Hung By The Thumbs

I think I'm about done with Pinnacle's Dakota series. 1975's CHAIN REACTION, the fifth in Gilbert Ralston's series, is so dull that I could hardly finish it. Really, I spent the last chapter and a half speed-reading, even though this is where the allegedly thrilling climax occurred.

Ralston spent the 1960s and the first part of the 1970s as one of television's busiest writers, penning episodes of major dramas and adventures like HAWAII FIVE-0, I SPY, GUNSMOKE, STAR TREK, and THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR. He also penned the screenplays for WILLARD and its sequel BEN, which were based on his novel about A Boy and His Rat.

By the time he created Dakota, a Native American private eye, Ralston appears to have left Hollywood behind to churn out cheap paperback novels. Unfortunately, CHAIN REACTION reads like a rejected MANNIX script. It lacks excitement and mystery, the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large, and many scenes exist of filler dialogue telling us stuff we either already know or don't care about. Sort of if a writer was trying to stretch a 50-minute screenplay to a 180-page manuscript.

CHAIN REACTION starts promisingly about the murder of an Indian woman who is found in an abandoned house, tortured and hung by her thumbs until death. Her teenage daughter enlists the help of local private dick Dakota, who drags his best pal and the victim's two brothers to Oakland to investigate. Precious little action and lots of driving around occur.

I liked the first Dakota adventure okay, but two others that followed left me wanting.

New Battles In Today's West

This Dakota novel is a heckuva lot better than the last one I read. That one, #3 in Pinnacle’s series, felt clichéd and tired. But WARPATH (1973, Pinnacle), the first Dakota adventure, is much better. It still reads like a typical 1970s network cop show—picture Robert Forster or Clint Walker as the lead—but it also presents a decent mystery, plenty of action, and quite a body count.

Dakota is a Native American ‘Nam-vet private investigator based in a small Nevada town. An old friend, Sam Lew, asks him to speak to a young woman whose husband was killed in a fire. The authorities claim it was an accident, but the woman, Amy, believes murder was involved. Dakota isn’t sure either way, until an explosion kills both Sam and Amy.

Now convinced to poke around the case, Dakota checks out the mining town where Amy’s husband’s death occurred. It’s one of the those typically sinister small towns where everyone knows everyone else in town, they all distrust strangers, and the whole place is run by the local rich guy, Burton Ashley, who, of course, owns everything, including the bank and the newspaper.

It lacks the hardcore action of a Death Merchant novel or the gimmickry of a Penetrator, but WARPATH is still worthy of the Pinnacle name on its cover. The hardbitten hero is easy to root for; not only does he take no shit, but he’s also frequently the recipient of racist barbs that put us in his corner. The action highlight is a siege that strands Dakota in the desert against five armed men.

Author Gilbert A. Ralston was better known as a screenwriter who, among other credits, wrote the pilot episode of THE WILD WILD WEST. When the bloated movie remake was in production, Ralston sued Warner Brothers for royalties. He died in 1999 before he could collect, but his heirs reportedly pocketed a settlement worth somewhere around a cool million bucks.

Sleek, Ruthless, Cunning

MCCLOUD meets NAKIA is a good way to describe CAT TRAP, which is Pinnacle's third entry in its paperback series about Dakota, a Native American private eye. Using then-current television series to describe CAT TRAP is apt, because of its author, Gilbert Ralston.

Ralston was a veteran producer and writer of television series whose credits include ROUTE 66, BEN CASEY, THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR, I SPY, THE WILD WILD WEST, STAR TREK ("Who Mourns for Adonis?") and nearly every other important drama of the 1960s. In film, he penned the screenplays for the campy horror classic WILLARD and the brutally violent western THE HUNTING PARTY.

I'm not certain how much prose Ralston wrote, but CAT TRAP reads very much like a Universal television show, light on sex and violence and a waste of a potentially memorable villain. Also, in opposition to other Pinnacle action heroes, Dakota has a very large supporting cast—friends, an extended family and a lover who all appear to live in or around his Nevada home.

Two disparate heart attack victims are revealed to have been killed by a rare poison, and the killer is Guy Marten, a madman previously thought to have been killed in a house fire. A worshipper of Bastet, an ancient Egyptian cat goddess, Marten and Dakota would appear to be worthy adversaries for each other, except we never learn very much about Marten or his state of mind.

Perhaps Ralston originally intended Dakota to be the leading man of a TV pilot, but as a rough adventure hero, he doesn't quite cut it. Conventional plotting and characterizations take precedence over the action and sleaze factors, which barely exist.