The Hunter #2: Night Of The Jackals

The Hunter #2: Night Of The Jackals, by Ralph Hayes
February, 1975  Leisure Books

John “The Hunter” Yard returns in another globe-trotting adventure that takes place “about a year” after the first. Author Ralph Hayes tones down the action barrage this time, instead turning out what for the most part reads more like a private eye yarn, at least so far as Yard’s incessant searching for his prey goes.

Something about this series hasn’t clicked for me yet; the writing isn’t bad, and the characterization is pretty good in comparison to the genre average, but at the same time the series just doesn’t excite me much. Maybe it’s because it’s all so standard, despite the fact that its hero is a big game hunter based out of Nairobi. Hayes, as with the first volume, doles out a very standard tale, with nothing crazy or outrageous or very memorable – the craziest this series has gotten was in the first pages of the previous book, where a woman’s newborn baby turned out to be some hirsute monster.

But I can’t really criticize a book for playing it straight or safe – Hayes basically just turns in a no-frills adventure yarn, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for. As ever the highlight here is the camaraderie between John Yard and pal Moses Ngala, a Keyan native who spent time as a cop in London and still goes about calling people “old man.” Unlike other men’s adventure authors of the day, Hayes does not constantly mention that Moses is black, and there is none of the cloying, maudlin sap about their friendship which would be mandatory in today’s PC-ridden world. However, this volume has the pair going up against a hardcore racist – so racist in fact that he’s a former Nazi.

Ernst Rohmer is the villain of the piece, currently serving on loan to the US Army as a jungle warfare instructor at a base in Georgia. Rohmer is in his early 50s and started his military career in the SS, where he served in battle and in the death camps. Afterwards he sold his services to the highest bidder, finding his best match with the Syrian army, whose leaders were very happy with Rohmer’s mania for murdering Jews. Rohmer also fought for the ARVN in Vietnam, where he carried out mass atrocities, including the massacre of an entire village: men, women, children. He was so infamous that even Yard, who served in ‘Nam, heard of him while he was over there.

All of this is relayed via backstory; Hayes spends so much time on Rohmer and on setting up this volume’s plot that John Yard doesn’t even appear until page 46 of his own novel. What brings the Hunter into this time is that Rohmer finally goes too far. Resenting the fact that a black man is in his company, Rohmer conspires with a redneck sergeant named Pruitt and a crooked stockade warden to visit the black soldier, Wendell Harrison, in his cell one night, Harrison having been sent here on false charges (after being beaten to a pulp by Rohmer and Pruitt, that is). But Rohmer goes too far, and kills Wendell – and gets off scot free.

Meanwhile Wendell’s brother Aron tries to probe the death, and for his trouble is nearly beaten to death, too. Turns out though that Aron, years before, met Moses Ngala. He doesn’t seek out the man, though; instead, Aron makes the decision to leave “the white man’s world” and move to Lagos. There he just happens to run into Moses, visiting here from Nairobi in his hunt for a jewel thief. After busting his man, an Indian criminal, Moses takes Aron out for a beer and listens in dismay to his terrible story.

Moses returns to Nairobi and presents the tale to Yard, who meanwhile has been going about his big game hunting. The question is whether these two want to return to hunting men, something they haven’t done since the previous volume. Yard is unsure, but when a persistent jackal ends up attacking his property again, Yard realizes that something must be done about all predators, because they never just go away by themselves (Liberals, take note!!). Hayes by the way is very good at thematic work, and this is just one such example – not to mention the angle of the entire series, which has Yard “hunting” his prey across the globe.

Given the elaborate scene-setting, this means that Night Of The Jackals doesn’t devolve into one overlong action scene after another, as the previous volume did. Indeed, there are only a few action scenes this time around, and Yard doesn’t get in a brawl with every person he encounters, like last time. Sometimes this is actually a detriment, like when Yard and Moses get to Georgia and learn that not only has Rohmer left the service (headed to Syria by way of Paris), but also his flunky Pruitt has moved off to another base! This sucks because you really want to see Pruitt get his comeuppance. 

Instead Yard must satisfy himself with beating Maddox, the corrupt stockade warden, to a pulp. Meanwhile Moses scores with a pretty black nurse who works on the base, but as ever Hayes is shy with the details. The hardest material we get here is, “There was gentle moaning from her lovely throat, and the fiery touch of hot thigh, and the enveloping oven of her, and then the sweet, violent song of love between them.” Enveloping oven?? She might want to get that checked out. 

The globe-trotting of the previous book is still here, though, and soon Yard and Moses are in Paris, where they find that yet again they’re too late. Rohmer has already gone on to Syria. But they have no idea where. Moses eventually meets a money-hungry bellhop who claims to know where the sadist is in Syria; there follows a long scene where the bellhop meets Moses at a boxing match and Hayes fills pages about the boxers and their match. Also Moses ends up having to get rough with this guy, after all, and ultimately discovers where in Syria Rohmer has gone.

Rohmer is in the Golan Heights area of Syria, where he can live out of his dream of killing Jews – we learn that he has a long history of helping the Syrians fight Israel, and thus is beloved by the Syrians for his zeal. Rather than taking the bastard out, Yard and Moses pretend to be mercenaries from Canada who have come down here looking for positions in Rohmer’s unit. Rohmer accepts them grudgingly, offering Yard a high post but Moses a menial one – he tries to hide his hatred of blacks from the Syrians, who appear to be all for his anti-Semitism but don’t appreciate his hatred of black people(!?).

“This group is essentially a terrorist group,” Yard sums up Rohmer’s unit, eerily predicting the nightmarish terrorist group which runs Syria in reality in the present day. Hayes seems to have done his research on the area, or perhaps even visited it, briefly but capably bringing the desolate place to life. He also caters to the men’s adventure mandate by having Yard get lucky, hooking up with a pretty Arabic dancer who sometimes serves as Rohmer’s mistress. Once again it’s not explicit in the least, “He took her savagely” being the extent of it. (After which she demands twenty bucks!)

The final third is kind of baffling, as Yard and Moses go through the motions of serving in Rohmer’s Jew-hating military squad…apparently they haven’t yet decided he truly deserves death and are just biding their time? Once Yard gets more details on the horrible atrocities Rohmer has committed, he decides (again) that the sadist deserves to die – but first he has to secretly radio word to a nearby village in Israel that Rohmer plans an ambush on the place, a “practice run” for his troops.

During the melee, in which an Isreali military squad successfully prevents Rohmer’s “surprise” ambush, Yard and Moses try to kill Rohmer, but fail. They get back to base in Syria and the dumbasses are surprised when they’re pulled out of the lineup and thrown in prison – someone saw their treachery. Now the book becomes torture-porn as Yard is by turns beaten savagely (while nude) and interrogated by Rohmer (while still nude). It goes on for too long, but finally culminates with Yard killing a guard with his bare hands and escaping.

Rather than the big action climax of the previous book, Night Of The Jackals instead finishes with Yard and Moses chasing Rohmer across the desert, where they engage him and his two men in a firefight. Rohmer is given an anticlimactic sendoff, accidentally stepping on a land mine Yard has planted. And that’s it; our two heroes drive off to get something to eat(!) and figure out how they’re going to get over the border into Isreal while wearing stolen Syrian military uniforms.

Night Of The Jackals is passable, pretty standard action-pulp fare, but as I wrote above I’ve still failed to drum up much enthusiasm for this particular series. We’ll see if that changes with ensuing installments.

Vatican Vendetta (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #88)

Vatican Vendetta, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

A notable installment of the Nick Carter: Killmaster series, Vatican Vendetta was not only the final volume to feature Nick’s archenemy Mr. Judas, but it was also the final volume to be “produced” by series creator Lyle Kenyon Engel. From here on out the series, now in first-person (until sometime in the mid-‘80s, at least), would be in the hands of a changing lineup of editors at Award, Charter, and Jove.

According to Will Murray in his excellent Killmaster article in The Armchair Detective volume 15 number 4 (1982), Vatican Vendetta was a Ralph Hayes revision of a George Snyder manuscript. Also of note is Judas’s appearance in this book. The last Killmaster book the metal-handed archvillain had appeared in was 1969’s The Sea Trap, not only a series highlight but one of the best men’s adventure novels I’ve ever read. Yet as Murray notes, Judas’s appearance in Vatican Vendetta actually picks up from the 1967 entry The Weapon Of Night, a Valerie Moolman installment that featured Judas plummeting over Niagra Falls in the climax.

Strangely, in Vatican Vendetta all of Judas’s post-The Weapon Of Night appearances are ignored, and the events of that book, which took place “a few years back,” are constantly mentioned, with Nick (who narrates the novel) and his boss Hawk repeating over and over that they believed Judas was dead after he went over the Falls. My guess is that George Snyder probably wrote his first draft sometime in 1969, which was not only “a few years” after ’67 but also was when Snyder started writing for Engel (his first volume of the series was 1969’s The Defector).

According to Murray, Engel had a slew of unpublished Killmaster novels in his archives, not only ones by series regulars but also by authors such as William Crawford (whose Killmaster work was never published, and probably for the better). I’m guessing Snyder’s first draft of Vatican Vendetta was one such manuscript, and sometime in ’73 or ’74 Engel gave it to new series author Ralph Hayes for revision. (Also I believe that by 1974 George Snyder had already retired from the writing biz.) I’d also say that Hayes rewrote the vast majority of it, as Snyder’s style isn’t very apparent here; however Hayes’s clunky style, familiar from The Hunter, is very apparent.

Vatican Vendetta doesn’t have much spark to it, and honestly was a sad way for Judas to go out – they should’ve just left it at The Sea Trap, where he was blown up in the finale (like any pseudo-Bond villain, Judas “died” at the end of every volume he appeared in). Hayes’s plotting (not to mention his description, characterization, dialog, etc) is pretty pedestrian, with the once-mighty archvillain Judas reduced to a regular sort of crime kingpin (ravaged by diabetes, no less!) who pulls heists like a villain off the Batman TV show.

As for narrator Nick himself, he too doesn’t shine as brightly in Hayes’s hands. When we meet him he is, of course, in bed with a woman; he’s in Rome, his mission to steal back a blueprint of a new top-secret nuclear triggering device from a KGB agent who stole it from a courier. Nick easily takes on the guy, killing him in the process, and makes off with the document – that is, not before he’s (very coincedentally) met an attractive young Italian gal named Gina in a bar. Hayes gives us the first of a few sex scenes between the two, but they aren’t very explicit or page-consuming.

Nick is to hand the blueprints over to an AXE courier, but he’s followed by KGB agents the next day. He rushes into the Vatican museum and ends up stuffing the blueprints into an ancient Etruscan vase. He loses the tail and it’s back into bed with Gina, who just happens to be the former mistress of a Mafia dude named Farelli. The next morning when Nick heads back to the Vatican to retrieve his blueprints…he walks right into a heist. Reality tossed out the window, Hayes first has a diversionary assassination attempt on the Pope, followed by a helicopter hovering over the Vatican while men rope down, loot the place, and rope back up onto the waiting ‘copter. And sure enough, they’ve taken the Etruscan vase!

The novel operates like a generic private eye/police procedural as Nick hooks up with an Interpol friend named Tony Beneditto and the two track clues and scan evidence, trying to determine who was behind the heist. Nick discovers an odd footprint in the looted Vatican and at great page-length they deduce it was from a “crepe-soled shoe” which is made only in Sicily. This leads us to the Mafia, and coincidence rears its head again when it’s determined that one of the heisters was the bodyguard of none other than Farelli, Gina’s ex! Now Gina’s part of the team, helping Nick and Tony but not really doing much other than keeping Nick’s bed warm.

Hayes does throw in the occasional oddball touch, like when Gina puts Nick in touch with Madame Vasari, a cathouse owner who has ties to the Mafia and might help track down the heisters. But to speak to the lady, Nick “has” to sleep with one of her girls! This right after he’s gotten out of Gina’s bed. Hayes again keeps it vague in the ensuing naughtiness, but lets us know at least that something has happened. But anyway the Madame is the centerpiece; like something out of a Fellini film she’s ancient and obese and wears a bright red orange wig to cover her bald head. Iincense and vaporizers mist the air to block out “the strange aroma” her body has acquired.

Action is sparse and, when it finally does happen, is relatively bloodless. Hayes is very much in the first-draft mode of writing, and according to Murray’s article all of his manuscripts were heavily revised by Award, usually because they came in well beneath the required word count. Nick doesn’t fare very well, either; at one point two random thugs get the better of him, leaving him a bloodied mess, and you have a hard time seeing this happen in books written by other Killmaster authors. Even when the trio goes down to Sicily and finds Judas’s secret complex beneath a villa, Hayes keeps it threadbare; Nick takes out the mere two guards who oversee the place and discovers that Judas has not only found the nuke device blueprint, but has actually made a nuclear bomb of his own.

The final third is more page-filling as Nick and Gina parachute onto an ocean liner upon which Nick believes Judas has planted the nuke. It’s headed for New York and Nick also believes Judas is aboard. But many pages are devoted to Nick bickering with the stubborn captain and then days elapse as Nick et al search the ship…finding nothing, not even Judas. Not until they come into port in New York does the mayor reveal that they’ve just been wired a ransom note, and the captain only then happens to remember that a strange man with a “gaunt face” attempted to place something valuable in the captain’s special safe.

During the Vatican heist Nick caught a look at Judas in the helicopter over the building; here’s how Hayes describes the villain, whom we later learn looks “emaciated” now due to having picked up diabetes in the ensuing years(!?):

It was a skull-like face, emaciated, the skin like parchment, waxen and pulled tight. The man’s eyes were slits, cruel and reptillian, narrow coal-black eyes peering out from a face of yellow leatherish flesh. The wide, thin-lipped mouth was curved up into a death head’s grin. This was the profile I continued to stare at, one side of a face that belonged to the most depraved and monstrous human being I’d ever known in my entire life. I thought I’d seen the last of him the day he plunged over Niagara Falls.

Later it’s also mentioned that Judas has metal hands, but Hayes goofs in stating that Judas lost both of his hands in childhood (meanwhile Nick himself shot off one of them in Run, Spy, Run). And strangely enough we’re informed Judas hides his metal claws with fake flesh. Seriously, if you’re a crazed supervillain with a skull face and metal hands, why the hell would you cover them up??

The finale is pretty middling. The nuclear bomb is found in the captain’s quarters and an expert disarms it while Nick stands around. Then Judas attempts to escape with the debarking passengers, having a tough go of it due to his emaciated, gaunt form and his cane and all. Yet he still manages to lose Nick! The villain hops a plane to Rome and Nick follows after him, once again bringing Gina along for no reason. The climax is a harried affair in which Nick gets in a brief gunfight with the two men on the streets of Rome, killing Farelli and chasing after Judas.

Racing down a well into the sewers beneath Rome, Judas leads Nick on a page-consuming chase across the slimy, rat and bat-infested passageways under the city. Nick catches up with him in the Catacombs, where a weak Judas finally appears, delivering his one and only line of dialog in the novel: “I will finally kill you now, Carter.” But he misses with his .44 Magnum and then passes out into a “diabetic coma,” falling over a bunch of skeletons from the early Christian era. Nick checks his pulse and there is none, and thus Judas is well and truly dead. The end!

So yeah, a pretty anticlimactic finale to the Judas saga, with the villain himself reduced to a shadow of his former self. But then the novel overall is pretty clunky and forgettable. Not only did Judas deserve better, but so did Lyle Kenyon Engel.

Murray states that Engel had the opportunity to stay with the series, and was indeed even offered the reigns again years later, when Charter Books took over, but ultimately he chose to end his relationship with the series he himself had started. Engel had grown frustrated with how Award was managing it, publishing manuscripts he submitted under different titles and taking forever to send payments, not to mention sending back many manuscripts and requesting vague rewrites.

But most importantly, Engel chose not to continue with Nick Carter: Killmaster because he hated the first-person narration which Award Books demanded. One must admire the force of his conviction, to quote Professor Lombardo.

The Hunter #1: Scavenger Kill

The Hunter #1: Scavenger Kill, by Ralph Hayes
January, 1975  Leisure Books

One of the last men’s adventure series Leisure Books published in the ‘70s, The Hunter ran for five volumes and, like other Leisure (and Belmont-Tower) publications, the volume numbers were eventually removed from the titles. Author Ralph Hayes was credited under his own name; Hayes was another of those prolific pulp authors of the era, but this is the first novel of his I’ve read.

Scavenger Kill is very much an opening installment, with hero John Yard deciding here, after much internal probing, to become a justice-seeking vigilante. We learn that Yard was a Major in ‘Nam but went AWOL after he got sick of the unjust war; now he lives in Nairobi, Kenya, where he makes his living as a professional hunter who assists and instructs vacationing foreigners who want to see what it’s like to be a “great white hunter.”

Yard’s job seems to suck; in the first pages he’s already in a life or death situation, after his spineless client gutshoots a lioness, which hides in the shrubs. Now Yard has to lure it out, putting his life in danger, because the authorities insist that you finish off your prey. Hayes has no qualms with baldly “foreshadowing” plot developments in the most obvious way possible, with Yard for no reason at all suddenly thinking of his old ‘Nam pal Joe Alger, who now lives in New York.

And guess what? Alger is having some tough times. He and his wife Holly have just had a baby boy, and over the past few weeks have watched in shock as it has developed some very inhuman characteristics. For one it has sprouted hair everywhere, and also it has claws. In an unsettling sequence Holly visits a doctor, only to learn that the baby is in fact not really human, its chromosones having been affected by an experimental pregnancy drug Holly took called Moricidin.

The doctor tells Holly that the drug has been banned in Europe, due to similar issues, and is being removed from the US market as well. Children born from it don’t live long, and never ascend beyond an animalistic state. It’s all really bizarre and off-putting, especially when Hayes further amps up the vibe by having a dazed Holly go home, drown the baby in bathwater, and then jump off the roof of her building!

Unfortunately the rest of Scavenger Kill doesn’t really match these lurid heights. Hayes is very much a “meat and potatoes” sort of writer, not just in how he only tells you what you need to know, but also how he doesn’t really do anything outrageous or unexpected. For that matter, the villain behind Moricidin is a French Canadian billionaire named Maurice Lavalle, and despite being presented as a cunning mastermind, Hayes basically writes him as a loan shark or something, just this overgrown bully who threatens everyone and never once displays the smarts that caused him to be so rich.

Hayes further shows his ease with shoehorning coincidence into the narrative; Yard’s best bud, a Kenyan native named Moses Ngala, just happens to be trying to track down Maurice Lavalle himself, due to the man’s poaching in parts of Kenya and beyond. Moses is a private eye, but once was a cop in Nairobi and received his training in London. Now he goes around calling everyone “old man” and serves as Yard’s partner and voice of reason once Scavenger Kill gets moving.

After visiting a shellshocked Joe Alger in New York, Yard vows to bring Lavalle to justice. The story is presented that since he’s so rich no one can get to him, thus he escapes any criminal charges for Moricidin, etc. Beyond coincidence, Hayes also isn’t shy about forcing action into the novel. Practically ever person Yard meets starts a fight with him, the first instance being when Yard visits Joe’s lawyer, and the friggin lawyer and his buddies attempt to beat the shit out of Yard, for no reason at all!

Back in Kenya, Yard finally decides to take the law in his own hands. Moses finds out and tries to stop him – cue another fight scene, as the best friends trade punches. But Moses ends up going anyway, and after tracking clues in London (where Yard bangs a pretty secretary who works in Lavalle’s London office, though Hayes provides zero details), they split up, with Moses going to Montreal to locate Colley Fowler, Lavalle’s ex-bodyguard. Here develops another endless fistfight where Moses is called racist names by the locals and gets in a fight with them, then finds Colley in a boxing gym and gets in a fight with him.

It all finally leads up to a good action scene, where stocking-masked Yard and Moses pull a nighttime raid on Lavalle’s penthouse in Kingston, Jamaica – the two really cover the globe in this novel – with them blasting shotguns and wasting guards. Unfortunately Hayes, for all the detail he provides on Yard’s big-game guns, pulls an unexpected blunder with Yard outfitting his .357 Colt Python revolver with a silencer. And he does this throughout the novel. Hayes doesn’t exploit the sex aspect much, but he does dole out the gore when bullets start flying, though after messily blowing away the stooges in the penthouse the duo discover that Lavalle has absconded again…this time to Zaire!

Hayes takes us into the homestretch with Yard devising a plan to lure out the reclusive Lavalle – a nice bit of callback to the opening, where he had to lure out the wounded lion. Given the just-introduced information that Lavalle “collects” goldmines, Yard conveniently finds out about one in Zaire that the bastard’s been trying in vain to buy. Long story short, it leads to a good climax in which Lavalle and his entourage are stranded on a ferry as it goes down the river, and Yard and Moses take them down one by one.

I can’t say I loved Scavenger Kill, but eventually I’ll read another installment of the series…because why not?