Butler #6: Killer Satellites

 

Butler #6: Killer Satellites, by Philip Kirk

No month stated, 1980  Leisure Books

This was the last volume of Butler written by series creator Len Levinson, and it’s clear that Len intended Killer Satellites to be the final volume of the series, as it wraps up the storyline of hero Butler, essentially taking him full-circle from where he started in the first volume. There is also a focus on telling us more about Butler this time – we even learn his first name! – as well as giving him a Happily Ever After. Which of course makes it all the more frustrating that Leisure Books continued the series in 1982 – without Len’s involvement or awareness – farming it out to some unknown writer(s) for an additional six volumes. 

But honestly, I have no intention of seeking out or reading those later Butler books; this was Len Levinson’s series, and his volumes are the only ones that exist in my world. So basically there’s a “Len six” and a “Ghostwriters six” for Butler, and curiously it’s the latter six volumes that are the most overpriced on the used books marketplace, indicating that they had scarce print runs. It’s funny that they even exist, as Killer Satellites is clearly a send-off for Butler, courtesy his creator. 

This one picks up a few months after the previous volume, and Butler is still with the CIA. In fact there is no mention whatsoever of the Bancroft Instititute, and as mentioned above it’s the first volume of the series that is most often referred to in the narrative – particularly, that Butler was fired from the CIA by series regular FJ Shankham in that volume, “two years ago.” (Though in the typically-poor editing of a Leisure publication, on the very next page we’re told this happened “a year ago.”) But now with this sixth volume, Butler is so ingrained in the CIA that he’s spent six months studying how to speak Russian (and curious spoiler alert, but he never even gets a chance to speak Russian in the course of the novel!). The Bancroft Institute setup is dropped, as is recurring enemy organization HYDRA. 

The back-cover copy as usual tries to heighten the “thriller” elements of the story, but more than any previous volume Killer Satellites is less concerned with action than it is with Butler’s soap-opera life. When we meet him he’s boarding a small plane for a vacation in nearby Cape Cod. As I’ve mentioned frequently in past reviews, Len Levinson’s protagonists are unique in the men’s adventure field in that they try their damnest to pick up women; an inversion of the usual pulp template of the lady throwing herself at the protagonist. Butler hits hard on an attractive young woman on the plane (she looks, we’re informed, like Faye Dunaway), as usual saying stuff that would get a guy at least slapped in the real world. For instance: “You’re rather attractive, and I’m rather horny.” 

And, as usual for Butler, he’s rebuffed; the girl, Mary Ellen, has no interest in him, and just wishes to read her novel. In a curious miss on Len’s part that drove me crazy, we never learn what novel the girl is reading, despite Butler incessantly asking her what the title is! I was hoping Len would do a little in-joke and have Mary Ellen reading one of his own books. Anyway, it’s not that they have much time to really talk, as the front of the plane explodes and it crashes into the ocean – moments after we’re informed Butler is afraid to fly. But Butler’s able to keep his wits and swims to safety, rescuing the girl as well. The plane was intentionally crashed – though how is curiously never stated – and Butler soon learns that a host of his CIA colleauges have also been killed. Oh, and Mary Ellen vows that she will be Butler’s “slave” for having saved her life. 

Soon Butler is made the director of the CIA by whiskey-sipping President Smith; there’s a super-goofy part where Smith, in the bunker beneath the White House, bluffs on the phone with Premiere Brezhnev in the USSR about a satellite being shot down. This part again confirms that Butler is essentially a comedy series,with the assembled joint chiefs of staff even taking off their hats and yelling “hooray!” when the Soviet satellite is shot down. All this, by the way, is in retaliation for a US satellite that was destroyed, and I love the way Len has these heads of state calling each other directly and bluffing one another, making idle threats, etc. There’s also a goofy recurring joke about the Albanians. 

I really get the impression Len was winging his way through this one; the plot changes willy-nilly, with Butler thrust from one crazy situation to another. So he’s made director of the CIA because everyone else was killed, and his first act in this capacity is to call back onto duty the love of his life, Wilma B. Willoughby, who quit after the caper in the previous volume and now teaches at UCLA. In the meantime we are almost casually informed that Butler’s first name is Andrew – his full name is Andrew P. Butler – by a radio announcement Butler listens to while shaving in the shower, announcing that he’s been made the new director of the CIA. Butler’s first name has always been a mystery and no mention is made here that Butler hates it, something that was often remarked upon in previous installments. But the very fact that we’re told Butler’s first name this time could be another indication that Len intended Killer Satellites to be the series finale. 

Meanwhile, Mary Ellen has come to Butler’s home in Georgetown to be his slave, leading to the typical XXX-rated sex scene of the series. I found myself laughing out loud, though, because even in the sex scenes Len goes for laughs – in particular Mary Ellen bluntly asking Butler, “Do you want me to kiss your dicky?” To which a shocked Butler responds, “I beg your pardon?” Len has a lot of fun with this sequence, as it’s a reversal of the earlier scene betwee the two, when Butler was hitting on Mary Ellen on the plane; here it’s Mary Ellen who must convince Butler to have sex with her. Finally he does, in full-bore detail – only for Wilma to come in and catch them together and throw a hissy fit, calling Butler a “pig” and leaving. 

Again we get indication that this is the final volume when Mary Ellen explains to Butler that Wilma is only upset because she clearly loves Butler. Otherwise why would Wilma be so angry to find Butler in bed with another woman? Butler realizes this must be true, but meanwhile Wilma is kidnapped on her way to her hotel. When Butler finally figures out she’s been captured the following day, he decides to make none other than FJ Shankham the deputy director of the CIA, to handle the administrative side of the job while Butler goes out in the field to find Wilma. Here’s where we have the reverse setup of Butler #1, with Butler reflecting on the irony of his being in charge of the man who fired him “two years” (or was it one year?) ago. 

But man, it seems evident that Len was winging his way through Killer Satellites. Subplots are brought up and cast aside within a few pages. Like for example Mary Ellen. Despite pledging herself as Butler’s “slave,” she’s quickly removed from the narrative, Butler insisting that she go home so he can figure out who has been killing his fellow CIA agents. Then next thing you know, Butler is in his red Corvette and driving cross-country; his goal, apparently, is to act as bait for the people who kidnapped Wilma, but still…I mean he literally just drives across the country. We even get more of Butler’s random attempted pickups when he hits on an attractive female bartender who (per the template) turns Butler down, given that she’s married. But if you haven’t noticed, this is how the plot constantly changes in Killer Satellites; just a few chapters ago he was conferring with the President on how he could stop the “killer satellite” business, and now he’s on a cross-country road trip. 

Even what appears to be the big villain reveal is brushed aside after a few pages; Butler does indeed get captured by the same people who took Wilma captive, and they turn out to be…right-wing Canadian extremists. From their hidden location deep in the wilds of Canada they have a missile silo and have been taking down US and USSR satellites in the hopes of causing a war between the two superpowers…but man, like just a few pages after all of this is revealed, US planes come out of nowhere and bomb the place to the ground and Butler and Wilma escape into the snowy forest. The entire “Canadian radicals” development only takes up a handful of pages, and again the focus is placed more on Butler’s love life. 

But still, it’s very funny. Butler and Wilma hide in a cave and Wilma makes it clear that she has no intention of sleeping with Butler, even though we know from the scenes in her perspective that Butler’s the best lay she ever had, and she still dreams of the previous times they made it, etc. But as usual Wilma plays it tough, not wanting to look a “fool” for Butler, and she makes him sleep on the other side of the cave. Butler, sure that Wilma will shoot him with her machine gun if he tries to go over to her, decides to jerk off…no mention is made, by the way, of the “vow” Butler made to himself to never masturbate, as stated back in the fourth volume. Meanwhile Wilma, who is impatiently waiting for Butler to come over to her, looks over and sees “a piston” pumping beneath Butler’s sleeping bag, and angrily realizes he’s jerking off. So she has to take matters into her own hands, so to speak, leading to a sex scene between the two that takes up several pages of text. Even here it’s a payoff on those earlier sex scenes between the two, with Wilma finally giving herself in full to Butler and not pretending like it all was a “mistake” or etc. 

More finalities – on the morning after their idyllic tryst in the cave, Wilma informs Butler that she is saying goodbye to him forever, because she’s too crazy about him, and knows she’ll do nothing but have sex with him all day. (This after Butler asks her to marry him!) We also get the interesting backstory that Wilma was a hippie in the late ‘60s and dropped out of school to screw her boyfriend all the time, and she’s afraid she’ll do the same with Butler, because she likes him even more. So again, despite the “killer satellite” setup and Butler being in charge of the CIA and whatnot, it’s more about Butler moping around and wondering if he’ll ever find true love – not that this stops him from scoring again. In another humorous XXX passage, Butler goes up to Canada to look into the leader of the Canadian radicals, and ends up banging the secretary at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police HQ. 

Here we have another of Butler’s don’t-try-this-at-home pickup lines: “You’re the kind of woman a man would love to go down on.” This is stated mere moments after the woman happens to sit by Butler in the park, and soon enough Butler’s gotten it out of her that no one’s ever gone down on her and etc. So they go back to his hotel where they go down on each other, then have sex, all of it in the usual explicit detail of the series, but again a lot of it’s funny because of the dialog Len gives the characters throughout. But also, none of it has any real bearing on the plot, and is another indication of the ever-changing nature of the storyline; just twenty or so pages ago Butler was the captive of some right-wing Canadians in the woods, and now here he is dining at the Y with a slim secretary who looks “like the actress Lee Remick.” 

It all moves so quickly that Len has to go for a finale that is more out of a mystery than an action thriller, with Butler exposing who secretly funds the Canadian satellite-killing radicals. SPOILER ALERT, so skip this and the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to know, but given that Killer Satellites appears to be so scarce I thought I’d be comprehensive in my review for the people who can’t find a copy. Anyway, it turns out that FJ Shankham has been behind the plot, financing the Canadian radicals – and here we have a reprisal of the first volume, with Shankham again the manipulative bastard who holds Butler’s fate in his hands. But in another strong indication that this was intended as the final volume of the series, Butler literally blows Shankham’s brains out, blasting him point-blank in the forehead with his pistol. 

Even in the final pages subplots are brought up and cast aside within the span of a few paragraphs. Butler meets with President Smith again, and none other than Brezhnev calls in and offers Butler an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow as thanks for preventing WWIII, insisting that Butler come to Russia within a few weeks, and Butler accepts. Meanwhile President Smith floats the idea of making Butler the ambassador to Russia (and curiously, at no point in this entire exchange is it mentioned that Butler now speaks fluent Russian)…but a page or two later Butler’s already decided he’ll turn down the offer. 

The biggest indication that Killer Satellites was intended to be Butler’s send-off comes next: Butler goes back to his pad in Georgetown…to find Wilma waiting there for him. Wilma tells Butler she loves him and would “rather go crazy with him than without him,” and the book – and series – ends with the two having sex. In fact the last line of the novel is Wilma’s “OOOH!” as Butler gives her the goods – and speaking of which, we’ve learned earlier in the book, courtesy a ruler Mary Ellen puts alongside Butler’s erection, that Butler measures eight-and-a-half inches; which is “only two-and-a-half inches more than the average,” Butler argues! 

This of course is a fitting finale for Butler, given the strong focus on XXX-rated sex since the beginning, not to mention that Butler’s been hooked on Wilma since the beginning. (And apparently vice-versa.) For decades Len Levinson thought this was it for Butler, until I happened to mention to him when we talked on the phone in 2012 that the series had continued on for six more volumes. I still recall how flabbergasted Len was; “That was my series!” he kept saying. A commenter named TrueAim left a note on a previous Butler review that at least some of those non-Len volumes tried to retain the feel of the original six books…so if anyone else out there has read them, please let us know. I’m curious if Wilma even factors into the books. 

But again, I’d say those latter six installments are alternate-reality Butler. The series clearly comes to a close with Killer Satellites, and I’d say overall I really enjoyed these books. Again, the cover illustrations and back-cover copy are all misleading; Butler is more of a humorous affair than an action thriller. As usual with a Len Levinson book, it is the personality of the author that most stands out, and no doubt given that Butler was his own creation, Len’s personality is very evident as the series progresses. Indeed, parts of Killer Satellite, in which Butler reflects on his life or the sad state of his romantic affairs, could almost come straight out of Len’s decades-later autobiography, In The Pulp Fiction Trenches. I also appreciated the glimpse into Butler’s personal interests; this time he has a sudden interest in jazz music, with mentions of The Jazz Crusaders and Ramsey Lewis…I got a chuckle out of this, given that Len had to patiently wait while I shopped for Jazz LPs when I met him in Chicago in 2016. 

If I recall, only the first few volumes of Butler were reprinted as eBooks a few years back. Hopefully the time will come when all six volumes will be available again as paperbacks. Personally I’ll miss Butler and his madcap adventures, but I’m happy that Len gave him a proper send-off.

7/25/24 Update: I received the below email from Len himself, and he asked me to post it here for him!

It is very interesting to read a review of a novel I wrote circa 1979 and barely remember.  So I read the first chapter again to re-familiarize myself, and thought this first chapter simply terrific.

What a great writer I was!  I should have won a Nobel Prize and the National Book Award.  I should be rich and famous and living on the French Riviera with a movie star or supermodel, instead of the small cluttered apartment where I now reside alone in a tiny town way out here on the Great American Prairie.

Many of my books were written very quickly under two-month deadlines.  That’s why they read as if I was “winging it”.  Actually I was winging it, which probably explains why subplots don’t go anywhere and why important characters suddenly disappear.  I also had a tendency to write graphic sex scenes, which probably caused many readers to not take me seriously.

My Butler books were written toward the beginning of my literary career.  I think I got better as I became more mature and gained more experience as a novelist.  Thank you for this very insightful review.  You always understand my books better than I do.

Thirst

Thirst, by Pyotyr Kurtinski

August, 1995  Leisure Books

Apparently twenty years passed before anyone noticed the name Pyotyr Kurtinski was Peter McCurtin gone Slavic. -- Lynn Munroe 

“I can see you have a great big hard-on. I don’t mind being fucked by a vampire. Lord knows I’ve been fucked by everyone but the Birdman of Alcatraz. Just don’t get too rough.” -- From the book 

If it were not for Lynn Munroe I wonder if anyone would have ever known that Thirst was the last published novel of Peter McCurtin, who died in January 1997 at the age of 68. McCurtin was very prolific, but if I’m not mistaken Thirst was his only horror novel…but then, I wonder if it could accurately be described as such. If I didn’t know any better I’d say this novel was intended as a spoof of horror novels; it makes the similarly-goofy The Vampire Tapes seem like a piece of serious horror literature. Of course the other possibility is that McCurtin was just totally out of his area in horror and turned in what he thought was a genuine horror novel. 

The reviews for this novel on Goodreads are almost comical in how savage they are. McCurtin – though of course the reviewers have no idea it is McCurtin, and assume “Kurtinski” is a real author – is raked over the coals, particularly for his frequent mistake of stating that a bat has a beak. This fallacy is repeated throughout the novel. But then, the novel is about a vampire who can turn himself into a giant bat, so it’s not like realism is much of a concern. Seriously though, things needed to be grounded in reality for the supernatural stuff to have any impact, so little details like “bats don’t have beaks” should have been a concern for McCurtin…which makes me suspect the book is a spoof. 

More evidence comes in how neurotic our 200+ year-old protagonist, William Van Diemen, turns out to be. The guy is like the Woody Allen of vampires, though we’re informed he’s a good-looking Dutch dude who is permanently 23 because that’s when he became a vampire. One would have to wonder how such a goof could have survived – and thrived – for over two centuries. In Thirst he’s constantly second-guessing himself, mulling over really stupid stuff, making frequent mistakes, and he even falls in love. What I found most interesting about this neurotic nature is that Len Levinson told me that, when he was writing his Sharpshooter novels in the ‘70s, Peter McCurtin himself (who was editor of the series) said that Len’s version of “Sharpshooter” Johnny Rock was “too neurotic,” and wouldn’t last long in his mob-busting war if he was constantly second-guessing himself. Len reigned this in and delivered a neurosis-free Rock in Headcrusher. 

So McCurtin failed to heed his own advice in this 1995 novel. And that’s another thing. If I’d started reading Thirst without knowing anything about it…I’d probably fire off an email to Len to ask him if he’d written it! Now I’m not saying Len Levinson would think bats have beaks, but Thirst is so “Len Levinson-esque” that I wonder if McCurtin was influenced by Len. Like a Len Levinson novel, there’s no “plot” per se and the characters all seem to exist outside the novel, often obsessing over things both mundane and spiritual. That said, Len would have written a better novel than Peter McCurtin did. Thirst, while it is Len Levinson-esque in the narrative style, lacks the trademark spark of a genuine Len Levinson novel. 

The most curious thing is how little Thirst is like the other McCurtin novels I’ve read. I guess the closest comparison would be his strange ‘70s attempt at a bestseller beach read-type book, the similiarly-goofy The Pleasure Principle. The difference is Thirst is longer, coming in at 346 pages. But per the Leisure Books norm those pages fly by thanks to some very big print…and also true to Leisure form the novel is riddled with typos. In many ways Thirst is exactly like the stuff McCurtin was writing (and editing) for the publisher back in the ‘70s, not to mention that the “main” plot (per se) features our villainous protagonist Van Diemen operating less like a vampire and more like a ‘90s Johnny Rock, fighting the Mafia…which is another source of ridicule in those Goodreads reviews, given that this vampire does his fighting with guns and grenades! 

So for 346 big-print pages Van Diemen, who has a castle in the Bronx, tries to stop a lawyer who wants to purchase his land, feeds nightly on unsuspecting prey, works on his autobiography, turns a hapless P.I. into a vampire, and also falls in friggin’ love with a jaded photographer who either has a “hard face” or is “attractive” (McCurtin can’t seem to make up his mind). She also has a “hip-flask voice,” one of my favorite random descriptions ever. Oh and there’s also a sort-of Vampira type who shows up in the novel for a handful of pages, but McCurtin does nothing at all with her. Actually, she’s more of a fake vampire than a horror hostess – calling herself “Draculina,” she has her face done up like a “ghoul” and dresses like a hag, but Van Diemen deduces that she has a “nice body” beneath the drab clothes. Van Diemen rapes her, along with another woman earlier in the novel; Van Diemen’s tendency for rape is another source of anger the Goodreads reviews. Yes, Van Diemen rapes (and kills) two women in the course of Thirst, but then again, he also figures that he has killed nearly eighty thousand people in the course of his vampire life – this a quick calculation he does based off his nightly feeds over the course of the past 200+ years. 

This I found was the only non-goofy stuff in the novel, because McCurtin clearly understands you can’t have a vampire hero. By nature vampires must drink blood to live. But then the seriousness is robbed by Van Diemen’s frequent bitchery over common misconceptions about vampires, not to mention that he also has a VHS library of every vampire movie ever made. There’s an “I can’t believe Peter McCurtin actually wrote this” part where Van Diemen says that he even has Interview With The Vampire on VHS, and the soon-to-be-a-vampire-himself private eye responds that this particular movie hasn’t even come out on VHS yet, so it would be impossible for Van Diemen to have a copy of it on video…and Van Diemen boasts that he has a pirated copy! It’s stuff like this that again makes me suspect Thirst is a spoof. Just too much of the novel is given over to Van Diemen’s obsessive compulsions about various mundane topics…and also, for an immortal vampire, the dude is constantly getting hassled: by the lawyer who wants to buy his land, by his own lawyer who is representing him in the case, by the sad-sack private eye Van Diemen turns into a vampire, and finally by the photographer with the “hip-flask voice.” All of these characters are constantly questioning Van Diemen, or putting him out of sorts, and he’ll go back to his Bronx castle to sulk. 

Those looking for a traditional vampire yarn will be quite diappointed with Thirst. Again, the Goodreads reviews are indication of this. Only in the extended excerpts from Van Diemen’s autobio – written in ugly italics – do we get the traditional stuff, with Van Diemen being turned into a vampire (by some vampire woman who bit him during sex, a recurring theme here) and then going about his “new vampire life” for the next few centuries. As mentioned he has a castle in the Bronx, the construction of which in the 1800s he recounts for us, and now he sticks to himself, only venturing out each night to feed. He turns himself into a giant bat to do this; McCurtin has it that the bat transformation is “an act of faith” and that each night when Van Diemen throws himself off the tower of the castle he could very well plunge to his death if he doesn’t transform. Oh and as a giant bat he can fly “300 miles per hour.” Seriously! Plus we’re informed of the various fallacies on how vampires can be killed, but McCurtin still sticks to the main ones: stakes to the heart and fire. 

Van Diemen’s a loser, though, there’s no other way to put it. So the book opens with him in his library working on his bio, and he treats himself to one glass of vodka, after which he’s drunk. Oh, and he also pops a few Ritalin. He flies out to feed, goes over a zoo…and there’s the “hard faced” female photographer out there taking photos who might really be pretty (again, McCurtin can’t figure this out), but she certainly has a nice body (maybe), but also a rough demeanor from being a famous world-traveling photographer and seeing it all. Van Diemen turns human and approaches her in the dark. Her name’s Maggie Connors, and Van Diemen has heard of her, but this night he goes to feed on her…and she takes his photo, and he stumbles in the flashlight and flies away in escape. Our tough bastard of a vampire, folks! And he goes back to his library to sulk over this, working up a rage to get revenge on this woman. Oh, and he obsesses with worry that she might get the photo printed in the papers…but will people even know who he is? Will anyone believe her story? Etc, etc. 

I mean honestly, the book is a spoof. It has to have been intended as a spoof. Because soon after this, Van Diemen’s getting hassled by his loser lawyer, Bradford Wilcox, who keeps pestering Van Diemen that another lawyer, Landau (who likely represents a mobster), is trying to get Van Diemen’s castle. But now they’re leaning hard on Wilcox himself…with the threat that Wilcox’s mistress, Tracy, is going to come out with photos and a fake claim that Wilcox had her get an abortion…and Van Diemen is winging off to burn down the lawyer’s house and then rape and murder Tracy. Here we get a bit of that old ‘70s-style sleazy sadism: 

Actually the sleaze is goofy, too. The quoted dialog at the top of the review is courtesy Maggie Connors, the photographer who snaps Van Diemen’s photo before he can kill her. He obsesses over her, finally locates her…and when he gets the spring on her (staying in a “special guest house” in the zoo…under heavy guard, even though she hasn’t told anyone she was attacked by a vampire?), she promptly offers herself to him:

Even Live Girls didn’t feature the line “I’m being screwed by a vampire.” Van Diemen, ever second-guessing and doubting himself, wants to bite Maggie’s neck and kill her, but doesn’t…then flies back to his castle and keeps thinking about her! There are even parts where he calls her on the phone to chat! I kid you not, friends! McCurtin tries to go somewhere with this; Van Diemen’s property soon becomes the target of the mob, with guys tossing trash and stuff on the grounds and later assassins sent onto the property, and Van Diemen will kill them off and call Maggie so she’s in such and such a place to take a photo of it. But the plotting is just so random that McCurtin, if he was serious about the whole thing, had no idea what he was doing. 

Like the shady private eye, Victor Mara, who is apparently hired by Landau to get the goods on Van Diemen. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, Van Diemen turns Mara into a vampire, perhaps to use him as his inside agent. But man, this develops into yet another goofy subplot, where Mara keeps trying to convince Van Diemen to let him move into Van Diemen’s castle! I mean complete with Mara, now a vampire, worried about the rent at his place and just persistently nagging Van Diemen about letting him have “just a little corner” of the castle to call his own! And this just keeps going on, perhaps further evidence that Thirst is a parody of serious horror fiction. It’s hard to believe Peter McCurtin could have intended this novel to be on the level. 

More Sharpshooter or Marksman (which McCurtin also edited and wrote for in the ‘70s) similarities are evident in the finale; anyone who has read those books, particularly ones actually written by McCurtin, will know that a favored “climax” featured all the villains conveniently assembling in one place so Rock or Magellan could blow them all to hell at once. Well guess how Thirst climaxes! Van Diemen even handles the job with some un-vampiric dynamite. We even get banal details like the note that he lodges the dynamite sticks on the roof (carrying them up there in his giant bat beak, naturally), so the wind won’t blow them away. I mean folks that is how Thirst climaxes – our vampire protagonist turns into a giant bat and carries dynamite in his “beak” and places it on a roof, ensuring that the friggin’ wind won’t blow the dynamite away. It’s not exactly Bram Stoker, is it? 

Speaking of whom, the last lines of the novel should be the final proof that Peter McCurtin was laughing to himself throughout Thirst; Van Diemen decides that maybe he does love Maggie Connors, and wonders what “Prince Dracul” (aka Dracula) would think! And Maggie wants Van Diemen to take a bubble bath with her...and this will be his first bath since the 18th Century! The end! Oh and another goofy thing, Van Diemen is always coming up with stupid inversions of the usual oaths, ie “by the Antichrist” and “only Satan knows” and other dumbass stuff. 

So all of which is to say, Thirst is a complete and total failure as a horror novel. But as a goofy-toned horror novel parody, it is a roaring success. It’s also fun to see that McCurtin was able to publish a quick and dirty (and sleazy) ‘70s-style novel in the mid-1990s. But still it was a sad way for such a prolific author to go out; as mentioned, this was Peter McCurtin’s final novel.

Endworld #2: Thief River Falls Run

Endworld #2: Thief River Falls Run, by David Robbins

No month stated, 1986  Leisure Books

Man it’s been years since I read the first volume of Endworld – it was before my kid was even born, and he’s halfway through kindergarten already! Well anyway, I have many books in this series, as well as sister volume Blade, so it’s about time I get back to it. The only thing I could remember from my reading of the first volume back in 2016 was that the series seemed like a ripoff of Doomsday Warrior, only for the Young Adult market, and also that I didn’t like it very much. 

And this second volume just confirmed my feelings; Thief River Falls Run comes off like an edited-for-TV version of Doomsday Warrior, lacking the gore and purple-prosed sex of that superior series. Otherwise it has the same setup: one hundred years after a nuclear hell, and a cast of colorfully-named asskickers. But whereas Ted “The Ultimate American” Rockson and his pals act like true men’s adventure heroes, Blade and his fellow “warriors” are like innocent children. Part of the schtick of this series is how Blade and his “family” venture out of their safe space in Minnesota and encounter other people, and they’re just so innocent and unaware of everything. 

And whereas Doomsday Warrior had its cake and ate it, too, with Rockson and friends talking about 20th Century trivia (thanks to that “library” of videos and books in Century City, of course), Blade and his friends are confused about such mundane things as a car horn. Yes, friends, there is actually a part in Thief River Falls Run where Blade accidentally leans on the horn of their post-nuke all-terain vehicle, the SEAL, and they all wonder what that strange loud noise they just heard was. Did the vehicle make the noise?? So there is none of the winking-to-the-reader nutjob stuff like in Doomsday Warrior, and that even includes the sex material…Blade and his fellow warriors, you see, only get busy when they are married! WTF!! The whole damn thing is like a post-nuke Little House On The Prairie. 

This series is also starting to remind me of another Leisure post-nuke pulp series: Roadblaster. Not that it’s that bad, it’s just that, as with Roadblaster, our heroes takeforever to get anywhere. Last volume they wanted to go to Twin Cities, apparently the post-nuke Minneapolis. They didn’t make it. This volume they try to go to Twin Cities again. They don’t make it! Compare to Rockson and team, who would go to space and back in a single volume. 

Another annoyance is that we can’t just have a team of post-nuke shit-kickers. Instead, Robbins gussies up the plot with the unwanted presence of Joshua, a long-haired pacifist who is so naïve he seems to have walked out of a book written by Ned Flanders. And Plato, the leader of “Home,” insists that Joshua go with Blade and the Warriors on the Twin Cities run! You almost wonder if the guy’s an inside agent, setting Blade and the others up. 

Speaking of inside agents, David Robbins sets up several dangling subplots for future volumes. There is the threat of enemy agents within Home who plot to wrest control from Plato, and also the development that Blade’s father, the former leader of Home, was murdered years ago as part of a plot. Blade stumbles upon this info during events in Thief River Falls, mostly due to the presence of mutant “Brutes.” He learns via happenstance that Brutes, which are kept on leashes by Watchers, might have been used to kill his father. 

As for Blade, he’s still sick from infection as this one opens; it’s some unspecified time later. Robbins spends the initial pages introducing two new characters who will presumably factor into later novels: a young woman named Rainbow (who is comatose the entire time) and her precocious, twelve year-old daughter Star. They have escaped from somewhere, “hunters” after them, and Blade’s colleagues Hickock and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi save them. After this nothing more is said about the two, but the way they are introduced, Star asking tons of questions about Home, might indicate they will have bigger roles in future. This part furthers the Doomsday Warrior vibe, with the Warriors fighting a giant mutant spider. 

So anyway, once Blade is better old Plato tells him to try to get to Twin Cities again – but this time he’s taking along Joshua. Robbins uses this as a way to fill up the book’s unwieldy 256 pages: Joshua spends pages and pages defending his pacifism to Hickock. Now it would be one thing if Joshua were constantly being pressured by the Warriors, but instead it's Joshua who is constantly judging them and their “violent” ways. And folks it’s just no fun reading a post-nuke action thriller with a main character who keeps judging everyone for being “too violent.” 

There’s also a bit of a Guardians vibe with our heroes driving around in their customized vehicle. There’s only periodic action, like when a biker takes a shot at them and Hickock blows him away – cue more bitching from Joshua. Fortunately, Joshua goes through some character growth in Thief River Falls Run; a subplot concerns him being forced to kill to save his comrades, and Robbins seems to use Joshua as a stand-in for those who complain about the use of excessive force…you know, like brain-addled puppet politicians who wonder why cops can’t shoot violent perps in the shoulder or something. When it’s kill or be killed, you kill, and this is the lesson Joshua learns. 

And sadly this subplot turns out to be the “meat” of Thief River Falls Run. Because action-wise, again we aren’t talking Doomsday Warrior. The vibe’s actually more like a Western, with Blade et al coming across a saloon in the titular town and engaging with some redneck gunslingers. There is a lot of promise for Twin Cities here; we learn the place is overrun by rats and roving crime gangs. This info is courtesy Big Bertha, a pretty young black woman Blade and team rescue from the gunslingers; they were keeping her as a sex slave. 

One thing we learn is that there are no black people in Home; Blade muses that there was “one black family,” but they died long ago. Hence Big Bertha is the first black girl any of them have seen, and Bertha herself takes a shine to Hickock, whom she calls “White Meat.” As for “Big Bertha,” she informs us she got this name on account of her “boobs.” She also calls Hickock “honky,” and Robbins clearly wants us to understand that these two will become an item…which works out for Hickock, as his chosen mate was killed last volume. Which I admit I’d entirely forgotten about, but Robbins frequently reminds us. 

I also forget the gore quotient of The Fox Run, but it’s only minimal in Thief Falls Run. The Warriors shoot several people, but the violence is mostly PG-13 at best. There’s also a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, with Blade taking on a male-female pair of Brutes. We’ve been told in these first two volumes that “only animals” were mutated by the nukes, with the insistence that there are no human mutants, but the Brutes seem to disprove this. Joshua and Bertha take on one in the climax, and there’s also a cool part where an injured Blade is separated from his friends as hunters, Watchers, and a revenge-minded Brute come after him. 

But humorously it’s back to square one at the end of the novel; Blade decides to call off the “Twin Cities run” yet again, and the team gets in the SEAL and heads back for Home. Maybe next volume they’ll actually get there!

Butler #5: Love Me To Death

Butler #5: Love Me To Death, by Philip Kirk

No month stated, 1980  Leisure Books

This fifth volume of Butler was a lot of fun and definitely my favorite one yet. Len Levinson specifically mentioned Love Me To Death when I met with him the other year, and we talked about it again just the other week when I gave him a call. So clearly this one was important to Len himself, which makes it odd that it turned out to be his penultimate volume of the series. 

As I mentioned in my review of Butler #1, Len only wrote the first six volumes of the series, the last being 1980’s Killer Satellites, after which Butler went on hiatus, returning in 1982 for six more volumes. Len was unaware that Butler continued without him until I informed him of the fact in 2010; he always saw Butler as his own series. It looks like who served as “Philip Kirk” for the post-Len volumes is still unknown, but honestly I have to wonder what the point of reading those volumes would be, as Butler is so ingrained with Len Levinson’s personality that I don’t see how the series could exist without him. I mean, this is a zany series, with a zany mindset, and again the action-centric cover art is quite misleading. It would be one thing if this was just any other action paperback series, but Butler is more Marx Brothers than The Executioner, and it would be disappointing if Belmont just turned it into just your average action series after Len’s departure. 

Speaking of which, I asked Len when I recently spoke to him why he left Butler after this volume. Len seemed to recall it might have had to do with new writing possibilities he’d gotten from another publisher – which would lead him to The Sergeant and ultimately The Rat Bastards. Butler then is the line of demarcation between Len’s ‘70s work for Belmont-Tower and Leisure – crime thrillers with a modern setting – and the WWII-themed material he would be focused on throughout the ‘80s for other publishers. It was an interesting conversation, because I was over halfway through Love Me To Death and thus closer to the world of Butler than the author himself – but then, Len wrote the book 43 years ago. Interestingly, the main thing he recalled about Love Me To Death was an otherwise incidental sequence featuring an otherwise incidental character: Pierre, an old French Foreign Legion solder Butler meets in Morocco. 

This one picks up immediately after the previous volume, with Butler when we meet him flying back into California from Hong Kong, but Len doesn’t much refer to the previous book other than vague mentions that Butler had a mission there. In other words, you don’t need to have read that one to read this one. And indeed, Love Me To Death almost sees a series reset for Butler; at the airport, Butler is approached by a former CIA colleague named Frank Sullivan, who tells Butler that the “right-wing maniacs” who have controlled the Agency are now being opposed by Sullivan’s own left-wing group. Sullivan, who knows Butler hated the right-wingers and the CIA in general, wants our hero to rejoin the Agency and help take on the right-wingers – we’re told even the President is in favor of this idea. 

So after talking over the idea with the mysterious Mr. Sheffield, who runs the Bancroft Institute for which Butler works, Butler decides to rejoin the CIA. And he’ll work in this capacity for the entirey of Love Me To Death. Indeed by novel’s end he’s still a CIA agent, and even requests a vacation from his new boss Frank Sullivan. So what I’m trying to say is that with this volume Len seems to drop the “Bancroft Institute” angle of the preceding four volumes, and now Butler’s back to being a CIA agent. Why Len decided to go this route is a mystery, and I look forward to seeing if Butler returns to Bancroft in this next volume (which is advertised in the back of the book, by the way, with the note that it will be published in March of 1980). 

That said, Len has fun with a discombobulated CIA that is so fractious the agents have to walk and talk in the countryside outside the headquarters in Virginia because their offices have been bugged by “the other side,” ie the right-wingers vs the left-wingers. Curiously FJ Shankam, that other old CIA colleague of Butler’s who has appeared – and plagued – Butler in the previous four volumes, is given short shrift in Love Me To Death. He appears in but a sentence, serving as Sullivan’s “assistant,” and Shankham doesn’t even exchange any dialog with Butler. In fact not much is made of Shankham at all, and other than his name being specifically mentioned you could assume he was just some random agent…not someone who has appeared in the previous volumes. Again, the impression is that this volume sees a sort of series reset, as if Len had grown bored with the overall setup of the series. If that is the case, then there’s little mystery why he jumped ship after the next volume for new writing pastures. 

I haven’t even gotten to the main plot of the novel, and it’s the best one yet in the series – essentially, pretty women are literally “fucking to death” various industrialists, politicians, and other VIPs. This phrase, “fucking to death,” is used repeatedly in the novel, and indeed this is the most sleazy and explicit volume yet. Which is of course to say it’s my favorite yet. The opening is an indication of this sleazy nature, as a beautiful blonde picks up a fat millionaire in New York, goes back to his place, and proceeds to ride him in explicit fashion. But the incredible thing here – and I still recall Len talking about this in the hotel foyer that day I met with him – is that the girl has a “special technique” which causes the fat millionaire to have a fatal heart attack. 

Butler is informed by Sullivan that a ring of beautiful women is possibly killing all of these men, and given that all the victims are American men of influence the CIA suspects some foreign power must be behind the plot. Sullivan wants Bulter to handle the situation because, in Sullivan’s opinion, Butler is an “utter sex degenerate” and thus would be perfect for the assignment. Butler’s idea is to bring in none other than Wilma B. Wiloughby, his archenemy/true love, last seen in the third volume. Auburn-haired Wilma is “a slender young woman with nice boobs” and “one of the most beautiful rear ends in history,” and when I spoke to Len on the phone the other week he described Wilma as his “dream girl.” Here we learn the interesting note that Wilma is sort of in love with Butler, and he gave her such an incredible orgasm in their sex scene in the second volume that she’s afraid to be around him because she knows she will become his sex slave. And Wilma has too much self-respect to debase herself for any man. Thus Wilma treats Butler like shit, hence their constant spatting. 

Despite the hostility she accepts Butler’s offer to join the CIA; she is just as much a left-winger as Butler is, though again be aware that what passes for “Leftism” in Butler would mostly be considered “Conservatism” today, something which Len also agreed with when I spoke to him recently. Wilma is sent off to New York to infiltrate the Women’s Lib movements. Again, this series is zany to the core, so Wilma promptly finds success when she hooks up with a women’s lib gang calling itself The Society To Utterly Destroy Men, and of course one of the members is familiar with the “Killer Fuck Squad” (as Butler refers to the mysterious group of women who are killing American VIPs). But as part of her undercover role, Wilma not only has to pretend to fervently hate men…but she also engages in some hot lesbian action with one of the women. Per the series template, this entails a few pages of extra-explicit material as the two women go down on each other…and after which Wilma decides that she just might be a lesbian! 

As stated in every one of my Butler reviews, while this series might have been conceived as “socialist” by Len, or even perceived as overly “Leftist” by readers of the day, it could not be seen that way today. Yet more indication is given when Wilma meets up again with Butler, Sullivan, and a fellow CIA agent named “Len Vinson” (our author again appearing in his own book – Vinson being 44 years old with a “bald head” and a black beard), and she declares herself to be a lesbian…and is promptly hassled and ridiculed by the men. Take that, identity politics! Another thing I enjoyed here is that Len Vinson claims that he’s always felt that Butler was “a stand-up guy;” this after Wilma and Sullivan have gone one about how Butler is a degenerate. In other words Butler’s creator himself appears in the novel to defend Butler! 

The book goes exactly where you were hoping it would when Butler tangles with one of the Killer Fuck Squad – the same gorgeous blonde who “fucked to death” the millionaire in the opening scene. This part is interesting because Mr. Sheffield returns to the narrative long enough to agree to pose as bait for the killers…but the real Sheffield goes into hiding while Butler disguises himself as the older man and goes to DC amid much media hoopla. In other words, if the killer women are looking for rich notables to off, then Mr. Sheffield should be prime bait for them. Of course the plan quickly succeeds – but first Butler is propositioned by a young “celebrity fucker,” who engages Butler in several pages of explicit shenanigans. Since Butler is unsure if she’s one of the squad, there follows some humor in how he’s hidden his gun in his pants…and keeps bringing the pants to bed with him, much to the confusion of the girl. 

There’s actually a lot of humor amid the sleaze, in particular how the women are shocked that the “old man” is actually so muscular and well-hung. This latter element really throws the blonde killer for a loop; she has her turn with Butler soon enough, and can’t believe how big this guy is compared to the other old men she’s killed in bed. Another recurrring element in Love Me To Death is that Butler’s “big dong” is enough to make these avowed “lesbians” question their entire sexual identity; again, a far cry from anything that could possibly pass as “Leftism” today. Here Butler gets a first-hand view (actually it’s not his hand, but still) of the “occult sexual techniques” these women use on men – basically, they work their inner muscles to access the pineal gland, via the nerves of the man’s penis, and force the men to “fuck faster” than their heart can keep up with. Hence, the old men are compelled to keep thrusting away, even if they want to stop due to chest pains, until it’s too late. However the technique is no match for young stud Butler: 

The action moves to Morocco, where Wilma has learned the woman behind all this is currently located: Kyra Deeb, an Iranian who runs a whorehouse and, given her hatred of men, trains a select group of beautiful women in the “ancient occult sexual techniques.” This part is like a sleazy sci-fi yarn as Kyra has Wilma screw a male dummy that’s hooked up to a scoreboard: 

Meanwhile Butler is engaged in a 23-page sequence that doesn’t have much at all to do with the rest of the novel, and seems to be there to help meet the excessive word count Belmont apparently demanded (the book, like the others in the series, comes in at 224 pages). Basically Butler grills an Arabic guy about the “barbarous” ways of the Middle East (again, impossible to see a Leftist attempting anything like this today) and finds himself challenged to a duel. Meanwhile Butler’s befriended an old Legionaire named Pierre, the character Len mentioned when I recently spoke to him. Despite having not much to do with the plot per se, this sequence is still pretty fun and has a nice recurring joke of how no one thinks Butler will survive the duel – the taxi driver even asks for the return fare ahead of time. 

Len does find a nice way to tie the unrelated plot into the main plot; a victorious Butler is pressured into going to the best whorehouse in town to celebrate, and of course it’s the one Kyra Deeb runs. An undercover Wilma is under suspicion due to all her questions, and to prove herself she’s forced to pose as a prostitute in Kyra’s whorehouse and screw the first man she sees. The reader can see exactly where this is going – and of course it’s none other than Butler himself. Their ensuing boff runs nearly as long as the one in the second volume, and is just as explicit:

You’ll note I haven’t mentioned much action; again, the cover art for Butler is very misleading. Len does deliver an action-packed finale, though, with Butler and Pierre leading the charge into Kyra’s headquarters and Wilma zapping people with her special CIA pen-laser. There isn’t much gore at all, and humorously the book is pretty tame in the violence department…humorous when compared to the explicit sexual material, I mean. Curiously no mention is made that Wilma has been trained in those occult sexual techniques – one would think Butler would be chomping at the bit to try them out. However by novel’s end Wilma has returned to her frosty exterior, and she and Butler are again enemies…with the vow from Frank Sullivan that the two of them will never be teamed up again. 

And that’s correct, both Butler and Wilma are still CIA agents by the end of Love Me To Death, with the implication that they will be reporting to Frank Sullivan – and not Mr. Sheffield of Bancroft – in the next volume, Killer Satellites. I’m curious why Len made this change to the series setup. But as mentioned he only wrote one more volume, so maybe he really was getting a little bored with Butler and just wanted to try something different. If so, that’s not apparent in the novel itself; Love Me To Death is a lot of fun, and Len is fully invested in the tale. And once again he channels his own personality through Butler, making for an always-entertaining read, with Len’s usual gift for entertaining dialog on full display throughout.

Hitler's Legacy

Hitler's Legacy, by David Alexander

June, 1989  Leisure Books

While he was writing Phoenix and Z-Comm, David Alexander also published this one-shot paperback original, which is one of the most deceptively thick books I’ve ever seen. Even though it’s 281 pages long, the print is super large and the novel’s really about the length of the average men’s adventure novel. I guess Leisure just wanted to push it as a “real novel” for the crowd who likes those extra-long suspense thrillers. Maybe they were going for the Tom Clancy audience, who knows. But Hitler’s Legacy instead comes off like the first volume of an action series that never was. 

At first I was hoping this would be David Alexander’s take on Dirty Harry, as the protagonist is a cop “with a chip on his shoulder.” But the cop setup is barely explored, and in reality protagonist Matthew Kells is a highly-experienced commando who was in various special forces, worked for the CIA, and only recently became a cop in New York so as to “give back to the community.” He has little in common with Dirty Harry or even Joe Ryker; this is not a police procedural, and in fact Kells acts more like your standard action-series hero, even wielding the same machine gun as Magnus Trench in Phoenix (a Minimi). The Alexander novel Hitler’s Legacy most reminds me of is Nomad #1, with the same pseudo-James Bond setup, lots of globetrotting, and an endless supply of international terrorists for our hero to kill. 

Actually, there’s less of an action onslaught in Hitler’s Legacy than in that first Nomad installment. It seems that David Alexander was trying to rein it in a bit; even the gore isn’t nearly as spectacular as Phoenix, and all the sex is off-page. So maybe this really was an attempt at a suspense-thriller type of mainstream novel, one that features a reborn Nazi menace as the threat. And Alexander spends more time scene-setting than he does in one of his series novels. The situation begins with a series of murders across the globe; the victims are all old German men. The mystery moves to America when a group of terrorists open fire at the Times Square subway station, mowing down a horde of innocents – and apparently using the massacre to mask the fact that their real target is yet another old German man. 

Meanwhile hero cop Matthew Kells isn’t even active on the force; he’s been put on unpaid suspension due to blowing away a rapist. Even though the rapist had just murdered someone and was coming after Kells, it doesn’t matter – the usual goddamn liberal lawyers got him off and the Internal Affairs guys managed to get Kells suspended. When we meet him he’s working on some stockyard or somesuch, and gets in a fight with some thug. Alexander uses a crude tone throughout the novel, with Kells delivering R-rated retorts. In fact it’s pretty easy to see someone like Bruce Willis in the role, and what with the globe-spanning action and frequent one-liners you get the feeling that Alexander is writing the novelization of a movie that never was. 

Due to his convoluted backstory Kells has some serious anti-terrorism experience, and thus he’s called in by his chief to look into the Times Square Massacre. The NYPD Anti-Terrorism squad is mostly staffed with guys who have only studied terrorism, and have no first-hand experience with it. Kells is needed due to his expertise, even if he’s been suspended. Within a few hours of studying the crime scene photos, Kells deduces that the “terrorists” pulled off the massacre as a cover for an assassination, and the old man was their real target. He breaks into the dead man’s apartment and finds an old photo of Nazis, with a cryptic message written on it. Gradually Kells will learn that the old man was part of a special Nazi squad that was active in the last days of the war. 

At this point the cop setup is dropped. Kells is sent over to Europe as a “representative” of the NYPD, not even carrying a gun. But of course he has no problem arming himself, giving his familiarity with the territory and the various gun-runners who operate there. He also suddenly gets a partner: Sidney, a smokin’ hot blonde who has intelligence-world connections and will serve as Kells’s partner (and occasional bedmate) for the rest of the novel. This further lends Hitler’s Legacy a proto-Nomad vibe, as I recall the hero of that novel jet-setting around Europe with his own beautiful babe in tow. However as mentioned Alexander keeps all the sex off-page; even an earlier scene, where Kells manages to score with a bar floozy, is an immediate fade to black. Again it gives the impression that he was writing the book with more of a mainstream market in mind. 

There’s no sleaze, but Alexander does use the term “fellatrix” to describe that bar floozy. This made me chuckle, as the only other time I’ve seen that word was in Richard Blade #1, by one of my favorite writers, Manning Lee Stokes. It’s a rather highfalutin word that describes a woman who has superior oral skills. Alexander’s usage of the term really threw me for a loop, as it’s not in his usual style. It’s a fun word, and one I think we should see a whole lot more often. Otherwise Alexander keeps the exploitative stuff to a minimum, barely even describing Sidney’s apparently-incredible bod. Instead, the crudity is in the tone of the narrative itself; Alexander peppers his word-painting with coarse, off-hand comments, a la “…the hands of the French were as dirty as a well-digger’s asshole.” That doesn’t even make any sense, but it certainly paints a picture. 

Kells and Sidney venture around Europe, tracking down leads. The story eventually unfolds that these old men being assassinated were part of a last-ditch Nazi gambit, and “Bloodstar” is the name of the mission they were on. Kells will soon learn that the mission never ended; Bloodstar was planned as an endless series of terrorist attacks and assassinations to keep the Nazi flame burning. He’ll even learn that “the murder of the Kennedy brothers” was a Bloodstar initiative. Kells will also learn that the CIA has well been aware of this Nazi menace, and indeed has been working right alongside it. Kells has a few run-ins with the Agency, and at one point even gets captured by them…a bit that’s very men’s adventure-esque, as despite being chained and beaten Kells is still able to get the drop on his tormentors, appropriating a gun. 

Even Kells’s arsenal is straight out of men’s adventure. Through his underworld contacts in Zurich he gets himself a Mini-Uzi, a Beretta 93R (favored by Mack Bolan around this time), and a SPAS-15 auto shotgun. He engages in frequent firefights, and his main nemesis in the novel is a blond giant with the codename Polaris. Giving the book even more of a “novelization of a film that never was” vibe, Polaris clearly seems to be inspired by Dolph Lundgren. Alexander’s Phoenix novels were filled with outlandish gore, but the gunfights here are mostly bloodless. Speaking of Mack Bolan, I just realized that the entire plot of Hitler’s Legacy, which concerns an old Nazi menace that still has repercussions today (complete with an entire neo-Nazi army), is very similar to Gerald Montgomery’s COMCON trilogy…only that later Executioner series was more in the vein of men’s adventure pulp, with superpowered soldiers and demons(!). 

But as mentioned Alexander gets closer to the vibe of men’s adventure himself as the novel gets into the final quarter. Here in the climax Kells finds himself in a Bavarian castle; it’s the headquarters of this neo-Nazi movement, and Kells gets hold of that Minimi machine gun and raises hell. There are also various revelations around who is really on Kells’s side and who is his enemy. The (uncredited) cover depicts the White House with Hitler’s crazy eyes overtop it; Kells discovers by novel’s end that the upper levels of the US government might be aligned with this Nazi menace. In the climax Kells pulls a disappearing trick – even disappearing from the narrative itself, a la Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow – to hide from the US government. (Maybe Kells should go to Switzerland!) 

The following year Alexander published another thick paperback original with Leisure: Angel Of Death. It too has a “Nazis in the modern day” plot, but I’m too lazy to check my copy to see if it’s a sequel to Hitler’s Legacy. I guess I’ll find out someday.

Mafia Death Watch (The Sharpshooter #16)

Mafia Death Watch, by Bruno Rossi

No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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