New title from Tocsin Press

Just wanted to let you all know that there’s a new book out from Tocsin Press: Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Maimer, by Nelson T. Novak. Here’s the cover: 

Sgt. Joe Blitz, that tough 1970s New York cop who featured in The Psycho Killers, is back in another sordid tale which sees him up against a Satanic snuff-flick cult. 

You can check out the back cover copy and read the first few pages of the book here. 

And let’s not forget the other books currently available at Tocsin Press… 

The Undertaker: Death Transition, one of the best books I read last year. 

The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder, which was another of the best books I read last year – I mean if you get the first one you should get this one, too! 

If you like thigh-boot wearing Nazi she-devil vixens, and you like John Eagle Expeditor, then you’ll certainly enjoy John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth! 

The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch, in which Johnny Larock, the Triggerman (who is of course not to be confused with The Sharpshooter or The Marksman), satiates his hunger for Mafia blood!

Mentioned above, Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers is the previously-published adventure with Joe Blitz...one involving a rather grisly rape case.

And like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s more to come…

New Book Available At Tocsin Press

Just wanted to let you all know that a new book is listed at Tocsin Press – Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers, by Nelson T. Novak. Here’s the cover: 

Joe Blitz is a tough cop in 1970s New York who totally shouldn’t be confused with Joe Ryker, Joe Keller, or Joe Blaze! In The Psycho Killers Blitz deals with a rather grisly rape case. 

This one’s uber-sleazy and should come with a warning on the back cover, a la Gannon or Death List. As an Amazon reviewer aptly put it: “This was so disgusting…it almost made me vomit!” I couldn’t think of a better blurb than that…  

Please head over to Tocsin Press for more details!

The Sadist (aka Ryker #6)

The Sadist, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

This was the last installment of Ryker to sport a painted cover, and as usual with Leisure Books I figure it was commissioned for a different novel – the guy that’s supposed to be Ryker has blond hair and is toting what appears to be a .45 automatic, and the white-haired doctor looming over the naked woman on the operating table doesn’t exist in the book. In fact, the villain of the piece, the titular “Sadist” (though he’s never actually referred to as such), has dark hair and is relatively young. There is a part where Ryker visits the morgue and views the burned corpse of a female victim, so maybe the cover artist just got his wires crossed.

At any rate The Sadist is a slow-moving chore of a read, lacking the spark of the earlier De Mille installments. Ryker here has been emasculated into a cipher, with none of the blowhard assholery of the De Mille original, nor even the fiery gumption of the version Len Levinson gave us in #3: The Terrorists. He lives only for his job, and when not at work sits at home and watches TV or reads magazines. He doesn’t fight with his fellow officers, and indeed has a friendly, respectful rapport with his commanding officer, Lt. Sal Fiscetti, referring to him on a first-name basis. But otherwise the same recurring characters and locations appear as in the De Mille novels –  there’s fellow cop Bo Lindly, and Ryker works out of the same fictional department, the Twenty-First Precinct on West 68th Street – which leads me to believe that series editor Peter McCurtin at least tried to retain some order of semblance with the original De Mille installments. Ryker even reads with his lips, a habit De Mille noted in his books. The Sadist also follows the late ‘60s/early ‘70s settings of the De Mille novels, taking place in 1970.

Thanks to Lynn Munroe we know that the first writer to serve as “Edson T. Hamill” was Paul Hofrichter, who turned in the fifth volume, The Child Killer. I have that one but likely will never read it, or at least not anytime soon – a novel about a creep who rapes and kills little boys just doesn’t sound like something I want to read. As Bill Crider so aptly put it, “It’s probably best that some books remain forgotten.” And thanks to Lynn we also know that Hofrichter wrote this volume as well – and it’s on the same level as all his other work. There’s hardly any action and the book is mostly comprised of arbitrary situations featuring the main villain or Ryker just sitting around and brainstorming about the case.  There is a bland, meat-and-potatoes narrative style and zero spark to the characters or the situations.

And as with most other Hofrichter books I’ve read, the supposed protagonist is a supporting character in his own book. The true star is Michael Marlin, a professional hitman in his 40s or 50s who has spent the past few decades killing women – older housewives in particular. We meet him in action, in an overlong sequence in which he chases some poor woman to her death in the Columbus Circle section of Manhattan, which we’re informed at night becomes a no man’s land of junkies, rapists, and pickpockets. Marlin forces the woman to climb an endless series of stairs to the rooftop, holding her at gunpoint, and then throws her down the chimney stack. After this folks we get a 32-page backstory on who Marlin is and how he got into this particular game; a specialist, he charges twenty thousand bucks a hit to rid wealthy husbands of wives they no longer want.

Meanwhile Ryker sits around in the precinct house and gabs with “Sal” and Lindly about the case. There’s a gruesome bit where he and Fiscetti visit the morgue at Bellevue, all of it uncannily similar to the part in Death Squad where Keller views a corpse being embalmed. In fact this part goes aboveboard in the “too much information” department, Hofrichter clearly striving for legitimacy in his otherwise lethargically-paced procedural, as Ryker views the horrifically charred body of the woman killed in the opening chapter and we get to know every little detail of what he sees.

Marlin is the star of the show, even picking up a woman for himself, a “sleazy” blonde go-go dancer who lives next door at the grungy hotel he’s staying in. (Ryker for his part goes without a woman – but he’s such a cipher he wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway.) Marlin despite his killing specialty is a hit with women – you might even say he’s a lady-killer if you were into lame puns – and he picks this babe up with ease, though Hofrichter keeps the tomfoolery squarely off-page. Eventually she figures out there’s more to her mystery neighbor than she suspected, leading to another gruesome sequence in which Marlin employs one of his fallback termination methods: Drano.

Women fare very poorly in The Sadist; it only occurred to me after I read the novel that every single female character in it is killed! In fact on the same night Marlin uses his Drano technique, he also flat-out strangles a woman he’s been hired to kill, another “sleazy” type who comes on to him. It’s all very lurid but undone by Hofrichter’s typical penchant for page-filling and padding. For example, Edward Marcel, the husband of the woman killed in the opening chapter, is giving his own inordinate subplot in which hardly anything happens. What makes it all the more annoying is that his name, Marcel, is so similar to “Marlin” that you can’t help but confuse the two characters.

There isn’t much of an attempt at bringing sleazy ‘70s Manhattan to life. Occasionally we’ll get the mention of a certain street, or maybe a topical detail like “a seedy hotel on Ninth Avenue,” but there’s no feeling of grungy veracity like you’d get with Len Levinson. But anyway Ryker and “Sal” basically just drive around the New York area and interview people who knew Mrs. Marcel, leading to reader annoyance in that they go over stuff we readers were privy to way back in the first chapter. What’s worse is we have lots of brainstorming sequences where the two cops try to figure out how Mrs. Marcel was killed and who might’ve hired her killer. This does at least lead to Ryker detecting a pattern; there are a few other murdered housewives in Manhattan, and Ryker begins to suspect they’re courtesy the same serial killer who has been offing housewives across the United States over the past few decades.

But there’s no action, nothing memorable. The “climax” involves Ryker rounding up Marcel and a few other husbands whose wives were “mysteriously murdered” and grilling them for info. Eventually he finds the bookie who arranged the hits, a sleazy character named Poagie. There’s a lot of stuff where Fiscetti – a police lieutenant, mind you – questions Ryker on basic investigative method and delivers bald exposition on this or that. And again as is typical with Hofrichter the book features an abrupt switch to “action” for the harried finale…poorly-handled action that doesn’t deliver a jolt because it’s so unexploited.

Marlin has relocated to another hotel, and a dragnet has surrounded him there without his knowledge. Ryker, Fiscetti, and Lindly go in with guns drawn and try to get the jump on Marlin, but he sees them and starts shooting with his .38. Lindly is hit in the chest, and the last we see of him he’s lying on the ground with a pale face.  Hofrichter never bothers to inform us if he lives or dies. This is another interesting paralell, because the “real” Lindly, ie De Mille’s original creation, was also killed in the line of duty, in Death Squad (despite appearing without any explanation in The Smack Man, which took place after Death Squad!). So I guess Bo Lindly just can’t catch a break. 

Anyway Ryker’s knocked out but then chases Marlin up to the roof, where the two get in a knock-down, drag-out fight in which Marlin kicks Ryker in the balls twice. Finally our hero, who has been instructed to take Marlin alive (the dude’s killed literally thousands of women and they want him to get the chair), decides to hell with it and hoists Marlin in the air and tosses him. And then delivers a lame one-liner, calling Marlin a “devil,” which seems incredibly underwhelming given how many innocent lives the guy has taken. And that’s it for The Sadist, and I guess that’s also it for me and Ryker…unless I ever decide to read The Child Killer.

Ryker #1: The Sniper

Ryker #1: The Sniper, by Nelson De Mille
August, 1974  Leisure Books

Everyone’s favorite asshole cop makes his debut in this first volume of the Ryker series, which I was recently able to find at a very nice price. The Sniper appears to confirm my theory that Nelson De Mille wrote these novels in a different order than they were published; while this one takes place after May, 1973, the next volume takes place between 1969 and 1970.

I don’t know much about Nelson De Mille, other than that he served in ‘Nam and, upon his return, hoped to break out into bestselling crime fiction. While he eventually succeeded in his goal, he spent his formative writing years at low-rent publishers like Leisure and Manor (Len Levinson once told me that the one time he visited the Manor offices in New York, the only people there were De Mille and a lady whose name Len couldn’t recall; he got the impression that the two were running the place). My suspicion is that the Ryker books (and by tangent the Keller books, which basically were the Ryker books) were really “trunk novels” that De Mille had perhaps written with the intention of getting published as hardcover crime fiction and, failing to secure a publisher, ended up just publishing them in willy-nilly order through Leisure and Manor.

There is of course also the possibility that De Mille intentionally wrote these novels without any care toward continuity, with one volume taking place several years before the previous one, and etc, but I think there might’ve been more going on behind the scenes. This might also explain strange instances like one character being dead in one volume, only to be alive with no explanation whatsoever in another. Or maybe De Mille just didn’t care, who knows.

Anyway, The Sniper is a fine intro to the series, in that it sets the measured pace of the ensuing volumes. This is a police procedural, not an action onslaught (only the final De Mille volume, Death Squad, really featured any action – and was easily my favorite). De Mille slowly spins a 240-page story about Sgt. Joe Ryker of the NYPD and his new partner, Arthur Hayes, tracking down the titular sniper: Homer Cyrus, a freaked-out ‘Nam vet who is murdering pretty blondes with a Starlight-scoped M-14 he smuggled into the country after the war. Action is very infrequent, with more focus on detective work; De Mille by all accounts did his research with various police units, and he goes out of his way to bring it all to life. Indeed one wonders if Joe Ryker was based on a real cop De Mille met.

Worth noting is that Ryker isn’t as much of an asshole this time around; other than his interractions with his “stupid chief” Captain Peterson, a pair of Puerto Rican kids, and a gold-hearted hooker, Ryker isn’t as mean as in other volumes. Nor is he as obnoxious. The first half of The Sniper sees Ryker growing increasingly foul-smelling as a result of working round-the-clock on the case, with no niceties like taking a shower or whatnot, but Ryker himself doesn’t go out of his way to assail his fellow cops with his stink, as he did in The Hammer Of God. Speaking of which, The Sniper is yet another crime novel that takes place in a New York City in the grip of merciless summer heat, and De Mille often reminds us of his sweaty, stinky characters – but like the other books in the series, it takes place over several months, so that by novel’s end we’re in the middle of a freezing winter.

One thing The Sniper proves is that at least one of the Edson T. Hamills who eventually took over the series had actually done his homework; in my review of Motive For Murder, I mistakenly claimed that the still-unknown Hamill who wrote that one had devised an “alternate universe” in which Ryker’s wife and son were murdered by the mob. Well, it turns out this sad background was taken from this first novel; De Mille gradually informs us that part of the reason behind Ryker’s brutal behavior is that his wife and kid were strangled years ago by two Mafia hitmen (who themselves have disappeared, though Ryker and his fellow cops still search for them). This is something De Mille changed when Joe Ryker became Joe Keller; the latter not only didn’t have a son, but his wife was still alive, if separated from him.

Another thing I got wrong in my Motive For Murder review was the presence of muckracking TV reporter Creighton Straichey, who I assumed was original to that volume but who in fact appears in The Sniper and hounds Ryker and the rest of the police force. As in that later installment, Ryker succeeds in using Straichey in the course of his investigation, though without the harm to Straichey’s life the reporter endured in that later volume. At any rate it seems clear that series editor Peter McCurtin gave at least one of his “Hamill” ghostwriters this first installment to work off of; Len, who wrote his own Ryker novel, told me that he’d never read any of the De Mille originals. (And speaking of Len, McCurtin proves he was a savy editor by having Len ghostwrite a novel under De Mille’s name, as the two have very similar styles.)

We know from the first page that Homer Cyrus is the killer; we see him in action on the incomplete, elevated highway on the West Side as he snipes a gorgeous blonde passing beneath him in a red Jaguar. In death she crashes and causes a huge pile-up which results in several more dead and wounded; meanwhile Cyrus brains a bum with the butt of his M-14. Folks, I hated Homer Cyrus more than any of the other killers in this series, and relished the moment he’d get his just deserts. De Mille has him as a bumbling fool who goes about his killing with professional acumen instilled upon him in the ‘Nam jungles; eventually we’ll learn that he suffered a head injury there which affected his mind but not his coordination and skills. Also he appears to be targeting blondes due to an old pre-war flame as well as a hot nurse who frequently had sex with her patients to cheer them up(!).

Ryker and Hayes (whom Ryker actually treats fairly well and even considers a friend!!) do solid police work to root out the killer; again, this isn’t a Dirty Harry-esque book at all. This mostly hinges around Cyrus’s Starlight scope, which is still top secret. Here De Mille works in a customary ‘70s conspiracy vibe with the presence of a shady FBI agent who comes onto the case, more concerned about the stolen Army inventory than the dead bodies piling up. Captain Peterson, who I don’t believe appears in other volumes, I can’t recall, ends up making “a deal with the devil,” as Ryker puts it, comprimising the integrity of the NYPD to placate government politics. Ryker and Peterson hate one another, by the way; whereas ensuing volumes have Ryker more so butting heads with Lt. Fiscetti, here Fiscetti is sort of friends with Ryker, at least carrying on a civil relationship with him, and it’s Captain Peterson who has it in for our hero.

And what a hero he is! In the opening half of The Sniper, Ryker grabs a nude preteen Puerto Rican girl and slams her into the gravel on a rooftop, bullying her for info! While Ryker’s no Dirty Harry when it comes to the action side of things, he goes far beyond him when it comes to police brutality. Ryker’s hassling the girl and her boyfriend because he discovers they were up here on the roof having sex while Cyrus was nearby aiming his rifle. The two hid and watched him, and it’s from them that Ryker learns about the starlight scope; the kids saw the eerie green glow on the scope, and Hayes, who also served in ‘Nam, knows what it must be.

Hayes actually does more detecting work than Ryker, hence Ryker’s respect for him; that being said, there’s a goofy part where Ryker kicks Hayes out of bed with his live-in hooker girlfriend, sends him downtown to get some prints…and then tells the hooker to “get on the floor” so Ryker can have his own go at her! While De Mille keeps all the sex off-page, Ryker himself eventually lives with the hooker in her “fleabag” apartment on the West Side, which leads to one of the most devastating “Rykerisms” in the entire series, when the girl mentions she’s been meaning to move to the East Side:

“Look, we’re going to be roommates for awhile,” interrupted Ryker. “I don’t want to hear your whining about how life could be better. You’ll live and die a hooker and a junkie, probably right here in this fleabag. Concentrate on good fucking, please.”

That’s our Ryker! This all comes later, after Ryker and Hayes have pissed off their brother cops by getting Cyrus released; the killer escapes and manages to murder two cops, thus explaining the anger of Ryker’s brothers in blue – so he moves in with the hooker, Maureen, to use her fleabag as a hiding place. Cyrus was caught after a few more blonde killings by the appearance of that aforementioned nurse; solid police work having yielded Homer Cyrus as the prime suspect in the recent M-14 shootings. The nurse, currently stationed in Europe, heard about the case and offered her help. She feels that her casual screwing of Cyrus – not to mention the abrupt way she broke it off – might have had something to do with his ensuing murder spree. “You think?” Ryker sarcastically asks her.

The woman’s appeal on the radio is what gets Cyrus out into the open, but meanwhile Ryker has already got a positve ID on him thanks to a bum who has seen him around. This is another guy Ryker badgers, along with the Puerto Rican kids; when the bum shows up drunk at the precinct, Ryker decides to “Puke him!,” and he, Hayes, and Fiscetti take the bum into the bathroom, force him to puke, and then clean the stink off him with turpentine. Cyrus has been impossible to find because it turns out he’s been living in a tree in the middle of Central Park – a bit of subtle in-jokery from De Mille, who early in the book has Ryker guessing that Cyrus “could be living up in a tree.”

Dumb-ass Cyrus responds to the nurse’s radio-broadcast appeal to meet at a hotel, and thus walks right into a police trap. But as mentioned it’s a dirty job; the FBI has strong-armed Capt. Peterson into focusing more on the starlight scope than the actual killer, and Cyrus has walked into the trap without his gun. Now the book devolves into an overlong sequence of people searching Central Park for the hidden M-14 and scope. Ryker comes up with the idea to get Creighton Straichey, who always wants a scoop, to front the $10k bail. Ryker and Hayes follow Cyrus upon his release, hoping to nab him with the rifle in hand, but end up losing him in the now snow-shrouded Park – and getting their two fellow cops killed as a result.

Ryker deals with this the only way he knows how – beating up another woman! This is Cyrus’s sister, who lives in Oklahoma. Ryker flys there off-radar, threatens the woman in her home, then slaps her face (and breasts!) around while her little kid is screaming in another room(!). That’s our Ryker! He even ensures that she’s gotten his name right, his goal for her to blab to her brother when he makes one of his periodic calls to her. Then, again using Straichey, Ryker has the fake news planted in the media that Ryker will be “grieving” at the coffin of one of those murder cops (whom Ryker didn’t even know), which is lying in state in a West Side church for a week. Thus Ryker has set himself up as bait for Cyrus.

This takes us into the homestretch, with a foolish Ryker realizing too late that he has to get out of the church that’s holding the coffin and into a cab without getting shot by Cyrus, who is no doutb watching from afar through a sniper scope. True to series form, when Cyrus does pull the trigger it’s someone else who is killed instead of Ryker (guess who!!). This leads to the hilariously-anticlimactic climax…in which Ryker engages Cyrus in an endless walk through the streets of the West Side, the two mortal enemies keeping a hundred or so feet distance between each other; in other words, out of the range of their pistols.

It just goes on and on, the two walking almost casually through the grimy streets. Cyrus is jungle-honed and thus can’t hack the freezing cold, something Ryker capitalizes on. Ryker here has his .357 Ruger Redhawk, but also has a Beretta automatic “ladies gun” strapped to his ankle as a backup (the “ladies gun” bit proving that Ryker – and therefore De Mille – was at least familiar with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels). De Mille is good with setups and payoff, as Ryker is constantly dismissive of the little Beretta, but it ends up saving his ass; he uses it to get the drop on Cyrus when the killer finally closes in on Ryker, mistakenly believing that the .357 is out of bullets.

And while he denies us much action or thrills, De Mille at least has Cyrus getting those just desserts; after shooting him in the legs with the .25, Ryker proceeds to “carefully” bashing out each of Cyrus’s teeth with the butt of the gun, then “smashing” his testicles with a savage foot-stomp. Ryker then proceeds to cuff the heartless kller to a pipe on a desolate rooftop, leaving him there to freeze to death – or starve to death. Ryker could care either way. It’s a fitting, brutal end for the sniper, not to mention an abrupt end for the novel, given the preceeding 200+ pages of slow-going police procedural.

I enjoyed this one, as I have all the others in the series, though ultimately I think it was my least favorite of De Mille’s Ryker/Keller books. Now the only one of them I haven’t read is the nauseatingly-overpriced The Cannibal…which I hope to read someday.

The Slasher (aka Ryker #8)

The Slasher, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1976  Leisure Books

The Ryker series ends with a whimper, with an installment that appears to have been written by a new ghostwriter…one who basically just turns in a slow-moving police procedural that has nothing in common with the preceeding volumes. No idea who wrote this one, but I’m sure it’s not the same “Edson T. Hamill” who wrote the much superior Motive For Murder. In fact I wonder if this one was just a standalone procedural Leisure got hold of, and then editor Peter McCurtin turned into a Ryker book. But I doubt this is true, as there are none of the Leisure-typical goofs in the text. Ie, Ryker is solely referred to as “Ryker” throughout.

However he bears little resemblance to the Ryker of those earlier books, and none of the recurring characters appear. If this was commissioned as a bona fide Ryker novel, then the author clearly didn’t read any of the originals. This Ryker is also a weary cop, but there the resemblance ends, for the most part. He has no family, unlike the character created by Nelson DeMille, and he displays few of the racist/sexist/what-have-you tendencies of the normal Ryker; in fact at one point he’s told, by his girlfriend no less, that he’s a “good person” and “not racist or sexist.” Also, this Ryker isn’t a dick to his fellow cops, even trying to help out one of them who is laid off. He appears to only get angry when his latest case is compromised by laziness or judicial corruption, and then he will let fly with the racist/sexist/what-have-you stuff.

None of the regulars are here; this Ryker, while still in Homicide, reports to a Lt. Carley, who himself reports to Captain Creech. These are all new characters, yet they are presented as Ryker’s long-term colleagues. And Ryker seldom shows his superiors any of the hostility typical for the normal Ryker, only running afoul of them due to his complaints over the corruption of judges, city hall, etc. As for Ryker’s partner, first we’re told that his partner “of over two years” is being laid off due to the cutbacks hitting the city, and later he is given a new one: Frank Bailey, fresh out of admin and new to the world of detective work. Ryker harrasses him for a bit, but it’s nothing along the lines of the harrassment Ryker doled out to his new partner in #2: The Hammer of God, and in fact there are parts where Ryker doesn’t even call Bailey to the latest crime scene, telling Bailey that he wanted to ensure he got enough sleep(!!).

The Slasher occurs in a nightmarish New York in which budget cuts have whittled the police force down to nothing, the liberal civil rights parties have neutered the arm of justice, and a cape-clad sadist runs amok, slicing the throats of hookers with a surgical blade. So far he has killed seventeen women, and Ryker is thankful his team doesn’t have the case. Unfortunately the Slasher, referred to in the papers as a modern Jack the Ripper, stays off-page for the majority of the novel. Instead, The Slasher is a 180-page slog of small, dense print, more concerned with documenting the travails of an overworked cop than the lurid, sensationalistic stuff of, say, Motive For Murder, which is still my favorite Ryker novel of those I’ve read.

But it’s real slow-going. With the emasculated “Ryker” of the novel, there isn’t even any of the fun stuff to get us through the first third of the book. What makes it worse is that “Hamill” writes the novel like he’s John Gardner or something, overstuffing it with needless, pointless detailing. Instead of just writing “Ryker went home” or whatever, we’ll get several paragraphs of Ryker putting on his hat and tie and tossing his coffee cup in the trash and walking by the night clerk and stepping out onto the sidewalk, etc. For example:

Bailey looked at him and then at Creech, cleared his throat uncertainly and nodded, and turned to follow Creech. Ryker walked over to the coat rack and hung up his top coat, suit coat, and hat. He took the two envelopes out of his coat and dropped them on the desk and he picked up his coffee cup, and he took the cup to the urn and filled it. Carley got up from his desk and kicked his door closed with a boom. The men on Bodecker’s side of the office looked up, looked at each other and shrugged, and went on with their business.

Every page is like this. It might not seem like much when just a single instance is displayed, but when every single paragraph on every single page is filled with mundane incidentals fully spelled out, it gets to be a dead bore. The vast majority of the manuscript should’ve had a red marker slashed across it – I mean, we’re talking about a novel with a titular villain who wears a disguise, slashes throat, and might even be of supernatural origins (a tidbit only revealed in the very final pages, alas), but instead of all that we instead read tedious detailing about Ryker pulling on his coat and tie and etc. Or filling out paperwork. Or ensuring that the office door doesn’t slam so the captain won’t be annoyed. 

Another drag is that the titular Slasher is barely in the book. Plus it isn’t even Ryker’s case until midway through; initially he’s working on a rape-murder case where an unknown black assailant broke into an apartment and raped a single mother and her two daughters, including a prepubescent one who later died from the assault. Strangely, Ryker eventually hooks up with the single mom, who invites our hero up to her apartment for some somewhat-explicit sex. Ryker actually scores twice this time; we’re informed he has a girlfriend: Shirley, an “aggressively liberated woman” who doesn’t agree with Ryker on anything. She likes to call him a “fascist pig” and he likes to call her a “bleeding heart bitch.” Shirley enjoys psychoanalyzing Ryker, but weirdness ensues when we learn that she gets off on Ryker’s graphic descriptions of the dead and violated victims of the cases he works on! 

Eventually the Slasher case is thrown at Ryker. Hamill writes all of the “action” the same as he does with the rape-murder case; this version of Ryker is strictly a by-the-book investigator and uses his smarts and solid researching skills to track leads. There are no chase scenes or fights in The Slasher until the very end, and even then it’s over too quickly. Through his stolid method Ryker discovers that the killer is a former mental patient named Albert Grimes, a guy who killed women several years ago while fashioning himself as a modern Jack the Ripper. Ryker has no evidence to back up his theory, though. Here, too late in the novel, we also learn that the Slasher might be supernatural – cops who come across him during his latest kill swear he’s not only invulnerable to bullets but also disappears into thin air.

The climax has Ryker and his partner tracking the Slasher to his woodshop, where Hamill finally delivers the horror-thriller the back cover promised. Here the killer has devised a series of traps, using sharpened chisels as weapons, hurling them at the two cops. Ryker blasts at him with his pistol – Ryker by the way uses a Walther P-38 this time – and discovers that the stories are true, as the Slasher appears unfazed. Surprisingly, Ryker’s partner is not killed, just injured, and Ryker at length discovers that the Slasher is human after all…plus a bullet between the eyes finishes him off for good. And that’s it for the Slasher, who appears and is ultimately dealt with in the span of twenty or so pages.

The novel free-falls into a middling climax in which Ryker saves the life of a cop horribly injured by the Slasher, then heads on back to his apartment to have some more somewhat-explicit sex with Shirley, who again gets sexually excited by Ryker’s graphic descriptions of the injured cop. Hamill ends the tale on the note of despairity that hangs over the entire book; despite being promised a commendation for taking out the Slasher, Ryker learns that red tape prevails, with more cutbacks coming to the department and even the chance that the rapist-murderer he collared on his other case might get out due to liberal lawers.

And that was it for Ryker. While I found The Slasher ultimately listless and boring, it must be said that this version of Edison T. Hamill at least tried to write a solid police procedural, with a bit of literary flair outside the genre norm. (Yet for all the good stuff there are head-scratchingly stupid lines like, “He silently shrugged, sighing.”) I really didn’t enjoy the book, and I still think Leisure should’ve turned The Savage Women into a Ryker novel. Now that would’ve been a memorable finale to the series!

Death Squad (Keller #4)

Death Squad, by Nelson DeMille
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

I lucked out and finally found a reasonably-priced copy of this fourth and final Keller novel, which in the late ‘80s was revised and updated to become the sixth and final volume of the “Jack Cannon” Ryker series. I’ve wanted to read Death Squad since I read Marty McKee’s review a few years ago, and I’m really glad I finally got to, as this was my favorite Keller/Ryker novel by far.

As Marty notes, Death Squad is clearly influenced by the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, as it’s about a secret police squad that acts as judge, jury, and executioner. Nelson DeMille wasn’t alone in taking off on this concept, as there was the similar Death Squad and Kill Squad series, not to mention a 1974 TV-movie titled The Death Squad. For that matter, Herbert Kastle even published a novel titled The Death Squad in 1977. So “cops gone vigilante” was a hot topic at the time, and many of the elements DeMille deals with in this novel are still relevant today.

Kastle is a good reference point, as even though both the Keller and the Ryker books were packaged as men’s adventure action novels, they have more in common with the crime thrillers Kastle was turning out at the time, like Cross-Country. They’re also very similar to the work William Crawford was doing under his own name and various pseudonyms, as they’re obviously based on extensive research and they’re grounded in a realistic-seeming cop world. But whereas Crawford had lots of police world details but lackluster storytelling skills (incidentally, I’ve recently learned that Crawford was indeed a cop himself), DeMille has a firm handle on both. (Except for when he has Keller screw a silencer onto a revolver….)

I’ve enjoyed every Keller and Ryker novel I’ve yet read, even though none of them (the DeMille ones, at least) have had much in the way of action. They are instead rather slow-paced, grim and gritty police procedurals, but the characters and the situations are so well defined and depicted that I’ve found them very entertaining despite the lack of thrills. Death Squad however turns out to be a little different – while it’s just as entertaining and well-written as the previous volumes, it actually has its share of violent thrills and action scenes.

DeMille proves this early on, with an opening clearly influenced by a scene in Magnum Force, as Keller sits in with a pair of stakeout cops who are hiding in an oft-robbed liquor store. Keller happens to leave just as a pair of black dudes walk in; Keller stumbles across their spotter outside, cuffs him, and then almost walks right in on the execution of the two would-be robbers. They’re shot point-blank by the stakeout cops, and Keller has gotten first-hand confirmation of what he’s suspected for a while: that there’s a “Death Squad” operating within the NYPD.

This leads into an entertaining and very ‘70s paranoia tale as Keller doesn’t know who on the force he can trust. It gets even worse when a rapist, jailed in the detectives’ squad room in Keller’s precinct house, “commits suicide” by hanging. When Keller later finds a needle beneath the dude’s fingernail, he gets yet more confirmation of foul play. The back cover hypes it that Keller doesn’t really mind the dirty deeds of the Death Squad, but in the book itself he’s on the fence, and can’t decide if he likes their actions or not. What most bugs him is why they haven’t asked him to join!

The only men on his squad Keller believes he can trust are series regulars Lt. Piscati (aka Fischetti in the Ryker books) and Sgt. Bo Liddy (aka Bo Lindy). He’s not sure about his new partner, a young ‘Nam vet with a leg wound named Paul Reuter. Meanwhile we readers get to see the Death Squad in action, and their efforts aren’t limited to crooks: they have grander designs, like for example taking out a notoriously-liberal circuit court judge. The Squad meets in an abandoned subway on the outskirts of town, their “Chief” sitting in the shadows and wearing a hood as his men surround him. More ‘70s paranoia continues with the details that an FBI agent and a CIA agent are part of the ruling board, as well as a retired Army general.

DeMille as ever excels in setpieces, from an arbitrary but disturbingly fascinating part where Keller watches as a corpse is embalmed to a long dialog exchange between the leaders of the Death Squad, who state that their prime targets will be liberal politicians. Grungy ‘70s New York City is again captured in all its tawdry glory, if not to the extent of the other Ryker/Keller novels. Most surprising of all is that DeMille actually bothers to write action material here, with a handful of gunfights occuring in the narrative. In previous volumes our “hero” rarely if ever pulled his gun, and never fired it once. (At least in the ones I’ve read – the only two I still need are The Sniper and The Cannibal.)

Finally the Death Squad goes too far, at least so far as Keller is concerned; when they kill off a friend (or at least what passes for a friend for Keller) our hero swears vengeance. “If they’re the Nazis,” he blusters, “I’m Attila the Hun.” Keller isn’t much for planning; instead he just loads up his Ruger .357 Magnum and his Police Special .38 (which he’s constanty screwing a silencer on, by the way) and charges in. This almost gets him killed in an ambush, but he’s saved by Reuter – a fact the two keep bickering and bantering about like a regular Razoni & Jackson, with Keller insisting that he could’ve saved himself.

The two are now on the run, hiding from cops, trying to interrogate men they have identified as members of the Death Squad. Here Keller proves himself as merciless as his enemies, killing in cold blood. But nowhere is safe for Keller and Reuter – they even have to sleep in the patrolmen’s quarters in the precinct house – and the final quarter of the novel is very tense as they’re in open conflict with the Death Squad and don’t know who they can trust. Finally Keller learns where the Squad meets, and with the aid of a surprise ally our two heroes (now a trio) make a midnight raid on the place.

The climactic action scene isn’t along the lines of The Executioner or anything, and indeed brings more to mind a ‘70s crime flick, with Keller and Reuter only having to deal with a few Squad cops in the dark subway. DeMille doesn’t go much for the gore, either, with people just getting shot and falling down. He does though deliver a very abrupt ending, with Keller and Reuter taking out the ruling elite of the Squad, at least most of them, only to realize on the final sentence of the final page that they’ve just let the leader of the Squad escape. But here the book ends, which is unfortunate, as the Death Squad has been set up as so far-reaching and widespread that the story almost begs to keep going on.

Instead, that’s that; I guess we’re to believe that Keller has chopped off the head of the organization and now it will fall apart. But at least DeMille gave us some action in the first place, and again his characters pop to life, as does grimy Manhattan. Keller here has developed a penchant for one-liners and snappy comebacks, and DeMille even employs movie-style setup and payoff dialog, like a recurring joke about “a five-letter word meaning meddlesome.” One thing missing for those keeping track on your trash scorecard is there’s no sex at all – in fact, there isn’t a single female character in the entire novel.

Death Squad confirms that this series was published (and maybe even written) out of order. In my review of The Smack Man, I mentioned that a certain character was stated as being dead, even though he was alive in later volumes. I won’t give this character’s name away in this review, as it would be a spoiler to anyone reading Death Squad, but that character is in fact killed in this novel, which means that The Smack Man takes place after Death Squad, even though it was the first volume of the Keller series! (And DeMille didn’t change the series order when he revised these books in the late ‘80s, so I guess this out-of-order sequence was intentional.)

But then on page 140 Keller’s new partner Reuter says that “rumor has it” that Keller killed a bad cop named Schwartz. My friends, this is a direct reference to the climactic events of…The Smack Man! So what the hell?? Did DeMille just figure to hell with it, no one would notice the continuity misfires anyway, or did he himself get goofed up? As mentioned, it would appear these mix-ups were present in the ’89 revisions as well, so either DeMille didn’t catch them again or he just figured “to hell with it” again. But as it stands, Death Squad takes place before and after The Smack Man. I thought maybe the novels might occur at the same time, but each takes place over the span of just a few weeks – and in different seasons, to boot.

Sadly, this was it for Joe Keller; meanwhile, his alternate-reality version, Joe Ryker, continued on to have a few more adventures over at Leisure Books, courtesy the group of writers who served as “Edson T. Hamill.”

The Smack Man (Keller #1)

The Smack Man, by Jack Cannon
July, 1989  Pocket Books
(Original publication March, 1975  Manor Books)

Originally published as the first volume of the Keller series, The Smack Man was later revised and reprinted as a Ryker novel, author Nelson DeMille crediting himself as “Jack Cannon.” Ironically, these 1989 Pocket Books reprints are sometimes more scarce and expensive than the orginal editions, and I only got my copy because some unaware employee at a used bookstore put it on the Mystery shelves, for half off the cover price, at that.

I previously read Night Of The Phoenix, which was also one of those ’89 revisions, but I don’t recall it being as revised as The Smack Man clearly is. I’ve never seen the original Manor Books edition, but vast portions of this ’89 edition have obviously been rewritten, with Detective Sergeant Joe Ryker fully brought into late ‘80s New York. I’d love to read that original edition, but I don’t see it happening – I’m not about to spend that much on a copy.

As mentioned in my The Hammer Of God review, Joe Ryker and Joe Keller are one and the same, and when DeMille left Leisure Books and went to Manor he just renamed the series Keller and kept on writing. I think these books were definitely not printed in order, or maybe even weren’t written in order, because The Smack Man clearly takes place after The Cannibal (one I’d love to read) and The Death Squad (another one I want to read) – but both of those books were published after The Smack Man.

And like DeMille’s other Ryker books that I’ve read, The Smack Man is by no means an action-centric men’s adventure novel, even though it was packaged as such (in both editions). It is rather a slow-paced police procedural that operates more so on character and nitty-gritty detail, with the sleazy pit of the Lower East Side fully brought to life (in the ’89 reprints, Ryker was a Sixth Precinct cop, working the Lower East Side, whereas he was a Midtown Manhattan cop in the original ‘70s editions).

But despite the lack of action or sex, I have to say I enjoyed this one just as much as I enjoyed the others. DeMille I think has a great style, very readable, with compelling characters and great dialog. And, as usual, Ryker is a complete obnoxious prick, though it seems here DeMille actually tries to make him the hero, or at least attempts to make us sympathize with him. In previous books it’s seemed to me that Ryker was an antihero in the truest sense of the word, a guy who intentionally pissed off everyone, including the reader.

When a pimp named Rodney calls Ryker to tell him there’s a dead “hoor” in his apartment, Ryker is brought into his current case. The hooker lies sprawled in the pimp’s living room, her spine arched in a horrendous position; Ryker immediately identifies it as the result of strychnine poisoning. There’s a syringe on her thigh, so, as Ryker puts it, “Someone put bad shit in the good shit.” The M.E. claims it’s murder, but it appears the hooker willingly dosed herself. In other words, someone’s out there selling deadly dope to hookers.

As in previous DeMille Ryker novels, we really learn a lot about the criminal underworld and life on the streets. So we learn that no one sells to street hookers – they get their dope from their pimps. Someone though has circumvented this hierarchy and is selling directly to them. We know from the start of the book that it’s a half-dead bum who bought his heroin from a member of a Jamaican posse (another definite revision to this ’89 reprint, I’m sure), but the police have no idea who is behind it and spend the majority of the novel in a fruitless search for whoever’s selling the deadly junk.

Meanwhile Ryker’s more concerned with his broken air conditioner – like practically every other crime novel I’ve read that’s set in New York, The Smack Man takes place during a merciless summer – as well as the constant phone calls he’s getting from his ex-wife, Eleanor. DeMille adds genuine pathos and hummanity to Ryker here, with him still in love with her, and her feeling the same, but calling to taunt him that she’s about to get married, in a desperate gambit for Ryker to drop his work and fly to Chicago to proclaim his love for her. (We also learn that Ryker has a “girlfriend” named Beverly Kim, a “high-price call girl” he apparently met in The Cannibal, but she doesn’t actually appear in this novel.)

Of course, Ryker isn’t about to do what his ex-wife asks of him. And besides, he soon sets his sights on Detective Pamela York, an attractive blonde Narcotics officer who practices “total immersion” in her undercover roles. The most compelling character in the book, Pamela is similar to Abigail Robbins in The Hammer of God, only tougher – and not in that cliched modern “female cop” style, but in a way that seems more cut from reality. She is pretty much Ryker’s perfect match, though they start off with a frosty relationship that gradually warms due to their respect for one another’s experience.

But as for the other cops, Ryker fights with them per usual, in particular his boss, Lt. Fischetti, who is the butt of most of Ryker’s putdowns and insults. The strange lack of continuity is apparent here, for we are informed that Ryker’s partner Bo Lindly is dead, killed on duty. But when? He was alive in Night Of The Phoenix, which was published after this. And also we’re informed that another partner, Sawyer, retired after he and Ryker “had uncovered a pervasive rottenness in the department,” which surely must be a reference to The Death Squad – which I believe was the last volume published in both these “Jack Cannon” reprints and the original Manor series. So what the hell?

Ryker comes up with a plan that’s identical to the one he devised in The Hammer of God: he gets another male cop and a female cop to do the dirty work while he just sits around and bitches about how tough the case is. Williston is the male cop, and since he’s black Ryker gets him to pose as a pimp. A funny joke develops with Williston becoming one of the more successful new pimps in New York, with his stable growing daily. And Pamela York poses as a streetwalker, hoping to run into the mysterious “smack man” who will proposition her.

DeMille builds up a believable growing relationship between Ryker and Pamela, with them bonding as they walk the dangerous night streets of the Lower East Side. They also find the time to badger a bunch of pimps in a local hangout, but when Pamela finally decides to go home with Ryker, the night’s fun is ruined by his broken air conditioner. Throughout the rest of the novel Ryker constantly reminds himself that he doesn’t give a shit about Pamela York – or his wife, who basically pleads with him to come get her in Chicago. But you kind of wonder what the hell these women even see in Ryker.

Once again there isn’t a single action scene, though in this novel Ryker does, for once, actually pull his .357 Magnum in the finale – though it is immediately kicked out of his hand! Ryker doesn’t even get in any fistfights. While it might be realistic so far as all that goes – and DeMille’s Ryker books definitely have a ring of authenticity about them – it does leave the reader feeling a little jilted. Ryker comes off as a loudmouthed jerk who never once backs up his words with his fists, so he loses some of his clout in the reader’s eyes.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want it to be spoiled, but The Smack Man features the mandatory downbeat ending of ‘70s fiction. Each of DeMille’s Ryker novels have had downbeat endings, but in this one he really sticks the blade in and twists it, with Ryker and Pamela finally having sex, and then Pamela rushing out to meet a contact who might know about the bad dope. Williston has recently been killed by someone, and of course it turns out to be the guy Pamela’s meeting. She too becomes his victim, suffering a horrible fate at that, forcibly injected with the strychnine-laced heroin. Only much too late does Ryker put it all together, showing up in the park to find Pamela’s “broken doll” corpse, splayed half-nude in the bushes.

It’s when going for revenge that Ryker actually pulls his gun, but DeMille can’t even give us that much, and continues to aim for realism. Instead the killer gets away – the hastily-rendered story has it that he’s killing hookers in vengeance for his sister, who became a hooker junkie herself – and Ryker gets a month’s suspension. And even though we’re informed Ryker does eventually get revenge, it’s all rendered via summary, and is none too sastifactory. By the end of The Smack Man, Ryker has come full circle, back to the self-centered asshole he started the book as, though he goes through a few changes in the course of the narrative.

I’m curious if this was in fact the last volume DeMille actually wrote, not just due to the references to other books, but also because The Smack Man comes off as a fitting finale for the “adventures” of Joe Ryker – more than any other volume I’ve yet read, Ryker himself becomes personally affected by the events in The Smack Man, but we learn that, despite it all, in the end he is still Joe Ryker, asshole supreme.

Motive For Murder (aka Ryker #7)

Motive For Murder, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

It doesn’t feature a series title or volume number, but this was actually the seventh volume of the Ryker series. Not that it much matters, as Motive For Murder works as a standalone novel, likely turned out by a writer new to the series – given the research of Justin Marriott in Paperback Fanatic #28, I’m assuming like him that Edson T. Hamill was just a Leisure house name.

But here’s the crazy thing – whoever actually wrote this was pretty good! In fact, Motive For Murder is easily my favorite Ryker novel yet. It combines the assholic “hero” of Nelson DeMille’s original creation with the goofy tone of Len Levinson's take on the character. “Hamill” has a good handle on character and action, and one could argue that his version of Ryker is even more of a dick than DeMille’s; as evidenced by how we’re introduced to our hero in this volume: “If there was anything Sergeant Joe Ryker despised more than homosexuals, it was long-haired hippies.”

This is just the tip of the iceburg, as in Motive For Murder Ryker beats up innocent people, threatens “friends,” and even puts children in danger in his effort to track down “The Cremator,” a homicidal woman who is taking young men home and torching them. She has killed three men so far (we meet her during her latest murder, as she sets fire to a guy by putting a candle to his long hair), and the cops haven’t gotten any leads in tracking her down. All that’s known from the precious few who have seen her is that the Cremator is gorgeous, fantastically built, and wears various wigs.

Ryker is still Ryker, but this volume almost takes place in some alternate reality: his fellow cops all have the same names as in previous installments, but act differently. For example Bo Lindly, the closest thing Ryker had to a friend in DeMille’s Night Of The Phoenix, here comes off like yet another of Ryker’s enemies, constantly mocked as an “Ivy League cop” by Ryker and the others. Lt. Fischetti is out to get Ryker fired, and this time Ryker’s partner is Tex Medley, a new character and junior cop who might as well be wearing a red shirt, if you catch my drift. Also, continuing with the alternate universe feel, we learn here that Ryker’s wife and son were murdered by the Mafia years ago, in retaliation upon Ryker, whereas in the DeMille books Ryker had no son and he was divorced, still getting in fights with his ex on the phone.

Ryker’s biggest archenemy in Motive For Murder is Creighton Straichey, a TV reporter who apparently has been hounding Ryker for years (though, needless to say, this is the first we readers have ever heard of him). Hamill delivers a few scenes where the two men come head to head, with Straichey determined to out Ryker as a fascist idiot, and Ryker always getting the last laugh. Some of the scenes are pretty comical, with Ryker confronting Straichey on the street or while he’s dining in a restaurant. However the ultimate outcome of the Ryker-Straichey confrontation is pretty dark, as I’ll mention later.

While Ryker is busy busting heads and confronting Straichey, Tex actually gets the first break in the case – he finds out from a witness that the Cremator was wearing a special lipstick, one that is available in only one place: Madame Olga Petrovia’s Instituit de Beaut, a cosmetics store in Manhattan. Almost fascistly run by the ancient Madame Olga (whose right arm is the immense Gerte von Tiffell), the place is obviously somehow connected the Cremator, but Ryker doesn’t connect the dots until much too late.

Meanwhile the Cremator continues her murders, and we see in one haunting scene that her kills can rake in innocent bystanders as well, like when she burns alive some poor message carrier and inadvertently sets an entire apartment building on fire. Hamill here proves his ease with killing off characters, as we read how a young wife and her newborn twins die in the conflagration. Oddly enough the Cremator actually sleeps with this victim, though her standard m.o. is to have the victim strip down, throw his clothes at the bottom of the bed, and jerk off onto the blue bedsheets(!!). Hamill doesn’t elaborate on why the Cremator screws this particular victim, though he does provide a fairly graphic description of it all.

Unlike DeMille, Hamill keeps everything rolling smoothly; the Cremator kills a few poor saps, Ryker butts heads and makes asinine comments (even getting thrown in jail at one point for harrassing a woman in an insane asylum!), and the city becomes increasingly agitated, thanks to Creighton Straichey’s broadcasts over the inability of the police to stop the killer. Hamill even delivers a few action scenes, like when Ryker is nearly offed by a hitman moments after leaving Madame Olga’s store (yet he still doesn’t put two and two together!). He also delivers a sex scene for Ryker, when Creighton Straichey’s wife Ondine calls Ryker over to her secret apartment and throws herself at him – a very funny scene, which sees Ryker still treating the poor lady like shit even as he deigns to let her blow him. (“You give good fuckin’ head,” being his sterling endorsement.)

But Ryker’s using of Ondine gets even darker in the novel’s finale. After a few characters have been knocked off by the Cremator (who of course turns out to be connected to Madame Olga), Ryker comes up with one of his dumbass plans; he forces Ondine to draft her teenaged son, Mervyn, to pose as a delivery boy so as to capture the Cremator’s attention. The climax plays out in Madame Olga’s store and here Hamill once again displays his ease with killing off various characters. In fact by novel’s end Ryker is so despicable – even still threatening a character whose life he has ruined – that you just have to laugh at the dark comedy of it all.

Anyway, I have to say I really liked Motive For Murder, and I wonder if this same author served as “Edson T. Hamill” for any of the other Ryker novels. About the only complaint I could make is his tendency to POV-hop, with character perspectives jarringly changing between paragraphs, but I’m thinking this might’ve been the usual half-assed “editing” at Leisure at work.

Night Of The Phoenix (Keller #3)

Night Of The Phoenix, by Jack Cannon
September, 1989  Pocket Books
(Original publication June, 1975  Manor Books)

In 1989 Nelson DeMille decided to bring his Ryker series back into print, crediting himself as “Jack Cannon” with a note to the reader explaining that these editions were “revised and updated” by the author himself. The note to the reader also provides a little backstory on these books, briefly stating that the series started as Ryker with Leisure books before moving over to Manor and becoming Keller.

As part of the revisions New York “hero” cop Joe Ryker is here only referred to as such, and never as “Joe Keller.” It’s my theory that DeMille left Leisure because he got pissed off that editor Peter McCurtin published Ryker #3 under DeMille’s name, even though it was written by Len Levinson. Len explained this to me that McCurtin’s thinking was that Leisure owned not only the series but the rights to the author’s name. Doesn’t sound legally accurate to me, I mean DeMille was a real name, not a house name, but what do I know, it was the ‘70s.

But anyway shortly after this DeMille split from Leisure and went over to Manor, changed “Joe Ryker” to “Joe Keller,” and continued writing the series, which ran for a total of four volumes. Counting the two Ryker volumes DeMille published with Leisure (actually they published three by DeMille, but more on that below), that means the Joe Ryker/Keller books ran a total of six volumes, all of which were reprinted by Pocket in these “revised and updated” editions. Night Of The Phoenix originally appeared in 1975 as the third volume of Manor’s Keller series, but was the fifth (and thus penultimate) volume of the ’89 Ryker reprints.

Even this is screwy, though; as Marty McKee notes, Leisure actually published Night Of The Phoenix as the fourth volume of Ryker, titling it The Agent Of Death. Marty mentions that this Leisure edition features different character names than the Manor edition and also lacks a prologue which features so memorably in the Keller version of the tale (fortunately, the prologue is also in this Pocket reprint). So as Marty states, sly DeMille must’ve gotten paid twice for the same book…though if Len Levinson’s comments to me are any indication, DeMille probably didn’t get paid for either book, Manor and Leisure being notoriously reluctant to pay their authors.

Now that all that is out of the way, on to the novel itself. Night Of The Phoenix is along the same lines as the other DeMille Ryker I’ve read, The Hammer Of God. (A problem with all of these Ryker and Keller books is they're so goddamn expensive on the used book marketplace – hell, even the Pocket reprints are expensive, in some cases moreso than the original editions!) Rather than focusing on the action this genre is known for, DeMille instead delivers a police procedural that’s heavier on dialog and character.

And speaking of character, Joe Ryker is once again an arrogant, obnoxious prick, belittling coworkers and degrading superiors. Whereas Len Levinson made Ryker a whole lot more likable, DeMille’s (original) interpretation of the character is a hateful bastard, as repulsive as can be. Like Narc #4, this is another cop novel that takes place in the sweltering heat of a New York summer, and DeMille relishes in letting us know how sweaty and stinky his protagonist is – and talking about obnoxious, there are a few scenes where Ryker notes his own stink and will spread his arms so that others can smell him! So like I said, he’s a pretty repulsive guy.

As mentioned this Pocket reprint retains the prologue which was in the original Manor edition but removed from the Leisure edition. And truth be told, this prologue is the highlight of the novel; I could’ve read an entire novel about CIA assassin Morgan as he sits in ambush in some swamp deep in ‘Nam, targetting any unfortunate NVA or VC who might come his way. There’s a dark comedy afoot as we learn that Morgan is paid per kill, and, like Death Race 2000 or something, he’s paid in accordance to how important the person is he’s killed.

It’s late in the war and a CIA rep drops into the swamp to tell Morgan he’s no longer employed; the CIA rep further informs Morgan that he’s made the personal decision to kill Morgan and take the few hundred thousand dollars he’s amassed over the years in his Swiss Bank account. But Morgan ends up killing the rep and, stranded in the swamp (his sole companion a Vietnamese girl he wounded earlier due to a misfire and spent the rest of the night raping), begins walking his way out of the jungle.

This brings us to the “present,” clearly 1989 in this updated Pocket edition; I’m curious how much exactly DeMille revised, but the original Manor edition being so pricey I’m unable to compare the two printings. Anyway Ryker is called onto the case when a gruesome corpse is discovered; a former CIA agent is found sitting in his bathtub, killed by leeches. DeMille brings to life the nightmarish scene, with Ryker and his fellow cop “friend” Lindly looking in horror at the fat leeches as they float around in the bloody water – a scene which finishes on a bizarrely humorous cop movie-style joke when Ryker pulls one of the leeches out of the water and reads it its rights.

When the guy’s wife is later blown away by a sniper, Ryker is convinced something’s going on…his first clue being how his “stupid chief” superiors at the precinct sort of brush over how the Feds immediately swooped onto the crime scene and took away all of the evidence. Then CIA rep Jorgenson shows up and informs the cops that a rogue CIA assassin from the ‘Nam era is back and is hunting down the men who set him up. The assassin is of course Morgan, and Jorgenson delivers Ryker et al a background story that’s a little different from the “facts” as presented in the prologue. But then, Jorgenson makes it clear that he’s in the business of lying, thus making Ryker even more distrustful of the man and the entire situation.

But as mentioned Night Of The Phoenix is narratively identical to Hammer of God in that the novel is basically a dialog-heavy police procedural with none of the action or suspense a reader might want. There isn’t even much of a lurid element, other than the grisly crime scenes Ryker investigates, for example a later sequence where another former CIA agent who betrayed Morgan is found hanging above a building, the skin flayed from his corpse. As for sex, there isn’t any of that either, even considering a nonsensical bit where Ryker and his new partner Lentini hire a hooker for the night, even bringing her onto one of the crime scenes the next morning!

For the most part Night Of The Phoenix is comprised of Ryker snapping at his colleagues and superiors that there’s more to the Morgan case than meets the eye; he of course runs afoul of Jorgenson, who makes veiled threats that Ryker “knows too much.” Ryker’s certain that a member of Jorgenson’s CIA team is a turncoat, someone who is feeding Morgan intel, but Jorgenson continues to backpedal and spread mistruths. After a while Ryker’s also certain he and his partners will come under fire, so in one of the more unusual “plot twists” I’ve ever read in one of these novels, he decides to hell with it and goes on vacation!

For vacation Ryker settles on a rural farmland owned by his ex in-laws in Chicago. Both of them “old unconverted Nazis,” they live on a compound guarded by dogs and the old man has an arsenal in his basement, complete with machine guns, subguns, and even gatling guns. There’s a part where Ryker, Lindly, and Lentini look over the weaponry, suspecting they might need it when the inevitable CIA squad comes after them – Ryker has gone on vacation so as to escape any death squads that might be sent after him, but when Lindly follows after him Ryker knows the cat’s out of the bag and his hiding place has been uncovered.

But man, DeMille can’t be bothered to write an action scene. Forget about Chekov’s dictum; DeMille shows us a whole lot more than just a rifle above the mantle, but doesn’t use them in the third act or any other act. When the squad does show up that night, all we get is a somewhat tense scene where Ryker et al hear the dogs barking outside; they see some headlights; and then the car drives away! The next morning, despite finding all of the dogs dead, Ryker just decides to leave, telling Lentini to go start up the car…and Lentini’s killed in the ensuing blast, the CIA of course having wired the car to blow. You see, Ryker’s an idiot in addition to being an asshole.

Please skip this paragraph if you want to avoid the novel’s surprise. As the murders continue, Jorgenson doles out more info, like the fact that Morgan is a leper. Ryker starts to wonder how a guy with such a supposedly-ruined face could get around the city without anyone noticing him. And like Ryker you soon begin to suspect Jorgenson himself. This turns out to be the reveal – Jorgenson is actually the murderer, and he doles out the tale for Ryker at the very end of the novel. Long story short, Jorgenson himself was part of the CIA team that screwed Morgan over, and also as coincidence would have it Jorgenson happened to be on the base a jungle-ravaged Morgan stumbled into after surviving his betrayal in the prologue sequence. So Jorgenson finished off Morgan himself (throwing him out of a helicopter!) and now, these years later, has decided to cash in on the Swiss Bank account, after getting the various serial numbers from his old turncoat pals. So in other words the promised tale of a leper-faced CIA assassin running amok in NYC is denied us, DeMille once again going for more of a “realistic” approach. Dammit!

While it skimps on the action and the sleaze, Night Of The Phoenix is still rather well-written, with DeMille bringing his characters to life, in particular his slimy protagonist. There’s good dialog and funny stuff too, though nothing on the un-PC level of Hammer of God. Speaking of which I don’t think DeMille removed too much of such material from this revised edition, as evidenced in an early scene where Ryker goes on about how black people hate cold weather. It’s just that in this installment Ryker’s moreso just a regular asshole instead of a racist and sexist asshole.

I’d like to read more of DeMille’s Ryker and Keller novels, whether in the original editions or these “Jack Cannon” reprints, but the prices for them are too prohibitive. However the post-DeMille Ryker novels from Leisure, credited to Edson T. Hamill, are fortunately much more affordable, so I’ll be reading them next.

Oh, and as for these Jack Cannon/Pocket reprints, each of them have similar covers, of this shades-wearing "cool" cop who in no way shape or form resembes Ryker or anyone else in these books.  In fact, the covers look like stills from the sequel to Cobra that Sylvester Stallone never gave us.

Ryker #3: The Terrorists

Ryker #3: The Terrorists, by Nelson DeMille
October, 1974  Leisure Books

It bears his name, but this third volume of the Ryker series was not written by Nelson DeMille; it was actually written by Len Levinson. Len says it was a last-second job from his editor at Leisure, Peter McCurtin, and since the publisher owned the series rights they could hire anyone to write it.

It’s easy to see though that this is not the same author who gave us #2: The Hammer of God. For one, “hero” Ryker isn’t a full-bore bastard this time around, coming off more like your typical Levinson protagonist, and the narrative has that same down and dirty (yet still funny) vibe common of Levinson’s work.

I asked Len about his work on The Terrorists in my interview with him for The Paperback Fanatic #23. Here are his comments on it:

I wrote The Terrorists around the time that the Symbionese Liberation Army was in the news for kidnapping Patty Hearst. It also was around the time that some Weathermen made an error in their laboratory and blew up themselves and a townhouse in Greenwich Village, not far from where I lived on Christopher Street. Weathermen and their affiliates were shooting and killing police officers during those years, so I came to hate terrorism in all its self-righteous, hypocritical forms, and this attitude was expressed in the novel. Amazingly, some people nowadays consider Weatherman terrorists to be heroic figures and noble idealists.

There’s nothing heroic or noble about the SLA stand-ins in this novel; Len calls them the American Freedom Army, and they’re made up of inner-city youths who murder in the name of “democracy.” In fact they have more in common with the drug-created zombies of GH Frost’s Able Team #8: Army of Devils, rampaging through society with little concern for the police, blowing away “capitalists” with insane zeal. If you kill one, five more rise up to take his or her place.

The Terrorists is also like The Penetrator #4: Hijacking Manhattan in how it plays on all the fears of the average mid-1970s middle American – the AFA is mostly made up of blacks and Hispanics and they’re all under twenty and they’re all hippie scum. To make another comparison to yet another forgotten book, they’re like a more military version of the hippie terrorists in Burt Hirschfeld's Father Pig. They start their campaign on New York with the shocking abduction of a banker’s son followed by several massacres in Manhattan, showing absolutely no mercy.

Sergeant Joe Ryker is called onto the case by his captain, who humorously enough proves to be just as willing as Ryker to break the rules in order to see justice. This alone goes against the old “stupid chief” cliché and was fun to see. Actually Ryker’s version of the NYPD operates in a mode far removed from reality, where they can stage raids on supposed hippie terrorist compounds, armed with machine guns and grenade launchers, and then blithely lie to the Mayor’s rep that the hippie terrorists shot first!

I get the feeling that Len banged this one out pretty quickly, probably fueled by some controlled substances. (This isn’t a criticism, it’s something I demand from my pulp writers.) But still Len has a tendency to fill some pages here, especially with lots of stuff in ALL CAPS. He doesn’t give us much of a view on why the Army is like it is – they’re just a bunch of sociopathic hippie scum, and that’s that. He does however play up the lurid quotient, with several scenes of unarmed people getting blown away, tortured, and murdered. Surprisingly though, there isn’t much sex in this one, the first Levinson novel I can say that about.

Ryker comes off as a more likable person here. Rather than the hateful prick of The Hammer of God, the Len Levinson version of Ryker is just a dedicated cop with a knack for goofy humor and a tenedency to stray outside the bounds of the the law. He also has no problem with picking up hookers for the night. Like most other Levinson characters, Ryker lives in a crumbling flophouse sort of place, rides around town in taxis, and gets most of his meals from Chinese takeouts.

When the AFA kidnaps a banker’s son and then mows down a disco filled with clubbing socialites, Ryker gets on the job and starts tracking down clues. This mostly entails meeting up with a young snitch in a 42nd Street porn theater and hobknobbing with a mafioso named Zagari. Along the way Ryker also continues to work on another case, namely the unsolved murder of a circus midget with the great name of Charlie Salt. This subplot really doesn’t add much to the story and comes off like another incident of page-filling, and in fact Len leaves it unresolved at the end of the book.

Ryker himself sees a lot of action, another big difference from the previous volume. He finds the time to lead two assaults on the AFA, gets in a lot of chases, and even manages to collar a pair of juvenile delinquents who break into his apartment and attempt to make off with his color TV and stereo. Again the character has little in common with the DeMille incarnation, and in fact we learn that Levinson’s Ryker was a Marine in Korea and wants to move to China someday so he can eat Chinese food all the time! There’s also a goofy sequence where Ryker, at a Chinese restaurant, overhears some dude calling the cops “fascists” and Ryker tosses his food at the guy.

But the cops sort of are fascists here, going to any means necessary to bring in the AFA. Actually, they just want to kill them all. “Civil rights” have no meaning as Ryker and squads of machine gun-toting cops will storm suspected AFA quarters with no intention of arresting anyone – they just want to waste them. But then the AFA are shown to be such merciless bastards that you want to see them get blown away. Some of it’s too much, though, like when Ryker catches an AFA guy, has the morgue doctor drug him with truth serum, and then blows the guy away in cold blood once he’s revealed the AFA headquarters!

When Ryker wants to go even further than his permissive captain will allow, though, he goes to mob boss Zagari. The two have a friendly sort of “one hand washes the other” relationship, with Zagari giving Ryker underworld intel in exchange for Ryker letting off cronies of Zagari that get arrested. Once Ryker knows where the AFA is, he tells his captain not to worry about it and goes to Zagari, who puts together an army of mobsters. This entails the second of two major raids in the novel (in the first Ryker gets shot in the leg, but manages to walk it off), and goes to even more zany extremes than the first, with the mobsters basically unleashing armageddon on the AFA-run tenement building, blasting it to its foundations.

The goofy humor you’d expect from other Len novels is still here, if a bit subdued. Ryker has a knack for delivering some dumb jokes, particularly one about dope-smoking monkeys. Ryker also has a penchant for pondering things, again as is expected in a Levinson novel. And funnily enough, Ryker is referred to a few times as “Blaze” in the novel. This is something Len spoofed in his must-read The Last Buffoon, with an editor calling his protagonist Frapkin and telling him to change the name of the hero in Frapkin’s latest tough cop novel. This happened to Len in reality; he later wrote an installment of the similar Super Cop Joe Blaze series, and he discussed the name-switching in the interview:

I don't think I consciously based Joe Blaze on Ryker, although they were similar characters. Joe Blaze began as a different already-established Belmot-Tower character, don't remember his name; he probably was a rip-off of Ryker. While I was writing, Peter [McCurtin] called and said BT was spinning off a new cop series, so I should change the name of the main character to Joe Blaze and keep going. So evidently Joe Blaze was a rip-off of a rip-off. I more or less reproduced my conversation with Peter in The Last Buffoon, changing names to protect the innocent or guilty, another example of art imitating life.

This was the only volume of the Ryker series that Len wrote; DeMille returned for the next one, and then the series went over to “Edson T. Hamill,” which I’m guessing was a house name. As mentioned, Len also wrote a Joe Blaze installment, The Thrill Killers, and I’m betting it will be along the same lines as The Terrorists. At any rate I look forward to eventually finding out.

And here’s an interesting postcript to The Terrorists, once again from Len’s interview:

After Nelson became a literary star, his agent Nick Ellison mailed me a legal document with a letter asking me to relinquish my rights to The Terrorists. I signed on the dotted line because I couldn't imagine what could be gained by being a pain in the neck to Nelson.