Shaft Has A Ball (Shaft #4)

Shaft Has A Ball, by Ernest Tidyman

April, 1973  Bantam Books

The first Shaft novel to be published as a paperback original, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner, who the following year turned in the execrable Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Fortunately Shaft Has A Ball is better than that one, though as John Lennon would say, “it couldn’t get much worse.” For the most part Shaft Has A Ball comes off like one of the hardboiled yarns Turner wrote for Manhunt and other crime mags several years before, as collected in the anthologies Shroud 9 and The Hardboiled Lineup. In other words, it’s not much of a Blaxploitation affair, though that seems to also be true of Ernest Tidyman’s original Shaft novel (which I intend to read one of these days!). 

Again a big thanks to Steve Aldous for the background detail that Ernest Tidyman did the final edit of Shaft Has A Ball. Tidyman did a good job in his editing and rewriting, as the style here is the same as in the final book in the series, The Last Shaft, which was written by Philip Rock. In other words, one could read the Shaft series and not even suspect it was the work of two ghostwriters and one editor. The only caveat is Philip Rock was a superior writer, and Robert Turner again takes a fun concept and proceeds to do little with it. And, as with every other Turner book I’ve read, it was a chore to finish the book; despite being only 150 pages, Shaft Has A Ball maintains a sluggish pace throughout. 

I first read about this novel twenty years ago on Teleport City, meaning to someday check out the book. I recall even back then the Shaft books were obscure and hard to find. I’m reading this series way out of order, but it’s no big deal; there’s not much in the way of continuity, other than the small group of people John Shaft regularly works with: Captain Anderozzi of the NYPD, a cleaning lady who stays off-page the entire book, and Rollie Nickerson, a minor actor who is part-time bartender at the No-Name Bar that Shaft frequents. There’s also returning character Ben Buford, a Malcolm X type who apparently grew up with Shaft and has a brotherly sort of antagonism with him. 

According to Steve Aldous, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner at the same time Philip Rock was writing Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which was the last Shaft novel to be published in hardcover in the United States (and, like all other books in the series, credited solely to Ernest Tidyman). This means there is some incongruity in how a certain character is presented in each book: Senator Albert Stovall, a black politician who in Shaft Has A Ball doesn’t have much to do in the narrative other than bet on a horse race, give Shaft an expensive watch, and get the shit beaten out of him (off-page) by a “sadie-massie” gay male prostitute. Meanwhile I was most staggered by the off-hand mention that Stovall, a black politician known for his firebrand personality, was a Republican. 

And yes, the sadie-massie (ie sadomasochism) mention brings us to the titular “ball;” it’s an event being held in the Hotel Armand in New York City for GAY, aka Gay American Youth, but really it’s a drag queen ball. Presumably the attractive black women on the cover are these drag queens, or maybe the artist (Lou Feck, per Steve Aldous) had no idea what the novel was about and just assumed there would be a bunch of hot black women in it. (Spoiler alert: There aren’t.) But then, even the drag queens are seldom in the text. Above I mentioned how Robert Turner does little with the plot. This is no truer than the ball itself; indeed, the entire “heist going down at a drag queen ball” element is almost an afterthought, and the heist could just as easily have occurred anywhere else. What I mean to say is, just as in Scorpio and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, Robert Turner doesn’t seem to know what kind of a book he’s supposed to be writing. 

Also according to Steve Aldous, the plot for Shaft Has A Ball came from Ernest Tidyman himself, and clearly his idea was of a heist happening in the middle of a drag queen event. One can already see the hijinks this would entail, with various characters dressed up like women and whatnot; but, brace yourself for this shocker, Robert Turner does zilch with the setup. If you expected Shaft himself would put on a dress in this one, be prepared to be crestfallen. Shaft isn’t even in the hotel when the drag queen ball takes place! I mean that’s how lame Turner’s plotting is. Rather, it’s a pair of crooks who dress up like broads and proceed to knock over the Hotel Armand (while knocking over some of their colleagues to increase their cut of the heist), and the whole thing is over and done with in a handful of pages. 

But really, it’s like a Manhunt story taken to novel length; Shaft the cynical, burnt-out private eye who wonders if he’s had enough of the city and just wants to give it all up, but is pulled into action again. Speaking of which, Shaft is pretty much a bad-ass in this one, killing people with his bare hands and blowing people away with a submachine gun in the finale. He also sees some bedroom action, courtesy a smokin’ hot black-Hispanic chick named Winifred Guitterez who works for a “black-themed magazine” and asks to do a profile on Shaft. Instead she wants to get, uh, shafted, and the two go from dinner to Shaft’s apartment…only, Shaft finds the naked corpse of a white girl in his place, a junkie who just got out on bail and has implicated Ben Buford in an upcoming heist. 

Shaft sends Winfired off…not that she holds any grudges, as she returns later in the narrative for the sole purpose of providing a somewhat-explicit sex scene, after which she completely disappears from the novel! The literary equivalent of the perfect woman, I guess. Curiously Turner does build her up a bit; Shaft researches her after she approaches him for an interview, learning that she was into boxing for a while, which is odd for a woman now and even more so was in 1973. But ultimately Winifred has no imact on the narrative, and is another indication of Robert Turner’s lackadaisacal plotting; she appears in the opening to interview Shaft, goes to dinner with them, gets sent home, and then calls him later so they can “finish business” – and next time we see her, she’s in bed with him. And then that’s it. I just felt she could’ve had more impact on the story. 

The same goes for the entire subplot around Ben Buford. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a group of professional criminals plan to heist the Hotel Armand and pin the blame on Buford. Why this is necessary is not much dwelt upon, but part of the caper involves a crook who looks enough like Buford that he will pose as the revolutionary rabble-rouser during the heist so as to make people think Buford is behind it. The only puzzling thing is, the Buford lookalike pulls off the heist in drag, which undermines the entire plan! It’s stuff like this that just makes me think that Robert Turner never really understood what he was supposed to write in these ghostwriter projects. 

So in a nutshell, Shaft Has A Ball mostly features Shaft being told his old “pal” Ben Buford is planning a heist, and Shaft insisting that Buford wouldn’t have time for such nonsense. Then some people leave a dead junkie girl in his apartment and Shaft hunts them down, brutally killing one of them in the filthy bathroom of a bar and crippling the other. And curiously this subplot sort of goes away for a while, and Shaft moves on to providing bodyguard services for Senator Stovall. But this doesn’t entail much: Shaft takes a nap on a couch in the senator’s hotel room while Stovall disguises himself, to go bet on a horse race. After this Shaft goes home to bang Winnifred, and is called late that night when Stovall is taken into the hospital, having gotten banged up by a rough-trade male prostitute named Cowboy.  This is a character who also receives some brutal payback from Shaft. 

A humorous thing about Shaft Has A Ball is that Shaft’s sentiments on the gay community are very out of touch with today…but Turner indicates they were for 1973, too. There’s a curious bit where Shaft, in the Hotel Armand where he is to bodyguard the senator, rides up the elevator with the head of security, who informs Shaft that a drag queen ball is going on. Shaft makes some off-color jokes, and the security guard gets upset…which just seemed a very modern reaction to me. Shaft by the way will continue to make off-color jokes about gays and drag queens as the story progresses, which again makes it damn puzzling that Shaft himself has no interraction with the drag-ball heist itself. Personally I pictured burly, mustached John Shaft toting a gleaming .44 Magnum while in a dress and lipstick…wait, didn’t Hightower do that in one of the Police Academy movies? I haven’t seen one of those since the ‘80s (I saw the fourth one in the theater!!), so I can’t remember. 

Meanwhile we know, from various cutovers to the villains, that a group of criminals are plotting to knock over the Armand and pin the blame on Buford. There’s a lot of stuff from the perspective from the heisters as they plan things, but in true heist style it all unravels. Instead two low-level criminals in the gang do the heavy lifting, and it is they who go about in drag during the heist, even though one of them is supposed to fool everyone into thinking he’s Ben Buford, which makes one wonder why he’s in drag in the first place. Then these two guys start knocking off their fellow criminals. Meanwhile Shaft is off sleeping somewhere. No kidding. He’s informed by Captain Anderozzi about the heist, the morning after, and Shaft sets out to clear his good budy Buford of any blame. 

Apropos of nothing, Shaft deduces that someone at the heist was impersonating Ben Buford…and then Shaft goes to the apartment of his part-time actor friend, Rollie Nickerson, and asks him for a book of local actors(!). Shaft then looks through the book and picks out the black actor in it who looks like Ben Buford…and sure enough, that is indeed the guy who pulled off the heist! I mean it’s ludicrous. But Turner is close to meeting his word count, thus the finale jettisons the gritty vibe of the rest of the book and has Shaft figuring out where this guy likely has holed up. Shaft spots some mobsters also scoping out the place, and ends up using one of them as bait. But at least we get an action-styled finale, with Shaft picking up a machine gun and blasting away at the house; all told, Shaft kills a couple people in this one, though not on the level of series finale The Last Shaft. 

While the concept isn’t sufficiently taken advantage of, Shaft Has A Ball is at least better than Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, but one can see why reception of the Shaft paperback series was lukewarm. John Shaft here is just your standard pulp private eye, with the same grizzled, cynical worldview as a million other pulp private eyes, and this blasé vibe extends to the narrative. But then, this could just be due to Robert Turner. Next I’ll be checking out Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which as mentioned also features Senator Stovall, but it was written by Philip Rock, whose work I prefer to Turner’s.

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (Shaft #6)

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, by Ernest Tidyman

September, 1974  Bantam Books

To this day I still have not read Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft, and I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve seen the more-famous film adaptation. Of course, I have Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack on vinyl, as to me Shaft has always been more of a music thing than a movie or novel thing. (Not sure if that sentence even made sense.) Many years ago there was a cool overview of the Shaft novels on Teleport City, and of them all it was this installment, the paperback original Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, that caught my attention. Only now, like 20 years after reading that Teleport City article, have I got around to reading the book. 

First of all, a big thanks to Steve Aldous’ World Of Shaft site, which provides a lot of great background info. Basically, Ernest Tidyman wrote a handful of Shaft novels in the early ‘70s, then farmed the series out to ghostwriters for a few paperback originals.  Carnival Of Killers, then, was actually written by pulp veteran Robert Turner, working off an unproduced non-Shaft script Tidyman had written years before about a private eye in Jamaica. But, according to Steve Aldous, Turner not only took a long time to turn in his manuscript, but Tidyman also deemed it subpar when Turner completed it, and Tidyman ended up rewriting the majority of it. 

Now, finally having made my way through this deceptively slim, 136-page book, I can only say that Robert Turner’s manuscript must have been really bad. Indeed, it gave me flashbacks to a novel Turner published the following year: Scorpio. Like that book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers was a chore to read, with Turner taking what should have been a sure shot of a concept and turning it into a middling, overly-digressive banality in which super-cool John Shaft is reduced to a bumbling fool, always ten steps behind his opponents. Indeed, Shaft – and the reader – spends the entire narrative just trying to figure out what’s going on. My assumption is Robert Turner was a Mystery writer at heart, as that is all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers really is: a tepid mystery, with hardly anything in the sex or violence categories. It’s so lame that Shaft even bungles the chance for a three-way with a pair of sexy white chicks, instead getting drunk and passing out. 

In this one, John Shaft is taken out of his element; when we meet him he’s lazing on the beach in Jamaica, taking a rare vacation. Not much effort is placed on establishing the character or referring to previous adventures, so I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything by reading this sixth volume before the others. Turner’s style is clearly apparent – but then, so is Tidyman’s. Above I mentioned I’ve never read Shaft, but I did start to read it once upon a time, and was surprised at the hardboiled narrative tone Tidyman employed. The fact that Shaft was black only came up in the occasional descriptions of him, but otherwise there was nothing that really differentiated Shaft from umpteen other tough guys of the time. But I guess the same could be said of the film, as Shaft the movie isn’t really “Blaxploitation” per se; it’s just like any other early ‘70s crime movie, only with a black protagonist. But the same could be said about every Blaxploitation movie; they aren’t so much “exploitation” as they are urban action movies with black characters. 

The same is doubly true of Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Shaft could be replaced with pretty much any other standard tough-guy P.I. in the book. Even the fact that he’s black doesn’t make much difference, which is odd, given that Jamaica is a country with a black population. Periodically Shaft will ruminate on the plight of the black man, but otherwise there is no focus on any sort of black unity or anything. In fact, Shaft constantly butts heads with the natives, and soon learns to hate Jamaica. 

Turner throws us into the action (or what passes for it) posthaste; Shaft’s beach picnic is ruined when a pretty young girl (“taffy-skinned, long-waisted, high-hipped, and very roundly bottomed with conical leaping breasts”) is accosted nearby by a pair of goons. Shaft only intervenes when the goons kick sand in his face, chasing after the girl, and knock over Shaft’s picnic setup. Our hero beats up the guys, but the girl runs away, and Shaft is taken to the local police precinct…where he learns that the two goons were undercover police officers. 

Here begins the incessant stalling and repetition that will make up the brunt of the novel’s narrative. Shaft meets Chief of Detectives Alex Ashton, an eyepatch-sporting native who speaks in a clipped British accent and who will spend the rest of the novel baiting and bantering with Shaft. The story goes that the “taffy-skinned” girl, Marita Dawes, was serving as the private secretary of the Prime Minister, Sir Charles Lightwood, and the cops were trying to round her up on suspicions of her involvement with a planned assassination attempt on the PM. Ashwood tries to lean on Shaft – as he will continue to do through the novel – but Shaft don’t take no guff and has Ashton call up his cop pal in New York, recurring series character Captain Anderozzi, who puts in a word for Shaft. 

And really, that’s all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers proves to be: a continuous cycle of characters playing head-games with Shaft, using him as help or as bait as they try to figure out who is planning to kill the Prime Minister. The idea is that Shaft, a private eye, will help Ashton figure out who wants to kill Lightwood, in exchange for Shaft himself not being sent to prison. The only problem is, Shaft suspects that Ashton himself might be behind the assassination plot, as do many other characters – including Marita Dawes, the girl from the beach. In one of those “pulp novel” moments, Shaft comes back to his hotel room that night to find the scantily-clad beauty smoking dope in his room, practically begging Shaft to join the cause. She claims to be a fervernt supporter of the P.M., and indeed thinks Ashton is the one who wants to kill him. But our surly hero kicks her out. 

This will be the start of a disturbing trend in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Robert Turner – and presumably Ernest Tidyman – seems intent on keeping John Shaft from getting laid. Our studly hero goes without for the entire novel. There’s sexy Marita, who makes herself available but is spurned. Later, there’s the PM’s hotstuff but ice-cold wife, a black beauty who scorns Shaft, and who in a better pulp novel would probably engage him in some hate-sex. Then, as mentioned, there are the two white gals from America, teachers here in Jamaica on vacation; Shaft, pretending to be a prince from Trinidad who does not speak English (in one of the novel’s more bizarre subplots), takes them up to his room and gets them drunk…then watches as they strip…then ponders over the etiquette of a three-way (ie, wondering which to take first)…and then Shaft ends up passing out, along with the girls, thus squandering our third and final opportunity for any seventies-mandatory sleaze. 

Action is slightly more pronounced, but not much. Shaft gets in a few scuffles here and there, generally taking his opponents down without much fuss. Robert Turner has a tendency to make his action scenes hard to follow, as seen in Scorpio, and that is apparent here; I still find it humorous that Turner, who edited The Spider toward the end of its run, had dissmissive things to say in Robert Sampson’s 1989 study The Spider about main Spider writer Norvell Page, sneering at the frequency of action in Page’s manuscripts. Maybe Turner was just jealous, aware on some subconscious level that Norvell Page was a better writer than he was.  (I provided Turner’s quote about Page in the comments section of my Scorpio review, for anyone who is interested.) 

There’s also a little in the way of gunplay. Toward the end of the book Shaft gets hold of a Colt Python Magnum, and in the climactic action shoots down a thug, “[giving] him a new navel about the size of an ostritch egg.” Otherwise this is not a gory novel by any means, nothing like contemporary Blaxploitation pulp paperback series The Iceman, and as mentioned it’s more of a standard mystery than a pulp-action thriller. Robert Turner even squanders what few pulpy conceits exist in the novel; one of the thugs in the book is a friggin’ hunchback who uses a blowgun that fires poison darts, but the character is treated so conservatively that there’s nothing novel nor memorable about him. 

In fact, Turner is guilty of that hoary copout: having his protagonist knocked out by the bad guys but conveniently not killed by them when he’s out cold. This happens a few times in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, one instance in particular involving Shaft getting hit by one of those poison darts. Later on there’s a part where he crashes his car while chasing some bad guys. In each instance Shaft comes to later on, swearing revenge, apparently not realizing that his enemies could very easily have just killed him while he was lying there unconscious. But then, maybe Turner just doesn’t want his readers to realize that. 

The novel is mostly comprised of Shaft chasing one red herring after another, and getting nothing but conflicting signals from the locals he meets with. This is one of those novels where the hero is constantly befuddled and uncertain, making for a very trying read…again, so similar to the following year’s Scorpio. One can tell where Tidyman might have tightened things up at times; there are parts where Shaft will abruptly seem more like the John Shaft one expects. I also suspect Tidyman was behind the occasional veiled references in the book; we’re told, apropos of nothing, that Shaft doesn’t like moustaches, implying of course that he himself doesn’t have one – which, of course, is pretty surprising, given that Richard Roundtree sported one in his iconic portrayal of Shaft. There’s also a part where Shaft, watching those goons struggle with Marita Dawes on the beach, decides that it’s all “a lot better than that shit on television,” and I wonder if this was a veiled dig at the much-disliked Shaft TV series. 

Curiously, there is a focused attempt at knocking John Shaft down a few pegs throughout the novel, with the author(s) making him altogether disagreeable and surly…and stupid. There’s also a strange quirk in the final pages to imply Shaft is fat; for muddled reasons, the climax takes place during a costume ball, and Shaft appropriates the guise of a toreador. But the costume doesn’t fit him and everyone keeps telling him he’s “too fat” to pose as a toreador. Shaft consoles himself that there isn’t “an extra ounce of fat” on him, but otherwise he picks over his food in the climax…and yes, that’s how lame Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is: the “thrilling” climax features Shaft picking at his meal during the costume ball and still trying to figure everything out. 

Even the very end of the novel continues with the novel’s confusing vibe: Shaft happily gets on a plane back to New York, and drifts off to sleep…only to be woken by a woman screaming that she has a bomb. It’s none other than Marita Dawes, that “taffy-skinned” beauty who started the whole caper, and I guess we are to take it that she’s one of those hippie terrorists who were so fashionable at the time. But Turner (and Tidyman, I guess) is determined to maintain the goofy vibe of the book, thus Shaft closes his eyes and forces himself to feign sleep! Whether he’s dreaming all this or not is unstated, but given the madcap tone of the book, one must imagine he is not. 

As it turned out, this was it for the adventures of John Shaft – in the United States, at least. Presumably Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers sold so poorly that Ernest Tidyman was unable to secure a publisher for the following – and final – installment of the series, The Last Shaft. That one was only published in the UK, in hardcover and paperback, and is now exceedingly scarce; a scan of it was, however, up on archive.org, but who knows when it will be back online now that the Internet Archive has been hacked. 

About the only thing that would make The Last Shaft worth reading is that it wasn’t written by Robert Turner; it was written by Philip Rock, who also wrote the incredible Hickey & Boggs novelization. It also sounds like the closest the Shaft series ever got to men’s adventure, with a well-armed Shaft taking on various criminals in New York. And it apparently lives up to its title, with Ernest Tidyman having grown so sick of his famous character that he wanted to do away with him. Judging from the harsh, rude, surly, and just plain grumpy character featured in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, I can’t say the literary world suffered much of a loss.

In Hot Blood

In Hot Blood, by Mercer B. Cook
No month stated, 1966  Challenge Books

This lurid, sleazy cash-in isn’t to be confused with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood at all. The similar titles are just a coincidence, of course. In fact, in the “Author’s Introduction” Mercer B. Cook sniffs that the “nonfiction novel” is nothing new, and that this particular nonfiction novel is about the growing threat of…well, something…and if, well, something isn’t done about it, the country’s gonna suffer!

Well anyway, thanks to Hawk’s Authors’s Pseudonyms I know that “Mercer B. Cook” was a pseudonym of that erstwhile pulp author Robert Turner. While the book is copyright Challenge Books, we are informed from the outset that “Cook” is the pseudonym of a Los Angeles-based author who has written a variety of genres, with a focus on mystery and crime. I wonder why Turner didn’t just publish the novel under his own name and be done with it. Likely it was a publisher demand, or maybe Turner just didn’t want to be ridiculed for this cheap ripoff of In Cold Blood.

I’ve never read Capote’s book, I’m unashamed to admit, but I’m aware of it. Given that it was published the same year, my assumption is this one was rushed out to capitalize on it. In the breezy 150 pages of this book we read as a trio of sadists descend on Elmorra, South Carolina one July night in 1965 and kill and rape several people. It’s not the feel good book of the year, that’s for sure – it’s pretty grimy and lurid, particularly given the publication date.

Turner writes this book as if it really is true crime…there’s lots of page-filling, from arbitrary breakdowns of how Elmorra is layed out to impromptu psych evals of the three hoodlums: Fitz, Townlee, and Parsons. We gradually learn they met in the clink and banded together upon their release into an unsuspecting society; now they drive south in an Olds posing as businessmen and hit random business offices at night, stealing the checkbooks and writing exorbitant amounts to themselves. This is of course elucidated for us at length…Turner, the old pro, leaves no page-filling stone unturned, and as is his usual wont he info-dumps a helluva lot. The book is almost all show and too little tell.

The opening, titled “After,” is a case in point. We have this long, digressive intro in which an Elmorra teen is shacking up with an older guy who travels through town on business. Lots of detail on her background and whatnot; Turner will pull this trick throughout, as he has in every other book of his I’ve read, but here at least the info-dumping isn’t as egregious, given that it’s presented as a nonfiction novel. Well anyway, this gal has some hot off-page lovin’ with the dude, and meanwhile she’s prepared a cover story with her chunky galpal Vangie…but after that aforementioned lovin’ the gal falls asleep, wakes up from a nightmare in which someone was screaming her name…and yep, she’s got ESP, and she knows some bad ju-ju has gone down in Elmorra. Soon enough she learns that Vangie and another girl, as well as a few teens and an adult, have been murdered…

Then Turner jumps back to “During” and tells us how all this sordid stuff went down. Long story short, Fitz, who strangled a cat as a kid, is the boss of the other two guys on their cross-country crime spree: Townlee’s a big bruiser who constantly giggles, and Parsons is the handsome Elvis lookalike who reads Westerns and is the most sadistic of the bunch. Fitz orders that they lay low when they stop in each town, but on this night of July 28 in Elmorra, Townlee and Parsons succeed in getting Fitz to slacken off on his strict “no booze” rule. Then they slip him some speed along with it.

Earlier, Townlee and Parsons, out getting the booze when Fitz was asleep in the motel, ran into a group of teens who were on their way to a meeting at the home of CL Hinkelman, a widowed bachelor in his late 40s, for a Church steering committee or somesuch. Vangie, the pudgy gal in the group, stupidly invited these two older strangers over to Hinkelman’s…just trying to be “right friendly” with these out of towners and all that. Now, back at the motel, the two sadists urge Fitz to go to Hinkelman’s – Parsons has the hots for Vangie and he’s sure Fitz will go nuts over the brunette teen who was with the group.

Soaring on the speed and booze, Fitz agrees. Here we go straight into drive-in trash territory; it’s a shame a cheap, black-and-white exploito film was never made of In Hot Blood, for of course eventual skewering on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s super-insane as the three just show up at Hinkelman’s house, and of course the dude has no idea who they are or why they’re here. But Vangie’s invited them, and it’s the neighborly thing to do…pretty soon they’ve knocked the guy over and are ransacking his pantry for food and booze. The vibe is almost that they’re vampires who have been welcomed into a home, and now they’re free to cut loose.

Turner pulls no punches in the ensuing grim sequence, which sees Hinkelman’s rifle put to use – conveniently just sitting in his kitchen. Hinkelman and the two teen boys are almost perfunctorily dealt with, and then Parsons and Fitz set on the two girls. Turner at least doesn’t go full-bore with Vangie’s rape, providing just enough exploitative elements of her clothes being ripped off before cutting away. Meanwhile Fitz ends up strangling the other girl while raping her. He then orders Parsons to go back in the bedroom and shoot Vangie, who’s passed out! So it’s safe to say these three are the villains.

After this the novel goes into free-fall; Turner page-fills with abandon, including an egregious bit where we read the pscyh evaluations of Fitz, Parsons, and Townlee, written during their prison terms years before. We learn how the people of Elmorra deal with the tragedy, and how the girl who opened the book – the one with ESP who was screwing a married man – has to leave town in shame. Occasionally we cut over to the three killers, who continue their way south, knocking over businesses. They begin to go crazy, apparently from their vile deed in Elmorra, and when Parsons rapes another girl and blabs to her about having killed someone, the cops get their first lead.

There’s a nicely-developed tension as the novel grinds to its close; Fitz, Townlee, and Parsons are now in Clearwater, Florida, oblivious that the cops have found out who they are and are closing in. But when the police stage their ambush the crooks end up turning on each other; one kills the other two, for being cowards, and then he himself dies a few weeks later when trying to escape police custody. But not before he’s told his story of what happened in Elmorra.

Overall this is a fairly quick, sleazy read, though a bit hamstrung by the intermittent narrative rambling. There’s just too much info-dumping about random characters or places, with the forward momentum constantly stalled. It’s for this matter that I prefer Turner’s short story work, as collected in Shroud 9.

Manhunt, February 1956 (Volume 4, Number 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shroud 9

Shroud 9, by Robert Turner
No month stated, 1970  Powell Publications

This 200 page paperback seems to be exceedingly scarce; I’m unfamiliar with Powell but they must not’ve had the best distribution. They also didn’t come up with the best covers. While the artwork by Bill Hughes for Shroud 9 is nice, it’s also very misleading. It makes the book look like a horror thing. It’s not – it’s a collection of short stories the prolific Robert Turner wrote for various crime fiction digests in the mid-‘50s, Manhunt in particular. The title also has nothing to do with anything, as there are 18 tales here, not 9!! 

Another miss is the acknowledgements; we’re not told which specific magazine each story came from. We’re only given a list of publishers and dates. I know Flying Eagle published Manhunt, so I know which ones here are from that magazine. But the other ones are unfamiliar to me. Not that it matters – those crime digests are sadly tough to find, so it likely would be easier to just hunt down this book…which itself is too damn scarce! There’s no intro from Turner; about all we get are a few words of praise from John D. MacDonald and Robert Bloch on the back cover, and a few snippets of various industry reviews of Turner’s work. It’s also mentioned that Turner has written an “original script” and that some of his stories have been optioned for the movies, but I don’t think anything came of it; the one thing I recall from Turner’s autobio Some Of My Best Friends Are Writers But I Wouldn’t Want My Daughter To Marry One (1970) is that he was always on the cusp of fame and fortune, but never quite got there.

Despite coming from various crime digests, the tales in Shroud 9 aren’t really of a criminous nature; mostly the stories are about average people getting caught up in horrific situations of their own making. Stories featuring professional criminals or contract killers or the other staples of pulp-crime are relatively few. But the main thing that I disliked about the book was that all of the stories are so short – just a few pages each. After a while I really wanted something with a bit more meat to it; I know Turner wrote scads of such stories, some of them novella length, and I wish some of those had been included here. My assumption is the theme of this anthology was to stick to short, punchy tales with “shock” finales; in that way the stories are very similar to EC Comics. Another point of reference would be the Old Time Radio drama Lights Out.

The first story, “Field of Honor,” from a 1955 issue of Manhunt, isn’t what I would’ve expected, but it definitely introduces the dark theme of the book. It’s a piece of juvenile delinquent fiction in which 14 year-old Jill ducks out on her uncaring socialite mother and hooks up with her pal Thelma. The two put on jeans and tote beer can openers; they’re going to prove their mettle in a fight with a rival girl gang. In particular Jill wants a piece of big-boned Roxanne; Thelma says hunk Johnny, “nearly twenty years old,” is going to date the winner; this excites Jill greatly. But the fight doesn’t go as planned, with Roxanne tearing Jill the hell up, even gouging out her right eyeball. The juvies dump Jill off at her house and she has to scratch at the door with that beer can opener to get her mom to let her in, as she’s too busy entertaining guests. The end!

Up next we have “What Do You Want?” from 1955, another dark one with a dark comedy payoff. Rich punk Buckman is getting freaked out how “old man” Pritchett keeps staring at him; never speaking, just staring. Pritchett’s been doing it for days. We’ll learn that Buckman “accidentally” killed Pritchett’s daughter in a car wreck. It develops though that Buckman’s thing was to take girls who refused to screw him on 100mph races in his sports car, which usually thawed ‘em out. Only Pritchett’s daughter wouldn’t give. Now Pritchett keeps following Buckman around and staring at him, to the point where Buckman tries to escape him in his car, racing along that same perilous road in which he crashed with Pritchett’s daughter. You can see this one coming a mile away, if you’ll pardon the pun. Not bad but not great.

“The Two Candles” is from 1955 and concerns an old lady just returned to her apartment after lighting two candles at the local church, one for her recently-departed husband and one for her son, who died 21 years ago. She’s shocked to discover a young man waiting for her in the apartment, a self-assured punk who swears up and down that he’s her son, returned home at last. It’s none other than Mad Dog Castle, infamous bank robber, who just killed a cop last week. The lady refuses to listen to him, calls the cops, and shoots him when he tries to stop her. Up-in-the-air finale in which the reader must decide for himself if Mad Dog really was the lady’s son, and she just made herself think he died all those years ago, instead of running away and becoming a notorious criminal.

“A Life For A Life” is from a 1954 and is a little better. This one’s also about a killer bank robber; the cops have come up with this sting where they’ve made the guy think that a lady he knocked up is about to give birth in a local hospital – in reality the lady was moved out of town long ago. They set up their dragnet, with the narrator and his junior partner concerned that the sadistic sergeant in charge of them, a top marksman, is going to kill the crook instead of arresting him. This is what happens, but as the crook is dying in the hospital he calls in the cop who shot him – and gouges out his eyes with his bare hands! That makes for two eye-gougings in one book!!

We return to the Manhunt yarns with “Fight Night,” from a 1955 issue. Our narrator tells us about the night he went to a bar to watch a boxing match with his pal Max, a dude who, despite his “sensitive face,” is actually quite manly and served in the war. But a drunk starts up a fight with Max, insinuating he’s gay and whatnot. The two get in a brutal brawl which climaxes with the drunk smashing a bottle and grinding it in Max’s face. Our narrator finally gets off his ass – he’s been in shock throughout – but the drunk escapes and Max later dies from too much blood loss. He leaves behind a wife and kid, and the narrator questions the “macho” sentiments which demand that men must defend their honor and not turn their backs to drunken challenges.

“A Living From Women” is from 1957 gets back to the third-person narration and concerns good-looking stud Danny Lund, who is notorious for marrying rich women, burning up their money, and then divorcing them. But his latest victim, a willowy girl named Levora, keeps following him around the country, getting frailer and frailer. Danny goes on with his con work, and has his biggest coup in sight, an ultra-wealthy woman who admits to him that she knows he’s only after her for her money, and that’s fine with her – she just wants to be seen around town with a pretty face and will give Max a thousand bucks a month, and he won’t even have to touch her. Levora louses all this up when she throws acid in Danny’s face one day! The rich woman leaves him and, despite extensive plastic surgery, Danny now looks like a “gargoyle.” Features an EC Comics finale in which Levora now happily cares for Danny.

“Who’s Calling?” is from a 1956 Manhunt and actually received a TV adaptation. It makes for good early television fodder, taking place in one location and featuring only two characters: Jay Breen and his wife, Beth. This one is totally in the Suspense mold as Jay keeps receiving calls from New York, the operator asking for “James Binford.” What freaks Jay out – and he gradually loses his sanity over the few pages of the story – is that this is his old name; five years ago, in New York, he embezzled a lot of money and killed a guard or something in the escape. He changed his name from Binford to Breen, but only Beth is aware of this new life. But the calls keep coming and the mystery of who knows Breen is Binford deepens, our “hero” getting closer to panic. It’s a taut, suspenseful tale, and very good, though given that only Beth knows Jay’s past makes it quite obvious who the culprit is. The ending though goes on a surreal tangent as Beth, happily with the man she used to drive Jay nuts (to the point of suicide), starts to receive mysterious calls for a Mrs. James Binford…

“Shy Guy” is from a 1954 Manhunt and is screwy in that it’s narrated by a dude who is telling us about a story he heard – it’s overly pedantic, with too much background detail and setup, something for which the narrator apologizes. Apology not accepted! The story is overly dull and is yet another tale about a guy driven to insanity – in this case an artist named, on-the-nose as can be, “Artie,” whose wife Della insists on going to big parties and is likely whoring around. A few years ago Artie and Della lost their unborn child in a car wreck, and the narrator intimates this is what has driven Della to her behavior, though he also claims she pretended not to be overly concerned about it. Ends with Della leaving her latest part and coming back with other people for Artie, who refused to go because he had a premonition bad stuff would occur if he did. But when they get him to the party they ignore Artie, and he sees his wife hanging around with some men…he finds a .45 in a deputy’s car and shoots everyone, the end. Thought this one was lame.

“Business Trip,” from a 1957 Manhunt, makes up for the previous misfire, and is probably my favorite in the book, even though it too is too short. We go back to the third-person narration and meet our protagonist, Burke, a “Specialist” for “The Organization.” He sits in a nondescript office with a few other Specialists while the Organization rep, an older VIP type I pictured as legendary character actor John Vernon (who of course would’ve pronounced his outfit “The OrganIZE-ation,” in that old-school way I love so much), goes over the latest target. We’re informed of the Organization’s weird way of assigning hits; all men are briefed, then a random drawing determines who actually gets the job. Burke of course pulls it, and he takes a train to the unnamed city – banging some broad he meets off-page, the first mention of sex yet in the entire book – and then buys an ice pick. He jams this into the ear of the target when the man gets in his car. Burke flies home to his nice house, with his lovely wife and adoring kid, reflecting over how he only needs to be a Specialist for a few more years before he too becomes a VIP. The “shock”-type finale we now expect has it that Burke suffers from recurring nightmares in which his ear is clogged and only an ice pick could unclog it, with Burke nightwalking to the kitchen to do the deed, ie kill himself. His wife stops him this time – but who knows about next. Other than the dumb finale, I liked this one, and it has that vintage pulp-crime vibe I love.

Next is “Everyman’s Woman,” also from 1957, and slightly longer than the other tales collected here. Our narrator is Brad, a cartoonist who moved to a cabin in the woods a few months ago with his new wife, a mega-babe named Nikki. One day Nikki comes home from the long hike to the town post office – Brad was too busy on a project to go with her, as he usually does – and she’s distraught because some creep followed her home. Eventually Brad rousts out the creep; it’s a dude with a limp named Carl Brand, who announces himself, “I’m free, white, and twenty-five.” He insists on his right to walk along the country road, and says he wasn’t following Nikki, but eventually Carl will flat-out tell Brad that he, Carl, has figured out that Nikki is a “nympho,” and it’s only a matter of time before he screws her. Unfortunately for Brad, this turns out to be the truth, at least so far as his wife is concerned; he met her, he tells us, when she was about to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in suicide to escape her condition, which compels her to screw countless men. A doctor recommended moving to the countryside where there were less men(!). This one ends with Brad finally having enough of Carl’s shit and accidentally killing him in hand-to-hand combat. Turner just says “to hell with it,” with Brad going home, realizing he’ll never be free of the worry that Nikki might screw every man she meets, and so killing her to end his worries!

“Accident” is from 1955 and goes back to third-person; it’s a short about a rich drunk who crashes into a car one night, wiping out an entire family except for the father. He lies to the cops that the other driver was at fault, and gets away with it; when the father who drove the other car comes out of his coma, he basically just shrugs it off, for what will bring back his wife and kids? Features a nasty finale in which the father shows up one night and carjacks the rich dude, tearing off into the night with the rich man’s own wife and kids in the car and plowing into a tree, killing them all – poetic (if draconian) justice is served, as now the rich man must live with everything also having been taken from him.

“Don’t Go Away Mad” is from a 1956 issue of Justice and is a highlight of Shroud 9 as it was a highlight of The Hardboiled Lineup; I reviewed it in my writeup on that one.

“Repeat Performance” is from a 1957 Manhunt and concerns a nameless guy who fondles teen girls at rock concerts. He’s all jazzed up about how he went “too far” with one of them at a concert this afternoon; the intimation is that he raped the girl and got away with it due to the noise and the crowd. He’s all excited to go to this evening’s concert and do it all again, but when he gets there he sees his victim from this afternoon, with a bunch of other girls. She saunters over to him and, just when he thinks she actually enjoyed her raping and has come back for more, she and her friends stab him to death with hat pins. Ends with the cops figuring they’ll never figure out who killed the guy! 

“Vacation Nightmare” is from a 1956 Manhunt and is like a ‘50s Deliverance. Our narrator informs us how he was driving his wife and teen daughter back from vacation, and decided after a full day’s driving to sleep in the car one night, at a fishing camp just off the highway. Next morning they woke into a nightmare: a trio of rapist-hillbillies were leering in the car at the women. Our narrator gets beaten while the hillbillies take their turns with the women; Turner keeps it all off-page, with the narrator knocked unconscious. When he comes to he staggers to his car despite the pleading of his wife and daughter and finds the three men down at the lake fishing(!). He steers his car toward them, jumps out, and the car runs over them – the cops chalk it up as an accident, the end.

“Everything Has To End,” from 1956, features the most disturbing “shock” finale in the book. We’re informed that a rich bastard named Vincent has knocked up his latest mistress, Verna, and he’s taken her to a doctor who handles abortions; indeed, this isn’t Vincent’s first time handling such an issue. But this time it’s cheaper, as we’re informed that Vincent has learned that dumb, poor women like Verna are much more “enjoyable” than the rich dames he used to run with – plus they’re easier to handle. But Verna’s waited four months to tell Vincent, which makes him wonder if he should break the affair off for good once the abortion is over. The doctor gives Verna a pill and Vincent drops her off at her place and gets back to his society life with his rich wife – Vincent is only wealthy due to her inheritance. Then one afternoon a few days later Vincent is drunk at a big party at his house; so drunk he thinks it’s his imagination when he sees a taxi pull up and Verna herself get out. She looks disheveled and she’s carrying a small box. She comes up to Vincent and tells him that she didn’t know what to do, especially since “he” was Vincent’s – “he” being the aborted child, of course, which Verna proceeds to dump on Vincent’s lap, right in front of his wife and everyone!

“Movie Night,” from a 1957 Manhunt, gets back to the juvenile delinquent fiction. Our narrator tells us how he and his family would often go to the drive-in with the family that lived next door. The father of that family, Fred, was a hothead who would get worked up over nothing, as he does this particular night; the movie is about juvenile delinquents, and Fred rants and raves that the “jaydees” get away with their rule-flaunting and bad behavior because no one ever stands up to them. Fred gets his chance to do this very thing when everyone goes to the crowded snack bar between movies; a group of jaydees are horsing around and one of ‘em knocks Fred’s soda all over Fred’s shirt. This leads to a brawl in which Fred gets the better of the punks, but when a cop comes by and is eager to bust the jaydees for causing a disturbance, Fred’s wife pleads with him not to press charges and to just forget it. Fred does so, reluctantly – and that night our narrator and his wife are woken by the horrible screaming of Fred’s wife. Turns out the jaydees lured him out of his house and beat him about the knees with axe handles before smashing him in the face with glass-filled socks. He’s now crippled and half-blind, and the narrator receives notice that he’s next on the jaydee revenge list.

“The Onlooker” is from a 1954 Manhunt and concerns a dude named Blake who watches a blonde in the hotel room across from his own. This is a stalker tale, with Blake becoming increasingly worked up as the blonde talks to the young soldier she’s invited up to her room; when it’s apparent the two are having sex in the now-darkened room, Burke whips out an automatic rifle and fires. Ending has the cops discussing this nutjob Burke, who didn’t even know the blonde, and was just some psycho who thought she was “his” girl; he didn’t even know that the soldier was actually the blonde’s husband, just returned from the war.

“Room Service,” from a 1955 Manhunt, follows, and is of a similar bent; indeed it’s so similar to the previous story you wonder why it was placed right after it. This one’s also about a guy hanging out in a room with a rifle, but this guy’s watching a parade pass by beneath him. Occasionally he checks over a dossier at his side, which shows an older man and a young, pretty woman – the last photo shows them being married. Then we see the main attraction in the parade below is the man and woman in the photo; our nameless rifleman blows the woman away and escapes. Ends with the revelation that the older man was the rifleman’s father, and apparently he killed the woman out of jealousy because she was going to get in the way of all the big game hunting he’s done with his dad(!?).

And that’s that, 18 tales that mostly just go for shock and usually succeed. I really wanted to read something by Turner a bit longer, which I guess is an indication that his writing is good enough that it made me want more. I think next I’ll get around to one of his actual novels. Anyway, Shroud 9 is entertaining enough, but I’m not sure it justifies the exorbitant prices it goes for on the secondhand market.

The Hardboiled Lineup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mafia: Operation Hit Man

Mafia: Operation Hit Man, by Don Romano
October, 1974  Pyramid Books

Allan Nixon and Robert Turner deliver their final installment of Mafia: Operation. Technically this was the fourth volume of the “series,” with Operation Hijack by Paul Eiden being the third one, but Mafia: Operation has more in common with the crime thrillers “produced” by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel than the actual series he oversaw, like John Eagle Expeditor or The Baroness. There is no continuity in the five volumes of Mafia: Operation, with each book really just a standalone crime novel. 

While Operation Hit Man is pretty cool and sometimes attains the sleaze level of the previous two offerings from these authors, it sadly fails to live up to expectations, and is nowhere as phenomenally lurid as Operation Porno. More than anything Operation Hit Man reminds me of Scorpio, a BCI crime paperback that was written by Robert Turner on his own. Like that novel, Operation Hit Man is mostly made up of arbitrary narrative digressions, with lots of background histories of one-off characters, usually shoehorned willy-nilly into the plot. It also lacks the sleazy drive of the previous two installments by Nixon and Turner, and comes off like something quickly banged out to meet a deadline. Given this my suspicion is Nixon was the main writer of Operation Porno and Operation Cocaine, and Turner wrote most of Operation Hit Man. But I’ve been wrong before, as my wife likes to remind me.

Turner got his start in the pulps, editing The Spider and writing scads of stories himself, and he did tons of crime short stories in the ‘50s for publications like Manhunt. It seems to me that he brought the short story aesthetic to his novels: lots of scene-setting and character-building before getting to the action. In other words there’s a lot of telling before showing; Operation Hit Man is filled with a lot of backstories and background setup before we get to “the good stuff,” which was also the case in Scorpio. I mean in point of fact, the novel is ostensibly about a Mafia hit man, yet we only see him carry out a handful of hits – and there’s no pure action stuff, like shootouts or whatnot. I assumed this installment would have more action than the previous two books by these authors, but as it turns out Operation Cocaine was the most action packed.

Also, sadly, the sleaze is kind of gone too, this time, which I think is more indication Turner was behind it; whereas the previous two books had all kinds of hardcore shenanigans, Operation Hit Man only gets down and dirty a few times; I knew something was up early on when a Mafia capo had sex off-page. Off-page!! This same sort of thing happened in Scorpio. And speaking of which when we meet our “hero,” Dominick Caressimo, he’s just gotten lucky with the landlord’s slutty wife in the sleazy Manhattan hovel he’s staying in. Caressimo is 25, a ‘Nam vet who ran a suicide squad, where he was nicknamed “The Noose” for his proficiency with strangling Charlie in the dead of night with a garrotte. (Unbelievably, the authors do nothing with this in the story that follows – I thought it would be a given that Caressimo would carry out a Noose-style hit at some point, but it never happens.)

Caressimo is offered his hit man job within the first few pages, proposotioned by Anthony Vicarella, the aforementioned capo. Vicarella’s been monitoring Caressimo, noting he’s a former ‘Nam badass who has had a hard time transitioning back to “the world.” He offers him the chance to make big bucks killing people for the Mafia; Vicarella wants to start a new Murder, Incorporated, which he will name “Operation Hit Man.” Caressimo would be the first assassin he’s hired, but if it all goes well Caressimo could be the top guy with his own legion of hitmen. The authors don’t waste the reader’s time; Caressimo accepts posthaste.

Whereas the previous two books were mostly ensemble pieces, hopscotching around a large group of characters before settling on one (or two) in the final chapters, Operation Hit Man keeps Caressimo in the spotlight for most of the narrative. Unfortunately he’s kind of a cipher…he literally becomes a Mafia hit man because he needs the cash, and there but few moments of introspection or self-doubt. But he’s definitely the man for the job; Vicarella clarifies that most of these assignments won’t be simple gun-them-down deals; Caressimo will need to show some invention in his work. He also must follow an elaborate method of getting his jobs, going to a dead-drop box when notified, collecting the dossier left for him, and studying his latest target.

His first job has him taking out a CPA who has somehow run afoul of the mob; since Caressimo himself isn’t in the Mafia, he is never given the reason why he must kill. But usually he figures it out. This first job takes up a good portion of the opening quarter and has Caressimo shadowing his prey, discovering that he has a hotstuff mistress on the side, and deciding to kill them both when they go away for an illicit weekend in the countryside. On the job Caressimo drafts a fellow vet, a black dude named Hampton Jarvis who was in Caressimo’s suicide squad. This one involves a lot of setup as Caressimo, using a cheap rifle, figures out the range and distance to blow out the CPA’s tire as he drives up the mountain; he ends up killing both the CPA and his mistress in a tire blowout that sends their car flipping down the mountain.

Vicarella isn’t happy that Caressimo has taken out an innocent, and advises that if something like that happens again, Caressimo himself might end up dead; the Mafia only wants the person in the dossier dead, no one else. But otherwise Caressimo did great and is on his way to money, with ten thousand and up for his hits, even more for big jobs. Vicarella cautions Caressimo not to go overboard with the high life, which ultimately leads to a subplot in which Caressimo develops an alternate identity for himself. He has a hidden door built in his apartment – again, all of it described via page-filling backstory summary – which leads into an apartment in the high-class building that happens to be on the other side. Caressimo merely slips through the hidden door and becomes a high roller; a pulpish vibe from former pulp-writer Turner.

More jobs follow, each of them playing out more as interesting obstacles Caressimo must encounter and overcome rather than slam-bang pieces of action. Caressimo takes out a pair of brothers who have been notorious thorns in the Mafia’s side by electrocuting them in their pool, and another guy, who has been skimming the Mafia’s cigarette-tax-scheme profits, he bulldozes right in front of his employees. This latter one definitely has the feel of a short story, all of it being relayed through the perspective of the witnesses. Eventually Caressimo does head up his own execution wing for the mob, with Hampton Jarvis as his right-hand man; the other killers are taken from Caressimo’s old ‘Nam unit.

After that first kill, of the CPA, a horny Caressimo picks up a married cougar-type babe; he’d once been told that if a guy wants to score quick, look for an older, married woman, as most of ‘em are super-horny thanks to husbands who no longer screw them. Caressimo does just that, leading to the novel’s first explicit sex scene, which brings to mind similar sequences from the past two books. Caressimo doesn’t even learn her name – but he does learn it, memorably so, when the same woman turns up in the drop-box dossier some months later. The Mafia wants the woman dead, despite the fact she’s just some random wife and mother of two teen kids; Caressimo deduces on his own that the husband has set up the hit, likely to get her out of the way and cash in on life insurance.

Not that this stops Caressimo from carrying out the hit. As yet a reminder of the cretinous cur we’ve been presented for a protagonist, Caressimo not only kills her – but makes it look like the work of a rapist-murderer who is operating in the vicinity! In one of the more bizarre segments I’ve ever read in a novel, Caressimo calls the lady up, tells her he’s looking to rekindle that one-night stand they enjoyed months ago – but first wants her help trying to make a break in that whole rapist-strangler deal that’s going on in her neighborhood. Caressimo tells her this tall tale about being a psychic who has helped the cops break similar cases; he needs to go to the rape-murder scenes with a woman, concentrate, and let his psychic skills tell him who the rapist was(!).

The woman goes along with him, and Caressimo ends up raping her – not that she doesn’t enjoy it. Then he strangles her! He tosses her nude corpse aside, wondering if he’s impregnated her…meaning, if so, he didn’t just kill her but also his unborn kid(!). Folks, nothing beats the sleazy vibe of these ‘70s crime novels. But even though Caressimo ends up killing the husband in vengeance (on his own dime, and without the Mafia’s knowledge), he is so unnerved that he’s unable to have sex…three weeks later and only a talented hooker can get him to rise to the occasion. He takes a trip to Europe, where a horny American governess takes him to a torture-sex show in Amsterdam; Caressimo’s so excited he loses it in his pants, relegating a hasty retreat back to the hotel for more explicit sex.

Gradually Caressimo learns that he can only overcome his limp hangup by getting whipped and beaten every once in a while; this he learns via a hooker Hampton knows. Once she hears Caressimo’s problem, she gives him a phone number, which leads Caressimo to a strange interview with a professional-looking lady in some business office. From there he’s sent to a location where he’s blindfolded, taken somewhere else, and then whipped and sodomized by a gorgeous nude dominatrix and her teen accomplices, after which Caressimo screws them all. At this point the novel is far beyond a Mafia yarn and into the realm of pure sleaze.

Eventually the don of Vicarella’s family gets wind of Caressimo’s quirk (the whips and chains hooker service being yet another Mafia venture), and he doesn’t like it; he summons Vicarella and tells him Caressimo is now an asset, as you can’t trust a guy who gets off on being whipped and tied up. As Zwolf said, “Murder doesn’t phase these guys, but a liltte hanky-spanky gives them the vapors?” But this takes us into the homestretch, as one evening Caressimo goes from his high-class secret apartment into his Vicarella-appointed one next door and spies Vicarella’s henchman waiting in there for him. Promptly Caressimo realizes the man is here to kill him, and blows him away. Next he takes care of a traitorous “best friend” before (almost anticlimactically) dealing with Vicarella himself.

But Dom Caressimo has done too many evil things to get a Happily Ever After. Justice finally finds him months later, living on the beach in Cannes, delivered via a submachine gun salvo to the crotch and sternum – a fitting finale, but an unexplained one, given that the authors have informed us that Caressimo is here in Cannes under yet another fake name, one that no one knows about. So how did the Mafia gunners find him? The authors hope we’ll overlook this, more intent on giving their series-mandatory downbeat ending in which everyone dies.

I guess Mafia: Operation didn’t do well enough to continue past five volumes, which is a shame; these two authors certainly could’ve come up with a sleazy fourth book together. Anyway next time I’ll move on to Paul Eiden’s two contributions; having now read Crooked Cop, which I think was by Eiden, I’m game to read anything he wrote.