Shaft Has A Ball (Shaft #4)

Shaft Has A Ball, by Ernest Tidyman

April, 1973  Bantam Books

The first Shaft novel to be published as a paperback original, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner, who the following year turned in the execrable Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Fortunately Shaft Has A Ball is better than that one, though as John Lennon would say, “it couldn’t get much worse.” For the most part Shaft Has A Ball comes off like one of the hardboiled yarns Turner wrote for Manhunt and other crime mags several years before, as collected in the anthologies Shroud 9 and The Hardboiled Lineup. In other words, it’s not much of a Blaxploitation affair, though that seems to also be true of Ernest Tidyman’s original Shaft novel (which I intend to read one of these days!). 

Again a big thanks to Steve Aldous for the background detail that Ernest Tidyman did the final edit of Shaft Has A Ball. Tidyman did a good job in his editing and rewriting, as the style here is the same as in the final book in the series, The Last Shaft, which was written by Philip Rock. In other words, one could read the Shaft series and not even suspect it was the work of two ghostwriters and one editor. The only caveat is Philip Rock was a superior writer, and Robert Turner again takes a fun concept and proceeds to do little with it. And, as with every other Turner book I’ve read, it was a chore to finish the book; despite being only 150 pages, Shaft Has A Ball maintains a sluggish pace throughout. 

I first read about this novel twenty years ago on Teleport City, meaning to someday check out the book. I recall even back then the Shaft books were obscure and hard to find. I’m reading this series way out of order, but it’s no big deal; there’s not much in the way of continuity, other than the small group of people John Shaft regularly works with: Captain Anderozzi of the NYPD, a cleaning lady who stays off-page the entire book, and Rollie Nickerson, a minor actor who is part-time bartender at the No-Name Bar that Shaft frequents. There’s also returning character Ben Buford, a Malcolm X type who apparently grew up with Shaft and has a brotherly sort of antagonism with him. 

According to Steve Aldous, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner at the same time Philip Rock was writing Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which was the last Shaft novel to be published in hardcover in the United States (and, like all other books in the series, credited solely to Ernest Tidyman). This means there is some incongruity in how a certain character is presented in each book: Senator Albert Stovall, a black politician who in Shaft Has A Ball doesn’t have much to do in the narrative other than bet on a horse race, give Shaft an expensive watch, and get the shit beaten out of him (off-page) by a “sadie-massie” gay male prostitute. Meanwhile I was most staggered by the off-hand mention that Stovall, a black politician known for his firebrand personality, was a Republican. 

And yes, the sadie-massie (ie sadomasochism) mention brings us to the titular “ball;” it’s an event being held in the Hotel Armand in New York City for GAY, aka Gay American Youth, but really it’s a drag queen ball. Presumably the attractive black women on the cover are these drag queens, or maybe the artist (Lou Feck, per Steve Aldous) had no idea what the novel was about and just assumed there would be a bunch of hot black women in it. (Spoiler alert: There aren’t.) But then, even the drag queens are seldom in the text. Above I mentioned how Robert Turner does little with the plot. This is no truer than the ball itself; indeed, the entire “heist going down at a drag queen ball” element is almost an afterthought, and the heist could just as easily have occurred anywhere else. What I mean to say is, just as in Scorpio and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, Robert Turner doesn’t seem to know what kind of a book he’s supposed to be writing. 

Also according to Steve Aldous, the plot for Shaft Has A Ball came from Ernest Tidyman himself, and clearly his idea was of a heist happening in the middle of a drag queen event. One can already see the hijinks this would entail, with various characters dressed up like women and whatnot; but, brace yourself for this shocker, Robert Turner does zilch with the setup. If you expected Shaft himself would put on a dress in this one, be prepared to be crestfallen. Shaft isn’t even in the hotel when the drag queen ball takes place! I mean that’s how lame Turner’s plotting is. Rather, it’s a pair of crooks who dress up like broads and proceed to knock over the Hotel Armand (while knocking over some of their colleagues to increase their cut of the heist), and the whole thing is over and done with in a handful of pages. 

But really, it’s like a Manhunt story taken to novel length; Shaft the cynical, burnt-out private eye who wonders if he’s had enough of the city and just wants to give it all up, but is pulled into action again. Speaking of which, Shaft is pretty much a bad-ass in this one, killing people with his bare hands and blowing people away with a submachine gun in the finale. He also sees some bedroom action, courtesy a smokin’ hot black-Hispanic chick named Winifred Guitterez who works for a “black-themed magazine” and asks to do a profile on Shaft. Instead she wants to get, uh, shafted, and the two go from dinner to Shaft’s apartment…only, Shaft finds the naked corpse of a white girl in his place, a junkie who just got out on bail and has implicated Ben Buford in an upcoming heist. 

Shaft sends Winfired off…not that she holds any grudges, as she returns later in the narrative for the sole purpose of providing a somewhat-explicit sex scene, after which she completely disappears from the novel! The literary equivalent of the perfect woman, I guess. Curiously Turner does build her up a bit; Shaft researches her after she approaches him for an interview, learning that she was into boxing for a while, which is odd for a woman now and even more so was in 1973. But ultimately Winifred has no imact on the narrative, and is another indication of Robert Turner’s lackadaisacal plotting; she appears in the opening to interview Shaft, goes to dinner with them, gets sent home, and then calls him later so they can “finish business” – and next time we see her, she’s in bed with him. And then that’s it. I just felt she could’ve had more impact on the story. 

The same goes for the entire subplot around Ben Buford. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a group of professional criminals plan to heist the Hotel Armand and pin the blame on Buford. Why this is necessary is not much dwelt upon, but part of the caper involves a crook who looks enough like Buford that he will pose as the revolutionary rabble-rouser during the heist so as to make people think Buford is behind it. The only puzzling thing is, the Buford lookalike pulls off the heist in drag, which undermines the entire plan! It’s stuff like this that just makes me think that Robert Turner never really understood what he was supposed to write in these ghostwriter projects. 

So in a nutshell, Shaft Has A Ball mostly features Shaft being told his old “pal” Ben Buford is planning a heist, and Shaft insisting that Buford wouldn’t have time for such nonsense. Then some people leave a dead junkie girl in his apartment and Shaft hunts them down, brutally killing one of them in the filthy bathroom of a bar and crippling the other. And curiously this subplot sort of goes away for a while, and Shaft moves on to providing bodyguard services for Senator Stovall. But this doesn’t entail much: Shaft takes a nap on a couch in the senator’s hotel room while Stovall disguises himself, to go bet on a horse race. After this Shaft goes home to bang Winnifred, and is called late that night when Stovall is taken into the hospital, having gotten banged up by a rough-trade male prostitute named Cowboy.  This is a character who also receives some brutal payback from Shaft. 

A humorous thing about Shaft Has A Ball is that Shaft’s sentiments on the gay community are very out of touch with today…but Turner indicates they were for 1973, too. There’s a curious bit where Shaft, in the Hotel Armand where he is to bodyguard the senator, rides up the elevator with the head of security, who informs Shaft that a drag queen ball is going on. Shaft makes some off-color jokes, and the security guard gets upset…which just seemed a very modern reaction to me. Shaft by the way will continue to make off-color jokes about gays and drag queens as the story progresses, which again makes it damn puzzling that Shaft himself has no interraction with the drag-ball heist itself. Personally I pictured burly, mustached John Shaft toting a gleaming .44 Magnum while in a dress and lipstick…wait, didn’t Hightower do that in one of the Police Academy movies? I haven’t seen one of those since the ‘80s (I saw the fourth one in the theater!!), so I can’t remember. 

Meanwhile we know, from various cutovers to the villains, that a group of criminals are plotting to knock over the Armand and pin the blame on Buford. There’s a lot of stuff from the perspective from the heisters as they plan things, but in true heist style it all unravels. Instead two low-level criminals in the gang do the heavy lifting, and it is they who go about in drag during the heist, even though one of them is supposed to fool everyone into thinking he’s Ben Buford, which makes one wonder why he’s in drag in the first place. Then these two guys start knocking off their fellow criminals. Meanwhile Shaft is off sleeping somewhere. No kidding. He’s informed by Captain Anderozzi about the heist, the morning after, and Shaft sets out to clear his good budy Buford of any blame. 

Apropos of nothing, Shaft deduces that someone at the heist was impersonating Ben Buford…and then Shaft goes to the apartment of his part-time actor friend, Rollie Nickerson, and asks him for a book of local actors(!). Shaft then looks through the book and picks out the black actor in it who looks like Ben Buford…and sure enough, that is indeed the guy who pulled off the heist! I mean it’s ludicrous. But Turner is close to meeting his word count, thus the finale jettisons the gritty vibe of the rest of the book and has Shaft figuring out where this guy likely has holed up. Shaft spots some mobsters also scoping out the place, and ends up using one of them as bait. But at least we get an action-styled finale, with Shaft picking up a machine gun and blasting away at the house; all told, Shaft kills a couple people in this one, though not on the level of series finale The Last Shaft. 

While the concept isn’t sufficiently taken advantage of, Shaft Has A Ball is at least better than Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, but one can see why reception of the Shaft paperback series was lukewarm. John Shaft here is just your standard pulp private eye, with the same grizzled, cynical worldview as a million other pulp private eyes, and this blasé vibe extends to the narrative. But then, this could just be due to Robert Turner. Next I’ll be checking out Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which as mentioned also features Senator Stovall, but it was written by Philip Rock, whose work I prefer to Turner’s.

The Last Shaft (Shaft #7)

The Last Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman

January, 1977  Corgi Books

(Original UK hardcover edition 1975)

Well, the Internet Archive fixed itself and this final volume of the Shaft series, only ever published in the UK, is now back online. A big thanks to the person who scanned and uploaded their precious hardcover copy, as The Last Shaft is incredibly scarce and overpriced, either the orginal 1975 UK hardcover or the 1977 Corgi paperback. It’s surprising the novel still hasn’t been published in the United States. 

And also a big thanks to Steve Aldous, who notes that Shaft creator Ernest Tidyman intended this as the final novel in the series from the outset, and tried to get it published in the US. I’d love to know why he was unable to; it sounds as if Tidyman was courting upscale (read: hardcover) imprints, which is odd, given that the previous two Shaft novels – Shaft Has A Ball and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers – were paperback originals. Had Carnival Of Killers and Shaft Has A Ball sold so poorly that Bantam passed on The Last Shaft? Or was it that Bantam (or other US imprints) passed on The Last Shaft due to Tidyman’s insistence on making the title of the book literal? I guess we’ll never know. 

The helluva it is, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is the book that should’ve been passed on in the US, with The Last Shaft coming out instead. Carnival Of Killers, written by Robert Turner, was incredibly tepid, whereas The Last Shaft, written by Philip Rock (who turned in the awesome Hickey & Boggs tie-in), is for the most part fantastic – a pulpy slice of ‘70s crime, served up just the way I like it. And Philip Rock is a much more talented author than Robert Turner; there is no part where Rock seems to be winging it, banging out the words to meet his quota. The Last Shaft moves at a steady clip throughout, maintaining tension, characterization, and good dialog. In fact it comes off at times like Hickey & Boggs, which itself was a fantastic piece of ‘70s crime-pulp. 

There’s no pickup or mention of the previous book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft is even more bitter and worn-down when we meet him this time, looking out the window of his Manhattan apartment in the very early morning hours and wondering if he wants another belt of vodka. We are told Shaft is sick of New York, and wonders if it is time for him to go. Philip Rock maintains the world-weary characterization of John Shaft that Ernst Tidyman gave the character, as Robert Turner also did, but Rock manages to make Shaft likable, whereas Turner didn’t. Also we are often told Shaft’s a big bruiser, and, given the amount of action in The Last Shaft, I more so saw Jim “Slaughter” Brown as Shaft than I did Richard Roundtree. 

But then, The Last Shaft could just as easily have been the novelization of the third Slaughter movie we never got. It has more in common with the Blaxploitation action movies of the early-mid ‘70s than it does the hardboiled P.I. yarn Ernst Tidyman gave us in the original Shaft novel (which I really need to go back and read to completion someday). In this one we have Shaft beating people up, gunning them down, blasting away with a machine gun, and even blowing a place up and napalming stuff. We’re often reminded how he’s “Big, Black, and Bold,” per Billy Preston’s awesome “Slaughter” (which curiously was never released in its complete form until 2009’s Inglourious Basterds soundtrack.) 

Overvall, The Last Shaft sees John Shaft essentially becoming another Executioner or Revenger, or any other of the proliferation of mob-busters who showed up on the paperback racks in the mid-‘70s. Which again makes it curious that this novel did not come out as a paperback here in the US. Regardless, Shaft here turns into a one-man commando squad who takes on the underworld, even outfitted with a trick vehicle that’s stuffed to the gills with all manner of firearms and explosives. He even manages to get laid while kicking some Mafia ass, which is also par for the course for these ‘70s mob-busters. 

The plot is basically a Maguffin that allows Shaft to become a vigilante. He gets a visitor despite the early morning hour, none other than Captain Vic Anderozzi, a recurring series character. Anderozzi has come here with a guy named Morris Mickelberg, who per Anderozzi is the guy responsible for all the payoffs and whatnot going on in the city. Anderozzi has also brought along a massive box that contains all the dirty secrets – names, payoff dates, receipts, etc. It’s kind of a goofy setup, but Anderozzi’s reasoning is that Shaft is the only guy he can trust – the captain’s goal is to take Mickelberg and the box to the District Attorney first thing in the morning, and he just needs someplace safe to stay in the interim. 

Shaft’s reaction makes him seem a wholly unattractive character, which gave me bad flashbacks to Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft essentially tells Anderozzi he’s crazy and immediately grabs a shotgun and takes off – Shaft realizes “half the city” will be out to kill the captain, kill Mickelberg, and get that box. So Shaft leaves his “good friend” in the lurch, but to Shaft’s credit he has a change of heart while escaping; Shaft sees two men on the roof of his apartment building, one of them wielding a machine gun, and he swoops in to the rescue. As mentioned, Shaft does a fair bit of killing in The Last Shaft, blasting these two would-be hitmen apart with his shotgun. Philip Rock doesn’t dwell much on the gore, but he capably handles the action, a gift he demonstrated as well in Hickey & Boggs. 

Ernst Tidyman foreshadows his intention of making the title of The Last Shaft literal with the offing of a major character here in the opening, an occurrence which sends Shaft on his rampage – and furthers the “one-man commando Mafia buster” connotations of the novel. (I say Tidyman and not Rock, as per Steven Aldous the novel is based on a storyline Tidyman gave to Rock, with Tidyman also editing Rock’s final draft.) This death serves to be Shaft’s impetus for the rest of the novel: to get revenge on the killers and see that they all burn, handing off Mickelberg’s papers to the proper authorities. But Shaft is from this point a hunted man, with assorted crooks, mobsters, and corrupt cops out to get him. 

If there’s any failing to The Last Shaft, it’s that Rock (and Tidyman, I guess) introduces a deus ex machina conceit, a character who is randomly introduced into the narrative and will prove, again and again, to have just what Shaft needs for any given situation. This character is named Willie, a seemingly-inconsequential character who is introduced when Shaft checks himself into a hotel in the city. Willie, we’re told, has a “peculiar face,” one that is “striated,” and his hair is goofy, too. Another character mentions that Willie’s wife works at a salon and she “experiments” on Willie for practice. It’s an altogether curious intro for a character who will ultimately play a huge role in The Last Shaft, indeed serving as Shaft’s sidekick. Again, one can see this as a novelization of a movie that never was. 

Willie, as it turns out, is aware of who Shaft is (our hero giving a fake name when checking in and also covering himself with a hooded parka), and offers his help. This begins a gag that runs through the novel; Willie has decided he wants to be a private eye, and has been taking correspondence courses on it. But as the novel progresses, it turns out to be more – much more – than this. Willie not only knows all the tricks of the trade, but also has a delivery truck that is outfitted with virtually every firearm (up to and including machine guns), a mobile phone, and even C4 plastic explosive. (Not to mention napalm!) Rock clearly knows all this is a bit too much, and to his credit he has Shaft initially shocked by this, until finally accepting all of Willie’s vast bag of tricks with nonchalance. 

But seriously, if Shaft needs to shoot at someone, Willie has a machine gun for him. If Shaft needs to get some people out of a building they’re holed up in, Willie has napalm for Shaft to douse the parking garage with, flame-roasting the people within. (A sequence that has an eerie bit of prescience to it; Shaft and a random New Yorker stand on the street and watch the building burn, wondering how long the people trapped above have to survive, much as real-life New Yorkers would 26 years later as they helplessly watched the Twin Towers burn on 9/11.)  If Shaft needs to do some detective work and get a phone number, Willie knows just the things to say to the operator on his mobile phone. And yet at the same time we are to understand that Willie is naïve, an amateur who looks up to Shaft; there’s a big of a Hickey & Boggs vibe here, with the bickering and bantering black-white duo, but Willie is not Shaft’s equal on the action front, and acts more as the straight man. 

Willie also acts as a chaffeur, driving Shaft around town in his delivery truck, which is disguised as a bakery truck. And if that disguise is uncovered, not to worry; Willie has also taken a course on how to quickly paint the truck so that it looks like something else, like for example a yogurt delivery truck. Meanwhile Shaft sits in the back of the truck, formulating his plan of action; the second half of the novel is comprised of a series of assaults Shaft stages on the New York underworld, again operating in the same capacity as a Mack Bolan or a Ben Martin – like Bolan, he even takes to calling his targets moments before hitting them. 

Shaft also finds the time to pick up Sandra Shane, Morris Mickelberg’s hotstuff ex-wife, a former topless dancer Mickelberg picked up years ago. Now she’s determined to get the money her ex never gave her, becoming sexually excited over Shaft’s promises to get it for her. Rock doesn’t do as much to bring her to life, but at least Sandra Shane provides the series with some genre-mandatory spice, something that was completely absent in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. That said, the Shaft-Sandra conjugation is not much dwelt upon, though we learn that Shaft, uh, gets hs rocks off a few times. Our author has more fun with another secondary character, Rudolph Gromyck, a dirty New York cop who tries to outwit the Mafia and his fellow cops and find Shaft – so he can get Mickelberg’s papers and become rich off them. 

There are a lot of one-off mobsters yammering at each other on the phone before getting blown away by Shaft; our hero kills a fair number of people in the novel, again like Bolan or any other ‘70s men’s adventure protagonist. Rock also provides a little comedy with Willie fretting over Shaft using all those weapons in his truck – goofy, particularly when you consider that Willie himself is the one who stocked his truck with all of the weapons. But given that the novel moves so quickly, the reader doesn’t have much time to ponder over all of the plotholes. 

Unfortunately, the reader does have time to ponder over the ending of the novel, which is guaranteed to upset everyone. SPOILER ALERT, but The Last Shaft, as mentioned, lives up to its title. In a humorously tacked-on ending, we read as Shaft finally returns to his apartment building after successfully wiping out all the criminals who have been hounding him the entire novel. And on the way into the building the poor guy is mugged by a random thug and shot dead. This brief sequence, likely written by Ernest Tidyman himself, does not flat-out state “Shaft died,” but otherwise it’s clear as day – the mugger shoots, and we’re told the metal of the gun “became a blossom of flame…but only for the shortest moment known to man, that moment before dying.” Granted, the character dying could be the mugger; Shaft has already proven himself to be quite a resourceful individual, and might have pulled out a holdout gun and shot the mugger before the mugger could shoot him. I mean, Tidyman (or Rock) doesn’t specify who is dying in that last sentence, so it might not even be Shaft. And yet, I don’t think so; Tidyman’s intended irony here is that Shaft has spent the entirety of The Last Shaft cleaning up the city – of the bigwig mobsters and other high-level crooks – and then he is shot down by a random mugger. 

As mentioned above, perhaps it’s this lame ending that kept The Last Shaft from being published in the US. If so, it’s strange…I mean the publisher could’ve easily removed it before publication. As I say, this brief finale is tacked on, and comes off as the literary equivalent of the similarly tacked-on surprise ending of contemporary action flick Sudden Death: a downbeat, nihilistic cap-off that seems thrust on the reader more so for shock value than for any dramatic intent. 

Overall, I did enjoy The Last Shaft, and it’s too bad Tidyman didn’t get it published in the US…and change the finale along the way, opening the series up to be the continuing adventures of Shaft and Willie. But likely Tidyman considered himself above such pulpy things, and preferred offing the character that had made him famous. 

I’m reading the Shaft books way out of order; next I will likely read Shaft Has A Ball, but one of these days I will read Tidyman’s original Shaft novel.

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (Shaft #6)

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, by Ernest Tidyman

September, 1974  Bantam Books

To this day I still have not read Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft, and I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve seen the more-famous film adaptation. Of course, I have Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack on vinyl, as to me Shaft has always been more of a music thing than a movie or novel thing. (Not sure if that sentence even made sense.) Many years ago there was a cool overview of the Shaft novels on Teleport City, and of them all it was this installment, the paperback original Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, that caught my attention. Only now, like 20 years after reading that Teleport City article, have I got around to reading the book. 

First of all, a big thanks to Steve Aldous’ World Of Shaft site, which provides a lot of great background info. Basically, Ernest Tidyman wrote a handful of Shaft novels in the early ‘70s, then farmed the series out to ghostwriters for a few paperback originals.  Carnival Of Killers, then, was actually written by pulp veteran Robert Turner, working off an unproduced non-Shaft script Tidyman had written years before about a private eye in Jamaica. But, according to Steve Aldous, Turner not only took a long time to turn in his manuscript, but Tidyman also deemed it subpar when Turner completed it, and Tidyman ended up rewriting the majority of it. 

Now, finally having made my way through this deceptively slim, 136-page book, I can only say that Robert Turner’s manuscript must have been really bad. Indeed, it gave me flashbacks to a novel Turner published the following year: Scorpio. Like that book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers was a chore to read, with Turner taking what should have been a sure shot of a concept and turning it into a middling, overly-digressive banality in which super-cool John Shaft is reduced to a bumbling fool, always ten steps behind his opponents. Indeed, Shaft – and the reader – spends the entire narrative just trying to figure out what’s going on. My assumption is Robert Turner was a Mystery writer at heart, as that is all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers really is: a tepid mystery, with hardly anything in the sex or violence categories. It’s so lame that Shaft even bungles the chance for a three-way with a pair of sexy white chicks, instead getting drunk and passing out. 

In this one, John Shaft is taken out of his element; when we meet him he’s lazing on the beach in Jamaica, taking a rare vacation. Not much effort is placed on establishing the character or referring to previous adventures, so I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything by reading this sixth volume before the others. Turner’s style is clearly apparent – but then, so is Tidyman’s. Above I mentioned I’ve never read Shaft, but I did start to read it once upon a time, and was surprised at the hardboiled narrative tone Tidyman employed. The fact that Shaft was black only came up in the occasional descriptions of him, but otherwise there was nothing that really differentiated Shaft from umpteen other tough guys of the time. But I guess the same could be said of the film, as Shaft the movie isn’t really “Blaxploitation” per se; it’s just like any other early ‘70s crime movie, only with a black protagonist. But the same could be said about every Blaxploitation movie; they aren’t so much “exploitation” as they are urban action movies with black characters. 

The same is doubly true of Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Shaft could be replaced with pretty much any other standard tough-guy P.I. in the book. Even the fact that he’s black doesn’t make much difference, which is odd, given that Jamaica is a country with a black population. Periodically Shaft will ruminate on the plight of the black man, but otherwise there is no focus on any sort of black unity or anything. In fact, Shaft constantly butts heads with the natives, and soon learns to hate Jamaica. 

Turner throws us into the action (or what passes for it) posthaste; Shaft’s beach picnic is ruined when a pretty young girl (“taffy-skinned, long-waisted, high-hipped, and very roundly bottomed with conical leaping breasts”) is accosted nearby by a pair of goons. Shaft only intervenes when the goons kick sand in his face, chasing after the girl, and knock over Shaft’s picnic setup. Our hero beats up the guys, but the girl runs away, and Shaft is taken to the local police precinct…where he learns that the two goons were undercover police officers. 

Here begins the incessant stalling and repetition that will make up the brunt of the novel’s narrative. Shaft meets Chief of Detectives Alex Ashton, an eyepatch-sporting native who speaks in a clipped British accent and who will spend the rest of the novel baiting and bantering with Shaft. The story goes that the “taffy-skinned” girl, Marita Dawes, was serving as the private secretary of the Prime Minister, Sir Charles Lightwood, and the cops were trying to round her up on suspicions of her involvement with a planned assassination attempt on the PM. Ashwood tries to lean on Shaft – as he will continue to do through the novel – but Shaft don’t take no guff and has Ashton call up his cop pal in New York, recurring series character Captain Anderozzi, who puts in a word for Shaft. 

And really, that’s all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers proves to be: a continuous cycle of characters playing head-games with Shaft, using him as help or as bait as they try to figure out who is planning to kill the Prime Minister. The idea is that Shaft, a private eye, will help Ashton figure out who wants to kill Lightwood, in exchange for Shaft himself not being sent to prison. The only problem is, Shaft suspects that Ashton himself might be behind the assassination plot, as do many other characters – including Marita Dawes, the girl from the beach. In one of those “pulp novel” moments, Shaft comes back to his hotel room that night to find the scantily-clad beauty smoking dope in his room, practically begging Shaft to join the cause. She claims to be a fervernt supporter of the P.M., and indeed thinks Ashton is the one who wants to kill him. But our surly hero kicks her out. 

This will be the start of a disturbing trend in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Robert Turner – and presumably Ernest Tidyman – seems intent on keeping John Shaft from getting laid. Our studly hero goes without for the entire novel. There’s sexy Marita, who makes herself available but is spurned. Later, there’s the PM’s hotstuff but ice-cold wife, a black beauty who scorns Shaft, and who in a better pulp novel would probably engage him in some hate-sex. Then, as mentioned, there are the two white gals from America, teachers here in Jamaica on vacation; Shaft, pretending to be a prince from Trinidad who does not speak English (in one of the novel’s more bizarre subplots), takes them up to his room and gets them drunk…then watches as they strip…then ponders over the etiquette of a three-way (ie, wondering which to take first)…and then Shaft ends up passing out, along with the girls, thus squandering our third and final opportunity for any seventies-mandatory sleaze. 

Action is slightly more pronounced, but not much. Shaft gets in a few scuffles here and there, generally taking his opponents down without much fuss. Robert Turner has a tendency to make his action scenes hard to follow, as seen in Scorpio, and that is apparent here; I still find it humorous that Turner, who edited The Spider toward the end of its run, had dissmissive things to say in Robert Sampson’s 1989 study The Spider about main Spider writer Norvell Page, sneering at the frequency of action in Page’s manuscripts. Maybe Turner was just jealous, aware on some subconscious level that Norvell Page was a better writer than he was.  (I provided Turner’s quote about Page in the comments section of my Scorpio review, for anyone who is interested.) 

There’s also a little in the way of gunplay. Toward the end of the book Shaft gets hold of a Colt Python Magnum, and in the climactic action shoots down a thug, “[giving] him a new navel about the size of an ostritch egg.” Otherwise this is not a gory novel by any means, nothing like contemporary Blaxploitation pulp paperback series The Iceman, and as mentioned it’s more of a standard mystery than a pulp-action thriller. Robert Turner even squanders what few pulpy conceits exist in the novel; one of the thugs in the book is a friggin’ hunchback who uses a blowgun that fires poison darts, but the character is treated so conservatively that there’s nothing novel nor memorable about him. 

In fact, Turner is guilty of that hoary copout: having his protagonist knocked out by the bad guys but conveniently not killed by them when he’s out cold. This happens a few times in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, one instance in particular involving Shaft getting hit by one of those poison darts. Later on there’s a part where he crashes his car while chasing some bad guys. In each instance Shaft comes to later on, swearing revenge, apparently not realizing that his enemies could very easily have just killed him while he was lying there unconscious. But then, maybe Turner just doesn’t want his readers to realize that. 

The novel is mostly comprised of Shaft chasing one red herring after another, and getting nothing but conflicting signals from the locals he meets with. This is one of those novels where the hero is constantly befuddled and uncertain, making for a very trying read…again, so similar to the following year’s Scorpio. One can tell where Tidyman might have tightened things up at times; there are parts where Shaft will abruptly seem more like the John Shaft one expects. I also suspect Tidyman was behind the occasional veiled references in the book; we’re told, apropos of nothing, that Shaft doesn’t like moustaches, implying of course that he himself doesn’t have one – which, of course, is pretty surprising, given that Richard Roundtree sported one in his iconic portrayal of Shaft. There’s also a part where Shaft, watching those goons struggle with Marita Dawes on the beach, decides that it’s all “a lot better than that shit on television,” and I wonder if this was a veiled dig at the much-disliked Shaft TV series. 

Curiously, there is a focused attempt at knocking John Shaft down a few pegs throughout the novel, with the author(s) making him altogether disagreeable and surly…and stupid. There’s also a strange quirk in the final pages to imply Shaft is fat; for muddled reasons, the climax takes place during a costume ball, and Shaft appropriates the guise of a toreador. But the costume doesn’t fit him and everyone keeps telling him he’s “too fat” to pose as a toreador. Shaft consoles himself that there isn’t “an extra ounce of fat” on him, but otherwise he picks over his food in the climax…and yes, that’s how lame Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is: the “thrilling” climax features Shaft picking at his meal during the costume ball and still trying to figure everything out. 

Even the very end of the novel continues with the novel’s confusing vibe: Shaft happily gets on a plane back to New York, and drifts off to sleep…only to be woken by a woman screaming that she has a bomb. It’s none other than Marita Dawes, that “taffy-skinned” beauty who started the whole caper, and I guess we are to take it that she’s one of those hippie terrorists who were so fashionable at the time. But Turner (and Tidyman, I guess) is determined to maintain the goofy vibe of the book, thus Shaft closes his eyes and forces himself to feign sleep! Whether he’s dreaming all this or not is unstated, but given the madcap tone of the book, one must imagine he is not. 

As it turned out, this was it for the adventures of John Shaft – in the United States, at least. Presumably Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers sold so poorly that Ernest Tidyman was unable to secure a publisher for the following – and final – installment of the series, The Last Shaft. That one was only published in the UK, in hardcover and paperback, and is now exceedingly scarce; a scan of it was, however, up on archive.org, but who knows when it will be back online now that the Internet Archive has been hacked. 

About the only thing that would make The Last Shaft worth reading is that it wasn’t written by Robert Turner; it was written by Philip Rock, who also wrote the incredible Hickey & Boggs novelization. It also sounds like the closest the Shaft series ever got to men’s adventure, with a well-armed Shaft taking on various criminals in New York. And it apparently lives up to its title, with Ernest Tidyman having grown so sick of his famous character that he wanted to do away with him. Judging from the harsh, rude, surly, and just plain grumpy character featured in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, I can’t say the literary world suffered much of a loss.