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."

Danger Is My Line (Stephen Marlowe, 1960)

I read Drum Beat - Madrid recently and quite liked it. Nice mix of a private eye mystery and spy thriller with a decent story (there are actually two of them) and a bit of a globetrotting plus some sex thrown in. This one follows such a template but is far inferior.

The opening part, let's call it the "P.I." section, which takes place in Washington, is okay, and, although it's pretty short, it sets things up nicely. A guy found not guilty of murder confesses the crime and sells his story to some newspaper publisher. There's also a beautiful blonde, and we don't need to wait long for the first corpse to appear. It didn't exactly grab me by the throat, but it wasn't bad.

But then it just goes from pretty good to somewhat decent to kind of okay-ish to... a bit boring, and towards the end, it's just a struggle to get over the line.

The story is too fragmented, and numerous action scenes are too static. The damn thing hardly moves anywhere, and it is usually in the wrong direction when it does. And you know that the writer wasn't very confident (dare I say skilful?) when, in the middle of the novel, you come across a two-page recap that reminds the readers what the hell they've been reading so far.

In short - disappointment. Stephen Marlowe and his Chester Drum post were long overdue on this blog, but I wish it would be for some other book. This one is memorable only for one of the most idiotic takes on the Cold War (see 'Object of Desire' section of the facts below) and maybe also for some pretty ridiculous LSD trip descriptions.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
His eyes examined my card for the first time.  It said I was Chester Drum. I did confidential investigations, I had an office in the Farrell Building on F Street in downtown Washington and could be seen with or without appointment or any way at all.

Bad guy(s):
"He runs the show. You want a name for it, I'll give you one. He's the chief hatchetman for the Reds. He can make men dance on five continents."

Location: 
Washington, Reykjavik, Akureyri (400 km from Reykjavik), Stockholm

Body count:  
9 + Wally's dog Benards. Interestingly, the main villain survives in this one and only gets away with a broken arm.

The object of desire: 
Preventing a fishing war between Iceland and the UK that the Commies would like to exploit.

Huh? Let's see how this gets explained to our hero: 

"And Chet, if the key to world mastery, thanks to intercontinental missiles whose shortest route lies over the Pole, is the Arctic Ocean, then the key to the Arctic is Iceland, Now do you see where we stand?"

Makes sense now, doesn't it?

Dames: 
Maja Kolding, a small blonde with ice-blue eyes only a little colder than the Rhone glacier. Unfortunately, after the opening, she's mostly out of the picture.

Baroness Margaretha:
She was not quite  twice the size of Anita Ekberg, and all of it in splendid proportion... She was that kind of woman. Her eyes were green, her large breasts fought against the white wisp of the Bikini top, her hips, bare for a couple of devastating inches above the Bikini bottom, were broad and firm-fleshed, her long legs were as tanned as a beach-boy's and as shapely as a Grecian statue's. She was an insolent-eyed, thick-lipped sex-bomb of a woman, to end all insolent-eyed, thick-lipped sex-bombs. she was probably a Swede.

Stewardess Freya, a fine-boned, almost delicate. brunette:
It was as if there were two Freyas - the one pleasantly and lightly seductive who did all the talking, the other silent and deeper with an almost astonishing understated desire and need. Alone either one of them would have been a memorable occasion for a man who likes such memorable occasions. Together they could have stirred even an octogenarian.

And when both Freyas finally have sex with Drum, the whole thing is described pretty - oh well - octogenarian-ish:

It was swift and explosive and then it built - a slow mounting fusion of lips, arms, legs, bodies - to magic.

And to conclude this section - there's a cool blurb on the cover saying: "She was a daydream turned into a nightmare - the most lethal beauty Chester Drum had ever met"

Nice one indeed, although I'm not 100% sure whether it refers to the Baroness or to Freya.

Blackout: 
She held it [the rifle] by the metal barrel and was swinging it like a baseball bat. I dove for the ground and got halfway down before the heavy walnut stock took the top of my head off.

The peculiar thing about this one is that afterwards, Drum still manages to walk for three hours before collapsing. But let us not question this too much since even "Dr. Ericksson says it sometimes happens like that, even with severe concussion." 

Anyway, he loses his consciousnesses twice more, but neither one is especially memorable:
Dark sky split and spun sickeningly a hundred and eighty degrees until it was beneath my feet, and I plunged in,

The blow drove me to my knees and a dark closed on my brain, squeezing out consciousness.

Title: 
One of the early Drum titles in the form of:

Murder/Trouble/Terror/Violence/Homicide/Danger/Death/...
is my 
Meat/Dish/Name/Trade/Business/Comrade/Pay/Job/...

It's fair to say that it is one of the coolest. Except for, of course, "Killers Are My Meat"!

Edition:  
Gold Medal #947, First Printing, January 1960

Cover: 
An iconic and super cool illustration by Barye Phillips.

Cool lines: 

With her left hand she shut the door and leaned on it. That made her right-handed, because in her right hand, and pointing it where such things will be pointed, she held a small, snub-barreled revolver, a belly-gun.
The phone went on ringing. the shower went on hissing and drumming. I went on living - for a while.

Don't Call Tonight a.k.a. End of a Call Girl (William Campbell Gault, 1958)

Had a pretty shitty streak of book choices lately, ranging from an ultra boring and annoying Perry Mason to a couple of old British spy thrillers, so I just wanted to get back on track with some classic PI stuff. I had read Gault's "Million Dollar Tramp" not long ago, so I knew what to expect with this one.

And I did get the classical detective stuff that I'd wanted. However, unfortunately, except for my favourite type of opening (a PI hired by a damsel in distress in his shabby office), there's nothing really positive to report about this one.

The biggest problem is our protagonist. He's simply not very imaginative and totally lacks initiative. At times he gets so lost that instead of doing proper gumshoeing, he reads Western paperbacks (btw - approved) or goes playing golf (not fucking cool). He simply goes out on a stakeout on one occasion because "I had nothing else to do"?!? And even though he works with the police, he gets most of the information from newspapers and radio.

It gets worse. Or maybe it's better since it's a bit comical. When he finally gets a hold of the suspect, who might be able to give him some useful clues, our man Joe fucks up the interrogation and subsequently gets so frustrated that he beats this poor schmuck so hard that the guy ends up in a hospital. Not exactly Marlowe-esque, right? Therefore, due to his inefficient techniques, it takes him over 150 pages to obtain a vital clue. He goes for lunch and accidentally runs into one of his fellow sleuthing colleagues who investigated one of Joe's current suspects in a totally unrelated case. During the chat, he then opens Joe's eyes to information that both he and the police have somehow overlooked. Eureka! And again - not exactly Marlowe-esque...

A bit amateurish but still bearable. In a way, it is even amusing. But coupled with a corny romance involving one of his suspects and topped with some lame self-pitying midlife crisis philosophy, it proved to be too much for me.

Not good, not bad, just another formulaic novel. I think I'm probably a bit pissed off and mean towards Joe because of the climax. You see, the twist has to do with homosexuality. I'm certainly no prude, don't care much about political correctness and try not to judge old books from the modern perspective, but at the same time, reading about the queers, degenerates, and half-people,... did leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, for fuck's sake - half people!?

Okay, if you were reading Perry Mason before this one, but otherwise...

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
"My name is Puma," I said.
She stood in the doorway of her apartment and looked at me without interest. "Is that supposed to mean anything to me?"

Location:
L.A.

Body count: 

2

Dames:
Jean Talsman, the call girl. Her madame Mrs Dora Diggert. Her flatmate (and Joe's playmate) is Mary Cefalu, the model. Mrs Rafferty, the red-headed secretary with a shady past.

Blackouts:
Redness flooded my brain, but I was still conscious as I went down, conscious and powerless. As soon as I went prone, they began to kick me.
The last thing I heard, before a shoe caught my chin and brought oblivion, was the voice of the man whose throat I had held.
"God-damned snooping shamus," he was muttering.

Title: 
I have no idea where the "calling tonight" business came from. There was no fatal phone call in this one. The original American title "End of a Call Girl" is a bit more appropriate and accurate. The call girl in question survives this one, but she's now engaged to be married, so that would make the end of her as a call girl.

Edition:
Mayflower B-39, 1962

Cover:
Nice colours and lovely Kim Novak lookalike blonde. The original one with the Marilyn Monroe lookalike doesn't look bad, either.

Cool lines: 

/

Dolls are Deadly (Brett Halliday, 1960)

Pretty cool opening. Shayne is in his office nursing a glass of his Hennessy cognac, working on the dilemma of putting out his cigarette. He opts for the hardest of the three available choices by swinging his long legs to the floor and thumbing it out in an ashtray. And then the trouble comes knocking on his office door. Only this time, the trouble isn't shaped as some beautiful damsel in distress. The distressed one is a muscle man of the local loan shark, and there are two reasons for his disturbed mental state. Someone has sent him a couple of voodoo dolls!

After a mere five pages (of pretty large print), our shamus throws the big man out and reminds his secretary (who stopped typing and looked up reproachfully):

"I draw the line, Lucy, at keeping a professional murderer from being murdered. I know the law doesn't, but I have a code of ethics which I don't think it would hurt the law to embrace."

And then off he goes fishing with his Cuban friend Sylvester!

Pretty funny, I liked it. But in the very next chapter, things start to go downhill a bit. His little Cuban captain is being exploited by three shady characters, and it doesn't take long before he ends up under his ship tied to an anchor. Which is not that good. I mean, obviously, it's pretty fucking bad for Sylvester, but what bothered me was that personal crap got involved, and I don't like that in P.I. stories. However, on a positive note, at least it's not family crap which is the worst kind of personal crap.

But I'm digressing. So, we have two unrelated cases that our sleuth needs to solve. It won't be much of a spoiler to reveal that it turns out they are not unrelated. Nothing unusual, of course, about that. It follows well-established and proven formulas, and we read such stuff all the time. What is worth mentioning is that these two affairs are linked by sheer coincidence. Protagonists of both sub-plots simply attend to Madame Swoboda's mystic seances.

Unlike coincidences combined with personal/family shit is usually a recipe for disaster (sometimes for laughter), but it still works in this one. The story is quite complex, and it culminates in a cool twist, reminiscent of a Ross Macdonald-esque tragedy.

I also liked the style. This is one of the first Shayne novels that were ghostwritten (according to this website by Walter Ryerson Johnson). The writer attempted to capture the original style of the 1940s and succeeded remarkably well (check out the 'dames' and 'cool lines' in the facts below). But at the same time, it also feels like it was penned out pretty quickly without much reviewing and/or rewriting. Some scenes simply don't make much sense and feel like leftover ideas that the author forgot to drop when trying to reach his word count before the deadline. Why would Shayne take his secretary to an interview with his client and then leave her waiting in his car?

Charming. The coolest Shayne I can remember.

4/5

Facts:

Hero:
"Michael Shayne?" Ed repeated quickly. He looked at Shayne, as did Slim and Vince, from the wheelhouse. "You mean," Ed said with unsteadiness in his voice, "you're Michael Shayne, the private detective?"
"The same," Sylvester said proudly. "My friend, he is famous everywhere."
"Well, I'm damned!" Ed smoothed his angel's halo of graying hair. "Miami's best-known detective on our boat. Wait'll I tell the folks back home."

Bad guys:
It was rumored that he had known Lucky Luciano before Luciano was deported to Italy, and had since visited with the dope and vice czar there. However, as yet no crimes of consequence had been hung on De Luca by local or federal lawmen, for he was cunning and capable as well as ruthless.

Location:
Miami

Body count: 

3

Dames:
There's Clarissa Milford with a smooth golden head... tall, but her bones were light... she gave the impression of delicate fragility... she seemed to be one of those rare feminine creatures without imperfection.

But the real star is the mystic Madame Swoboda. Check out her anatomical details: 

...ample and worldly breasts, extraordinary long lashes, slim fingers, aquiline nose. Her features were regular, her skin clear and fair, her face beautiful and tantalizing. 

Blackouts:

/

Title: 
Someone is sending around voodoo dolls, and some recipients end up dead.

Edition:
Jove Books, May 1989

Cover:
A horribly generic photo, so I'm also including the original McGinnis illustration. 

Cool lines:
In any case, since murder unaccountably was breathing down the necks of some people, a talk with Sylvester was strongly indicated.