Showing posts with label Jana Blake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jana Blake. Show all posts

Monday, August 29, 2016

They Do It With Mirrors (Jana Blake #2)


They Do It With Mirrors, by Jim Conaway
No month stated, 1977  Belmont Tower Books

The second and final volume of the Jana Blake series is once again courtesy J.C. Conaway, who again brings sleazy ‘70s New York City to life; the guy was so familiar with the seedier areas of the city – and so gifted with presenting a gutter-level view of them – that I’m starting to think that Conaway might’ve been the mysterious author of The Savage Women.

Our heroine doesn’t even appear for the first 46 pages; we open with Stash, a black pimp with movie-star looks who is given to outrageous fashions. These opening pages of They Do It With Mirrors are almost a guide to grungy ‘70s Manhattan, with Stash doing the rounds of the sleazy parts of the city, including a jaunt along 42nd Street which sees him checking out a live sex show where Conaway leaves no gross stone unturned. Stash lives in utter poverty (cockroaches litter his cupboards in another memorable bit of detailing) and runs his stable of whores with an iron fist – actually, make that a sharpened knife. When he catches three of his working girls cheating him on pay, he takes his knife to the scalp of one of them to leave her a permanent reminder not to screw him over again.

The reason Stash takes center stage is because he’s gradually shaping up to be this volume’s villain; Conaway inserts a lot of faux-“API” stuff and fake news columns (most of them an obvious page-filling gambit) about the recent migration of famed blonde goddess film star Chiara Locatelli, who is moving with her movie producer husband and toddler daughter Risa from their native Rome to Manhattan. Stash you see has recently hooked up with a blonde transvestite named Honey (Stash we’re informed has “unusual sexual leanings” so it’s cool with him that Honey’s a dude), who has real boobs but hasn’t yet gotten “the operation” to go full-on woman. But Honey looks identical to Chiara, and Stash slowly (very slowly) is beginning to form an idea to make some big bucks capitlizing on her resemblance to the famous woman.

Meanwhile Jana, when we finally get to her on page 47, is still hanging out with her gay pal Charlie, who has since opened his own boutique and is trying to lose weight. Conaway shows a passing familiarity with the then-underground world of the gays and the transsexuals, so much so that you go “hmmm.” As with all of Conaway’s other novels I’ve yet read, They Do It With Mirrors even takes the time to briefly feature a gay or at least underground musical; this time we’re treated to an all-tranny revue of Grand Hotel, in which Honey plays the Jean Harlow part. But otherwise we get lots of stuff from Charlie’s boutique, how he cuts patterns and gives fashion advice, and it all shows a bit more “research” than you’d expect from the average men’s adventure author – not to make any assumptions, of course.

It’s some unstated time after the previous volume, and Jana hasn’t had a big case since. She’s still trying to hide the fact from her landlord that she secretly lives in her office, which as we’ll recalll is on the same floor as a gay-dominated gym (“hmmm” again) and one floor down from a porn film production company. Jana when we meet her is swimming laps with Charlie, and Conaway shows a complete disintrest in conveying tension; it’s all very much in a long-simmer trash fiction mode as Jana and her GBF shoot the shit and go eat at a health food restaurant. Here again Conaway brings seedy New York to life; indeed he’s almost a regular Len Levinson throughout, sometimes even giving exact locations of his fictitious locales, complete with walking directions.

Jana’s still in a relationship with hunky Gianni, the Italian dude who works in a fruit stand across from her building (and whom she has off-page sex with here – Jana’s sole such scene in the novel), however the hunky cop she was also involved with last time out isn’t mentioned this time. But friends, Jana is a supporting character at best in They Do It With Mirrors. I kid you not. She’s absent from the book more than she’s in it. Jana disappears for long stretches…for example, other than a page-and-a-half cameo, she’s completely absent from pages 78 to 158. That’s eighty pages where our heroine isn’t even seen or mentioned! So it seems clear to me that Conaway wasn’t much invested in this series or his protagonist, and basically went about filling the novel with incidental characters.

So in that regard the true protagonist is Stash, who saunters around various Times Square establisments and has frequent sex with his transvestite “girlfriend,” Honey. There’s also lots of stuff about Honey’s dreams of stardom and her appearances in various off-Broadway plays, as mentioned a recurring staple in Conaway’s work. It’s via Honey that Jana makes that brief cameo between pages 78 and 158, as Honey hires Charlie to design a new gown for “her,” and Jana happens to be in the boutique when Honey stops by to check the designs. But Stash and Honey aren’t the only characters who steal the show from the series protagonist. Conaway also spends a lot of time with Chiara and young Risa; most of the novel is told through their perspectives.

The incident promised on the back cover – the kidnapping of Risa – doesn’t occur until well over a hundred pages in. Stash, at great page length, earlier watched a lame magic show performed by a drunk, older married couple – and Conaway, not getting enough mileage out of this, actually writes the sequence twice, as Stash later takes Honey to see the show, too – and thus Stash hatches a scheme to steal away Risa via magic. Coincidence be damned, the drunk couple has been hired to do magic at Risa’s birthday party, and here the abduction is carried off. One can’t help but feel bad for poor little Risa, who is locked up in Stash’s grungy apartment with only her stuffed monkey to keep her company. Stash, wearing a ski mask, periodically brings her food, but otherwise he just forgets about her for long periods of time.

Chiara and husband receive the ransom note and the cops tell them not to play along, but the Italian couple is frantic. Also, Chiara is frustrated by the slowness of the cops in handling the case, and conveniently remembers an ad she just happened to have seen in the paper recently – an ad for Jana Blake, private eye who only handles cases for women. Thus in the last 30-some pages Jana’s finally on the job.

And here’s the unique skill she brings: when Chiara shows Jana around her apartment, Jana notices the dumbwaiter and figures that’s how the kidnappers abducted Risa. Jana’s theory is confirmed when she finds a scuff mark inside the dumbwaiter, no doubt left by a shoe – Risa’s shoe. She shrugs off Chiara’s comment that the cops already searched the place, scoffing that the cops wouldn’t know a scuff mark when they saw one, as none of them have likely ever scrubbed a floor! And that’s it, friends, Jana’s sole lead here is provided via her sexism.

Even here there’s no action or suspense. Jana just goes around the grungier areas of Manhattan asking one-off characters about a truck, Jana haviing learned from a neigbor of the Locatellis that a mysterious truck was seen outside the building before the little girl disappeared. This goes on and on, Jana calling people, visiting them, finding out they’ve sold the truck, and then moving on to the new owner.

Like the previous volume, you can forget all about that cover image of an ass-kicking Jana toting a pistol. The only “weapon” she uses here is a telephone, and she doesn’t get in a single fight. In fact Stash and Honey are chased by the cops while Jana instead saves poor Risa, who is in danger of being burned alive in a fire accidentally started in Stash’s apartment, Honey having dropped a smoking cigarette when she left with Stash to collect the ransom.

As for Stash and Honey, neither are killed – the cops chase them through the city and shoot Stash in the arm, while Honey meanwhile freaks out in a heroin trip. We’re informed via another of those faux-API news bulletins that the two have been arrested, along with the other accomplices. And this is how They Do It With Mirrors ends, with Conaway, out of space due to padding, not even bringing us back into Jana’s world long enough to say goodbye. It’s debatable if he intended another volume, but I’m betting not – it’s clear from this volume that he had lost all interest in the character, and his disinterest is contagious.

While this was it for Jana Blake, I have more Conaway books on tap…including most promisingly another two-volume series he wrote in the ‘70s about a female private eye: Meet Nookie and Get Nookie, which were published by Manor Books under the pseudonym “Ross Webb.” Oh, and I’ve since found out here that Conaway was a WVU graduate (class of ’57), meaning like myself he might’ve grown up in West “the middle of nowhere” Virginia. I’d suspected this for a while, mostly due to the WV setting of The Deadly Spring.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Deadlier Than The Male (Jana Blake #1)


Deadlier Than The Male, by Jim Conaway
No month stated, 1977  Belmont-Tower Books

J.C. Conaway returns as “Jim” for the first of a two-volume series that comes off like a female-fronted equivalent of Conaway’s earlier Shannon series. Our hero is Jana Blake, a hotstuff blonde (despite the brunette on the cover – and Jana doesn’t wear a trenchcoat or carry a gun, by the way) who lives in Greenwich Village and works as a private investigator who only helps women.

An “ardent feminist who likes men,” per the back cover copy, Jana is apparently new to the world of private investigation, and is waiting for her big case. She lives on the second floor of a Greenwich flophouse, the first floor of which is a leather and chains store that caters to gays, with a gym across the hall from Jana’s apartment and a porn film production company on the third floor! And Jana’s constantly afraid her landlord will discover that she’s actually living here, with a Murphy bed hidden in one of the walls – her lease only calls for her to office out of the room, not live in it fulltime.

Deadlier Than The Male takes place during a very hot New York summer, and opens with the first of a few lurid murders, as a good-looking woman, dressed as a nun, stalks some random middle-age guy from the subway and murders him, unseen by anyone, in the entrance of his swank penthouse. Then she chops off his head and takes it with her, leaving no fingerprints. The woman is of course the novel’s villain, a complete basketcase with one of the most miserable childhoods I’ve ever read in a trash novel.

Interestingly, her first victim is very much like Patrick Shannon himself – we read that he lived in a “sensuous” type of pad with a mirrored ceiling in his opulent bedroom, and was known for courting many ladies. The second murder is even more along the swank lines, as the lady makes her kill in a disco club called Narcissus, and Conaway really goes to town describing the garish, swanky place, with lucite furniture, glowing lights, an entrance that is designed to look like female genitalia, and private “conversation rooms” on the upper floor where couples can go to “talk.”

Once again our villain murders a middle-aged guy who is popular with the ladies, coming on to him and then following him into the restroom – he’s sick from too many drinks – and chopping off his head. A later murder sees her further playing up on her apparent sex appeal, calling up another middle-aged guy and talking her way up into his bedroom, where she has him strip down…and then chops off his head. Like the other two, she makes off with the guy’s head.

The cops are baffled, and Gil Lanahan, the detective working the case, insists they’re all random murders. Jana, following the case in the papers, suspects otherwise. When she’s hired by the mother of the first murdered victim, she promptly follows her hunch and researches the man’s background. This leads her to a private college on Staten Island which the guy attended twenty years before, in 1956 – and Jana soon discovers that the other two victims attended there at the same time, and that they were all friends.

Her alarm bells are set off by the creepy old “house mother” who oversees the fraternity house the three men once lived in; the lady first professes not to remember them, but as she goes on she starts to say the three were like “sons” to her. Jana also notices a photo with the three victims, taken in 1956, with their arms around two other guys – surely, if the murders are connected, these two will be next on the list.

Meanwhile Jana’s busy getting laid by her studly Italian boyfriend (who runs a fruit stand across the street from her apartment!) and, of course, by Detective Lanahan. Conaway serves up some explicit sequences here, but rarely does he write them from Jana’s perspective, as per usual he POV-hops throughout the novel. And also as per usual he maintains a lurid, sleazy vibe through the novel, often cutting over to the nameless murderer's viewpoint while she’s pleasuring herself.

Conaway also must’ve had a thing for off-Broadway plays, as each novel I’ve yet read by him has either featured theater actors or the protagonists going to a play. This time Jana and her gay best friend go to see a “rock musical” based on Oedipus Rex titled “Mother Fucker” (later changed to “Mother Lover”) which turns out to be performed mostly by transvestites. Conaway doesn’t provide a long sequence detailing the play, like he did in Shannon #3, but it’s certainly memorable enough, and also a lyric in one of the songs gives Jana the idea that whatever is causing these present murders had its beginnings in the past.

Gradually we learn that our nameless murderer was, as a sixteen year-old, raped by these five college boys, all of whom were spoiled, troublemaking offspring of millionaires. We also learn her sad backstory, how her mother (whose surprise reveal is easily seen coming) completely ignored her, and even used her horrible raping as a way to get some money for herself. Jana deduces all of this from basically looking at photos and asking questions; there are no wild shootouts or in fact any action scenes in the entire novel.

So then Deadlier Than The Male is about on par with everything else I’ve read by J.C. Conaway, with a definite sleaze factor at play and a goofy feeling to the entire proceedings. However Jana is more likable than Patrick Shannon, a good-natured bombshell who wants to make her mark as a private investigator. She only had one more shot at it, though, with the second volume, They Do It With Mirrors, being the last one in the series.