Showing posts with label David J. Gerrity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David J. Gerrity. Show all posts

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Rim Of Thunder


Rim Of Thunder, by Dave J. Garrity
April, 1973  Signet Books

Dave Garrity turns in another fast-moving novel set in the world of stock car racing, following on from his earlier The Hot Mods. But whereas that story was more of a hardboiled affair, Rim Of Thunder is a drama focused on a twenty-year champ who loses it all in a spectacular crash and tries to get his courage back for one last race. The two novels are also told differently; this one trades off between first-person narrative and random third-person chapters, whereas The Hot Mods was narrated in first-person throughout. Both novels have one thing in common, though: they’re very short, coming off more like novellas, with Rim Of Thunder amounting to only 128 pages. The same length as The Hot Mods, in fact. 

Once again Garrity writes a racing story in which precious little detail is given; Roscoe Larkin, our narrator, is an 80-something racecar manager (and mechanic), and he speaks with authority on the subject – as if he’s talking to a fellow lifelong enthusiast who doesn’t need anything to be explained. Absolutely nothing is brought to life; Roscoe’s protégé, The King, drives Roscoe’s top stock car, “the 44.” There’s no description or explanation of the car other than “the 44” throughout the book. The races are told in this same “expert opinion” style, robbing them of much drama or impact – the same way such sequences were told in The Hot Mods. It’s clear that Garrity himself was a fan of racing and also that he hung out with racing crews to get all the vernacular correct, and there’s a definite vibe of legitimacy to the text, but at the same time it makes for a listless read for those of us who don’t much care about racing. 

Fortunately, the dramatic stuff is slightly better, and mostly interesting because it’s the product of an earlier, more masculine era. In today’s emasculated world, the King’s plight seems downright alien: how to “become a man” again after a crash-up that nearly ended his career. There is throughout a focus on men and masculinity, with the few women here reduced to either wives or groupies, and there are absolutely no concessions to the “inclusive” mindsets of today. The King’s wife has one or two minor sequences in the novel in which the narrative is given over to her thoughts (in third-person), but her plot is solely concerned with her separation from the King when he insists on returning to the races after recuperating for several months. There’s added drama with “the little King,” the toddler son of the King who has a heart problem and ultimately will require heart surgery before novel’s end. 

The novel takes place along the east coast, and opens with the King’s big crash during a dirt-track race. We’re never given his real name, but the King has been racing for Roscoe for twenty-two years, coming to him as a snot-nosed kid and gradually proving himself to be among the greatest stock car racers of all time, hence his nickname. How he fared against the protagonist of The Hot Mods, the magnificently-named Lux Vargo, we’re not told – but Vargo does exist in the world of this novel. In a nice bit of tie-in work, “Lux” is referred to twice in Rim Of Thunder: on page 78 he’s mentioned as one of “the good ones” who went on to other things after retiring, and on page 113 a character states, “Remember Jackie Evans in Lux’s 77?” 

Garrity has it that the King has been Roscoe’s champ for two decades, but in a repeat of the King’s origin story we have another wet-nosed kid who has gradually proven his worth driving lesser cars than the 44: Nino Cordone, a kid in his very early 20s with “an Andretti smile.” So while the King is recuperating (two broken legs and other assorted bashings), Nino’s been racing in his 44, picking up more wins for himself and moving into the spot vacated by the King. But when the King returns to the fold, insisting that he’s ready to race again, the 44 becomes his again and there is of course an underlying resentment from Nino, particularly given the growing implications that the King maybe should’ve just retired. 

For it soon becomes clear that the wreck broke more than just the King’s legs: for one, his family life is a mess. His wife Laura, it develops, has left him, taking “the little King” with him. She doesn’t want her man racing anymore, and can’t take the concern and worry. But the King’s chosen racing over the family and has come back to Roscoe anyway. Meanwhile he’s clearly lost his courage; he fails to make an impression in his first race, and as the novel progresses he further demonstrates his lost masculinity: when a thuggish racer with the misleading name “Shorty” Clanton challenges him to a fight, the King meekly asks “why can’t we be friends?” Soon thereafter the King’s also running around with Shorty’s sometimes-girlfriend, the notorious racing circuit tramp Gerry Cattlon. (Yes, Garrity names one character “Clanton” and the other “Cattlon,” seemingly for no other reason than to confuse the reader.) 

While it’s all capably handled, it does get a little goofy in that 80-something Roscoe thinks of the King’s family as his family. Roscoe, whose own backstory is occasionally doled out, has spent his life racing and never got married or had kids. So he started to thinking of the King’s family as the wife and kid he never had. All very strange, especially given that he’s twice the age of the King (presumably…I mean if the King started out as a kid Nino’s age and has been racing for 22 years, then that means he’d be in his early 40s, compared to Roscoe’s late 80s). This ultimately has the outcome of jacking up Roscoe’s own life; he has periodic blackouts and heart troubles in the book, but in true “tough redneck” fashion he walks off these incidents with a good shot of whiskey or two. 

The novel works its way up to a big race on the very same dirt track the King wiped out on at novel’s beginning. Garrity has various internal and external factors working together: the King’s racing ability, whether he’ll return to his family, whether “the little King” will survive his heart surgery, whether Nino will take the King’s mantle and become the new top racer. The climactic race is again described mostly via Roscoe’s authoritative narration, with occasional cutovers to random one-off spectators in the stand. Garrity does a good – if a bit too treacly – job of wrapping everything up in a positive conclusion. 

At only 128 pages, Rim Of Thunder moves too quickly to make much of an impression, but Garrity wisely keeps the focus on just a few characters. As a picture of the era it doesn’t really deliver, given the lack of much topical description, but it does serve as a nice window into a masculine mindset that probably wouldn’t exist in the fiction of today. As for myself, though, I didn’t relate as much to the King, as I sure as hell would pick my kid over the racing circuit.

Monday, May 11, 2020

The Plastic Man


The Pastic Man, by David J. Gerrity
April, 1976  Signet Books

Well it took me seven years, but I’m finally getting back to the Cordolini trilogy David Gerrity began with The Never Contract. Once again sporting a generic photo cover and running to just a little over 180 pages, The Plastic Man follows its predecessor in that series protagonist Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini is sort of a guest star in his own book. Such a guest star that the dude’s family is killed off before the book begins, thus we don’t even get to see Cordolini’s reaction – mostly because he doesn’t stick around long enough in the narrative to make an impression on us.

But then, Cordolini is a legendary, almost mythic figure in the Mafia, so clearly Gerrity tries to recreate the experience for the reader. But it really ruins any good potential for reader empathy and all that jazz. At any rate the book opens with a pair of Mafia hoods staking out a funeral in the hopes of ambushing Cordolini. We only learn through vague dialog that the people being buried are Cordolini’s wife and young son, and these guys are here at the behest of their godfather, Don Genarro, “The Fat Man.” Long story short, and again something we only gradually learn: Genarro received a picture of the Virgin Mary shortly after the wife and kid were murdered, and the picture is Cordolini’s calling card – per the Mafia legend, if you receive such a picture it means the Wolf is coming for you. Cordolini clearly believes that Genarro was behind the hit on his family, but we readers will learn that Genarro was framed.

Thus these guys are here at the funeral in the hopes of nailing Cordolini before he can nail their capo. But they don’t see him and leave – and of course get blown away when they least expect it. This opening sequence gives us a taste of the novel to follow: it’s mostly comrpised of various Mafia types talking and plotting, the subject of their dialog mainly Cordolini…and Cordolini himself only briefly appears. This is also evident in the titular “Pastic Man,” a plastic explosives specialist named Jerry Doyle who hires out his skills for top-dollar assassination work. We meet him as he’s been flown in from Boston by Genarro, the Godfather putting up with the guy’s constant insults due to his underworld rep for always getting his target – even if it means blowing up the target’s entire family. 

Gerrity’s narrative style is completely different than his earlier, Spillane-influenced work, a la Dragon Hunt and The Hot Mods. Gone are the hardboiled-isms, replaced with your typical mid-‘70s Mafia crime thriller vibe: the word “fuck” appears about twice a page as various goombahs sit around and shoot the shit. The random sadism and sleaze of The Never Contract are gone, though, as is the Manson-esque hippie element. In fact, The Plastic Man is pretty static and, well, boring, save for the (too few) scenes with Cordolini and the colorful scenes with Jerry Doyle. Not to mention the completely unexpected eleventh hour twist, which adds an entirely different dimension to the novel, Gerrity pulling a narrative trick that is both outrageous and ridiculous.

A lot of the narrative is comprised of picking up the pieces from the fallout of the previous book, where Cordolini wiped out the forces of Don Vicari. Various Mafioso have moved in on his old territory, led by “The Old Man” as the main godfather, and Genarro handling New York. But while the novel opens with Genarro seeming like a worthy villain, as the narrative develops he’s revealed to be a screw-up, looked down on by his underlings and constantly disrespected by the Old Man. Even his consiglieri, Gino Friedman, plots behind his back, so we’re missing the loathsome villain we had last novel, where we spent the entire time just waiting to see the bastard get his comeuppance – and as mentioned in my review, a comeuppance Gerrity inexplicably sped through.

One person who really rakes Genarro over the coals is Jerry Doyle, who ridicules the Fat Man and his various goombahs from the moment he gets off the plane. Gerrity throws a curveball with an actual romantic subplot for this hired assassin: Genarro sets Doyle up with a live-in hooker named Brendine, and while Doyle initially rejects her he relents when the girl pleads that the Fat Man will kill her if she’s sent back to him. So Doyle, wondering why he’s going to the trouble, brings Brendine into his confidence, the author skillfully developing a romantic bond between the two – however the tomfoolery occurs entirely off-page. Sleaze is nonexistent in this one. Brendine it develops has been sent here to spy by Gino Friedman, who plots to wrest control from Don Genarro, but Doyle manages to talk Brendine into going back home in the country and getting away from all these mob killers – which has dire consequences for various characters.

But where is Cordolini, you may ask? If he’s not striking from the shadows, he’s talking with old Pasqual Scalise, a former Mafia buddy; this is the first the two have seen each other in a decade, and Pasqual can’t get over Cordolini’s new face, courtesy some plastic surgery (I can’t remember if this was established in the previous book or if it’s something that happened prior to this one). Pasqual shoots the breeze with Cordolini, but we readers soon learn that he has his own part in the plot, as he simmers that Don Genarro was given Vicari’s domain; he believes it rightfully should be his, and will go about various brutal actions to achieve his goal.

Spoiler warning: Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens. But anyway as mentioned Gerrity pulls a narrative trick that foreshadows Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club by a couple decades. We have motormouthed Jerry Doyle hired to kill Cordolini, but for the most part he just takes care of Brendine and mocks various mobsters…I mean we never see him actually planning anything. And we have Cordolini striking from the shadows as he wipes out various torpedos or intercepts a shipment of heroin Don Genarro is expecting. Well friends prepare yourself for this one – the novel ends with Genarro, The Old Man, and other high-level mobsters sequestered on a ship to discuss what to do, given current events. Then Doyle calls Genarro on the phone…and Genarro realizes that Doyle is really Cordolini! That’s right – Cordolini reveals that the real Jerry Doyle is “dead and buried” and he, Cordolini, has been posing as Doyle since his arrival in New York! Hence Cordolini really has been center stage throughout most of the novel, but no one – not even the reader – has been aware of it.

The Plastic Man ends with Genarro’s rule come to as decisive an end as Vicari’s did, but this time Cordolini also manages to take out the Old Man. Then there’s a final reckoning with the person who ordered the murder of Cordolini’s family – but Gerrity again squanders any potential for blood-soaked vengeance by casually informing us that the actual perpetrators of the murder were no doubt killed themselves, their bodies dumped somewhere. So then the reader must be content as Cordolini strangles the man who ordered the hit, his gray eyes “terrible to see” as he gets his revenge. This is where we leave Cordolini, and hopefully I’ll get to the concluding novel, The Numbers Man, a lot sooner than I did this one.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Dragon Hunt


Dragon Hunt, by Dave J. Garrity
December, 1967  Signet Books

David J. Gerrity, still using his sort-of pen name “Dave J. Garrity,” turned in this paperback original which, despite much cover-blurb ballyhoo, actually turned out to be the sole appearance of private detective Peter Braid. Very, very much in the Spillane mold, Dragon Hunt is such a Mike Hammer riff that it not only carries a cover blurb from Spillane himself, but it’s also based on a story Spillane wrote for the short-lived 1954 From The Files Of Mike Hammer newspaper comic strip.

There’s even a photo of Garrity with his pal Spillane on the back; you’ll often read this in reviews of Dragon Hunt, but you’ll seldom see it, so here it is:


I’ve yet to read a Mike Hammer novel, but it can’t be much different than this. Garrity, as in The Hot Mods, succeeds in capturing a total hardboiled voice and vibe, but this time it’s almost as if he’s trying too hard. There are parts of Dragon Hunt that are borderline parodic, and one wonders if this is intentional. It’s particularly in the blowhardry of narrator Braid himself, who’s so bad-assed and sleazy that he’s hard to take seriously, particularly when one moment he’s unsure how to spell certain words but in the next he’s using words like “limned” to describe the effect of a setting sun.

Braid is a WWII vet and is now your cliched downtrodden P.I. Hammer-style he was in love with his secretary, but unlike Hammer he married her; she was killed years ago by a criminal who in turn was killed by Braid. All this is relayed via Braid’s grizzled narration. His customary weapon is a very un-P.I. Luger, which he only uses toward the end. His business is terrible and he spends most his time guzzling bear at a sleazy bar and placing futile bets on the Mets. He’s got only one suit (“his one and only”) and even boasts to attractive women about his “dirty drawers.” Yet he’s still able to score (off-page – no sex at all in the novel despite the cover promise) with gorgeous women who wear nothing but “skin and perfume” for him.

Braid’s business might be bad, but he’s in no hurry to improve it – as the novel opens he’s already turning down a job offer from old “King Loot,” aka reclusive millionaire Adam DuMont. But when DuMont’s sexy-but-shrewish secretary Amanda Miggs shows up in Braid’s office to personally offer the job, he’s interested. Here Braid indulges in all sorts of boorish behavior which would be considerably frowned upon in today’s world, but which I gather is intended to let us know he “makes his own rules” and whatnot. At any rate his treatment of Ms. Miggs almost makes Joe Ryker seem like Mr. Rogers.

At length our narrator decides to ride along with Ms. Miggs to the rural estate of Adam DuMont. The chaffeur, Max, is a monster-sized mute who can only converse via “clacking” on a gizmo Braid/Garrity barely describes. Here in the palatial estate Braid spots young Marie DuMont, granddaughter of Adam, a curvaceous blonde who, Braid keeps reminded himself, is much too young for him. As for DuMont, he’s exceedingly old and in a wheelchair, but still has fire in his eyes and a steel grip when he shakes Braid’s hand.

DuMont wants Braid to hunt a “dragon,” aka DuMont’s son, Cain, who has been missing for two decades. In a story that was suppressed from the papers, Cain, who was built to Mr. Olympia proportions, went nuts one day and murdered his wife, locking her up in a chamber in his father’s “castle.” At least this is what Braid uncovers; old DuMont has left the room locked since the fateful night. As a sign of his inhuman strength, Cain DuMont twisted a barbell and locked the doors with it. As a sign of those different times, Braid doesn’t even seem aware of what Cain’s various gym equipment is called, which is so very different from the gym culture of today.

But then, other than a late reference to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., there’s nothing in Dragon Hunt that acknowledges this is the late ‘60s. Like The Hot Mods, the story could just as easily (and perhaps more believably) be occuring in the ‘50s. Braid’s hardboiled patter is reason alone. But then one of the unexplored elements of the book is that Braid, and his drinking buddy Mike Hammer, are men from another time – there’s a part where Marie DuMont marvels how “old” Mike Hammer must be, to be pining for the same woman for twenty years, and Braid does a brief double-take as he digests that he too has been kicking around that long.

Speaking of Marie, she’s the reason Braid takes the job; someone tried to attack her the other week while she was acting in a play somewhere, and Braid realizes it could’ve only been her father, Cain DuMont, come to kill off his daughter because she’s the spitting image of her mother. Adam DuMont has already shown Braid the trophy heads young Cain acquired all those years ago, hunting game with only a knife. Then Cain apparently figured that humans were the ultimate game – yet somehow decided he’d just murder his wife?

Honestly, the backstory in Dragon Hunt is muddled and awkward. Cain is presented as both a juggernaut of muscle as well as an artiste – in addition to being an ultra-buff tough guy, he was also a sculptor and, incongruously enough, also an opera singer!! This is how Braid starts off his half-assed investigation, first getting news from a portly musician whose clingers-on fawn on his musical belches; this guy claims to have remembered a dude years ago of massive physique with a godly voice.

Another clue is provided by Adam – someone by the name of “Black,” whose description might match Cain’s, killed off a bunch of malcontent miners somewhere in West Virginia. Adam is convinced Black is Cain. To further muddle things, there are no photos of Cain and no one in his family has seen him in twenty years. So off Braid goes to Manhattan to mull over beers and get information from various people, including a reporter almost as sleazy as himself. To show the amount of page-filling Garrity stoops to, at one point the newshound promises some photos of this Black guy…but won’t be able to get them for almost a week.

In his review on Amazon, Tom Johnson succinctly summed up Dragon Hunt: “Well, it’s a good story, though most of it is about Peter Braid trying to identify Cain, and finding him.” It just sort of goes on and on, Braid puzzling over the job, asking a few lowlifes some questions, and then wondering when the case will break. The novel’s only 143 pages but it’s one of those Signet jobs with ultra-tiny, dense print, so it takes a lot longer to read than you might expect.

Things don’t pick up until Braid drives to that West Virginia mining town and seeks clues. Lots of page-filling here as he pretends to be a traveling salesman. He meets a woman who claims she was the sex slave of the Herculean bastard Black. Then Braid goes back to his hotel room and young Marie DuMont is waiting in his bed for him nude, a moment captured on the cover. But Braid tells her to scram, then gets in bed to sleep – and is attacked by none other than Cain/Black. Yet somehow, despite being inches away from him, Braid’s unable to see the guy’s face!? (All of which reminded me of that still-hilarious Twin Peaks spoof on Saturday Night Live years and years ago, with my all-time favorite Chris Farley telling an enternally-confused Agent Cooper: “I shot you – you saw me!!”)

Braid gets his ass kicked and doesn’t even faze his attacker with the Luger, so there goes that. But Cain runs away when he sees Marie. Even here it sort of free-falls into the final quarter, with Braid in a huff telling Adam DuMont to stuff it, he’s off the case. I forgot to mention, but previous to this we have gotten a few cameos from Mike Hammer himself; he never appears on-page, only via phone conversations with Braid, who often calls “ol’ Mike” up for advice or to watch young Marie. (A job which Hammer fails at, though we later learn that Marie had already left the place Braid told Hammer to go watch her.)

The finale takes place back in DuMont’s castle where, again quoting Tom Johnson, a sort of EC Comics twist ending goes down. It’s a twist, but it’s damned goofy. I’ll spoil it so skip the paragraph if you don’t want to know. But Braid suddenly figures out that Cain is really Max, ie Adam DuMont’s monstrous, mute chaffeur, and none other than Adam DuMont was the killer of his daughter-in-law. In fact, Adam is the muscle-bound one who twisted those barbells. Our hero gets his ass kicked again, this time by Adam DuMont, who turns out to be rippling muscle beneath the shawl he wears over his wheelchair, yet for some reason Adam doesn’t kill Braid. In the end, Adam kills Max off-page and is about to bury him in the burial lot long ago arranged for Cain Dumont. Braid shoots him and the tombstone falls on Adam Dumont, killing him…and, uh, that’s it!

As mentioned above, Dragon Hunt sort of started life in January 1954, as part of the daily From The Files Of Mike Hammer comic strip; the title was “Adam and Cain,” and according to Max Allan Collins in his intro to From The Files Of Mike Hammer: The Complete Dailies and Sundays (Hermes Press, 2013), Spillane apparently just gave the story to his buddy Garrity several years later. The Hermes Press hardcover contains the “Adam and Cain” story, and I was able to read it via Interlibrary Loan.

The comic strip version of this story is much more simplistic. Hammer is summoned off the streets of New York by Amy (Marie in Dragon Hunt), granddaughter of wealthy, wheelchair bound codger Adam Shaver. There ensues a goofily bizarre bit where old Adam mocks Hammer for being afraid to show off his physique, and then Hammer, who just met this old man and doesn’t even know why he’s been summoned here to this mansion out in the countryside, pulls off his shirt and shows off his chiseled pecs!

But Adam is, uh, sizing Hammer up to see if he’s man enough to take on Adam’s muscle-bound son, Cain. In fevered backstory we learn that Adam had two sons, Cain and Abel, and twenty years ago Cain murdered Abel. Adam, who in this comic story is a wealthy old criminal, wants Hammer to find Cain and bring him back here so Adam can kill him and justice will be rendered. Hammer for some reason takes the job – there’s none of the material as in Dragon Hunt where he’s afraid for Cain’s daughter. In fact, Cain in the comic story doesn’t even realize until the climax that Amy is his daughter.

Hammer proceeds through New York to find Cain, even interviewing an old German bodybuilder who knew Cain back in the day – this made so much more sense than having Cain be an opera singer!! The central theme of “Adam and Cain” is that studly Mike Hammer is afraid of Cain Shaver, who is built up as being this inhuman powerhouse. It’s a bit hard to buy, with Hammer even freezing in terror when he finally meets Cain, who proceeds to beat up our hero on two separate occasions. 

The finale is rushed and anticlimactic – Cain, learning that his father wants him, decides to go home on his own, to have a final reckoning. There he hefts old Adam and Amy and proceeds to toss them over a crevasse. Hammer, from afar, just whips out his .45 and blows Cain away. Adam’s dead, but Amy is saved, and the story (and series) ends on a cliffhanger that Adam left behind a note for Hammer, instead of the promised payment. What the note stated would never be known, as here the series ended.

In his introduction Max Collins states that Spillane claimed he’d written “Adam and Cain,” and the fact that thirteen years later the same plot was recycled in a novel by Spillane’s drinking buddy, with a cameo by Hammer himself, would appear to confirm this. It’s hard to compare the two versions, as obviously there’s more meat in a novel than in a daily newspaper strip, but one has to admire how Garrity expanded on the central plot and added in a bunch of metaphor, particularly the “dragon” theme.

One just wishes he’d also included more action, or at least more drive. As it is, Dragon Hunt just seems to trudge on and on; maybe Spillane himself should have fleshed out his comic story into an actual Mike Hammer novel.

Monday, April 17, 2017

The Hot Mods


The Hot Mods, by Dave J. Garrity
June, 1969  Signet Books

Dave J. Garrity, who a few years later started off a Mafia trilogy beginning with The Never Contract under his real name “David J. Gerrity,” here turns in what could most accurately be described as a hardboiled hot rod novel. Running to a mere 128 pages of big print, The Hot Mods is entertaining, but given the hardboiled vibe it comes off like something from a decade earlier.

Our narrator is the magnificently-named Lux Vargo(!), a veteran “modified” racer (ie hot rods – throughout referred to as “mods” or “modifieds”) who is based out of the East Coast; Garrity plays it fast and loose with the locales, usually not even informing us where the action takes place. But this is just part of Lux’s narratorial style; he only gives us as much info as he thinks we should know, and anyone looking to the novel to learn about vintage hot rodding vehicles and gear will be disappointed.

Lux rarely if ever even informs you what kind of cars he’s competing against or even driving. This gives the novel the ring of authenticity and authority (Garrity thanks a New York racing team at the intro, so he was into the scene), as if Lux were speaking casually to a fellow racing enthusiast, but it does cause a bit of confusion on the part of the reader. At least if, like me, you’re not too hip on the racing scene to begin with.

But Lux’s voice steals the show, because it’s the Hardboiled Voice straight-up, weary and cynical and eternally pissed-off. Garrity pulls it off so well that The Hot Mods is another of those novels where you’re uncertain if the author intended it as a spoof, as the bad-ass dialog walks a tight line between legit and satire. Garrity was pals with Mickey Spillane and if you ever wondered what it would be like if Mike Hammer became a racecar driver, wonder no longer (for what it’s worth, though, there are no private eyes or tough cops in the novel). It’s an interesting choice Garrity’s made, and I wonder how it went over with the readers of the day – when I picked up the book, the last thing I expected was a narrative style more akin to a Gold Medal paperback from a decade (or more) earlier. 

Plotwise the novel is also more along the lines of a hardboiled yarn than the racing action one might expect; Lux is in the midst of a torrid affair with a stacked blonde named Carol Minor (“She was a dream-sized chassis with all the speed parts and built to run up front”) who just happens to be married to Pat Minor, a fellow mods racer. Lux informs us how he and Carol like to shack up in motels and have hot (off-page) sex, but Carol gets serious as the tale opens, asking Lux if he wouldn’t mind maybe “accidentally” killing Pat in tonight’s race!

Lux says hell no, and instantly that sultry look in Carol’s eyes fades away, and our narrator knows their torrid affair is over – just like that. He mopes on back to the garage, where Poppy Bergen, the “leathery old bird” who serves as Lux’s chief “mech,” nags at Lux about getting involved with another man’s wife. By that night’s race Carol, who makes her final appearance until the very end, informs Lux that she’s made a decision to work on her marriage with Pat. Lux heads on into the race, and the racing scenes throughout have that hardboiled hot rod vibe:

The champ from Langhorne found a clear chute in front of him and slammed hard into the turn with Murdock at his heels. The Florida rebel hung in the groove with Pat Minor dug in tight behind him, wheel over and back-end sliding. He stayed in there, working hard with steering and with power. The three front cars went round in front of the pack, one a battered Plymouth coupe out in the loose stuff and breaking his wrists to stay. He caromed off the wall going into the back chute but pulled free and charged away with a new battle scar to mark his already wrinkled right side.

In the heat of the race Lux corners Pat Minor’s “yellow bug” and the realization hits him just as it happens – he’s lined him up to make the kill he earlier told Carol he’d never do. It happens, the two crashing into each other and Minor’s car flipping and catching fire; Garrity well captures the horror as an unharmed Lux tries and fails to pull a shrieking Minor out of his burning car. Now the man’s dead, and at the inquest Lux is cleared – it really was just an accident, after all – but he spirals into depression and self-doubt. “Go out and get drunk,” Pappy tells him.

Lux does so…and in the next chapter we open on him sitting in some jail cell in an unnamed small town hundreds of miles south of “Mid-City,” which is where the race took place. He has no idea how long he’s been on his drinking and fighting binge, but eventually we’ll learn it’s been six weeks. The way Garrity writes it, though, it’s like Lux has been gone a lot longer, like years maybe, having completely dropped out of the racing life and gone AWOL so far as his friends and associates are considered.

The night before, Lux apparently started a hellacious brawl in the local bar, one which catered to the racing crowd. Before the judge can hand down a big sentence this wiry dude comes in, whispers to the judge, and gets Lux out of trouble. His name is Les Carver, he’s a sports reporter, and he’s recognized Lux Vargo (the novel was clearly written long before the internet existed!). Instead of serving his sentence, Lux is ordered to get the job Les claims to have arranged for him, and to even live with Carver.

The Lux-Les relationship is humorous because Garrity has our hero instantly hating the guy for getting involved in his bout of self-pity (“Two little words” being the first thing Lux snarls at him…). Things brighten a bit with Les’s live-in sister, a bodacious young blonde named Sue, who is super-nice to Lux and super-supportive and caring, and Lux reminds us throughout the book that she’s the type of understanding, loving woman a guy could spend his whole life looking for, a gal who asks no questions and puts 100% faith, trust, and love in her man (no wonder Lux has found her, this being a work of fiction and all).

Les’s ulterior motive is that the job he’s arranged for Lux has him working in the shop of a local auto owner; the dude blew a ton of money in a race car that’s been improperly designed and terribly driven. The idea is for Lux to rebuild it to win. He’s instantly fighting with Turkey Johnson, the young local yokel who has been so poorly racing the car – Turkey apparently was in the bar the night a drunken Lux began ranting about piss-poor racers and throwing fists around. Turkey has no idea who Lux is; no one does, only Les Carver, Lux calling himself “Frank Smith.”

Garrity pulls that unexpected trick I always love encountering in these sort of novels – he makes you care about his characters, to the point that the hokum “tough guy learns to care about himself and others” theme is actually more touching than grating. But this is what happens – given the brevity of the book, Sue’s sudden love for “Frank” is a bit hard to swallow, but Garrity doesn’t dwell in the maudlin sappiness; instead he has Lux lording it over Les that Lux might just take advantage of poor lil’ Sue, and how will Good Samaritan Les Carver feel about that??

Lux still runs afoul of everyone else, though of course the redemption angle gradually plays in here as well. He gets yokel Turkey Johnson fired as the racer, given how poorly he’s been doing, and Lux throws himself into rebuilding the auto shop’s racer. Time comes for the big race and sure enough Lux realizes he’s the only person who can drive it. What’s more – he’s decided it will be his last race. Les has gone back to Lux’s hometown (wherever the hell it is) and has uncovered the truth – he knows about Pat Minor’s death and insists that Lux not blame himself. This after Lux has told Les all, even about Carol.

But Lux has decided to kill himself in the race, anyhow. This climax is the longest and most tense race scene in the book, hitting all the action and emotional high points, particularly given the unexpected performance of none other than Turkey Johnson, now driving another car and giving Lux a run for his money. Not to spoil the payoff of this race, but it does end the way you’d imagine – sort of. Lux becomes savior instead of suicide as he must prevent Turkey from wiping out right alongside him. And only now has Lux realized what we readers knew long ago – Turkey pisses Lux off so much because Turkey reminds Lux of himself when he was a hungry young racer.

The finale returns to the Double Indemnity vibe of the opening; Les has uncovered what really happened the night Pat Minor died. He insists Lux go back home with him. After a humorous fistfight (“These things can only go so long unless you’re a trained fighter,” Lux informs us after trading a few punches with Les before collapsing!), Lux says the hell with it and goes along. Back home, Les takes Lux to a local mechanic who has impounded Pat’s crashed yellow bug. Looks like someone did some sabotage to the undercarriage; Lux instantly spots it, confirming the mechanic’s suspicions – sabotage done by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

This leads to a final Lux-Carol confrontation that is a bit anticlimactic given how quickly the ice cold witch melts. But by this point Garrity has moved beyond the grim hardboiled vibe; Lux is so reformed that he’s even become BFFs with previous punching bag Les Carver. The tale ends with Turkey also new best buds with Lux, with the hint that he’s about to become his protégé, and Sue – who turns out to have known “Frank” was really Lux all along, given how big a fan she is of racers – is there waiting for Lux.

The Hot Mods is one of those novels I expected very little from, but ended up enjoying a whole bunch – enough that I’m soon to read more of Garrity’s ‘60s novels. I’ll also try to get back to that Mafia trilogy he wrote in the ‘70s, but to tell the truth The Hot Mods is much better than The Never Contract.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

The Never Contract


The Never Contract, by David J. Gerrity
April, 1975  Signet Books

This was the first of three obscure novels David J. Gerrity wrote about infamous mob enforcer Frank Cordolini, a gray-eyed “wolf” who, now in his fifties, has been retired from the mob life for the past ten years. Living in upstate New York under a new name, with a wife and young son, Cordolini knows that it’s only a matter of time before his old life comes back for him. The Never Contract is the long-simmer tale of how this comes about.

Cordolini is almost like a guest star in his own novel. The narrative, especially at the beginning, focuses more on low-tier mobsters, in particular Eddie Rush and Peter Bergin. The latter has been contracted by representatives of Don Anthony Vicari in New York City to kidnap the son of Frank Cordolini, and Bergin wants Rush to do the job with him. But Rush, a perpetual loser, is wary of the job. We get lots of page-filling as Rush gets Bergin to go on a job with him, one that turns out to be a total bust. Meanwhile Bergin also employs some upstate radicals, a trio of revolutionaries lead by Jerry Roth, a self-styled Abbie Hoffman who has more in common with Charles Manson. Their job will be to watch Cordolini’s kid after he’s adbucted.

We also get a lot of material from Don Vicari’s perspective – Vicari is the son of the man who was Frank Cordolini’s don, but Vicari is nothing like his father. He’s psychotic, which we learn when in his opening scene he kicks a stray cat that’s just given birth on his oceanside property and, before her dying eyes, stomps her litter of kittens to death! We learn via snippets of backstory that Vicari actually killed his father, so as to take over the family empire; that was ten years ago, and was the reason behind Cordolini’s sudden departure from the hitman life. Like the other “old-timers” Cordolini despises the young Vicari and all he stands for; he knew it would only be a matter of time before Vicari junior would order his own death, so he split.

As for Frank Cordolini, he only appears sporadically for the first half of the novel. Cordolini is a ghostly figure in the underworld, nicknamed “The Wolf” and legendary for his brutality. In other words, he’s a younger, better looking Luca Brasi. I say “younger” but Cordolini is in his fifties at least (Gerrity mentions in one of the brief flashbacks that Cordolini was ten years old when the Depression set in), though Gerrity doesn’t make much of this in the narrative itself – in other words, there’s none of that “I’m too old for this” shit. Cordolini has lost his edge over the past decade, though; he suspects Don Vicari is finally going to try to have him killed, but Cordolini does nothing about it, other than gradually plan to take his family on vacation.

So really, there’s just a lot of plotting and dialog for most of The Never Contract, and Gerrity is along the lines of Dan Schmidt in how he wastes so many pages with several different characters planning to do something…and then taking forever to show them actually do it. The novel really has all the makings of being a trashy, sleazy classic – Don Vicari by the way also gets his kicks trussing up women and whipping them to death – but even this exploitative stuff is downplayed in favor of go-nowhere digressions and redundant character introspection.

When the novel finally achieves boil, however, it’s pretty good. The abduction of Cordolini’s kid doesn’t happen until toward the very end – the plan is, Bergin’s people will kidnap the boy, and when Cordolini comes out to get him Vicari’s men will kill Cordolini. But the incredibly annoying Jerry Roth, who dreams of himself as being “The Leader” of a post-revolutionary United States, takes over the job from the ineffectual Bergin and spirals the whole affair into chaos.

The old killing instincts slowly come back to Cordolini as he goes after the kidnappers. Even here though it’s a long-simmer affair, with Cordolini complying with their demands (getting ransom money, being at certain phone booths at exact times for their calls, etc) as he bides his time. This develops into a contest of wills between Cordolini and Roth, who doesn’t understand why this guy isn’t quaking in fear – none of the people Bergin hired for the kidnapping job (or Bergin himself) know who Cordolini is, or know of his past. Gerrity does a fine job here of making the reader despise these kidnappers so much that we look forward to Cordolini’s many promises that he’s going to make them suffer horribly before they die.

But man, talk about an anticlimax. Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. When Cordolini finally turns the tables, Gerrity welches on the blood-soaked finale he’s been promising throughout. There are several instances where Cordolini will think to himself how he’s going to skin Jerry Roth alive and etc, but when the big finale arrives…Cordolini walks into the kidnappers’s hideout with a shotgun and blows everyone away in the span of a sentence. That’s it! The reader has so grown to despise Roth that we want to see him carved up horrifically or something to pay for his deeds, but Gerrity fails to deliver, in a big way. Just as worse is the resolution with Don Vicari, another guy who deserves to get his just desserts; Gerrity puts on his fancy “Literary Artist” pants and ends the novel just as Cordolini has snuck up behind Cordolini, leaving what transpires next to the reader’s imagination.

As mentioned above, this wasn’t it for Cordolini; he returned the following year in The Plastic Man and then finally in 1977’s The Numbers Man, all of them paperback originals. Gerrity by the way was pals with Mickey Spillane, who endorsed this novel; Gerrity also published as “Dave J. Garrity” and also just plain “Garrity,” so I guess he must’ve really wanted to confuse his readers.