Mace #7: The Year Of The Cock

Mace #7: The Year Of The Cock, by C.K. Fong
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

It’s curious that with this seventh volume of Mace Manor came up with a new house name: C.K. Fong replacing Lee Chang. I say curious because Bruce Cassiday, the writer who took over the series with this volume, clearly strives to mimic the style of Joseph Rosenberger, who served as Lee Chang for the first five volumes, whereas Len Levinson, who also served as Lee Chang in the previous volume, did his own thing. I know from Len that he never read any of the previous Mace novels, nor even knew who Joseph Rosenberger was (his succinct answer when I asked him: “I never heard of Joseph Rosenberger”), but it seems clear that Cassiday not only read Rosenberger’s Mace installments but went out of his way to replicate his style. 

All of which is to say The Year Of The Cock is ersatz Rosenberger; Cassiday successfully captures the flavor of JR’s clunky, soul-crushing narrative style, but he misses the oddball touches Rosenberger afficionados would expect. But the bland plotting, the egregious bios of one-off villains, the interminable action scenes that don’t have a single spark of excitement – all of it’s there. If I hadn’t known going in that Cassiday was Fong, I would’ve assumed it was Rosenberger on an off day. I don’t know much about Cassiday, and so far on the blog I’ve only reviewed one of his novels, the earlier psychedelic cash-in The Happening At San Remo. I have several other paperbacks of his, ranging from historicals to sleazy crime, so I assume he must’ve been pretty prolific and capable of changing his style to match the content.

In any event, Len’s novel is basically a blip and, in case there was any doubt, has nothing to do with the series itself, best judged as a standalone novel about some other half-Chinese kung fu wizard named Victor Mace. Because Cassiday gives us the same guy that Rosenberger did, a “Kung Fu Monk-Master” who works for the CIA and is capable of superhuman feats but has the personality of a thumbtack. Cassiday might give us a slightly more “human” Mace, in that this one actually has a libido (usually a much-lacking feature in a Rosenberger protagonist); there’s a part midway through where he falls for a honey trap scenario and has some (off-page) sex with a young Chinese babe. I don’t think the Rosenberger version of Mace would’ve had this experience.

It’s straight to the action and the egregious backstories for one-off opponents as we meet Mace in Galveston, Texas, where he’s busy tying himself to a motor boat that’s speeding across a dark bay. Mace we’ll learn is on his latest CIA assignment, looking into the nefarious presence of a Red Chinese cell here in Texas, one that’s led by a dude named Major Fong (who is compared to both Hitler and Frankenstein!). Curious too that “Fong” is the name of the villain as well as the name of the (fictional) author, leading me to believe that Cassiday was unaware that the house name for the series would change. But then, this opening action scene takes place at “Bruce’s Fishing Charter,” which is likely some in-jokery from Cassiday, so who knows. Oh and there’s the possibility that Fong might’ve killed Mace’s father, who we learn in brief backstory was American – it was his Chinese stepfather who sent Mace to the Shaolin school – but Cassiday basically drops this angle.

Mace quickly learns that it’s a setup, and the thugs on the boat have known he was here all along. They corner him and it goes straight into the Rosenberger-style action, with random asides detailing the goofily-named opponents Mace is about to crush. As with Rosenberger this results in a clunky, pseudo-omniscient tone, a tone Cassiday employs throughout the book:

Nick Bartolomew was next to join the surging attack on the Kung Fu Monk-Master. Armed with a twelve inch flyssa, a Moroccan sword characterized by a single-edged blade engraved and inlaid with brass, Bartolomew slid it histily[sp] from the scabbard he wore around his waist and came at Mace with a wild glare. 

“Your last breath on earth, you chink son of a bitch!” he yelled, and slid the deadly blade upward toward Mace’s groin. But the Kung Fu Tung-chi had anticipated the black-haired ex-con’s move with the blade, and countered by whirling around with a simple Korsi Tu Minga kick to the crotch. 

Shrieking in agony, Bartolomew sagged to the deck, his sexual apparatus a mass of jelly instantly radiating pain from its ruined center to every nerve ending in his body. As he fell, the ugly flyssa impaled him in the heart as he sank down face first. He twisted and tore at the deck plates with his bleeding fingernails as he slowly lost consciousness and died in the lashing rain.

Or this example:

An ex-hood named Pinky Desnoyers was the next who reacted with dispatch. An albino, he dyed his hair red to make himself presentable to his fellow man. Desnoyers went nowhwere without a snubnosed S and W .45 caliber revolver clipped to his shoulder holster.

Or:

“Make sure he’s dead!” yelled Sam Riley, known as One-Ball Riley ever since he had been partially maimed by the disgruntled husband of a floozie he had been caught with in bed one eventful evening.

One thing Cassiday actually outdoes Rosenberger on is the racial slurs. Not since the first volume has “chink,” “slant-eyes,” and sundry other racial putdowns appeared so many times in a Mace novel. Cassiday even comes up with wholly new ones, like “noodle-nibbler.” In fact there’s a long stretch where an Asian slur appears on every single page, as if Cassiday were trying to outdo himself. And it’s not just the villains coming up with the slurs, it’s everyone – cops, fellow CIA agents, etc. This opening action scene is our intro to this, as the seemingly-endless parade of thugs come up with slur after slur before Mace’s feet or fists pummel them into bloody burger. But as with Rosenberger there’s no joy in the action, and it just comes off like an interminable barrage of description from a martial arts how-to book. Cassiday does though try to retain the occasional goofy cap-offs for his action scenes, a la “The goon woke up and found himself in hell,” sort of thing you’d find in a Rosenberger Mace. Like this, from a later action scene:

The goon in the middle stormed in to deliver a Karate chop to the back of Mace’s neck. His hand connected, and Mace rolled with the punch. Immediately he recovered, forcing his muscles and his psyche to regroup in a positive chi effort. Instantly he was clear-headed and alert, backing around, wheeling slightly, and clobbering the man called Hank Grogan with a Dragon Foot snap kick in the solar plexus. The ball of the foot and the heel slammed into Grogan’s nerve centers, paralyzing him instantly and sending him crumpling to the ground. His abdominal wall collapsed and he was bleeding internally when they finally put him in the ambulance and sent him to Houston General. He recovered seven weeks later, but he was on soft foods for the rest of his life.

So as you can see, one could easily be fooled into believing this was the work of Joseph Rosenberger, and Cassiday does an admirable job of aping his unusual style. But sadly he is so successful that The Year Of The Cock (the working title of my autobio, btw) is just as boring as a legit Rosenberger book, 222 whopping pages of spirit-deadening blocks of prose and hardly any narrative momentum. There’s plentiful kung-fu fighting, though, but as with Rosenberger’s books it just comes off like dry textbook descriptions of outrageously-named moves being employed on outrageously-named thugs – thugs who spout outrageous racial slurs moments before their faces meet Mace’s feet.

The plot gradually centers around a Red Chinese plot to destroy the offshore oil rigs off the Houston coast. Mace sits through interminable meetings with his CIA comrades, the only memorable one being Benny Jaurez, the Houston chief of station. This too has the ring of Rosenberger, with the spooks sitting around in their humdrum office over cups of lukewarm coffee and trading exposition on the spy life (why a CIA ring is called a “pod,” etc). Eventually it comes to light that one of the various intelligence agents is a traitor, and there’s also an elaborate sting operation where Mace tries to out him. This bit leads to a surprise climax in which Mace, pursued by a dogged Houston cop who himself turns out to be a villain, is “rescued” by a hot young Chinese babe who pulls up in her sportscar and offers Mace a lift.

In what is as mentioned a departure from Rosenberger’s more cipher-like version of the character, this Mace actually goes back to the broad’s place and ultimately has sex with her. Her name’s Moon Chu Lingdoo, and she claims to be a string reporter for Time, currently working for the local PBS station. She says she’s “hopelessly Americanized” and there follows a lot of dialog between the two, concluding with Moon throwing herself on Mace, as she claims to be lonely. Off-page sex ensues, and Mace wakes up to discover, of course, that it was a setup – Moon is gone but some thugs have slipped into her darkened apartment to get the drop on him. Of course he kills them all and escapes without breaking much of a sweat.

In a laughable sequence Mace, again hanging out with Juarez, employs his total recall to review every single thing he glimpsed in Moon’s apartment, in particular the photo of a man on one of her tables. Mace and Juarez already know there’s a deep undercover spy for the Chinese government here in Houston, and Mace is certain this man in the photo is that undercover agent: Tom Galey, the director of programming for the Houston PBS station. I guess in 1975 it would’ve sounded crazy – maybe even impossible – that a member of the American media could be an undercover Red China asset. In 2020 it sounds downright timely. Mace of course is correct, and meanwhile Galey, who lives in a fortified compound, is busy arguing with Major Fong over how to carry out the operation on the oilwells, and also over whether or not they should kill Moon for failing in her mission. She attempts to escape, only to be raped (off-page) by a guard who captures her.

This leads to probably the “best” action scene in the book, with Mace infiltrating Galey’s compound and taking out a few guards, as well as some guard dogs with some hypodermic needles. He also manages to rescue Moon, aka the woman who nearly got him killed. Moon claims she didn’t know Mace was going to be attacked, etc, but she does give him and Juarez the info on the oilwell attack. This leads to the finale, with Mace and the CIA agents staging an assault on the PBS station, where it turns out Galey has set up a transmitter on the broadcasting tower. A signal from it and the offshore rigs will blow up. The climax is a bit gory, too, with Mace ripping out Galey’s eyes and shredding his throat, and another character performing some heroic sacrifice to both wipe out the transmitter and kill Major Fong.

And with this, thankfully, the book concludes…it’s too long, too wordy, too bland, but as I say it’s at least a successful mimicking of Joseph Rosenberger’s patented style. Only without the quirks that make the real Rosenberger’s work occasionally so memorable. Cassiday also turned in the next volume, which would prove to be the last of Mace.

Mace #6: The Year Of The Boar

Mace #6: The Year Of The Boar, by Lee Chang
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

I’ve been looking forward to this sixth volume of Mace for quite a while. Because my friends we’re finally out of the weeds, ie the previous five volumes by Joseph Rosenberger, and as if in reward for enduring those five beatings we’re graced with an installment by Len Levinson (using the same house name that Rosenberger did, “Lee Chang”). So even though Len delivers a protagonist much different than his usual (at least when considering his other ‘70s novels), it goes without saying that The Year Of The Boar is vastly more entertaining than any of Rosenberger’s installments.

I know from Len himself that he never read those previous five books; in fact as he most memorably informed me once: “I never heard of Joseph Rosenberger.” So for all intents and purposes this could be considered a standalone novel. And in many ways it is much different from Len’s other books of the decade, with a straight-shooter protagonist wholly at odds with Len’s typical main characters from this era. In fact Victor Mace is kind of boring, and makes one miss, for example, the neurotic Johnny Rock of Len’s three Sharpshooter novels.

Len was clearly given at least a character outline to work from, though. It’s still Victor Mace, Chinese-American kung-fu wizard from Hong Kong who has relocated to America, but whereas Rosengerber’s Mace did CIA jobs on the side, Len’s is the head instructor at the Lotus Academy on Canal Street, in the Chinatown section of Manhattan. There is of course no mention of the previous five volumes, though if anything Len’s novel harkens back to the vibe of Mace #1, in that it doesn’t have any espionage commando stuff and is more of a simple “kung fu master versus stupid thugs” sort of thing.

The simple nature of the storyline is made clear by the plot: Mace goes up against some crooks who plan to burn down tenement buildings in Chinatown and build luxury high-rises in their wake. Mace comes into it when one of his students is killed in the latest fire; he learns later that another building was recently burned down in the same area. But as the dead guy’s teacher Mace is sworn by the ancient rules of kung-fu to avenge his student’s murder within a few days or something, so he’s off into action posthaste.

Mace starts off the novel being interviewed by sexy journalist Joyce Wilson, who is doing a story on the kung-fu craze. Len sort of pulls a fast one on the readers; we know that Joyce is attracted to Mace and hopes he asks her out – indeed she hopes he’ll take her back to her place and boff her brains out, being a “liberated woman” and all – but it never happens. Mace goes off with Joyce within the first few pages, but is first distracted by some would-be muggers who give him the handy opportunity to show off his skills, and then he’s further distracted by the burned-down building his student lived in. He ends up telling Joyce “maybe next time” and sets off – and Len apparently forgets all about Joyce, having her disappear for the rest of the novel, only returning near the very end when Mace calls her up to see if she knows a mob boss’s address. 

Instead, the novel is given over to a lot of chop-sockeying; same as in the Rosenberger era there are random all-caps bursts of “CHINK!” from Mace’s enemies, followed by Mace’s shouts of “KIII-AAA!” as he kicks them into oblivion. However the incessant “shuto chop” of Rosenberger is gone, replaced by various combinations of punches and kicks, though Len’s own “shuto chop” (meaning his own overused pose, a la Rosenberger’s shuto chop) would have to be the “horse stance,” which it seems Mace is going into every few pages. That being said, Len’s fights are more entertaining, even though they’re really the same as Rosenberger’s – endless, extended sequences of Mace kicking and punching people. But as I’ve said before, I personally feel that martial arts combat isn’t as suited to prose as say gun combat is. There are only so many ways you can describe a punch or a kick.

And as mentioned Mace is kind of boring anyway…he’s too much of a straight-shooter, and his occasional speeches on the kung-fu way kind of make him a bore. That said, he does have an incongruous habit of putting an unlit match in his mouth, which I guess is intended to make him seem tough – otherwise he’s very tall, slim build, long back hair, same as the cover. Also in an interesting bit of cross-series continuity, or at least what might be seen as such, Mace has a pal on the New York police force: Lt. Raymond Jenkins, who we can assume might be the brother of Lt. Richard Jenkins in Len’s Bronson: Streets Of Blood, written around the same time as The Year Of The Boar. Jenkins even gives Mace a gun at one point, insisting he keep it for protection against the Mafia enforcers who are coming for him, but of course Mace doesn’t use it.

Another harbinger of the Rosenberger installments is that Mace is suitably superhuman; he’s actually up in the Dr. Strange league this time, able to see and hear beyond normal human perception with his “shuh” talent. As if that weren’t enough, he’s even able to focus his “chi” to such an extent that he can stop the flow of blood from a gunshot wound in his shoulder…and when the bullet’s extracted (by a Chinatown acupuncturist, naturally), Mace is able to focus his will and re-seal the wound!! All of this, coupled with his take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward sex, makes Mace more of a sort of kung-fu Jesus than the typically-rabid (or at least driven) Len Levinson protagonist.

The title comes from Mafia bigshot Frank Zarelli, whose plans Mace threatens; Zarelli and Chinatown opium importer Mr. Sing concoct a scheme to hire some kung-fu killers to come over from Hong Kong and kill Mace. It’s Mr. Sing who compares Zarelli to a boar, so one assumes Len was given this title before he started writing and found some way to accommodate it into the narrative. Led by seven foot tall sadist Rok Choy, who happens to have been a kung-fu schoolmate of Mace’s who was kicked out twenty years ago, these kung-fu assassins are pretty cool and definitely bring the novel the flavor of vintage bell-bottom fury movies; upon their arrival in Manhattan they’re instantly getting drunk and taking advantage of Mr. Sing’s teenaged assistant – the only part of the novel to feature any dirty stuff, and most of it relayed via dialog.

However Rok Choy is dispensed with sooner than expected, and Mace quickly sets his sights on his remaining followers. In fact Mace is so superhuman that the question isn’t so much if he’ll survive but how quickly he’ll take out his opponents, no matter how greatly they outnumber him. I guess in this way Len’s book is also similar to Rosenberger’s, but it must be said that his Mace is a bit more likable, if too distant from the reader due to his perfection. As for Zarelli, his fate is a bit unexpected, and it occurs shortly afterward, as Mace promptly assaults the man’s heavily-guarded home. Len ends the novel right here, with Mace catching a taxi back to Chinatown – there’s a goofy out-of-nowhere recurring bit about a new cabdriver who doesn’t know his way around Manhattan, and the various characters keep getting into his cab – and that’s that. Vengeance has been meted out in the demanded time.

Overall The Year Of The Boar was entertaining, certainly when compared to Rosenberger’s previous five books, but at the same time I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Len’s other books from this period. Not that there’s anything wrong with his prose or his dialog, it’s just that it lacks that zany spark the others had. And mostly I feel this is due to Mace himself, but again this isn’t Len’s fault – he was hired to write a book about a kung-fu master and that’s how a kung-fu master is written. So in that regard he certainly exceeded, but when you’ve read say Shark Fighter you just expect something more from the guy. I mean when a cab driver who appears on maybe half a page total is more memorable than the lead character, you know something is up.

Back in July 2012 I asked Len about Year Of The Boar as part of the interview I did with him for The Paperback Fanatic. I asked him again about the book now that I’ve read it, and he decided to “augment” his original Paperback Fanatic comments for my review. So here’s Len on the origins of The Year Of The Boar – and I have to say, the “rapacity” of New York landlords (as Len memorably described them in a recent email) comes through loud and clear in the novel!

THE YEAR OF THE BOAR began with a phone call from an editor I knew at Belmont-Tower, don’t remember his name. He said he was working for a new publishing house called Manor and asked if I would write for them. I said “sure,” which was how a desperate freelance writer naturally would respond. 

I lived at 114 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in those days, and walked uptown to the meeting at Manor’s office located in the same vicinity as Belmont-Tower on lower Park Avenue south of 34th Street. Zebra Publishing for whom I later wrote was in the same area. 

Also in attendance at the meeting was a young lady editor who I also knew from Belmont-Tower. No one else was in the office, which as I recall, consisted of only one medium-sized room. This young lady editor had previously told me that she worked with Nelson DeMille when he was in the Belmont-Tower stable. I suspected that Manor was connected to Belmont-Tower in some way. 

I don’t remember details of the meeting but I ended up writing two novels for Manor, THE YEAR OF THE BOAR and STREETS OF BLOOD in their BRONSON series by Philip Rawls. I don’t remember which I wrote first. 

THE YEAR OF THE BOAR really stimulated my imagination because I was very interested in Eastern religions at that time, and had studied karate under the great Okinawan master Ansei Ueshiro who worked out in class alongside us students in his studio on West 14th Street in New York City around 1962. His speed, strength and precision seemed supernatural. Inspired by him, I affixed a bamboo mat to a wall of my apartment and punched it in order to build up callouses on my knuckles, but my knuckles bled and no callouses ever happened. 

In addition, I had studied Vedanta Hinduism plus Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, attending many lectures and reading lots of books. I also spent much time in NYC’s Chinatown, largest Chinatown in America, which was spilling over into Little Italy and the Lower East Side. Often I explored out-of-the-way streets and alleys, hung out in Buddhist temples, ate at funky restaurants, and munched on lotus seed buns as I wandered about. Sometimes I wished I could move to Chinatown because I loved the exotic atmosphere, almost like being in Hong Kong. 

I also had watched a few Kung-Fu movies on the Bowery in Chinatown. None had subtitles but were fascinating anyway. The nearly 100% Chinese audiences seemed to enjoy them very much. Those King Fu movies doubtlessly influenced action scenes in THE YEAR OF THE BOAR, which begins in Chinatown and much of the action occurs there. 

The character of Joyce Wilson, described as reporter for a NYC daily, was based loosely on a real reporter for an underground NYC weekly newspaper who lived in the same building as I in Greenwich Village, and was a friend of mine. Now she is a famous reporter for the NEW YORK TIMES. I don’t want to mention her real name because I don’t want to embarrass her. 

While writing THE YEAR OF THE BOAR, I was having problems with my landlord because my apartment was rent-controlled and he wanted me to move out so that he could jack up the rent. He refused to fix what was broken and threatened to have me beaten up if I complained to the Housing Authority. So he transmogrified into the predominant villain of THE YEAR OF THE BOAR and came to a very dark end in the novel. 

All these experiences and semi-understood theologies served as foundations of YEAR OF THE BOAR. As I skim through the novel today, I think the narrative was undermined by my tendency to toss in sex scenes that seem casual and unmotivated, but it seemed like a lot of sex was casual and unmotivated during the seventies. It was a strange time and I spent much of it sitting in a series of non-luxury apartments in Manhattan, writing action/adventure. To paraphrase Marcel Proust, it was life carried on by other means.

Mace #5: The Year Of The Horse

Mace #5: The Year Of The Horse, by Lee Chang
No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

It’s Thanksgiving, and if there’s one thing we can all be thankful for, it’s that this was the last volume of Mace written by Joseph Rosenberger. I’d sort of been dreading returning to this series, which is a wearying read to be sure; it’s about as fun as a “Shuto chop” to the crotch. But I finally went through with it, mostly so I could move on to the next volume, which is by Len Levinson…as if Manor were rewarding us for enduring five Rosenberger books.

Anyway, The Year Of The Horse is the same ol’, so far as the series goes, however Rosenberger (aka “Lee Chang”) drops the CIA stuff from previous volumes. Hero Mace, the “Kung Fu Monk Master” (as he’s constantly referred to in the narrative), is back to working for the Tongs, going up against rival gangs and whatnot. We meet him in action, in Chicago busting the heads of the local mob; gradually we’ll learn Mace is doing a job for one Tong, which is at war with another, one that’s aligned with this Chicago syndicate.

But the threadbare plot is really just a framework for Rosenberger to deluge us with endless, repetitive kung-fu battles. The back cover copy has it that a beautiful young woman has been kidnapped, thus setting off Mace’s rage, but in the text itself the girl, Mary Wah-hing, doesn’t even appear until over 100 pages in. The book’s really just about Mace beating the shit out of an endless tide of thugs with goofy nicknames. (Wee Willie, Cherry Nose, John the Greek, etc, and my favorite of them all: Hi-There-Moses.)

The CIA stuff may be gone, but The Year Of The Horse retains the template of previous books, in that it’s basically comprised of four huge action scenes. We start off posthaste with the first, as Mace “sneaks” into a warehouse owned by Gus Vogel, Chicago mob bigwig. In the melee of punches, kicks, and Shuto chops, Mace as ever flashes back for four pages to his training in the Shaolin temple (in Hong Kong, of all places), where his teacher instructed him about…the hypocrisy of Christian beliefs. Oh, and despite being a kung-fu wizard, Mace is also a ninja, let’s not forget, and uses all sorts of fancy ninja tricks to waste scads of Vogel’s thugs.

Humorously enough, the “Kung Fu Monk Master” is knocked out…by a metal stapler! Thrown by a geriatric night guard, no less! But have no fear, Rosenberger’s superheroic protagonists are never in danger, even when they’re uncoscious in the back of a van, being driven by several armed men to their place of execution. Mace is merely using yet another ninja trick, that of only pretending to be unconscious, and comes to life to kill the rest of them, as well as to extract intel from one thug he allows to live.

Rosenberger prefigures Rush Hour or the like with stoic Mace teamed up with wisecracking Chicago P.I. Lenny Kines, but he doesn’t do much with it, and mostly it’s just Kines proclaiming how he’s “the best P.I. in Chicago” and Mace uttering “wise Oriental” sayings like, “It is the duty of the future to be dangerous.” We also have Kines in awe over Mace’s “supernormal talent,” which is displayed in another overlong action scene, as this time Mace suits up in a ninja-like costume and storms yet another warehouse owned by Vogel.

I chose this action sequence to provide a few excerpts of the action onslaught that makes up Rosenberger’s Mace work:

Jack Daniels, the other trigger-boy in the library (he considered it a compliment when people kidded him for having the same name as a famous brand of whiskey), had never heard such a sound, the kind of moaning and gurgling coming from Joe “The Pole,” who staggered back into the library, acting as if he were possessed by the devil! He was possessed – by the Shinde shuriken, which by now had almost cut off his tongue! A number one wise guy, he had never been a man to know when he had bitten off more than he could chew. Now he knew he had a mouthful of razor blades and was choking to death, drowning in his own blood! Slumping against the wall, he became a wild man, trying to pry his mouth apart to dislodge the Shinde shuriken wedged in his mouth, while Daniels gaped at him in helplnessness and terror.

Or:

The second slob, using a stainless steel Smith & Wesson .38, did his best to jump back and empty the full cylinder – six slugs – in Mace. The only thing wrong with his plan was that Mace wouldn’t let him. The Kung Fu Monk Master chopped the .38 from his wrist with a shuto slice, blocked a kick with a Gedan Juji Uke downward X-block, and slammed the boob across the temple with a Gyaku Shuto reverse chop. Looking like a man whose taxes had just been raised fifty percent, the man toppled to the floor.

Finally:

An ugly thug, Steve Macy always had the appearance of a guy somebody had hung in a closet overnight! Come morning, and Steve would jump out, his clothes all bunched up! Right now, he looked twice as ridiculous as he bravely attempted to swing his chopper down on Mace, who threw the Hokachai! Steve Macy howled in fear and pain and surprise, the three hardwood rods of the Hokachai tearing the Thompson submachine gun from his hands and breaking his left thumb. To compound his purgatory, he stepped back, tripped over the overturned table and fell heavily on his back. And when he looked up, there was Mace standing over him, staring down at him, his face expressionless as a blank sheet of paper, except for his eyes…two burning black coals…

Speaking of that “supernormal talent,” throughout the novel Mace dodges bullets as if he were in The Matrix, ducking and dodging with ease. He’s so superhuman and invicible that he becomes annoying, which is only worsened by his complete lack of humor. Kines offers a bit of levity, but is lost in the kung fu barrage. Eventually the two, along with a few of Kines’s colleagues, head to Mexico City, where it develops poor Mary Wah-hing (remember her?) has been taken, having been handed over to a Mexican mobster named Najera.

Sporting white makeup, a wig, and a “Hitler moustache,” Mace is now “Matthew Romanesh,” displaying the usual goofy penchant for disguise as other Rosenberger protagonists. But this element disappears as quick as one of Mace’s Shuto chops. Soon enough he’s wearing another of those ninja garbs and infiltrating Najera’s “Le Casa de Putas,” where women are kept in bondage to be enjoyed by paying clientelle. Rosenberger skips over the sleaze with more violence, and when Mary finally appears, she’s unconscious, sedated in one of the rooms, and Mace quickly frees her.

From there it’s to the Toltec pyramids, where Najera has escaped. Mace, Kines, and his colleagues engage the Mexican mobsters in another overlong fight, with Kines getting the honor of dispatching the villain. And that was it for Rosenberger’s time on Mace; he ends the tale with Mace taking a well-deserved nap.

Overall, The Year Of The Horse is standard Rosenberger, filled with action and not much else, overwritten to the point of banality, not even saved by Rosenberger’s usual off-hand weirdness. The series though does have a big injection of pre-PC racial slurring, particularly as ever when it comes to Mace himself. (“IT’S THE SLANT-EYED ONE – KILL HIM!” being one such example – and yes, it is in all caps…) Blacks again come off as monstrous proto-humans, and this time Rosenberger broadens his palette by including Mexican slurs, referring to some of Najera’s thugs as “tamale eaters.”

Anyway, now I don’t have to dread reading another of these – Len Levinson wrote the next one, and then Bruce Cassiday finished up the series as “C.K. Fong.”

Mace #4: The Year Of The Dragon

Mace #4: The Year Of The Dragon, by Lee Chang
No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

Joseph Rosenberger turns in another installment of the Mace series, and thank god there’s only one more Rosenberger volume to go. Seriously, The Year Of The Dragon is a straight-up beating of a novel, mercilessly pounding the reader into a lethargic stupor of boredom. Now let me tell you all about it!

Once again coming off like a Chinese clone of the Death Merchant, Victor Mace is a walking, talking cipher who blitzes his way through the opposition without breaking a sweat, let alone taking any damage. Mace, that “kung fu monk-master” as Rosenberger constantly refers to him, is up in Seattle looking into the disappearance of the Ming Do Chun, a Ming dynasty statue worth around five million dollars. A gift from China, in exchange for artistic gifts of similar worth from America, the statue went missing during its shipment to the US, and now Mace and his CIA fellows are working with “Red China” secret agents to track it down.

There’s even less character or plot development this time out than previously, which is really saying something. The Year Of The Dragon is hinged around three massive action sequences, and not much more. Mace rarely even speaks in the novel, with the “plot development” mostly relegated to his Seattle handler, Darren Crawford, and a group of Chinese agents whose names get confusing and who are even less developed than Mace. As usual it’s the villains who are more memorable, a hapless trio who through some hazily-explained ruse have gotten hold of the Ming Do Chun.

We know from page one that these crooks – Kirk Bogue, Harry Bothers, and Manny Zoe – have the statue, yet it still takes around 190 pages of small print for Mace and his colleagues to get it from them. The novel opens on the first of those three big action sequences, as Mace et al raid Kirk Bogue’s warehouse, where they think the statue is hidden. The ensuing action scene is practically endless, and sadly a sign of things to come, as Mace cripples and kills an army of thugs. And after all that, the statue isn’t even there!

Here we get one of the few dialog scenes, where Mace and the various agents sit around and talk about…well, not the case, as you’d expect, but instead about the imminent collapse of the United States, and how China ain’t much better. There’s some egregious right wing sermonizing here, with Mace basically stating that America should enforce martial law. That all of this radical rhetoric is coming from a “kung fu monk-master” from Hong Kong doesn’t seem very strange to Crawford and the other CIA agents, who basically just let Mace do whatever he wants throughout.

Rosenberger does work in some references to his other creations, though, with the Chinese rep asking for the assistance of the Death Merchant or the Murder Master (another Rosenberger creation, who featured in a three-volume series of that name for Manor around this time), but the CIA tells him they’re busy at the moment! But this little sequence, maybe a page or two, is about the only moment of levity in The Year Of The Dragon. Rosenberger seems to be in dead earnest throughout, which as usual makes for a pretty confounding read, as you wonder how any sane person could sit down and write crap like this in earnest. 

The second major action sequence has Mace and Chinese agent Lt. Ko mounting a nighttime raid on a freighter upon which they think the statue might be stored. Here’s the kicker, though – we readers know that it isn’t there, and yet Rosenberger delivers a 45-page action scene as Mace and Ko beat to shit and kill an endless tide of gangsters during their assault upon the ship! It’s all just a massive waste of time – and again, given the tiny print, you wonder why the hell Rosenberger even bothered.

The final action sequence is also the finale, as Mace et al launch an attack upon a foundry, and here at long last the Ming Do Chun really is being held. This final battle is even more taxing than those that came before. And again Rosenberger gets off on informing us all kinds of incidental details about various thugs who pop up out of the woodwork, take a swing or shot at Mace, and then get killed by him for their efforts. The same holds true for the few comrades of Mace who get killed in the assault; they die, Rosenberger documenting their death like it’s a big deal, and you have no idea who in hell they were in the first place.

However Rosenberger is truly in his element when it comes to the racist invective. Mace is once again called “Chink” so many times that you start to think it’s his name, and Rosenberger describes the Chinese agents as either “moon-faced rickshaw drivers” or “moon-faced laundrymen.” He unleashes his biggest ammo on the black characters: “black-as-tar North African coon,” “black boob,” and even “jungle bunny” are all terms used to describe what few blacks appear in the novel – and of course, all of them are thugs. And when they have dialog, Rosenberger writes it in all-caps pidgin English, so they come off like monsters straight out of some reactionary’s view of hell: “CHINK MOTHERFUKKER YOU! WE GONNA STOMP YORE ASS!” That’s an actual quote from the book, misspellings and all.

Again, I must thank the gods of Shaolin or whoever that Rosenberger only wrote one more volume of Mace. The finale of The Year Of The Dragon seems to lead right into this next volume, in fact, with Mace disappearing after the final battle and heading off for his next adventure – which I’m sure will be just as endlessly-detailed and tedious as this one was.

Joseph Rosenberger: The Man, The Myth

Here, thanks to a very kind contributor who would like to go uncredited, is an actual letter from the man, the myth himself: Joseph Rosenberger. (And also a huge thanks to that same contributor for sending me this photo of Rosenberger and his wife, Virginia, taken in 1984!)

The original plan was to run an essay on Rosenberger, but as it turns out, this letter tells us more about the man than any other piece could. Perhaps a little too much. It’s my duty to inform you that portions of this letter are incredibly racist, and will perhaps shed light on an aspect of Rosenberger’s image that might’ve been better left untouched. But then, given the paucity of any kind of info on the guy, I thought I should upload the letter anyway, with the racist terms expunged. Also, it’s my bet that those who are familiar with Rosenberger will not be surprised to read some of the sentiments he expresses herein.

But then, as the contributor told me (and as Rosenberger himself admits in the letter), JR was a heavy drinker, and “it’s readily apparent how he gets drunker as the letter goes on.” Note too how in his "rules for life" at the end of the letter Rosenberger states that he judges people as individuals, not by race, as if the previous pages of vile vitriol had been written by someone else. In fact, reading this letter I don’t feel so much anger over the ugly sentiments expressed – instead, I start to feel sorry for the bitter old bastard.

And finally, one more piece of data on Rosenberger: He passed away in Phoenix, Arizona at the age of 68, on December 2, 1993.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mace #3: The Year of the Rat

Mace #3: The Year of the Rat, by Lee Chang
No month stated, 1974 Manor Books

Joseph Rosenberger returns as "Lee Chang" for another installment of the fight-filled Mace series, and let me tell you, these books are getting harder and harder to endure. For one, Rosenberger here drops the bell-bottom fury vibe which (sort of) saved the first two volumes, replacing it with the feel of just another installment of the Death Merchant.

Victor Mace, we learn in the opening pages, has taken extensive CIA training since the last volume and is now a secret agent working for the US government! Other than the many, many references to specific kung fu or martial arts moves, The Year of the Rat could easily be a Death Merchant novel. Just like Richard Camellion, Mace is a cipher who accepts his job without emotion and proceeds to kill everyone with even less emotion. Oh, and sometimes he wears a ninja costume.

But yeah, Mace is now basically an Asian 007; skilled in all manner of subterfuge and modern weaponry. Not that he uses modern weaponry, mind you. There’s an action scene (one of many) where Mace goes in with a Browning Hi-Power in a shoulder holster, and I spent the entire endless damn time waiting for him to blow someone’s head off, just due to the fact that it would be something different than yet another belabored martial arts sequence, but he never even took it out of the damn holster!

Well anyway, the “plot” this time concerns some “Red Chinese” who are infiltrating spies in through French Canada, Ottawa to be precise. Mace is hired to go up there and see what’s what. But as is typical with a Rosenberger tale, Mace’s cover is blown on like the first page, and it’s straight into the fighting. He has a mere two contacts, an American CIA guy and his Canadian girlfriend, and though Mace realizes one of them has set us up, Rosenberger doesn’t bother to tell us who it was until literally the last two pages of the book, well after the action has moved on from Ottawa.

And as for that Canadian locale, Rosenberger doesn’t do much to bring it to life, other than mentioning the odd building or street, or to feature a soon-to-be-wasted French-Canadian thug who speaks in stilted English. There’s also an assault on the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, but this too devolves into an endless fight scene. What I’m saying is, plot, locale, and narrative all suffer at the hands and feet of Mace’s endless damn kung-fu fighting.

Let me give you an idea of what the book is like:

Mace’s cover is blown. Fight. Fight. Fight. Shuto chop. “We’re going to spread this virus across the US, my Communist brothers!” Fight. Fight. Fight. Flying sidekick followed by Shuto chop. “The world is going to end in 1980 -- this is why.” Fight. Fight. Fight. Spinning back kick followed by Shuto chop. “My son, when one seeks to kill a rat, one must proceed directly into the nest!” Fight. Fight. Fight. Reverse monkey kick followed by Shuto chop. “We’ve gotta kill that Chink!” Fight. Fight. Fight. Roundhouse kick followed by Shuto chop. “That Chink’s killing us!” Fight. Fight. Fight. Explosion of getaway helicopter followed by Shuto chop. The end.

It wears you down. It seems clear to me that Rosenberger figured he had settled upon the craft for writing action fiction, and nothing in the world was going to budge his conviction. Fight, fight, fight, fight. Which would be fine, if every damn scene wasn’t written out to the nth degree, and if everything wasn’t so repetitive! A reader can only endure so many back-to-back fight scenes before he can take no more.

As usual though, the only saving factor here is Rosenberger himself, but this time he seems less unhinged than in the previous books. I mean, as far as the sadistic violence goes, he’s still there -- he as ever takes delight in describing every detail of the deaths of those who fight Mace. But this time he doesn’t do as much of the goofy stuff as in the first two books, like jumping into the POV of some hapless stooge, or churning out his patented unusual turns of phrase. There are a few instances to be sure, but not as many as I’d want.

Even the conspiracy/hidden knowledge stuff is toned down, other than a part where Mace tells his Ottawa contacts -- with complete conviction -- that the world will end in 1980, due to various “prophesized” events. I kept wanting to yell at him, “You’re wrong, asshole! Wrong!” Not that I usually yell at books, but Mace is so damn annoying…I mean he is never wrong, and blitzes through the book constantly correcting or belittling others. What I’m saying is, he’s a dick.

None of the characters spark to life, save perhaps for the Canadian girl who worries about her boyfriend and has the audacity to question how Mace is always right. (Of course, she turns out to be the traitor.) Mace’s CIA goon-pals are also ciphers; toward the end when Rosenberger writes that one or two of them died in the final melee, you have no idea who the hell he’s talking about. I mean, there’s nothing to tell them apart. And the same goes for the Red Chinese villains, each a clone of the other. Plus the constant barrage of Chinese names causes reader confusion -- and mind you, my in-laws are Chinese!

Anyway, I’m just bearing through these until I can get to the sixth volume, The Year of the Boar, which was written by Len Levinson. It will come as a definite relief after the fight-heavy monotony of these Rosenberger offerings.

An Intervew With Joseph Rosenberger

First off, a big thanks to James Reasoner and Mike Madonna -- when I read a while back that the Spring 1981 issue of the obscure mystery magazine Skullduggery featured an actual interview with the elusive Joseph Rosenberger, I mentioned it to Mike Madonna in our email correspondence. I had a hard time finding a copy of the issue in question, and told Mike that, given that James Reasoner had a story published in the issue, James might happen to still have his copy.

Mike asked James, who not only had the issue but also scanned the Rosenberger interview and sent it to Mike, who then sent it to me. After talking with both of them I'm going to take the liberty to put the interview here on the blog.

I've retyped it, as the interview appears in the magazine as a blurry Xerox-esque burst of typescript. And no, it does not feature a photo of Rosenberger! Be forewarned though that this isn't the most indepth interview you'll ever read, barely coming in at two pages. But it's something, at least, and as far as I know this is the only Rosenberger interview out there.

The interview is titled Sherlock Tomes, and it's conducted by Carl Shaner. So, here it is, copyright the Spring 1981 issue of Skullduggery:


Back in 1969, a fledgling publisher, Pinnacle Books, brought out War Against the Mafia, by an unknown author named Don Pendleton. It was packaged as Book #1 in the Executioner series and, although series characters were not new to the paperback field, The Executioner was different. So different, sales soared and, as they soured, Pinnacle and others launched literally scores of imitators. Over ten years later, most of the new breed of men's action series have died off. Not so Joseph Rosenberger's Death Merchant. Richard Camellion, the master of death, deception, and disguise, who works secretly for the CIA, has starred in over forty books, with no end in sight. He is a heard-headed pragmatist, and so is his creator, Joseph Rosenberger, as the following Skullduggery interview demonstrates.

Shaner: First of all, tell us about yourself.

Rosenberger: I'll be 56 in May. I began writing at about age 17. To date, I've sold more than 2,000 articles and short stories and, roughly, maybe 300 paperbacks under my own and a variety of names: Rosenfeld, Lee Chang, Harry Adames [sp], etc. Maybe 50 or 60 were non-fiction -- ghost jobs, mostly on Psi/paranormal. For almost seven years I roamed the world as a photo-journalist and finally settled down about 20 years ago as a one-location writer. To me, writing is a business.

Shaner: The Death Merchant is apparently designed to appeal to a different audience than The Executioner or The Destroyer, as Camellion is neither a crusader nor a superman. How much of this was your idea?

Rosenberger: The Death Merchant was entirely my own creation. The editors at Pinnacle didn't have a thing to do with it.

Shaner: Do your editors provide you with much direction?

Rosenberger: None. The editors do not provide any ideas. There is only one rule: Camellion takes on only the incredible tasks, missions that, if not successful, would result in loss of freedom in the Western world.

Shaner: The first novel, The Death Merchant, was a "war against the Mafia" story, and the impossible missions vein did not begin until later. Was this a natural development?

Rosenberger: That was the plan all along.

Shaner: Camellion claims to dislike the "Death Merchant" title. How do you feel about it?

Rosenberger: So-so, but I'm not crazy about "Death Merchant."

Shaner: Does Camellion have any real-life or literary inspirations?

Rosenberger: None.

Shaner: After ten years and over forty books, do you still enjoy writing the character?

Rosenberger: I enjoy the money.

Shaner: Have you ever used ghost writers on the series?

Rosenberger: No. I never will. I don't think any writer can take over another writer's series and do a good job, with the exception of the "comic" Nick Carter novels.

Shaner: What are your favorite Death Merchant books?

Rosenberger: I don't have any favorites. I try to make each book as good as possible, and feel, after the book is finished, that it was the "best." It's the mind-set by which I operate.

Shaner: Do you have any favorites among your other books?

Rosenberger: None. It's all commercial writing. Paperbacks, as a rule, are nothing but pulps in a different form.

Shaner: How do you rate other series characters?

Rosenberger: Some are good; others stink, in that the writers don't do their homework.

Shaner: How do you approach writing a typical Death Merchant novel?

Rosenberger: I sleep on it for months in advance, letting the "Overmind" work out the details. From an outline as I actually begin to write. Plenty of research.

Shaner: What other series books have you written?

Rosenberger: The first Kung Fu fiction series in print (Manor Books) -- until Manor tried to screw me. Result: a lawsuit that I won. I now own the series, even though Kung Fu is as dead as yesterday's cigarette. Titles: Year of the Tiger by Lee Chang, etc. There were four or five books altogether; then when I told Manor where it could go, Manor got another writer to do the series. The series fell apart after, I think, two books.

I also evolved The Murder Master for Manor -- three books. I told Manor this series would not work -- a black dude hopping in bed with chicks, secret Fed, all that kind of nonsense.

I have done one Nick Carter book, Thunderstrike In Syria -- only one, because the advances are low, because I don't have the time, and, mainly, because there isn't a byline.

Shaner: Who reads your books, do you know?

Rosenberger: All kinds of people, judging from letters, from priests to prostitutes, from scientists to truck drivers. People read fiction to relax and, on a subconscious level, to work out their own anxieties, but mostly to relax and enjoy the book.

Shaner: Finally, with the Death Merchant entering its second decade, where do you see Richard Camellion and Joseph Rosenberger going from here?

Rosenberger: Rosenberger? Who knows? I can always sell series. I've turned down five this year. Camellion will live as long as the books at Pinnacle show a profit. The bottom line in publishing is money.

Mace #2: The Year of the Snake

Mace #2: The Year of the Snake, by Lee Chang
February, 1974 Manor Books

I've been taking my time getting back into the Mace series. After reading the first volume, The Year of the Tiger, I felt about as beaten as one the opponents of hero Victor Mace. The action onslaught whipped me but good, and we have of course Joseph Rosenberger to thank, posing here once again as "Lee Chang."

Thankfully The Year of the Snake is slightly better than its predecessor. Whereas the first novel followed one single plot -- some Mafia thugs wanted to use a boat which belonged to Mace's uncle, and Mace kept beating them up -- this one opens things up a bit, but not much. Mace is now in New York City's Chinatown, called here by one Tong leader to handle the problems caused by the Blue Devils, another Tong...one which has connections to the Chinese mob. Not that the mob or its soldiers or anyone poses much of a threat for Mace, who again is presented as a superhero, incapable of being harmed, let alone defeated.

Rosenberger dispenses with character development or plot development, and it goes without saying that the reader gets little feel for Chinatown or its inhabitants. He does however sprinkle the narrative with a host of goofy characters and also doles out an endless array of WTF? metaphors and analogies. If a case were to be made that Rosenberger's novels were parodies of the men's adventure genre, then his Mace books would make for Exhibit A.

There is absolutely no way the man intended this book to be taken seriously, and the nonstop fighting is just the first clue. Rosenberger even manages to insert slapstick into the book, sometimes going in and out of the perspectives of various minor characters (usually right before they're killed by Mace), taking the opportunity to write in a goofy POV-style (ie, It was like, Death, man -- far out!).

And you'd never think that in a book about a kung-fu master Rosenberger would be able to indulge in his own metaphysical interests, but he does; in the obligatory flashbacks to Mace's training at a Shaolin temple in Hong Kong, his teacher even finds the opportunity to discuss how the Egyptian pyramids were "really" constructed, via esoteric sound-manipulation techniques!

But for the most part The Year of the Snake is just fight scene after fight scene after fight scene. It's my opinion that martial arts combat doesn't make for an easy transistion to print; it's much easier to read (or write, I'd guess) gun-blazing action scenes, but how many different ways can you write about one guy kicking or punching other guys?

As usual though Rosenberger steals the show. For one, his enthusiasm is contagious. Whereas the other writer might back off on the fights a bit and work on the plot, Rosenberger instead barrels full steam ahead. I can almost see him hunched over his typewriter: "All right! I'm gonna write another action scene!" And then pounding away at his keys as he launches Mace into another pages and pages and pages-long kung-fu fight sequence.

In another "you'd never believe it" moment, Rosenberger also delivers a straight-up sex scene, featuring a heavyset Chinese gangster and his black American concubine. The scene is written from the lady's perspective, complete with description on how the gangster likes to "service" her and etc, and what's hilarious is that Rosenberger writes it all exactly like one of his action scenes, with exclamation points ending every other sentence.

And again Rosenberger puts his all into the book. It's 190 pages of tiny print, each page packed from top to bottom with copy. In other words, the man never shirked on his writing duties -- no big copy, no "white space" for him. But as usual, a whole bunch could have been cut from the novel and it would have benefited from it. Especially Rosenberger's strange fetish for explaining incidental things -- usually in flashback -- that don't even need to be explained. (For example, how Mace planned to escape from "oriental" Chinatown into "occidental" Manhattan.)

Another staple of the Mace series is the endless battery of racial slurs. I'd say the only other book that might use the word "chink" more than The Year of the Snake would have to be a manual on how to repair medieval combat armor or something. As in the previous novel, Rosenberger breaks out the slurs while writing from the perspectives of various of Mace's enemies, but what's strange is that most of them are Chinese themselves. It would be like a white character blasting away at another white character while thinking to himself: "I'm gonna waste that honkey!"

But then, the politically-incorrect vibe embraces a host of ethnicities in The Year of the Snake, not just Asians. Again it could all be a sign of spoofery, but moreso it's just a sign of its times. Like many of its men's adventure brethren, The Year of the Snake is a kind of book that couldn't be published today.

Which admittedly makes for part of its charm, at least as far as I'm concerned, but still. You need more than a non-PC vibe and goofy analogies to make for a good book. The Year of the Snake just left me feeling as beaten and exhausted as its predecessor did.

Mace #1: Manor Books Delves into the Kung-Fu Craze

Mace #1: The Year of the Tiger, by Lee Chang

Manor Books, 1973

The most thrilling, action-packed series ever published!

Hey, would Manor Books lie to you? You bet they wouldn't! (And besides, if you said they would lie to you, they'd probably send some guys over to have a little chat with you...) But here's one case where the hyperbolic cover blurb really does speak truth: the "Mace" series truly could make a claim for being the most action-packed series ever published.

But then, that's all it is. Action -- fight after fight after fight. Minutely-detailed scenes of lead character Victor Mace smashing apart mob scum, beating them senseless and killing them with single blows to various body parts.

Plot...what plot? Who needs a plot?

Here's the story. Mace, raised and trained in a Hong Kong Shaolin Temple, comes to San Francisco to visit his half-brother and his uncle. The local mob wants to use his uncle's boat; the Greeks are bringing in some heroin and the mob wants a "non-Syndicate" boat for the trade, to ward off suspicion. Mace's uncle refuses to comply. The mob puts on the pressure. Mace beats the shit out of them. Again and again and again.

That's it. That's the story.

Yes, we are in the hellish, sordid, and downright bizarre world of Joseph Rosenberger -- here posing as Lee Chang (you know, so this novel seems legitimate). Rosenberger is most "famous" as the sole writer of the Death Merchant series...80+ volumes spanning two decades, each book nothing but fight after fight after fight, with lead character Richard Camellion blowing apart his enemies.

Character...who needs character?

Mace is THE GOOD GUY. The mobsters are THE BAD GUYS. That's it.

Perfect in every way, trained since childhood to kill in a plethora of methods, Mace is more of an idealized he-man than anything else. On top of which he's so complacent as to come off like an arrogant ass; after a while I started to root for the mobsters, hoping they'd at least get a punch in. Or maybe a bullet or two. But no; Mace wades through this book as unstoppable as a Terminator. Nothing stops him, nothing fazes him. Therefore all dramatic impact is lost and the book becomes a tiresome slugfest, the literary equivalent of a Bruce Le movie. (Bruce Le, not Bruce Lee -- I'm referring to the lowest of the Bruceploitation clones, the guy who gave us such monstrosities as Enter the Game of Death.)

Year of the Tiger was the start of an 8-volume series. It appears in later volumes Mace becomes a CIA operative; here's hoping this opens up the stories a bit more. Because the story for Year of the Tiger is so narrow as to have tunnel-vision; you start to wonder why the mobsters don't just say "We fucking give up -- let's go get some other guy's boat for the trade!"

Later volumes branded "Mace" on the cover, but this first volume doesn't even feature his name. Instead, "Kung Fu" blazes across the cover -- capitalizing of course on the then-popular Kung-Fu TV series starring David Carradine. Manor Books never met a fad they didn't capitalize on.

Year of the Tiger is so based upon the Kung-Fu template as to be plagiaristic: Mace's name is similar to Carradine's Cane; Mace too was raised in a Shaolin Temple, only to leave it for San Francisco (same place Cane voyaged to); and just as the Kung-Fu show would feature flashbacks to Cane's training in the Temple, so too will Mace flash back to his own training...sometimes in the most odd of circumstances. (Though my favorite is when, after a massive fight with the mob, Mace flashes back to, guess what, another fight, one he fought during his childhood -- and it's just as endless as the fight scene we just endured.)

Beyond his usual bad writing, Rosenberger also specializes in poorly-researched "facts." Of them all my favorite is his explanation of the book's title. Mace speculates on the "violent" nature of the US, and decides that if there was a year for the US, it would be the "Year of the Tiger." However, Mace further speculates, "the last Year of the Tiger was in the 1800s." I guess Rosenberger didn't realize that the signs of the Chinese Zodiac revolve every several years; further, the next Year of the Tiger was 1974, the year after this novel was published!

But for all his banalities, Rosenberger pulls the most odd turns of phrase out of his head. Mobsters "so ugly Frankenstein would've pulled a double-take," narratives which take up the thoughts of the goon about to be killed: "He threw a punch. What the hell? Yeah -- why not!" Rosenberger also (unwittingly) takes the book into the metaphysical realm, often informing us how the mobsters go to hell upon dying beneath Mace's flailing limbs.

Every few pages there's another brain-wrecking Rosenbergerism, but this one's my favorite in Year of the Tiger, as Mace destroys yet another goon:

Instant death as the blood supply to the man's brain was cut off! The hood felt stupid when he woke up and found himself sitting in the middle of hell!

That line pretty much tells you all you need to know about Year of the Tiger...!