Daddy Cool (Donald Goines, 1974)

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with this one. I expected our hit-man hero to be a cool, Shaft-like badass, but he's more like an ageing guy having many problems with his family while running his pool hall. He is not very cool either - he loses his coolness when returning home from one of his "jobs" and finds his 16-year-old spoiled daughter Janet making out in a car with a young and "thoroughly unlikable" pimp, Ronald. Daddy Cool gets mad, slaps her, and as a result, she's so pissed at him that she packs her shit and runs away with the unlikable one. Soon she ends up whoring on the streets of Motor City, and daddy is not too happy about it.

But he's not too upset about it either because he's still unable to locate her two weeks later. Is he simply not streetwise anymore? Hard to say, but one thing is sure. Instead of looking for her, he takes another job in LA because it pays so well (25 grand). Greedy bastard! And an asshole too. When he finally returns, he releases his frustrations and rage on his two step-sons, who were given the ultimatum to either find her or move out of his house. I'm not saying that two of them are not good-for-nothing assholes, but still, I think he was a bit unfair to them.

It gets better and more dynamic towards the end with a somehow Shakespearean tragic, bloody family drama climax.

It's a quick and entertaining read, but I missed any kind of style in it. It does not have much of the ghetto noir feeling I had expected, plain dialogues lacking street slang, a sloppy and pretty unbelievable story, hardly any characterisation (especially Janet, which is done poorly), and a bit too exploitative (five pages of sex scene). The whole thing just feels like it was put together hastily, which - after reading Goines' biography - can very well be the case. Apparently, he wrote mainly to support his heroin addiction and published 9 books in 1974 alone. Amazing, big fucking respect!

3/5

Facts:

Hero:
Larry Jackson, aka Daddy Cool, "one of the deadliest killers the earth had ever spawned".

Location:
Detroit mostly, except for the two jobs that Daddy Cool takes in Michigan and LA

Body count: 

7 + one German police dog

Dames: 
Daddy Cool's daughter Janet. She is an innocent 16-year-old girl when we first meet her, but two weeks later, she celebrates her 17th birthday street-walking and "doing tricks".

Blackouts: 
None. This is strange because he's savagely beaten when a gang of six mugs him. 

Title: 

See 'hero'

Cover: 

Pretty standard 

Cool lines:  
Pimping was his game, and no good pimp would allow some bitch's daddy to blow his game.[The Coolest!]

Yes, there would be hell to pay, and some crying. But casket buying would be the order of the day in the near future.