Showing posts with label Berkley Medallion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berkley Medallion. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

The Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter


The Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter, by Mike Barry
May, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The Lone Wolf series continues to impress, if for no other reason than the strange vibe Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg brings to the tale. Not to mention the clear fact that he’s winging his way through the narrative. In a way this brings the reader into the creative process, as it’s almost as if you and Malzberg are fguring out where the story is going at the same time. 

As I was reading Chicago Slaughter it occurred to me why I rate The Lone Wolf so highly: I have no idea what’s going to happen next. With one of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, for example, you pretty much know exactly what’s going to happen; each installment follows the same overall pattern, and only in the particulars might there be any surprises. Or more pointedly, in one of James Dockery’s The Butcher novels, there’s no surprise whatsoever, as each volume is essentially a rewrite of the one that came before: if you’ve read one Dockery Butcher, you’ve read them all. 

But man, this does not hold true for Barry Malzberg’s The Lone Wolf. There is no telling where the plot will go or what the characters will do. While you’d expect this would bring more “realism” to the tale, it only serves to make the series even more surreal, at least when compared to other men’s adventure novels. Malzberg, clearly unaware of any “rules” for this genre, will do what he pleases – for example, if some new tough professional assassin is introduced to the tale, don’t make the assumption that this guy will eventually tangle with “hero” Burt Wulff, as would happen if such a character were to be introduced in an Executioner novel. Instead, some other random element or character might interfere with this typical format, meaning there might not even be a confrontation with Wulff at all. In a way of course it’s anticlimatic, but at the same time it’s cool because it makes the series so unpredictable. 

For once there’s no direct pickup from the previous volume, but this is still a continuity-heavy series. Last we saw Wulff he was headed out of Cuba; when we meet up with him in Chicago Slaughter he’s just come into New York, and it’s a few days or so after the climax of the previous book. His goal is to shove the suitcase of heroin he’s been toting around “in the face” of Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the NYPD. Malzberg has introduced this conceit that Williams, to Wulff, represents “the System,” and Wulff’s goal is to show Williams how corrupt and unworkable the system is. But this theme really only exists in Wulff’s own deranged mind, as we learn from the frequent sequences from Williams’s perspective that Williams too questions the system, and spends the entirety of Chicago Slaughter recuperating in the hospital from a stabbing he endured (courtesy a black drug dealer) in the opening pages of the book. 

Wulff too does some serious pondering throughout Chicago Slaughter. A recurring sentiment in the series has been Wulff’s “I’m aleady dead” line, but in this one he starts to wonder whether he really is ready to die. He also becomes “sick” of his one-man war on the syndicate, due to the “ugliness” of the death he leaves in his wake everywhere he goes. Once again Malzberg truly brings a morbid tonality to the series, with that same ghoulish focus on recently-dead victims of Wulff:

The manner of that way in which a man gave up life was some comment on how he had held onto it during his time, and Versallo had wanted very much to live.  Now, lying still in the posture of death the mouth had fallen open, rigidified into a pained bark of dismay and horror as if Versallo had caught some glimpse of the actual form of death during his passage and had screamed out against it, was maintaining that scream evey now.  A mystery, Wulff though, a mystery -- life, death, the intertwining of the two, none of it ever to be understood; and yet men attempted to control death in the way that they did, inflicting it, holding it off because only that gave them a feeling of immortality.

Or an earlier part, where Wulff shoots a guy and we are informed that “He died as if he had been practicing it alone in bed a long time.” It probably says more about me than Malzberg when I admit that stuff like this has me laughing out loud as I read it. Really this series is either a darkly comic masterpiece or just a depraved tale for depraved minds. Speaking of which Wulff – and I guess Malzberg – crosses a line this time that isn’t too commonly crossed in the world of men’s adventure: Wulff kills a few members of law enforcement. Not dirty ones, either (or at least if they are, we aren’t told so); just guys who are attempting to bring him in. Generally these lone wolf heroes refrain from killing cops, but Wulff flat-out murders these guys, gunning them down in cold blood. Later on he realizes he could’ve let them live, but essentially shrugs it off. Still, these murders gradually make Wulff question himself and his vendetta, but more importantly these murders have the reader questioning what kind of a hero Burt Wulff really is. (Spoiler alert: He isn’t a hero at all, but that’s been clear since the start of the series.) 

The metaphysical vibe I love so much about The Lone Wolf is still here; another conceit is that bigwigs in the criminal underworld will throw themselves at Wulff, arrogantly assuming they’ll be able to break him…but of course they end up themselves broken. This happens a few tines in Chicago Slaughter, the first with a Mafia executive who tries and fails to defeat Wulff’s will, and then toward the end with an even higher-level executive who think he has defeated Wulff’s will – but only manages to have him escorted out of the country. This conceit adds to the dreamlike quality of the series; the impression is almost that Wulff is a supernatural presence. 

Mel Crair’s typically-great cover is misleading, as once again there’s no female character in this volume…for Wulff, at least. The sleaze quotient is filled by a random busty secretary in the employ of one of the Syndicate executives Wulff goes up against. The sex scene between these two is pretty bonkers:

He locked the door and checking his watch decided that he could give her ten minutes.  Ten minutes was more than enough for what he needed; he banged the shit out of her, working her up and down, and demanded that she finish him off with her mouth.  She balked, one timid peep of resistance, but he gave her the look and repeated the demand and she went at it without another word.  Drained him dry.  Drained him fucking dry.  He came in her mouth gasping, groaning, beating on the slick surfaces of the couch like a butterfly, forgetting for the moment that he was fifty-three years old, that he was hooked up to his neck, that most of the time he had trouble coming, that he had kicked horse five years ago and there had truly never been a period of more than an hour since then when he had not been in agony for it...forgot all of this beating and screaming against the couch, coming into her mouth and she held it there when he had finished, her cheeks bloated until at a look from him she swallowed all of it with a gasp.  Thought she she would be able to ditch his seed in some toilet but no one was going to get away with that.  

The construction of the plot is also “spur of the moment;” as mentioned Wulff when we meet him is in New York, even though “Chicago” is in the book’s title. And in fact the first chapter implies that the book will be set in New York, featuring an evocative opening of Williams, undercover in Harlem, being stabbed. But when Wulff hears of a Federal prosecutor who is taking on the drug world in Chicago, he decides to just go there and take this guy the valise with a million dollars worth of “shit.” Though just as often it’s referred to as “two million dollars worth of shit.” Again, the series is pretty loosy-goosy with facts and elements of realism; despite getting hold of a revolver late in the book, Wulff still hunts for “clips” for it. Oh and the action scenes, despite being relatively smallscale – ie, Wulff just shooting a couple people – are still apocalyptic. In this one Wulff manages to burn down a building, unaware that he’s even done so until after the fact; even he is awed by his supernatural qualities. 

But the Federal prosecutor thing isn’t much dwelt upon; instead, Wulff gets caught (another recurring conceit of the series) and taken into the presence of one of those Mafia bigwigs. After this Wulff is caught again, but this part is super random, seeing as it does Wulff getting into some road rage on the parkway with another motorist, one who runs Wulff off the road(!). After this Wulff turns himself over to the Chicago cops – lots of stuff here about how brutal and simple-minded Chicago cops are – and later on he’s taken into the presence of yet another Mafia bigwig. Indeed, Malzberg has spun so many wheels that by novel’s end he just barely remembers the entire “Federal prosecutor” subplot, and quickly brushes it off with some dialog. 

As for that second Mafia bigwig, his name is Calabrese and Wulff senses that he’s the most senior underworld boss Wulff has yet encountered. Such a boss that Calabrese, an old man, essentially tells Wulff that he, Wulff, is really nothing more than something “interesting to think about,” and decides to let him live…for reasons that have more to do with how Wulff brings excitement to an old man’s life. Or something. At any rate Chicago Slaughter ends with Wulff about to be escorted by Calabrese’s men to someplace outside the United States, where I suppose Calabrese intends Wulff to stew for a while until the old man calls for him – I’m really not sure, but the entire thing, not to mention Wulff’s blasé reaction to it all, just makes the entire scenario seem all the more surreal. 

Like I’ve said many times before, it’s totally unlike typical genre entries like The Executioner or The Penetrator, but The Lone Wolf really is one of my favorite series, and I’m having a great time reading it.

Thursday, September 21, 2023

The Proud Enemy (The Demu Trilogy #2)


The Proud Enemy, by F.M. Busby
June, 1975  Berkley Medallion

The Demu Trilogy continues with this second installment, which was published as a paperback original two years after Cage A Man.  Once again, though, I read the complete reprint of the novel as found in the 1980 Pocket Books paperback The Demu Trilogy.  Before The Proud Enemy, this anthology also features a mostly-forgettable short story titled “The Learning Of Eeshta,” focused on the young “female” Demu introduced in the first novel, and how she goes about learning of mankind; it originally appeared in If Magazine, and takes place in the final quarter of Cage A Man.

As for The Proud Enemy, it opens right at the ending of Cage A Man, thus giving the impression that this trilogy is indeed one long book.  As we’ll recall, that novel ended with hero Barton commanding the Demu starship he escaped from captivity, in, and now part of a fleet of 40 Earth starships that was about to set off on an assault upon the Demu homeworld.  However, more focus was placed in that novel on Barton's alien girlfriend, Limila, getting a bunch of plastic surgery to look human again, rather than this interstellar war plot.

Ultimately this will prove true for The Proud Enemy as well, but initially Busby does follow on with the space combat stuff. But it’s goofy and continues the juvenile tone of Cage A Man (ie, where Barton took over a Demu spacecraft and managed to fly it back to Earth and land unscathed). For, moments after the fleet launches into space, they all sort of hover there for a bit and Barton and Space Agency rep Tarleton get on the viewscreen and brief the other 39 ships on the objectives of the mission, complete with a rundown of Barton’s captivity and who the Demu are – and also the fact that there are a few aliens with Barton on his ship. 

This all made me laugh out loud. I mean folks, don’t you think such a briefing should’ve taken place before the armada took off from Earth? I mean clearly it’s all here for the readers who bought The Proud Enemy but hadn’t read the previous book; catchup material that just comes off as doubly ridiculous when collected here in The Demu Trilogy. But man it really is ridiculous, complete with Barton calling little Eeshta over to the viewscreen and having her pull up her robe so he can show the viewers her lobster-like exterior shell and talk about the sexual apparati of the Demu race! 

Actually, around this point something occurred to me about The Demu Trilogy. This juvenile tone, where a “regular” guy can escape alien captivity, steal one of their ships, hook up with another alien babe, and then fly back to Earth where he ultimately becomes the boss of a space armada – all this, really, could be seen as coming from Barton’s own imagination. In Cage A Man Busby stressed that Barton was able to survive his eight years of captivity via his skills with “hallucination,” where Barton would create a reality in his mind and escape there. So who’s to say the events of the trilogy itself aren’t just the product of Barton’s imagination, still trapped there in his Demu cell? But then again, as Alan Moore once said (no doubt while stroking his beard in deep thought): “Aren’t all stories imaginary?” 

I could press my theory without much effort. I mean, even though Barton et al are on a spaceship headed off into another galaxy to kick some alien ass, the plot soon becomes focused on…who sleeps in what bed. Barton’s ship, Tarleton explains, is special because it’s equally made up of men and women…so Barton can sleep with Limila and the other men and women can sleep with each other. Seriously, a whole bunch of narrative space is focused on this, and little details like description of the ship’s interior and etc are pushed to the side. And once again F.M. Busby is a “cut to black” author when any of the sexual material arises; there is absolutely nothing in the way of explicit material. 

Since the voyage lasts a long time, we also get material on how the bedmates are free to, uh, swap, though Barton doesn’t partake because as we’ll recall he’s in love with Limila, she of the 60 teeth, six fingers and toes, half-bald head, and boobs that hang low on her rib cage. Busby goes to great pains to show Barton’s complaceny with Limila’s alien nature, totally devoted to her and all, and it just seems strange to me because I must’ve missed the part where he fell in love with her in the first place. As stated in my review of Cage A Man, Barton and Limila’s star-crossed romance was forced into the narrative with little setup or explanation. 

Not that this stops Barton from some action on the side. Limila’s people, the Tilarans, are kind of reserved and overly formal, yet casual sex is the rule. Male and female Tilarans will openly fondle a person, moments after meeting them, if they find them attractive. Kids, don’t try this at home! My impression was Busby was taking the ‘70s swinger vibe into a sci-fi setting, and Limila takes off with an old boyfriend to spend the night with him the night they land on Tilara, and Barton meanwhile scores (off-page, naturally) with some Tilaran gal who starts fondling him. 

Busby’s powers of description are pretty weak throughout. Tilara is hardly described, and again, what we do learn is filtered through the rudimentary prism that is Barton’s mind – he can’t make “much sense” out of Tilaran traffic and architecture and whatnot, so Busby just leaves it at that. Again, one can easily argue that such topical details are limited because Barton’s imagination is limited, and he’s the one creating this entire scenario in his mind. But it is really lame; like a part where Barton goes to a Tilaran hospital and Busby notes that a Tilaran is sitting there, “reading,” and you’re left wondering, “Reading what?” I mean, do they have lurid-cover paperbacks on Tilara? Is the guy reading a notepad? Have they advanced to display screens? It’s just all so vague as to be maddening. 

Oh but I forgot: that bedswapping scenario on the ship leads to some confrontations. A young hothead named app Fenn, son of a Space Agency bigshot, bullies his way from one gal to the next, wanting to get all the sex possible. This frustrates the woman who was previously rooming with app Fenn, and Barton goes to soothe the guy, instead getting in a fight with him – Barton smashing app Fenn in the face with a chair. Later Limila goes to app Fenn to offer herself to him, explaining to Barton later that this is a time-honored Tilaran custom in which women call off the blood feud between two men. But when app Fenn sees that Limila does not have breasts (which we’ll recall were lopped off by the Demu in the previous book), he sends her back to Barton with the message that Barton can keep his “plastic woman.” 

Whereas this would lead to a violent confrontation in a typical novel, Barton instead seethes for a bit…and then Busby drops the ball entirely, with app Fenn getting in some other trouble when the crew lands on Tilara. Barton and app Fenn never even have a proper squaring off. As for Limila’s boobs, we get a repeat of the plastic surgery onslaught of the previous book, as Tilaran doctors graft on a new pair for her and put in teeth buds to regrow her second set of teeth, and yada yada yada. So much of this stuff is just retread of Cage A Man, I mean two volumes of this “trilogy” are devoted to Limila being turned into a Demu, then into a human, then finally back into a Tilaran. 

Things pick up when Hishtoo, the surly Demu captive, steals a ship, along with a few Tilaran hostages. Here Hishtoo gets his revenge, messaging back that he, too, will eat his captives, same as Barton did in Cage A Man. Barton gives chase in his own ship – and here we learn that space travel doesn’t make for the most thrilling action. Like when they spot Hishtoo’s ship, eventually, and to decelerate so they can come abreast him will take…approximately thirty-some days. It’s sort of like that throughout; Busby spends more time on characters sitting around in undescribed rooms on the ship, drinking stale coffee and eating various alien cuisines. 

Even crazier, The Proud Enemy doesn’t even lead to a thrilling conclusion. Instead, it sees Barton and comrades disguised as Demu and walking around on the Demu homeworld of Sisshain, where they come upon a massive spaceship that clearly was not made by the Demu. Instead, some ancient race preceded them and the Demu stole their tech from them; something that was alluded to by Tarleton in the previous book, but apparently a secret so devastating that the Demu are willing to sue for peace to keep it all a secret. 

So this second installment of the trilogy was pretty lame. Not much in it really happened, and what did happen mostly came off as a replay of stuff in Cage A Man. The trilogy concluded with End Of The Line, which appeared five years later in The Demu Trilogy. Since I’ve gotten this far I’ll be reviewing that one soon, too.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit


The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit, by Mike Barry
March, 1974  Berkley Medallion Books

Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg ventures even further into stream-of-conscious territory with this fifth volume of The Lone Wolf, which per series template begins immediately after the events of the previous volume. As we’ll recall, Martin (or Burt, we haven’t figured it out yet) Wulff has just gotten on a plane bound for New York, a valise with “a million dollars worth of shit” (aka uncut heroin) with him. 

As Havana Hit opens, the plane has redirected as the result of a hijacking. While initially I thought this was a coincidence, at length Wulff realizes that the hijacking has occurred because of him. Or, rather, because of the valise. Like the previous valise of heroin Wulff toted around in the earliest volumes, this one is a MaGuffin in the true sense; it moves the plot along because everyone wants it, but otherwise it has no real bearing on anything. And as mentioned it’s interchangeable with the prevoius valise of heroin, which Wulff tossed in a lake in Boston

I do like The Lone Wolf, but I’m finding myself more interested in what is going on in Barry Malzberg’s head than I am in what’s atually happening in the books. And there’s no question what’s going on in Malzberg’s head, as this time he retreats even further into his own headspace, doling out incessant observations on society, crime, Cuba, trust between colleagues, and what have you. I mean in no way whatsoever could you ever confuse this series with The Executioner. There is a strange, surreal texture to Lone Wolf that is similar to The Butcher in how it all comes off like the events of a dream. Wulff is our guide through the dream, making things happen, as ever his mere presence somehow affecting reality – nowhere more apparent than in this opening, where a plane filled with people is hijacked merely so the Syndicate can get their clutches on Wulff. 

This is the least action-centric installment yet. Not that the previous ones were action blockbusters, but Havana Hit is so confined to Wulff’s mental musings that the action comes off as a distraction. Adding to the weird vibe of the series is the fixation on death. There might be gore in other men’s adventure novels of the day, but generally the victim is forgotten about after we’ve been told how his head’s exploded and his brains have burst out. Not so here. When Wulff or someone else shoots a guy Malzberg will keep going back to him, focusing on the corpse, how it changes appearance in its postortem state, the killer thinking again of how easily life is stamped out and how death equals us all out, etc. In a way it’s so overdone that it made me think of the MST3K episode Night Of The Blood Beast, where the characters kept obsessing over the corpse of an astronaut and Mike Nelson quipped, “I’ve never seen a man so dead!” 

Well anyway, Malzberg’s clearly winging it this time. This has been apparent in previous volumes but this time it’s especially pronounced. It is clear that Malzberg just sits down at his typewriter and writes, and what comes out is what gets printed. There is no editing to take out any chaff; Malzberg-via-Wulff will wax morbidly about mundane things for pages and pages at times. The observant reader can even detect Malzberg pushing himself at times to get back to the plot – there are parts where Malzberg literally commands himself to get back on-track so far as the story goes. But as mentioned I kind of enjoy this aspect because I like to see the feverish mind of a writer at work. 

All of which is to say the plot of Havana Hit is pretty thin. In a nutshell, Wulff’s plane is hijacked, the hijackers take it to Cuba, and the passengers are anticlimactically let go (off page) and Wulff finds out the entire thing was orchestrated just to get hold of him. Meanwhile Delgado, a sadistic Cuban military official whose sadism is a gauze for the cowardice he displayed back in the ‘50s as one of Castro’s flunkies in the mountains, brutally kills off the hijackers for bringing this problem to them. As mentioned though Malzberg has no grand plan when he starts writing, thus as the novel progresses Delgado is retconned into being a Syndicate man himself, even though in his intro he hates the hijackers for being so stupid as to believe they would have friends here in Cuba. It’s all very hazy because it’s so underdeveloped. 

As for Wulff, he manages to free himself in one of the novel’s few action scenes. Taken off in a helicopter, supposedly to freedom, Wulff realizes it’s really a hit and as ever takes matters into his own hands. In this way he meets Stevens, an American expat currently working for the Cubans as a helicopter pilot. Stevens factors heavily in the second half of the novel, serving as a meek counterpoint to Wulff; whereas Wulff takes life by the reigns and makes things happen, Stevens has spent his life running from responsibility. But even in this characterization Barry Malzberg can’t stay consistent; Stevens will periodically change from resigned to inspired, whichever benefits the current whims of the plot. 

What it really comes down to is a lot of mordant commentary on Cuba. Havana Hit offers interesting period commentary in that the Castro regime is fairly new to power and, in Wulff’s eyes, Cuba had almost become an American annex during the previous regime – every native he meets speaks English and acts like an American. There’s also a lot of musing on Stevens’s lack of resolve and how it “bleeds” into Wulff, making him in danger of losing his killer drive or somesuch. To tell the truth it’s all very weird and as ever things just play out as if it’s all a dream. I mean Stevens, despite spending his life not wanting to get involved, decides to go confront Delgado with Wulff, and even though the two of them only have old revolvers the ensuing firefight is so apocalyptic that the second floor of a building explodes. 

Another recurring schtick of The Lone Wolf is that a secondary “main villain” is revealed in the final pages. The same holds true here, with Delgado, built up as the main villain in the first third of the book, unceremoniously replaced by a new guy who works in the Intelligence division of the Cuban military. But it all comes down to that damn valise of heroin, which everyone wants, but no one more so than Wulff himself. So we have yet another recurring schtick of a finale where Wulff takes on everyone – including supposed comrades – to retain possession of “his property.” 

While enjoyable just for the second-hand buzz of the whole surreal aspect, Havana Hit is really a sort of stumble in the series; I suspect you could just skip it altogether and not even miss anything. For by novel’s end Wulff is once again airborne, headed back for the US with his valise of heroin, which is exactly how the previous volume ended. But judging from the title of the next installment, it looks like Wulff ends up in Chicago instead of his desired destination of New York.

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Midnight


Midnight, by Dean Koontz
November, 1989  Berkley Books

Dean Koontz was one of those ubiquitous horror authors in the ‘80s; I’d see his name everywhere, but I never read any of his books. Of course at the time his image was that he was a second-rate Stephen King, or some other dismissive impression, and I didn’t know any kids in school who read his books. Of course, they lapped up VC Andrews and stuff like that, but that’s another story. All I mean to say is, you’d always see Stephen King books in my middle school and high school in the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, but you’d never see a Dean Koontz book. In fact the only place I ever saw one was my mom’s copy of Twilight Eyes, which I never read. 

But, as has been documented in recent reviews, I’ve been on a random horror kick lately…and I was looking for a “creature feature” read…and I stumbled upon this Koontz novel, which seems to be the epitome of a creature feature. Indeed the contemporary Kirkus states this bluntly. So I decided to make Midnight my next horror read, even though it was pretty long – which seems to be typical of horror novels in general – coming in at an unwieldy 470 pages of small, dense print in this Berkley paperback edition. Long story short, Midnight served up the creature-featuring I wanted, with the caveat that the abundant description and character introspection ultimately ruined the impact, turning the novel into a chore of a read. Also, most curiously of all, the abundant description did not extend to the creatures. Lots of description of the fog and the mist and the forest, sure, but when it came to the werewolves, monsters, and even cyborgs who populated the tale, for the most part – at least for the first 300 or so pages – Koontz would only provide slight description of them. This I guess is akin to a monster movie where the monster stays in the shadows for the majority of the film. 

First off, this is the horror novel Burt Hirschfeld never wrote. Koontz’s prose style, with the heavy atmospherics and introspection, is uncannily reminiscent of Hirschfeld’s, at least in this novel. But then it occurred to me that Koontz was the guy who, the decade before, published Writing Popular Fiction, a book which gave specific directions on how to write like Burt Hirschfeld. However I mean this solely in the way the narrative unfolds, not in the content; unlike a genuine Hirschfeld novel, Midnight is not overly concerned with the sex lives of its characters. In fact the novel is relatively anemic in the sexual arena. What a bummer, man! But in the constant probing of its characters’ thoughts and emotions it is very reminiscent of something by Burt Hirschfeld. 

But whereas this constant probing of emotions works in a Hirschfeld novel, where the emotions of the characters compel them in their sexual urges and whatnot, it unfortunately becomes a drag in a horror novel. I mean when you have werewolves, cyborgs, and a creature that’s literally stated as looking like the titular monster from Alien, the last thing you want is to incessantly be informed about how people feel, or what they think, or what incident in the past caused them to think and feel the way they do now, and etc. I mean the plot Koontz delivers requires a fat-free delivery to really work. Instead it becomes a ponderous bloat with way too much extranneous detail and stalling. The monsters are lost amid the rampant navel-gazing. 

That said, the writing is very good…it’s just too much of a good thing. I did enjoy the atmospheric word-painting, with Koontz very much bringing to life the coastal Californian town in which Midnight occurs. I also dug the glimpse into the inner views of the cast of characters. But around page 150 I felt like I’d hit a brick wall. Even crazier was that Koontz wouldn’t let up on it; I mean the novel is split into three parts, the entire thing taking place over a day or two, and part one gradually (very gradually) builds up the creature feature you’ve been wanting. Then part two takes three steps back with immediate and obtrusive flashbacks for the main characters – even an egregious dream sequence that goes on for several pages. I could only imagine what a more streamlined author could’ve done with the plot setup. 

For make no mistake, Midnight is straight-up pulp horror in its conceit: it’s literally about a mad scientist who conducts Island Of Dr. Moreau style experiments on the populace of a small town. But Koontz clouds the pulp fun with way too much introspection and discussion, explaining everything away to the point that it’s not nearly as fun as it should be. I mean even late in the game, when the few heroes have finally found one another, the sole humans in this monster-plagued town, and decide to do something about it…even here we get long-winded discussions on the “nature of man” and how “not all scientists” are like the crazy bastard here in town who has patterned himself after Dr. Moreau. I mean who gives a shit? Go kill a friggin’ werewolf or something! 

But man those first hundred pages or so I was really into Midnight. Koontz sets the scene with an evocative opening in which a young woman goes running at night through Moonlight Cove, a closeknit community on the coast of California. Soon she is chased by creatures, and here Koontz’s “keep them off the page” motif actually works, because they’re just shadows with luminescent eyes. The poor young woman soon meets her fate, which starts the story proper. Hers is not the first murder in town; Sam Booker, the character who comes closest to being the main protagonist, arrives in Moonlight Cove shortly thereafter to figure out what’s going on. Sam is an FBI agent, and the Bureau has taken stock of the untoward amount of “random deaths” in the small town. 

Another new person in town is Tessa Lockland, “cute” blonde thirty-something documentary filmmaker who happens to have been the sister of the young woman killed in the opening scene. She too will soon learn that there are monsters about. Also there’s Chrissie Foster, an 11 year-old who has experienced first-hand the weirdness that has taken over Moonlight Cove, given that her parents have turned into monsters(!). Along with a disabled ‘Nam vet named Harry Talbot (and his service assistant dog Moose), these four people will be Moonlight Cove’s only hope. 

Meanwhile there’s the villain of the piece: Thomas Shaddack, a Bill Gates type who is mega-wealthy due to his work in the tech field and lives in a mansion in an exclusive area of town. I thought this book was right up my alley when Shaddack was introduced in what could’ve been a scene out of Altered States, floating in a sensory deprivation tank and literally getting off on the thoughts of his own grandeur. But Shaddack too is undone by the dense onslaught of introspection and narratorial padding; he starts the novel like a pure villain but ends it as a whimpering narcissist. On the villain side there’s also Loman Watkins, police chief of Moonlight Cove and one of the prime movers of the “accidental death” lies which have brought Sam Booker to town. 

Long story short, Shaddack has devised methodology for advancing the human body, turning them into “New People” via injections which shoot various technology into the system, making people undergo “The Change” before they are reborn as supermen and superwomen with all kinds of augmentations. But one doesn’t get much choice when it comes to “the jab.” First Shaddack forced the change on Loman and the rest of the cops, then injections were given to the public in random groupings. The title of the novel has to do with Sam’s discovery that Shaddack plans to have injected the entirety of Moonlight Cove by “midnight” of the night after Sam’s arrived in town. Personally I felt the title was not suitable for the novel; “Midnight” implies almost a Gothic sort of vibe and doesn’t convey the glut of monsters one will encounter in the book. 

It takes quite a while for Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie to learn all this, though. The first hundred-some pages concern the three of them trying to make their way across a strange and dangerous Moonlight Cove. The stuff with Chrissie definitely has a Stephen King vibe to it, first with her parents – who are apparently werewolves – chasing her out of her house, and the plucky little girl making her laborious way through the woods, hiding underground, hitching rides, and etc as she tries to get to safety. One might say Chrissie is a bit too plucky for an 11 year-old, though Koontz has it that she’s an avid reader (one who dreams of being a writer one day), but I was an avid 11 year-old reader (not too many years before this book was published, in fact), and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to handle myself as well as Chrissie does. 

Koontz really goes for a slow burn in this opening part, with Sam and Tessa slowly realizing something very disturbing is amiss. But the suspense angle is blown for us readers due to the sequences that focus on Thomas Shaddack and Loman Watkins, as we immediately know what’s going on in town. Thus there’s a feeling of “figure it out already!” when we get back to Sam and Tessa trying to deduce why everyone’s acting so weird. Oh and also there’s Harry Talbot, confined to a wheelchair, who snoops Rear Window style on the community with a telescope; he too knows something is going on, and in fact it was his letter which brought the FBI onto the scene. I have to say, though, I had a hard time understanding how a crippled ‘Nam vet was able to afford a three-story structure on a hill that provided a view of the entire town. 

Only gradually do the monsters come out of the shadows. For the most part they’re werewolves, and we do get a nice horror sequence where Loman and his fellow cops take on a local who has “regressed” to werewolf state and can’t turn back into a human. Here too though we get that onslaught of explanation; even though this werewolf is snarling at them and ready to pounce, we have a lot of dithering on what caused him to turn into a werewolf in the first place. Here too we learn that Koontz is basically taking monsters from contemporary films and putting them in the novel; the werewolf’s hand reminds one character specifically of the werewolf in The Howling, and soon after Chrissie encounters a character who mutates into a monster specifically compared to the titular Alien

But man, the forward momentum is just constantly lost. Like that part with the werewolf. After Loman handles things, Shaddack shows up to appraise the situation…and he and Loman get in a practically endless conversation about the nature of “the change,” just right overtop the werewolf’s corpse, and it’s just…dumb. And like I said, Part 1 builds up momentum, taking place over the span of a few hours, and when Part 2 opens the next morning Koontz gets back into the introspective stuff instead of continuing on with the momentum he painstakingly built up. Even here, with all the heroes congregating in Harry’s house, we don’t get to any action…Koontz clearly had a movie in mind, as he has all this “movie moment” stuff in here, like Chrissie singing pop songs the morning after she was nearly killed by monsters as she prepares a hearty breakfast. It just comes off as contrived, like “I could see Goldie Hawn playing this part!” And made even worse because Goldie Hawn is constantly referenced in the book itself. 

At least we get more real monster stuff here, but it’s repetitive. We have back-to-back sequences in which two different characters meet two different cyborgs, both of whom (both of which?) are literally connected to their computers. But on that point Koontz is really ahead of the curve; he writes about computers and technology way beyond what I expected from a late ‘80s novel. The only thing that sets Midnight in its era is that Moonlight Cove has been shut off from the rest of the world by Shaddack’s closing down of the phone lines. This entire subplot would be undone in our modern cell phone era. Oh I forgot to mention Koontz also throws The Blob into the mix, with a weirdo bit where three of the monster-people regress even further, into a protoplasmic ooze which hungers, of course, for human flesh. 

That said, the book seems like it wants to end somewhere in the 300s, but it continues on for another 100-plus pages. Like for example one character vows to personally kill Shaddack…and this subplot just churns. Meanwhile Shaddack becomes increasingly dumb an ineffectual to suit the demands of the plot; there’s a ridiculous part where he says he doesn’t know who “Dr. Moreau” is. It just goes on and on, losing the power and mystique it had in the opening section, to the point that it’s a relief when things finally wrap up. There’s also a Maguffin about Shaddack’s heart being tapped into all those who underwent the change, or somesuch, a dead man’s switch sort of thing that would kill everyone in town if Shaddack himself were to be killed. But again, as buffoonish as this guy acts in the finale you wonder how he ever even thought of any of this stuff. 

Special note must be made of the end, though. It’s so reactionary it’s hilarious. So Sam has a teenaged son who listens to “heavy metal rock” and he and Sam don’t get along much. Sam worries about the kid, hinging all his concerns on that damn heavy metal. Meanwhile, we learn in one of those incessant flashback/introspection deals that Sam’s wife – ie the kid’s mom – died of cancer a few years ago. Gee, do you think the kid might just be dealing with his mother’s death in his own way? Regardless, Midnight ends with Sam stomping on his son’s heavy metal CDs and then forcing him into a bear hug. I mean even the producers of the ABC After School Special would’ve thought that was too much. But then maybe Koontz had his tongue in his cheek. 

Otherwise, I found Midnight too bloated to recommend. But Koontz was/is incredibly prolific, so I don’t think it would be fair to judge the guy on just this one book. And hell, others might enjoy it more than I did. I just wanted more creatures and less atmospheric word painting about the fog, mist, and buried emotions.

Thursday, September 22, 2022

The Peacemaker #4: The Wyss Pursuit


The Peacemaker #4: The Wyss Pursuit, by Adam Hamilton
March, 1975  Berkley Medallion Books 

The Peacemaker limps to a close with a fourth volume that’s even more tepid than the previous three; titular “Peacemaker” Barry Hewes-Bradford doesn’t even kill anyone in this one. I mean at least he shot the occasional bad guy in the previous books. This time ol’ Barry spends the majority of the narrative doing exactly what Mel Crair depicts on the cover: making phone calls. 

Speaking of the cover, again we get confirmation that Crair’s depiction of Barry is his own invention. The moustached lothario of the Crair covers does not exist in the actual novels. Instead, Barry is specifically stated as being “tall and black-haired” – no mention of a moustache, blondish-brown hair, or a bow tie. Also speaking of Crair’s cover art, it’s misleading in another regard: the scene shown doesn’t actually happen in the novel. While Barry and his assistant Lobo do ski down a slope as someone fires at them, Barry does not return fire – in fact he and Lobo flee off to safety and hide, waiting for the sniper to go away. The Peacemaker!! 

Yeah, but this one’s really lame, and just further evidence that the series was DOA from the get-go. I mean like Zwolf said, it’s supposedly a men’s adventure series, yet they named it “The Peacemaker,” and they got a woman to write it!! Maybe some editor at Berkley just had a goofy sense of humor. Whatever, Marilyn “Adam Hamilton” Granbeck again writes what is really a mystery novel, one that isn’t even gussied up with the paltry thrills of the previous installments. 

The series concept itself is also ungainly, that mega-wealthy Barry operates on the side as a crimefighter. The problem is, as I’ve bitched about in each previous review, Barry himself doesn’t do much – he just gets one of his untold employees to do the work for him. Thus there is very little tension or excitement in the series. Barry isn’t even given a proper background of a men’s adventure protagonist; he's just rich and has legions of employees at his disposal, so it’s not like he’s some ‘Nam vet out for payback. In fact it’s Lobo who does most of the “action stuff” in the series, but this time even Lobo doesn’t do much. 

The plot this time has to do with a heroin smuggling scheme; some mysterious drug kingpin known as “Wyss” seems to be targeting Barry’s freight line, using the ships to transport heroin out of the fictional Southeast Asian country of Balarac. Just forget about any promises of action and think of The Wyss Pursuit as a mystery novel and you might enjoy it more than I did. As mentioned it’s even slower-going than previous volumes, but Granbeck’s prose is strong enough that I figure she’s probably a fine writer in an element she’s more comfortable with. 

Granbeck is good with effective scene-setting, like the opening in which a hapless sailor on one of Barry’s ships accidentally uncovers the heroin and is killed for it. However Granbeck again proves that Barry is not really an action hero in the standard mold when later in the book Barry and Lobo get ahold of the killer and grill him for info on the heroin scheme. This takes place inside Barry’s limo as it slowly moves along Broadway in Manhattan; Barry doesn’t threaten or harm the killer. Indeed, Barry pays the guy and drops him off! A guy who killed one of Barry’s own men! It’s all just so against the grain of what makes for an action hero that you can only shake your head at the poor editorial decision-making at Berkley. 

So to reiterate, in the course of The Wyss Pursuit Barry doesn’t get in any fights, doesn’t shoot anyone, doesn’t do much of anything except travel around the country and make some phone calls. That said, he does get laid this time, by two different gals (not at the same time, though!)…however if you just thought to yourself, “Yeah, but Granbeck probably keeps it off page,” then award yourself a no-prize. And neither female character is exploited in the wonderful way mandated by the men’s adventure genre. One’s an insurance investigator who seems to have her own agenda and travels around the world with Barry, the other’s one of Barry’s jetset acquaintances. Curiously Granbeck seems to imply early on that the insurance investigator is interested in Lobo, but that might’ve been a misreading on my part; I did doze off a few times while reading the book, after all. 

Reinforcing the “mystery novel” vibe is the titular Wyss, a notorious figure in the drug world. It turns out that Wyss is behind the heroin-smuggling on Barry’s ships, with the added kick in the crotch that Wyss wants the heroin to be discovered so as to cause Barry legal and other woes. Even here we get more of a lowkey payoff, with Wyss finally being tracked down in Switzerland…but posing under another name. Instead of taking direct action, Barry tries to entrap him and all that, and it’s lame. And yes, it’s in Switzerland that the cover incident occurs, with Barry and Lobo hitting the slopes as one of Wyss’s goons sharpshoots at them. 

I mean this one’s so lame, Barry doesn’t even take part in the climactic action scene. It’s all relayed via report as Wyss and his ship get in a fight with some Balarac forces, and Barry frets while it goes down. And smokes a bunch of cigarettes. In previous installments he’d at least blow something up. It’s like with this one Granbeck didn’t even bother to give us that. But one must appreciate her steadfast determination to not cater to the demands of the action genre. Anyway not that it matters, as with this volume The Peacemaker comes to a close. It shan’t be missed.

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Hard Target


Hard Target, by Robert Tine
September, 1993  Berkley Books

I can’t recall if I saw Hard Target in the theater; I’m thinking I didn’t, and probably saw it later on VHS or laserdisc. I also have a hazy memory of seeing the fabled workprint at some point in the dim past…I seem to have vague memories of watching a blurry video copy with the timecode on the screen, the extra gratuitous violence, and lots of scenes that didn’t make it into the completed film. Well anyway, I’ve always ranked Hard Target as one of Van Damme’s best films, despite the unfortunate mullet he sports in it, and certainly the best movie director John Woo made in the US. 

Who knew there was a novelization? Once again I have Robert Mann to thank for sending me this book. Penned by ubiquitous tie-in novelist Robert Tine, the Hard Target novelization is notable for featuring some of the cut scenes that feature in the workprint. But one thing the novel lacks in a serious way is the graphic carnage Woo brought to the film. Tine’s action scenes are curiously bloodless, more outline-esque than anything and lacking much impact. In fact, “outline-esque” sums up the novelization; Tine, judging from this and his Eraser novelization, is not a tie-in novelist who brings a lot of “new stuff” to his novelizations. For the most part, Hard Target reads like a narrative summary of the film. The positive note though is that it does have some sequences in it that didn’t make it to the finished product. 

I get the impression that Tine wrote this before production began, or at least he was not privy to the production. The characters are not described like their film counterparts, in particular old man Douvee, who is described as “rail-thin” in this novelization…but was played by rotund Wilford Brimley in the film. And there’s none of the balletic heroic bloodshed of Woo’s action choreography; in fact, the action scenes are pretty boring here in the novel. What Tine’s novelization makes clear is that the story for Hard Target was pretty anemic, and it was only John Woo’s stylistic excess that made it memorable. With that missing, Hard Target the novel comes off like a tepid retread of The Most Dangerous Game

Now as for the “new” stuff, honestly it’s pretty minimal. And most of it is material that appeared in the workprint. Like a minor crony gets his ear chopped off by a pair of scissors, something which is graphically shown in the workprint. There’s also a part where main villain Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) plays a piano. There’s also a part where hero Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme) gets it on (off page) with female protagonist Natasha “Nat” Binder (Yancy Butler). The ending also appears to be different, with Chance and Nat about to go off in a Happily Ever After. But then it’s been decades since I saw the actual film, so maybe that’s how it ended. There might be other subtle differences here in the novelization that would be more apparent if I were to actually rewatch the film, but I’d rather watch Miami Vice

So the novel follows the film, or perhaps that should be the screenplay, rather apishly. Wait, another difference – I got the impression, reading the book, that Chance Boudreaux could’ve been played by just about any action star. In other words, Chance’s martial skills aren’t much focused on, and he basically just does basic “action hero stuff” throughout, with none of Van Damme’s flash. This could be another indication that Tine was writing before production; I read somewhere the John Woo originally envisioned Kurt Russell for the lead role in Hard Target, and yes he certainly could have played the Chance Boudreaux of the novel. 

Another difference is that Boudreaux is more of a ragamuffin in the novel, practically destitute and living hand to mouth in New Orleans as he waits for the opportunity to continue working as a merchant seaman. But then the poor and the homeless are a central subplot of Hard Target, something made even more obvious here in the novel. Hey, sort of like that fourth season episode of Miami Vice, “Badge Of Dishonor!” Sorry, let me get back on track. Also, no mention is made of Boudreaux having an unfortunate mullet. He’s basically a cipher here, and late in the novel it’s explained he was a Marine and such, but there’s no real personality given him in the book. This makes it really hard to buy the ensuing relationship between him and Nat. 

The novel also follows the opening of the film, with Nat’s estranged father, a ‘Nam vet, being chased by Fouchon’s men. (Fun fact: The screenwriter, Chuck Pfarrer, played Binder in the film.) The setup is that Fouchon rents out his commandos to the mega-wealthy, who go along on a sort of big game hunt, with the prey of course being man. The hunted men are former soldiers who have come upon hard times, and they take the crazy job in exchange for money; if they can make it to a certain location, they will go free. However we know from the sequences in Fouchon’s perspective that he’ll never let one of his prey escape; this opening sequence proves it, as Fouchon’s latest client, Mr. Chang, fails to kill Binder…who does indeed make it to the safe location, and thus should go free. But Fouchon kills Binder anyway. 

All as in the film, but here we learn posthaste that the novel will not have the stylistic flair of the movie. Also the vibe is different; one does not get the impression here that Fouchon has a huge team of hunter-killers at his disposal. Also he himself takes place in the hunt, and he doesn’t use any special weapons or specific gun like the film. Mostly he just issues steely-cold orders to his men, particularly Pik Van Cleave, a South African who is in charge of the hunting dogs (Arnold Vosloo in the film). Checking imdb.com, Vosloo’s character is called “Van Cleaf,” and also there’s no credit for a “Mr. Chang,” so this could be more indication that Tine was writing before production. Mr. Chang also factors in the final action sequence of the novel, so the character might have just been written out of the film. 

The movie makes more sense out of how Chance and Nat team up – but again, I haven’t seen the movie in forever. Here in the novel it’s kind of hard to understand why they do. There are vague mentions that the New Orleans cops are threatening to go on strike (one of the reasons Fouchon has recently set up shop here), thus the homeless population does not get any attention. Nat’s dad, then, was a nonentity so far as the cops are concerned, so she desparately seeks someone to help her around the city. It’s just all very hard to buy – “My dad’s missing, I need some stranger to help me look for him!” But regardless she convinces Chance to help her by offering to pay the amount he needs to pay for the resinstation of his merchant seaman card. 

It's also really hard to buy that Chance sees more to the story; when it’s soon learned that Nat’s father is dead (his corpse found in a burned-out building), one would think Chance’s job has come to an end. I mean he was hired to help find the guy, and he’s been found. But Tine has it that Chance and Nat continue working together. And of course, Chance notices something the cops overlooked – that one of Binder’s two dog tags are missing – and he goes around looking for clues. This is how Chance stumbles upon Fouchon’s plot, in which “runner” candidates are sourced from a local business that’s run by a sleazy guy who hires bums to hand out XXX flyers. When Fouchon finds out about this, first he has Van Cleave take a pair of scissors to the sleazy business owner’s ear, then he tells Van Cleave to find Chance and kill him. 

From there on, Hard Target is essentially an endless action scene. Oh, I forgot to mention, but despite the recent murder of her dad, Nat still finds the time to get down and dirty with Chance. The scene plays out with the two kissing, and then Nat leaves…but then she comes back to Chance’s place and says she changed her mind. This bit is repeated in the end, only the other way around – Chance says he plans to go off on the latest merchant sailing and then comes back to Nat and says he changed his mind. But anyway the boinking is off-page; the chapter ends here. But soon after this Chance and Nat separate; when it’s soon clear that people are trying to kill Chance, he sends Nat off with his uncle, Douvee, whose job is to keep Nat safe. 

This leads to dual-pronged action scenes, with Chance taking on one portion of Fouchon’s forces and Nat and Douvee facing the other. Tine tries to work in some comedy with oldfashioned swampscum Douvee boasting about his moonshine and complaining about having to ride a horse. But it’s all pretty messy; for example, at one point Nat hurls a molotov cocktail at Mr. Chang, and Tine writes that Chang “vanishes” in a burst of flame. One would get the impression that Mr. Chang is no more. Yet he appears again, with no explanation, later in the book to hunt Chance and Nat along with two other clients Fouchon has quickly hired for the hunt to kill Chance. Also, the separation of Chance and Nat serves no purpose, as soon enough they (along with Douvee) are reunited and working together against Fouchon. 

The biggest problem is that Tine is not at all invested in his action scenes and brings nothing to them. It comes off like he’s lazily just lifted material directly from the screenplay: 


With the pizzazz gone, one is left with a curiously flat and uninvolving “action novel.” Chance’s motivation is also really hard to buy; he’s very much a cipher. I felt that the movie did a better job of investing him in the tale – and also in the film you really wanted to see Fouchon and Van Cleave and the others get blown away. Here I had absolutely no emotional investment in the story…it was all just too bland. Oh and one thing to note – the finale does feature Chance dropping a grenade down Fouchon’s pants, which I believe happened in the film. Here in the book Fouchon manages to get it out and tries to disarm it, to no avail. 

In closing, Robert Tine’s Hard Target did not come off as a fine novel on its own, and it did not make me want to see the film again. I’m not saying it was terrible, though. It was interesting at the very least just to picture someone other than Jean-Claude Van Damme as Chance Boudreaux (again, the character’s a lot more “Kurt Russell” here in the book), and I appreciated the stuff that didn’t make it into the film. Oh, and random note – yes, Chance punches a snake and then bites off its tail here in the book, too.

Monday, August 22, 2022

The Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker


The Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker, by Mike Barry
January, 1974  Berkley Medallion Books

Years ago Marty McKee sent me the entire run of The Lone Wolf, telling me how much he thought I’d enjoy the series. I’m sorry again that I took so long to heed Marty’s advice, as I do indeed enjoy this series – so much so that, even though crazed hero Burt Wulff spends the majority of Desert Stalker merely sitting in a hotel room, I found myself so caught up in it that I sped through the novel in no time. 

In my review of the previous volume I noted Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg’s “Notes On The Lone Wolf” essay from 1990, in which Malzberg stated that he took a publisher-mandated break between that volume and this one, and Malzberg felt it caused him to lose some of the narrative momentum. That did not seem very evident to me. Desert Stalker burns with that same weird, neurotic fire as the first three books. And once again Malzberg subtly displays the coolest conceit of The Lone Wolf: that Wulff’s presence is so disruptive he affects the reality of those he enocunters, to the point that they wonder if they are dreaming. 

While the “Conlan” name goofs don’t appear this time, there does seem to be some confusion on the first name: is it Martin or is it Burt? They’re both used in the book; the novel opens with an underworld communique in which “Martin Wulff” and his war on the mob is discussed – a communique that makes it clear that the Mafia had nothing whatsoever to do with the OD death of Wulff’s girlfriend in the first volume. In other words, Wulff’s war on the Mafia has started on false premises…yet, the communique notes, Wulff’s learning of this would probably have no impact on his war. He is committed to it, and is clearly insane. But on the back cover we are told it’s Burt Wulff, so either it’s more copyediting gaffes or he goes by the nickname Burt. Maybe the first volume spelled this out and I’ve just forgotten. 

Malzberg also maintains the pace of the previous books, with Desert Stalker opening pretty much immediately after Boston Avenger. Wulff drives direct to New York from Boston, his first time there since the first volume. He visits Williams, his partner from the opening pages of that first volume, and we get a lot of not-safe-for-today observations on blacks from Wulff/the narrative: “There was hatred one inch below the surface of any black man.” Malzberg treads this strange ground where Williams and Wulff have a sort of surly relationship, with Wulff thinking that Williams plans to use Wulff as a blunt instrument to kill criminals – and meanwhile Williams is still just a patrolman, so it isn’t like he’s some higher-up who can use his resoruces to fuel a secret war, a la the guy in Death Wish 3

Regardless, Williams essentially gives Wulff his mission this time. Impressed with the amount of damage Wulff has done so quickly, Williams tells Wulff that maybe he should look into Bill Stone, a lieutenant in the NYPD who “bugged out” with “a million dollars worth of shit” from the evidence room – a plot similar to Inside Job. However, this plot will prove to be a nonentity, as if Malzberg loses interest in it as he writes. Stone is set up as being a sort of reflection of Wulff – in fact Williams says that it was speculated that Wulff and Stone were working together, given that they both “bugged out” around the same time – but as it turns out, Stone only features in the novel for a single chapter. 

Instead, the brunt of Desert Stalker is composed of Burt/Martin Wulff barricading himself inside a plush penthouse suite in a hotel in Las Vegas. For that is where Stone has fled, per Williams’s intel, and after a night’s sleep Wulff hauls ass for Las Vegas. That surreal vibe of his enemies always surrounding him is also retained, with Wulff attacked along a desert road. Malzberg delivers effective action scenes in that they certainly have plentiful violence and gore, but as is typical he hasn’t done much research on firearms. Most notably, Wulff’s gun is refered to as a “revolver,” but Malzberg will write stuff like, “Wulff took out his revolver, put in a full clip.” I overlooked such mistakes, though, as the atmosphere and surreal vibe of the series is superior to any sort of firearm accuracy: 


Despite the psycho-surreal vibe, Malzberg still delivers action scenes. But as ever the series has more in common with the mainstream crime thrillers of the era than it does The Executioner. Whereas Mack Bolan would carefully plan his assault on the Vegas mob, Wulff as ever just bulls his way through without much of a plan. In fact he just walks into the casino-hotel Stone is reportedly staying in, knowing that he’ll immediately be spotted. Malzberg delivers his patented dark humor as Wulff shows absolutely no fear of the two thugs who come to collect him, much to their confusion – again, he is such a supernatural force that “normal people” don’t know how to react. This leads to some crazy stuff where Wulff, presumably the target, takes charge of the situation, escorts the thugs up to the big boss’s room, and proceeds to argue with everyone. 

Vinelli is the big boss, and as seen in the excerpt above he quickly suffers at the “revolver” of Wulff. But like Stone, Vinelli initially comes off as more of a presence than he ultimately will be; one of the few problems I had with Desert Stalker is that a profusion of “big bosses” kept appearing on the scene. It’s not a big deal, though, and just more indication that Wulff himself is the true “big bad” of the series; even the top Mafia boss is stupefied by him. But after shooting Vinelli, Wulff drags his bleeding form into Vinelli’s room and spends pretty much the rest of the novel there. It sounds lame I know, but man it’s filled with such dark humor and just plain weirdness that I found myself loving it. 

Malzberg frequently refers to previous volumes, and suprisingly Wulff even makes a phone call to Tamara, aka Louise, the babe he scored with in the second volume. This is an affecting scene that doesn’t get too sappy, but it’s made clear that Wulff feels something for Tamara. In fact it is she who makes him realize that he now wants to live, to “come back” to the real world…even though he still thinks of himself as “a dead man.” Wulff makes the call while the various Vegas forces are converging on his penthouse suite, and truth be told the inevitable action scene also is not in the realm of The Executioner. Guys just come in through the window and try to barge down the door, and Wulff shoots them. Again, it’s the twisted vibe that stands out, like the ultra-bizarre metaphor Malzberg uses to describe a collapsing hotel: 


Malzberg continues the schtick of having the volumes bleed into one another; Desert Stalker ends with Wulff getting on an airplane, ready to head for his next destination to kill more mobsters. Despite Malzberg’s reservations about any loss of momentum in his 1990 essay on the series, I have to say that this one was just as enjoyable as the previous three.

Monday, May 16, 2022

The Closing Circle


The Closing Circle, by Lou Cameron
November, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Between 1974 and 1977 prolific author Lou Cameron published five paperback crime thrillers with Berkley. The cover art for most of the books had a somewhat-similar design to Berkley’s cover art for Lawrence Sanders’s The First Deadly Sin (which was even referenced on some of the covers of the Cameron books). These five novels weren’t part of a series, but they were all about cops. In addition to The Closing Circle, the others were Barca (1974), Tancredi (1975), Dekker (1976), and Code Seven (1977, but this one dispensed entirely with the cover design of the previous four books). Each of them were also fairly long, coming in around 250 pages. 

If The Closing Circle is any indication, Cameron’s goal for these books was realism, gritty cop-world realism that left no sleazy stone unturned. I’m not sure about the other books, but this one is not an action thriller by any means; it is a slow and methodical procedural, one that is livened up by Cameron’s focus on the lurid. He brings mid 1970s New York City to life in all its tawdry, grimy splendor, and he certainly captures the grizzled cops who patrol its streets. Our protagonist is Lt. William Garth, “a cold-eyed white man of about thirty-nine or forty,” per Kitty Hot Pants, a “high-yellow” black streetwalker who appears early in the book. “High-yellow” is a term I have only seen infrequently; I would imagine it is considered racist now, and assume it was a way that light-skinned black people were referred to at the time. I’m sure I’ll be headed back to sensitivity training for even wondering about this. 

But then, the racism is thick throughout The Closing Circle, courtesy the other cops on Garth’s force. This too is certainly a quest for realism on Cameron’s part; these are grizzled cops who don’t give a shit when they’re done for the day. One of them, a sergeant named Crosby who used to be Garth’s partner, bluntly states that he could care less about the latest serial killer when he clocks out for the day. Crosby also refers to a Hispanic colleague as “the Spic” and, when he sees Garth talking to Kitty Hot Pants and a new “colored” probationary patrolman named Till, Crosby asks Garth, “What’s with you and the spades today? Martin Luther King Day or what?” Crosby is not alone; there are racial slurs throughout the book. And for that matter, Garth himself is certain that the serial killer he’s hunting isn’t white, because the kills are happening in a white area that “resents” the encroaching black population – and the serial killer is moving around freely, meaning the white residents trust him. I found this very interesting from a historical perspective, given that we live in an era that has become so emasculated that, even when there’s an active black shooter afoot, his race is not mentioned

And speaking of lurid, move over William Crawford – we’ve found an author who seems even more obsessed with characters shitting themselves. Seriously, if there’s one thing I learned from The Closing Circle, it’s that you shit yourself when you’re strangled to death. Cameron reminds us of this many, many times. And he doesn’t just tell us. He has Garth and the other cops enthusing over the amount of shit at the crime scenes; “We really shit ourselves when we’re strangled!” Garth even exposits at one point. I mean we are told this again and again. Each and every single time the killer strangles a woman, we are informed she shits herself before dying. In the cases of the corpses the cops discover that are clean, we’re informed that the body must’ve been moved after death and then cleaned off – for, sure enough, the shit’s all over the place where the murder actually occurred. I mean William Crawford had an obsession with characters shitting themselves in his books, but Lou Cameron takes it to a whole different level. To an extent that I found myself questioning it…I mean honestly, let’s say you went to the john shortly before being strangled to death. Would you still shit yourself? These are the sort of questions I found myself wondering during the course of The Closing Circle

Adding to this lurid vibe is the killer himself. Now an issue with The Closing Circle is that it truly is methodical; Cameron really wants to show how an investigation is handled in the real world, with Garth and his fellows going over all leads, researching all clues, and putting forth theories. The only problem is, we readers know from the get-go who the killer is. Hell, the back cover tells us: it’s a “professional exterminator” named Kraag. And that’s in the literal sense; he’s not like a Syndicate contract killer but a guy in a uniform who goes around apartment buildings killing bugs and rodents. Cameron tries to get in Kraag’s mind, but he doesn’t come off as fucked-up enough for the crimes he commits. Basically, the sick bastard’s m.o. is that he strangles the old women in the apartments he handles, gives their corpses a bath, and proceeds to “bang them all three ways,” leaving their defiled corpses for the cops to find. And yet in the scenes from his perspective, Kraag isn’t nearly twisted enough…he just clearly hates women and thinks they’re more obedient when they’re dead. I mean sure, he’s twisted, but we aren’t talking like a wackjob personality-wise; he comes off more like a grumpy idiot, and we never even get a good idea of what led him to this particular serial-killer approach. 

Well anyway, it kind of ruins the suspense because we know what Kraag’s up to, but we’ll keep spending a lot of time with the clueless cops who try to put the puzzle pieces together. And unlike Crosby, our hero Lt. Garth is determined to find the killer, even working off duty. Kraag has already made a few kills when the novel starts, all of them the murders of old ladies in apartment houses around 72nd Street and nearby. The opening of the book is probably the highlight, as it comes off like a grungy ‘70s cop flick, with Garth bringing in veteran street hooker Kitty Hot Pants to ask if she’s seen any unusual dudes on her beat, given that she works the area in which the kills have occurred. We also get mentions of the “pussy patrol,” ie the NYPD vice squad. Again, a far cry from the domesticated demeanor of today’s police forces; The Closing Circle is populated by mostly-white detectives who sit around smoking and drinking all day and hurling racial slurs with aplomb. They also make poor choices throughout; Crosby in particular makes some dumb moves when Garth is temporarily removed from the case. 

Cameron was a veteran crime writer, and I suspect he enjoyed getting risque here. Even the dialog between Garth and the M.E. follows the overall lurid angle of the novel; there’s a part that goes on for pages where they discuss how guys “cream less” as they get older – the seminal fluids left at the crime scenes indicates that the perp is likely a middle aged man, and this gets Garth and the M.E. going on about the lessening of, uh, emissions as time goes by. There’s a lot of dialog in The Closing Circle, though, much of it recapping things we readers already know, but the majority of it retaining that same sleazy vibe. It seems clear that Cameron wanted to write a police procedural in the exploitative vibe of contemporary crime novels; perhaps Lawrence Sanders’s work itself was an inspiration, and not just a cover blurb. It goes without saying that Cameron didn’t reach the success levels of Sanders, as his sequence of Berkley crime novels seems to be forgotten today. 

The setup is that Kraag scopes out his victims when on exterminator calls, and then weeks or days later will go back to the building, get in the apartment on the claim that he’s here to finish the job…and then he’ll strangle the old woman from behind, wait until she shits herself, give her a bath, and then start raping her corpse. As mentioned Cameron tries to capture Kraag’s twisted mind, usually via crudity. Like for example when Kraag thinks what it would be like to rape a woman he’s planned as a future victim: “But she was so old her boobs would flop all over the place like empty sacks of shit.” The back cover hyperbole has it that Kraag himself will get caught up in an evil worse than even he is: this is in reference to Cynthia Dean, a “brassy blonde with a Miami tan. Cynthia Dean (and Cameron constantly refers to her by her full name) is the manager of the company that owns the apartment buildings that the killings have occurred in (the company also owns its own exterminator service). She’s the one who figures out one of her own men is behind the killings. However she has plans of her own, leading the narrative in an unexpected direction. 

At 255 pages, there’s a lot going on in The Closing Circle. Garth is not married, and Cameron tries to work in a romance subplot, but it too follows the same grim-eyed vibe as the novel itself. One of Garth’s top suspects is a 19 year-old kid named Randy who is mentally retarded and who was locked up for exposing himself to kids at a playground. Randy has a social worker named Sandy, a hotstuff babe Garth takes to, and they end up going on a few dates. The two like each other, even though Sandy is a social worker and she knows cops hate social workers – indeed, cops hate all “bleeding heart liberals.” Again, compare to today. I should mention here that, despite the ultra-lurid tone, there is no sex whatsoever in The Closing Circle. Spoiler alert, but Garth never scores with Sandy. And while I don’t consider rape scenes to be “sex scenes,” I should also note for the sake of thoroughness that all of Kraag’s assaults occur off-page. So this too is similar to William Crawford in that we can learn about all sorts of sordid stuff via the dialog, but when such material actually transpires the author quickly cuts to another scene. 

The focus on realism means that The Closing Circle also lacks much action. There’s a random part, midway through the novel, where Garth gets in a shootout. This part is very unexpected, as he happens to be on a date with Sandy…and sees a guy who is wanted in connection with a cop-killing. The guy fires at Garth, who takes him out in the firefight. All told, this sequence is over and done with in the span of a few sentences, and Cameron is not one to dwell on the violence of the shootout. Instead, the greater ramification is that Ballistics takes Garth’s gun and he’s put on temporary suspension while the “paperwork” is filled out – the cop-killer was from out of state, and thus there’s an extra layer of red tape Garth must overcome in order to get his gun back and be put back in charge of the serial killer case. So we can see here that Cameron’s goal is not a Dirty Harry type thriller but a realistic procedural; we’re even given occasional breakdowns of how the NYPD runs, with Cameron at one point baldly expositing through the narrative that the plainclothes detectives (aka “Clothes”) are the “true workhorses” of the entire force, even though they rarely get any recognition. 

Things really pick up when Kitty High Pants returns to the narrative…and ends up whoring out to none other than Kraag himself. This part isn’t much explained; we’ve been told through the endless theorizing-exposition bits that the killer (ie Kraag) is probably afraid of women (thus he always kills them before raping them), and likely wouldn’t rent a hooker. And yet Kraag does, and despite his racism there’s no mention made of how Kitty is black. Instead Kraag is excited that he can “bang her all three ways” for thirty bucks. But he does his usual thing (off-page), and given that Kitty was the favorite of a black underworld type, we soon have a Black Mafia contract out on the killer. This leads to fun stuff that seems to be from another novel, like when two black contract killers sit around in Manhattan on the lookout for Kraag and argue over how they can walk around in broad daylight with a shotgun. With the infamous “n-word” liberally employed by these colorfully-named underworld types as they bicker and banter (and try to kill each other), it gives the entire thing a sort of proto-Tarantino vibe…but probably was just another “inspiration” from Sanders, given how he too seemed to populate his book with a host of underworld characters. Again, I get the impression that these Cameron books were devised by Berkley itself, with the publisher probably trying to capitalize on the success of its Sanders paperbacks. 

Cameron’s other theme appears to be necrophilia. I mean necrophilia and shitting yourself are the two central ideas of The Closing Circle. Randy, the mentally-retarded kid Garth incorrectly assumes to be the serial killer, gets his own taste of necrophilia in a super weird scene where he accidentally kills a woman…and then starts exploring her body. This ultra-twisted sequence does lead to unexpected consequences in the finale, but again it’s another indication of Cameron seeming to enjoy the freedom crime writers had in the ‘70s. Oh and I forgot – even here in this sequence with Randy, the dead female also shits herself after being (unintentionally) strangled. I mean seriously! But as I was saying, this bit leads in an unexpected direction; Cameron, despite wanting to show thorough police work, also apparently wanted to demonstrate how thorough police work can lead to incorrect conclusions. An annoying thing about The Closing Circle is that its unsatisfying climax prefigures The Zodiac Killer, with fate and coincidence trumping police work. 

Sleazy mid-‘70s New York City is fairly well captured, though Cameron mostly sticks to the Upper West Side; Needle Park factors into the novel a lot. This so-called area, near 72nd and Broadway, was a favored spot for heroin users at the time, hence the name. There are also two separate scenes in a 42nd Street porn theater, but otherwise Cameron keeps the topical details few. In other words the city itself isn’t practically a character, like it is in Nelson De Mille’s Ryker and Keller cop novels. The ‘70s vibe is well captured, though, with the streetwalkers and pimps and whatnot, and also Johnny Carson gets mentioned a few times. I’ve always loved Carson and remember staying up late in middle school in the mid to late ‘80s to watch his show…I recall being super bummed when the school year would start and I wouldn’t be able to watch Carson anymore! Surely no kid today is staying up to watch the annoying dweeb who currently hosts the show. 

I think I have all of Cameron’s other crime novels for Berkley. They don’t all take place in New York, and it looks like some of them might be more action-focused than The Closing Circle, but that could just be the misleading back cover copy. Not that The Closing Circle is boring. For what it is, it’s very well done: a probing police procedural with a super sleazy overlay. But it certainly could’ve been tightened up. Garth is removed from the case for like 40 pages or so and we read as secondary characters try to make sense of the killings, and all this just seems to be a means to pad out the pages. But if you are into grimy ‘70s crime fiction like I am, I believe you’ll get a lot of enjoyment out of The Closing Circle.