The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter

The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter, by John Quinn

July, 1983  Pinnacle Books

The second volume of The Terminator is similar to the first: a somewhat slow-moving piece that is more focused on building tension and suspense than it is to catering to Pinnacle’s almost desperate declaration that they (still) are “the number one action-adventure publisher.” 

Dennis Rodriguez is again outed as the writer on the copyright page, which makes one wonder why the “John Quinn” by-line was even necessary. It’s not like Pinnacle’s contemporary Justin Perry series, where author Hal Bennett likely used a pseudonym (and didn’t put his name on the copyright page) so no one would think he was batshit crazy. As with the first book, Rodriguez turns in a book that’s very sedate and methodical in its delivery, at times more approaching the vibe of a hardboiled yarn than an action caper. 

What I find most interesting about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that series protagonist Rod Gavin – who by the way is never reffered to as a “Terminator” in the entire book – is revealed here to basically be a drunk. This was already hinted at in the previous book, where Gavin “fortified” himself with a bottle of booze while lurking in the trunk of a car, feeling “good” and “loose” when he finally came out for the big finale. 

Well, Rodriguez takes that and runs with it in this second volume. Gavin drinks his way through a lot of bottles in the course of the book, even recreating the previous volume’s bit by asking some goons to buy him a bottle of liquor so he can go to sleep and they won’t have to worry about him! I mean if this guy doesn’t have a problem, I don’t know what a problem would even be. 

Rodriguez also follows the template of the previous book in that the majority of the tale is at a slow boil, cutting across a swathe of characters, until reaching a harried finale. A curious thing about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that Gavin has no personal impetus in the plot; he isn’t out for revenge, and indeed only gets into the fray so as to help his friend Duffy (returning from the previous volume). Otherwise Gavin has no personal stake in the proceedings; ostensibly his goal is to rescue Duffy’s hotstuff, 20-something niece, but Gavin’s never even met her. 

The Terminator series is somewhat similar to the earlier Dakota in how Rod Gavin has a supporting group of characters, who appear in each volume. Actually, his “girlfriend” Kendall does not appear in Silicon Valley Slaughter, but she’s mentioned a lot. But there’s also Duffy, a Justice Dept. colleague of Gavin’s, and Dorn, a car mechanic who fixes up a beaten ’74 Trans Am for Gavin…even putting the very “1980s action” augmentation of an Uzi hidden inside of a center console. One can almost see Steven J. Cannell at his typewriter. 

As mentioned, Rodriguez likes to jump around a large group of characters. So for Sicilian Valley Slaughter we have material with Duffy (who is knocked into a coma after his intro, where he will remain for the duration of the novel), material with Duffy’s niece, Susan, and then stuff with both a high-level Japanese gangster as well as the American-born Japanese thug who works for him, with other characters besides. There is a lot of cutting between perspectives – and Rodriguez is good because he gives us white space or a chapter break to warn us of the perspective hopping – which ultimately means that Gavin comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

The plot concerns Duffy’s niece Susan being abducted, and the editors at Pinnacle do a great job of hyping the lurid aspects of this on the back cover, claiming that she’s about to be sent off into sexual servitude. However, author Dennis Rodriguez has much less lurid intentions. While it is mentioned, in passing, that the ultimate plan is to send her off into some sex slavery thing in Japan, for the most part Susan’s been kidnapped because she is working on some top-secret encryption device for an electronics firm in Silicon Valley. 

The novel is quite prescient in its talk of encryption and data, yet at the same time it’s not really the subject I want to read about in a men’s adventure novel. That said, Gavin himself is blithely unaware of all this mumbo-jumbo and tells people gladly that it’s outside of his realm. Regardless, he acts as a private investigator for the most part, trying to find young Susan as a way to pay back his injured friend, Duffy. 

Action is sporadic, and again has the vibe of a Gold Eagle novel from decades before; it’s mostly Gavin punching people. At one point an old Agency colleague gets him a P-38 pistol, a la the gun Gavin wields in the cover portrait on each volume – and also, the copyright page further states that the cover art is courtesy Bruce Minney. But honestly Gavin doesn’t use the gun much, and he’s more prone to hit the bottle than he is to shoot someone. 

Gavin does find the opportunity to get laid, though. While searching Susan’s place he discovers an attractive young woman hididng, fully clothed, in Susan’s shower. This turns out to be Hillary, a friend of Susan’s – a pretty one, naturally, with “full, upswept breasts.” Hillary has no idea who Gavin is – he uses a fake name throughout, claiming he’s a reporter – and later on there’s this unintentionally hilarious part where an injured Gavin needs to hide…and he goes to Hillary’s place and insists that she let him in, then tells her to go take a bath while he prepares dinner! I’ve seen a couple episodes of Dateline with this setup. 

But instead of telling Gavin to go away, Hillary opens the door and invites him in – this total stranger who is bleeding from an injury, who she met just a few days before, when he was snooping through her missing friend’s house. She even goes off to take a bath! Gavin makes a meal and the two eat and then they go to bed, but as with the previous book Rodriguez does not go into detail; indeed, the sex scenes seem to be incorporated merely so as to meet a publisher requirement. 

It’s the drinking, though, that makes me question how serious Dennis Rodriguez was about this whole affair. There’s actually a part where Gavin thinks to himself, “You can’t be on duty twenty-four hours a day,” and proceeds to get drunk. By himself. Then Dorn drives to California with the rebuilt Trans Am and Gavin gets drunk with him, too. Then there’s the part I already mentioned, where Gavin is caught by these yakuza thugs and he tells them to buy him a bottle so he can get drunk and won’t be “much trouble” for them! And it isn’t even some clever ploy, like Gavin throwing the booze on them and then flinging a match on them (which would totally combust in an action novel, there’s no reason to question “the science”). No – Gavin really does just drink until he goes to sleep! 

Another interesting thing is that Gavin keeps screwing up, thinking to himself that “the old Gavin would never have been caught” and that “the new Gavin [is] an amateur at this.” He’s an assassin – well, a Terminator, technically – and he’s been programmed to kill for the government. But acting on his own in a lone wolf capacity is outside of his experience, and he keeps messing things up and getting caught – even knocked out at one point, by nothing more than a bartender! 

As with the previous installment there’s a lot of cutting across the group of people, from the yakuza thugs to the treacherous employees of Susan’s company. And speaking of which, Rodriguez fills up so many pages with his scene cutting that Susan’s surprising fate is almost anticlimactically rendered, and the reader thinks he’s missed something. The worse thing is that Gavin is reduced to a supporting status, and we waste our time reading about one-off characters. 

But again it all is quickly wrapped up with an action scene that spans a few pages. And yes, Gavin does manage to get his Uzi out of his hidden Trans Am console, though the setup for this to happen is incredibly belabored and hard to buy. Rodriguez is again shy with the juicy details, though we do get occasional lines like, “One burst [from the Uzi] ruptured their chests, blowing pink meat against the walls.” 

Otherwise it’s a quick wrap-up after this, with Gavin dispatching practically all of his foes in a page or two. There’s not much in the way of a setup for the next volume – in fact, Gavin is essentially listless and without any plans for the future at all – but I did get a chuckle out of how the back cover proclaims that The Terminator series is “taking America by storm!” If that’s not hyperbolic copy, I don’t know what is.

Random Record Review: Bloodsong - “Season Of The Dead”

 

Two years ago I posted a review of “Initium Meets Earth AD” by Bloodsong, an album that so perfectly replicated The Misfits and Samhain that I could only hope that one day I, Misanthrope – the sole force behind Bloodsong – would do an entire album of original material. 

Well, fiends, that day has come – and ironically enough it’s around the same time of year as when I discovered Initium Meets Earth AD. Namely, right around my son’s birthday. Just as I recall going back home after an exhausting day of hosting my kid’s sixth birthday party and relaxing to the soothing strains of Bloodsong’s awesome Initium-styled rendition of Earth AD’s “Death Comes Ripping,” so too did I find himself mentally humming along to Bloodsong’s “Life Is Fucking Cold” this year while hanging out with my kid at the Crayola playground on his eigth birthday. 

Once again Bloodsong captures the mood, style, and vibe of mid-‘80s Glenn Danzig, to the point where this stuff would’ve blown my mind if it had come out on cassette tape circa 1989. And speaking of which, what this – and all of Bloodsong’s material – needs is a cassette release! In one of those “you’d never in a million years believe this would happen” scenarios, cassette tapes are back in these days, especially with younger people. As a coworker of mine quipped, “Have these people ever heard a cassette?” 

Also in true Danzig fashion, the album is short! Season Of The Dead is essentially an EP, comprised of eight tracks, each of which are just a little over three minutes long. And tracks 5-8 are remixes of tracks 1-4! 

“Cold World” starts the proceedings, with its memorable chorus of “It’s a cold fucking world.” This one sounds so much like Initium that you could swear it’s an outtake. Opening with heavy chords and those “Taco Bell commercial” synth-gongs, this track is crazy in how it so perfectly captures the Samhain sound. This is the one I was humming to myself while my kid created his own crayon at the Crayola factory – nothing like bopping your head to “It’s a cold fucking world” while kids are happily running around a crayon playground. Of course I was wearing earphones at the time. 

Title track “Season Of The Dead” follows; it starts off with more of a dirgey nature, before going into a metallic onslaught. Complete with those Taco Bell gongs, which I love to death, as well as unearthly growls buried in the mix. Lyrically this track is very in-line with mid-’80s Danzig, concerning witches and “malicious spirits.” I especially appreciate the multi-tracked “Yeahs” that puncuate the end of the track; very goth-punk.  This one received its own single release this past October, albeit in slightly different form (as noted below). 

“Psychofuck” is the mosh track; faster than the previous two songs and all scraped metal chords and pounding tribal drums. Ironically it’s this track where I feel I, Misanthrope most replicates the sound of Danzig’s voice, muted and buried in the mix during the verse but belting out wails in the chorus. There’s a cool part midway through where the track comes to a stop…and then starts back up again. I could really see the 15 year-old me banging my head to this one in 1989. 

Last is the mega-awesome “I Want Your Blood (2025),” another piledriver of heavy, punk-metal guitar riffing, with speed metal drums straight off of Earth AD (but better produced, as befitting Samhain!). A minute in we get into a cool bit of Danzig-esque experimentalism, with the tribal drums panning back and forth across the stereo spectrum and a chorus of I, Misanthropes intoning “I just want…your blood.” Super cool and so perfectly done. This section comes back at the end of the song, where it’s more prolonged and even cooler; I also love how the track ends, with a lone guitar offset by more of those unearthly growls.  This version is an update of the first-ever Bloodsong release, the I Want Your Blood single from 2018.

“Side 2” commences with a “Dark Cloud Mix” of “Cold World,” which runs a few seconds longer than the original mix. It’s a more experimental take than the original, opening with FX’d growls, and more focus on those awesome Taco Bell synth-gongs than the guitars. I, Misanthrope’s voice is more buried in the dense mix, again giving it the sound of a cassette. This mix would probably have given my kid nightmares if I’d been playing this on speakers instead of headphones; the focus is more on hellish din, with the growls often overtaking the music entirely. Yet at the same time it really sounds like something Danzig might’ve put on Unholy Passion. 

The Dark Clouds Mix of “Season Of The Dead” follows the same path – the howls and growls are panned up and the music is murky and buried beneath them. There’s also a headfucky chorus with a demonic voice whispering overtop I, Misanthrope’s voice. In some ways this one’s almost a dub mix; about the most we hear from the instruments is the kick drum and scraped guitar strings, with the focus on demonic sound effects. 

Seventh track “Psychofuck” also becomes a demonic nightmare in its Dark Clouds Mix; I, Misanthrope’s voice is amped up but at the same time sounds far away, like he’s up on stage at an outdoor festival in hell and we’re all the way back in the cheap seats, getting poked by demons with pitchforks. Once again the instruments are all meshed together into a blurry sonic wail, with screams and wails taking precedence over the music. The “mosh” nature of the original is somewhat lost, yet at the same time the track is so crazy sounding that you can’t help but laugh like a madman. This is truly music to lose your mind to. In a good way, of course! 

Final track “I Want Your Blood (2025)” follows the same path as its three predecessors in its Dark Clouds Mix, though this time the guitar is brought up a little. Otherwise the main add to this mix is a lot of murk and demonic growling, but really it doesn’t sound drastically different from the original mix. There’s just more hellish FX added to it, so like the previous Dark Clouds mixes it’s basically a more experimental, more “evil” take on the original mix. 

That’s it for the Season Of The Dead album, but over the past few months Bloodsong has put out a few other digital releases; I’ve just been too lazy to write about them until now! 

On Halloween of this past year, Bloodsong released the single Season Of The Dead, topically titled “Halloween ’24 Mix.” Per the notes, this is a demo mix of the eventual EP mix, but is not lacking any of its power. If anything this early version just sounds a little more barebones, almost like a live run-through of the track (impressive, given that Bloodsong’s a one-man band!). 

In September of 2024, Bloodsong’s first release of original music came out – titled Glub, it was comprised of two versions of the title track. First was the “Mannyfield Version,” dedicated to Manny Martinez, the recently-passed first drummer for the Misfits, followed by the Original Version of the song. 

“Glub” is inspired by the very first Misfits releases, “Cough/Cool” and “She,” particularly the former track. “Cough/Cool” was a smoky, jazzy number that had nothing much in common with later Misfits material, and Bloodsong stays very true to that vibe here. Like its inspiration source, “Glub” is a piano-driven lounge sort of tune; the Mannyfied Version lives up to its namesake with a lot of snare fills throughout the tune. 

The “Original Version” is quite similar. The snare fills are brought down a little, with the kickdrum getting more focus. Otherwise there isn’t much difference between the two versions that I could detect. Of the two, though, I’d say this one sounds the most like a lost number from the original Misfits sessions. Kudos to Bloodsong for trying to replicate the sound of this early, mostly-forgotten incarnation of the Misfits, though. 

In closing, Season Of The Dead comes off as highly recommended for anyone out there who likes the Misfits and/or Samhain (I only ever knew one guy who liked Samhain better than the Misfits, by the way – a guy I knew in college back in the ‘90s who not-so-coincidentally was also a total nutcase). Bloodsong hits the ball out of the park in his recreation of mid-‘80s Glenn Danzig music, and I had a blast listening to these songs. 

But what we really need is a physical release, like ideally on a neon orange cassette tape, similar to how Danzig’s own Black Laden Crown was recently released!

Search (Search #1)

 
Search, by Robert Weverka

January, 1973  Bantam Books

I first became aware of the 1972-1973 TV series Search some years ago; it was a little before my time and did not last long enough to reach syndication, so I was unfamiliar with it. But the concept of the show sounded cool: a team of “Probes” who had a continnuous audio-visual connection with a control team back at headquarters. 

In early 2014 the complete series was released on DVD, and I spent an exorbitant amount of money on it; at the time, it was one of those “manufactured on demand” releases, so there was no cheaper price option. However the first true episode, a TV movie titled Probe, was not included in the set, so I had to purchase that separately…and it was another exorbitantly-priced manufactured on demand disc that I had to shell out for. 

Well, I should have saved my money, as Search was for the most part a stage-bound, slow-moving show, and it was a chore to get through what few episodes there were. Only toward the end of the run, when a new producer tried to up the action quotient, did things really pick up, but even then it was too little, too late. In fact, I don’t even think I watched the entire series all the way through – and I know I fell asleep while watching the tv-movie Probe, which this tie-in paperback is a novelization of. 

The show itself was to be titled “Probe,” but due to another program with that title it was changed to Search. This paperback tie-in reflects that title change, but the TV movie itself was titled Probe. Tie-in novelist Richard Weverka also penned another Search novelization, but I don’t have that one; I came across this one in 2013 in a used bookstore in New Orleans, and only now have gotten around to reading it. 

Despite being only 152 pages, Search is a slow read, sort of like the TV movie itself. Interestingly there is nothing in the way of background setup, same as in the movie version. We are introduced to our protagonist, Hugh Lockwood (as played by Hugh O’Brian in the series), who is already a Probe agent, working for World Securities Corporation. As a Probe agent, Lockwood’s job is “the search and recovery of things that are missing.” 

But what sets Lockwood (and other Probe agents) apart from your standard private eye is that he is electronically hooked up with a control room that monitors everything Lockwood hears (courtesy an impant behind his ear), sees everything he sees (courtesy a video scanner on a ring he wears), and also is able to monitor his health (ie his heart rate, brain functions, etc). And also the control room – mainly through the guise of head honcho V.C.R. Cameron (Burgess Meredith, of all people) – can talk directly to Lockwood, no matter where in the world he happens to be. 

The setup seems to clearly be inspired by the contemporary Space Race, with the Probe agents a globe-trotting variation on the Apollo astronauts, their bodies monitored constantly by Mission Control. But a sort of “James Bond for the space age” setup is ruined with the later revelation – almost casually dispensed by Weverka – that Probe agents are “forbidden” to carry weapons!! And reading this made me recall why Search the show was such a bummer. The Probe agents were reduced to automatons, literal “probes” who essentially did the bidding of Cameron and the other techs back in mission control. Not being “allowed” to carry a gun (even to defend themselves!) was like the ultimate slap to the face…and something, I seem to recall, that the second producer on the show realized was a huge mistake, as only in the very final episodes of Search did you see one of the Probe agents even carrying a gun. 

Weverka tries to cater to the setup of the show while not having Lockwood appear to be an automaton. Unfortunately he only suceeds in making Lockwood seem passive-aggressive. Cameron will give an order, and Lockwood will grumble under his breath, or pretend not to hear the order. But then, Lockwood is nagged at through the entire book (and series). One of the techs is an attractive young lady who has an interest in Lockwood – as most women do, we’re informed – and there’s a lot of stuff where she’ll mutter angrily when some girl’s “heart rate picks up” when Lockwood talks to her. 

So essentially, Search is almost like a play from Ancient Greece, with Cameron and the other techs like the chorus who push Lockwood through the narrative, making all his decisions, etc. But we’re told that Lockwood was “the last Probe agent” to have the ear implant put in, etc – and, by the way, there’s no mention of the other two agents who featured in the series, so the book is like the show in that it never occurred to anyone to maybe have all the Probe guys meet up for an adventure or something. 

Despite being a guy who is constantly obeying the voices in his head, Lockwood we’re to understand is still a firebrand, a rule-breaker who picks up the chicks with aplomb. We meet him in this capacity, hooked up with some babe on “his first vacation in months,” but in a foreshadowing of the nagging and hectoring Lockwood will endure throughout the novel, Cameron starts talking to Lockwood through his ear implant right before Lockwood’s about to do the deed with the babe, and our poor hero has to send the girl off so he can scramble for New York, to be briefed on an emergency case. 

The case is also an indication that this is a TV show with a TV show rating: Lockwood is to find some diamonds that were stolen by the Nazis in the war. His company has been hired by a South African diamond firm that has bought the rights to the diamonds, they just need to find the damn things, and so they’ve hired World Securities. As a Probe agent, Lockwood is the one who gets to head over to Austria and talk to the old lady who was last known to have these diamonds…which were given to her by none other than Herman Goering! 

Along for the ride is Harold Streeter, the dapper employee of the South African company that hired World Securities (John Gielgud in the movie). His is the “comedic relief” role, serving up the jokes while Lockwood is the traditionally stoic protagonist. And throughout we have Cameron and team yammering in Lockwood’s ear. Weverka does a good job of conveying the setup; he refrains from annoyingly referring to Cameron’s voice as appearing in Lockwood’s ear, and just leaves it as “Cameron said” or “Cameron asked,” etc. But of course in the show, whenever Cameron would talk to Lockwood, we would see Burgess Meredith in a lab coat back in Mission Control. 

The story is very uninvolving, and reading the book it reminded me of why I fell asleep while watching the tv movie. I mean this was probably 2014, and I still remember falling asleep. Lockwood and Streeter find the old lady, Frau Ullman, who got the diamonds from Goering, but Lockwood of course is more interested in her hotstuff blonde daughter, Ullie (Elke Sommer). So we get the bantering stuff with the lady back in control getting her panties in a bunch because Ullie’s heartbeat increases when Lockwood talks to her, etc. 

Action is sporadic; like here at the Ullman estate Lockwood and Streeter are shot at from afar. Here is where we also get more reminder that Lockwood is not a self-sufficient troubleshooter as is typical of the genre. He relies on Cameron and team to give him intel on the situation, intel on his enemies, and also ideas on how to escape or fight back. It’s cool for Lockwood and all, but at the same time it robs him of his heroic qualities. 

Note though that Lockwood doesn’t kill anyone, not in the entirety of the book (or the entire series itself, so far as I can recall). He mostly gets in fistfights, reminding us again that this is the novelization of an early ‘70s TV show. That said, Lockwood does (eventually) get laid, courtesy Ullie, who tags along with Lockwood when her mother goes missing. I half expected Cameron and crew to give Lockwood step-by-step instructions while he was having sex, but our hero “goes offline” and handles the job himself. But novelist Weverka goes offline as well; “[Ullie] was voracious in her appetite for repeated fulfillment” is the extent of it. 

There is an attempt at globetrotting, denoting your typical Budget Bond; from Austria Lockwood follows leads that take him to…Florida! Eventually he finds himself mixed up with a bunch of old Nazis, many of whom are also looking for those lost diamonds. But still there isn’t much in the way of action, just Lockwood knocking people out or getting knocked out himself. And so far as the latter goes, once again Cameron and crew come to the rescue, coaxing Lockwood back to consciousness and giving him tips on how to escape his captors. 

It’s a strange and unwieldy setup, and granted it actually worked better on film, where quick cutting to Cameron and the others would add more drive to the action scenes. But on paper, where it all has to be explained in words, it only serves to make Lockwood seem incompetent, and constantly needing the support of control. Again this takes me back to the Space Race connotations, as the astronauts themselves often complained that Mission Control treated them like automatons, there to push buttons. 

Also in the tradition of a TV show, it all comes to a head with exposition. Lockwood keeps getting ambushed, wherever he goes, and neither he nor Cameron are capable of figuring out who the (clearly obvious) traitor is. So for a climax we have the traitor outed, via dialog, while Lockwood just stands there. And even here in the finale he doesn’t shoot anyone or even hold a gun. 

Reading this Search novelization makes it all the more clear why the show was not successful. It’s too talky, too slow-moving, and the protagonist is stymied by the technology. Compare to the later – and much more successful – Six Million Dollar Man, which did a far better job of incorporating “gee whiz” technology and a competent, self-sufficient protagonist.

The Butcher #14: African Contract

The Butcher #14: African Contract, by Stuart Jason

April, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Well, first the good news: James “Stuart Jason” Dockery for once writes an installment of The Butcher that isn’t a retread of every other volume he wrote, meaning that we don’t have the recurring template that I’ve nauseatingly complained about for the past several reviews of this series. But that brings us to the bad news: African Contract isn’t very good. It isn’t very good at all. 

This is a shame, because once again James Dockery proves himself a pretty good writer. But man, his plotting is so bizarre that even Russell Smith would get frustrated by one of Dockery’s books. Because once again Dockery takes a novel about a former mobster turned government assassin – Bucher the Butcher, of course – and, instead of the inner-city action piece one might expect from that setup, he turns in a tale where Bucher goes on a safari in Africa…oh, and apparently gets married! 

The reader knows he (and I’m sticking with the old-fashioned “he” instead of “they,” ‘cause we all know there’s no woman anywhere ever who would read a book titled The Butcher #14: African Contract, don’t we? I mean, let’s be honest!) is in for a bumpy and unusual read when African Contract opens, not with the series template opener of Bucher in some unstated city being dogged by two colorfully-named Mafia goons, both of which Bucher will gun down before being briefly arrested by a slackjawed yokel cop…but instead, African Contract opens with Bucher already in South Africa, already on a job – and indeed, there is no part where he is stalked in some city and briefly arrested, etc. (BTW I was trying to see how far I could stretch out that sentence.) 

Granted, that part will come later, but this time Dockery grafts his usual recurring schtick within the storyline proper (such as it is). So we don’t get the customary scene of Bucher being arrested, the slackjawed yokel cop going on about how illegal Bucher’s silencer is, etc. This does not mean that African Contract is wholly new, though; there are trace elements of Dockery’s previous installments throughout. 

Most notably would be #7: Death Race, an earlier tale in which Bucher, would you believe, fell in love, and you get a no-prize if you guess what happened to the gal in question. This time Dockery throws an old flame of Bucher’s on us, with little in the way of setup; Bucher’s in South Africa, on his latest assignment, when there’s a knock at his hotel room door…and he’s shocked to see his old girlfriend, blonde beauty Franziska, a South African babe who “picked Bucher up” on the street in Paris, years before, and Bucher immediately went for the gorgeous young college student with her “plump breasts.” 

It seems that Bucher was already a White Hat agent when he met Franziska, as it’s stated he was “on a mission” when she threw herself on him in Paris; at any rate, she calls him “gunslinger” as a pet name, so she is aware of his mob background. But here’s the thing: Franziska was the most important woman in Bucher’s life (though obviously we’ve never heard of her)…but Bucher thought she was dead! There’s a hazy backstory that she flew back home to South Africa, but the plane crashed, and Bucher was devastated for days because he thought she was gone. 

But now here the blonde is, alive and well – and what’s more, she’s a doctor, now. (Dockery isn’t very specific on how much time has passed, btw). She explains that she got off the plane when they had a stopover, and she herself later heard of the crash; further, she claims she sent Bucher a cable telling him that she was still alive, but Bucher never got any cable…so he’s just staggered that Franziska is still alive, after all this time. 

But Franziska isn’t done with the revelations yet – she also says she was pregnant at the time, but did not tell Bucher…however, the baby was stillborn. I mean all of this is a lot to dump on a guy who thought you were dead (for how many years we do not know), but still one would think Bucher would be a little suspicious of Franziska…especially because it soon develops that the mob knows Bucher is here in South Africa, and they’re sending people to kill him! 

Oh and Franziska has become a doctor due to the loss of her and Bucher’s child, and Bucher takes her back into his arms, and she will be the sole female character in the novel. But, anyone who has read the previous Dockery novels will know he is a “fade to black” sort of writer when it comes to the sleazy stuff; there are zero sex scenes in African Contract, and, also as is customary for Dockery, there is zero exploitation of Franziska. About the most we get is a bit, bizarrely late in the novel, where Dockery suddenly decides to write about her boobs:

Another thing the veteran reader of The Butcher might note from the above excerpt is that Franziska talks like every other female character in the series. A very highfalutin, reserved, “I rarely curse or use contractions” sort of demeanor, so Bucher cleary has a type…not to mention this is another facet in the (eternally?) recurring plot of Dockery’s installments – every novel sees Bucher in a sort of purgatory in which he experiences the same sequence of events, meets the same sort of woman, over and over again. 

Another thing the cagey reader might’ve noticed from the above is that Franziska refers to Bucher and herself as “husband and wife!” And mind you, this is Chapter 10 of the novel, and this is how the reader actually learns the two have gotten married! Poor Bucher is really head over heels for this girl he thought was dead…this is after 9 chapters in which Franziska acts increasingly suspicious…like for example she takes Bucher on a trip into the jungle in her “bush buggy,” and despite being a doctor she’s got this tricked-out truck that’s positively stuffed with weaponry, from rifles to machine guns. And when Bucher questions her on the necessity of this stuff, she has an explanation for each thing, like charging rhinos and whatnot, and Bucher accepts her explanations, and you wonder how this guy became such a top mobster (not to mention special agent). 

The main plot has to do with Bucher trying to figure out if the Mafia has started up a “replacement parts” deal where they give new human organs to old and dying mobsters. What’s been happening is that high-level mobsters who were previously old and near death have suddenly shown up looking younger and healthier. And also one of them was about to turn state’s evidence, or something, and exploded, and the theory is that these replacement parts might be booby trapped or somesuch. 

But as usual with a Dockery Butcher, all this is just background detail. Dockery does cater to his recurring template, just a bit out of the typical order: two superdeformed goons do inevitably come after Bucher, in the jungle no less, but Bucher easily dispatches them. There’s also a lot of stuff with various tribes Bucher and Fraziska encounter in the jungle, in particular one that is led by a guy who speaks in perfect British English, courtesy an education abroad. 

There’s also a lot of “flying fiction,” which harkens back to #10: Deadly Doctor and #11: Valley Of Death, in which Bucher suddenly became an aviator – which might indicate that Dockery had read those two installments, which were courtesy Lee Floren. Here Bucher flies an STOL around the jungle…I mean folks the title is not misleading at all. This one’s really an African Contract, and it’s more about Bucher on safari than it is the gritty action tale you might expect. 

Action is infrequent and, as ever with Dockery, fairly bloodless. Honestly, The Butcher is an anemic series in Dockery’s hands, not to mention how little it has in the way of sleazy exploitation. That said, there is still a ghoulish vibe to the series, mostly courtesy the dark humor Dockery brings to his plotting. But the thing is, Bucher must consistently be made to look stupid, as he overlooks obvious things…and, once again, the finale is a nightmare of exposition as everything is patiently explained to Bucher. This too is part of the recurring template of Dockery’s books. 

Overall, there isn’t much to recommend African Contract. I mean, saying “at least it isn’t a retread of the previous volumes” isn’t the most sterling endorsement. But what we get in exchange is so lackluster that a retread would’ve actually been preferable. Also, someone entirely new to the men’s adventure series will suspect something is amiss with Franziska’s story, but Bucher has proven himself in past Dockery installments to be a fool when it comes to women. 

At this point, I am looking forward to when Michael Avallone takes over The Butcher, but that won’t be for many more volumes – not until #27, to be precise.

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror, by Lionel Derrick

February, 1982  Pinnacle Books

Boy, we’re getting into the homestretch of The Penetrator, aren’t we? At this point there are only a few instalments left until #53, the series finale. And I’m happy to say that Mark Roberts continues to show a new investment in the series, as Quaking Terror is for the most part a bunch of goofy fun, Roberts doling out juicy gore and explicit sex with aplomb – meaning there is none of the half-assedry of the past twenty-some (or more!) volumes. 

I kind of hoped it would be the case when I saw the cover (credited to George Wilson on the copyright page), and I’m happy to report that Quaking Terror is indeed Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin versus a vampire! Not just any vampire, either, but Count Dracula! Granted, Roberts doesn’t go all the way with the setup, but it’s evident that he wanted to. Throughout the book he walks a thin line that the novel’s villain is either Dracula or just some nutjob Eastern European named Magarac who merely thinks he’s Dracula. Otherwise the horror-action hybrid you might be hoping for doesn’t really exist in the actual novel, as Mark Hardin spends the majority of the 200 pages gunning down technicians and guards who work for the would-be vampire. That said, Quaking Terror does at least end with a chainsaw-vs-chainsaw showdown between the Penetrator and Count Dracula! 

There’s also some of Roberts’s typical continuity, as one of Magarac’s men worked on the vibrating “super gun” that Mark destroyed way back in #21: The Supergun Mission. This is what Magarac-Dracula is using to set off volcanoes around the United States, in order to get a ransom from the government. Roberts ties into the then-recent Mount St. Helens eruption, implying that Magarac was behind it, and is now looking to set off more volcanoes. Given that there are limited areas where Magarac can carry out this plan, the entirety of Quaking Terror occurs in Washington state. 

Speaking of topical references, Mark Roberts even finds the opportunity to mention Mork & Mindy; Magarac breaks over the airwaves of the United States just as “Mork had climbed into his Orkan egg.” This line actually took me back; for no reason whatsoever, it made me remember a Mork & Mindy toy some kid in elementary school had at the time (I would’ve been seven years old when this book was published), and I really wanted one of my own, but I never got one. It was this cool little Mork action figure that came with an egg, and I’d completely forgotten about it over the past four friggin’ decades, until I read this line in Quaking Terror. I guess I must’ve really wanted the damn thing, as here I am 50 years old and I still remember it – well anyway, here is the toy. 

Continuing on, Magarac breaks over the TV airwaves to make his threat – sort of how Max Headroom hijacked signals a few years later – and this causes panic across the US. In particular the Mafia gets involved, putting together a hit squad to take out Magarac, becase he’s infringing on their territory. Or something. It’s reasons like this that leads me to conclude that Roberts wanted to do a straight horror-action hybrid, but felt straitjacketed by the conventions of the series. So instead of vampires, the Penetrator fights mobsters and henchmen, and Magarac stays off-page for the majority of the text. 

This is unfortunate, as Roberts really builds him up in the opening. For one, he looks more like Nosferatu than Dracula; Wilson’s cover art is great, but Roberts actually describes Magarac as being “egg-bald [with a] long, lobey head and over-large ears, all flour paste white so that the huge, smoke-gray eyes and nearly lipless gash of a mouth made stygian holes in a skeleton mask.” Ten points for the creation of the word “lobey,” by the way. Magarac also has a dwarf “familiar” named Koslov, who prepares Magarac’s victims – usually employees who have failed him in some way – for a “life bath.” Meaning, their veins are opened and Magarac does something with the blood, though it’s never outright stated if he drinks it. But boy, Mark Roberts ultimately drops all of this in the course of the novel; hell, the dwarf doesn’t even appear again, and there’s no part where Mark Hardin kicks him or anything. I mean, and spoiler alert, but Koslov the dwarf familiar is dead when the Penetrator comes upon him, at the very end of the novel! 

Mark Hardin doesn’t appear in the book until page 28. Roberts spends the preceding pages in exposition overload; we have an overlong bit where a scientist goes on and on about volcanoes and what sets them off and etc…and then, humorously, the scientist is killed off like a page later. But this guy was friends with Professor Haskins, ie the Penetrator’s mentor, or whatever the Professor is to the Penetrator. I mean, it’s not like he’s the M to Mark’s Bond. He doesn’t give Mark orders, or do much else. Well anyway, who cares; the series is almost over, anyway. 

So Mark heads to smalltown, Washington (he does not visit Seattle in the entirety of the book), Roberts of course taking the opportunity to engage in some of his flying fiction as he tells us about Mark’s plane and his flight. One thing to note though is that Mark comes fully stocked this time; in the course of Quaking Terror he uses a riot shotgun, a Mac-10 submachine gun (referred to as an “Ingram M-10”), various pistols, and even once again he uses Ava, his dart gun – with both the knockout pellets and the “instant kill” pellets. So again, the ferocity has somewhat returned to The Penetrator, and Mark avidly kills the majority of his opponents, instead of knocking them out like he was doing for a long, tepid stretch of the seeries. 

This is displayed posthaste, as Mark when he first appears in the text gets in a big gunfight with some of Magarac’s men around the base of a volcano in Washington. Mark guns them down and then heads into a small town on his plane, where he soon hooks up with a small-breasted, “raven-haired” beauty named Carrie who waitresses at a local bar…but is also a college student who is studying the psychological aspects of vampires. Magarac has been seen in the vicinity, and Mark looks to Carrie for info on vampires…cue even more page-filling exposition, as Carrie goes on and on about historical “vampire” cases. 

Here is where we learn of all the mysterious disappearances in the area, with blood-drained bodies showing up, and Mark will spend the time wondering if Magarac is really a vampire and if he’s really been drinking the blood of his victims. Meanwhile Mark gets it on with Carrie, though Roberts does not go for the full-bore exploitation as he would in the later Soldier For Hire. Or, for that matter, as he did in some of the earlier volumes of The Penetrator. But we do get a winner of a line when Carrie strokes Mark’s “pendulous, rising maleness…to fullness.” Sadly though Roberts denies us any similarly-goofy sleaze in the actual sex scene, with Mark castely “turning out the light” before he gets busy with the gal. 

Roberts does deliver a fair bit of action throughout. Mark not only blows away scads of technicians and thugs who work for Magarac, but he also takes on the Mafia. This is courtesy Lucky Lou Battaglia, a gunner from Chicago who has been hired to wipe out Magarac, but instead finds himself running afoul of the Penetrator himself. As ever Mark makes short work of these goons, to the point that you figure if the Penetrator swapped places with The Executioner, the Mafia would be finished off in a few volumes. Roberts injects a fair bit of gore into the tale, though as ever he it as if he’s consulted a copy of Grey’s Anatomy: 

For the most part, Mark Hardin spends the majority of the novel going around Washington, from one Magarac location to another, and shooting up his men – or shooting up the mobsters who are supposedly looking for Magarac. There’s a lot of repetition in the narrative, too; Carrie is abduced by the mobsters midway through the novel, and Mark rescues her humorously fast. But then, Carrie is abducted again later in the book! There’s also a page-filling bit where Mark has to quell a rebellion among the American Indians in town, who feel they are getting blamed for the earthquakes or somesuch. Honestly this part seemed grafted on. 

Which again makes it a shame that so little time is spent with Magarac himself. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Mark launches an assault on the villain and the two come face-to-face…or perhaps that should be chainsaw-to-chainsaw. Apropos of nothing, Magarac grabs one up when Mark is chasing him, and Mark picks up one of his own…it’s pretty wild, even if it’s just a goofy way for Mark Roberts to establish that a tree stump is conveniently chainsawed into a handy stake! 

Overall, Quaking Terror is pretty entertaining, and it’s nice to see the Penetrator acting like his old self. But it’s a shame the “vampire” stuff isn’t more dwelt upon, so either Mark Roberts didn’t think he could make it work, or perhaps he didn’t get buy-in from series editor Andy Ettinger.

The Liquidator #4: Invitation To A Strangling

The Liquidator #4: Invitation To A Strangling, by R.L. Brent

No month stated, 1975  Award Books

The penultimate volume of The Liquidator is another good one, the mysterious R.L. Brent turning in another fast-moving pulp thriller that has the vibe of a ‘50s Gold Medal paperback, only brought into the ‘70s. Brent also gets back to the continuity of the first two volumes; whereas the previous volume was sort of a one-off affair, Invitation To A Strangling continues with the storyline initiated with the first volume: Jake Brand’s war against the Mob in general and mob honcho Vincent Orsini in particular. 

Once again we have a cover blurb from King Features, but what I’ve failed to mention all this time is that the blurb refers to this as a “tough cop series.” Jake Brand is not a cop! Sure, he originally was, but The Liquidator is no more a “tough cop series” than The Lone Wolf is. Indeed, the two series are pretty similar, what with the setup of a tough former cop going out for justice on his own, but of course Lone Wolf is a bit more shall we say “surreal” in its treatment of the subject.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Liquidator was also one of the very few men’s adventure series to attain any sort of critical attention – at least judging from the cover blurbs – which makes it odd that the series disappeared for three years after this volume. After Invitation To A Strangling, The Liquidator did not return until 1978’s The Exchange, which dropped the cover design of the first four books and also dropped the volume numbers entirely. It was also published by Charter, not Award, so perhaps the Award-Charter transition played some factor in the delay of the fourth volume. 

As usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Invitation To A Strangling picks up on threads from the second volume; Gwen, the hotstuff babe who was a mobster’s girl in the first volume before becoming Jake Brand’s girl, returns to the series – for a brief time, at least. I’m not giving away any spoilers, as the title of this fourth volume refers to Gwen’s fate, and also the back cover tells us exactly what happens to her. Long story short, Gwen has been living in hiding in the (apparently short) time since the second volume; she’s staying in Raleigh, North Carolina, boarding with an older married couple who were acquaintances of Brand’s. 

Meanwhile the Mob has figured out where Gwen is. Orsini tasks a scar-necked thug named Monk Simon with fronting a team of Syndicate assassins to do the job; in R.L. Brent’s typical gift for hardboiled prose, we are told that “[Monk] wanted the job almost as much as Robinson Crusoe must have wanted a piece of ass.” Monk has a personal score to settle with Brand, as Monk was arrested by the man himself once upon a time. Monk puts together a team of misfits who seem to have come out of The Butcher; ironic, then, that one of the misfits is even nicknamed “Butcher,” which makes me wonder if R.L. Brent was intentionally referencing that other men’s adventure series. 

Orsini further instructs Monk that he is to kill Gwen and the couple she is staying with, and make it such a gory scene that the story will be picked up nationally, so as to ensure Jake Brand will hear about it and come running to Raleigh, where Monk and team are further instructed to kill Brand when he shows. Finally, Orsini – who by the way looks more like a kindly grandfather than a mob boss, we’re told – tells Monk that the women should be raped before being killed. “Fringe benefits,” as Monk thinks to himself. 

As I read Invitation To A Strangling, I couldn’t help but think that this was a plot tailor-made for Manning Lee Stokes. I could only imagine the lurid novel he would’ve turned in; Stokes worked a rape-strangling scene into practically every novel he wrote, and that’s the entirety of Monk Simon’s plan in this one. But whereas Brent covers the grisly topic in a taut, gripping chapter, Stokes probably would’ve spent at least a quarter of the novel on it, if not more. But, as evidenced by the title and spoiled by the back cover, Monk and team are successful – and, by the way, Brent is not too exploitative in the rape-murder sequence, which would be another difference from how Stokes would’ve handled it. 

Indeed, Gwen’s fate is left off-page, and Monk isn’t even the one who does her in; he enjoys his “fringe benefits,” having lusted after the sexy and well-built Gwen for a long time. After he’s had his fill, Monk turns Gwen over to one of the “Creech brother,” simian misfits (one of ‘em being the “Butcher” guy), and it’s one of them who strangles Gwen during the act. Brent is sure to dig the knife in us readers, though, having opened the book with Gwen pining for Jake and hoping she’ll see him again – even having refrained from sex in the time she’s been in Raleigh, as she’s so hung up on Brand. 

As for Brand himself, he’s busy getting laid. There’s no pickup from the previous volume; Jake (as Brent most often refers to him in the narrative) is just laying low as usual from the mob and he’s been thinking about Gwen lately. After knocking off a hippie-type pimp who thinks he might collect on the mob’s bounty on the Liquidator’s head, Jake heads to Raleigh to see Gwen again – and meanwhile, we readers already know that Monk and crew are going there that very night to kill her. 

Brent avoids what otherwise would have been a hard-to-buy coincidence; Jake’s car breaks down in some no-name town, and the local mechanic takes a couple days to fix it. And meanwhile the guy’s hotstuff daughter-in-law, a busty blonde former cheerleader, makes her interest in Jake clearly known; her husband was killed in ‘Nam, and she’s lonesome and horny as hell. As with previous books, Brent delivers a sex scene that’s somewhat explicit but not full-bore sleazy, with lines like, “The sound she made when he entered her resembled a growl.” Brent as I’ve said many times before is a pulp writer who knows his stuff; I particularly appreciate how he always finds the opportunity to mention the breasts of female characters. 

So as we know from the back cover, Jake arrives too late to save Gwen. And he doesn’t go on as big of a warpath as one might expect; indeed, Jake takes the loss with a sort of nonchalance at first, though Brent gradually builds up Jake’s true feelings as the narrative progresses. Not that this stops Jake from picking up another chick; Leila, another hotstuff babe (in true lone wolf fashion, Jake Brand always picks up hotstuff babes), this one a redhead who works as a reporter for a Raleigh newspaper. 

Jake’s seen the media coverage of Gwen’s murder, of course, and knows it’s a mob setup. He also knows Orsini is behind it. There’s a cool bit where Jake deals with two of Orsini’s backup assassins, who are staying in the house across the street from Gwen’s. The female assassin in particular is set up very nicely, but there’s no hanky-panky between her and Jake; she’s just out to kill him for the Organization. These are the types of action setpieces Brent delivers throughout, by the way; The Liquidator does not go for big action affairs a la The Executioner, and instead it’s usually just Jake with a .45 (his favored gun) or a .38, taking on one or two opponents. 

And meanwhile Jake gets laid again – courtesy Leila. Jake sees her on the news, comments on how hot she is, and seeks her out. I’m not sure why Brent didn’t just make the character of Leila a TV reporter; Jake sees her on TV because Leila is being interviewed. At any rate, she writes for the local paper, and has researched the murder, so Jake hunts her down for info. Leila will prove to be the main female protagonist in the novel; Brent delivers a few somewhat-explicit sex scenes between the two (ie, “[Jake] slid deeply into her welcoming warmth,” etc). 

Leila also makes possible an injection of Blaxploitation into the world of The Liquidator. As ever R.L. Brent cuts across a broad group of characters, from Jake Brand to the mobsters who are out to kill him, and from sequences with the latter group Brent has cagily dropped mention of a superfly black pimp waltzing around the streets of Raleigh. Monk Simon sees the guy, notices him doing un-pimp things like buying milk at a convenience store. Gradually we learn this is Sugar Boy Hollis, “one of the ten best-dressed macks in the southeastern United States,” as Leila puts it; she often pays the pimp for underworld info. And also, we learn Sugar Boy bought the milk due to a stomach ulcer! Unfortunately though, he’s only in one brief scene, providing Jake with the very useful info of where Monk and his crew are staying. 

Brent keeps the action moving, and there are no slow parts in Invitation To A Strangling. Even the sequences from the perspectives of Monk and his crew are entertaining, given the author’s skill. Which makes it all the more of a mystery why R.L. Brent – supposedly Larry Powell – did not go on to write more books. There’s a fight in an alleyway in which Jake is nearly run over, and also Jake’s takedown of the sadists who killed Gwen is effectively handled. Also these scenes again remind me of something I’ve mentioned before: Jake Brand is not the best strategist. Often he just storms into a situation with no consideration of how he’ll get out of it, but of course he manages to win due to his stubborn resolve. 

There’s a third girl in the story, a college co-ed who is the daughter of the couple Gwen was living with, but Brent doesn’t do much with her; she only factors into the finale, when Jake is taken to a cabin in the woods where Monk thinks he’s going to take out the Liquidator. Even here Brent goes for a realistic approach, and in fact Monk’s sendoff is somewhat of a surprise, but still effectively handled. Otherwise the takeaway from this finale is that Jake Brand is willing to put his life on the line to save an innocent person – as mentioned, Brent also effectively conveys how Jake’s sense of loss over Gwen’s murder gradually affects him more and more, to the point that he makes selfless decisions to prevent more innocent lives being taken. 

Other stuff I appreciate was how Leila, the newspaper reporter, intended to do a feature story on the Liquidator – and by the way, it’s official that this is Jake’s name, now, as both he and Orsini refer to it. There’s also an appearance by Jake’s mentor, a retired old cop named Nate, who tries to work with Leila to convince Jake to give himself up before the Mafia can kill him. 

Invitation To A Strangling ends with Jake Brand deciding to lay low for a while; “he knew how to disappear,” Brent informs us in the closing pages. The last we see of him, Jake is boarding a bus to Virginia, and he’s considering growing a mustache to change his appearance. It would appear he was very successful in disappearing; as mentioned, it would not be until 1978 that Jake Brand resurfaced, in The Exchange. With a plot concerning mob involvement in the porn industry, this is one I might check out sooner rather than later. 

Summing up, The Liquidator is one of the better men’s adventure series from the ‘70s – it’s better even than the majority of the bestselling crime novels of the day that I’ve read – and Invitation To A Strangling is another strong entry.

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.