Showing posts with label Major Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Major Books. Show all posts

Thursday, February 14, 2019

You’re Hired; You’re Dead! (Hitman #7)


You’re Hired; You’re Dead!, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1975  Major Books

The final volume of Hitman* takes the series in a sleazier direction – even when compared to previous installments – but be aware it’s not “fun” sleaze, but sleaze of an off-putting nature. For in this one Mike “Hitman” Ross goes up against brainwashed teenaged girls, and Kin Platt (aka Kirby Carr) takes a sick delight in exploiting them throughout, particularly those younger than 16, with even a few random hardcore sex scenes featuring a 14 year-old.

In many ways You’re Hired; You’re Dead! is a lazy rewrite of the previous volume, which featured the exact same plot – a bitter woman sending out young female assassins to do her bidding. But this is just one sign that Platt has grown bored of the series; much of the book is comprised of page-filling of the most egregious nature, with Ross most times just standing around and wondering what to do…before a plot contrivance stumbles along to point him in the right direction. Otherwise we get lots and lots of digressive material on one-off characters; even Ross’s action scenes are sorely compromised, amounting to two such sequences, both of which are blatant rehashes of the ones in the previous volume.

The opening even demonstrates an author winging it as he goes along; Ross wakes up in his own bed to find a hot young girl beside him, nude and ready to go…he has no idea who she is or what’s going on. Then she reveals a knife and goes for the kill, and Ross, being the Hitman and all, kills her with her own knife, later regretting that he didn’t keep her alive to question her. Only belatedly does he realize he hired her as a maid the other day and she just spent the night in his home as part of an “overnight contract.”

However, Platt tries to cover himself when Ross admits he had a few drinks the night before, thus his temporary confusion in the opening pages – whether intentional or not, another parallel to the Spider pulps is the implication that the nutcase “hero” of this series is in fact drunk most of the time. Before death the girl blabbed something about “Murder Maids.” We soon learn there’s been a rash of murders around Los Angeles, the killers all young blondes posing as maids and babysitters (in one cruel sequence we learn a 5 year-old had his throat slashed), all of them hired via classified ads. When recurring character Lt. Wilson of the LAPD tries to investigate, he finds all the ad postings were one-time deals and can’t be traced, or somesuch. So he calls in Mike Ross, the Hitman.

We readers know the culprit is Martha Hamilton, a hotstuff older blonde with an axe to grind on male society; her backstory is even a retread of the female villain’s in the previous book, with men treating her woefully since childhood. Now she’s got this army of young girls, all picked up off the street and promptly brainwashed by hunchbacked genius Dr. Shult, who has developed a device that controls minds. He even gets his own digressive backstory which shows how he ended up working for Martha, who as a millionaire thanks to her dead criminal husband could give Shult all the money he wanted for his invention. A vague backstory also has it that Ross killed Martha’s husband or something, hence one of the girls being sent to kill him.

As mentioned the girls are all young, 18 at the most, but Platt focuses mostly on the young ones. It’s my understanding Platt made a name for himself, such as it was, as an author of juvenile fiction in the ‘70s. If so then he must’ve been having some sick fun with this series, because it’s like the sleazeball alternate reality version of juvenile fiction – grimy, outrageous exploitation of preteen girls, up to and including their deaths. The cover painting actually depicts a scene in the book, sort of, because folks the guy with the sword turns out to be Master Lo, Ross’s 80 year-old martial arts teacher, and he’s taking care of a pair of brainwashed teen girl assassins by chopping their heads off.

There’s lots of shit about the various assassin girls going about their chores, including another one sent after Ross. This one he successfully stops by re-hypnotizing her, figuring he can trail her back to wherever she came from, but a timed explosive in her car finishes her off. Around this point Ross gets in one of the few real action scenes in the novel, as a squad of killers who work for mobster Joey Massina descend on Ross’s nigh-impregnable mountaintop home. Joey was hired by Martha to round up a bunch of guys to kill Ross…yes, exactly as in the previous book.

And it goes down the same, though this time Ross is alerted to his visitors by an anonymous call, which turns out to be from Dr. Shult – he’s worried Martha will send her killer girls after him one day, too, so figures he should keep Ross alive for protection. But once again Ross is nearly superhuman; he takes care of the invaders as easily as the average guy might stomp on a cockroach. A later scene has him decked out in his Hitman gear – black nylon combat suit and cowl with eye-slits – and launching a raid on Joey’s place. Here he kills over a dozen guys without batting an eye. The action scenes lack any thrilling content but are at least slightly gory, if less so than previous books. Platt does look forward to the men’s adventure of the ‘80s with occasional gun-porn, like a digressive rundown on the armament in Ross’s “Chevyvan war wagon.”

Platt, apparently realizing he blew a good chance to fill pages with the abrupt car-bomb murder of the previous brainwashed gal, introduces another one in the latter half of the book, this one a 14 year-old hooker named Alice who also poses as Laurie and Lori. She too comes to kill Ross, showing off her body in a failed attempt to screw him – Ross goes without sex this volume – and our hero successfully deprograms her. He even offers her a job. Alice leaves to “think about it” and ends up being picked up by Martha – the series has always existed in its own little universe, populated by just a handful of people – who, brace yourself folks, promptly seduces Alice right there in the car, in outrageous XXX detail. Alice, who royally gets off on it, declares Martha a supreme “muff-diver.”

As if that weren’t enough, Martha sends Alice over to Shult’s as the latest candidate for brainwashing…and now it’s the good doctor’s turn to boff the preteen girl in outrageous XXX detail. But Alice sort of falls in love with Shult, mostly due to his massive wang, and in the homestretch the plot turns into Shult planning to use Alice against Martha. Meanwhile a squad of girls have been sent to Ross’s home, making for the third time he’s been visited by brainwashed preteen killers. Here Platt goes through the roof with the off-putting sleaze, because the girls go into a sexual frenzy, tearing off their own clothes and Ross’s as they attack him en masse – complete with explicit detail of the parts of their bodies being jammed in Ross’s face as he struggles against them. He’s saved by the appearance of Lt. Wilson, who just laughs and wonders if Ross took the opportunity to fuck any of them first, because that’s what he would’ve done!

Since the book’s so scarce and obscure (likely because Major didn’t want to waste much money on printing this crap), I’ll spoil the finale…it’s dumb. In a complete disregard for any sort of reality, even “reality” as it exists in this bizarre, pulpy series, Platt has Master Lo basically “sniffing” the aether and, like a human hound dog, tracking down the hiding place of the villain who has been sending out these killer girls. And folks he just walks right up to Martha’s door and hacks her head off. He later does the same to Shult. Meanwhile Ross is still busy struggling with those nude teen girls. When Ross, Lt. Wilson, and Lo meet up at the end, they all have a good chuckle over how Lo took care of everything for them!

This was easily my least favorite book in the series, though the only one I really liked was the first volume. It would seem apparent that Kin Platt quickly grew bored of the series, and by this last volume he was completely checked out. But then, Major Books was, too – note that the cover does not state “Hitman” anywhere, nor is there a volume number presented. For that matter, neither Ross nor “Hitman” are even mentioned on the back cover copy. Now that I think of it, this has been true since the first volume Major published, You Die Next, Jill Baby!  So maybe Major quickly churned out these three final volumes so as to be done with it.

*As mentioned in previous reviews, the 1975 Major paperback The Impossibe Spy, also credited to Kirby Carr, is often listed as the eighth and final volume of Hitman. I dutifully picked up the book several years ago…only to discover it’s a standalone novel, not connected to the series. Thus You’re Hired; You’re Dead! is actually the final volume of Hitman.

Monday, November 27, 2017

Don't Bet On Living, Alice! (Hitman #6)


Don’t Bet On Living, Alice!, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1975  Major Books

The penultimate volume of Hitman* sees the sleaze quotient continuing to ramp up; there’s no full-bore hardcore material as in say The Illusionist, but boy is it filled with some grimy smut, Kin “Kirby Carr” Platt mostly relaying the sleaze via dialog or digressive background material. To the extent that Mike “Hitman” Ross is almost lost in the shuffle – but then, the dude is such a friggin’ superman that he barely registers on the reader’s conscious anyway. And yet for all that I appreciate this series because it clearly strives to be a Spider for the ‘70s, even operating on that same sort of pseudo-reality as Norvell Page’s earlier pulp work.

To wit, Ross is called onto his latest case by none other than Lt. Martin of the LAPD, who wants Ross to look into something concerning a judge named Gavin. But when Ross gets to Gavin’s house, he finds the judge’s throat slit. Then Ross is shot at by a passing car, guns it down with his trusty Mauser and P-38, and calls up Martin to tell him what’s gone down. It’s like that throughout Don’t Bet On Living, Alice!, with Ross existing in this alternate reality in which his guise as “Hitman” is an open secret with the cops, who look over the carnage he constantly leaves in his wake.

The case with dead Judge Gavin and the would-be hitpeople, one of whom turns out to be the busty secretary of a record industry bigwig, soon puts Ross on the trail of the mysterious “Mom” who is behind it all. There have been a rash of mysterious deaths and suicidides, all of which turn out to be Mom affairs – like for example when Alice Cooper-esque transvestite rock singer Mabel Babble has an “acid freakout” and jumps out of “her” car on the LA Express, being run over and killed. Ross reads about this stuff in the paper and suspects something’s up, and this deal with Judge Gavin having his throat slit seems to be connected.

Mom turns out to be a lady named Mabel Oretha Mack – ie “M.O.M.” – a “svelte” 40-year-old blonde with “no tits to speak of.” Given the lack of attention men gave her, due to her boyish build, Mabel grew to hate all men. She began plotting against men in general, and put her plan in action several years ago; working as a secretary in various fields, she gathered enough dirt on various high-level men to bring them down via blackmail. She even built up a network of spies, all of them women – other secretaries, hookers, etc. Now she has endless reams of data on various infidelities carried out by men, to such an extent that she can get her blackmail victims to do her bidding, no matter how criminous the action she demands of them might be.

And of course, the dirt Mom has on her various victims is all sleazy in nature. As mentioned Platt gets pretty scuzzy in this one, with the majority of it relayed via backstory of this or that sexual excursion. This goes from the blowjobs given by that above-referenced secretary (complete with grossout descriptions of “hot loads,” folks) to even more pervy, unsettling areas, like the “child buggery” enjoyed by a dirty cop. But it’s mostly done via dialog; I can’t recall that there’s an actual sex scene in the novel. Even when Mike Ross has sex with Alice Britton, a senator’s wife turned whore due to her gambling addiction, it sort of happens off page.

As for action, there’s actually a bit more than I expected there would be – I didn’t think a plot about a blackmail-scheming woman would serve up too much in the way of gun-blazing action. But Mom has various stooges at her disposal, from victims-turned-assassins to Mafia torpedoes she hires for her personal security. Platt serves up several action scenes, and while they’re all nicely gory – lots of exploding heads and guts – they’re a bit neutered because Ross is so superhuman. Indeed his enemies even think he’s “not human,” which I guess gives the series even more of a Spider vibe. But seriously, the closest Ross comes to harm is when one guy shoots at him and Ross feels the bullet pass over his head(!). Most of the time his opponents don’t even get to shoot at him, Ross is so fast on the draw.

Some action highlights would be when Ross is attacked by hitmen while having sex with Alice – he kills them without any fuss and goes back to Alice: “Now, where were we?” Another bizarrely-underexploited part has Mabel putting together, with much setup, an army squad of rejects, gathered together by a war department dude Mabel has dirt on, and sending them after Ross, to ambush him in the hills outside LA. Instead, Ross finds out about the plot and guns them down while they’re still sitting in their cars, negating the chance for a big firefight that seemed to be promised. It does have a nice capoff, though, where Ross mutters under his breath to Mabel, “Better luck next time, bitch!” 

We also get lots of backstory about various one-off victims of Mabel’s blackmailing, with Alice Britton getting the most space. A senator’s wife, Alice is forced into whoredom when her gambling debts get too unwieldy. We’re given lots of info about how she started to screw various men for her bookie’s benefit – and enjoying it. So again there’s a heaping helping of sleaze throughout Don’t Bet On Living, Alice!, including Alice’s training in whoredom from said bookie. But eventually Mabel gets hold of Alice and siccs her on Ross, though Alice instead blabs to Ross that it’s all a setup and she has no idea who this “Mom” is, etc.

Alice serves to take the narrative into the homestretch, and to give Ross a clear lead on Mabel and where she can be found. They use Alice’s husband, Senator Britton, as bait, Mabel calling him to make him her latest blackmail victim, using of course her knowledge of Alice’s wrongdoings. As a clincher she even plays the senator an audio recording of Alice blowing some guy. But when Ross confronts the senator, pleading with him to make an arrangement for payment dropoff and etc, Alice too comes clean about her dirty extracurricular activities. As if proving the goofy (but gory) vibe of the Hitman series, Senator Britton is totally forgiving of his wife’s adultery – “Just give my cock the same treatment you gave his!” being his only caveat, referring to the lucky blowjob-recipient on that tape Mom played for him.

Ross still wears his Hitman guise: the “black paratrooper suit and slitted mask” that he’s worn throughout the series, as depicted on the cover of the first volume. He carries around an arsenal in his “war wagon,” which is a modified “Chevyvan.” He does his kiling in the finale with an M-16, and Platt delivers copious gun-porn throughout, with technical detail on firing rate and velocity and whatnot. But the finale again sees Ross being a regular superman, gunning down an entire houseful of Mafia torpedoes without so much as breaking a sweat. As for Mabel, she is rendered her comeuppance, but unsatisfyingly not by Ross’s hands – and our hero is all fired up to kill her. In the end, though, there’s “Nothing left to kill but the bottle.” 

Platt delivers pretty much just what you’d want from sleazy ‘70s men’s adventure pulp; the prose is rough but economical, coming to life with the gore and the grime. But there’s something that keeps Hitman from true men’s adventure greatness…not just that Ross is too superheroic, too unfazed and untouchable; there’s just this rushed, messy feeling to the books.

*As mentioned in my review of the first volume, the series was really only seven volumes; The Impossible Spy, a 1975 Major Books paperback credited to Kirby Carr, is sometimes listed as the eigth volume. However the book is really a standalone spy novel, with no connection to Hitman.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

You Die Next, Jill Baby! (Hitman #5)


You Die Next, Jill Baby!, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1975  Major Books

The Hitman series, which moves over to Major Books with this fifth volume (which removes both the series title and volume numbers), was very much an attempt by Kin “Kirby Carr” Platt to capture the vibe of the pulps of the ‘30s. To wit, hero Mike “Hitman” Ross wears a mask while fighting crime, unlike the majority of his men’s adventure brethren. He’s also about as insane – not to mention nuts about killing – as pulp hero The Spider. And You Die Next, Jill Baby! is basically a Spider novel, only given a somewhat-sleazy ‘70s overlay.

In fact, the sleaze makes a big return here, and in an arbitrary way – whereas the previous couple volumes have reigned in on the dirty stuff, this one brings it all back, though it must be stated that Ross himself doesn’t score (that is, other than on the very last page). The cover alone is proof that this book is going to be rather lurid, and while the cover image does happen within the first few pages, You Die Next, Jill Baby! is actually more of a private eye sort of yarn, with Ross going around Los Angeles looking up clues, while a right-wing (sort of) guerrilla army sows plans to take over the country. The narrative and dialog even have a suitably hardboiled-esque vibe.

The “Jill Baby” of the lurid title is Jill Court, Patty Hearst-esque daughter of Chad Court, megawealthy businessman. She’s been kidnapped as the novel opens, and Mike Ross hears about it on the news. Then he gets a phone call from fellow ‘Nam vet Jim Boyd, a total asshole of a major whom Ross hated – the vague backstory has it that Ross during combat tried to get an air evac for two wounded soldiers, and Boyd refused – the fact that the soldiers were black certainly had something to do with the denial, Ross was certain. But now Boyd, still fit and eager for action despite being old enough to also be a veteran of the Korean war (as is Ross, by the way), runs a trucking business in LA and has been dating Jill Court. The fact that Jill, barely in her 20s, has been seeing a much older man is later explained away with the off-hand comment that she’s into freaky sex scenes or something.

But Jill has been kidnapped by the “army” of “Wake Up America,” which is run by “Major Wingate.” I assumed it would just be another of the left-leaning guerrilla armies of the day, but gradually we learn that the WUA is made up of former ‘Nam vets who initially get together to fight crime, but eventually set their sights on the country itself. But to tell the truth Platt doesn’t do much to elaborate on this. They’ve kidnapped poor Jill as their first attack, which gets them in the news – Boyd has it that he was jumped by several men while driving Jill home, and when he was knocked out they took her away. He wants to know if Ross will help, given Ross’s impressive cred with the police – again, the fact that Ross is “Hitman” is sort of a well-known fact while still being a secret…again, pretty much exactly like in The Spider.

Jill, the only time we see her in the book, is tied up in a dank room in the “ghetto section” of LA, being raped – by a female member of the WUA army. This is Me-Boot, formerly Sarah Bootree, a hotstuff half-American Indian babe with “firm jutting full breasts.” She is also, per another character, a “lesbie dyke,” mostly because, we learn via egregious backstory, she has been used and abused by so many guys. After so many uncaring bastards “shoved their stick pricks” into Me-Boot, she learned that the sapphic way was more personally fulfilling. Thus she introduces Jill Court to the lesbian life – and we’re informed Jill loves it. 

Then Major Wingate shows up…and promptly blows Jill away! Thus the cover image depicts an actual event in the book, and titular Jill is dead by page 15 or so. Also, Platt sort of blows some potential here, and so I will, too – Wingate has killed Jill because she is one of the two people who knows that Major Wingate is also…Jim Boyd! So, rather than stringing this out for the narrative, Platt instead straight-up tells us this in the opening pages, and thus we get a little irritated with Mike Ross, who spends the entire novel trying to “help” Boyd while not realizing he is in fact the enemy.

Action is sparse, and not as gory as previously, though Ross as usual kills several people. To once again compare him to the Spider, Ross as Hitman not only wears a mask and wields dual pistols, but shows a compunction for shooting (and killing) first, and not asking any questions later. Humorously, this is something he’s been accused of in past books, but here Ross himself begins to get annoyed with himself – not that this stops him from outright killing any WUA thugs he comes across, even at one point tossing three of them out of an upper-story window, despite the fact that they could answer all sorts of questions for him.

Me-Boot, after her long backstory in which we learn all about her sex life in copious detail, runs into our hero after Ross has cleaned out the dank room in which Jill was held captive – blowing away every single WUA guy in the place, naturally. But the sparks quickly fly between the two – curiously, Ross is not in his Hitman garb at this point – and Ross suspects Me-Boot might be able to help him. We’ve learned that she isn’t a full-fledged WUA member, had nothing really to do with the kidnapping, and indeed fell in love with Jill, and has sworn vengeance on Boyd – whom she also knows to be Wingate, something which Ross also doesn’t realize until the very end.

But Me-Boot is shot by the police as they raid the place, and Platt has us thinking she’s a goner, taking a bullet or two to the chest. Later we’ll learn she’s in intensive care. Later still Ross will save her from WUA thugs who come to snuff her, taking her back to the dojo of his old Korean mentor Lo, who is one of those magically-talented martial arts masters of pulp. With his skilled hands he is able to make the now-paralyzed Me-Boot walk again.

In fact Platt seems to intimate that Me-Boot, who by novel’s end is once again “Sarah Bootree,” will become Ross’s steady girl…the back cover copy, which as ever only partially reflects the actual plot of the novel, even refers to her as “the only woman Ross has ever loved.” While this might turn out to be true, the element isn’t even introduced until the final twenty or so pages.

Just like in a Spider novel, Wingate’s army runs roughshod over the country, and no one is able to stop him except for Hitman. In fact there’s a total “Grant Stockbridge” moment when Ross, resolving himself to battling the WUA alone, thinks that it will be “one man against a hundred – just the way he liked it!” Wingate’s men have raided US army bases, killing the soldiers and stealing weapons, and in this manner have even gotten some surface-to-air missiles.

By this time Ross has finally figured out that Wingate and Boyd are one and the same. Given that there are only about thirty pages left at this point, the climactic battle is a bit unsatisfying; Ross, having found the secret WUA base deep in the hills outside LA, dons his Hitman garb, plants some smoke bombs, and guns down a few helicopters before finally shooting Wingate/Boyd in one of the most abrupt finales ever.

And that’s it…I recall when I tracked this series down a few years ago, You Die Next, Jill Baby! was by far the hardest volume to acquire. In fact I did some Mike Ross-like searching to even find a copy. But sadly, and as usual with such cases, the book ultimately wasn’t worth the effort (or price). While it starts off promising to be as sleazy, lurid, and action-packed as the first volume (which is still the best one, by a long shot), this fifth installment quickly tapers off into a sort of padded affair in which not much really happens. But maybe at least it will have repercussions for ensuing installments, if for no other aspect than the budding Ross-Sarah romance.

Monday, July 20, 2015

The Murder Business


The Murder Business, by Peter C. Herring
No month stated, 1976  Major Books

I read about this one in Bill Pronzini’s Son Of Gun In Cheek, where it was featured as an “Alternative Classic” or something. Pronzini was a bit merciless on it, as I recall, but in the expectedly humorous way; nevertheless, it sounded so unusual that I intended to read it someday.

Pronizini’s comments on the book’s clunky writing are on point, but the plot of The Murder Business is actually pretty interesting: basically, “What if James Bond worked for SPECTRE?” While this isn’t a spy thriller by any means, it is sort of similar in that our “hero” is an assassin who works for a shadowy consortium with designs on global domination. However instead of a bald dude with a cat it’s a group of ten men who have secretly been pulling international strings since WWII.

As for our “hero,” he’s a total psychopath: Michael, a good looking young British dude who began killing as a kid and quickly learned that he enjoyed it. And I mean “enjoy” in the sexual sense, as Michael my friends actually orgasms when he murders! His favored instrument is just as kinky, a six-inch blade which he mails to himself overnight before he goes on missions, thus bypassing aiport security. (Why the dude couldn’t just buy a new knife wherever he goes is never explained.)

Michael is the chief assassin of The Board, ie those aforementioned ten men. He’s worked in this capacity for a few years, and is very good at what he does. However as we meet him Michael is in a bit of a pickle: he might be falling in love with a British girl named Jenny. They met a few months ago and have been seriously dating; Michael even rushes to her after the novel’s opening murder, leading into one of the novel’s few (and not very explicit) sex scenes.

Our depraved hero is sent from London to Los Angeles and then to Las Vegas, all within a few days, on his next assignment. Here he knifes another powerful man, one who apparently works for a sort of anti-Board. In a sadly-underdeveloped plot we are informed that the Board, despite its power, has an equally-powerful enemy. But Michael is too far down the totem pole to care, and instead gets off royally on this latest hit, in which he discovers that his target is having sex with a hooker. Michael’s never killed someone while they were doing it, and he has a major orgasm as he knifes them.

So as you can see, The Murder Business definitely has a sleazy vibe going for it. But here’s the major problem with it, at least so far as I’m concerned. It’s just too damn overwritten. Practically every single thing Michael does is described. The dude can’t open a window without like two sentences detailing the act; no matter how menial the event or the action, the author overdescribes it. It becomes very ponderous and makes the book, which is only 176 pages (of pretty small print, though), take seemingly forever to read.

I have no idea who Peter C. Herring is/was, but judging from the Catalog Of Copyright Entries this was really the author’s name; in other words, “Herring” apparently wasn’t a house name or pseudonym. I’d gather Pronzini’s statements on Major Books is correct in this case – Pronzini in the two Gun In Cheek books particularly takes Major to task for publishing manuscripts that were rejected everywhere else. The hell of it is The Murder Business has the potential to be good, but it’s undermined by the overwriting and the mid-novel plot switch.

Sadly, Herring jettisons the entire “sick assassin” angle and goes for more of a “hunted man” storyline. That mysterious “anti-Board” has targeted everyone, and while on vacation in the south of France with Jenny Michael is ambushed. He manages to kill his attacker, and Jenny witnesses it – cue a rivalry that will go on until the end of the book, with Jenny now hating Michael, whom she screams is a murderer. Strangely though, the dude was just saving his own life, not to mention Jenny’s, so her vehement reaction is puzzling. But her hatred of Michael comes and goes, and besides the two are now on the run together.

Anyway from here Michael spends the rest of the novel rushing from one place to another, all while various assassins come after him. We see no more of The Board and only find out major plot details through phone calls, like when Michael calls his contact at one point and is casually informed that all ten members of The Board have been killed! It’s so anticlimactic as to be hilarious. I mean, you want to read this “evil James Bond” story but instead you read endless patches of description of the English countryside as Michael, Jenny, and a fellow Board employee named Henri hide in the rural home of Jenny’s aunt.

Herring delivers action scenes here and there, but as the novel progresses the sick and sadistic vibe is replaced by more of a standard action vibe. Michael in fact goes on to using pistols, his kinky murder-orgasm penchant completely forgotten. Speaking of which the violence isn’t too graphic, though some of the pictures Herring paints are particularly gruesome. But there’s just this blasé air that permeates everything, neutering any impact the book might otherwise make. Another big problem is that neither Michael nor Jenny are very likable characters.

There’s a bit more interest at the very end, where Jenny, driven to a total loathing of Michael now – guess what happens to poor old “auntie” after she and Michael try to hide in her home? – plans to sell out our sick bastard of a hero. But this development too goes nowhere. In fact Herring does his best to tear everything down, and not just the whole “Board” angle: Michael too is disfigured, his face ripped to shreds by a shotgun-blasted windshield. And Herring seems unwilling or unable to end the tale, with the final fifteen or so pages comprised of a half-dead Michael just sort of wandering around the streets of London.

It’s been a few years since I read Son Of Gun In Cheek, so I can’t remember what all Pronzini had to say about The Murder Business. I’ll have to check out the book again to see. I have to say though that the book isn’t terrible. I mean it’s not the worst book I’ve reviewed on this blog. But there’s just something ponderous and sort of detached about it, and the mid-narrative detour from the opening sadism is unfortunate.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Operation Nazi - USA


Operation Nazi - USA, by James Gilman
No month stated, 1976  Major Books

This paperback obscurity was published by Major Books, a low-tier house that eventually took over Kin Platt’s Hitman series. Bill Pronzini rhapsodizes about the stupid greatness (or great stupidity) of a few Major releases in his Gun In Cheek and Son of Gun In Cheek, but ultimately Operation Nazi – USA doesn’t come off like a “so bad it’s good” sort of thing; instead, it’s much like the Hitman books in that it obviously doesn’t take itself seriously.

The book also comes off very much like the first volume of a men’s adventure series that never was. Our narrator hero is Rain Allison, aka “The Indian,” aka “Scorpion,” a member of a secret government strike force called The Peacemakers. Like the Expeditor, Rain was raised by American Indians and often refers back to his ancestry and the wizened secrets he has been imparted. His signature weapon is a Colt .45 Peacemaker but he carries an M-16 for heavy fire, he wears a belt that has a knife sewn inside of it, and he drives a combat van that’s tricked out with four levels of security: a loud alarm, a jet of “simulated skunk spray," a burst of high-voltage electricity, and finally a stream of concentrated napalm.

How Rain became a Peacemaker is just another indication of the goofy nature of the book: His father was a famous soldier who fought in WWII, Korea, and ‘Nam, where he was killed. Then a few years later the commander of Rain’s father, General Wheeler, approached Rain and told him it was his “duty” to help the nation, and ordered him to become a Peacemaker! General Wheeler is only hinted at throughout the novel, until making an appearance in the finale; Rain has a habit of reflecting back on the various teachers of his life, and more importantly the lessons they taught him. Truth be told, this gets annoying after a while, especially the way Gilman works these lessons into the framework of the narrative.

We meet Rain as he’s already on his latest mission, deep under cover within the American Nazi Party, where he is known as “The Indian.” He serves as security for Steffan Lincoln, the leader of the ANP, and his mission is to assassinate the man. First though Rain must thwart Lincoln’s plan to poison the Harlem water supply. As Operation Nazi – USA opens Rain is about to make his move when it turns out that Lincoln has vanished; Rain figures the man must’ve figured him out and thus escaped.

The novel approaches a hardboiled feel as Rain makes his way through the ANP elite, killing most of them, as he attempts to locate Lincoln. There are a few action scenes here, but they all lack much spark, Gilman too stuck in his character’s thoughts to keep it exciting. One of the leads is Eleanor Schneider, a German national who has come to the US to aid the ANP cause; a lady endowed with “enormous breasts,” a fact that is mentioned every time her name comes up – this being an intentional joke. I should mention that there isn’t a single sex scene in the novel, though Rain states that he (and most other members of the ANP) have slept with Eleanor; Rain himself is still hung up on his college sweetheart, who married a guy named Lenny Wood, Rain’s former business colleague who himself has gone missing.

You might think, as I did, that all this “Lenny Wood/old college flame” stuff is extranneous detail, but it turns out to be (clumsy) foreshadowing: Lenny Wood becomes the novel’s villain. In a complete bit of deus ex machina, Lenny Wood appears out of nowhere, kills Steffan Lincoln just as Rain has tracked the ANP leader down to the Harlem water supply installation, and escapes in Rain’s van! The novel loses all grip on reality, at least what little it had, as Rain now has no idea what’s going on. So ensues an interminable stretch, which turns out to be the rest of the book, where Rain deals with the fact that Lenny Wood is somehow not only a master villain but has also taken over the American Nazi Party.

There are chase scenes, gun battles, and even a brief kung-fu fight, but it’s all just…I don’t know, boring and half-baked. Rain’s narrative voice is so casual that the fights have little thrill. There isn’t even much of a lurid quotient, or any of the outrageous sort of stuff one who expect from a mid-‘70s novel published by a low-rent house – you would expect that a novel with a Nazi lady with “enormous breasts” would have more pizzaz, but Eleanor’s barely in the narrative and when she is, she mostly just pines for her lover, Lincoln Steffan. There’s also an unbelieveable tenor to the novel, and not “unbelieveable” in a good way; the way coincidence is piled atop coincidence just comes off as lazy and a failed attempt at being funny.

There’s no way of knowing if this series was in fact intended as a first installment. At any rate Rain as expected is ready for more adventures by novel’s end (and the novel by the way includes yet more coincidence, with General Wheeler’s appearance amounting to a lame “surprise” reveal), but no more ever came out.

One mystery I can solve is who James Gilman was – a Google search yields a 1976 Catalog of Copyright Entries which states that Gilman was the pseudonym of Joseph L. Gilmore, an author who churned out a handful of books under his own name as well as several volumes of the Nick Carter series in the ‘80s; he passed away in 2005.