New Book Listed At Tocsin Press

 

FYI a new book’s been listed at Tocsin Press – The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch, by one Bruno Scarpetta. Fans of The Sharpshooter will revel in this action and sex-packed tale in which The Triggerman, Johnny LaRock, blasts his way through 1970s New York in his never-ending quest to shed Mafia blood. 

Curiously, “The Triggerman” was the name of the pseudo-Sharpshooter in Len Levinson’s The Last Buffoon. Even more curiously, Len’s Triggerman character was named Johnny Ripelli, and we’re informed in Brains For Brunch that Johnny LaRock’s real name is…Johnny Ripelli. Very curious indeed! 

(Just to clarify, Brains For Brunch was not written by Len Levinson!!) 

So if you like The Sharpshooter, The Marksman, or even Bronson: Blind Rage, I think you’ll really dig The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch! 

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

The Undertaker #1: Death Transition, one of the best books I read this year – and with its funeral parlor shenanigans, the perfect post-Halloween reading. 

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

The most sleazy and grimy book at Tocsin (so far!), Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers is also great Halloween-time reading, what with its rapist-freak zombies… 

And hey, 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! 

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

Mafia Death Watch (The Sharpshooter #16)

Mafia Death Watch, by Bruno Rossi

No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

Well folks I can hardly believe it, but here we are: the final volume of The Sharpshooter. It’s taken me over ten years but I’ve now made my way through this entire series – a series which was published in the span of two years! – and I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself now that I have no further adventures of Johnny “The Sharpshooter” Rock to look forward to. 

But on the plus side, I’ve been looking forward to reading Mafia Death Watch since I started collecting the series all those years ago. Rayo Casablanca memorably declared “take a shower after this puppy,” noting the outrageous sleaze element of this final volume – something Lynn Munroe and Justin Marriott also pointed out. But if you all know anything about me from the reviews on here, you’ll know this one sounded right up my twisted alley! And I have to say, Mafia Death Watch certainly delivers on the sleaze angle: we’ve got copious female exploitation, several explicit sex scenes, gory firefights, and not one but three separate characters who receive their fates courtesy a bullet to their nether regions. Indeed there seems to be a sick fascination with shooting people in their bodily orifices. 

This final volume was courtesy a writer named Dan Reardon, of whom not much is known – save that, in 1980, he also published an installment of the Nick Carter: Killmaster series (Tarantula Strike, which I have but haven’t read). What makes this interesting is that there are a lot of Killmaster elements in Mafia Death Watch. “Johnny” (as Reardon refers to Rock) uses a “luger” as one of his favorite firearms, a la Nick Carter’s Luger, and Johnny also carries a “golf ball” that emits tear gas, similar to Carter’s mini-bomb “Pierre.” Johnny also carries a derringer in a “crotch holster,” which brings to mind where Carter generally stores Pierre. Anyway, I found all this interesting because it’s as if Reardon was already thinking of a Killmaster installment when he wrote this book. 

But folks there’s no volume of Killmaster as perverted and sleazy as Mafia Death Watch. We get our indication posthaste of what sort of novel we’re about to read: the novel opens with a chapter in which “Mafia chieftan” Joe Bartolo, in Detroit, meets with a lovely young girl named Nancy Jenkins; Nancy is a new hooker, you see, one who is part of the Mafia’s stable, and she’s had second thoughts. In fact her uncle down in Florida wants to pay for her to go to college. Bartolo is kind and understanding, telling her no problem – but first he’d like to try her out. This leads to a crazed moment rivalling the opening of Corporate Hooker, Inc.: Bartolo, having gotten Nancy naked on his pool table, whips out an automatic shotgun and has her fuck it while she blows him – and then pulls the trigger when he climaxes! 

Meanwhile Johnny Rock is visiting his parents’ gravesite in New York; we learn it’s four years after the first volume, and Johnny, despite his better interests, still visits this grave each year. We’re told the Mafia has yet to figure out that “Johnny Rock” is the son of this murdered couple, and interestingly Reardon does not make Rock the legendary figure he is in the other Sharpshooter novels. Indeed throughout the book Johnny refers to himself by a variety of sarcastic titles – ie “I’m just a citizen,” and etc – and there’s never a part where his Mafia prey realize he’s the same guy who has been raising hell for them for the past four years. 

Speaking of Johnny’s origins, I think it’s clear Reardon was brought into the series the same way earlier ghostwriter Len Levinson was: series editor Peter McCurtin gave Reardon a few Sharpshooter books and told him to read them. But in Reardon’s case I’m certain it was one of Len’s books he was given to read, for Mafia Death Watch is a direct sequel to Len’s second contribution to the series: Night Of The Assassins. Johnny is attacked at the gravesite by some men who overpower him; they knock him out and fly him to Miami, a city Johnny last visited “a few months ago” (later stated as being “last spring”). The captors turn out to be Miami cops, and the guy who put them on Johnny turns out to be Detective Jenkins of the Miami police force. 

I couldn’t recall if Jenkins had been in Night Of The Assassins, but I did remember that there had been a “Detective Jenkins” in Len’s Bronson novel, Streets Of Blood. I checked my copy of Night Of The Assassins and, sure enough, a “Detective Jenkins” appeared in it as well. So I went to the source: I told Len that Reardon’s Sharpshooter was a sequel to one of Len’s own, with Len’s character Detective Jenkins appearing, Jenkins even mentioning the “Peter Dominick” pseudonym Johnny had used in Len’s novel. However Len’s Bronson novel was set in New York, not Miami, so I asked Len about the Jenkins character, and if he was aware that this final Sharpshooter was a sequel to one of his own books: 

John Jenkins was my supervisor when I investigated child abuse in Dade County, Florida, which included Miami. He was a retired NYPD police officer. I have used his name in several of my novels. I never heard of Dan Reardon. 

So then my assumption is Night Of The Assassins was probably the most recently-published installment when Reardon started working on his manuscript (from Len I know it took “about a year” for these manuscripts to see print), thus Reardon used it as a springboard for his own novel. However Johnny doesn’t remain in Miami very long. Jenkins turns out to he the “uncle” who was going to fund Nany Jenkins’s college education, and he’s since found out that the girl was murdered – “shot through the genitals.” Jenkins wants to finance Johnny on a blitz campaign against the sadist who killed his niece. Jenkins doesn’t have the details, he just knows the Mafia was involved, and he also knows from the events here in Miami “last spring” that Johnny Rock is the number one killer of Mafia. 

It’s interesting to note that Johnny Rock is in no way, shape or form a hero in the hands of Reardon. Not that he ever has been in the hands of any of the series ghostwriters, but here he’s particularly crazed and sadistic. For example, he is in no way pleasant to Jenkins, and even takes the opportunity to punch him in the gut after they’ve eaten a lobster dinner. Granted, Jenkins hired some men to knock Johnny out, drug him, and take him to Miami. But through the course of the novel Johnny will show no heroic nature; there’s a shocking part midway through where he even shoots a dead girl in the head so as to taunt a mobster. The implication is he’s just as bad as the Mafia he’s sworn to kill, and the portrait is so crazed you wish there’d been more volumes of the series just to see how much crazier Reardon could’ve gotten. 

We get more rampant sleaze in a cutaway sequence in which we meet Tonia, yet another Mafia hooker; this one trainbound for Detroit with her pimp, Tony, as well as a Mafia stooge named Cardo. The implication is clear that Tony is going to give Tonia as a “gift” to Cardo once they get to the city. Or, as Cardo puts it, “I kept thinking about them nice tits of yours.” As with the opening chapter, we get a very explicit sequence told from the girl’s point of view as Cardo “eats it out of” her – despite her revulsion over the heavyset thug, Tonia’s body reacts to just about any sexual stimuli. There’s a big focus here on how Tonia’s body reacts to the various probings, that’s for sure. The scene has a nice conclusion, though, with Tonia getting hold of Cardo’s gun and blowing his guts out – after which Johnny Rock arrives on the scene. 

But for a character that is so built up, Tonia is almost casually dispensed with. She gives Johnny some info on the Detroit mob scene, engages him in the expected bedroom shenanigans (which unbelievably occur off-page), and then is almost shockingly removed from the narrative. Later Johnny will meet yet another hooker with a heart of gold, Anne, and she will turn out to be what passes for the main female character in Mafia Death Watch. But she’s so similar to Tonia – who gets more of an intro and more character development – that you wonder why Reardon didn’t just combine the two characters into one. 

At least Reardon keeps the focus on Johnny throughout, and doesn’t forget the action. He’s merciless in his attacks on the mob. There are frequent scenes in which he’ll take his Luger or .38 and go out blasting; an extended sequence in the final quarter has Johnny staging a series of lightning strikes on various Mafia bigwigs, blasting them away from afar with his rifle. But despite being prone to aggressive action, Reardon’s version of Johnny Rock still displays some of Len’s take on the character in that he’s a little too concerned with things at times. There’s a bit too much needless explanation on how such and such things happen, or what Johnny thinks might happen, or how certain things came to pass. What I mean to say is, Reardon often stops the narrative to explain too much, and sometimes Johnny comes off as too thoughtful, as did Len’s. But as we’ll recall, this was in Len’s first two installments; in his last one, Headcrusher, he delivered a Johnny Rock who had no anxiety hangups and, per the directive of McCurtin, “killed in cold hate.” 

Actually the occasional anxiety jibes against Johnny’s otherwise bullish behavior; he meets Anne by going into a mob bar and starting up a ruckus, setting his sights on Anne because she looks more sophisticated than the other hookers there. Johnny basically just follows a string of names to figure out who was behind the murder of Nancy Jenkins, and Anne helps him make a lot of connections. But there’s a fair bit of coincidence at play, too; Johnny will find someone in the chain, only to discover they are related to someone else in it, or what have you – what I mean to say is, we aren’t talking a highbrow mystery here. Oh and also I love it that Johnny specifically goes back to that bar to dish out bloody payback to the thugs who beat him up during the ruckus, even blowing out the knees of the bartender before killing him. 

And Johnny is certainly brutal in Reardon’s hands; I mentioned already the shocking part where he shoots a dead girl in the head. But later, when one of Johnny’s new friends is almost beaten to death, our hero finds out that Bartolo’s “main girl” was behind it – yet another hooker, one who has been elevated to becoming the top man’s mistress. Johnny breaks into Bartolo’s compound, kills a few guards, and surprises the girl in her bedroom (dressed in a negligee and reading a “paperback,” no less). Here Johnny does something not even Russell Smith would’ve come up with in his most fevered moment. Johnny plays a variation on “an eye for an eye” and treats the girl to the same death Nancy Jenkins experienced: “The .38 spat twice into the gaping orifice.” A “vicious rape” indeed, and well beyond any of the sadism Johnny Rock committed in any previous volume…which is really saying something. 

Surprisingly, Johnny isn’t done shooting into “gaping orifices.” The finale borrows from McCurtin and Russell Smith in that Bartolo and his various underlings conveniently gather together in one spot; this even takes place on a boat, same as the usual scenario courtesy those other two series writers. Instead of blowing the place up with a bazooka or whatever, Johnny gets on the boat and delivers Bartolo with a fitting sendoff – Bartolo by the way having disappeared from the narrative since the first chapter. SPOILER WARNING, but I mean come on we aren’t talking Citizen Kane here or anything. Johnny holds his rifle on Bartolo and has him stand in front of his underlings as a sign of what happens to men who shoot unarmed girls in the groin – and then jams his rifle up Bartolo’s ass and pulls the trigger! 

Indeed, Mafia Death Watch is so depraved and grimy that it equals other such lurid crime paperbacks of the era: Death List, The Savage Women, and even Bronson: Blind Rage. Sales must’ve been really low for the series not to have continued past this point; I can imagine Peter McCurtin was thrilled to discover a writer who could deliver such wanton sleaze and violence…with pretty good prose stylings, to boot! But this was it for The Sharpshooter; last we see of Johnny Rock he’s gotten out of the hospital, where he spent three weeks recuperating from injuries he received in the climax (Anne by his side the entire time, we’re informed). He heads down to Miami to meet again with Detective Jenkins – telling Jenkins that the money he was going to use to pay for Nancy Jenkins’s college education can now be used to pay for Anne’s. 

And that’s it for The Sharpshooter. I could re-read the series, as I’ve done with other series I’ve finished, like The Baroness, and have planned to do with TNT and John Eagle Expeditor. And maybe I will. But given the jumbled nature of this series, with manuscripts from The Marksman brought over and changed to Johnny Rock stories and etc, I don’t see how much reward there would be in the re-reading. Then again maybe I’ll change my mind in a couple years. In closing, The Sharpshooter was one of the series that inspired me to start this blog in the first place – I remember how excited I was to learn about it, and quickly went about collecting all the volumes. I know my reviews are overlong and pedantic, but I hope over the years I have inspired similar excitement in other readers.

A Dirty Way To Die (The Sharpshooter #15)

A Dirty Way To Die, by Bruno Rossi

No month stated, 1975

How in the world have I gone over two years without reading a Sharpshooter? Maybe I’ve been putting it off because, as hard as it is to believe, there’s only one more volume after this one. It’s taken me over ten years to get this far, which only again reinforces how quickly this series was written and published – all these books came out within the span of two years. 

Once again a big thanks to Lynn Munroe, who revealed that A Dirty Way To Die is a sort of collaboration between series editor Peter McCurtin and series mainstay Russell Smith. As Lynn notes, “McCurtin only wrote the first chapter. The rest of the book has different characters and is actually a different story, changed ever so slightly to tie it to Chapter One.” We might be in a similar situation to another McCurtin venture, The Camp, for which McCurtin wrote the first chapter and Len Levinson wrote the rest. But whereas Len at least hewed a little closely to McCurtin’s opening chapter, Smith seems to turn in an entirely unrelated book, so I guess another possibility is that McCurtin welded a chapter of his own to Smith’s manuscript, so as to set up the storyline. Because as ever Russell Smith turns in a “plot” that requires the reader to do some very heavy lifting in order to make sense of anything. 

So in chapter one, which clearly seems to be by McCurtin, a New York Don talks to a dirty New York cop about that perennial problem, Johnny Rock. The cop’s novel suggestion is to kill a kid and pin it on Rock; there’s mention here, finally, that Rock has gunned down women and hookers and whatnot in his past exploits, but the public at large, we’re told, has sort of brushed off these kills given that the women were involved with the Mafia anyway. Thus Rock’s folkloric heroism is strong as ever. But if a kid were to be killed – especially a “problem” kid – and Rock was blamed for that, the situation would change. The cop even has a kid in mind – the retarded eleven year-old son of a Mafia floozy whose husband was killed years before by Rock; she beats the kid anyway, so they’d be doing him a favor. The Don likes the idea and gives the go ahead. The cop says he didn’t come up with the idea alone, that he hired a “one man think tank” psychologist “in California” named Dr. Dorelli to come up with a way to finally bring down Rock – and thus the idea was Dorelli’s. 

So there’s the setup. Next chapter opens, and we’re thrust without preamble into the typical surrealism of a Russell Smith novel. We meet Rock as he’s in Palo Alto, California, scoping out VAPA, the Veteran’s Association of Palo Alto. This hospital for vets is where Dr. Mario Dorelli serves as chief psychologist, and Rock’s here to settle a score. So then, the killing of the kid has already happened…but what’s curious is that we learn so little about it that one gets the impression Smith himself doesn’t even know what happened. All we’re told is that Rock is furious because “every cop in New York” is out to get him, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to get the heat off. But even more curiously this concern is never brought up again, nor is whatever brought Rock out to Palo Alto…for the most part, he just seems to be stalking Dr. Dorelli, whom Rock only suspects of being involved with the mob. 

Whereas McCurtin’s chapter vaguely set Dorelli up as a “one man think tank,” in Smith’s narrative Dorelli is a Mafia bigwig who was previously known as Joseph Reitano, and who worked with the CIA in ‘Nam and ran a dirty black ops squad that was known for sadism. For reasons never really disclosed, Rock is the only person in the entire world to figure out that Reitano and Dorelli are one and the same, and Rock decides to jolt the doctor by leaving a message in his office at VAPA under the name of “Joseph Reitano.” Rock gives the message to Dorelli’s lovely assistant, Eleanor Wood, a Jamaican woman “as black as a moonless Jamaican night and equally as romantic.” This sets off a strange cat and mouse game between Rock and Dorelli, with Rock at one point disguised as a doctor and spying on Dorelli inside VAPA, then later asking the always-horny Eleanor on a date to get info out of her on his prey. Meanwhile Dorelli – who as typical for a Smith novel gets way too much narrative space of his own – frets over who could know that he was once Joseph Reitano, or if it’s just some cosmic fluke that this guy has the exact same name that he once did. 

Smith serves up what have become staples of any of his Sharpshooter or Marksman manuscripts; Rock gets a room in an old hotel, murders a few thugs in cold blood, captures and interrogates a few people, and ultimately ends up on a boat. Smith also refers back to many of his previous manuscripts, in particular Vendetta, given that Rock ventures over to Sausalito, “well remember[ing] his last trip there.” Of course Smith’s narratives have been published as both Sharpshooters and Marksmans, even though they all clearly feature the same protagonist (Vendetta for example being a Marksman installment), which yields an extra metafictional layer to it all. There’s also curious mention here of a supposedly-recurring minor character named “Frank,” a short-statured Mafia flunky who has run into “Rock” three times in the past and has just managed to escape death each time. I have no recollection of this character, but presumably he must’ve appeared in previous Smith novels (in either series). 

One interesting “new” element in this one is that Rock actually gets in a firefight; in most other Smith yarns, Rock (or Magellan) just shoots down his prey in cold blood, usually while their backs are turned. He does that here, of course, gunning down some thugs who have shown up to ambush him in a bar, but later on he gets in a protracted gunfight with more thugs in yet another bar. This is in another of those surreal Smith sequences where Rock just goes into this dive with zero explanation or setup, talks to one of the Asian hookers who work the joint, then figures out the place is a Mafia front. Some thugs come in to get him and Rock blasts away with a pistol in each fist: the customary Beretta 9MM (which has appeared in every Smith manuscript, despite the series) in his right and a Colt .38 revolver in his left. The gore factor is very pronounced in this one, with characters puking at the sight of the shattered, brain-spewing skulls left in the wake of Rock’s bullets. 

But as mentioned, regardless of the series, Smith has always and ever been writing about the same protagonist, and since Philip Magellan came first then that ultimately means that A Dirty Way To Die is just another Smith installment of The Marksman. As the novel proceeds it only becomes more apparent. “Rock” wears a “nylon cord” around his waist, lugs an artillery case, wields the same 9mm Beretta, has a penchant for disguises, and drugs up a few random women before interrogating them in sadistic fashion. These are all hallmarks of Philip Magellan. Anyway I’ve beaten this dead horse enough in past reviews so it’s safe to say that by this point we all understand that, for the most part, Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan are one and the same, at least when the book is written by Russell Smith. 

I would say that all the Smith novels from both series could be gathered together and a running narrative might be found within them, but that sure as hell isn’t the case. Smith’s “plotting” is just as nuts as his protagonist. Things happen for absolutely no reason throughout A Dirty Way To Die, with no setup or explanation for most of it. This is why I suspect that McCurtin’s introductory chapter might’ve been added after Smith submitted his manuscript. Otherwise Rock just arrives in Palo Alto, stalks Dorelli, kills a few thugs, captures, drugs and interrogates two women, blows away a few more thugs in a rushed finale, and only at the very end are we even given a hazy explanation of why Rock’s here: In ‘Nam, when Dorelli was a CIA spook named Reitano, he would murder servicemen about to return home and then sell their IDs to other soldiers who were desperate to get out of the war. But Smith still forgets to inform us how Rock figured out that Reitano became Dorelli, or even how Rock became personally involved in the situation, save for a vague but compelling mention that one of Dorelli/Reitano’s affairs in ‘Nam “involved Rock.” 

So there’s no mention throughout of the “special kid” whose fate was determined in the first chapter, and it’s possible that the line early in chapter two that “every cop in New York” is out to get Rock could’ve been a McCurtin amendment to Smith’s manuscript. But without McCurtin’s opening chapter the novel takes on an even more surreal vibe, as Rock stalks and strikes Dorelli even though he’s not certain until the very end that Dorelli is really in the mob and is trafficking cocaine. Smith really drags this out past the breaking point, clearly trying to fill pages – we know from the get-go that Dorelli’s in the mob, given the parts of the narrative devoted to him, and we also know that Rock is in town trying to figure out how dirty Dorelli is. Yet the characters themselves don’t learn the truth about one another until toward the end of the novel. Dorelli’s realization that the young doctor calling himself “Dr. Joseph Reitano,” who just arrived in town is indeed Johnny Rock is especially ridiculous, given all the thug-killings that follow in the wake of “Dr. Reitano’s” presence…not to mention the little fact that “Reitano” has the same exact name as Dorelli’s original one! 

As Lynn Munroe notes, Smith also worked in the sleaze market, and if what he serves up late in A Dirty Way To Die is any indication of the kind of books he wrote for that market, then you’re well advised to steer clear, as it’s grimy and gross to the max. So out of nowhere, really absolutely nowhere, we suddenly learn that Dorelli has a sadistic self-punishment streak. For one, kind young Eleanor Wood, that “moonless Jamaican night” babe, turns out to be his private “slave owner,” torturing Dorelli in the office between patient visits. There’s some real sleazeball stuff here, like how Eleanor enjoys using her panties to give Dorelli a “rubdown,” and how Dorelli later must do something rather unseemly with the “soiled panties.” This part alone might have the less hardy reader racing for the restroom to spew his guts. 

Even more outrageous is the later off-the-cuff revelation that Dorelli has a live-in Filipino maid named Alicia who is hooked on coke and thus will do any sort of depraved sex act for him; we don’t see one happen, but witness the disgusting aftermath of a particularly depraved orgy, in which the stench of “shit” and “vomit” fills the room in which Dorelli and others “gang-banged” Alicia, who by the way spends the entire novel in a drugged stupor. Rock later comes upon her comatose form in the aftermath of the orgy, Rock having broken into Dorelli’s house, and wakes her up, sickened at the sight of her “chewed-up vagina” (!!). He is taken aback how casual the girl is about everything; she says she’s in no pain and instead just wants to take a bath; Rock figures she must be “used to being gang-banged!” 

Here there’s also promise that Rock himself might get in on the dirty festivities; a Mafia stooge shows up at Dorelli’s house with a hotstuff floozy in tow, assumes Rock is Dorelli, and tells him that the hotstuff babe is the latest scheme to rope in the Sharpshooter. Rock, pretending to be Dorelli, listens patiently and then excuses himself; he rushes outside, blows off the head of the Mafia stooge’s driver, and leaves! And not much else is made of the proposed floozy entrapment. But this is just how Smith rolls; it’s one wild sequence after another, usually followed by lots of page-filling where characters sit around and reflect over recent bizarre circumstances. It’s like they’ve all been plunged into a surreal nightmare in which nothing makes sense, which pretty much sums up ever Smith novel I’ve yet read. 

The helluva it is, Smith shows that he can deliver memorable characters: Eleanor Wood, despite the eleventh hour revelation of her sadomasochistic impulses, is a likeable character with a gift for sarcastic comments. Rock takes her on a “date” in which he first mows down several Mafia thugs and then threatens to kill Eleanor if she doesn’t get on a Chris-Craft boat he steals in Sausalito (the same boat he – as Magellan – stole in Vendetta), and throughout Eleanor keeps joking about when they’re going to get around to eating dinner. Of course Rock ultimately drugs her up (this after copious description of her vomitting due to sea sickness) and, when she won’t talk, terrorizes her with water snakes in what is clearly a shoutout to when Rock terrorized his captives with rats back in #3: Blood Bath (another Russell Smith joint, and another that clearly started life as a Marksman manuscript). 

Oh and Rock also captures another woman, just out of the blue; after the gunfight at the dive, Rock jumps in a car and beats the woman behind the wheel silly. He appropriates the car, taking the comatose woman along with him, and then tosses her, naked, into the hold with Eleanor. Absolutely no explanation is given of who this woman is…Smith seems to imply she’s a “driver” for the Mafia, but she’s presented as yet another innocent caught up in the sadistic sway of “Rock.” She too will be drugged, but Rock doesn’t even interrogate her, thus her entire presence is as baffling as anything else that happens in the novel. And another thing – after all this cruelty, Eleanor’s interrogation is mostly off-page! We are informed she’s privy to all of Dorelli’s mob dealings, but after Rock spends “ten minutes” explaining to her the dangers of narcotics and how they damage the “society he still believes in,” Eleanor’s suddenly on Rock’s side…despite all the torture with the snakes, some of which tried to crawl between her legs, we’re informed. 

Meanwhile Dorelli gets a lot of his own text, as does a Mafia executioner named Zanicchi who is fond of “hanging a man on a meat hook, drenching him in urine and shit and watching him die slowly.” Zanicchi we’re informed will get a $90K bonus for killing the Sharpshooter, but what the actual bounty is we’re not informed. Regardless this particular plot, which promises so much, goes nowhere – as is typical for any Smith venture. Zanicchi’s goons are the ones mowed down by Rock while on his “date” with Eleanor, after which Smith seems to forget about Zanicchi…until the final three pages, in which Rock dispenses justice in customarily rushed fashion, wiping out sundry villains who as ever have all gotten together in one spot so he can conviently kill them all at once with his Uzi. 

Sometimes these books give a peek into the disturbed mentality of their authors, and A Dirty Way To Die is a definite case in point. Lazy plotting, go-nowhere digressions, random acts of depraved sex, and torture with water snakes. Smith is so focused on all this that he, as typical, races through the last pages with such abandon that you can almost feel his joy at finally meeting his word count. In fact the finale makes as little sense as anything else in the book. So we’re informed, again in the very final pages, that Dorelli would kill ‘Nam soldiers about to return home and sell their IDs, with the compelling hint that one of his “atrocities” over there “involved Rock.” So Rock gets Dorelli, blows apart his guts with the Uzi so he’s near death, and then straps him onto a gurney in the Chris-Craft…and apparently sets the controls for Vietnam, over the horizon? After this he calls Eleanor, who asks him to “hurry” over to her place because she “wants” him! The end! WTF?! 

By all accounts the next volume, Mafia Death Watch, is just as depraved, if not more so. That one was written by series newcomer Dan Reardon, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. While this was it for Smith on The Sharpshooter, he was still churning them out over on The Marksman, so we’ll be seeing more of him in future reviews. Oh and Bob Larkin’s (uncredited) cover for A Dirty Way To Die is one of the best in the entire series, and not just because of the cleavage! Okay, so maybe the cleavage has something to do with it, but still!

The Sharpshooter #14: Las Vegas Vengeance

The Sharpshooter #14: Las Vegas Vengeance, by Bruno Rossi
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

John Marshall, who wrote the earlier #10: Hit Man, returns to The Sharpshooter for his second and final volume. But then there were only two more volumes of the series left, anyway – I mean can you believe it?? We’re almost to the end of this twisted, disjointed, but usually-entertaining “saga.” This was also the last volume to carry a number.

Like with his previous entry, Marshall is clearly writing a “real” Sharpshooter novel, which is to say he wasn’t writing a Marksman manuscript that was magically transformed into a Sharpshooter in the “editing” stage. His Johnny Rock is the same as the one in the first volume, a guy whose parents were killed by the Mafia, and unlike Philip “The Marksman” Magellan he doesn’t have a penchant for drugging people and cutting off their heads. Marshall not only refers to that first Sharpshooter yarn but also mentions his own Hit Man. I mean it’s almost enough to make a guy weep – actual continuity in The Sharpshooter!

We learn that the first volume was “well over a year ago” and the tenth volume was ten weeks ago. “Johnny” (as Marshall refers to him) has killed 278 mobsters in the past year; when we meet him, he has just arrived in Las Vegas for a well-earned vacation. Marshall clearly has taken Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel On Her Majesy’s Secret Service (1963) as inspiration, with gaudy Vegas standing in for Casino Royale and Johnny standing in for Bond, even down to the “cruel mouth” Fleming gave Bond. Like that Bond novel, Johnny encounters an ultra-gorgeous but “galacial” brunette beauty at the tables and watches as she bets – and wins – with an almost casual disregard. When he follows her later on, he comes upon her just as she’s about to commit suicide.

And just like Tracy in OHMSS, the young lady is Italian and involved with organized crime – but here it’s not her dad who runs it, but her husband who was in it. He was the cash collector for the mob’s various Vegas interests, but was gunned down by the family when it turned out he was skimming profits. This Johnny learns in a nicely-done scene between the two; the lady turns out to be named Elisa Parendetti, and because her husband was Mafia the family now looks out for her. Thus she “can’t lose” in any of the casinos, much to her dismay – she hates “dirty money” and is about to blow her brains out in her new Maserati when Johnny comes upon her.

Johnny makes the mob widow an offer: if she listens to his story but isn’t interested in his offer, she can not only go ahead and kill herself but he’ll finish her off if necessary. He tells her he’s the infamous Sharpshooter, and proposes that together they’d make a winning team: with her mob-world contacts she could feed Johnny info and he could take out the Vegas Mafia. She of course takes him up on the offer, then insists he get in her Maserati so they can go back to her place: “You’re going to get the best tail of your life,” she promises. But all you fellow pervs out there looking for some hot ‘70s sleaze action will be disappointed, for once again Marshall is stricty an off-page kind of writer when it comes to the sex scenes…though curiously, as I’ll elaborate upon presently, he has no such qualms when it comes to the rape scenes.

The Johnny-Elisa team not only reminds the reader of the Johnny-Iris Toscado team of the first volume, but also of the Johnny-Ginny Reid team of Marshall’s own previous volume. Only here the relationship isn’t nearly as developed. In fact, Elisa ultimately provides zilch, either to Johnny’s mob-busting efforts or to the narrative itself. She’s there to trade exposition with Johnny, to cook and serve him his meals, and to have off-page sex with him. And speaking of exposition, Marshall, despite a strong opening with Johnny and Elisa’s first meeting, is soon back to the same tricks as in Hit Man, with countless scenes of Johnny sitting around and expositing on what he’s planning to do…after which Marshall will describe Johnny doing exactly that. And even worse, in each case it all goes down just as Johnny planned.

For new stuff, Johnny has a Travis Bickle-style derringer holder on his forerm; a flex of his muscle and the two-shot gun jumps into his hand. This is employed in a memorable scene where an unusually-gullible Johnny is briefly in the clutches of a dirty cop – one who claims to be taking Johnny “down to the station” but is really planning to blow his head off and collect his mob reward. Johnny’s also back to his disguise trickery, spending portions of the novel going around as a hippie. In a humorously go-nowhere subplot, Elisa occasionally dresses up like “the hippie’s wife,” but we never see what the intention of this, as she goes off on her own.

The confrontation with the dirty cop is the highlight of the novel, with Marshall doling out some nice suspense even though every single reader knows what the outcome will be. Here too he shows a nice touch with dialog. But for the majority of the novel he’s content to dole out exposition for the dialog, with Johnny lounging around after the latest Elisa-prepared meal and stating, “After this I shall…” Otherwise the “action scenes” follow the usual template of the series, with Johnny planting explosives and killing scads of villains en masse; especially lame is a “climactic sequence” where Johnny takes out practically all of the villains off-page. In fact this is so lame that Marshall has to introduce a new “main villain” in the veritable 11th hour so Johnny can have someone new to kill (and Marshall can meet the page requirement).

Instead, Marshall focuses more on the capture, rape, and rescuing of Elisa. Those dirty cops strike again, finding Elisa’s fingerprints in Johnny’s hotel, and soon enough a Mafia crew is sent out to round her up. They get her just as she’s in the shower, Johnny having just left to handle more mob-busting business; of course, Elisa has fallen in love with Johnny as expected. The creeps take her to a remote ranch and set about gang-raping her. Marshall goes into full-bore sleaze territory here, including even sodomy: “It was as though her rectal passage was being ripped apart.” As ever, the bland, meat-and-potatoes nature of the humdrum writing makes these sleazy scenes even sleazier.

By the time Johnny tracks her down, poor Elisa’s been raped so much that she’s plumb insane. Johnny kills the rapists and takes her back to a hotel, later having her doctor look at her. By novel’s end Elisa is so far gone that she’s burning mob money and babbling like a child; Johnny calls the one good cop on the force and tells him to come pick her up! And with that Johnny makes his leave from Las Vegas, having broken the local mob apart – and the dude still hasn’t even taken his vacation. This was it for Marshall on the series, and while his two stories are okay, he’s really only just a rung or two above Paul Hofrichter.

And you’ve gotta love Ken Barr’s typically-outstanding cover art. It practically screams “Cint Eastwood is…!!”

The Sharpshooter #13: Savage Slaughter

The Sharpshooter #13: Savage Slaughter, by Bruno Rossi
February, 1975  Leisure Books

Very grim stuff and not the light reading I expected but surprisingly well written and exceptionally powerful. Definitely the best of the series. -- Rayo Casablanca, the Sick Hipster blog 

I’ve been looking forward to this volume of The Sharpshooter since reading Rayo’s comments on it years ago; I should’ve just jumped straight ahead to it, but instead I’ve been reading the series in order. Not that there’s much “order” to the Sharpshooter. And, as Lynn Munroe suspects, it would appear that Savage Slaughter started life as a Marksman novel, anyway – while the copy editing is much better than previous such books, there are still a handful of slips where “Rock” is referred to as “Magellan.”

However, Savage Slaughter might answer a question I’ve long held – namely, who the hell wrote the almighty Bronson: Blind Rage. Because I’m 90% sure the same author wrote Savage Slaughter, and if Lynn’s speculations are correct, then it was George Harmon Smith, a prolific writer editor Peter McCurtin apparently used as his “fixit” author. While Smith never listed “Bruno Rossi” as one of his many pseudonyms, Lynn suspects that Smith might not’ve been aware that his Marksman novel, as “Frank Scarpetta” (a pseudonym Smith did list), was transformed into a Sharpshooter.

As we’ll recall, Blind Rage was a friggin’ masterpiece of sadism, with a deranged “hero” who, in the course of the narrative, wrought his vengeance in the most brutal of ways, from torching the pubic hair of a random floozie to emasculating some guy with a shard of glass. Or how about the part where he caged some guy and let loose a bunch of rats on him? “Johnny Rock” goes to even more insane lengths in this book, and to me it’s clear indication of that same author’s fevered imagination. To wit: 

Early in the book Rock interrogates a drug pusher. When the guy won’t talk, Rock pulls down the guy’s pants, breaks open a bullet cartridge, and pours gun powder on his crotch, threatening to light it up. “This is going to be the come of the century.” The pusher gives Rock the info – and then Rock says “Bye, bye, motherfucker,” and sets his crotch on fire, anyway. He then delivers the coup de grace: a bullet to the face.

Not long after this, Rock is baited by a honey trap – turns out the girl works for someone else, someone who wants to hire Rock. When she comes back to his apartment to drop off the keys to a car they've gotten him, Rock knocks her out, throws her on his bed, strips her – and, well, you can figure out the rest. At least the author doesn’t go full-bore with it and leaves the scene vague. However the girl’s unconscious throughout, and later on Rock thinks briefly about it – but doesn't regret it.

At one point Rock wants to weed out a heroin pipeline, and in order to do so he sets himself up as a pusher. He doses a stash with cyanide, killing off a slew of users with “hot shots,” chalking up their deaths as collateral damage. He pulls such stunts throughout the book, like when he hits a mob-run massage parlor and “dance palace,” figuring the (otherwise innocent) patrons there should’ve known better, anyway – and killing just as many of them as the mobsters he’s there for.

A grueling sequence has Rock interrogating another guy, this one a Vietnamese dude who turns out to be a soldier from North Vietnam who is part of a heroin-importing business. (A subplot which curiously goes nowhere.) This part will raise the hackles of the most bloodthirsty reader, as Rock busts out a pair of pliers and sets about breaking the dude’s toes one by one, at some points having to stomp on the pliers because the joints are too strong! Then he sets the dude’s foot on fire, then he jabs a penknife in the dude’s eye! And only then does the tough bastard finally talk! Guess how the scene ends? (If you said “point-blank bullet to the face,” you win a no-prize…)

And then my friends comes the piece de resistance; toward the final third of the novel, Rock gets hold of a Mafia gunner who was part of a crew that killed someone close to our crazed hero. Rock strips the guy down, ties him up here in the desert in which the sequence occurs, and tracks down a diamondback snake. After interrogating this latest victim, Rock…actually, read for yourself:

The snake’s deadly head darted forward again, striking twice, and Rock could see flecks of blood on the man’s dangling genitals as he pulled the snake back again…He walked back over and sat down near the man, watching him writhe in agony and listening to his moans and screams, his begging pleas for help. It took about an hour. The man’s testicles and penis swelled and turned a dark splotchy black, then he began to have trouble breathing. He went into spasms a few minutes later and lost control over his bowels, and a foul stench came from him as his body jerked and heaved, mashing and spreading the thick, heavy feces which came from him. His body began undulating in strong convulsions as his face became mottled, and the wire cut into his wrists and ankles. Presently he went into deep shock, his breathing stopped, and he died.

But all is not perfect in this sadistic paradise, for the sad truth is Savage Slaughter is so drawn out as to be a wearying read; it comes in at a whopping 218 pages, which is much, much too long for a Sharpshooter or Marksman novel – and that’s 218 pages of small, dense print. This particular “Bruno Rossi,” if indeed George Harmon Smith he be, is truly a gifted writer, capable of doling out some compelling prose and characters, but the sad fact is he doesn’t know when to say when. There’s a ton of stuff that could’ve been cut from the book to make for a more streamlined read, and there’s a lot of repetition throughout.

Every single thing Johnny Rock does is explained to the utmost degree; if the dude smokes a cigarette we’ll read as he rips open the pack, takes one out, lights the match, inhales, etc. If he crosses a street we’ll read about every step of the way. The author can write but doesn’t seem to understand that this particular genre demands brevity. Even the action scenes, while gory, suffer from the same thing – blocks and blocks of description with little emotional content. For this reason I can’t agree with Rayo, that this is the best book of the series; indeed, there were parts where I wished Savage Slaughter would just end already. But meanwhile the author was too busy with arbitrary plot detours, like a random diatribe about racial tensions in San Francisco to an overlong part where Rock lives in a shack in the desert and has to fix all the old, broken equipment in it.

It's been a few years since I read Blind Rage, so I can’t recall if it too suffered from this overwriting. But given the levels of sadism on display – coupled with the almost blasé attitude of the protagonist – makes me suspect it’s the same author: George Harmon Smith. However one thing to note is that, despite the violence and gore, Savage Slaughter is curiously conservative with the sex scenes, all of which occur off-page. I don’t remember this being the case with Blind Rage. I also seem to recall the author of that book using words that don’t appear in this one, like “focussed” instead of “focused,” and “pellets” instead of “bullets,” so despite all my above musings I could be dead wrong, and it’s a different author here.

But anyway, Savage Slaughter appears to have started life as a Marksman novel, though we don’t get to our first “Magellan” gaffe until page 154, after which there are only a few more such slips. But the cagey reader knows something is up from the first pages; while the novel opens with Rock waking from a dream and thinking about how his mom and dad were killed by the Mafia, which is of course the incident which set Johnny Rock on his mob-busting career, later on in the book Rock announces himself thusly: “I’m Rock, the guy whose wife and kid were wasted by the Mafia.” That of course is the incident which set Philip Magellan on his mob-busting career. (Actually, it was Robert Briganti, but it’s the same character, right?)

This particular author is pretty familiar with the workings of the underworld, especially when it pertains to the grimy world of heroin-pushing. In fact Rock at times seems more focused on stopping drugs than wasting mobsters. To this end Rock is hired by the CIA early on; they want to use him to close in on mob boss Sully Gianelli and his brother. (The criminal brothers is another parallel with Blind Rage.) The author also understands that the CIA has no jurisdiction within the US, something he often has his CIA agent reminding Rock. But the Agency will provide Rock with weapons, cars, and whatever else he needs in his war of attrition on the Mafia.

Rock tails the Gianellis all the way from New York to San Francisco, the author already displaying his overwriting – it goes on and on, complete with stops in roadside diners. And in SanFran we get that above-mentioned detour into the racial tensions of the city, and that goes on for pages and pages. Things liven up with that grueling torture sequence, of Rock maiming the Viet drug pusher, but afterwards it gets bizarre – Rock runs into young Shirley and her dad and, apropos of nothing, decides to become their guardian, even subtly implying that he’ll marry Shirley!

But folks, I hate to burst any bubbles with this spoiler, but Shirley’s friggin’ dead like a handful of pages after she’s introduced, gang-raped and beaten to death offpage – and Rock comes back just in time for her to die in his arms. (You’d think Rock would learn here not to get involved with anyone – or at least not to leave anyone he loves alone for long, but nope…he doesn’t learn.) But the whole part is so arbitrary as to be hilarious, and another indication of material that could’ve been cut. At least it has a nice payoff, with Rock phoning his local CIA contact and getting some heavy gear; he launches a revenge blitz on a mob whorehouse, doling out plentiful gory deaths with a Thompson submachine gun, shotgun, and grenades.

Heading into New Mexico until the heat dies down, Rock, despite his protestations, ends up giving a sexy young hitchhiker a lift. This is Barbara, who relays her sad sack story to Rock from page 128 to 141(!). This is a miniature story in itself, as egregious as can be, made all the worse by the fact that Rock eagerly listens to the whole thing, even asking questions here and there. The Sharpshooter cares, folks! But seriously Barbara’s story is like the turbulent ‘60s in microcosm, taking in her college days in hippie-terrorist groups to her meeting with a ‘Nam vet who changed her entire perspective with a simple question: The hippies might be against the Vietnam war, but have you ever asked if the Vietnamese people are against it? While interesting, and very much like the Hippie Lit I used to enjoy so much, it goes on and on and friggin’ on.

Barbara is the one who pleads with Rock to get that cabin in the desert; there ensues more padding with the couple having a veritable happy life over the next few weeks, complete with inordinate scenes of an old prospector coming over to visit and bringing gifts and etc. This could be another Blind Rage parallel, as just as that author got you to care about Bronson’s main squeeze before killing her off, so too does this author strive for the same thing – only Barbara’s kind of annoying, and to tell the truth the impact is dilluted by the galacial pace of the novel. But once again Rock goes off on some random quest, pushing down his suspicion that something might be amiss – like for example that helicopter that recently passed over their cabin.

This time when Rock suffers his latest heartbreak, which lasts for like a hot second or two, the reader is prepared to laugh – I mean seriously, the author pulls the same thing twice in the same book! In a way I admire his moxie. While this setback doesn’t elicit another revenge-hit, it does lead to the bit with the diamondhead. And later Rock tracks down the mobster who ordered the kill and takes him out – but here too is another detour from Blind Rage, where we got to witness our insane hero exacting his bloody vengeance. In Savage Slaughter, Rock generally shoots up the place and we read that random dudes go down in bloody sprays of gore, but rarely do we read about the main target getting his just deserts. In a way this robs the novel of its dramatic thrust.

Rock spends a long time hiding in this one, too; first it’s for a few weeks in the desert shack, then it’s in a CIA safehouse. They even provide him with some female company – which of course turns out to be the very same woman Rock raped, early in the book. And after a brief scuffle, in which she tries to claw out his eyes catfight style, the girl gives in to Rock’s charms! Her name is Betty, and she’s a kick-ass field agent herself; she is the only character in the novel to openly state how friggin’ nuts Rock is, telling him he’s “fucked up and rotted away inside.” But still and all, she lives with him in the safehouse for a whopping five weeks, during which Rock grows a moustache to disguise his features.

Another thing that kills dramatic impact in Savage Slaughter is that there is a lot of telling before showing. As is the case here, where Rock’s CIA handler Halton shows up again and they go on and on and on about this hit Rock could make on a mob wedding – I’m talking every inconsequential detail worked out. And to make it worse, we see it all go down just as planned! At any rate Rock disguises himself as a delivery man, bringing flowers to the event, but instead drops off some explosives that wipe everyone out – innocents and all (including a male wedding planner presented as so mincingly gay that he’s sure to trigger the sensitive readers of today).

There’s no pickup from previous books, no setup for ensuing ones. Overall the novel really does have the feel of a true Sharpshooter, with only a few indications of its original Marksman nature slipping through the cracks. In addition to the handful of “Magellan” slips, we also are reminded sometimes of Rock’s “wife and kid” who were killed, which is incorrect, and also we’re told that he misses his Uzi – a favored Magellan weapon, as is the Beretta Rock uses throughout. But other than that, this one feels like a Johnny Rock novel; it’s mean and sadistic as hell, and written much better than the series average – it’s just so bloated and padded it loses much of its impact.

The Sharpshooter #12: Scarfaced Killer

The Sharpshooter #12: Scarfaced Killer, by Bruno Rossi
February, 1975  Leisure Books

Paul Hofrichter, the man who gave us the abysmal Stiletto, returns to the Sharpshooter series with an installment that turns out to have been written as a volume of The Marksman but changed by editor Peter McCurtin into a Sharpshooter. Yet for once the copyediting is fairly good, with only a handful of slips in which Johnny Rock is mysteriously referred to as “Magellan.”

As Lynn Munroe points out in his awesome Peter McCurtin checklist, McCurtin employed a ghostwriter named George Harmon Smith to polish the occasional Sharpshooter or Marksman manuscript. I wonder if Scarfaced Killer was one of those manuscripts, as the early pages display a level of qualitity inconsistent with Hofrichter’s typically-clunky style. Whereas Hofrichter’s typical novels are filled with pedantic dialog and scant description, the opening of Scarfaced Killer is for the most part pretty good, with Johnny Rock heading into the small town of Boyle, Oklahoma, which has been subtly overtaken by Mafioso who want to control Boyle’s newly-discovered gold mines.

Another thing that makes me think McCurtin or Smith tinkered with the book is the phrase “Soon he would again taste Mafia blood,” which appears early on and reminds us of Johnny Rock’s mob-killing psychosis. The phrase “taste Mafia blood,” to my knowledge, only appeared in the three volumes of the series written by Len Levinson, and given that it appears here makes me think that either McCurtin liked the phrase and used it in his polishing of the manuscript, or perhaps Hofrichter had been given copies of Levinson’s three books as study material before writing his own. But anyway, gradually the polished feeling of the opening page is replaced by the clunkiness we expect from Hofrichter – the same sort of style he was still employing over a decade later, in the Roadblaster books. 

But McCurtin (or one of his copyeditors) slips at times, missing the occasional “Magellan” in Hofrichter’s original manuscript and not changing it to “Rock.” However the reader gets the suspicion that this might’ve started life as a Marksman novel early on; when Rock checks into his hotel in Boyle, he gives the fake name of Phil Marsalla – ie Philip Magellan, the Marksman. This “subtle” joke clearly made more sense in Hofrichter’s original version, where it was Magellan. Curiously, a minor character in Scarfaced Killer is named “Emil Scaretta,” which is so similar to the Marksman house name of “Frank Scarpetta” that you wonder if this was yet another in-joke on Hofrichter’s part or if it was just an oversight. (At any rate, Scaretta’s accidentally referred to as “Scarpetta” on page 163.)

Anyway, as usual with this stuff, it doesn’t matter. Hofrichter’s Johnny Rock/Philip Magellan is such a cipher that it really could be either character; only minor details, very late in the novel, betray that the character we’ve been reading about started life as Magellan – namely, the tidbit that “Rock” once worked in a carnival. As all fans know, that’s Magellan’s background, not Johnny Rock’s. Also, this version of “Rock” is fond of carrying a “suitcase” around with him, in which he stores his arsenal; surely this is none other than the infamous “artillery case” Magellan lugs around with him in every volume of The Marksman written by Russell Smith.

Oh, and speaking of that suitcase – Scarfaced Killer is filled with typos, like a ludicrious amount of them. For the most part they’re the usual Belmont Tower/Leisure screwups, like “shair” instead of “chair.” But my friends, on page 180 we come across this humdinger: “…holding the handle of the heavy shitcase.” Yes, friends, someone actually wrote “shitcase” instead of “suitcase.” How this could possibly happen – let alone not be caught – will have to remain a mystery, but maybe it was the copyeditor or McCurtin or even Hofrichter himself letting us know what they thought about the book.

Anyway, Rock surveys Boyle and discovers that it’s practically the fief of a Mafia bigwig named Franklin Ditrinco, who rules the small town with a crooked mayor and the police in his employ. Only a hardscrabble group of salt-of-the earth types oppose Ditrinco’s complete takeover of the gold mines, and Rock finds out about them thanks to Carl Cortner, the town drunk. Leading the miners is Hank Belmann, Cortner’s son in law, and the man Rock gradually teams up with to take on Ditrinco’s goons and dirty cops. In particular Ditrinco retains a trio of wheelchair-bound killers, the Celebano brothers, who go around town on electric wheelchairs, toting shotguns. Their leader, sadistic Wendell, may be the “scarfaced killer” of the title and hyperbolic back cover copy, but probably isn’t – this is likely another indication of McCurtin once again coming up with a suitably “tough” title.

One thing that can be said of Hofrichter is that he doesn’t shy from the gory violence. While there isn’t even a hint of sex in the novel (the only woman in the book is an old lady who has maybe a line or two), there’s a ton of action and carnage, with Hofrichter, as in the inferior Stiletto, taking a sort of relish in describing how eyeballs pop out of skulls when a person’s gunned down or blown up. And Rock as ever is a straight-up killer in this one; his first victims being a pair of Ditrinco-paid lowlifes who occasionally rape runaways and then murder them. Rock catches them in the act of doing this, waits until they’ve raped and killed their latest prey(!!), and then guns them both down. This initiates his war of attrition against Ditrinco.

It’s constantly hammered home that Rock has been fighting the Mafia “for two years,” and practically everyone has heard of him. However in Hofrichter’s hands he’s kind of a moron. After his first hit Rock’s in his hotel room and falls for a Celebano brothers swindle; figuring the new guy in town is Rock, they send a flunkie up to his room, posing as a sandwich seller. Rock, who just killed two henchmen moments after rolling into town, buys himself a sandwich and doesn’t suspect a thing. It takes town drunk Carl Cortner to explain to him that it was a ruse to suss Rock out.

While he might be stupid, Rock is still sadistic – not to mention deadly to his friends. Learning that Ditrinco and the crooked mayor are hosting a dinner for various town notables, Rock steals a bunch of nitro, gets a job as a busboy at the restaurant, and then fills the coffee percolators with the nitro. After the tediously-overdescribed setting up of the explosives Rock escapes before the blast hits – and he wipes out around 70 men and women at the banquet. This leads to the first of many running battles in the novel, as Rock, armed with Uzi and grenades, takes on hordes of Mafia soldiers in the woods outside the restaurant.

Another long action sequence quickly follows, as poor ol’ Carl is gunned down by dirty cops who open fire on Rock’s hotel room, hitting the drunk instead. Rock blows ‘em all up with grenades, and then gets in another big firefight at Frank Belmann’s place. Oh, and speaking of which, that patented clunky Hofrichter dialog appears in an interminable chapter in which Belmann convinces his sickly wife to leave town until the action’s over; there are go-nowhere conversations throughout the novel, in particular the stuff with Ditrinco and his butler Scaretta, most of it recapping stuff we’ve already read.

The majority of the novel trades off between Ditrinco plotting to send killers after Rock and Belmann’s men and then Rock and Belmann fighting them off. Things really come to a head in the finale, in which Rock comes up with the “master plan” of serving himself up as bait in his hotel room while Belmann’s force capitalizes on this concentration of forces and heads for Ditrinco’s supposedly-defenseless home. Meanwhile, Ditrinco quickly deduces it’s a trap and Belmann and his little army is massacred in another running action sequence which sees more heads exploding and eyeballs popping out. 

The Celebano brothers are the highlight here, riding specially-made heavy-tread electric wheelchairs with armored shields covering their bodies, shields which have slots to see through and slots for their shotgun barrels. (“In them, the brothers looked like creature[sp] from Mars.”) These three butcher Belmann’s army, killing them to a man on a battle that rages on the streets of Boyle, and for once the reader figures Johnny Rock might be up against some stiff competition. But the finale is a total copout; in just a page or two Rock takes the three brothers out, shooting under their armored plates and then blowing them up with dynamite.

More focus is placed on Rock’s knife fight with Emil Scaretta, who is a master with the stiletto; here we get the background detail that “Rock” grew up in a carnival and thus is a master of knife-throwing. As for Ditrinco, he does Rock the favor of offing himself – after which “There was no one else left to kill,” and that’s it for Rock’s war upon Boyle, a war which humorously enough has seen the death of everyone, mobster and innocent townsperson alike.

As mentioned, despite the clunky prose and the headscratching amount of run-on sentences, Hofrichter really doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to the action and the gore, which makes Scarfaced Killer more entertaining than any of Hofrichter’s other novel’s I’ve yet read.

The Sharpshooter #11: Triggerman

The Sharpshooter #11: Triggerman, by Bruno Rossi
January, 1975  Leisure Books

Russell Smith returns to the Sharpshooter series in what appears to be yet another of Smith’s Marksman manuscripts that was turned into a Sharpshooter novel. At first it’s hard to tell, as for once the editors managed to change most instances of “Magellan” into “Rock,” but as the novel progresses you can clearly tell this is indeed a Philip “Marksman” Magellan novel – especially when, about 90 pages in, the “Magellan” goofs start to pepper the text.

Anyway, Triggerman opens with no pickup from any previous volume, with Don Ricardo “Rick” Tattilo getting out of some mystery prison in New York (“A –”) where he’s spent the past two years. We get lots of background detail on Tattilo, an obvious page-filling gambit on Smith’s part. We also learn that the only reason “the Rock” hasn’t come after him yet is because Tattilo’s been in the joint since Rock started his campaign against the Mafia. Now that he’s out, Rock is coming for him.

At first I thought this novel was a straight-up Johnny Rock story, as early on Smith has Rock reflecting back on the murder of his mom and dad and etc, all of them murdered due to the family business, which the mob wanted a piece of. As die hards know, this was the origin story of Johnny Rock, as told in #1: The Killing Machine. However, on the very same page, Smith also has Rock reflecting back on his mob-murdered wife and son, and as die hards also know, this is not Johnny Rock’s backstory – it’s Philip Magellan’s.

But no, this is really a Marksman novel, with “Rock” displaying the expected Magellan characteristics, from obsessing over his “Valpak and artillery case” to even wearing “nylon cords” around his waist (to bind whatever thug he happens to beat senseless). There’s also Magellan’s fondness for stripping and tying up captives, keeping collections of them stored away for future torturing. He also enjoys donning disguises, another Magellan penchant, and Smith mentions that one such disguise is one “Rock” hasn’t worn “since Puerto Rico.” This is likely a reference to The Marksman #5: Headhunter. 

Now, how about the actual novel itself? Triggerman really isn’t that bad, and is on par with pretty much everything else churned out by the human typewriter that was Russell Smith. As usual you can tell the dude was winging it as he went along, with tons of incidental detail dropped early on but hardly any of it amounting to anything in the actual text. Things just sort of happen with little rhyme or reason. Magellan/Rock murders with impunity, walking around in a “hippie disguise” and blowing away mobsters with his silenced Beretta.

Triggerman also operates on Smith’s usual fondness for lazy coincidence. For one, after getting intel from an old black guy named Mickey the Fish (who apparently was saved by Magellan/Rock a year before), our “hero” checks into a hotel in Manhattan, where he later discovers, nestled in a courtyard behind it, an old “Quaker meeting hall” from which both heroin is distributed and a sort of kinky sex parlor does business. There’s also an old treehouse back there, which “Rock” soon uses to hide the gory mobster corpses he creates.

Meanwhile Tattilo holes up in the Manhattan apartment of Eleanora Constantini, the gorgeous 35 year-old madam who runs his lucrative whoring business. Smith for once delivers several sex scenes, all of them featuring Tattilo, particularly when later he stays in the Hotel Irwin and bangs Marge, neglected wife of the drunk mobster who runs the place. These scenes in particular are pretty sleazy, with Smith busting out all sorts of exploitative detail, to the point where Triggerman is the most sex-filled installment of the series yet.

Smith’s customary coincidental plotting again rears its head when Tattilo, fearing Magellan/Rock is going to find him, leaves Eleanor’s apartment and heads to the Hotel Irwin (which Smith sometimes mistakenly refers to as “Hotel Irving”). Guess where Magellan/Rock’s staying? That’s right, in the very same hotel. Not that “Rock” instantly discovers this; he’s too busy sneaking around in that courtyard around the hidden Quaker hall, murdering mobsters with his silenced Beretta and hiding their corpses in the treehouse.

Smith also as usual adds in goofy humor, with Tattilo one morning looking out over nearby Gramercy Park and seeing the Quaker hall beneath his window, scoping his binoculars over it…and seeing all those gory corpses. Yet he tells no one, because he’s certain people will think he’s nuts(?). When he calls over fellow don John Tedesco to check them out, guess what, “Rock’s” just rented a panel truck and lugged each corpse onto it, so that they’re all gone when the two mobsters take another look down there with binoculars.

“Action” is relegated to the usual Smith sadism, with an early scene featuring Magellan/Rock shooting up several mobsters in the lobby of Eleanora’s apartment building (this being the incident that really sends Tattilo into paranoia, eventually causing him to move to the Hotel Irwin). This scene too is goofy, because “Rock” wants to get upstairs to kill Tattilo without anyone seeing him, yet just a few sentences later he’s shooting one Tattilo guard after another, to the point where there’s a crowd of onlookers and the cops are rushing to the scene.

Magellan also has a penchant for picking up cleaning ladies (seriously), and not only does Triggerman open with “Rock” already being friends of sorts with a maid named Clara Green (which makes me wonder if this character will appear in another Smith Marksman/Sharpshooter installment), but towards the end he rescues from sexual servitude another maid, Maria. In another of the novel’s sex scenes, we see how Eleanora Constantini “forces” Maria to sleep with her, and the girl is super-happy to escape with “Rock” at the novel’s end, with the clear implication that she’s going to stay with him for a while.

The finale is pretty weird. Magellan/Rock stages a raid on Eleanora’s lush suite, blowing away scads of mobsters and then “literally slapping the shit” out of Eleanora herself! After the already-mentioned rescue of Maria (who throws herself all over “Rock”), our boy heads back to the Hotel Irwin…where all of the villains have conveniently congregated in one of the apartments. Magellan/Rock loads up his Uzi, kicks open the door, and blows everyone away! To add an even stranger tenor to it, “Rock” then goes over to the corpses and steals the cash out of their wallets!

Maybe it’s a weird Marksman/Sharpshooter hybrid who stars in Triggerman; on pages 132 and 142, he’s referred to as “Philip Rock!” It should say something that I found more interest in rooting out the editorial maniuplations, but all told Triggerman isn’t really that bad. It has a sleaze quotient missing from other Smith contributions, and for once the plot is tied up in a single novel – messily tied up, but at least it comes to a conclusion.

And Ken Barr’s cover, as usual, is great.

The Sharpshooter #10: Hit Man

The Sharpshooter #10: Hit Man, by Bruno Rossi
November, 1974  Leisure Books

Johnny Sharpshooter Rock returns in a fairly good tenth installment that’s a hell of a lot better than the previous volume. First-time series author John Marshall delivers a Rock that comes off like a combo of Peter McCurtin's original version and the more neurotic character Len Levinson gave us; like McCurtin’s take this Johnny is crazy about guns, and like Len’s he’s crazy about killing mobsters.

As usual, continuity doesn’t exist; in the opening pages we learn that Rock has spent the past month out of the country, with “two of the last four weeks in Acapulco,” taking a vacation after fighting a branch of the Mafia in Puerto Rico. So then, could Hit Man be yet another Sharpshooter novel in which the author thinks he’s writing a volume of The Marksman? I wonder this because, you guessed it, Philip Magellan took on the Mafia in Puerto Rico in The Marksman #5: Headhunter, published a year before Hit Man.

Len informed me that when he was brought onto the series, McCurtin just sent him a few volumes of the three series which made up this bizarre triumvirate as background material, ie The Sharpshooter, The Marksman, and the source series, The Assassin. I’m assuming then that McCurtin did the same with Marshall, just giving him the latest books in the various series to help him with this book. Also, Headhunter was published around the time Marshall would’ve been writing Hit Man. (Len’s also told me that it took “about a year” for his manuscripts to be published.)

Anyway, all this could be nothing and maybe Marshall just pulled “Puerto Rico” out of the air as a place for Rock to have recently been, because otherwise Hit Man isn’t a sequel to that Marksman novel or any other novel, even in the Sharpshooter series. But Rock here does display some Magellan tendencies, from an “armory case” he has made at great expense (and detail) which carries his vast arsenal, to a penchant for donning disguises; the novel opens with Rock shaving off a moustache he apparently sported in Acapulco, to fool any possible mob sightings.

Checking up on the stock he still owns in the family company, Rock also checks the mail that’s accumulated for him in New York. Here he finds a letter from an old ‘Nam buddy, Mike Reid. We’re informed that Mike actually saved Rock’s life during the war, heading out into the night to find a lost and wounded Johnny, and now the man, who owns a cleaning company in Los Angeles and lives with his wife and daughter, has run into trouble with the Mafia. Having seen a photo spread on Rock in “a slick detective magazine,” Mike instantly realized that this character named “Johnny Rock” was none other than his old army pal, John Rocetti.

The letter is a month old, but Rock heads out to LA posthaste. Marshall delivers the goofy sleaze with Rock checking out a stewardess and her “pert ass,” and after he feels her up she goes back to his seat, tells him it’ll cost a hundred bucks, and then proceeds to give him a blowjob! Rock even goes home with her in Los Angeles, leaving a few hundred dollars on her nightstand before leaving.

When Rock meets up with Mike, his pal claims that the mob stuff blew over. Rock doesn’t believe it, but leaves anyway. Soon he learns that the LA area is made up of two families, the Franzias and the Scarpellinos, with a Don Lorenzo serving as godfather and keeping the two families from going to war. Rock finds all this out first-hand when, driving on a steep road, he gets in a wreck with a Cadillac, which happens to be driven by a good-looking Italian woman. Her brutish passenger, an obvious mobster, tries to pull a gun on Rock, who blithely blows him away.

The lady is named Maria Belamonte, and she thanks Rock profusely. She claims to be from Ohio, and came here because her kid sister got involved with the Scarpellino family, and ended up hooked on heroin and now dead. The guy Rock just wasted was a Scarpellino, and Rock did Maria a big favor. Later Rock even takes out the don of the Scarpellinos. After this Maria calls him over to her apartment to show him her appreciation – right in her swank bedroom with its ceiling mirrors and round bed. (Marshall by the way doesn’t get into details in the sex scenes.)

But when Rock and Maria are caught in a failed hit the following morning, Rock instantly suspects something once he’s taken out the hitmen; none of them took a shot at Maria. He’s also figured out that Mike’s wife Ginny and his ten year-old daughter have been taken captive by the Franzias. This latter part he learns, again first-hand, when he comes back to his hotel room to find a gun-toting Mike waiting for him. After disarming his old buddy, Rock gets the full sob story, that the Franzias are holding the two captive until Mike signs over his business to the mob. And Mike had a gun on his pal because he was afraid Rock would stir up trouble and get his family killed.

So as you can see, there’s a bit more plotting and scheming in this installment than most others. Rock himself is a bit more of a schemer and planner in Marshall’s hands, carefully plotting out his attacks and ensuring there are no complications. But he’s kind of stupid so far as protecting his comrades goes. Rock heads off to scope out the Franzia retreat where Mike’s wife and kid are being held, and just leaves Mike there alone. Guess what happens? The Scarpellinos send someone over, get Mike, torture him to find out when Rock plans to hit the Franzia place, and then kill him.

The rescue of Mike’s family is entertaining, with Rock in camo with his face painted like he’s back in ‘Nam, but Marshall doesn’t really play up the action scenes. Rock just sprays people with whatever gun he’s carrying and the people fall down. When he discovers some Scarpellino thugs showing up to ambush him – having learned of his hit from a tortured Mike – he easily deals with them. In fact, Rock is never once in trouble in the entire book, but this is typical of the series. Even a part where he gets vengeance on the Scarpellino who killed Mike, blowing him away point-blank with a hidden derringer, sees Rock making an easy escape.

The highlight of the book is Ginny Reid, who turns out to be even more bloodthirsty than Rock. She wants vengeance for her dead husband and, after sending her kid off on a plane, demands that Rock let her help kill some Scarpellinos. Her first victim is Maria, whose story has turned out to be a lie; she’s really a drug-addict hooker who works for the Scarpellinos. Ginny kidnaps her, ties her up, and in a darkly comic scene tortures her with a car battery, jamming the prod in horrific places. This is probably the only scene in the entire Sharpshooter series in which Johnny Rock tells someone they’re being too brutal! In fact he puts Maria out of her misery with a mercy shot.

Rock and Ginny make a good pair, along the lines of Rock and Iris, way back in the first volume. Marshall doesn’t deliver the expected sex scene between the two, but then, Ginny’s husband was just killed, and as Rock reminds himself, “No matter how horny you are, you just don’t screw your best friend’s wife.” She aids in the final assault in the novel, where Rock again carefully plans an ambush on a lodge in which Don Lorenzo is meeting with the Scarpellinos and Franzias. In fact Ginny does most of the work, firing a grenade launcher from a tree while Rock hides in some bushes and guns down anyone who comes out.

Marshall’s writing is pretty good, with the caveat that he really tells a lot more than he shows. And speaking of which, most of Hit Man is comprised of Rock telling people what he plans to do…and then later we see him doing it. There are several sequences where he’ll just sit around, sipping scotch, and say stuff like “After this, I shall then…” And yeah, Rock says “shall” a lot this time out; in fact, the characters here all speak much too formally, with contractions rarely if ever used.

Also, Hit Man is littered with typos, even more than the Leisure Books norm. I mentioned this to Len, and he sent me this response, which I enjoyed so much I thought I’d share it with the rest of you:

Copyediting at Leisure (BT) probably was done by several people including Peter, Milburn, Jane Thornton and freelancers, depending upon the book and year it was published. BT was a low end company. They paid less for everything, which means they didn't always hire the best people. Peter probably couldn't work at a company like Bantam, because he was too much of a rebel and free spirit, and probably didn't graduate from college. He also had a few teeth missing, which didn't fit the major publisher image. But he was a great man in his own way. I really miss him.