Showing posts with label Hardy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hardy. Show all posts

Thursday, April 8, 2021

Reunion For Death (Hardy #5)


Reunion For Death, by Martin Meyers
No month stated, 1976  Popular Library

The Hardy series draws to a close with a fifth installment that sees Martin Meyers apparently trying very hard to live up to the “sensuous sleuth” tagline the publisher labellled the series with. While Patrick Hardy has gotten lucky frequently in past volumes, this one sees him scoring right and left, even engaging in a two-way with a pair of hippie girls (“fears of V.D.” be damned!). This is all the more impressive given that Hardy’s 40 pounds overweight this volume and struggling to get back in shape. One wonders why he’d even bother. 

There’s no real pickup from the previous volume, though Hardy does occasionally reflect on previous jobs, particularly with the Duchess in Spy And Die; but even here the focus is on the “sensuous” aspect of the job, as the Duchess told Hardy she was the best lover she’d ever had – even better than a KGB agent trained for such stuff. However Meyers has cagily foreshadowed the events of this one; in the previous volume, Hardy got a mailing from his college alumni association, and this volume’s plot concerns a murder mystery involving Hardy’s college pals of twenty years ago. I only recall this about the alumni letter in the previous book because Meyers reminds us of it. For this is a series where pedantic, trivial little details are of key importance, because not much else really happens (other than the frequent sexual interludes, that is); as ever, “action” is mostly comprised of Hardy “flipping through the TV Guide” to see which movie he can watch while he prepares his latest meal. 

Meyers gets the sex out of the way quick, with Hardy entertaining his casual girflriend Ruby, a stripper whose been around since the first volume. Ruby mentions Hardy’s gained some weight and then jumps in bed with him for some off-page fun, after which she disappears from the novel, heading out of town for an engagement. She implores Hardy to visit his doctor, yet another recurring character; Dr. Merle Foster, who puts up with Hardy’s frequent come-ons, given that she’s a hotstuff babe and all. She sets Hardy up with some “pills” to help with his blood pressure and also gives him the card of a fat-loss place called “Fat Limited.” All this is pretty similar to the setup of the previous volume, which also had Hardy going to a fitness facility. 

This means that a lot of Reunion For Death is made up of Hardy’s diet, how hungry he is, how he forces himself to eat less, etc. At least this livens up the “what’s on TV” material. Otherwise as mentioned, Hardy gets laid a helluva lot for a fat guy: Ruby, the two hippie chicks, and a couple other babes all in the course of a 160-page novel. But still we must endure lots of stuff about his worries over his weight and how he restrains from eating high-caloric meals and snacks. The biggest impact on Hardy so far as the extra weight goes is the pills Dr. Merle gives him for his pressure, which cause all sorts of side effects, in particular taking away the feeling of “completeness” in climax. So as I say, Meyers has now figured out how to incorporate the “sensuous” aspect into everything in the narrative. 

After getting all the diet stuff set up, Meyers moves into this volume’s case; Hardy receives a call from old college buddy named Lassiter, who says he’s been looking for another college friend of theirs, Ben Alsop. Lassiter’s in California and Alsop’s in New York, thus Lassiter asks Hardy to look him up. A curious thing about Reunion For Death is that there’s no feeling that any of these people were ever friends. I know it’s been over 20 years since they’ve seen each other, but still…if my friends from college 20+ years ago called me, I’d at least talk about old times or whatever. But Lassiter and the other college friends who pop up in the novel are along the lines of any other one-off characters in the series; there’s no conveyed sense that they were friends at one time. 

This is sort of explained in a brief recap; Hardy was morbidly obese in college, thus was mainly friends with spindly geek Ben Alsop, given that the two were outcasts in school. It was through Alsop that Hardy met the other guys: Lassiter, Ricci, and Leon, all of whom were popular jocks. So then Hardy was never “buddies” with any of them except for Alsop, and Alsop’s the one he spends the entire novel looking for. But regardless, there isn’t much in the way of background setup here, nothing other than a vaguely “subtle” mention that a girl went missing one year in college…a mystery Hardy forgot about years ago because he “wasn’t interested in such things at the time.” But this minor mention is all that’s made of the mysterious incident of twenty years before, thus the big revelations at novel’s end come off as very lame. 

Even more lame is when Hardy can’t get through to Ben on the number listed in the phone book; he talks to some other spaced-out guy and tries to convey a message. So later Hardy’s out walking his dog Holmes and notices a hotstuff black lady approaching his apartment. This will be Melanie, whom Hardy lusts after the entire novel. She has a letter for Hardy from Ben, but “the postman or someone got it wet.” So Hardy will have to piece together the letter upon which various words have been conveniently erased. It’s all ridiculous, but meanwhile he’s busy checking out Melanie and wondering if he should get a shot at her, even though she is, by her own admission, “Ben’s girl.” 

Not that this prevents Hardy from his nookie; he goes to the sleazepit apartment under Ben’s name, to find it’s a hippie crash pad. The hippie girl there, as mentioned above, offers herself to Hardy moments after they meet. Here we get an indication that the sex material in Reunion For Death will be a little more explicit than previously in the series. But also as mentioned Hardy doesn’t feel “right” when he reaches the big moment, thus he rushes back to Dr. Merle, who tells him it’s all a side effect of the drugs, and his body will adjust. So Hardy skips the next day’s dose and heads back to the hippie crash bad, to engage the hippie girl in another tussle…and then immediately thereafter, the other hippie girl who happens to be there! Everything working properly now, Hardy happily heads home and continues fantasizing about Melanie. 

Meyers actually restrains himself on this one; with it being a “will they or won’t they” thing that keeps up between Melanie and Hardy throughout the book. He also injects a bit more action into the novel; while the otherwise nice cover is as misleading as all the previous ones were (Hardy doesn’t own a gun, let alone use one), Hardy does get shot at a few times, and also gets to use his military-programmed “reflexes” to take on a few armed opponents. That being said, there is as ever a humorous lack of tension in the plot. Like for example, when Melanie and Hardy go to Ben’s other apartment, Melanie reveals that the place has clearly been searched by someone. She says this mere moments after the two have entered the apartment. For all they know, the interlopers could still be in there. But what does Hardy do? He tells Melanie to take a look around and flops on the couch to do some crossword puzzles! 

The other two college “pals” come out of the woodwork, both of them looking for a package that was supposedly at Ben’s apartment: Ricci, who is now an interior decorator and seems to be gay whereas he was a lady killer back in college, and Leon, who doesn’t contribute much to the plot other than taking a few shots at Hardy. Eventually a heroin-smuggling scheme is worked in; Ben Alsop is found dead in Mexico, courtesy a few shots to the back of the head, and a Mexican cop (working with recurring series character Detective Gerald Friday) believes Alsop was smuggling drugs over the border. Hardy doesn’t even bat an eye that his old college pal is dead – instead he wonders how long he should allow Melanie to mourn before he tries to get in her pants! 

Surprisingly though we never do get to see it happen, even though Melanie starts making longing looks at Hardy. Instead Hardy gets lucky courtesy some floozie he hooks up with thanks to old pal Lassiter, now in town and suddenly giving off menacing vibes. Hardy gets in a few fistfights here and there, as ever his reflexes kicking into gear when threatened; Hardy will pulverize his opponent, then go and vomit in terror (to quote Homer Simpson). The finale sees that damn crossword puzzle coming into play, the one Hardy picked up at Ben’s apartment; Ben left a clue in it, and after much pondering Hardy figures out how to solve it – and also finds the package everyone’s been looking for, which you guessed it, contains photos of that fatal night two decades ago where the poor girl went missing. Blackmail Ben was using on his three “pals.” 

Meyers ends the novel – and series – on a sex joke. Melanie, feeling all better now, lets it be clear that she wants some good lovin’ with Hardy posthaste…then the phone rings and it’s Ruby, who has just arrived back in town and is on her way over: “I’m so horny for you I’m shaking.” The book ends with Hardy in a serious predicament, with one randy girl in hand and another randy girl on her way over. This was as good a way as any to end Hardy, which unfortunately didn’t pan out like I hoped it would. I recall when I discovered this series years ago…it sounded like everything I could want, a sleazy ‘70s private eye yarn with a military-programmed hero. But man, Martin Meyers instead went for a ridiculously leisurely approach, with more focus on what Hardy ate or watched on TV. So to tell the truth I’m not too bummed that there were no more volumes.

Monday, June 1, 2020

Hung Up To Die (Hardy #4)


Hung Up To Die, by Martin Meyers
June, 1976  Popular Library

Grab your no-doze pills, kids, ‘cause it’s another installment of Hardy and we’re gonna need all the help we can get to stay awake! But you know to tell the truth, Hung Up To Die isn’t as soporific as the previous three volumes, I mean comparatively speaking. Martin Meyers at least tries to include a little sporadic action, so that the book isn’t just a list of what Hardy eats and watches on TV. There’s also a lot of “adult” action in the book – Hardy’s the “sensuous sleuth,” you know, at least per the covers – but as with the previous books it all pretty much occurs off-page.

The opening couple pages almost have you suspecting this one’s going to be more action packed than the previous ones; Hardy when we meet him is driving back into Manhattan after spending a couple weeks vacation in Maine. There he had a cabin by a lake and of course managed to hook up with some babe, and now he’s sad he had to end the summer romance with her…though Hardy does pretty well for himself in this book, so it’s not like he should feel too bad. For as he drives along he sees some hot young babe hitchiking, and he pulls over for her. She says her car’s in the shop and offers Hardy some primo grass back at her place. So they go back and smoke it, and just as they’re about to get into bed some guy busts in and tries to take out Hardy. But our hero, we’ll recall, has been trained hypnotically or something to go into immediate offense when attacked, even if he’s afraid. Hardy beats the shit out of the dude, chases him off, and figures the whole thing’s a honey trap – but goes in and does the still-eager girl, anyway! 

Immediately upon his arrival in New York Hardy’s already hooked up with some other babe: Denise, a petite actress. She’s built up as the main female character in the novel before abruptly leaving; she gets a role in some play out in the sticks and says so long to Hardy, both of them knowing this will be goodbye for real. But meanwhile Hardy’s already checking out the babes at the physical rehab place he’s been sent to by his doctor. Hardy’s knee as ever is giving him trouble, and he’s been sent to a supposedly-gifted rehab doctor named Natasha, who runs a clinic in Manhattan. The place is staffed by hot gals, and Hardy can’t stop staring at busty blonde Faith or even bustier blonde Lane. We’re promptly informed that there’s only a single shower in the clinic, and it’s used by men and women. But since everyone’s afraid they’re going to be spotted in the nude, the only person who ever uses it is Lane – this incidental point of course merely setup for the sole murder that occurs in the novel.

I’ve mentioned in every previous review that Meyers’s writing style is incredibly similar to Len Levinson’s, and that’s true again here. This time though we get what would’ve been an in-joke if “Martin Meyers” really was just another of Len’s many pseudonyms: there’s a nebbish guy in the clinic named Butler. Nothing like Len’s Butler, of course, but a central character in the novel, and if I didn’t know Meyers was a real person I would’ve gone into one of my typical delusional speculations about the author’s true identity. Butler’s always lurking outside the shower stall, forever concerned he’s about to stumble across a half-nude female patient or employee. Hardy makes passing conversation with the guy, then one day after his latest appointment Hardy goes back to change, sees weird shut-in Butler lurking back there…and then discovers Lane’s corpse hanging in the shower. 

Now clearly anyone with a modicum of intelligence would suspect Butler, who already gives off danger signals from his very first appearance. But Hardy doesn’t, and indeed will continue to conveniently overlook the mounting clues as the novel continues. And he’s supposedly a private eye! He’s too busy, really, worrying over his love life: he’s already managed to get Faith in bed (the girls at the clinic seem very willing to break the “rules” and go out with patients), but regardless he was also trying to determine how to “make” Lane as well. Now she’s dead, and Hardy’s hired by Natasha to find out who did it. She doesn’t seem as upset by the girl’s death as she is that the murder will cause her to lose business.

Really though, it’s Hardy’s relationship with Faith that takes up most of the narrative. She’s constantly coming over to his place for some all-night shenanigans, not much of which is actually described by Meyers, though he does get a tad more risque with this volume. Hardy slowly beings to realize he’s in love with her, and the book really takes on a Len Levinson vibe as it’s more about Hardy worried that Faith doesn’t love him back, and his going to comedic lengths to let her know he’s crazy about her. There’s also a return appearance by Steve Macker, Hardy’s actor friend who serves as his spy, but even he figures into the Faith subplot, with the two going out on a double date, Faith bringing along yet another girl from the clinic.

This one’s odd because Hardy just sort of stumbles onto the job, and really only solves anything through dumb luck. For once we don’t have interminable scenes of him scanning the paper for what old movie’s on that night, or going over his list of ingredients for his latest meal. To be sure, he does both of these things throughout Hung Up To Die, just not as much as in previous installments. He’s also hassled by the same cop from previous volumes, but these parts come off more like Meyers catering to his established formula; the cop adds nothing to the story, and as mentioned Lane’s killer is so glaringly obvious you wonder why the case is so hard for all these professionals to crack.

As ever Hardy puts Macker on field duty, following around Lane’s ex-boyfriend, who was acting suspiciously before and after Lane’s murder. Meanwhile Hardy frets that he’s fallen in love, and tries to convince Faith she loves him, too. She reveals she’s also seeing her agent, and thus being a wanna-be starlet she’s obviously swinging more toward this other guy – and there are some red herrings that he might’ve been involved with Lane’s death, too. When Faith casually reveals to Hardy one day at the clinic that she’s now engaged to the agent, the reader is more heartstricken than Hardy, for our hero has finally caught the ball and deduced who the murderer likely was, thus he’s only half paying attention to Faith’s devastating news. I kid you not when I say the majority of the narrative is concerned with his courting her, though.

Meyers does a good job of pulling all the various subplots together for the finale. There’s also a return appearance of Ruby Red, Hardy’s stripper galpal whom he enjoys a casual affair with – this dude does get lucky, that’s for sure. So really he doesn’t spend too much time pining for Faith, as Ruby arrives in town immediately after their breakup. Ruby also succeeds in making Faith jealous, as Faith reveals when Hardy heads over to Natasha’s clinic to confront the killer. This part actually features some action, but not from Hardy – Faith ends up punching someone out, a person who was in the act of training a gun on Hardy. A nice way of paying him back for breaking his heart.

And that’s it for this penultimate adventure of Hardy. Meyers clearly tries to play up on the “sensuous sleuth” angle this time; I would say at the expense of the action, but then there’s never been much action to begin with in this series. Perversely though this volume turned out to be my favorite yet, maybe because there were times that I could pretend it was some lost Len Levinson novel from the ‘70s.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Red Is For Murder (Hardy #3)


Red Is For Murder, by Martin Meyers
No month stated, 1976  Popular Library

The most slothful of private eyes returns in the third volume of Hardy, and once again if I didn’t know any better I’d assume “Martin Meyers” was just another pseudonym of Len Levinson. Seriously, their styles are almost identical – with the caveat that Len turns in more entertaining work. But Meyers was a real person, and I see now that he died in 2014, two years before his Hardy novels came out as eBooks.

This one picks up a couple months after the previous volume; it’s a few days before Christmas, and Hardy has just been let out of the hospital for knee surgery. As known from previous volumes, Hardy has a trick knee, and apparently he injured it even more in the events of the previous book. He’ll use a cane and experience knee pain throughout Red Is For Murder, the events of which span three months. This knee trouble in particular has a Levinson ring to it, with Hardy even buying a leg weight in some Manhattan sports shop and hobbling around with it to strenghten his knee, even using it as an impromptu weapon – all this just had a bit of a Len Levinson vibe for me.

Hardy’s immediate first stop is the apartment of Kate Arnheim, a hot redhead we’ve never met before, I think; we’re briefly informed that Hardy’s usual pals Steve Macker and Ruby Rose are both out of town, and they’ll remain so for the duration of the novel. Yes, this means that for once Hardy himself does all his private eye work, and doesn’t leave the heavy lifting to Macker. But make no mistake, Hardy’s “method” remains the same as ever – checking the TV Guide for what old movie’s on, preparing himself elaborate meals, walking aimlessly around Manhattan, sitting in the barber chair in his Riverside Drive home, and getting lots of sleep. As ever he scores with a few eager gals – Hardy is the “sensuous sleuth,” after all – but also as ever Meyers refuses to give us any sleazy details. This is ironic, because it robs the series of the one trashy thing it has going for it.

I say “ironic” because Popular Library clearly hyped the trashy elements in their packaging of the series; the Hardy books could be viewed as an example in the power of marketing. Looking at the cover and sensastionalistic blurbs and back cover copy, one would get the impression that the five books in this series are just lurid blasts of ultra-‘70s trash. Unfortunately they are not. One wonders what Meyers thought of how Popular marketed his work – one also wishes that he might’ve taken a little inspiration from his publishers and tried to turn out a series more in accord with the marketing department. I mean folks, three volumes in and Hardy’s never even touched a gun, yet there he is toting one on the cover of every single volume!

After some off-page lovin’ Kate and Hardy make a date for Xmas Eve. Hardy whiles away the next few days – Meyers has a penchant for delaying things for no plotwise reasons, particularly for no dramatic reasons – and on Christas Eve he keeps waiting and waiting for Kate to answer her phone. He goes over to her apartment that night to find, you guessed it, her bloody corpse. Hardy calls the cops and ends up talking to his “pal” at the local precinct, Gerald Friday, who has appeared in all the novels. Hardy meanwhile mourns Kate for all of a few pages, but he does at least vow to find out who killed her, especially when the cops don’t come up with any leads.

Flashforward to February, and while Hardy’s pretty much over Kate, he still wants to know who murdered her and all. But the cops don’t have much to go on. He retains the assistance of Friday, who lets Hardy know all the people in the Kate’s apartment building, info that’s clumsily relayed over a few pages of exposition, as if we readers are supposed to take notes on who’s who. Around this time one of the guys who lived in the apartment, a PR type, is killed in his office. Hardy of course suspects a connection. This guy was boffing his girlfriend, Denise, the night Kate was murdered, and Hardy calls Denise up – and is himself boffing her (offpage) that night! People quickly move on from grief in the world of Hardy; Denise later relates that the murdered dude was just another casual lay she had going on.

Speaking of casual lays, Denise visits Hardy a whole bunch at his Riverside Drive place, spending the night and engaging in weekend-long boffs, and ultimately even goes out with him on a few of his private eye deals. She’s an actress and for the most part replaces Ruby Red, Hardy’s hooker friend who served a similar capacity in previous books. But Denise is given more importance and it’s implied Hardy’s falling in love with her – a lot of the book’s padded length is given over to their bickering, with Denise being asked out by producers and Hardy being resentful, and Denise calling him to apologize and whatnot. Meanwhile Hardy has no qualms with screwing any random babe who comes his way.

But don’t be misled. Most of Red Is For Murder is along the exact lines of previous installments – Hardy sitting around, getting lots of sleep, feeding his dog Holmes, watching TV, and shoving his face with gourmet meals. This time we have the added element of his bum knee, which he grumbles about at length. Folks, this novel – and the series in general – is so damn boring that even Hardy himself is bored! Don’t believe me? Check out this excerpt. It’s also a good example of that strange penchant of Meyer’s I noted; he’s forever having Hardy plan to do something like hours or days away, then whiling away the time as he waits:

It was still early [for Hardy’s date with Denise]. Hardy prepared Holmes’s dinner. Then he turned on the television and turned it off. He looked through his own TV scanner that covered the street entrance. Nothing interesting. He swiveled around in his chair and looked up at the shelves of books He got up to take a closer look. Muhammad Ali’s face stared at him from the paperback cover of Sting Like A Bee. Hardy took the book to the chaise and read till it was time to go.

And that’s just page 47!! We’ve got another 100+ to go. Hardy is bored throughout most of those pages, often looking for ways to pass the time.

When not catching up on his sleep, Hardy often visits his prime suspects, a pair of writers who employed Kate. These two are involved with a shady businessman who has mob connections; Hardy soon notices a thug loitering outside Kate’s apartment and glaring at Hardy every time he walks by. After a party in which Hardy runs afoul of this guy, he goes home with some random babe, has some more of that off-page sex, and then when leaving walks right into the mobster and henchman. It was all a trap, but Hardy uses his cane as an impromptu weapon; he jabs a hole in the waterbed and uses the gushing water to foil the thugs long enough for him to hobble away. I’m not making that up, either.

Soon thereafter Hardy’s moved on to his next conquest, a busty megastar in the Raquel Welch mold. The sole memorable bit in the novel features her and Hardy watching one of her early movies, in which she played a cavewoman, on TV: “Look at those boobs,” she says, oggling her younger self. One of their boffs, by they way, occurs with the lady still wearing her clothes, as she has an event to go to; Hardy thinks to himself that she’s the kinkiest lay ever, up there with the Duchess of the previous volume.

After various bits of padding – more meals consumed, naps taken, and off-page sex – it culminates in a party in which Hardy hopes to out the killer. The reveal is as thoroughly pre-PC as you can get – the killer turns out to be one of the gays in Kate’s building, who, “like most homosexuals” (per cop Friday), hated himself for being gay and wanted to be straight, so put the moves on Kate…only to find he couldn’t do the deed. And when she laughed at him he killed her…and became so excited killing her that he “made it” after she was dead, hence the signs of Kate having been sexually assaulted by her murderer. Don’t worry about Hardy toting a gun or anything in the climax; Friday does the heavy lifting, bringing the murderer in.

And here Red Is For Murder ends, but I have to admit, while the book was as dull as the others, perhaps even duller, I guess I myself was in a bored sort of mood when I read it, as this one didn’t annoy me as much as the others did.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Spy And Die (Hardy #2)


Spy And Die, by Martin Meyers
January, 1976  Popular Library

The most slovenly, lazy, non-compelling protagonist in private eye fiction returns in Spy And Die, the second volume of the forgotten Hardy series. Once again author Martin Meyers spins out a listless tale in which hardly anything happens, other than our “hero” Patrick Hardy stuffing his face and watching old movies on tv.

It occurred to me that perhaps Hardy was Meyers’s attempt at capturing the vibe of James Garner’s The Rockford Files, with a down-on-his luck gumshoe who is constantly thrown into events that are over his head. But man, at least in that show stuff happened! Spy And Die is an endurance test of the first order; without any exaggeration at all, the novel is mostly made up of lists of what Hardy eats and which movies he watches.

My friends, there were too many times in which I wanted to put this damn book down and move on to something more interesting…like maybe watching dust form on the furniture. But I perservered so that I could bring you a full report. In the end though I probably should’ve just watched the furniture. Nothing at all memorable occurs in Spy And Die and it’s such a nonentity of a book that I wonder again if the whole thing was some dire joke – on the reader.

Despite the fact that the novel is filled with beautiful and nude women, tons of sex, a monocle-sporting villainess, and various groups of spies, Spy And Die barely registers on the reader’s consciousness. It would also be a great alternative to sleeping pills. Meyers rarely if ever describes actions, events, characters, or scenery, with those mentioned sex scenes always relegated to, “They made it again.” Action scenes are slightly more fleshed out, with details of Hardy throwing punches, but they are so few and far between that even they can’t rescue the novel from its torpor.

But what’s it about? Well as we’ll recall, Patrick Hardy, our “hero,” is an Army-trained private eye who’d rather eat, read, and watch tv all day. Who wouldn’t?? But you see, this doesn’t make for a very compelling private eye protagonist, and Meyers isn’t very interested in expanding beyond this limited scope; even when Hardy is thrust into situations which take him out of his comfort zone, he just runs away and goes back to gorging himself and watching tv. The novel is almost a litany of the various things Hardy stuffs his face with.

Anyway, some unspecified time after the first volume, Hardy is hired for another job – once again, by some hotstuff gal who waltzes into his big place on Riverside Drive and proposes the task for him. Her name is Alice King, she’s from Houston, and an uncle named Walter whom she’s never before heard of recently died and left her some money, or something. But Alice suspects that Walter was involved with the Army (apparently he died on a “post” somewhere) and thinks the story’s real weird, and wants Hardy’s help.

Well, they screw a bunch (zero details per the norm), and Alice goes back to Houston. Hardy proceeds to sit on a barber chair in his lounge and watch tv, with frequent breaks to the kitchen. We are of course well-informed of what he eats – the one element Meyers doesn’t fail to elaborate on is what Hardy eats. Soon he discovers himself being followed around by groups of strange men – spies, he’s certain.

After a half-assed chase, Hardy ditches his car and heads over to Philadelphia to hook up with his stripper/dancer friend, Ruby Rose, returning from the previous volume. More undescribed sex occurs. Hardy returns to New York, where he is contacted by members of the Central Security Force, headed by obese Julius Foxx, who inform him that Walter Henry was a spy. They want Hardy to keep working his case for Alice, basically using him as a lure for the other group of spies who are tailing him.

These other spies work for Duchess Annette de Montespan, a smokin’-hot, super-stacked blonde who goes around wearing a monocle, and usually nothing else. A bisexual fashion photographer, she calls Hardy over to her place so he can watch her photograph some equally-hot and equally-nude models. Hardy falls hard for one of them, a Chinese gal named Mae-ling, aka Linda. After this the Duchess invites Hardy up to her room, where apparently a whole bunch of sex occurs off-page.

But Hardy "can’t make it.” Due to the valium he’s taking for his high blood pressure, he can’t reach climax, and thus the whole Duchess-banging is a bummer. I forgot to mention – the Duchess keeps on her monocle during all the banging. Anyway the lady is such a missed opportunity, apparently a supervillain in the Bond mold, even with a hulking henchwoman named Claude and an assassin named Korloff. But Meyers would rather tell you about what books Hardy buys on the way home.

Not having gotten enough tail, Hardy also tracks down Mae-ling, and more bland fireworks ensue. Hardy, who is often described as rugged but slightly going to seed around the middle, must be a killer with the ladies. But then, it was the ‘70s. Oh, and like last volume, friggin’ Hardy leaves all the real work to his tv-movie actor friend, Steve Macker – in fact it’s Macker who inadvertently stumbles upon the clue which allows Hardy to break the case!

But yeah, Macker flies down to Houston and Dallas to research leads while Hardy sits in his barber chair and watches old movies. Occassionally he’ll get up to write down an idea on his cork board. People, I’m not making this up. The novel is so eventless (not a real word, I think) as to be hilarious; you can forget about the sensationalistic cover, which has no bearing on the actual contents of the novel.

I’ll just cut to the chase – apparently Walter Henry was an undercover spy, and the name “Walter Henry” was just some random name these dudes would use. Something like that. And, uh, apparently the Duchess and her people were trying to find some MacGuffin he was working on, and Julius Foxx wanted to use Hardy as bait to lure them out. But good friggin’ gravy it’s all so half-assedly played out and revealed that you actually do forget everything except what Hardy eats!

Even the finale sucks – Hardy, with Mae-ling, crashes an upper-crust party and the Duchess captures them. In the span of two sentences, my friends, the Duchess kills Linda, and then Ludwig Lurche, a “black Teuton” who is behind it all, kills the Duchess! Seriously, there’s no drama behind either death…just like, “The Duchess stabbed Linda in the heart. Ludwig shot the Duchess.” It’s like that throughout, like an outline.

In fact, once again it occurred to me (you see, I was desperate to at least find some value in this book) that Meyer’s intent was that he himself was just as lazy and indolent as Hardy; that, just as Hardy is too lazy to actually do anything, the joke would extend into the metafictional realm with the author himself to lazy to write anything, churning out an outline instead of a fleshed-out work of fiction.

Does Hardy learn anything from the tale? Of course not. After Lurche is caught and Foxx and his minions arrive, Hardy mourns Mae-ling for a hot second before announcing, “I’m starving.” At this point Spy And Die mercifully ends, the tedium of it all is finally over, and the reader can recuperate and move on…until the next volume. And like a fool I bought it, years ago – and like an even bigger fool, I’ll read it some day.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Kiss And Kill (Hardy #1)


Kiss And Kill, by Martin Meyers
No month stated, 1975  Popular Library

This obscure series ran for five volumes; none of them were numbered, but each carried the Hardy series title. Given the sex-and-violence theme of the covers, it would appear that Popular Library was trying to attract the men’s adventure market, just as they were doing with the similarly-packaged Hardman series, by Ralph Dennis. The Hardy books are even less like men’s adventure novels than Dennis’s, though Hardy’s unusual backstory is somewhat in the pulp realm.

We learn in the opening pages of Kiss And Kill that Patrick Hardy was a rather obese young man who enjoyed nothing more than reading, watching TV, and gorging himself, and he was certain that his 325-pound weight would keep him from being drafted into the Vietnam war. But while getting his hair cut, Hardy was shot in the stomach by a masked man who was knocking over the barber shop; when Hardy came out of his post-surgery coma he was down to 200+ pounds, and further discovered that, no matter how much he ate, he could no longer put on any weight. He was called to the drafting board again, and this time they drafted him.

However Hardy had another problem – he was a coward. Shunted with a bunch of other “rejects” into an experimental division, Hardy and his fellows were trained via Pavlovian techniques to become fighting machines. Military psychologists manipulated Hardy’s brain so that, when confronted by a life or death situation, Hardy’s reflexes would spring to the attack, even if Hardy himself was still frightened. After being discharged Hardy goofed off around the world, eventually ending up in a big apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City, where one day he just decided to become a private investigator.

Hardy is loglined as “the sensuous sleuth,” one who “prefers sex to slaughter,” and this isn’t mere hyperbole. Hardy is basically a sloth, content to lay around all day watching TV – in between the calorie-heavy meals he prepares for himself. Yet due to his old gut wound (and a daily workout he hates) Hardy retains his muscular frame, and the gals just love him. A cursory glance through future volumes indicates that this element gets a bit more focus later on, but in Kiss And Kill Hardy does well enough for himself, picking up not one but two strippers, a femme fatale, and finally his own client – however it should be noted that author Marvin Meyers doesn’t go into too many details, despite the lurid thrills promised by the front and back covers.

Origin dispensed with in a few pages, we meet up with Hardy as he’s approached with a new case: a gorgeous blonde name Dorothy Robbins has been murdered, and her equally-gorgeous sister Peg has come to NYC from the midwest to find out what happened. Peg hires Hardy because she’s certain “the Organization” killed her sister, and the cops don’t believe her, given that Dorothy lived in a notoriously-dangerous tenement area in the city. Hardy, who has never handled a murder case (he claims that’s just “paperback stuff”), reluctantly agrees to take the job. His fee is $200 a day plus expenses, but man that’s a waste of cash because for the majority Hardy basically just watches TV, reads, plays with his dog Sherlock Holmes, and makes an occasional phone call.

Hardy relies on his sidekick Steve Macker to do the dirty work, scoping out sites and tracking down clues. Then Hardy will pull himself away from the TV and go talk to a witness or suspect. Along the way he runs afoul of Captain Gerald Friday of the Homicide department, and a running joke is how Friday constantly puts Hardy down for watching too many private eye movies and not learning the basics, like when Hardy calls Friday about a murder that isn’t even in Friday’s precinct. Gradually Hardy discovers that mobsters might have been involved in Dorothy’s death, in particular ones named Vanning and White.

Meanwhile Hardy scores with the above-mentioned stripper and later falls in love with Peg Robbins. There are barely any action scenes in the novel, and when they do happen they’re over in the span of a few sentences. Hardy can fight but he’s still a coward and gets scared at the thought of confronting someone. For example in one action scene he’s ambushed in a park, and as he fights off the two attackers he’s terrified the entire time, despite the fact that he beats up both of the men. He doesn’t even own a gun, so the sensationalistic cover art is totally misleading! He's quick to run afoul of people, though, given that his method of investigating is basically just harrassing people with questions, usually ending with, “Did you kill Dorothy Robbins?”

There isn’t much suspense either, and for the most part Kiss And Kill plays out like a goofy sort of comedic slice-of-sleazy-life tale, with Hardy going to parties and checking the TV listings for what movie he’s going to watch next. We also get a thorough rundown of the meals he eats and the dives he frequents. He’s also a compulsive smoker, and generally in bad health, which leads to some non-PC quips with his female (and of course beautiful) doctor. (“How does your chest feel, Hardy?” “I could ask you the same thing.”) When the surprise reveal comes at the end, it’s as lazy and indolent as Hardy himself. (Spoiler warning: It turns out that Peg was really Dorothy all along, and that Dorothy murdered her sister and pretended to be her for contrived reasons.)

The novel is written in third-person and moves at a snappy clip. Martin Meyers was an actor turned writer, but if I didn’t know any better I’d assume he was just another pseudonym of Len Levinson. Their writing styles are almost identical; like Levinson Meyers spends just as much time focusing on the mundane aspects of his protagonist’s life, listing out what Hardy watches on tv, what he reads, what he eats. Hardy also has a goofy sense of humor, much like a Levinson protagonist, and the focus on sex and sleaze is about the same – though Len would win the award on that one.

The Hardy series is pretty obscure; it isn’t even mentioned in Robert A. Baker’s otherwise-comprehensive 1985 book Private Eyes: 101 Knights. I picked up the other four volumes, and as mentioned it looks like they become a bit more lurid, so we’ll see.