Showing posts with label Stark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stark. Show all posts

Monday, May 15, 2023

The Revenger: Angel Of Destruction (aka The Revenger/Stark #12)


The Revenger: Angel Of Destruction, by Joseph Hedges
No month stated, 1977  Sphere Books

Not to be confused with the American series The Revenger, this Revenger series was published in the UK and came out in America as Stark. At least the first six volumes did. This twelfth and final volume was only published in the UK, under the original British series title of “The Revenger,” with the lurid photo covers the British of the 1970s seemed to demand in their pulp paperbacks. In fact, this cover photo actually depicts a scene in the novel. 

Indeed, Angel Of Destruction was similar to Cut in that it made me reassess my lazy notion that British pulp writers of the day were more clinical and bland than their American counterparts. Because my friends this one, at least at the start, achieves lurid levels comparative to such grimy masterpieces as Bronson: Blind Rage and Gannon. Yet of course it still has that “polished” British vibe…just not to the level of other British pulp I’ve read. And I’ve gone this far without mentioning that this final volume, as well as the volume before it (which I don’t have), was written by Angus Wells. Not by original series author Terry Harknett. I complained incessantly about Harknett’s stodgy, overpadded prose in my previous Stark reviews. I mean no lie, I loathed those three books I reviewed on here. Just overwritten, dull banalities with none of the escapism one might want from this genre. But Angus Wells is certainly better. 

Previous to this, the only thing by Angus Wells I’ve read was the first two volumes of the Raven fantasy series, which he wrote shortly after Angel Of Destruction (the original UK editions of Raven were published in 1978; the American editions came out ten years later). If this final volume of The Revenger is anything to go by, Angus Wells knew how to turn out a sex-and-violence filled piece of crime fiction. I mean Angel Of Destruction has it all: brutal torture, violent action, a whip-cracking bondage babe in knee-high boots, graphic sex a’plenty, and sardonic dialog from our asshole protagonist. Wells even tries to work in Harknett’s goofy tendency for puns, with each chapter ending on one…just like those earlier, Harnkett-penned volumes did. But Terry Harknett’s work on The Revenger is just a bad memory here. Wells’s work is so good it comes off like its own separate series, and it’s a pity he didn’t just write The Revenger from the start. 

While he does cater to the template Harknett devised – namely, that “hero” John Stark is a self-serving bastard who brings misery to anyone he encounters, thanks to the criminal syndicate he’s at war with – Wells does make a few detours. For one, he capitalizes the name of that criminal syndicate: here it is “The Company,” whereas it was always just “the company” for some mysterious reason in Harknett’s volumes. And Stark is still self-centered, but not narcissitically so, like he was in the Harknett books – where Stark didn’t even seem to care that he put others in jeopardy, and almost seemed to relish the idea. He’s still a prick, though. Just not such a hateful one. 

The entirety of Angel Of Destruction takes place in Japan, and Wells does a fair job of capturing the crowded neon streets, dropping the names of various locales and having Stark shuffle across the place not comprehending the language. This time he goes up against the “Kaikan,” ie the Japanese branch of The Company; as with Harknett’s volumes, the Company is a global consortium of criminals, with each country operated as its own fiefdom. Stark, in hiding after the events of the previous book, gets into it this time because the Japanese stewardess he picked up on the flight comes back to her “flat” one day all beaten up; turns out her boss as the airport works for the Kaikan and wants the poor girl to start smuggling dope on her flights. She refused, and got beaten up for it. 

So there’s no grand plotline connecting Angel Of Destruction to previous volumes of The Revenger/Stark. The volume Wells most refers to, of course, is the previous one, which is the only other one he wrote. But even then, it’s just in passing; we know that Stark busted up some Company business in Spain. This of course goes hand-in-hand with the loosey-goosey approach to “continuity” in ‘70s men’s adventure. And also just to get clarify, even though this was the final volume of the series, there is no definite end; by the end of Angel Of Destruction John Stark is on a plane bound for his next confrontation with the Company – wherever that might be. 

My only problem with the novel is that it starts off so great, with so much violence and sleaze…but then eventually morphs into the same senses-deadening onslaught of overstuffed prose, go-nowhere subplots, and tedious action scenes as in the Terry Harknett volumes. But I mean, not that bad. I mean Angus Wells doesn’t waste pages detailing every single thing Stark does while in combat like Harknett did, at least. Also, Stark is slightly less self-centered here; he does end up worrying about Yukie, yet another hotstuff Japanese babe he picks up…and presumably the titular Angel Of Destruction. 

But folks, Angus Wells is guilty of some of the worst misdirection I’ve ever encountered in this regard. Early in the book we have the Japanese Kaikan members gathered to excitedly watch as Stark’s stewardess girlfriend is interrogated. And handling the interrogation is this s&m Japanese mega-babe who is described thusly: 



This is where the “I can’t believe this is British pulp” comes in, as the leather-babe proceeds to “torture” the bound gal in a particularly interesting way: 


As I read this, I was thinking to myself, “Surely this must be the Angel of Destruction, and she’s going to have a run-in with Stark at some point.” I was expecting that the bondage babe would be this evil hell-bitch, the kind of pulp villainess I friggin’ demand, and the novel seems to be headed this way when Stark, via crazy plotting, ends up staying in a house…with this very same bondage babe! Stark hooks up with some expat Americans (we must take Well’s word that they’re American, given that they say stuff like “We’ll bring the car round,” like absolutely no American speaks), and they give him a place to stay – with this mega hotstuff Japanese hooker chick, who specializes in the bondage scene. And she and Stark, of course, have a lot of chemistry, though the ensuing sex isn’t as explicit as the above excerpt. 

But folks…she isn’t an evil hell-bitch! Indeed, it takes Angus Wells forever to even explain all this, but the bit with the bondage gal “torturing” Stark’s stewardess girlfriend was all “just a job!” Indeed, bondage gal had no idea the girl was even being tortured; she just thought it was a bondage gig, and left before the poor stewardess was even hurt. Friends, I cannot tell you how disappointed I was by this unexpected turn of events. And yet, it follows the same surreal vibe as the Harknett volumes; Wells clearly seems to be tying to disparate plot threads together, with the busty bondage gal – who speaks perfect American English, for reasons never explained – arbitrarily turning out to be Stark’s housemate while he lays low…from the very same Company sadists who hired the bondage babe, earlier in the book. 

Anyway, her name is Yukie Tamasara, and Wells brings her to life more than Harknett did his female characters. For one, she fights against Stark once she knows being with him will put her life in danger, as if she’s aware of the fact that every single other such girl in Stark’s life was unceremoniously offed by Company thugs. Here is where Stark is much different in Wells’s hands; he understands the girl’s frustration and does his best to keep her safe. The two feature in a long car chase in which Yukie’s new car is torn apart; this is where those plot threads are tied together, as she happens to mention she purchased this car with the payment she received for a certain job, and Stark starts asking questions. 

But like the Harknett books it all just becomes deadening with too much detail; there’s a lot of incidental stuff, like a one-off character taking his last heroin trip, or other stuff with the Japanese Kaikan dudes in-fighting. That said, Wells does certainly play up the sleaze angle, with the old Kaikan boss being into gay s&m stuff and enjoying sitting around and watching a buff Japanese dude sodomize an American dude. Like Harknett, Wells populates his Company with total freaks, as if they come off like skewed reflections of straight society instead of a criminal organization. Wells certainly has his tongue in cheek; there’s even a very, very odd in-joke with one of the minor American characters being named Jim Rockford. 

The finale is another of those overdone action scenes that just keep going on and on, with Stark armed with something called a Self Loading Rifle, or SLR as it’s called throughout. Apparently this thing almost gives him superhuman powers, blasting helicopters and such out of the sky. Now let me tell you how The Revenger ends. Spoilers of course, so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know. Well anyway. Stark has given Yukie the task of purchasing him a plane ticket “anywhere” out of Japan. He gets on board after taking out the Kaikan guys, ready to launch his next battle on the Company wherever he lands (Wells doesn’t even tell us where that will be)…and he turns to find Yukie in the seat next to him. Angel Of Destruction ends with Yukie slipping to the floor to give Stark a blowjob, even though they’re on a commercial airliner, and with that the novel – and series – comes to a close. 

Anyway, Angel Of Destruction started off great, making me expect a super-sleazy blast of ‘70s crime-pulp fun, but unfortunately it turned into the same chore of a read as the previous Revenger/Stark books were.

Monday, February 7, 2022

Stark #6: Corpse On Ice (aka The Revenger #6)


Stark #6: Corpse On Ice, by Joseph Hedges
June, 1975  Pyramid Books
(Original UK publication 1975)

Coming in to this sixth volume of Stark I knew what to expect: the narrative would be pointlessly nihilistic, every female character would suffer a gruesome fate, the “hero” would be an asshole with no redeeming features, most chapters would end with goofy puns, and Terry “Joseph Hedges” Harknett would overwrite to the point of tedium. Thusly prepared I waded into Corpse On Ice; I’d been meaning to get back to the series for a good while now, and decided what the hell, now was the time. As it turned out, while all the above things held true, I didn’t detest this one as much as the other two I read. 

Ironically Corpse On Ice was the last volume to be published in the US; Pyramid Books must’ve also disliked the series, or more likely it just wasn’t selling so they cancelled it. But still the lazy bastards couldn’t correct the footnotes; while the quotation marks for dialog have been changed to American-standard double quotations as opposed to the original British single quotations, previous volumes are still referred to as “The Revenger.” This of course was the title of the original British series, before it was changed to “Stark” in the US so as not to conflict with Jon Messmanns The Revenger. But apparently no one at Pyramid Books realized they should change the footnotes, and surely this had to confuse at least some of the original readers. But hell, maybe they were too busy smoking their Kent cigarettes and enjoying the ‘70s to be bothered by such trivial details. 

True to series form this one picks up soon after the previous volume, with John Stark still in Sweden. It’s like a few days or weeks later, and now he’s in Stockholm, hiding out in a hotel from the company and the cops. And of course he’s managed to pick up some babe: Inga, the 19 year-old manager of the Ritz Stark is staying in. In fact he’s here with free room and board, courtesy Inga. The girl is becoming attached to Stark, even though she’s figured out he’s the criminal everyone is searching for, and she begs him to stay with her. This of course is Stark’s cue to get the hell out. But when Inga’s gone for the night, Stark meets another sexy chick: Belinda, a young Canadian girl who comes to his hotel room and within moments of introducing herself has stripped down, displaying her “sex beard.” (Certainly the most unpleasant description of pubic hair I’ve ever encountered.) 

But Stark is all business, and despite playing along with Belinda, who claims to be a friend of Inga’s, and that Inga’s sent her over to keep Stark sexually satisfied, he suspects her of being a company decoy. (As a reminder, Harknett never capitalizes the name of Stark’s archenemies, the global crime network that is “the company.”) Stark says his childhood fantasy was to bang his sexy teacher on top of her desk, so he has Belinda act it out for him…but instead he whips out his gun and jams the barrel into her “gaping orifice!” This believe it or not was a recurring image in the wild and wooly world of ‘70s men’s adventure novels, a la The Sharpshooter #16. But Harknett goes in a different direction, with a sequence so crazed I just had to share it: 


Yes, Belinda gets off royally, climaxing on the barrel of the gun. Which of course eventually leads to one of Stark’s lame puns: “I had you over a barrel.” It’s hard to believe that a series that includes a sexy chick climaxing on a gun barrel could be so lame. I mean this is a series I want to like. But again Harknett does himself no favors, overwritting with no editorial control: positively everything is described ad naseum, from the clothing to the cars to the weather. Any time a new character is introduced we get like a freeze frame as practically every single detail of their face, appearance, and clothing is described. As with previous books this only serves to halt the forward momentum. There’s a lot of action in Corpse On Ice, and Harknett doesn’t shirk on the exploitative detail, but man it still comes off as pretty slow-moving. He also again fills up way too much space focusing on a one-off character, this time the Canadian head of the company. While these sequences have their fair share of sleaze and lurid stuff (including a memorable bit where the guy kills someone by sticking his head in a microwave!), they ultimately only serve to make a long book seem even longer. 

Well anyway, once she’s had her fill of Stark’s pistol, it turns out that Belinda is the secretary of a Canadian businessman named Groves. After he’s made it clear he is not a threat to Stark, Groves reveals that he’s been tracing our “hero” around Europe since Stark’s war on the company began, and thus is here in Sweden given that it’s where Stark raised the most recent hell. Ultimately he offers Stark $10,000 plus expenses to kill a man in Canada. Stark, after a bit of deliberating, agrees – and then tells Groves to send Belinda back in so he can properly bang her on a desk! Harknett as ever does not fade to black; the helluva it is, Stark should be one of the best ‘70s men’s adventure series, what with its ultra gore, explicit sex, and cool setup. But there’s still something just so unpleasant and unlikable about it. Well I mean “sex beard” should give you at least some idea of what I am talking about. 

And another thing that annoys is that the action scenes seem to merely exist so as to set up the latest pun. For example, we have this egregious bit where Stark is attacked by company thugs at the Stockholm airport. This series is like The Lone Wolf in that Stark’s enemies are always surrounding him, no matter what lengths he goes to hide himself. So Stark goes into the restroom and waits for the company thugs to come in after him. Then he gets a “gas cylinder” from the janitorial room(?) and uses it to spark a torch, which he then uses on the thugs, frying them up. After which he quips, “It was quite a gas.” I guess Harknett must’ve had fun coming up with scenarios to challenge his gift for puns, but at the same time it would’ve been just as cool for Stark to blow their heads off with a .38 and call it a day. But heck, even this weird factor should be enough to give Stark an edge, but regardless the series still sort of bugs me. 

And there really is a Lone Wolf-esque dark, surreal vibe to Stark, especially how Stark is constantly being hounded. No matter where he goes, company men are waiting for him. Even in Canada, a place he’s never been before, he’s nearly captured by company men as soon as he arrives in Toronoto. This entails a long journey out into the Canadian wilderness, at the end of which Stark and Belinda find themselves the targets of a company sniper and a company demolitions expert. Again the overwriting slows down the proceedings, but this part does show a more savage side to Stark, as he wields a rake in a nicely violent sequence. It also features the grimy denouement of Stark talking to the blasted-out eyeball of a particular character. It’s at this point that Harknett “opens up” the narrative with a lot of stuff focused on Essex, the Canadian honcho of the company and the man who sent these two to kill Stark. 

Once Stark hooks back up with Groves he learns what all this is about: the company runs a male prostitution ring here in Canada, and Groves’s twenty-five year-old son has gotten involved with it, likely as a way to stick it back to his notoriously-whoring father. “A man does not live by perverted screwing alone,” Groves the elder puts it. As a reminder of how twisted this series is, it’s actually Groves’s own son that Groves has hired Stark to kill. The reasoning behind this is vague at best, and Harknett doesn’t do the best job of explaining the setup. However the titular “corpse on ice,” which turns out to be literal, throws a monkeywrench into these plans, and as it develops Stark’s “assignment” is no longer about assassinating one person but wiping out as many of the Canadian company thugs as he can. Groves even presents Stark with a souped-up car and a veritable arsenal of machine guns, pistols, explosives, and the like to wage his war. 

Stark heads into Calgary, getting in the occasional firefight along the road with the company thugs who are perennially on his tail. There’s a crazy part where he gets the drop on one of the company’s male whores just as the guy’s about to pleasure his elderly female client. Stark’s assholery is firmly on display here, as he mocks the woman’s appearance. So too is the nihilistic tone of the series, as Stark is so devoted to eradicating the company that even the lowest of peons must suffer and die. This leads Stark to a resort lounge in the snowswept mountains in which the male hookers are trained in the art of screwing by sexy young women(!). Harknett caters to the pulp vibe by opening this sequence with Stark, newly arrived on the location, immediately being propositioned by a sexy young snowbunny who doffs her clothes and lies down in the snow, waiting to have some sex asap. One likable thing about this series is that Stark is not as single-minded as some of his men’s adventure brethren, and thus gives the girl the goods in another explicit sequence – after which she says there’s nothing she could teach the phenomenally-gifted Stark! 

But the finale of Corpse On Ice dispenses with the “fun” pulp and gets right back to the series mainstay of “unpleasantly nihilistic” pulp. Stark goes into the main lodge and discovers a young woman delivering some bondage sex to a bound company freak, and this boils Stark right up – that a woman so young and innocent could be so corrupted by the company. So he whips out his pistol and blows her brains out! Then he gets out a rifle, heads onto the slopes to wait for his prey, Essex, to come out to ski…takes a nap(?!)…and then wakes up in time to see everyone leaving for the lunch call, so he starts firing willy-nilly onto the slopes. Company men and innocent young women fall beneath Stark’s bullets (he wonders if the snowbunny he screwed might be among his victims), and then he rushes for his car to escape the scene of his latest carnage.  

As mentioned this was the last volume of Stark to be published by Pyramid Books, but The Revenger continued on for six more volumes in merry old England. This is also the last volume of the series I currently have…by Harknett, at least. (And I’m in no hurry to fill the gaps in this particular collection.) The only other volume of The Revenger I have is the last one, 1977’s Angel Of Destruction, which is by Angus Wells, who wrote the final two volumes of the series. I’m only familiar with his work from the Raven series. We’ll see how his take on John Stark measures up to Terry Harknett’s.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Stark #5: Rainbow Colored Shroud (aka The Revenger #5)


Stark #5: Rainbow Colored Shroud, by Joseph Hedges
May, 1975  Pyramid Books
(Original UK publication 1974)

John Stark, the Revenger (not to be confused with the other Revenger), continues his European war against “the company” in this fifth volume that’s as tediously overwritten as the third one was. Terry “Joseph Hedges” Harknett again undermines his own writing skills with blocks and blocks and blocks of overdescription that stops all forward momentum and turns Rainbow Colored Shroud into a turgid trawl of a read.

Harknett does inject a lot of continuity into the series, with this fifth book presumably opening up after the events of the fourth one, which I don’t have. (And again the occasional asterisk will refer us back to a previous volume, but again the series is referred to in these notes under its original title, The Revenger, which must’ve confused readers in the US!) Stark apparently wreaked havoc in Germany in that book, and now he’s heading up into Denmark to kill more company scum. The very first pages give us a reminder of how John Stark is a complete asshole and not at all heroic.

Stark’s hired a father and son team to pilot a boat up into Denmark, and coming in on a night landing during a heavy thunderstorm, Stark realizes at the last moment that the company is awaiting him on the beach. Stark jumps off the boat right before the goons open fire – and lets the son take the bullets that were intended for him. Then Stark hides in the water and silently pulls himself to safety while the father, an old man, is tortured by the company thugs who are seeking Stark. Stark finally pulls out his Luger, which is his customary gun this volume, and you think he’s about to do something heroic. Instead he shoots the old man in the head and runs away!

So safe to say, Harknett does not see Stark as a hero, and it’s a stretch to even consider the guy an antihero. But I found as I read this book that I actually want a hero in these men’s adventure novels; even Philip Magellan and Johnny Rock, despite being psychopaths, occasionally do something to engender reader empathy or sympathy. Not so John Stark, who cares for no one but himself and is actually more danger to those who help him than the company itself. Once again, if you are a character in this series and your name isn’t “John Stark,” you’re going to be killed in some horrific fashion.

But this opening left a bad taste in my mouth, which is never a good sign when the damn book’s 188 pages of incredibly small and dense print. Stark’s ass-holery is only just a small part of the problem. Not only could’ve a lot of these Imitation Executioner authors learned something from Don Pendleton in making their protagonists heroic (or at the very least likable), but many of them could’ve learned a helluva lot from the master on how to friggin’ write these kinds of books. I mean, just check out a section from this opening “action scene,” as Stark attempts to evade the company thugs waiting for him on the beach:

One of the riflemen sent a burst of shots across the beach and Stark speeded his progress. Perhaps spurred by fear, perhaps by a reasonable decision that the explosion of noise provided good cover. Shouts, in the tone of contrition and derision, ended the brief silence after the barrage. He didn’t step on to the steeply pitched roof of the barn when he reached the gutter. Instead, his probing foot tested the strength of a beam running along the rear wall on a level with the ledge of a hatchway into the barn’s hayloft. The beam was solid and he edged out along it. It protruded a lip of less than twenty centimetres from the wall and Stark had to keep his body pressed tight against the shiplap timber to stop from pitching backwards to the ground four metres below.

At one time the hatch had been shuttered by two swing doors, but one had long since been wrenched or had rotted off its hinges. There was ample space to crawl through the opening and stretch out full length across planks which smelled of decomposed hay and bird droppings. He froze into stillness, holding his breath and pumping sweat as he heard movement below him. He pin-pointed the position of two enforcers as he used the unaviodable idleness to accustom his eyes to the deeper degree of darkness within the barn.

Even the so-called “action” just drags on and on:

The recoil of the Luger jolted against his palm as he shot the man who had not yet fired at him. The bullet hit the side of the man’s head and burrowed through flesh on a downwards trajectory, passing across the mouth to burst out at the cheek and then find a new mark in the shoulder. The lightning supplied its follow-up of thunder, swallowing the sound of the Luger. The enforcer had flung himself backwards, fearful of being hit by the bullet blazing through the other man. Blood from the punctured cheek splashed into his eyes and the thunder masked his scream of revulsion. The Luger cracked a second time and the bullet rifled into his throat. The impact flung him harder against the door, then he bounced away and slumped across the forward curled body of the first man to die. They twitched through their death throes together. The thunder rolled away into the far distance and there was just the beating of the rain and howling of the wind against and around the crumbling walls. It covered the regular dripping of blood from torn flesh to floorboard carpet.

Seriously, enough of this could put you to sleep. And it’s like that on every single page. Every single thing Stark sees, hears, or does is over-described to the nth degree. Pendleton would’ve whittled the above down to a few sentences at the most and kept the action moving. In many ways Stark could be viewed as a primer on how not to write men’s adventure fiction. I haven’t even mentioned yet how pointlessly dour and nihilistic it is. Yet even this shouldn’t be a detriment to it being entertaining; Gannon and Bronson: Blind Rage were both dour and nihilistic, but good lord were they fun to read. Rainbow Colored Shroud almost makes you want to slit your wrists.

What makes it all the more sad is that the novel has a lurid core that could’ve made for a classic, and indeed perhaps there is a classic buried within the overlong text. For Stark in his Scandanavian war becomes involved with the porn business of the company; Denmark and Sweden are where 90% of the world’s porn comes from, we’re told, and Stark’s contact in Copenhagen is a busty beauty named Ingrid who has starred in many of these movies. Stark gets in touch with her via Poul, the son who took Stark’s bullets in the opening pages; Ingrid, a lesbian, is in love with Poul’s sister, Britt, who is also a porn actress but who is missing now. Ingrid fears that Britt fell in bad favor with the company sadists who run the porn biz.

As another example of the tedious overdescription in the book, here’s how Ingrid, the “statuesque Lesbian,” is described in her intro:

She was about twenty-five and at least six feet two inches tall, he guessed. Basically slim, she nonetheless had full, thrusting breasts and flaring hips that were challenging in their sexuality. The tight fit of her clothes revealed that she kept everything in place by her own muscle-power. Her face was long with a lot of sharp angles that could easily have resulted in plainness. But, in fact, the effect was opposite. Her eyes were dark, heavily shadowed with mascara. Her mouth was adorned by just the right colour and amount of lipstick. Her hair was long and golden, worn as Veronica Lake used to wear hers in the wartime mystery movies she made with Alan Ladd. Her hanging earrings were of real gold, as was the brooch above the cone of her right breast. The stones in the rings on the third finger of each hand had the blue sparkle of genuine diamonds.

Honestly, this is a men’s adventure novel; just tell us she’s young and pretty and has nice breasts and call it a day. I mean, is Stark’s vision so good that he can tell in a glance that earrings and brooches are “of real gold?” And for that matter, what the hell kind of a mob-busting vigilante even notices a woman’s brooch??

As in the previous volume, Ingrid’s homosexuality really sets Stark off, and he baits and taunts her throughout. They have an instant hate for each other, but Ingrid needs Stark to find out what happened to Britt. As for Stark, he could care less what happened to Britt and couldn’t care less what might happen to Ingrid – this is not just implied but flatly stated in the novel. Ingrid says Britt got involved in the bondage area of the biz, and we readers know that four women play a central part in this, led by the beautiful and psychotic Sigrid. Company bigwig Rappe, the main villain of the piece, has tasked Ingrid and her three co-dominatrices as “secret weapons” in the war against Stark. 

Unfortunately, this twisted stuff doesn’t factor into the novel until the damage of tedium has been done. Stark and Ingrid head to the posh island resort in which the company shoots its porno movies under the guise of a “health spa;” this sequence also takes place at night and clearly demonstrates Stark’s unheroic nature. While “The Revenger” is stalking the grounds, Ingrid sees that it’s a trap and cars filled with enforcers are on the way. She puts herself at risk by pushing a car down a hill and causing a massive pile-up that kills a dozen or so company flunkies. Later she’s caught…and Stark gives her up for dead and concerns himself with his own escape!

It’s hard to not hate Stark as poor Ingrid, who just saved his life, is strapped to a bed and tortured by Sigrid and her bondage sisters while Rappe and other company freaks happily watch. This is straight-up torture porn, as we learn that Sigrid gets off royally on mutilating other women. Harknett keeps toying with us on what happens to Ingrid, but by novel’s end we’ll learn that the flesh has been razored off of her breasts and ultimately scissors have been jammed into her eyeballs and mouth. But meanwhile Sigrid, posing as a wanna-be defector, has met Stark on the health spa grounds, and eventually succeeds in winning his trust and “escaping” with him. You want more tedious overdescription? Here’s how she’s described:

She was tall and slim with short black hair that hugged her head like a custom-made hat of some thick, silky material. Her face was as lean as the rest of her with clean-cut features and a smooth, tanned skin. Her eyes were china blue and saucer big. Her nose was just a trifle crooked and the imperfection added to her beauty rather than detracted from it. She had a wide, fractionally pouting mouth above a resolute jawline. Her clothes were elegantly casual and incongruously erotic – a polka-dot scarf tied at her throat above the high-necked, long-sleeved sweater, a plaid-patterned skirt with a large safety pin halfway up the split at her right thigh, and knee-length boots of shiny white. Thus, only the flesh at her knees, hands and face was exposed. But there was something, even in the tense fragment of time as Krag and his men piled into cars and sped towards the wood, about the way she wore the clothes and held her body which was sexually stimulating.

Krag by the way is the henchman in charge of finding and killing Stark, and Sigrid hides ulterior motives in that she wants Stark’s help to kill the bastard. Krag has a penchant for taking the various company porn actresses and using and abusing them as his mistresses; we see this in effect early on as Krag has his current mistress, an Israeli girl named Yeda, lick butter and jam off his body(!?) before blowing him in fairly graphic detail. One thing that must be said of Harknett is that, unlike many of his British peers, he doesn’t shirk on the explicit material. This is well displayed later in the novel, when, after killing Krag, a super-horny Sigrid succeeds in getting Stark to screw her:

With a sigh, Stark covered her body with his own, inserting himself between her thighs. Her sigh was louder as her arms dropped and her hands delved under his lowering form. The electric touch of her fingers sent delicious sensations to every nerve-ending again. And then she guided him into her and the sucking wetness of her drove him to the edge of ecstasy. As her womb drew at him, she fixed her clawed hands on his shoulders, crushing his chest to her breasts. Her legs rose and she locked her booted feet around him.

“Come on, Mr. Stark, do it to me,” she whispered, forcing his head down so that her wet lips brushed his ear. “Do it to me like you’ve never done it to any woman ever before.”

The strength with which she had sunk the knife blade deep into Krag’s stomach was now brought into use again. But this time to sink a weapon into herself. For pleasure, not pain. Despite Stark’s weight and the powerful thrusts that drove him lustfully into the hirsute centre of the woman, she was still able to arch her back from the bed: pushing towards him with her straining body and pulling him towards her with legs and arms.

Sweat pasted their flesh together and sometimes it tore apart with a moist sound: then became fastened again. But the engulfing grip of wet flesh that trapped the man willingly inside her body never released its grip. It flexed and sucked around his pumping hardness, yearning to hold him forever yet drawing him inexorably towards the spurting finale that would drain him of the essential driving force to maintain the ecstasy.

Ten points for managing to use the word “hirsute.” Mind you, all this occurs shortly after Sigrid has tortured Ingrid to death, unbeknownst to Stark. Plus Sigrid has yet another ulterior motive; Stark killed Sigrid’s boyfriend in the third volume, and now she aims to kill him in revenge; that is, after she’s “flexed” and “sucked” his “pumping hardness” to a “spurting finale.” Immediately after the sex a still-naked Sigrid tries to kill Stark, but he’s taken the clip out of his Luger. She starts clawing at him, and ol’ Stark trips her into a doorframe and slams the door on her, breaking her neck!

We go to Sweden in the homestretch, with Stark now accompanied by Yeda, Krag’s abused mistress. Yeda, who saw everything go down in Krag’s place, tells Stark how sick and evil Sigrid was. You feel bad for Yeda, who is nice and has had a rough time, which of course means Harknett plans to kill her off. And she’s dead in like two pages, her head bashed open and her neck broken as Stark crashes his stolen Datsun into the river while escaping the cops. And meanwhile we learn that Ingrid’s decomposing body was locked in the trunk, apparently planted there on the off chance that Stark would steal the car and get pulled over and thus pegged for her grisly murder…

Harknett piles on more lurid stuff in the finale, in which Rappe and his fellow “pornbrokers” watch Sigrid’s last film, which is an all-out bondage piece in which poor Britt is burned and mutilated on camera (“color by Rainbowcolour,” we’re informed, thus giving us the book’s cryptic title). As the cherry on the top, a happy Rappe even pulls poor Britt out for the others to see, proudly showing off how mutilated and mauled she is! She looks so bad – and Harknett leaves the details vague – that some of the company men even puke their guts out. But Stark, who meanwhile has of course lived through the car wreck, shows up just in time to steal a pair of AK-47s and goes in, guns blasting, mowing down every single one of them. The end!

A dire trawl of a read, Rainbow Colored Shroud leaves an unpleasant taste in the reader’s mouth. And worst of all, it isn’t even very entertaining. The book is too pessimistic and nihilistic and lacks the spark you want from this genre; it’s so dispirited as to be depressing. While Harknett’s a good writer, he honestly needed a better editor to whittle down his material to a more acceptable and fluid length.

Also, this book features one of the funniest goofs I’ve yet encountered – on page 170 Harknett actually writes “me” instead of “him” when referring to Stark, and both the UK and the US editors missed it. (My guess is they both probably fell asleep while reading the book.) Did Harknett identify with Stark that much?

Clearly I’ve been railing on this book, but the fact remains that Harknett has been a successful author for many years, so there are many readers who enjoy his style of writing. Like everything else on the blog, this review is just my opinion. And who knows, maybe after I’ve read a few more of his books I will become a bit more acclimated to Harknett’s info-rich narrative style. But as for right now, I prefer my pulp to be lean and mean and with as little excess fat as possible.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Stark #3: The Chinese Coffin (aka The Revenger #3)


Stark #3: The Chinese Coffin, by Joseph Hedges
February, 1975  Pyramid Books
(Original UK publication 1973)

The success of Don Pendleton's The Executioner was so widespread that Imitation Executioners began to pop up even overseas, this being one such example. Starting life in the UK as “The Revenger,” this series ran for thirteen volumes and documented British mob-buster John Stark’s war against “The Company,” ie the Syndicate-types who killed his girlfriend.

Pyramid Books brought the series over to the US (only reprinting the first six volumes), changing the title to Stark so as not to be confused with Jon Messmann’s Revenger series. Actually I think Stark is a better title, as it gives the series a Parker vibe – and perhaps author Terry Harknett (aka “Joseph Hedges”) was going for a Richard Stark feel in the first place, with an obvious reference in his protagonist’s last name but also because The Company is very much like Parker’s nemeses “The Outfit.”

Another change Pyramid made was to the covers, gracing them with pretty cool drawings of a shades-wearing Stark blasting various pistols. (The original UK editions featured disturbing photo covers of murdered topless women – and they say Americans are sick!!) Pyramid also changed the text to American-style double quotation marks for dialog (I’ve always suspected that the British single quotation mark was one of the things that lead to the Revolutionary War). Yet for some reason Pyramid failed to change the footnotes in the book. Occasionally an asterisk in the text will tell us to check out, say, “The Revenger: Funeral Rites”. In other words, in these footnotes Pyramid didn’t change “The Revenger” to “Stark,” which must’ve caused for some reader confusion.

Anyway, this third volume picks up immediately after the previous one, with Stark and a lithe redhead named Amanda escaping Company gunmen in Southern France. Apparently in that previous book Stark took out a Company bigwig here in France, and after a very bloody firefight in the opening pages of The Chinese Coffin he and Amanda capture a Cadillac and get away. Amanda must’ve only been introduced in that previous book, as we learn she just met Stark a few days ago, and was engaged to a Company man before Stark blew into town.

Harknett also wrote the Edge series (“Joseph Hedges” being that titular character’s full name, hence the in-joke of Harknett’s pseudonym for this series), which was known for its graphic violence. In this opening firefight Harknett proves that Stark will be much the same, with Stark doling out gory kills with a .357 Magnum and a .38 – like the best ‘70s crime fiction, the battles here are mostly fought with revolvers. Amanda even gets to take out one of the gunmen, shooting him in the back as she hides in a slime-filled swamp. Throughout the novel, there is lots of graphic detail about exploding heads and guts, and Harknett never shirks on the violence factor.

I’ve said before how I find most British pulp to be a little antiseptic, but Harknett doesn’t come off as prudish at all, delivering not only graphic gore but also some explicit sex scenes. In fact right after the gory firefight he proceeds directly to the sex, with Amanda showing off her oral skills for a lucky Stark. Amanda’s a pure ‘70s kind of gal, wearing a clinging tunic that even has a ring-pull zipper, and she gets off (so to speak) on Stark’s dangerous life. (Harknett also provides the incidental detail that Amanda is shall we say bare-shaven, which must’ve been really out of the norm in the early ‘70s; no wonder Harknett felt the need to mention it.)

Stark by the way is a grim kind of guy, very abrupt and always “on the job,” but occasionally he goes into “revenger mode” (just like Messmann’s protagonist, in fact!), where he’s even more deadly. My only problem with the character is that Harknett has him in his mid-twenties, which I think is much too young for a men’s adventure protagonist, especially one from the ‘70s – they should be square-jawed Marlboro Men types who are around thirty-five years old. We learn through the excessive detailing (more of which later) that Stark is also sporting a “bandito” moustache, apparently grown for the previous volume’s adventure, though he shaves it off midway through this one.

The Chinese Coffin operates more like a ‘70s crime novel than your typical men’s adventure offering, with a small cast of characters all converging in a convoluted plot. For as Stark and Amanda get a flight out of France courtesy a gay American friend of Amanda (cue lots of homophobia courtesy Stark, to the point where the reader thinks to himself “hmmm”), we are informed that a group of Chinese are also flying out of Tibet, making their slow way to Lebanon, where a company bigwig (strangely, Harknett never capitalizes “company,” so I’ll stop doing so as well) named Riachi is about to trade them a few million pounds worth of diamonds in exchange for uncut heroin.

Riachi is a pulpy villain, an obese lecher who lives in an ultramodern house in Lebanon where he caters to his every depraved whim. The head “executive” of the Middle East area of the company, Riachi apparently spends most of his time at play, in particular sampling the young virgins who are trained in company clinics to curse in multiple languages before being shipped to harems; Riachi takes them for a test run before sending them off to their various designations. At the moment he has a pair of Lebanese teens at his disposal, and Harknett serves up lots of lurid, exploitative stuff here, but still wrapped up in the overly-literary style of the series (and British pulp in general).

In addition to Riachi there’s Fairborne, an American company man who is bringing in the diamonds. For reasons unknown he stops off in Majorca on his way to Lebanon, where he bumps uglies with the wonderfully-named Kiki Anson, a lithe “Eurasian” gal who works as a high-class escort and provides the company with information as a side-venture. And guess what, Majorca is just where Stark happens to be flying! So the thrust of this particular installment is built around coincidence, but it’s no big deal. And anyway Stark only discovers the company is here by accident, after dumping the gay pilot at the airport he and Amanda head for the guy’s villa, Amanda hoping that Stark can at least apologize for how he treated the guy.

This gradually leads into a bloody confrontation in which a handful of people gorily die, including poor old Amanda, you won’t be surprised to discover. But Kiki Anson makes off with the briefcase of diamonds (including the darkly humorous detail of her running over Amanda’s corpse and beheading it), and Stark, in his grief and rage, eventually figures out that there was something special about that briefcase. Interrogating and killing several more Majorca-based company men, Stark finally puts it together that the briefcase was stuffed with diamonds. And his war chest is running thin, so this is perfect opportunity for him to get more money and also fulfill his pledge to kill company representatives.

John Stark is different from Mack Bolan and most other Mafia busters in that he could care less about helping society as a whole. Stark is very much only concerned with himself and his own vengeance. If his attacks happen to staunch some nefarious company scheme, so much the better, but that’s never his overriding goal. He just wants to kill company scum, but knows there are ultimately too many of them; he also knows he’s on a death quest, and could care less about this as well. While this is a “believable” mindset for such a character, it does make Stark seem to be a pretty self-centered prick. Hell, he even brushes off Amanda’s death, never once reprimanding himself for having inadvertently caused it. “She knew the risks,” he tells himself, and that’s that.

Like Mack Bolan, though, wherever Stark goes he finds trouble, and after blasting away company men in Majorca he gets word that Kiki Anson has just booked passage on a flight to Cyprus. Off Stark goes in pursuit, getting in an instanst skirkmish with company goons in Cyprus. In an entertaining sequence Stark blows up a few company cars and escapes without a scratch, even stopping for the hell of it to pick up a pair of American tourists who are checking out Cyprus. What with the rampant country-hopping, the Stark series almost comes off like a Eurotrash equivalent of The Executioner.

Stark tracks Kiki Anson to Cyprus, where she’s hooked up with her apparent lover, Thalia. Kiki is in no way a femme fatale-type, and indeed is on the verge of a nervous breakdown; turns out she took the diamonds in a dazed state, and thus is happy to give Stark whatever he wants. But the company is already in pursuit, and the climax features an overly-long sequence of a pair of Greek brothers who come after all of them. One thing that must be said about Harknett is that he is a positively unsentimental author, and will kill off characters without compunction. Seriously, if you are a character in this novel and your name isn’t “Stark,” odds are you’re going to die.

Oh, and meanwhile we learn that the old plane carrying the Chinese group and their heroin has crashed, outside of Lebanon. After a gory battle there in Cyprus, Stark bluffs his way onto a Riachi-owned helicopter and goes to the site of the crash, where Riachi is about to make a deal with the Palestinian soldiers who have discovered and thus confiscated the crashed plane. Riachi will give them the diamonds in exchange for the heroin. Instead it leads to a sort of anticlimactic finale in which Stark sets off a skirmish between Riachi’s enforcers and the Palestinians, while Stark himself hides in the crashed plane until it’s safe.

Harknett is a fine writer, and some of the deadpan dialog he gives Stark is hilarious (not to mention the puns he devises to close several chapters). But man does he overwrite. There is just endless description and detail in this novel, with huge, thick chunks of paragraphs on each and every page describing in copious detail each and every little thing. After a while it gets to be a drag, and this is something a reviewer should never admit, but I found that skimming portions of The Chinese Coffin resulted in a much more fluid – and enjoyable – read. Seriously, once you’ve read one several-line paragraph about what a cloud looks like, you’ve read them all.

So while The Chinese Coffin was enjoyable for the most part, and certainly violent and gory, it came off as more of a trying and tiring read than it should have. Also, Stark himself is a bit of a cipher, and you don’t root for him as you would other men’s adventure protagonists, at least not in this volume. That being said, I do have a few more of these Stark novels, as well as the final volume of the series (only published in the UK), so I’ll be checking them out.