Never Kill a Cop (Lee Costigan, 1959)

The last couple of posts were too long, and I blame this on my regained enthusiasm after neglecting this blog for three years. I'll try to keep this one brief, but it's a shame because it deserves a more thorough review.

A terrific police procedural with its main storyline intertwining with another, told from the perpetrator's point of view. So, it's not much of a mystery, but there's plenty of action, intrigue, romance, and even humour to make it a real page-turner. Great pace, too, as the whole thing is finished over three days. And, btw, chapters are titled by days and timespans within them, which is something I always like to see.

It all ties nicely together, and technical details—more often than not overplayed in police procedurals—are balanced just right in the proper dosage. We have the technological wonders of the IBM computer (along with stacks of punching cards, of course), polygraph tests, ballistic lab stuff, and basically loads of hard work and determination that pay off. The investigation doesn't simply follow from point A to point B, but instead, there are many bum leads and realistic obstacles, like the little episode in which a cop runs out of gas while driving to pick up a major witness! Did I mention there was some humour in this one? Additionally, refer to the "Bad guy" section of the facts below for more.

I do have a few minor complaints. Negro/nigger words are used too often. However, it needs to be said that such racist language is used strictly as a characterisation tool (nicer people would say 'blackfella') and to make the novel more realistic. I hope. I certainly didn't get the impression there was anything intentionally racist about it.

It wouldn't suffer much from trimming of 20-odd pages and a slight rewrite of the ending. I don't think that the asshole pimp Lucas should break that easily. However, at that point, we are past page 200, so it's likely Mr Costigan just wanted to wrap it up. Like I'm doing now.

Short enough?

4/5

Facts:

Hero:
Detective Lieutenant Johnny Cristo is the main character we follow, but in some ways, the hero of this story would be the entire police precinct. I especially liked Eleanor, "the diminutive little lady", who runs the IBM mainframe.

The bad guy(s):
Syndicate running Old Man is the top dog, and the main villains are the ex-pimp Frank Lucas - "a graduate of Sing Sing, an alumnus of San Quentin" and his henchman Marthusian.

But the real star is Fenton, the hitman. We get some idea of him upon his first appearance:

There was no stamp of the Syndicate upon him. There was something odd, though, something strangely fanatic in his face.
It was his eyes. They were dark, luminous, and they seemed never to blink. Frank Lucas had once seen a movie in which John Brown had stormed the arsenal at Harpers Ferry.
Fenton reminded him of John Brown.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that he steals the entire show, but he's definitely a cherry on the cake. Some piece of work this guy is. The polar opposite of the usual professional hitman. Not very bright since he kills a cop at the airport toilet right upon his arrival and later  - even worse - kills the wrong guy!? And why, you may ask? Well, he simply picked his target's address from the phonebook, and there happened to be a couple of guys with the same name. So, forget the usual stuff about hit preparation, such as long surveillance and gathering information about the target's habits. All that Fenton requires is the name, the address and a piece of advice from the newspaper's horoscope (!!):

Today is a propitious one for action which you may have been holding off for days or even months. Act today to buttress your position at work, in financial dealings or in matters of love.

Not exactly a psychopath. To one of his victims, he looks like "a Midwest farmer dressed for a church breakfast".

It's hilarious to read about the troubles he's putting his employees through. Even though he's told numerous times to back off until things cool down after the cop-killing fuck-up, he doesn't even consider giving up. When Lucas suggests hiding him in one of his establishments (since he's a pimp, you can imagine what they would be), Fenton flatly rejects such an idea because he's a religious man and won't stay in "them" houses. And he's no drinking man either, which drives Marthusian crazy later when he chaperones him.

Dames:
There's Johnny's love interest, Terry. She's cool, and this time I wasn't bothered too much with the "I Love You" crap after their one-night stand.

And we have seductress stewardess Sally with "curves that seemed to move with a life of their own" and "stacked like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield". But she's around only briefly for an interview and to give our Johnny boy some ideas...

Finally, there's Mrs Lucas. She is mentioned for the first time when her husband is introduced:

There was a man with a record as long as his arm, and a woman with a record barely shorter... The man's name was Frank Lucas and the woman was his wife.

And:

He had a pretty wife, younger than himself, intelligent and elastic enough to hide her past.

And finally, for the only time when she briefly makes an appearance, she's described as a "stylish woman of statuesque proportions".

But unfortunately, that's it. Intriguing (elastic!?) with great potential but not used at all. It would be cool to find a prequel to this book centred around her and Fenton.

Location:
I don't recall it being explicitly named, so it would be one of those 87th precincts: "the city in these pages is imaginary".

Body count:
3 (+ 1 Fentom's victim that is not directly related)

The object of desire:
Finding a cop killer

Blackouts:
None

References:
Did Frank see Michael Curtiz's Santa Fe Trail, and Fenton reminded him of Raymond Massey?

Cool Blurbs:
There are no notable blurbs, but I'm including the back cover scan anyway, as I find it amusing to see an advertisement for a book related to Jesus Christ on the back of a pulp paperback. Bad sales?

Title: 
Another pretty self-explanatory one.

Dedicated to:
"To Ann"

Edition:
Pocket Book #1256,  2nd printing, November 1959

Cover:
Nice one. No credits, but according to pulpcovers.com, done by Darrel Greene.

Cool lines:
There's a nice and somewhat tender subplot concerning one cop whose wife is growing tired of his constant absence and is about to leave him. So, it was nice to read this in the epilogue:

Motorcycle Patrolman Ryndes had solved his domestic problem by kidnapping his son, leaving him at his mother-in-law's, pouring three martinis into his wife and attacking her in bed.

That's an original and cool way to wrap up the book with a happy ending!

It Ain't Hay (David Dodge, 1946)

I had really hoped it wouldn't be one of those...

It starts okay-ish with the classic setup of a guy sitting in his office and a secretary admitting a somewhat shady client. Unfortunately, our hero, James Whitney, is no hard-boiled P.I., and his secretary is no Velda. She is his "middle-age female watchdog" (his words, not mine!), and he is an income-tax consultant. But what the hell,  let's not be prejudiced and judge people on despicable professions they do to pay the bills.

My eyebrows started to lift slightly as early as in the second chapter. After a hard day's work, Whitney takes his wife to a local restaurant for a quiet dinner by candlelight. All good and romantic until the place is attacked by some raving lunatic. He gets subdued, and one of the patrons, who happens to be a psychiatrist, offers an explanation of what just happened:

"The way he walked in attracted my attention. As soon as he ordered the muscatel I suspected him, because drug addicts who drink at all like something sweet and bland. I knew it was marijuana when I looked at his eyes. Opium or morphine or another opiate would have contracted the pupils instead of expanding them."

So now we know where we stand. But our Jimmy still doesn't, and so the next day, he visits his good friend, Detective Lieutenant Webster and is promptly given a quick prison tour during which we meet an eighteen-year-old kid bashing his head on prison bars. You see, he had been so hopped up on two reefers ("one might have been enough") the night before that he smashed the heads of his pa, ma and fourteen-year-old sister with a baseball bat!

Yes, by this time, it is clear it's going to be one of those... drugs are bad... kids, don't do drugs...

Not surprisingly, it turns out that the shady character from the book's opening chapter is some prominent mobster (he bears a resemblance to the French ambassador) who needs James to handle his money laundering. It's never explained why such a badass would randomly pick up his tax consultant from the Yellow Pages. Keep in mind that this is taking place 15 years after Al Capone's imprisonment for tax evasion, and one would think that by this time, the Syndicate would have established a team of legal experts on tax matters. Or something...

But this is just a minor inconsistency compared to some forthcoming hard-to-swallow shit. Webster soon joins forces with James (mind you, not the other way around!), but for some reason, it doesn't occur to either of them that the easiest way to bring this guy down would be for James to simply take the offered job. Surely, it would be a piece of cake to expose somebody's tax wrongdoings when you have access to the accounting books. This becomes especially unusual in the light of later developments when none of them has a problem with sending a grieved widow off to be bait when capturing some crazed (needless to say - hoped-up) maniac whose rap sheet includes rape, among other felonies. Was there no policewoman available in the entire SFPD willing to go undercover?

Not to mention the whole elaborate sub-plot about smuggling the hay from Mexico. It makes a little sense because just before revealing this master plan, we learn that the weed can be (and actually is) planted all over the USA. After all, it is super resistant. Is it possible that even back in the 40s, South Americans were scapegoats for the American drug problem?

Whatever. No need to go into that. What is worth exploring a bit is how our team of experts uncovers the connection between marijuana and Mexico. It is very straightforward - our mobster owns a tuna fishing boat, and apparently, commercial tuna finishing is carried off the coast of Mexico. And that's basically it, I kid you fucking not! All I can add is that at least the publisher was honest enough to call this "A Dell Thriller" and not "A Dell Mystery".

However, calling it a thriller would be somewhat of an exaggeration. There are pages and pages of needless padding. Towards the end - when things should really be speeding up - there's an almost dialogue-less chapter that is entirely dedicated to establishing some minor henchman's badass character. I am not sure what the point is because the guy gets killed shortly after, anyway. Was the author chasing some word count? It's hard to believe, considering the book is 200 pages long. Did he go overboard with the research and was simply a bit stoned?

I wanted to like it, but this one is all over the place. Nothing really works. But still, let's conclude on a positive, educational note. If you have ever wondered why musicians do drugs, this may help you understand:

"Look at some of these musicians that use it. It excites them, makes them high and hot, so they can beat the music out faster, get in the extra licks they couldn't handle otherwise. They are in the groove, and the groove is boogie-woogie - for them. For somebody else, the grove is rape or murder or arson."

And for all of you out there who are considering switching back from consuming hard opiates to just smoking pot, this may be useful to know:

"Opium doesn't give you trouble?"
"Don't get me wrong. Opium is plenty bad for anybody that uses it. I meant that hop smokers want to get off in a corner and go to sleep, not hell around looking for trouble. A hay head has to be near other people; he's excited, steamed up, talkative, full of vinegar. He's like a stick of dynamite in a fire. Maybe he'll burn with a nice hot flame, maybe he'll blow up in your face. You just can't tell."

So now you know.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
James Whitney may be "big, strong and handsome", but at the same time, he's also a dull, conservative, vain, and ego-centric asshole.

The bad guy(s):
That would be Barney, Tony and Max from the list of characters. Tony is a bit of a psycho, so there was some possibility of at least minor character development. But, of course, it never happened.

Dames:
No strong women characters either. Kitty (as voluptuous and luscious as she is) is introduced at the beginning, and she only reappears briefly at the end with the sole purpose of wrapping it up with a proper, family-friendly kind of ending. Iris and Rosa are more interesting, but both are totally underused. Rosa especially gets some pretty shitty treatment:

The story does take a somewhat cool detour in chapter 13 (titled "Better than a Drink"), in which James gets drunk and stoned (on a single reefer, mind you) and actually scores with Rosa. That's the cool part. But instead of keeping her around and actually involving her in the case, this pathetic tax consultant gets such a guilty conscience that he goes to see a shrink (chapter "Undressing the Inner Man")! What follows next is more nonsense about drug addiction and related childish psychology. And poor Rosa is more or less out of the picture. Too bad, I liked her.

Location:
San Francisco

Body count:
Discounting all the nonsense in various cautionary tales about hoped-up kids killing their family members with baseball bats and such, all that remains at the end is just a single proper corpse.

The object of desire:
Of all the flaws mentioned, I believe this is the book's most significant one. What drives our hero for 200 pages is nothing but vanity. He simply cannot get over the fact that he was beaten by some hoodlums.

This guy is so upset that for five weeks can't be bothered to pick up the phone and give a ring to his wife after she has left him with the "chasing gangsters or keeping me" choice.

And there's more to this obsession. He makes a deal with (not just one but two) cops that they would give him 15 minutes alone with the main bad guy before they arrest him. Huh, seriously? Come on!

Blackouts:
Two of them. First time when he's beaten and then again after he manages to drag himself home.

References:
Eddie Schwartz, the "nighthawk elevator man" is reading some story titled "Rape on the Range" in "Spicy Western Stories" magazine. And it didn't sound too bad either. I tried to find it online, but it turned out that both the story and the magazine were fictitious. But googling it, I found this cool gallery of spicy westerns scans.

And during the aforementioned shrink session, there's a reference to none other than Othello:

"Let me read you one more clinical report. This is Cassio, who got drunk as a pig and made a fool of himself. Hes says: Oh God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!"
John closed the book with a snap.
"'Transform ourselves,' Whit. Remember it."
"Great little guy, Casio," Whit said. "I know just how he felt. Be sure to send me a bill."

Title: 
Indeed, by now, no additional explanation is needed.

Dedicated to:
This book is dedicated to my good friend Joe O'Ferrall

Chief of the Division of Narcotic Enforcement, Department of Justice, State of California, and to the men who work with him.

Edition:
Dell #350

Cover:
Stunning illustration by Gerald Gregg. And despite all the above bitching and ranting, I'm keeping this book in my collection until the day I die.

Cool lines:
Nothing really cool, but every now and then, you come across some bizarre, WTF stuff like this:

The chief was a middle-aged Irishman with bright pink cheeks, white hair, and electric blue eyes. A strong chin accompanied the patriotic color scheme.[The Coolest!]

I'll bet a dollar that place is harder to get into without an appointment than an abortionist's operating room.

Target: Mike Shayne (Brett Halliday, 1959)

End of the hiatus, I'm back! Plenty of time to kill in these strange covid times, and besides, I've been missing the quiet nights in the company of my good friends Arthur Guinness, Joe Camel, Tom Waits and such. So, let's make social distancing fun again!

The good old gumshoe Michael Shayne is as good as anyone to help me restart this blog. I keep chasing these books on eBay because of their incredible McGinnis' covers and keep reading them even though they turn out to be pretty lame for the most part. Especially the latter additions to the series, when they were penned by God knows which ghostwriter, vary a lot in quality. With over 200 pages, this one is quite hefty, so I was reluctant to pick it up. But as usual, I was eventually persuaded by the voluptuous blonde giving me looks from the bookshelf.

Glad I did, and I'm happy to report that the book's length is more than justified, as it covers two intertwining stories. They both revolve around an ex-con who's planning a heist while also dividing his attention to plot the murder of a particular private detective who had put him into the slammer.

The heist part is excellent. It's not the usual bank or armoured car job, but a high-stakes private poker game on the top floor of a luxurious hotel, which makes it a bit more elaborate. The author puts in a good effort to describe just enough details of our team's preparation and execution. Which goes reasonably smoothly, and they actually manage to pull it off! During the heist, there's a cool detail that reminded me of Melville's Bob le Flambeur when Clayton (the inside man) gets on the roll with the dice and starts winning big time. Don't know; maybe our mysterious ghostwriter also saw the movie and got inspired. It was released only three years before the publication of this book.

The team of misfits makes it interesting: along with Clayton, there's a femme fatale past her prime (both of them on their "last job") and a trigger-happy, somewhat psychotic kid. A well-known template that has been used countless times before and since, and it works well here. The shifting alliances and relationships between the three are sometimes more compelling than the job itself. Good stuff, indeed.

What ruins it for me is our main man himself. Shayne is Mike Hammer's distant cousin, so excessive drinking and a conservative, macho persona do come along with the territory. And we've got used to this. Fine. However, in this case, his "lone wolf against the system" attitude is taken to absurd and even comical extremes. His dogged determination goes as crazy as beating the cops (twice!), and in the final showdown, he literally uses his wheelchair as a weapon. It stopped being funny after 50 pages and became simply annoying for the remaining 150+.

But all in all, this one is an interesting addition to the series. Also, to be fair, it does have a cool identity swap twist at the end that I didn't see coming. And now, when this one is off the shelf, I can see another beauty smiling straight at me. So stay tuned.

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero:

"Is Shayne still around?"
"Who?" she asked sleepily.
"Mike Shayne, the fearless, incorruptible, two-fisted private eye."

And then a tall, rangy figure came out of the hotel. His shoulders were wide and powerful, and he had the narrow hips and long legs of an athlete. His face was deeply lined. Even before she saw the red hair Miriam knew that this was Mike Shayne.

Dames:

Barring Shayne's faithful secretary and love interest, Lucy, Miriam is the only woman in this one. I'm including the back cover scan, but that description doesn't do her justice. I found her to be quite a complex and likeable character.

Location:
Miami

Body count:
Only 2. Possibly another one, as Clayton is badly injured, and doctors don't know if he will survive.

The object of desire:
For Clayton - killing Shayne while getting some money and eventually going away with Miriam

For Miriam - getting some money at first but at the end simply keeping Clayton 

For Fran - killing some people

Blackouts:
None less than on three occasions. During the climax, he first gets shot point-blank in his side with a dummy bullet, but he's such a tough guy that it doesn't put him out yet. But the next bullet, this one to his head (and obviously dummy too), does the job and "The night closed down around him".

Once he's in the hospital and interrogated by the cops, he blacks out due to exhaustion: "Shayne could feel the mists beginning to close in around him again."

Finally, after his semi-successful wheelchair attack, he loses consciousness because he's totally exhausted from the fight and preceding chase. This one is also pretty straightforward: "He felt a violent explosion behind his eyes."

Title: 

Clayton holds a grudge against Shayne for putting him in prison thirteen years ago. Now he's out, and it's payback time.

Dedicated to:

"For Leah and Lee with Love"

Blame it on covid-19 psychosis, but I actually did some sleuthing myself to find out who the author is. From this very informative page on Shayne, I got the list of ghostwriters and then checked their biographies for kids, spouses or friends named Leah and Lee. Came up with nothing. So far...

Edition:

Dell D355, first printing - June 1960

Cover:

Another gorgeous and iconic illustration by Bob McGinnis. A fantastic job that must have substantially accelerated the sales (it definitely made me buy it). 

Cool lines:

As he crouched on the floor, his forehead was on a level with her automatic. He started to bring up the tommy gun. She shot him between the eyes.[Fatale]

Attar the Merman #2: War of Nerves (Joe Haldeman writing as Robert Graham, 1975)

This one doesn't waste any time with preliminaries. In the opening chapter's mere five pages, we learn everything we need to know about the plot. If you're interested and have 15 seconds to spare, you can read its (even) more condensed version from the scanned back cover below. The only really curious detail that gets left out is the name of the poison that the villains plan to use. Here it goes:

The drums contained a total of twenty-two hundred gallons of Tabun III developed by army researchers in the early seventies as a more potent replacement for Tabun, called eyanodimethytlaminethoxyphsphine oxide for long.

Guess that the blurb writers didn't have the patience and/or space to put "eyanodimethytlaminethoxyphsphine oxide" on the back cover...

Anyway, the second chapter is a mandatory introductory chapter of the hero. There's not much to write about - he's a pretty ordinary men's adventure novels hero, with his unique feature being medically inserted gills that (obviously) enable him to breathe underwater. Not much gadgetry is involved either, with perhaps a notable exception of "...incorporated into Attar's ankle sheath was a small radio transmitter, powered by an electrochemical reaction with sea water..."

What makes our hero memorable are his sidekicks introduced in the third chapter. This is definitely the novel's highlight, and it requires multiple readings to fully appreciate.

Sam, the dolphin, is only briefly introduced and then later, for some unknown reasons, dropped and replaced with Attar's brother Victor. So let's not waste too much space on him and just see how this friendship was formed:

Then along came Attar and Essence with their strange ability to breathe underwater. Some dolphins decided to open up telepathic communication with these two humans, provided they would keep the ability secret to other humans. It's useless, of course, to lie to a mind reader; Attar and Essence would have been killed immediately if they hadn't been sincere. They lived and divulged the secret.

The Attar's other sidekick, the killer whale Grampus, is the real star here. The entire introductory section is simply hilarious, and I could easily retype the whole chapter. However, these posts have been running too long lately, so let's just highlight a few key paragraphs. The insanity starts with:

Killer whales are normally pretty rough customers. They're intelligent as dolphins but, in the wild, not as easy to get along with. They kill and eat dolphins and other marine mammals. That none has ever been recorded as having killed a human swimmer may say more about recordkeeping than it does about killer whales.
Grampus, though, was an exception. He though he was a dolphin.

Huh? You see, dolphins thought that raising the orphaned orca would be a "grand practical joke"! True, a "pretty dangerous game", but you see,  "dolphins live with danger the way humans live with weather - they don't let it bother them too much". But still, this experiment leaves him a bit mixed up:

The killer whale's mind was even stranger territory than the minds of the dolphins. Dolphins are not exactly gentle - the ocean is unforgiving and a pacifist dolphin wouldn't live long enough to starve to death - but the only fish they kill for pleasure is the shark. Grampus got a little dark thrill every time he killed something, anything. In other respects, though, the killer whale's psychological make-up was very dolphinlike: playful, sarcastic, relatively unconcerned about his own death.

Like I said, I could easily go on with this, but let's just wrap it up with an example of one of the Grampus' abilities:

"We've got you a wrist compass and a little sextant," Edward said, "out in the Ford. That should help."
"Sure," Attar said. Actually, he wouldn't need them. Grampus understood maps by reading them through Attar's eyes, and he had an infallible sense of direction.

Great stuff! And I honestly thought I was onto something special here. But then this silliness stops, and with every page, the whole thing grows duller to a point when it's almost unreadable. I can see why the series ran for only two entries, and I'm not really interested in finding the first one unless I come across it in some used bookstore for a couple of bucks. But I'll be prepared for that one and will probably stop reading it after the intro.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Attar the merman and his split personality, non-pacifistic, sarcastic orca, Grampus. No, wait a minute! It's actually the split personality, non-pacifistic, sarcastic orca, Grampus, and Attar the merman.

Bad guy(s):
Two of them and both pretty pathetic, especially Rasputin. Not menacing at all and, foremost, cheap. Considering he's blackmailing the US government, and it's about to destroy the entire planet, he sets the ransom ridiculously low at a mere 20 million! And the asshole is so cheap that he even haggles over the assassination fee with his henchman!

Location:
Attar is Australian, and this is where the introductory chapters are staged, but then he and his brother Victor leave for Florida and later finally end up in Haiti.

Body count:
6 (the first one is pretty funny - "You can't sneak up on a telepathic animal!")  + 9 (some pretty gory) in the final shoot-out + a suicide in the epilogue makes a grand total of 16.

And I'm happy to report that Attar's brother Victor makes it:

After a week-long telepathic powwow, the consensus among the dolphins was that Victor be allowed to live. But he would be given no further information about dolphin intelligence until he had proven his trust-worthiness. Actually, the dolphins thought it was quite a joke that Grampus had considered a human life to be worth that much. It was forgivable because Grampus was not really a dolphin - and whatever he was, it was at least partly the dolphins' fault.

The object of desire:
See the back cover.

References:
The voodoo prayer in Chapter 11 is taken from the book "Haiti: Black Peasants and Their Religion" by Alfred Metraux.

Dames:
None. Yes, you've read it right - there are no women mentioned in this asexual "men's adventure novel"!?!?

Blackouts:
He almost fainted when he got trapped underwater. But not for lack of oxygen, of course; it's the coldness of the ocean that gets him.

Title: 
Very accurate - it was a bloody war of nerves to finish this one.

Edition:
Pocket Book #77989, March 1975

Cover:
Partly accurate. See the 'hero' and 'dames' sections.

Cool lines:
While Attar was trying to frame a sufficiently sarcastic reply, Victor snarled a suggestion to the youth that was both biologicaly improbable and illegal under Florida's sodomy statutes.[The Coolest!]

Dark Angel #1: The Dream Girl Caper (James D. Lawrence, 1975)

As a devoted fan of the Glorious Trash, I've been well aware of the infamous Dark Angel. One of the two reviewed books even made it into Joe's Hall of Fame, which is the best recommendation I could possibly get. Unfortunately, these paperbacks are scarce, and when they appear on eBay, they are ridiculously overpriced. However, I have been selling some items on eBay myself lately and was fortunate enough to accumulate a decent PayPal fund at about the same time when a lot of three Dark Angels was offered for £ 30. Didn't hesitate much and couldn't wait for them to arrive.

Turned out that The Dream Girl Caper was a bit of a letdown. Instead of the hard-core violent blaxploitation stuff that I had expected, I got a pretty tame mix of mystery/action caper story with a few juicy sex bits thrown in.

The setup is okay. Some senior ad executive's trophy wife and her mafia hitman stud are scheming to hijack the grand prize of some T.V. treasure hunt that her clueless hubby has conceived. Their plan is hardly very elaborate (she fucks his boss, they plant a murder on him and then blackmail the schmuck), but there are some other characters involved, the seedy P.I. and the quack psychiatrist/pimp with his secretary, that make this mystery enjoyable. Our Angie doesn't exactly sweat a lot on this case since every clue (and intuition) turns into a successful lead, so she basically just goes from point A to B. Not a problem, really. She's cool, and halfway through the plot still has many possible developments. Or so I thought.

Mr Lawrence decided to go the other route. Instead of wrapping it up, he prolonged it to 200+ pages by bringing in not one but two organised crime families. And thus turned this decent crime novel into some sort of an action extravaganza with helicopters and boats rushing to the remote island where the treasure is buried and where the shootout between mobsters ends in a big ass explosion. Because you see, this island was until recently owned by the Pentagon, and military guys forgot to remove some missiles that were stored there. As they usually do...

Now, don't get me wrong - I have nothing whatsoever against the insane action sequences and noncoherent plots. They are usually fun, but here, everything becomes a bit boring. The thing is that Angie is the character that drives the story. She's genuinely cool and funny, so I cannot understand the author's decision to dedicate so much of the narration to Garth, especially in the second part. It kills the pace and puts out all the amusing sparks she is tossing around. And besides, do we really care about some advertising agency executive in his mid-life crisis!?

To make things worse, Angie and him become lovers! They start calling each other "darling", cook dinner before having sex and listen to Mozart after having sex... Toward the end, we even have to endure crap like this:

Fuck the three million. What mattered was getting his girl out safely - his lovely Dark Angel.

And not surprisingly, she is the one who brings a bit of humour into this far-fetched affair. Check out this transcript of her call to his office after their first night together:

"Mr Trent..."
"Mmm?"
"You have a call on line one."
"Oh? Yeah? Who is it?"
"That, uh, person who calls herself your black panthress. Only today she pronounced it 'pantless.'"

I told you she was cool, didn't I?

Before I finish this, I - of course - need to touch on two more aspects.

Is having its protagonist say "dig" occasionally and being referred to as "mama" every now and then really enough for a book to be labelled as blaxploatiative? I'm not an expert and will let you decide about it, but it did seem a bit odd that our hero was the only black character in this one. Although having said that, I must admit that there are a few hilarious bits related to our heroine being black. Just loved stuff like this:

Angie cursed fluently in Harlemese.

Even in the darkness he was conscious of the powerful pull of her sexual magic, her African juju.[The Coolest!]

Anyway, this racial angle is just an observation. It's pretty much irrelevant. Let's finally talk about sex!

And this one is really fucking weird. It seemed like it was written by someone who had never had sex but had read about it a lot (too much?) in Spillane novels. In Angie's introduction, we learn that she was savagely beaten and gang-banged as a teenager. Still, the experience wasn't all that traumatic because she had already been sexually abused at six and again at nine by two of her mother's boyfriends...

One would assume that such an ordeal would leave our poor Dark Angel traumatised for (at least one) life, but one couldn't be more wrong. Only a couple of pages later, there is a hilarious scene in which a guy gives her head while she interrogates him (sort of), and several chapters further, she gets fingered while being hypnotised by an ornament shaped like a pair of testicles!

I realise it sounds stupid, but it's actually funny, trust me. Until it switches back to vulgar mode several pages later:

"You want your teeth knocked out, jig?"
"No."
His fingers fumbled at his fly. "Then blow me." He crammed his penis into her mouth.
Angie blew.
"Swallow it, baby!"
She swallowed, gagging.

So when it finally comes to "proper" sex, it goes as cheesy as this:

[seduction part]
She was long-legged and very busty. Her breasts were even more beautiful than Garth had imagined. And she was so unself-conscious that when she handed him his glass, her nipples weren't even erect.

[foreplay part]
She rose to meet him as he walked toward her, shrugging off his coat. And then they were in each other's arms, hands exploring, tongues working passionately.

[the act]
He scooped her up in his arms and carried her over to the bed and pulled off the tiny bikini briefs and plunged into her with desperate urgency of a suffocating diver plugging his air line into a tank of oxygen. They grappled and lunged about the bed like clawing wildcats until his spurting seed momentarily slaked the thirsting heat in her loins.

I don't know, I probably put too much emphasis on this whole sex angle, but still, some of that shit was hard to digest. 

Not really sure how to conclude. It's definitely a bit of a mess, too long, and too crazy at times. But Angie is super cool and simply funny. And to finish this review on a more positive note, here's a poem she recites when testing her Micro 007 "sugar cube" bugs:

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow... and every dude that Mary screwed, the lamb would also blow.

Although a bit disappointed, I'm looking forward to my remaining two Dark Angels!

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero: See the back cover scan

Location:
New York, New Jersey

Body count:
2 proper ones and (roughly estimated) 10 gang members blown up on the treasure island.

Dames:
Garth's wife Vale:

Wov! Garth had himself quite a dish for a wife. A breathtakingly lovely blonde, with two truly outstanding boobs. And the most perfectly neat and classically ringleted triangle of pubic hair that Angie had ever seen.

Dr Baxt's receptionist Fogel is much more interesting - "two hundred pounds of solid bone, tit and muscle". She's repeatedly - and to the point of a real annoyance - referred to as a dyke. Won't go into political correctness bullshit, but it is unnecessary and comes across as simply mean. Not to mention stupid.

The object of desire:
The novel's central problem is that the primary plot vehicle is totally unrealistic. The thing is that everyone's chasing that T.V. treasure hunt's main prize because, for some unexplained reason, it is delivered in cash!? Yes, three million dollars in cash!?! Why the hell couldn't the producers simply hand out a check to the winner?

References:
Garth turned and raised himself up on the arm to peer at her through the moonlit gloom. It was a sight, he thought, to give even that veteran old letch, the Flemish flesh artist Peter Paul Rubens, a hard-on.

The painting portrayed a nude woman in black silk stockings and pink garters, painted in oils in the self-consciously "naughty" style of Felicien Rops, the Belgian pornographic illustrator of the Gay Nineties.

Blackouts:
Angie ducked.
The pot grazed her forehead, stunning her for a fraction of a second.

Title: 
Have no idea where that "Dream Girl" stuff came from. Is Dark Angel Garth's dream girl?

Edition:
Pyramid, January 1975

Cover:
A cool collage of some scenes featuring our heroine in the foreground. It even depicts one of the two fights where she's in the nude!

Cool lines:
Fogel slumped to the deck like a side of beef falling off a meat truck.

And a page later:
"Yours off, too, lard-butt," Angie told the dyke receptionist, who by now was fully conscious. Fogel got slowly to her feet. "Go on! Strip, mama, before I take an inch or two off those melons of yours with some lead-reducing pills."

Angie's brain was processing data in nanoseconds, and it printed out the answer while he was still speaking.

And let's finish with sex, what else? Here's a bit weird, very Coxman-like monologue of the creepy doctor which he uses for hypnotising our heroine:

Sex... sex is the answer to all human problems," he intoned. "The true religion of the messiah, resolving all human conflicts... the perfect dialectical synthesis, eliminating forever the dichotomy between male and female... melding them into a single harmonious human entity...

Scorpion Reef a.k.a. Gulf Coast Girl (Charles Williams, 1955)

I read Williams' debut novel Hill Girl a while ago and really liked it. I wish I had blogged about that one instead of Scorpion Reef, because the old maestro certainly deserves a more positive introductory post on this blog. But it is the end of the month, and I need to fill a self-imposed minimal monthly posts quota of at least one entry:)

Three-part structure with a somehow formulaic beginning in which our hero gets sucked into an intrigue that involves a beautiful blonde, her husband, a shitload of money, smuggled diamonds and a gang of ruthless gangsters. So, nothing really original, but I still liked it a lot. It's written with great skill in a very realistic style and with some excellent characterisations (the main bad guy is pretty fucking menacing!). A true page-turner, even though it has to be said that the plot is a bit simplistic and takes too long to get going.

This first half sets the stage for the central part. Our hero and freshly widowed Shannon (btw, by now, she has become the love of his life) are sailing on a small boat accompanied by a couple of mean gangsters on some sort of treasure hunt. Confined space, the heat of the sun, a handful of co-dependent individuals linked by love/hate/fear/greed/mistrust/etc., and with a clock relentlessly ticking,... should be a winning formula for a superb psychological thriller...

Unfortunately, it doesn't happen this way; instead, it rapidly goes downhill. There's too much emphasis on our damned lovers while the action is almost totally neglected. Psychological parts are naive at best and sometimes even laughable. There's a scene in which the bad guy hands a loaded gun to our hero, knowing that he hasn't got the guts to use it...

But as much as this middle part is a letdown after the promising opening, the worst is yet to come. I would dare guess that Mr Williams wanted to wrap up the novel with a surprising twist, so in the several following chapters, we need to endure some ultra-corny romance that serves as a basis for that unexpected ending. But it's too little, too late for my liking. After 190 pages, I was relieved to finally reach the end.

But I'm not giving up on Williams. I think my next one will be Dead Calm. Saw the movie with Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill ages ago, and as far as I can remember, it has a similar setup to this one. Or maybe I should go with "Talk of the Town" or "Hell Hath no Fury"? Surely books with such cool covers cannot be bad? :)

4/5 for the first eight chapters, 2.5 for the following six and 1.5 for the last three combined, equal to 2.31, but I'll round it to

2.5 / 5

Facts:

Hero:
Bill Manning - former writer, now a freelance diver.

Location:
The first half takes place in a fictitious coastal town called Sanport, while the rest unfolds on the vast open sea.

Body count: 4
And Bill is pretty philosophical about the demise of the hoodlums:  They lived by violence. They had died the same way. It was just an industrial accident.

The object of desire:
"What's in the plane?" I asked.
"Diamonds," Barclay answered. "You might say a considerable amount of diamonds."
"Whose?"
"Ours, obviously."

Dames:
The very first encounter between Bill and Shannon is pretty cool:

I was checking over some diving gear on the forward deck when a car rolled out of the end of the shed and stopped beside mine. It was a couple of tons of shining Cadillac, and there was a girl in it.
Or maybe a better way of putting it would be to say a girl came out of the shed, wearing a Cadillac. You'd see her first.

And I'll spare you all the superlatives in that corny last act...

Blackouts:
When they turned me loose at last and went away my knees folded and I fell forward on my face. Wind roared in my throat, and my mouth was full of sand.

Title: 
Scorpion Reef is where our party of four is headed to salvage diamonds from the sunken plane. However, I think it has a more symbolic meaning, something inescapable (think: scorpion, death). Anyway, it's a pretty cool title, and definitely better than "Gulf Coast Girl", under which it was republished a year later by Dell.

Edition:
Pan, 1958

Cover:
Typical British cover. We get a pretty generic fight scene instead of some sexy illustration of Russian-Finish-Irish tall blonde Shannon in a swimsuit. And look at the facial expression of the guy standing. Hillarious!

Cool lines:
"Well, I wanted to see everything before I died, and now I have. A man over thirty who still believes women.""

Due Or Die (Frank Kane, 1961)

I like the concept of a P.I. being hired by mobsters. It isn't terribly original, but it's still unusual enough to be effective when done well. It does work in this one, maybe because there's a cute twist. A group of ageing has-been tough guys hires our hero because somebody is trying to sell them protection! Yep - some "shake artist" threatens to wipe them out one by one unless they come up with a neat little sum of a million bucks!

It's too bad that the story doesn't evolve much beyond this premise. Only a couple of new characters are introduced outside this closed group of six people, so it gets clear pretty soon that the culprit will be one old fart double-crossing his mates. Liddell's M.O. doesn't help this non-development either. Our main guy basically stirs shit up by doing nothing more than simply hanging around and making bad guys nervous. You know, so they would make a mistake...

But it's still cool. The pace is relentless, and numerous scenes either don't make much sense, their timing is off, or some details simply don't add up logically when you stop to think about them. But the trick is that the reader doesn't stop to think about them. I'll give you a couple of amusing examples.

There's a body in the morgue that the local sheriff wants to dispose of by cremating it ASAP to destroy the evidence that would prove this guy was shot and hadn't committed suicide. The contrary proof is the angle of the bullet's entry point into a wound, so Liddell and his side-kick Tommy Thompson at first even contemplate stealing the fucking corpse!?! Luckily for them, Johhny does get the Eureka "Pictures!" moment (but doesn't share it with Tommy), so he spends 10 minutes setting up the shot and then another 10 minutes searching for the camera. After failing to find one (in a morgue!?!), he admits defeat and finally explains the whole setup to Tommy. It is a good thing he does so because it turns out that Tommy owns a Polaroid and needs just 15 minutes to fetch it from his home. So, here's a lesson for all you private investigators out there: do some brainstorming with your assistants and share the ideas!

The other example involves a bomb! Johnny is chosen to deliver the payoff money, but the "shake artist" replaces the money in the bag with the bomb before handing it to our delivery boy. This whole bomb business is entirely unknown to us, but Johnny has a hunch. Even more - he's pretty sure when the thing will go off, so he vehemently drives around with this bag in his trunk before burying it into the ground. Lesson #2: if you have a hunch there's a ticking bomb in your car's trunk, pull the fuck over and check it out. Otherwise, you're a dumb-ass and not bad-ass!

Cool, entertaining stuff. I just wish it didn't have to end with one of those silly but almost mandatory suspects roundups...

3/5

Facts:

Hero:
Johnny Liddell, P.I. - action man, fast on the trigger and relatively (10 minutes) fast on thinking. But, to be honest, he could definitely be fed a few witty lines. His verbal exchanges with women are especially corny.  Check this:

"I hope you know what you're doing."
Liddell smiled grimly. "I hope you get your hope."

"I liked your act," Liddell told her.
She looked him over with frank interest. "You should see what I do for an encore."
"That an invitation?"
The blonde shrugged. "Why don't you try taking me up on it?"
"Maybe I will. But if I did, I couldn't just go asking for the chocolate dish with the white frosting."

The bad guy(s):
Las Palmas sheriff:
"Under him, law enforcement was satisfyingly broadminded"

...and his two henchmen:
Behind him, he could hear the sheriff expressing a highly censorable, and at best debatable, opinion of his two men, their personal habits, their legitimacy, and the possible canine element in their immediate families.

Location:
It starts briefly in Johnny's New York but then moves to the fictitious town called Las Palmas, where "the only unforgivable crime was to be broke".

Body count: 5
But let's make it 6 because:

"What'll they do to him?"
Liddell shrugged. "Take back their money. Then they'll turn him loose and let him run." The elevator whooshed to a stop, the doors opened. "The syndicate will put a pencil mark around his name and he'll be a fair hit any place in the world. He won't live much longer this way, but it'll seem a lot longer. In the end, he couldn't be deader."

The object of desire:
Preservation of their lives (and a million bucks) for mobsters and clearing his name for Johnny.

Dames:
The voice on the other end was the husky kind that does things to the spine. "This is Lee Loomis. I don't know if you know me-"
"The Lee Loomis?"
There was a pleased sound from the other end of the phone. "A Lee Loomis. I hope it's the one you mean."
"You headlined the show at the Cuernavaca a couple of months ago? That Lee Loomis?"
"How nice of you to remember."
"How could I forget?"

There are two other gun molls, but (unfortunately) they don't get much exposure.

Blackouts:
He briefly loses consciousness during the interrogation of the two sheriff's bulls but kicks the shit out of them when he comes back to his senses.

Title: 
It sounds cool, but it doesn't have much to do with the story. At least, I didn't think that anything was so due that someone would have to die.

Edition:
Dell, First Edition, March 1961. It is numbered 8174, but when I Google it, I get an A. Betram Chandler's "Spartan Planet". Strange... I don't own some special collector's item paperback with the printing error, do I?

Cover:
She was tall. Her red hair was piled on top of her head and a green silk gown did its best to cover her lush figure. Her lips were full, moist soft; her eyes green and slightly slanted.

And again towards the end:

She was wearing the same nile-green dressing gown she had on when he first came to the bungalow. It was still doing the same wonderful job of showcasing her figure.

Cool lines:
Liddell turned to face the man who was leaning against the back of the cage. His eyes were tired, his suit wrinkled, but the right hand sunk in the pocket of his jacket gave him authority...
"Who are you?"
"The welcoming committee," the tired-eyed man drawled. He nodded to the gun. "Take it out with your left hand. Two fingers."
...
"Heavy piece."
"Makes my coat hang hang straight."

And a couple of threats. I'm not sure that I get the first one:

"Okay, buddy. One move out of you and this is Cinderella's coach, only midnight's never coming."

The next one I do get, but it's still a bit silly:

"Move one finger while I'm driving and I'll put a hole in you big enough to drive a Mack truck through."