The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter

The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter, by Jim Peterson

June, 1973  Pinnacle Books

I’ve been looking forward to this volume of The Executioner for several years now. Even though it’s hated by hardcore fans of the series, Sicilian Slaughter sounded interesting to me because, for one volume at least, it was as if Bruno Rossi or Frank Scarpetta got hold of the keys to the kingdom: the refined, skilled touch of Don Pendleton is gone, and for once “hero” Mack Bolan comes off as vile and sadistic as the mobsters he’s up against. 

Per his interview with William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, Pendleton himself never read Sicilian Slaughter, and never knew who wrote it – however he clarified that he held no ill will toward whoever did write it. Young himself was unable to find out how’d written Sicilian Slaughter, but we know now that it was William Crawford. Young did reveal something I’ve not read anywhere else: That Pinnacle was ready to keep The Executioner going as by “Jim Peterson,” a house name that would be filled by a revolving cast of ghostwriters, and Pinnacle even mocked up covers for the next Peterson volume (which turned out to never be published), Firebase Seattle. This is a mystery I’ve chased for a while, and I have some of the details I discovered below. 

It makes sense that Crawford got the “Peterson” gig first, as at the time he was sort of being groomed as Pinnacle’s flagship author. The imprint published several of his books, even devoting full-page ads to them. And having read a few of Crawford’s novels it was clear to me from the get-go that he was indeed the author of Sicilian Slaughter. Most of Crawford’s hallmarks are at play: an asshole protagonist, rampant misogyny, interminable digressions concerning one-off characters, perspective hopping, periodic sermons to the reader on the shittiness of the world, and an overall dispirited vibe. One Crawfordism that does not appear is the typically-mandatory scene in which a character shits his pants or pukes his guts out. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told him to reign that in. 

But then, Ettinger seems to have done some tinkering to Crawford’s manuscript, as it’s more streamlined than most of Crawford’s other bloated books. And also there’s a lot of flashbacks to previous Executioner volumes, so either Crawford did some serious research (which doesn’t seem likely from what I’ve learned about these contract writers) or Ettinger went into the manuscript and added these touches. I suspect the latter, given that Pendleton also told William H. Young that Andy Ettinger wrote the prologue for the following volume, Jersey Guns: this volume saw Pendleton’s return to the series, and given that he refused to read Sicilian Slaughter it was up to Ettinger to pen the prologue. 

And it’s a good thing Pendleton did refuse, as there’s no way he could’ve retconned Sicilian Slaughter into his overall storyline. The one thing we know about William Crawford, thanks to Will Murray’s research in his 1982 article about Nick Carter: Killmaster, is that he was a cop. Thus Crawford sees Mack Bolan as a criminal; he has absolutely none of the heroism Pendleton gave him. In this novel Bolan shoots unarmed people, murders a woman (in a very sadistic manner), gets another woman to take a severe beating for him, threatens a cop, and basically just acts like an asshole throughout. Even established relationships are skewed; Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man in the Mafia, basically hero-worships the Executioner in Pendleton’s novels, as evidenced by the various “what a man!” reflections he’ll have when encountering him. Turrin shows up in Sicilian Slaughter as well…and thinks to himself what a “pain” Bolan is, wondering if he should just turn him in to the capos and be done with it! 

Turrin was also in the previous volume, and Crawford tries to pick up the story from directly after. Bolan’s shot up and bleeding and heads to an underground doctor Turrin told him about years ago. Here we quickly see that this isn’t your grandma’s Mack Bolan when our “hero” decides he’s going to have to kill the doctor who just saved him. But as it happens the doctor has ulterior motives of his own and is about to call in some gunsels and collect the bounty on the Executioner. Meanwhile of course our hero has a surprise of his own in store for the good doctor. Bolan is a mean-spirited son of a bitch throughout, almost identical to other s.o.b. Crawford protagonists, like Stryker. But he’s a lot more action-prone than others, carrying along an artillery case of heavy firepower. I’m betting Crawford also had military experience – I know he also published some Vietnam War novels – as evidenced by the firearms and military details sprinkled throughout Sicilian Slaughter. 

Bolan decides to take his war directly to Sicily; this was set up in the previous volume with Bolan getting irked that the American mobsters were starting to import new blood from the mother land. The sequence in which Bolan flies to Italy is like something out of The Marksman or The Sharpshooter; the “Mack Bolan” here could easily be Philip Magellan or Johnny Rock. First he threatens the sleazy private pilot into the job, and then, in the most outrageous moment in the novel, Bolan decides to get rid of the pilot’s busty assistant. She, uh, deserves it, though, given that she’s a former hooker and drug addict and works as a stringer for the Mafia – and plus she’s recognized Bolan and plans to snitch on him. As if it wasn’t enough to show Mack Bolan killing off an unarmed woman, Crawford has it happen in the most vile way possible – the girl’s naked, offering herself to Bolan in the cabin, and Bolan coldly shoots open a window so that she’s sucked out, screaming in terror, thirty thousand feet above ground! 

What’s surprising is that series editor Andy Ettinger even allowed this material to be published. If there’s anyone Pendleton seems pissed at in his intervew in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, it’s Ettinger. And one can see his point. It’s surprising that the series editor and the imprint would even publish Sicilian Slaughter with its sadistic “hero;” it makes it very clear that they just saw The Executioner as product, something they had to get on the book racks at a certain date to keep up the publishing cadence. They couldn’t have cared less about the mythic hero the series creator had painstakingly built over the preceding fifteen volumes. In fact, the editorial embellishments throughout make it clear that Ettinger was indeed involved in Sicilian Slaughter, and one would think he’d be like, “No, Mack Bolan probably wouldn’t blast some nude and unarmed girl out of an airplane.” 

To be sure, though, I like this crazy stuff and always have, and if this had been a volume of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman it would’ve been one of the best installments of either series. What I do mind is Crawford’s typical penchant for undermining himself; his books come off like bloated bores what with the constant background detail on one-off characters, just egregious crap that’s there to meet the word count. Even the buxom victim has several pages devoted to her sad-sack history, which only further undermines Crawford, given that the reader sort of feels sorry for her…and then the “hero” mercilessly kills her. But then perhaps it’s intentional on Crawford’s part, more indication that he saw the Executioner as a villain. But then again, it’s surprising that the sequence even made it into print, given that the guy who’d served as series editor for the past fifteen volumes was involved. Surely someone at Pinnacle must’ve figured that at least some readers might be shocked by all this, but apparently the driving goal was more to get the product in the stores. 

Another annoying penchant of Crawford’s is that he’s never consistent in what he calls his hero in the narrative. It’s either “Mack” or “Bolan” or “the man in black” (which made me think Johnny Cash had suddenly become the Executioner), and it’s never consistent. But then this is one of my pet peeves, and others might not care. I just personally feel that the author should refer to his protagonist by only one name, and one name only; other characters can call the progatonist by various names, but the author should be consistent. And I’m willing to fight for my beliefs! Sorry, lost the thread there. And also Crawford fails to make “Mack” (or “Bolan,” or whatever) likable. Even Magellan, in all his “cutting-the-heads-off-my-victim’s-corpses” insanity was still at least somewhat likable, if only because he was so batshit crazy. But Crawford’s version of Mack Bolan is like all of Crawford’s other progatonists: he’s just a prick. 

Another thing that bugs me about Crawford’s prose is that he uses this half-assed “omniscient” tone, in that he’ll tell us stuff, while otherwise limited to Bolan’s perspective, that Bolan himself doesn’t know. For example, Bolan might shoot somebody, and Crawford will write like, “Bolan blew out Eddie the Champ’s heart,” or somesuch. But the thing is – Bolan doesn’t even know who Eddie the Champ is! For all he knows, it’s just some random mobster thug. Yet we readers know who it is, because Eddie is one of the many one-off characters we’re saddled with in the narrative, a former military dude hired by the Sicilian don to train some troops. And all this stuff here is just lazy retread of the previous volume, with the troops being trained pure military style, with barracks and hiding out in foxholes and whatnot, all of which is sort of ridiculous because it’s like they’re being trained to invade a country or something, not to act as enforcers for dons in American cities. 

And indeed, the climax is basically like a military novel. Bolan, after having blitzed his way through Italy and even posing as a simple country boy to get to Sicily – which entails him hooking up with some busty local babe and having some off-page lovin’ with her – ends up on the training fields of the Mafia recruits and starts mowing them down (in spectacularly bloodless fashion) with heavy weaponry. Here Crawford shows what appears to be some military background, with sidebars on strategy and also the efficacy of the Browning Automatic Rifle. There’s also weird survivalist stuff, like when Bolan’s shot in the back and kicks in a tree, grabs out the “thick spider webs,” and stops the flow of blood with them. Speaking of which Bolan comes off as a brazen, reckless fool in Crawford’s hands, displaying none of the superheroic planning of Pendleton’s original. Several times Bolan will just storm his way into some situation and realize he’s gotten in over his head. 

But one thing I can say about Crawford’s version of Bolan is that he’s mega-tough. Bolan goes through a lot of pain in this one, shot up and beaten and just in general abused, and he just keeps on going. He starts and ends the novel in a half-dead state. Crawford again goes places Pendleton likely wouldn’t when Bolan, late in the novel, shoots up with some morphine to combat the pain. However he’s not a hero by any means; I’ve already mentioned how the poor local girl gets beaten to a pulp for being suspected of having helped Bolan, and all Bolan does is watch from safety and swear to himself he’ll “make it up somehow” to her. But Bolan’s motives are purely driven by sadistic rage; not content to merely kill the Sicilian don, he goes to great lengths to destroy the man’s entire villa so as to prove a point to the rest of the Mafia. 

An interesting element of Sicilian Slaughter is the finale, which cuts to Seattle and features a muscular dude in his 40s with gray hair named Mr. Molto. This guy runs a sort of underground military operation, and has just been hired by the Mafia to kill the Executioner. Molto has an extensive operation, and via computer has deduced that Bolan’s next strike will be in Seattle. This epilogue – which I’m betting was written by Ettinger – clearly sets up the stage for the following volume, same as how Panic In Philly ended with an Ettinger epilogue that set up this Sicilian adventure. However, the Mr. Molto subplot would never be mentioned in any future Executioner novel. 

As mentioned above, William H. Young stated that Pinnacle had done mockup covers for the next “Jim Peterson” novel, Firebase Seattle. Given the title, it was clearly intended to follow up from the climax of Sicilian Slaughter. This Peterson novel was never published, as Pendleton and Pinnacle worked out their legal issues and Pendleton came back to the series for the next volume, which was titled Jersey Guns. Pendleton did eventually turn in a novel titled Firebase Seattle (I assume using the cover originally designed for the unpublished Peterson manuscript of the same title), but obviously it had nothing to do with the events set up in Sicilian Slaughter. 

This means then that the closing material with “Mr. Molto” was never picked up on, and thus the villain remains a mystery in the Executioner universe. I knew that Gil Brewer had written an unpublished volume of The Executioner, and for a long time I suspected that he’d written the unpublished sequel to Sicilian Slaughter. In other words, I had a hunch that Gil Brewer had been hired to be the next “Jim Peterson.” A few years ago I got my confirmation: the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming has Brewer’s unpublished Executioner manuscript in its Gil Brewer bollection, and friends, it’s titled…Firebase Seattle. And for a mere $50.00, you can get a copy! (They charge 20 cents per page for jpeg copies, and it’s a 248-page manuscript.) 

So I wager that Mr. Molto does indeed appear in Brewer’s manuscript, and further I wager Brewer’s manuscript would have more Andy Ettinger embellishments to keep everything simpatico with the series overall. But I’m certainly in no hurry to fork over so much to read it. Gil Brewer was a great writer, but judging from his work on Soldato he wasn’t a great men’s adventure writer. But if anyone out there wins the lottery and decides to check out the manuscript, let me know!

Soldato #4: Murder Mission!

Soldato #4: Murder Mission!, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1973  Lancer Books

Gil Brewer turns in his second and final installment of Soldato, once again proving that, despite his talent as an author of hardboiled mystery yarns, he really couldn’t cut it as a men’s adventure writer. I can only assume he didn’t understand the genre – not that the genre is very complex or anything – and that he did his best to wing it over the course of 190-some pages. I mean folks the “climax” of this one features Johnny “Soldato” Morini hiding a room…for like 15 pages. 

Actually Morini is a former soldato, aka Mafia soldier, and Brewer again does a swell job of reminding us of his past and how he’s still hooked on the girl he was married to back in the earliest volumes. Brewer does at least invest the series with a lot more emotional weight than the genre average, but really is that what any of us are here for? Morini in Brewer’s hands is too pensive, too given to self-doubt and uncertainty; he’s comparable to Len Levinson’s interpretation of Johnny Rock in the first two Sharpshooter novels he wrote, The Worst Way To Die and Night Of The Assassins. Then editor Peter McCurtin gave Len the advice that his version of Rock wouldn’t last, that Rock must be more driven, more prone to violent action – that he must “kill with cold hate,” a phrase that spurred Len into turning in one of the better installments of the series, Headcrusher.

I guess there was no editor on Soldato to give Brewer any such advice. Thus we must endure Morini’s frequent anxieties, and while we’re often told of his burning hatred for the Mafia, very rarely does he do anything about it. In fact he goes out of his way not to kill at times. More unintentionally humorous though is his supposed helper slash “best friend,” Riley, the lawyer who set Morini up in his current capacity of one-man army for a cancer-ridden old Mafia don who wants to wipe out his former brothers. Riley does absolutely nothing to help Johnny (as Brewer refers to his protagonist, so I’ll start doing the same) for the majority of the tale, and most of the time tells Johnny not to call him! There’s a ridiculous amount of antagonism between the two, particularly in how Riley expects Johnny to do everything on his own and acts like it’s a huge pain in the ass to even answer his occasional phone calls.

There’s no pickup from Brewer’s previous volume, and when we meet Johnny he’s in New Orleans, already having established himself as “Bacchi” for local Don Marno. The gist of the series is that Johnny goes undercover in various Mafia families, busting them up from within; his operating parameters seem to be “kill everyone,” as Riley and his Justice Department cronies aren’t really looking for arrest warrants or anything. Johnny’s got a lot of problems this time, and one of them’s that the real Bacchi, a Chicago soldato, is in prison; Johnny’s pretending to be the guy, the story going that he busted out of prison and is now looking for a job with Don Marno. Of course, before novel’s end the real Bacchi’s Don will come down to New Orleans to hook up with Don Marno, adding a bunch more tension to the tale.

And as if that weren’t enough, the photo taken of Johnny in the previous volume has been destroyed, but L.A.-based Don Sesto got a drawing made of it, a drawing by a professional artist, and he’s flying around the country to show the various families this drawing. I mean he can’t mail it or anything. I mean the dude’s literally walking around with a single drawing, the thing covered in protective glass and everything, and showing it to other Dons across the country. The whole subplot is so ludicrous you have no choice but to just go along with it. Johnny manages to fix this guy, though, in one of the novel’s more tense scenes: Don Sesto just happens to fly into New Orleans after midnight, and Johnny chases him along a deserted highway before crashing him into a lake and getting in a brutal life or death struggle with him. A curious capoff here is that, when Riley belatedly arrives on the scene, he insists on taking the drawing instead of destroying it, like Johnny wants to. Given Riley’s general half-assery throughout, I almost wondered if Brewer was developing a subplot that Riley would eventually sell Johnny out, hence his keeping this drawing that could cost Johnny his life.

We get a quick reminder that this isn’t your typical men’s adventure series; the opening sequence introduces us to Don Marno and his orbit of followers, including his heroin-addicted brother Milo. There’s also a six year-old kid the Don treats as his own; the boy’s mom is Helena, Marno’s disowned daughter. There’s a subplot about Marno having killed Helena’s husband because he wasn’t worthy, and also Helena is hooked on heroin and etc. To Brewer’s credit, none of this goes where you’d expect: while Helena is introduced in a scene where she screams at her dad to be able to see her son again, she wants to be accepted back into the family and still has Mafia in her blood. Also, despite being the prettiest woman Johnny’s ever seen, our hero doesn’t get lucky – Johnny’s really a sad case when compared to his men’s adventure brethren, friends – other than a quick kiss. Indeed, Helena will go further than any other character to do away with Johnny…not that he does anything to get her out of his own way, even once he’s figured out what a threat she poses to him.

But this opening bit with Don Marno lets us know what we’re in for: a lot of talking, a lot of scheming and plotting. Don Marno is up against two rival local Dons: “Fats” Faturo and Logari. As with previous volumes, Johnny will try to engineer a war between the families…at least, that’s how it starts out. Instead the onus of the plot becomes more about Johnny trying to protect his identity, with more time placed on his fretting – and eating in restaurants and diners – than on action. The back cover even promises that in this one Riley will be taken captive, which hints at some action or at least tension; instead, the subplot’s over and done with in about twenty or so pages. A couple of Fats’s men get the jump on Riley, Johnny as “Bacchi” hears about it, and that night – after a big meal – Johnny puts on black clothes and springs Riley from the warehouse where they’re holding him. Riley doesn’t even thank him!

Speaking of meals, the novel is very much of a different era. Johnny’s constantly smoking or pouring himself a drink; before any action he’ll hit a very heavy meal, like a couple steaks and etc – plus “five different vitamins.” In fact Johnny seems to drink quite a bit in the course of Murder Mission, to the point that I wondered if it wasn’t some in-jokery courtesy Brewer…that it was more of an indication of how much Brewer himself was drinking as he ground out the manuscript. It’s clear though that he struggles with the basic tenents of this genre; the action scenes, for example, are almost dashed off, with more focus on the talking, the scheming, and the introspection. And Johnny is much too consumed with guilt for a men’s adventure hero; we’re even informed he sometimes sees the faces of the men he’s killed in his sleep – even the men he killed in self-defense. 

For that matter, Brewer fails to grasp basic action-telling principles. I mean no one could ever confuse Johnny Morini with Mack Bolan. For one, Johnny’s only ever armed with a Colt Cobra .38. Not that there’s a problem with this, I mean .38 revolvers were pretty much the standard firearm for ‘70s crime fiction. But the problem is the way it all goes down. For example, there’s a part where Johnny abducts Helena and ties her up in an abandoned building, to be collected by Riley (who of course bitches that Johnny has troubled him with this task). But Helena manages to get herself loose, call Milo (Marno’s junkie brother), and has him come over with some soldiers. So Johnny’s standing there in the room, sees three guys walking down a hallway toward him…and he runs away! This leads to a tense chase, at least, but still – dude, you’ve got a gun, and they’re all just walking toward you, conveniently bunched together. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but our hero instead desperately rushes for the window.

Even worse is the supposed finale. As “Bacchi” Johnny manages to talk Marno into hosting the rival two Dons – as well as the real Bacchi’s Don, from Chicago – on his yacht. Johnny gets some explosives from Riley (cue more bitching – seriously) and secretly sets them up…then for some belabored reason, he boards the yacht and must be present until right before the explosives go off, I guess to ensure everything works or something. But since he’ll quickly be outed as an imposter when the Chicago Don sees him, Johnny pretends to be sick and sequesters himself in a stateroom. This goes on for pages and pages. The ship moves further into the ocean, heading for the Gulf of Mexico, and hours later Johnny’s finally confronted by drunk goombahs who demand to see “Bacchi.” He manages to jump off the yacht as they start shooting at him; at least Riley proves his worth here in the finale, arriving on the scene in a helicopter to pick him up just before the ship blows.

I brought up The Executioner and again, as I mentioned in my review of the previous volume, I finally got confirmation that Gil Brewer was the mysterious author who was hired by Pinnacle to write the followup to Sicilian Slaughter (which was by William Crawford). I’ve read before that Don Pendleton often mocked an unpublished Executioner manuscript, one that had been sent in by some contract writer, and I’ve often wondered if it was Brewer’s manuscript Pendleton was mocking. While the writing itself is fine – the introspective stuff does add depth to the storyline, even though it’s unnecessary depth – the basic stuff you want from this genre is lacking. I mean imagine Mack Bolan hiding in the stateroom of a yacht for twenty-some pages in the climax of a Don Pendleton novel.

Lorna’s Lust For Men (aka Ladies In Heat)

Lorna’s Lust For Men, by Dee Laye
No month stated, 1981  Beeline Books
(Original publication 1972)

Originally published in 1972 as Ladies In Heat, Lorna’s Lust For Men is by none other than Gil Brewer, here posing as “Lee Daye;” the original ‘72 publication was credited to “Luke Morgann.” Apparently the book went through several permutations, reprinted under a variety of titles and author names, but these days all of the editions appear to be as rare as hen’s teeth; I luckily came across this latter retitled reprinting at a nice price and, uh, snatched it up.

Now this is a sleaze novel pure and simple – it isn’t just an otherwise-standard hardboiled mystery yarn with an added “risque” element, like some of those earlier so-called sleaze novels were. This one’s all screwing, all the time, with at least one explicity-rendered banging per chapter. I’m supposed to enter the standard caveat that it’s “a shame a writer of Brewer’s caliber had to stoop to porn” and whatnot, but to tell the truth I went into Lorna’s Lust For Men eager to see how Brewer would handle sleaze, and sure enough he does manage to deliver a somewhat-entertaining plot amid the graphic sexual situations.

One thing to note – this retitling makes no sense so far as the actual plot goes; titular “Lorna” only appears in the first chapter. It’s my assumption someone at Beeline just lazily checked this first chapter when coming up with the latest title for this old Brewer novel. Another thing to note is that I only assumed the novel took place in Brewer’s typical location of Florida; we’re informed the town is named Howesville, but Brewer doesn’t do much to bring it to life or tell us anything about it – other than the incredible amount of swap parties that take place there. As one orgiast later notes (while having sex, in fact): “The whole town’s gone batty.”

It’s really hard to review a book like this; the majority of it is comprised of hardcore smut, and while I was tempted I decided not to quote any of it lest anyone get truly offended – for it is pretty sleazy. It’s always crazy to see what these hardbitten drunk old hardboiled novelists are capable of, and Brewer doesn’t let us down. The novel’s as profane as can be, with practically everything, from the narrative to the dialog, having to do with unbridled sex. There’s also some stuff that wouldn’t be publishable today; most notably, while Lorna gets the titular spot in this later edition, the girl our hero spends the most time boffing is named Emily…and she happens to be fifteen years old. And her young age is only seen as an enticement for more boffing.

Anyway our hero is Booth Landers, a professional painter who I assume must be in his early 20s, and this because we learn that “two years ago” he graduated from college. We don’t get much info on his job but he seems to be a painter for commercial accounts; early on a “soda ad” is mentioned. But otherwise the painting aspect has nothing to do with anything, other than the steady stream of willing models Booth gets to screw over the course of a few days. In fact, we meet him as the lovely redheaded Lorna is imploring him for sex – she’s been lusting after him the past few days, particularly after catching a glimpse of him and his eight-inch “pecker” in the shower here in his studio.

Straight out of the gate we see what we’re in for, as Booth and Lorna energetically screw over seemingly endless pages in full-on graphic splendor. We’re to understand that this is a first for Booth; he’s never had sex with any of his models, happily married to a “big blonde” named Verna. And folks guess who just happens to walk into the studio as Booth and Lorna are having round two? That’s right: Verna, who freaks out at the sight of Lorna sitting atop her husband and “slobbering over his dick.” She takes off, and Booth regretfully ends his time with Lorna, who drops from the narrative and never shows up again, so it’s clear the good people at Beeline didn’t put too much thought into the title of this edition.

Booth goes home but is unable to talk Verna out of dumping him, so he takes his stuff and goes back to his studio – just in time to have sex with another model, this one named Cherry. It’s revealed that all of his models have been lusting for him, and now that Lorna broke the dam they’re all bound and determined to have their way with him. So there ensues yet another hardcore a-doings, with yet another intruder coming upon Booth mid-boink: Dr. Lester Doyle, a local sleazebag who lost his license over an abortion years ago. He’s been keeping himself occupied by blackmailing Booth and has come for his latest payment.

Brewer displays his hardboiled background with this subplot: Booth, according to Doyle, raped a young woman two years ago, and now he’s got to pay every week to keep her from going to the cops. The belabored story has it that the girl was actually gang-raped, with Booth being the one who held her down while his buddies took their turns after him. This was after their graduation party, and all the other guys have returned to their homes; since Booth stayed here in Howesville, he’s the only one who can be successfully blackmailed by Doyle – the girl came to him for treatment after the rape and confided in him. Eventually we’ll learn though that she wasn’t raped: it was more of an orgy sort of affair, with the gal getting off on pretending to be taken advantage of by a bunch of guys in the woods. Whatever, we’ll roll with it.

Even here Brewer manages to cater to the sleazy whims of his editorial demands: Coyle plays pocket pool as he watches the half-nude Cherry waltzing around the studio. In a typical hardboiled story, Booth would no doubt be planning how he could kill Coyle – the only people who even know about the supposed rape and the blackmailing are Coyle and the “victim” – but instead Booth has been paying to keep the doctor’s mouth shut. Now though with Verna leaving him he’s not as worried about his wife being told of the incident (one of Coyle’s threats), however he’s still frantic he’ll go to prison if Doyle tells the cops (another of Coyle’s threats). Instead he sends the doctor off, telling him he’ll pay later.

The novel is like Blue Dreams taken to absurd hardcore proportions. For within days of becoming separated from his wife, Booth’s had sex with sundry hotstuff women, only of course this being a sleaze novel the sex is much more explicit than in that earlier, superior novel. And also once again the sex is taken to such extreme levels that it reaches gross-out proportions; Booth is forever “washing off his dick in the sink” and rushing to his next XXX engagement. Throughout Brewer tries to incorporate actual “novel stuff:” Booth’s studio is trashed while he’s out screwing some latest babe, and there’s a running mystery of who did it, and also he has a few confrontations with Verna, determined to reunite with her. As I say Brewer seems to be having fun, like when Booth gets angry at the suspicion that Verna’s already having sex with some new guy…and then realizes that he himself has been with five women in the past day.

Oh yeah and befitting the early ‘70s publication date (of the original edition at least), swap parties are all the rage: Booth goes to about five of them over the course of the novel, each time escorted by his latest model girlfriend. Chief among these is Emily, the aforementioned teenager; of all the female characters in the novel, she has the most sex scenes with Booth and takes him to a couple swap parties. Another running thread is that Booth keeps hearing that Verna is going to be appearing at these orgies, yet he never finds her at one. Oh and one of these orgies features one of the greatest lines of dialog I’ve ever read (not to mention another indication of Brewer having fun): “Put your whang in me, Alivin.”

Booth does finally come across Verna at a swap party, late in the novel, giving an energetic bj to some dude, something Booth learns she’s done for several other guys just before him. “This is my wife!” A naked Booth shouts to the assembled swappers. “She’s been sucking everyone off! Now I’m gonna fuck the shit out of her!” (Actual quotes from the book, mind you.) Thus Booth forces himself upon his wife as everyone watches, and it only occurred to me much later that cagey Brewer had worked rape into the resolution of this subplot – Booth’s troubles with Dr. Coyle being based on a supposed rape, and Booth’s repairing of his relationship with his wife via an actual rape. Not that Verna much minds it, given that she’s all worked up anyway. After this Booth even forces her to give him one of those super bjs, after which the two delcare their reborn love for one another and leave the orgy(!).

But as if we haven’t had enough orgy action, we get another one immediately after this; Booth and Verna have some dialog back home, accepting one another’s infidelities and deciding to have an open, swinger-friendly relationship. Also, Verna admits to having wrecked Booth’s studio, but offers to pay for repair. All that settled, they head to another orgy straightaway – there seems to be several of them going on at any given time here in Howesville – and here the climax plays out, so to speak, when Booth spots none other than Dr. Coyle engaging in the hardcore activities. Not only him, but also the young woman who accused Booth of raping her, two years ago. Booth again shouts to the assembled throngs, informing them of the good doctor’s blackmail attempts and the girl who lied that he raped her. He then proceeds to beat up Coyle, and he and Verna go off happily together.

And that’s it for Lorna’s Lust For Men, aka Ladies In Heat, etc. Hopefully this overlong summary will save others the trouble of actually reading the book. I mean not that it’s bad – as a purefire sleaze novel with explicit sex it’s certainly a success – it’s just that anyone hoping for a glimpse of what Brewer’s truly capable of will come away dissatisfied.

Soldato #3: Strangle Hold!

Soldato #3: Strangle Hold!, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1973  Lancer Books

Gil Brewer takes over the Soldato series with this volume; he’ll remain for the next one. It’s clear he read the previous two installments, courtesy Marvin Albert, as Brewer often refers back to the events of the first and second volumes. I was curious to see how Brewer would handle men’s adventure, and for the most part he turns in the same sort of book he was known for: a hardboiled yarn heavy on suspense and tension, with little in the way of the action or thrills you’d get in, say, the average installment of The Executioner. 

Speaking of which, Brewer wrote a never-published volume of The Executioner in the ‘70s, and it was always my suspicion that he was going to be Pinnacle’s next “Jim Peterson,” following on from William Crawford’s Sicilian Slaughter (aka the infamous sixteenth installment of the series which creator Don Pendleton never even read). The other year I had my suspicion confirmed when I discovered that Brewer’s unpublished manuscript was indeed titled Firebase Seattle, a title Pendleton himself eventually used, given that Pinnacle had already come up with a cover for it (as Pendleton relates in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction). However Brewer’s yarn would’ve been the true sequel to Sicilian Slaughter that we never got, and I’d love to read it…but it costs a whopping $200 for a jpeg copy of the 240-page manuscript which currently resides in the Gil Brewer collection at the American Heritage Center.

Judging from Strangle Hold, though, those two hundred bucks might be better spent elsewhere; while Brewer’s writing is fine, delivering much more character depth for titlular Soldato Johnny Morini than previous series author Albert ever did, the story ultimately fizzles out into too much stalling and repetition, and Brewer constantly fails to exploit his own material. The book is also much too long, coming in at 222 pages of small-ish print – however Brewer is too much the pulp veteran to turn in a slow-moving tale. Even though not much happens, it always seems that something is about to.

But the first half is really nice because as mentioned Brewer gives Johnny a lot of depth. We meet him as he’s still holed up in Los Angeles, drinking more than he should, and still thinking about his ex-wife, last seen in the first volume. Johnny even goes to the trouble of visiting her, only to be told by her mother that she’s not home; a cool scene here as the phone rings, Johnny’s ex mother-in-law answers it, and it turns out to be for Johnny. Brewer captures the general paranoid vibe of the ‘70s here, with Johnny constantly being monitored by Riley, his ex-Fed handler; Riley later even informs Johnny that his ex was upstairs all along, and her mom was lying to Johnny.

This thread is dropped, though…and folks believe it or not there’s zero female companionship for Johnny in the entire novel. In fact Brewer doesn’t even deliver any exploitation of the novel’s sole babe; from Play It Hard I assumed we’d at least get a bit of that, but Brewer’s very conservative here with the sex and the violence. For the most part Strangle Hold is just a Mafia novel, with Johnny going deep undercover as an L.A. bigwig, sent down to Tampa to oversee the activities of the Florida mob. 

Riley doesn’t appear much, this time. He summons Johnny to a dingy hotel in New Jersey, turns him over to another handler, and heads out. Johnny’s assignment is to fly back to L.A., take out a guy named Frank Lott, and head down to Tampa to bust up Don Remo Paragluci, who seems to be putting together a combine with two other Florida dons. Lott is a member of the Syndicate Committee or somesuch, basically the corporate wing of the Mafia which ensures all the various “franchise” families stay in order. Then Johnny’s new handler is blown away – the novel opens with Paragluci knowing that the Feds are onto him, and sending someone off to kill Riley – and Johnny runs from the cops, who think he’s the one who pulled the trigger.

Once Johnny’s captured the real Lott, interrogated him, and left him tied up for Riley to collect, our hero flies down to Tampa…and here the novel loses its frenetic pace. As “Frank” Johnny bulldozes his way through Don Paragluci’s domain; Johnny’s idea is that it’s “expected” he’ll be a hardass, given that he’s from the Committee, so he pushes boundaries at every opportunity, constantly testing the old don’s temper. He also runs afoul of little Nevito, Paragluci’s creepy younger son; Paragluci’s older son has recently been blown away during an attempted hit on soldatos from a rival Tampa don. 

This guy’s widow provides the babe quotient for Strangle Hold; she’s a hotstuff beauty named Lucia who likes to go around in her bikini. Even though her husband’s been dead just a few days, she’s throwing looks at “Frank Lott.” But Brewer ignores this element and goes for a heavy suspense vibe; Don Paragluci, who is prone to sitting around in his office and staring at a print of a Picasso painting he much admires, is planning to get together with two other dons and start up a combine, whether the Committee approves or not. There’s a ton of talking and scenes of fat old Italian guys going over plans for the takeover and whatnot.

Despite the threat of a war with another family hanging over the proceedings, nothing much really happens. Johnny gets reproachful looks from Nevito and continues to bully old Don Paragluci. Then things get weird. Nevito gets jealous when Lucia decides to go to dinner with “Frank,” and Nevito rapes and kills the poor girl off page…this like a day after she’s buried her husband. And what does Johnny do when he finds out? Tells Don Paragluci, who basically shrugs it off as yet another indication of his young son’s growing insanity. I mean there’s no part where Johnny takes up his .38 revolver (which he’s somehow able to screw a silencer onto) and vows revenge, mostly because he’s too concerned about blowing his cover. One hopes Mack Bolan wasn’t similarly emasculated in Brewer’s unpublished Executioner.

But it gets more weird…almost a dark comedy in that Nevito keeps trying to screw over Johnny, suspecting somehow that this Frank Lott is an imposter. Yet in every case someone else saves Johnny’s skin, all of them turning in Nevito’s duplicitous actions to either the don or to Johnny himself, so as to stay in good with the Committee. And it’s very messy, too; Brewer introduces one soldato, mentions that he’s a serial killer, and intimates that he and Johnny might be matching up soon…then the serial killer soldato goes to “Frank” to tell him that Nevito’s up to no good! After which the character is brushed back under the narratorial carpet.

Only in the final pages is there any tension. This comes through two acts: first Nevito snaps a photo of “Frank” and sends it to LA to ensure this is really the right guy. Secondly Johnny decides to heist the real Picasso Don Paragluci loves so much(!?). Conveniently, it happens to be at a nearby Tampa museum. This happens after Nevito has failed to steal the painting, desperate to impress his dad, and is nearly caught in the bargain. Another incident the don decides to forget. So Johnny goes off on his own and steals the painting in a tense but protracted and arbitrary sequence, particularly given that it happens toward the very end of the novel.

The absolute worst part is that Johnny is a bystander in the climax. Riley’s shown up and attempts to stop the mail and prevent Nevito’s package of photos from getting through, but fails, and now the clock is ticking. Johnny quickly sets up the various dons so that they converge on a restaurant, then works Don Paragluci up into a lather and sends him and his boys off to wipe them out. Johnny gets in a car chase, trying to prevent a group of thugs from getting to the restaurant before the don – lamely enough, they just got a phone call from L.A. telling them “Frank Lott” is an imposter.

But all the various villains gun each other down while Johnny watches from afar. Even little prick Nevito, who we’ve waited for Johnny to blow away the entire novel, is rendered his comeuppance by a squad of cops who show up on the scene, having been summoned by Riley. After this Johnny hops in a car with Riley and heads home, bitter about the life he leads…perhaps not nearly as bitter as the reader for having endured such a subpar but initially-promising book.

Don’t get me wrong, Brewer’s writing is fine, save for a strange fascination with the recurring phrase “beneath the wheel” every time a character gets in a car to drive (ie “Johnny got beneath the wheel”). This phrase was a new one to me; I mean I can see “behind the wheel” as making sense, but “beneath” makes it sound like all the characters are midgets. Anyway, here’s hoping Brewer’s next one is better.

Manhunt, February 1956 (Volume 4, Number 2)

This February 1956 issue of Manhunt is a special thing indeed, as it features the first of two stories Herbert Kastle would contribute to the magazine. I’ve wanted to read either of these stories for a long time, but it took me a while to track down one of the mags Kastle appeared in. His story is “They’re Chasing Us!,” and while it’s entertaining, it is hard to compare to Kastle’s later lurid masterpieces like Ladies Of The Valley.

Kastle was new in the writing field in ’56, still credited as “Herbert D. Kastle,” thus his name isn’t even headlined on the cover. And his story is buried toward the back, though of course I read it first. It’s only a few pages long (double-columned pages like all the other stories are, though), and it concerns a pair of brothers named Sid and Mel. In their 40s, the two share an apartment with Norma, Mel’s woman, though Sid lusts for her – a harbinger of future Kastle material is that this story features a guy who lusts after a woman who belongs to someone else and who successfully pressures her into having sex with him.

Sid and Mel are crooks, making their living knocking over stores. They want to get out of the hellhole of Brooklyn, though Norma complains that their neighbors, who have go-nowhere jobs, are actually doing better. This is proven at the start of the tale, with Sid returning to the apartment after the latest robbery and discovering they didn’t come off with as much cash as expected. Meanwhile, he bullies Norma into sex, which Kastle of course keeps off-page. When Mel comes back he instantly figures out the two have been screwing, but he’s cool with it. Another Kastle mainstay – the screwed-up “family” in which the single woman is shared, a la Cross-Country.

Then someone knocks on the door, claiming to be from the phone company, and the brothers instantly figure it’s the cops. They escape, there are gunshots, they shoot at some cops while they run. They abandon Norma back in the apartment. Mel’s shot in the ass and Sid manages to pull him into a car, taking hostage some random woman on the street as they go – they pistol-whip her and dump her. An underworld doc fixes Mel up in the back seat while Sid drives around, and the tale ends with Sid realizing their cash is low and their chances even lower, but he’s going to try to get them to safety.

This is a fast-moving tale and Kastle has the hardboiled vibe down pat; the brothers carry .38 revolvers and say all the right tough-guy dialog. But as mentioned it doesn’t feel like Kastle at all; if you were to tell me this was by say Fletcher Flora or Richard Deming or some other random contributor of the magazine I wouldn’t know otherwise. The same cannot be said of the only other early Kastle short story I’ve read, “Game,” which Ed Gorman collected in his anthology American Pulp; that one is pure Herbert Kastle, about a guy who thinks he’s saving some woman from a twisted relationship. I enjoyed that one so much I’ve been meaning to re-read it.

There are a bunch of stories in this issue of Manhunt. I didn’t read all of them. Here are my thoughts on the ones I did read:

“Block Party” by Sam Merwin, Jr – this 12-page “novelette” opens the magazine and concerns another pair of crooks: Tony and Carl, who when we meet them are slipping on “plastic rubber masks” and pulling a hotel heist – one of them’s in a Hopalong Cassidy mask and the other in a Joan Crawford mask, the latter to fool witnesses into thinking they’re “a pair of queers.” They’ve been hired by Dixon to steal the contents of a safe which contains blackmail photos, and they’re free to take their own haul.

But the way these things go, someone dies – Carl accidentally hog-ties the night manager too tightly and he strangles to death. This doesn’t sit well with Dixon, who tells the guys they need to escape to Mexico. He’ll even drive them to the bus stop. But when the car “breaks down” on the drive, Tony figures it’s a rubout; he drives over Dixon and he and Carl get on a bus; the tale ends with Tony figuring he’ll have to kill Carl as well. This one was okay, competently written, but didn’t offer much new.

Up next is an actual novelette, “Sauce For The Gander,” by Richard Deming; this one features a recurring character named Clancy Ross. A gambler who owns the Club Rotunda, Clancy is given zero introduction; about the most we learn is he has a scar on his face. His sidekick is a dude named Sam Black. This overlong-but-simple tale concerns the new Club Rotunda bookkeeper who is murdered by someone, and Ross helps the cops figure it out who did it. Along the way he has run-ins with various Syndicate hitmen and the bookkeeper’s hot widow, who throws herself on Ross for some off-page sex. This sequence leads to the unforgettable line, “I’m not a nympho, Clancy.” Probably the only time these words have ever been spoken. This one’s just overdone, a simple story blown to extreme portions.

Much better is “Fog,” by Gil Brewer, a story recently collected in the Brewer anthology Redheads Die Quickly. It’s the usual Brewer tale about simmering lust that explodes into full-bore sex. It’s about a guy visiting Florida and looking up his old friend; instead he finds the man’s sexy wife home alone, wearing a see-through robe, complaining about the heat, and coming on to him strong. He beats a retreat and goes back to his hotel, only to be called by her late that night. She claims her husband disappeared in the fog that has settled upon town, and the two walk around in it looking for him. It’s a surreal tale which of course leads up to them having hot off-page sex. The cover of the issue blows the surprise end, though – turns out there’s a good reason why we haven’t seen the nympho’s husband yet.

Robert Bloch gives us “Terror In The Night,” a first-person short-short about a woman who has escaped a mental asylum and swears to the narrator that murder and rape occurs behind the barred windows of the place, but our narrator and his wife think she’s making up the story due to her insanity, particularly the part about the bloodhounds sent after her. She runs away. Ends as expected with the narrator and his wife being woken that night by the howls of bloodhounds.

Fletcher Flora turns in “Handy Man,” an entertaining tale about Carey Regan, “handy man” (aka hit man) for Campan, a newly-powerful crime boss who sees Regan as his servant. They started off together, but now Campan’s the big man, so big that he no longer even needs his first name; he’s just “Campan.” Meanwhile Regan’s screwing Campan’s hot wife; he bridles when she bemoans that Regan will “never be more than a handy man.” Campan tasks Regan with killing the Swede, another crime boss. There’s a cool part where Regan sits alone in his apartment, not drinking or smoking or anything else, and lets the “coldness” take him over – then he drives over to the Swede’s place and guns down his prey and his henchman. Story ends just the way you expected it would, with Regan next killing off Campan himself and taking over his operation – “Just call me Regan,” he tells Campan’s widow.

“Killer” is a short first-person tale by William Logan; this one’s similar to “Handy Man” in that it’s about a professional killer. The narrator is tasked by his boss, Mr. Rose, to figure out the leak in the organization; Rose is certain it’s either our narrator or Charlie. Our narrator has a wife named Sue, who turns out to be screwing Charlie, who turns out to be the leak – instead of killing them himself, the narrator calls in Mr. Rose’s goons.

“Job With A Future” is by Richard Welles and is told in first-person present tense; it’s narrated by a 17 year-old who can’t find a job, and eventually gets paid driving the getaway car at robberies. But he’s shot during one, and the tale ends with him dying as he tries to escape.

“Shot” by Roy Carroll wraps up the issue; according to the Philsp site, Carroll was a pseudonym used by a few writers, one of them being Robert Turner. I’m betting this is his work, as the short tale is similar to those Turner collected in Shroud 9. So similar you wonder why this one wasn’t included. It concerns Renick, a regular dude who is shot while walking the crowded city streets, waiting for his wife. He stumbles around in a panic, not knowing who shot him or why; a guy comes up to help him, somehow knowing Rencik’s name. Turns out this is the man who shot him, a professional killer who complains that he actually missed with his silenced .45. Renick escapes him, but the hitman hurls a knife into his back; Renick dies on the city streets, just as a cop shows up. Turns out Renick’s wife was the one who hired the hitman. Cold!

The Hardboiled Lineup

The Hardboiled Lineup, edited by Harry Widmer
September, 1956  Lion Books

I have never been much of a short story reader, but I’ve found when it comes to hardboiled pulp I tend to prefer the short stories to the novels. Maybe because in my mind the more streamlined and focused these noir tales are, the better, and sometimes their plots are so thin it takes a bit of padding to fill out a whole book. Anyway this slim little paperback, 128 pages of fairly small print, really hit the spot – I was in the mood for some hardboiled yarns, and the book really delivered. Edited by Harry Widmer, the tales here are collected from Justice magazine, which Widmer also edited. He doesn’t waste our time with an intro and just gets right into it.

“Las Vegas Trap” by William R. Cox starts things off; it’s from the October 1955 issue of Justice. Told in third-person, “Trap” is the longest story in the anthology, practically novella length. It has the hardboiled feel down pat – a long-simmer tale with a grizzled cast of characters. I’m no expert on hardboiled or noir or whatever you want to call it, but to me the difference between it and men’s adventure is that the former is all about the setup and the latter is all about the payoff. You could read an entire Gold Medal paperback from the ‘50s or ‘60s and it could just be building and building toward something, with the eventual action almost hastily rendered in the final pages. Meanwhile, Mack Bolan could blow away a dozen mobsters within the first chapter of any volume of The Executioner.

And Cox’s story is definitely all about the setup. It opens like a ’55 prefigure of Frank Miller’s Sin City, with gambler Nick Crater (not to be confused with Nick Carter, of course!) having run afoul of Vegas kingpin Makowsky, who more than likely will be sending over his sadistic henchman Buster to beat Nick to a pulp or kill him. Then “zero girl” hostess Meg Bond shows up in Nick’s hotel room – only gradually does he realize how smokin’ hot she is, for some reason – and tells Nick his one shot is to come out with her to her Merc, which despite looking like a “heap” can move like hell thanks to a souped-up engine no one knows about.

The two take off, Nick certain Makowsky’s goons will be closing in, and he’s also uncertain how much he can trust Meg, whom he only knows slightly. But what starts off like one story soon veers into another. Driving through Vegas and on into the periphery of California, the two stop off in nowheresville Suntown, where they grab a motel – Meg actually blushes when Nick asks about the sleeping arrangements, given they’ve checked in as a married couple. Despite Meg’s wishes, Nick goes out to check out the poker game the manager’s having out back. Big money’s at stake, and next morning the manager is dead from a dozen knife wounds.

Now “Las Vegas Trap” becomes a murder mystery; having discovered the corpse, Nick is involved in the scene whether he likes it or not; his main concern is that a photo of him will make it into the paper, and thus Makowsky and goons back in Vegas will see it. The only cop in town, Sloan, is almost casually dismissive of Nick’s shady past; Sloan is certain the murder’s going to be pinned on young Andy Perez, given that he’s Mexican-American and the locals have been historically distrustful of him. Around Suntown Nick goes, gathering clues and meeting people, the most memorable being Myra, widow of the motel owner, a big-boned beauty who, pulpishly enough, is a former lady wrestler.

The finale has the locals closing in on the sheriff’s office, ready to lynch Perez; Nick, Meg, and Sloan wade through them, wielding shotguns and pistols. At this moment Buster shows up in a Cadillac, mowing down pedestrians, and Cox delivers the firefight in that almost outline vibe typical in hardboiled pulp – chaotic shooting in the melee and people falling down. Myra again scores the most memorable moment, catching her husband’s killers – they’re trying to escape in the chaos – getting them in hiplocks, and smashing their heads together! Oh, and Buster’s taken out, his car all shot up – another cool part where Meg blasts her double-barrelled shotgun right into the open door of Buster’s Cad. Meanwhile Nick decides he’s going to marry Meg – the end!

“Justice Is Blind” by Ad Gordon is next, from the May 1955 issue. As Bill Crider notes, this story is unusual in that it’s “about 90% telling.” The story is relayed in almost a summary format, telling us of the torrid affair between stud Tony, a dayworker hired to work the field of wealthy Grasso, and Gina, Grasso’s sexy young wife. We’re informed how the affair started, the two running off into the mansion to screw while Grasso was away, etc. The one day Grasso discovered the treachery and, in one of those moves only possible in fiction, beats up whelp Tony, lashes two saplings together, and ties Tony to them, then cuts the cord, wrecking his body. Gina ends up killing Tony to relieve his suffering – this is how the title is explained, as by law, Gina is the one who killed Tony. The story ends with an unexpected, surprise flashforward in which we learn who has told us the tale.

“Hot Snow” by Vin Packer is another short one, from the January 1956 issue. Taking place solely in a dingy bar, the tale opens with an unkempt young man declaring “I only love the white snow,” much to the interest of a lovely young lady sitting nearby enjoying a few beers. The story is mostly dialog between the two, with what appears to be a budding relationship blossoming – but then this guy comes in, goes in the back, and the unkempt man is called back there: “snow” is in reference to heroin, and this guy has just cleaned up his act and was about to leave for Alaska, but his old supplier knows he will squeal and gives him a fatal “hot shot” of heroin. Then the cops rush in; it’s too late for our unkempt dude, though, and the lady, who is revealed to be a cop herself, watches him die and mutters she never thought the job would be so hard. “You’ll get tough,” one of her fellow cops tells her!

Next is “Living Bait” by Frederick Lorenz, from the May 1955 issue. Our narrator, Roy, is captain of a small fishing vessel in Florida, and he and his sole crewmember, Wiley, who has one arm, are taking out wealthy Mr. Langler and also-wealthy Ms. Starr on a fishing trip. The two are business owners and are discussing a merger. Wiley is the star here; “I got more nothing than anybody,” he boasts, declaring that he too is a CEO in his own way. But when Langler loses a day-long struggle with a big tarpon, he blames Wiley and that night calls him a “one-armed freak.” The two fight, and Wiley’s knocked overboard. Meanwhile Langler claims he was attacked by Wiley.

Despite a big search Wiley can’t be found, and Langler is arrested for murder. Then on a hunch Roy finds Wiley hiding out on a little island – Wiley wants Langler to go to prison, even if he isn’t responsible for “drowning” him. Then Ms. Starr shows up, toting a rifle; she also wants Langler in prison, so she can get his business for a pittance. This one ends with a high-speed boat chase which sees the unfortunate Ms. Starr become sharkbait – eaten up by a great white nicknamed Whitey. I liked this one a lot, the characters were memorable and the action kept moving.

“Scented Clues” by Richard Deming follows, from the January 1956 issue. This one is also in first-person, narrated by a cop named Sullivan. It features a memorable opening, of Sullivan and Sam London, his partner of the past ten years, looking down at the negligee-clad corpse of Marge, London’s wife. This lurid procedural has the two investigating her murder, with the new lieutenant willing to throw the rules out the window and let London handle the case of his own wife’s murder. 

Deming delivers taut prose and good lines, but cheats the reader unecessarily. For one we are told Marge was strangled by someone big, and Sullivan often intimates how he’s a muscular dude, and there’s also how Sullivan acts more torn up over the lady’s death than London himself does. When it develops that Marge was carrying on affairs with multiple men, even keeping a little book with all their names in it (and Sullivan even knows where she hides the book!), Sullivan’s name is in there – and the reader can’t help but think that Sullivan’s the killer.

So too does the new lieutenant, and only here in the final page does Deming reveal that…Sullivan was Marge’s brother!! It’s just a rotten cheat and comes off as stupid because you’d figure this would be common knowledge at the precinct, or even that Sullivan himself would’ve, you know, told the lieutenant straight up. But then, Lost ran for several seasons on the same lame “everything could be solved with just a single simple question” premise. As if trying to top his own lameness, Deming here has Sullivan deduce, while sitting in a chair across from the lieutenant, that it was Sam London himself who killed Marge – an angry Sullivan jumps on him, tries to strangle him, and London admits it. The end!

Up next we have the now-culty Gil Brewer with “Die, Darling, Die,” the title of which made me think of “Die Die My Darling” by the Misfits. This one is from the January 1956 issue as well. A bit longer than the previous stories, but not as long as Cox’s, Brewer’s yarn as ever occurs in Florida, and as ever concerns two characters burning up for each other. Joe Morley is our hero, a guy who just gave up on his fiance and has come here to a hotel along the Gulf to forget about things. Meanwhile he’s got the burnin’ yearnin’ for a raven-haired sexpot named Miriam, who stays in the room across from Joe’s; he spends his days gawking out at her screened porch to monitor when she sunbathes. He’s made his interest known to her, and despite seeming interested herself and kissing him once or twice, the lady is aloof and keeps telling Joe it can never be between them.

Then one afternoon Joe finds a dude sitting in his room – it’s a cop named Thompson, who reveals that Miriam is a “moll,” the wife of bank robber Frank Garrett, and she’s here at the hotel waiting for her husband. Garrett just pulled a job in which he killed his comrades and the cops hope to pin him when he sneaks here to the hotel, but meanwhile there’s also a contract killer on the premises who has been hired by the heist backers, who want Garrett dead for doublecrossing them. But the cops don’t know who the killer is. So now Joe is pushed into working for the cops, who want to exploit Miriam’s interest in him to keep her there – Brewer intimates that Joe and Miriam finally go at it, but it being 1956 and all he leaves it vague whether they do it or not.

The finale sees Garrett’s arrival, and the surprise reveal of the killer’s identity – not too surprising, really, as there are only a handful of characters in the story. While Thompson’s off looking after Garrett, Joe is left to handle the killer himself, but is unable to save Garrett or his wife – “Die, darling, die” being the words Garrett screams to Miriam as he guns her down, as it turns out that Miriam was working with the contract killer to off her own husband. After this bitter ending, Joe figures he’ll head back home and look up his fiance, after all! I enjoyed this one, too, and it is more easily found these days, having been collected in the 2012 Brewer anthology Redheads Die Quickly.

“The Trouble With Alibis” follows; it’s by John Mulhern, from the May 1955 issue, and is one of the shorter tales in the book. This one’s about the owner of a “broken-down ranch” whose shapely but shrewish wife has just crashed her car on an icy road, and our hero figures he might as well leave her there to die – problem solved! She’s been cheating on him (a common theme in this anthology!) and she deserves to die; meanwhile he’s more concerned about the calf he’s left out as bait for a cougar. This one features an EC Comics finale in which our hero finds that he might be joining his wife in the afterlife a lot sooner than expected.

“Don’t Go Away Mad” by Robert Turner follows, from the January 1956 issue. This ten-pager is a breeze of a read, and it too has an EC Comics-esque vibe, the same I’ve noted in the few other Turner crime short stories I’ve read. Our narrator, Connaught, brings us into the action after he and his short-fused partner Briggs have pulled a payroll job. During the escape on foot they’re attacked by a dog, which bites Briggs in the calf; Connaught suspects the dog might’ve been attracted by the hoses he and Briggs are still wearing over their heads. They escape to their fishing cabin in the woods, where Brigg’s sexy girlfriend Julie waits, a brunette nymph who wears “snakeskin” shorts so tight Connaught wonders they don’t split when she sits down. He lusts for her – not to mention Briggs’s portion of the cash.

Then on the radio they hear about the heist, only for the announcer to state that a witness saw one of the robbers attacked by a dog, and the dog has rabies! The announcer pleads with the bitten robber to seek medical attention immediately, otherwise suffer the drawn-out death of hydrophobia. Briggs freaks, Connaught figures it’s a scam to get them to turn themselves in…but then he uses his slim knowledge of animal husbandry to play on Briggs’s growing paranoia, lying to him that the symptoms will set in quickly – symptoms which are really just indications of anxiety. Briggs goes slowly nuts over the next few days, to the point where he beats up Julie, demanding his gun so that he can rob a nearby drug store. Julie brings him the gun, alright – a moment which is sort of captured on the back cover:

Connaught ends the tale with he and Julie in Mexico, six weeks later, and all is great…save for the itch that’s begun to develop in Connaught’s calf, right where an insane Briggs bit him. The first sign of hydrophobia. This was a very entertaining one, my favorite story in the anthology, and it made me glad I finally forked over the dough for a copy of Turner’s sadly-scarce paperback collection Shroud 9.

“The Sinkhole” by James P. Webb, also from the January 1956 issue, closes the collection. This is another short one about a farmer getting revenge on his sluttish wife. It almost has the ring of a Stephen King story, with good old country boy Eli figuring out that his sexy wife Janet is cheating with Barney, a muscular young stud who just bought the farm nearby. Eli mulls over that sinkhole he’s been needing to fill in the backyard. Webb just keeps dragging it out, even though a crayon-sniffing toddler could figure out where it’s going from page one; Eli announces to everyone that he’s going to fill that hole with rocks, but he’ll need help, and hey, that Barney is muscular, ain’t he?

But Eli doesn’t toss Barney in the sinkhole, when the tale comes to the climax, instead pulling a gun on him and telling him to scram and never come back. Meanwhile Janet’s gotten so suspicious, particularly when Barney turns up missing, that she eventually calls the cops – who come over and say they’re gonna dig out that sinkhole and want Eli to stay here while they’re doing it, in case they find something down there they shouldn’t. A cocksure Eli says he might as well go along with them…the end!

I enjoyed each of these stories, even though none of them were knockouts that had me plunging back into a hardboiled kick – the book did at least make me want to read more of Turner’s work, as mentioned, so I’ll be reviewing Shroud 9 soon.

The Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction (Part One)

The Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction, edited by Maxim Jakubowski
August, 1996  Carroll & Graf

Back in late 2015 I was on a hardboiled kick and started in on Maxim Jakubowski’s colossal Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction, which is stuffed to the gills with hardboiled stories. At the time I envisioned a similarly-mammoth post reviewing each story in the anthology, but as these things go my hardboiled kick eventually faded away. I’ve had these reviews sitting around for a while, so figured I’d go ahead and post them now…then someday when I get back to the anthology I’ll do another post of reviews. Anyway, here are the stories I read:

“Too Many Have Lived” by Dashiel Hammett starts off the collection, from a 1933 issue of American Magazine. This tale, narrated by Hammett’s immortal private eye hero Sam Spade, didn’t appeal to me at all. It was something about Spade being hired to to look into a case about a missing guy or something, but I found it all so listless and padded that I gave it up posthaste.

“Flight To Nowhere” by Charles Williams is from a 1955 issue of Manhunt and was later expanded into novel form, published first as Scorpion Reef and then in paperback as Gulf Girl. Narrated by a war vet turned diver named Bill Manning, the story starts off very strong before it gets a little too bloated. In fact as I started to read the story I figured I’d find the unfortunately-scarce paperback, but gradually I decided the short story would suffice. “Flight To Nowhere” just gradually tapers off into too much exposition. It does however have an interesting opening and closing section that’s borderline metafictional.

Our narrator is approached by a hot young gal one day who says her name is Mrs. Shannon Wayne. She wants to hire him to retrieve an antique gun which she claims was accidentally dropped into the ocean. Manning suspects something’s up, and gets verification when the gun is easily found. After a few run-ins with some thugs, Manning finally learns there’s more to the woman’s story. Turns out her husband was a maritime insurance investigator who stumbled upon a cache of diamonds in a plane that crashed in the sea. His plan was to make off with it, but the local goon squad, under the command of Barclay, got wise – now he’s hiding in his home.

It all just gets bogged down as Manning and Shannon shuttle back and forth, gradually falling in love, while the mobsters track them. Occasional action scenes liven things up, like when our hero accidentally drowns a mobster who jumps him at the docks. There’s also a veritable heist as our hero springs Mr. Wayne from his house. But too much of it is relayed via dialog, and the rush of the opening section is soon diluted. Also, Williams fails to bring much to life. There’s a modicum of topical detail in the story; the finale plays out as a long section of all the characters on a yacht as it plies through the ocean, and Williams never once describes the scenery, the tang of the ocean spray, the feel of the sun on their backs.

“Black” by Paul Cain – From a 1932 issue of Black Mask, this short tale is narrated by the titular Black, who is like a go-to guy for criminals. I had a hard time getting into this one, which was like a Yojimbo riff, with Black playing competing gangs against one another, one led by a young guy and the other led by the dude’s stepfather.

“Finders Killers!” is by John D. MacDonald and comes from a 1953 issue of Detective Story Magazine. This is the first of MacDonald’s work I’ve ever read and I really enjoyed it. Narrated by an FBI agent named Russ Gandy, it features a snappy pace, good action, dialog, and plot. Our hero is just about to bust an infamous crook named Torran when his cover is blown; after which he’s asked to resign from the Bureau. Obsessed with catching the bad guy, Gandy gets his private eye license, buys a .357 (which he never even uses), and continues the case on his own.

Torran has just heisted a bunch of money but has disappeared, something he’s notorious for. Our hero, who has learned to think like his prey after hunting him so long, does his legwork and eventually traces him down Mexico way. The finale is like a Jim Thompson thing, taking place in a sunny patch of hell south of the border; the lone female character in the novel turns out to be the villain’s moll, and she’s dead like a few paragraphs after her introduction. The sole action scene has our hero blasting away with the girl’s .25 and recovering the stolen loot – which he uses to negotiate his return to the FBI. While it didn’t have a ton of action or anything lurid, “Finders Killers!” was very enjoyable and makes me want to read more of MacDonald’s books.

“Murder’s Mandate,” by WT Ballard, comes from a 1946 issue of Thrilling Detective Magazine and appears to be about a lawyer or something. I say “appears” because the story failed to draw me in (or perhaps I failed to be drawn in by the story) and I quickly abandoned it.

“Cigarette Girl” is by James M. Cain and comes from a 1952 issue of Manhunt. Cain is another famous crime author I’ve never read. Narrated by a guy named Jack Conner, it’s more of a love story. Our narrator is a composer or some such who visits a honky tonk dive in another city to check out some song one of his musicians claims was stolen from him, or something. But in the bar he meets up with the titular character, a lovely young lady who turns out to be on the run from the local mob. This is a shorty, breezy tale which doesn’t offer much in the way of fireworks but does work as a character piece. Unlike the MacDonald story it didn’t make me want to seek out more of Cain’s work, though. 

“The Getaway” is by Gil Brewer, late in his career, from a 1976 issue of Mystery. This short tale, told in third-person, is about a Mafia hitman named Vincenti who has been hired to take out one of the top dons in Florida. He pulls off the job, saving at the last moment a damsel who claims to have been an abused toy of the don. She’s also a pilot and flies them to safety on her small plane. But then she reveals she was really the don’s daughter, and the code of Mafia requires that she kill her father’s killer, even if she herself dies. They crash into a cliff, the end.

Nowhere up to the standards of Brewer’s earlier work, “The Getaway” could in fact have been written by anyone else. It was interesting though to see a writer from the hardboiled era in the mid-‘70s, with a generally sleazy feel encompassing everything. Also of note is that Brewer employs the term “soldato” a few times, as in a Mafia enforcer; Soldato was the title of a mid-’70s Lancer Books series for which Brewer wrote the third and fourth volumes, as “Al Conroy.”

“Preview Of Murder” by Robert Leslie Bellem comes courtesy a 1949 issue of Thrilling Detective Magazine. I really enjoyed this goofy novella, which is narrated by a PI named Nick Ransom, who tells his tale in what was apparently Bellem’s trademark goofy style. The tough-guy patter in this one is up there with Gannon, with the same bizarre syntax and vocabulary. Bellem was quite prolific in the pulps and it sounds like all of his stories had this same skewed vibe.

A former movie stuntman, Ransom now works as a private eye in Hollywood; this case has him called up by a crippled recluse who turns out to be Ransom’s old pal from the movie days, fifteen years before. Once a marquee name, Ronald Barclay is now confined to a wheelchair, missing both legs and one arm. He lives in a hovel of an apartment building and refuses to allow anyone to see his face; the entire world has thought him dead, but it turns out he’s been living under an assumed name.

The first half of this long story is played out via expository dialog, but it’s such bonkers dialog that you can’t complain. And Ransom is such a hardboiled bastard of a protagonist, narrating the tale with tough guy aplomb, that you wish it would just keep going on and on. But like the Charles Williams story above it kind of fizzles out after a while; Barclay ends up dead, as does the old man who runs the apartment building, and our hero is shuttling around Los Angeles trying to make sense of it all. 

Bellem has all of his pulp cliches firmly in check; the story features an almost token appearance by a sexy babe, this being a former starlet now married to Barclay’s old enemy, a studio bigwig. The lady, who moonbathes nude, comes on strong to our hero, who gives her the bum’s rush. But what starts out as a bizarre tale about a mutilated movie star seeking revenge turns into a rather standard murder mystery, with all of the interesting characters shuffled off the page and Ransom instead chasing after some punk kid. Still though, Bellem’s style is so goofy and memorable that I hope to read more of him someday.

“Forever After” is by Jim Thompson himself and comes from a 1960 issue of Shock. Short and punchy, “Forever After” apparently aims to live up to the title of the magazine. This third-person narrative is about a woman named Ardis Clinton who is stuck in a loveless marriage to a clout named Bill. As we meet her Ardis is priming her young stud, a peabrained roughneck named Tony, for the kill: Tony is to hide in the shower and hack Bill to pieces with an axe when he comes home. Bill sticks to a tedious routine and Ardis is certain the plan will work perfectly.

And it does, but problems ensue when Ardis insists that Tony hit her to make it look real – her plan is to mask it all as a robbery. With great reluctance Tony hits her…and knocks her flat. When Ardis comes to the cops are there, and they flat-out accuse her of a setup, planning to kill her husband. Why are they so glib? Turns out Tony hit Ardis so hard that she’s suffered fatal injuries and may go any second. She sends them away, goes to sleep…and wakes up in hell. In a surreal finale along the lines of his earlier novel The Getaway, Thompson finishes the tale with Ardis finding herself spending eternity in Bill as he goes along his same tedious routines.

“The Bloody Tide” is by Day Keene, another well-respected crime author I’ve never read, and comes from a 1950 issue of Black Mask. Slightly reminiscent of Charles Williams’s story above, this one’s narrated by a dude named Charlie White who just got out of prison, having done time for transporting illegal shipments on his boat. He did it all for his kind-hearted wife, but ran afoul of a femme fatale named Zo whom he apparently had an affair with. He gets out of prison determined to go straight, but instead of wife Beth he finds Zo waiting to pick him up.

Only after he’s drunk on rum, hours later in Florida, does Charlie find a note in his pocket, written by Beth and apparently sent to the prison for him. She says she’ll be waiting for him, and an excited Charlie rushes out to tell Zo he’s splitting – only to find her dead. Immediately after this our pal is knocked into dreamland. When he comes to he realizes he’s been set up for Zo’s murder. He decides to do something about it, but first he reconnects with his estranged wife over in Tampa. Beth is one of those wives that only exist in fiction, totally understanding and supportive, even if Charlie’s now wanted for the murder of his mistress.

I say this one’s similar to “Flight To Nowhere” because it starts off strong but gradually peters out. You start off the tale expecting this great revenge story, but instead Charlie goes off to stay on a remote island he owns with Beth, to hide in the attic of their abandoned cottage there – only to find it filled with a bunch of “wetbacks.” When he comes to from a sound beating, having been dumped in the harbor (the long swim to safety no problem for our hero, who we learn was a frogman in WWII), Charlie realizes who the villain has been all along, leading to a lame finale in which Charlie and Beth are under the man’s gun, only for the cops to come out of the woodwork and arrest him.

“Death Comes Gift-Wrapped” by William P. McGivern, is short tale I can’t remember about a cop in love with a nightclub singer or somesuch, who tries to go crooked to support the lifestyle she demands.

“The Girl Behind the Hedge” by Mickey Spillane, is another slight story I forgot as soon as I finished it, which is mostly a tale one character tells another about how he got vengeance on an enemy. Since this guy was a love ‘em and leave ‘em playboy, our storyteller made the dude fall in love with a mentally handicapped girl, and when the playboy discovered this he killed himself.

“We Are All Dead” is by Bruno Fischer and from a 1955 issue of Manhunt. This novella is a masterpiece of noir plotting and is my favorite story in the collection. Taking the old pulp cliché of a heist gone bad, it’s about a group of criminals turning against each other after one of their own died on the caper. Narrated by a career criminal in his 30s named Johnny Worth, the story moves at a fast clip, indicative of Fischer’s mastery of the craft. In a heist planned by professorial Oscar, the getaway driver is shot and Oscar finishes him off with a knife, saying it’s the only way to keep the heat off them.

The remaining four heisters split off with their share of the twenty-two thousand; besides Johnny and Oscar, one of them’s a family man and the other is an oldschool goon. Meanwhile our narrator stays with Oscar, trying not to lust over Oscar’s latest buxom gal, Stella. Then another good-looking lady, Allie, shows up, claiming to be the wife of the dead getaway driver. Not that she’s blackmailing them, but she thinks she’s entitled to her departed husband’s share of the loot. Meanwhile a cop is trying to bring them down; Oscar’s “fingerprints” are all over the job. 

The story becomes more of a tension-laden piece as the members of the heist team begin dying off one by one. But who is killing them? Meanwhile Johnny has become infatuated with Allie, who has become Oscar’s woman…and Stella has become Johnny’s woman. Fischer writes the tale so you have no choice but to finish it in one sitting. It all culminates with Johnny and Oscar against one another, and features a morbid, downbeat ending which bears out the title, Johnny writing his story from the death house.

Play It Hard

Play It Hard, by Gil Brewer
May, 1964  Monarch Books

Like Ennis Willie, Gil Brewer is another hardboiled pulp writer of the ‘50s and ‘60s whose name I’ve been seeing a lot during my recent kick. And also like Willie, Brewer’s a cult author whose books, despite their quality, never got the visibility they deserved when they were published and are now overpriced on the used books market. I was lucky to get this one for six bucks; many of Brewer’s novels have been reprinted in recent years, but unfortunately Play It Hard isn’t one of them.

Brewer’s publications for Fawcett Gold Medal are the most valued by his fans, but he also wrote for a few for the sleazier imprints of the day, like Monarch Books. I don’t think Monarch was a straight-up “sleaze” imprint (or at least what passed for sleaze in those days), but they were apparently a bit more risque than mainstream imprints like the Fawcett Books line. In other words, you’ll come across the word “breasts” a lot more often in a Monarch book. And Brewer, who appears to have been known for his sexy but evil female characters, is well up to the task.

Curiously though, Play It Hard has a publication date of May, 1964, and the cover proclaims it’s the “first publication anywhere,” yet the book is copyright 1960 by Brewer. So did it take four years to get published? Or did Brewer write it back in ’60, only for the manuscript to be rejected by Gold Medal or someone else? I’ve looked through Brewer’s catalog and Play It Hard doesn’t appear to be a retitled reprint of an earlier Gil Brewer novel, so I have no idea. But at any rate, all that matters is the quality of the book itself, and I have to say I enjoyed the hell out of it, despite its implausibility. 

At 142 pages of fairly small print, the novel, which is written in third-person, charges right along. Brewer has to write it this way, otherwise the reader will start asking too many questions. And as it is, it’s hard enough for the reader to not ask questions, for the central plot of Play It Hard is so bonkers you have to laugh: A guy wakes up one morning to discover that his wife of less than a week has been replaced by an auburn-haired sexpot, but no one believes him and the fake wife insists she is his wife! So this is more of a psychological noir story rather than your average hardboiled deal; either way it’s a lot of fun and Brewer’s writing is very enjoyable.

Our hero is Steve Nolan, a war vet, whether Korea or WWII is not stated, who lives in some (I think) unspecified town in Florida and makes his living as a mattress manufacturer. Apparently this is quite the way to meet the ladies, as we’re informed that Steve has gotten lucky again and again, as selling mattresses is a surefire way to get a lady in the sack. (I knew I shouldn’t have gone into Marketing!)  But Steve’s recently become a married man; meeting a hotstuff lady named Janice on the beach in nearby resort town Oceanside on a much-needed vacation, Steve fell in love with her and proposed. Janice accepted, and they’ve been married only a week. None of Steve’s friends or family have met her.

All this is relayed gradually in the text; when the novel begins, Steve is in a stupor, either from drinking too much or from being drugged. Honeymooning along the Gulf Coast, Steve and Janice hammered the drinks with a bushy-eyebrowed stranger the night before, and it all descended into a black void so far as Steve’s memory goes. He comes back to consciousness in his own home, which he shares with his aunt Eda, and discovers that the woman who claims to be his wife is not the Janice he married. But Eda doesn’t believe Steve, nor does longtime family doctor Earl Paige, who tells Steve he’s had a nervous breakdown and is just confused; of course Janice is the same woman he married a few days ago.

Here’s the big problem. Brewer does a superb job making this a psychological thing: did Steve really have a breakdown? Is it only in his mind, and is this the same Janice he married? Brewer skillfully plays out this absurd scenario so that you buy it. However, Monarch Books chose to blow the entire mystery by clearly stating on the back cover that the woman is not his real wife!! Talk about spoilers. At any rate the pseudo-Janice is a smokin’-hot babe with auburn hair and a killer bod which she enjoys showing off; she’s real game for Steve to get better so they can have some hot marital sex asap.

Another problem with Play It Hard, or at least what seemed like a problem to me, is that we never meet the real Janice. Hence we never truly empathize with Steve. As other characters tell him, “If my wife was replaced by a woman who looked like that, I wouldn’t be complaining,” and that’s how the reader soon feels, as the ample charms of pseudo-Janice are constantly played up to the point where you figure Steve should just close his eyes and think of England. I believe the reader would be more inclined to feel Steve’s pain if we’d been given a glimpse of the real Janice, rather than the story of how they met being doled out in backstory midway through the text.

This doesn’t really detract from the book, though. As I say, the entire concept is so goofy but so superbly written that you get swept up in it. Let alone that Steve never bothered to take a photo of the real Janice or to get much information about her; we’re to believe they quickly fell in love and decided to quickly marry, even foregoing the usual blood tests (something which I thought didn’t become standard until later). Now here’s Steve trying to convince everyone that this super-hot chick with the killer bod isn’t his real wife, even if she claims she is; about the only “test” he can think to put her through is to try on the real Janice’s clothes, including her lingerie. It all fits pseudo-Janice.

Steve isn’t the sharpest tool; Gil Brewer followed the preferred Gold Medal theme of making his protagonists average guys, but Steve really would only be considered “average” if your core demographic was like truckers with a kindergarten-level education. He never really comes up with much of a plan on how to “expose” the new Janice, who continues to implore him for some good lovin’. Instead Steve just runs around his little town, trying to get people to listen to him, particularly Dr. Earl, who is obstinate that this is Janice (even though Earl never met her), and that it’s all in Steve’s head.

Even more resistance comes from Steve’s “friend,” a cop named Rhodes. He at first listens to Steve’s wild story, asking common-sense questions about how Steve can be sure it isn’t the same woman (one thing noted is that the only thing similar about pseudo-Janice is that she has the same-colored hair as the original version). Yet Rhodes soon becomes an enemy, openly questioning Steve’s innocence in all this, particulary when the raped and murdered corpse of an auburn-haired young woman washes up on shore. Before this happens, though, Steve finally gives in to pseudo-Janice’s horny demands and has sex with her on the living room couch.

Brewer writes a sequence a bit more explicit than you’d read in other mainstream novels of the time, but nothing too outrageous, and still vague and metaphorical for the most part. One thing he does get across is that pseudo-Janice sure enjoys it a whole bunch. (And I guess sickly Aunt Eda, upstairs in his room, sleeps through all of the girl’s wailing.) But immediately after this Rhodes calls Steve and hauls him down to the precinct to identify that aforementioned corpse. This is a sad scene that, again, would have had even more impact if we’d met the real Janice beforehand. But as it it, the cat is now out of the bag, as Steve swears to Rhodes that this is the woman he married, not the imposter back in his home.

The novel slowly morphs from a psychological suspense tale to more of a thriller as Steve realizes something’s really going on. Now he’s certain it’s not just in his head and that isn’t the real Janice in his home, but the girl refuses to tell Steve anything, smiling tauntingly at him as he threatens her. Why Steve never goes at her with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch is a mystery to me. He does get to vent a little steam when he finds a dude lurking outside his house one night; after a quick scuffle, Steve’s knocked flat and realizes that the attacker was the dude with bushy eyebrows who bought drinks for Steve and the real Janice the night all this craziness began – the last night he saw the real Janice.

Brewer takes us into the homestretch as the narrative acquires a breathless pace. Steve shuffles back and forth from Oceanside, where he met the real Janice, to his home town, tracking down clues and questioning witnesses. Meanwhile Aunt Eda’s getting sicker and sicker, even though Dr. Earl’s constantly treating her. And meanwhile pseudo-Janice just sits up in her room and waits for him. One of the biggest failings of Play It Hard is that pseudo-Janice, who is really such a great femme fatale, is kept off-page for so long. Steve spends more time with Claire, his childhood sweetheart, a gal he’s been in love with and vice versa for years, but the relationship never worked out, or something. (Brewer throws in another somewhat-explicit sex scene via flashback.)

Claire turns out to be the only person who believes Steve, not that this is much help for him, as she too soon disappears from the narrative, abducted by whoever is behind all this. Another problem with the novel is that no matter what Brewer comes up with, it will ultimately be unsatisfying; the concept is too weird and almost sci-fi for the mystery and suspense genre. And as it goes it does turn out to be a mundane impetus behind the whole “fake Janice” ruse; turns out Steve’s home, which he’s lived in with Aunt Eda since he was a child, once belonged to an associate of Al Capone, and the thug supposedly stashed his loot somewhere in the house.

A certain character in the novel has lusted after this money for years and years, and now thanks to a stroke of luck has discovered that it might be in Steve’s home. The villain then pushed Steve to take a much-needed vacation and meet a girl; the girl, Janice, was in reality a hooker who was paid to marry Steve. The villain’s desired goal was that, being married, Steve would decide to move out of the house with Aunt Eda and thus the villain would be free to go in and out to search for the loot – especially if Aunt Eda was bedridden. But when Janice decided to push for more money, the villain had her killed off and then came up with the bizarro idea to replace her with a fake and make Steve think it was all in his head. Obviously such a plan was guaranteed to fail.

The novel culminates in a bit of an action scene, but Steve never does become an ass-kicker of a protagonist. Instead he just sort of stands by, waiting for his moment to strike, while the villain exposits on his scheme. Sick of the pseudo-Janice’s complaints and criticisms, the villain blows her face off, with Brewer describing her corpse with the memorable phrase “lying in a leggy huddle.” Humorously, pseudo-Janice’s body is talked up at all times, like in an earlier moment, perhaps intentionally funny, where Brewer describes her breasts for a sentence or two, and then writes something to the effect of, “though Steve was no longer interested in them.”

As for the stashed loot, it’s long gone, something Eda reveals in the final paragraphs. So in other words it was all for naught. However Steve has realized at long last that Claire is his true one-and-only, and that he was a fool to ever think otherwise. Thus Brewer delivers a veritable happy ever after, even if we’ve learned that the woman he’s been hunting for throughout the novel was tortured and repeatedly raped before being killed. But since she was just a whore, one who was hired to get Steve to fall in love with her and marry her, it doesn’t matter. She deserved her horrible fate! 

Brewer’s writing is great, with that noir style down pat. Short, punchy sentences, memorable dialog. Steve meets an assortment of fringe characters during his travels and they all have their unique charms. Also Brewer doesn’t shy from the spicy stuff, with pseudo-Janice’s breasts and body described frequently and at length. And as I say, you get the idea that Brewer knew his concept was goofy and just charged right on through it, which only adds to the enjoyability factor. Anyway, I was so entertained by Play It Hard that I’ll definitely be reading more of Brewer’s work.