook #1: The Gilded Canary

The Hook #1: The Gilded Canary, by Brad Latham
September, 1981  Warner Books

Part of Warner’s short-lived Men Of Action line, The Hook ran for five volumes, and was unlike the other series in the line (ie Ninja Master) in that it was a period piece about an insurance investigator. If this first volume is any indication, The Hook has more in common with the hardboiled pulp of the 1930s, only with much more explicit sex. Seriously, this novel is so sex-focused that the first-page blurb is a sex scene.

The series is set in 1938, and Brad Latham (apparently in reality David Schow) really captures the period detail. Not only does he grace his colorful set of characters with dialog that appears to come right of a Bogart movie, but he also gives them equally-colorful names: Muffy Dearborn, Two-Scar Toomey, Jock Bunche, Jabber-Jabber Jacoby, Stymie the Fence, Jimbo Brannigan, etc. But while the dialog, names, and period details are colorful, plotwise the novel isn’t all that much.

Our hero, William “The Hook” Lockwood, works as an insurance investigator for Transatlantic Underwriters, and is currently tasked with locating torch singer Muffy Dearborn’s reportedly-stolen diamonds, which are worth fifty thousand dollars. Lockwood (we’ll just go ahead and assume he’s the uncle of Hugh Lockwood, one of the protagonists of Search) got his nickname from his boxing career; he’s 38, and fought in WWI. Now he solves the big cases for Transatlantic, rolling around New York City in a supercharged Cord.

Lockwood’s already on the case as the novel opens, heading into a Manhattan nightclub to catch Muffy Dearborn’s debut performance. The story of her jewels being stolen was leaked into the papers via Walter Winchell’s gossip column, and Lockwood has a hunch the story was leaked on purpose. He’s sure there’s more to the case than a simple theft. A plethora of lowlifes have assembled for the performance, and Schow introduces us to our entire cast, all of whom are conveniently gathered here in the opening pages.

Jock Bunche, Muffy’s awesomely-named former paramour, starts catcalling her during her opening number, and a huge fight breaks out. Here Lockwood unleashes some of his boxing skills, though he’s no superhuman. He gets some help from Raff Spencer, a hulking dandy who speaks with an affected British accent despite being American, and a WWI vet himself; he’s Muffy’s current paramour. Lockwood also runs afoul of Two-Scar Toomey, so named due to the scar running across his face, and the gangster boss goes to the top of his suspects list.

Lockwood’s detecting skills are pretty lame; he spends the entire novel just sort of wandering around New York, chasing one wild goose after another. Schow peppers the novel with several action scenes, many of them much overdone, in particular an endless, endless sequence midway through in which Lockwood is hauled off by a group of Toomey’s men and is able to talk them into a boxing match. A desperate Lockwood, unarmed and riding with the men who plan to kill him, suspects this is his only chance to live, but what could be a taut scene goes on way too long, with Lockwood getting beaten nearly as much as he gives the beatings. To make it all worse, the entire scene is rendered moot when Raff conveniently shows up to save him.

Otherwise we have car chases, like one Lockwood gets in early in the book, as well as a handful of gun fights. Lockwood also has no compunction about blowing people away, and Schow goes for the right approach with not having Lockwood bound by any laws. He has a friendly rapport with titan-sized Jimbo Brannigan, tough beat cop who runs this part of the city, and Brannigan usually just shows up in the aftermath of Lockwood’s latest fight and makes a joke. Brannigan also shows up to save Lockwood several times; our hero is actually saved from certain death several times in the novel.

While it’s all pretty mundane, despite the colorful setting and character names, one thing that separates The Gilded Canary from its peers is the ramped-up sex scenes. If this first volume is any indication, The Hook is one of the most sexually-explicit men’s adventure series ever, with Lockwood getting it on in super-graphic detail with Stephanie, Muffy Dearborn’s hotstuff French maid, as well as, expectedly, Muffy herself, who you won’t be surprised to know is a blonde goddess among women. The first-page blurb is just a hint of what’s in store for the reader:

Stephanie comes into it in what amounts to a shoehorning into the narrative, just showing up at Lockwood’s doorstep and telling her she’s moving in with him to “protect” him. Her hazy story has it that she once knew a man similar to Lockwood, back in France, and he ended up dead, and Stephanie now feels something certain is about to happen to Lockwood unless she’s there to watch him. It’s all obviously bullshit, but Lockwood lets her move in and decides to keep an eye on her, even though he knows she’s no doubt up to something.

The plot, concerning Muffy’s missing jewels, is itself kind of bland, and you wish there had been a more fantastic or at least memorable storyline for this first volume. But somehow Lockwood runs into an assortment of mobsters in his investigation, most notably Widwer “One-Eye” Levinsky, who wears a glass eye and puts Lockwood temporarily in the hospital early in the book, ambushing him and beating him unmerciful, as the Jerky Boys would say.

Muffy herself is a talentless shrew who worries more over her public image and who treats everyone with disdain, particularly Lockwood; that is, until she decides to become interested in him. Schow does a pretty good job of presenting Muffy as a calculating harpy with no redeeming features, and when Lockwood has the expected sex scene with her he at least has the dignity to be ashamed with himself. Mostly because he’s certain she had something to do with the theft.

In a scheme that turns out to be as overly-complicated as the one in Trouble Is My Business, Lockwood finally deduces who was behind the theft. It’s so complicated that, like a regular Banacek, Lockwood has to deliver expository dialog explaining it all for around twenty pages or so while everyone sits around and gapes at his intelligence. Schow does end it all with a bang, though, with the outed villains getting the jump on Lockwood, leading into a final-pages gunfight.

But still, the novel is just sluggish, and took longer to read than it should’ve. The mystery is too mundane to justify the book’s length, and there are too many instances in which Lockwood just stands around and wonders what lead to follow next. But then, this is just the first volume, so it could just be a temporary misfire before Schow finds his footing with the next four volumes.