Showing posts with label Decoy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Decoy. Show all posts

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Decoy #2: Moon Over Miami


Decoy #2: Moon Over Miami, by Jim Deane
May, 1975  Signet Books

The second and final volume of the misnamed Decoy series is just as boring and tepid as the first. Once again our breast-obsessed narrator, Nick “The Great Pretender” Merlotti, blathers on and on as he relates his latest (and thankfully last) case, which for some reason has him trying to clear the name of a young Hispanic kid who’s been set up on a murder charge.

It’s pretty bad when by the second volume the series is already in trouble; I mean, why the hell is a master thief like Merlotti suddenly cast as a civil rights do-gooder? At least the first volume had him pulling a heroin heist. This one dispenses with all of the sub-Parkerisms and instead makes Merlotti almost like a private eye or something. What I’m trying to say is, the “hook” this series had – namely, of a notorious heister coming out of retirement – is squandered, and we’re left with a boring tale that could’ve featured anyone as the protagonist.

The one thing remaining is Merlotti’s fascination with boobs. As in the previous volume, breasts are constantly mentioned, with at times two full paragraphs devoted to describing how they jiggle. This time it comes off as even more creepy, or puzzling, as if Jim Deane were trying to compensate for something – something made even more possible by the fact that, once again, he’s all buildup. We get like a hundred words about a gal’s tits, and then Merlotti will tell us, “We fucked again.” In other words, just like last time.

It’s hard to convey how puzzling this whole boob-exploitation stuff is, when coupled with the dearth of actual sex material. Call me strange, but if you write a few paragraphs about how a girl’s breasts look and move and jiggle and sway, then why the hell wouldn’t you just go all the way with it and write some bad sex material too? It’s just really, really weird, and to tell the truth kind of creepy, especially when you factor in Merlotti’s tossed-off “nuggets of wisdom” about women.

Well anyway, Merlotti’s in Miami, which is where he parachuted to in the climax of the first book. Now he’s in a trendy house with a big pool, living there with big-boobed Faye, his moll from the previous volume, as well as Mr. Waves, Merlotti’s black partner/technology whiz. Plus Waves has picked up a girl of his own. As Moon Over Miami opens, Merlotti’s sitting by the pool, licking Faye’s breasts…while Waves is sitting right there.

My friends, who in the hell does this? Other than like members of a rock group. Would you lick some girl’s nipples by the pool while your partner in crime tried to tell you about a young Hispanic kid who’s been framed for murder?? I think even a dog would show more courtesy. But Merlotti relays all this to us like it’s the most common thing in the world…and hell, Faye only dislikes it because Merlotti gradually starts showing more attention to Waves than to her unlicked nipples!

But anyway, Waves himself has changed – where previously he too was a career criminal, now he’s all fired up over how some local kid has been arrested for the murder of an old lady. The lady was Lori Daniels, once a Follies girl who in her day was as famous as Garbo, but then became just as reclusive as her. Now she’s dead, savagely attacked by someone who broke into her apartment and beat her to death. A few people claim to have seen a “Cuban youth” running away from the apartment building, and the cops converged on a kid named Jaime Ramos, who was blithely eating ice cream in a parlor a few blocks away.

So Waves badgers Merlotti to help out. Why, I don’t know. Now “The Great Pretender” becomes like the crime world’s version of a civil rights activist, and vows to do his best to clear Jaime Ramos. Meanwhile Waves just sort of fades out into the background; even though he came up with this whole deal, he leaves it all to Merlotti. It all just smacks of some ultra-lazy writing. Now Merlotti’s back to the same tricks as last time, wasting our time with “scenarios” where he goes on for pages and pages with his theories on why Lori Daniels might’ve been killed.

More padding with Merlotti’s casing of one of the cops who arrested Jaime, an oafish drunk named Dan Wilson. Here the breast-obsession goes into overkill as Merlotti sets up a caper where Faye, wearing revealing clothes, dances provocatively in a rock club Wilson frequents, in a bid to catch the cop’s eye. Deane writes paragraphs(!) about how Faye’s boobs jiggle. But it’s blue-balling of the worst sort, as per the plan Fay leads the lucky bastard out to the parking lot…and right into an ambush by some biker thugs.

Merlotti shows up with some “karate” moves to save the day, and he and Wilson become best buds. Faye’s gone, so Wilson’s lost out on that, but he’s gained a friend…not that it goes anywhere. More stalling as we get background detail on Wilson and who he thinks really killed old Lori Daniels. Back to square one, Merlotti poses as a reporter and goes around talking to various people. More stalling as it just goes on and on with tedious bullshit that bores you to your very soul.

Already a month has passed, and Faye’s frustrated with just being thrown “perfunctory fucks” by an always-gone Merlotti, so after “The Great Pretender” catches her in bed with some other dude (since she wasn’t getting enough from our narrator she had to go elsewhere), she says thanks for the memories and heads home. Oh, and Waves is still around…doing whatever. You’d think the guy would be a little more involved in the case, given how it was all his idea.

Deane saves all the firewords for Vicki, the 17 year-old beauty who was one of the witnesses who apparently saw Jaime Ramos flee the murder scene. During his door-to-door reporter schtick, Merlotti catches a fleeting glimpse of Vicki suntanning topless, and we’re treated to another paen to boobs. But if you’re uncomfortable reading such material when it concerns a “teeny bopper,” get ready to get real uncomfortable.

Following the old porn-hack cliché of making the girl “seem a whole lot older than she really is,” Deane has young Vicki coming on strong to the Great Pretender. He has no intention of fending her off, either; Merlotti, that charmer of a man, informs us that 35 is his cut-off date, so far as a woman’s age is concerned. No, his only concern with Vicki is that she might be trying to hoodwink him, that she might know more about the Lori Daniels murder than she lets on. But with her constant use of the word “fuck” and the way she keeps batting her eyes at Merlotti (not to mention her breasts, of course!), we know where it’s headed.

And surprisingly, it’s to an actual sex scene. For the first time in this “series,” Deane actually writes more than “We fucked,” and goes all-out as his narrator-protagonist screws a 17 year-old girl. There isn’t even a hint of shame from Merlotti (or Deane, for that matter) as he happily regales us with the details of his conquest. But Vicki’s so experienced, so mature…she even promises Merlotti she’ll be “the best fuck” he ever had. And she is! I don’t know which character to feel more sorry for.

So far as the plot goes, it’s a straight-up waste of time. Merlotti eventually runs into a Mafia goon named Boom-Boom Cavaliere who briefly captures Merlotti, putting him through the horrible torture of shining a spotlight in his face(!). There’s also a big fake-out/miss on Deane’s part with the introduction of a porn actress who turns out to only appear for a few sentences; Deane builds her up to the point where you figure she’ll be another of Merlotti’s conquests. But as it is, she’s gone in a flash…and Deane doesn’t even exploit her breasts very much! Quite puzzling indeed.

The previous volume ended with Merlotti sort of hijacking a private plane; this one ends with him hijacking a courtroom. In one of the more middling “climaxes” in men’s adventure history, notorious criminal/mastermind heister Nick Merlotti acts as defense lawyer for Juan Ramos(?!), and when he discovers (as he expected he would) that the court is made up of men who have already deemed Ramos is guilty, Merlotti and Waves break out pistols and run the trial their way!

At gunpoint, Merlotti gets the true criminals to confess – as expected, it turns out to be young Vicki and her two teenaged friends. These three who claimed to see Juan Ramos running away were really the sadists who murdered old Lori Daniels. Merlotti has figured all this out on his own and only informs us here in the finale; have I mentioned that the events of Moon Over Miami occur over two long months? But yeah, young Vicki was screwing Merlotti mostly to find out what his angle was, in his research of the Daniels murder.

The truth uncovered, Merlotti and Waves take the judge hostage and board a private plane to Guadalupe. Here in the final pages Merlotti tells us he’s done for good, that this was his last job, and he’ll retire to a lifetime of screwing in Guadalupe. Waves chides the Great Pretender that he knows he’s not going to retire, that he enjoys the criminal life too much. Merlotti’s final line makes one wonder if Deane knew this was the last volume, or if he only planned to write two books, as Merlotti insists that he’s retiring for real this time.

Either way, it doesn’t matter, because whether he planned to or not, Nick “The Great Pretender” Merlotti did not return – and so much the better.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Decoy #1: The Great Pretender


Decoy #1: The Great Pretender, by Jim Deane
November, 1974  Signet Books

This was the first of a two-volume “series” narrated by Nick Merlotti, aka The Great Pretender – surely the author’s intended title for the series. I can only assume that either Signet or some editor there came up with the Decoy title, as never once does Merlotti (or anyone else) refer to himself that way. At any rate Merlotti is a “super thief turned super cop,” a guy famous in the underworld for his heists and capers. Caught by the cops after a decade of inactivity, Merlotti is now offered a chance to work for the Man, after which his slate will be wiped clean.

Sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun, but sadly The Great Pretender is one of the more leisurely-paced books I’ve read. Author Jim Deane fills countless pages with the bluster of his arrogant narrator Merlotti, the worst instances being the endless sequences where Merlotti will brainstorm how this or that happened. Just pages and pages of immaterial and unnecessary junk. The novel is moreso a suspense or mystery sort of thing; the cops hire Merlotti to find out who stole 5 million dollars worth of heroin, but in the course of the narrative it turns out that there’s more to the case than meets the eye.

Merlotti’s brought in by Duffy, captain of police in New York and a guy Merlotti’s had run-ins with in the past, as well as Passantino, a young assistant DA. The two men hit Merlotti with the proposal to figure out what happened to the heroin; they want Merlotti to ambush another shipment coming into New York and then turn around and try to sell it to Gianfreddo, a mobster they believe is behind the heroin steal. To help Merlotti they’ve brought in Mr. Waves, a black radio/gadgets wiz (sort of like Barney on Mission:Impossible, I guess ) who himself is famous in the underworld.

That’s the setup. Merlotti meanwhile immediately dives into his favorite pasttime: checking out the ladies. Reading this book was almost like reading a Harold Robbins novel – it was a chore getting through all of the boring, repetitive stuff, but you kept going only because you knew you’d gradually be rewarded by a goofy sex scene. But unlike Robbins Deane isn’t explicit in the least – that is, except for when it comes to describing the female anatomy, breasts in particular. This guy will go on and on about the female form, to the point where it almost gets a little creepy, but the sex scene itself will be relegated to: “We fucked again.” That’s an actual quote from the book, by the way.

The Great Pretender’s first conquest is Jane, a “tit-goddess” he meets while sunning on Fire Island. The ensuing romance takes up more of the opening narrative than the actual case, with Merlotti falling in love with the gal. Meanwhile he just sort of messes around with the investigation into the heroin, and Deane bores us with incessant pages of Merlotti researching the various clerks who worked the shift when the heroin disappeared, what their lifestyles are now like, etc. Here though he does indulge in a little disguise work, something he’s constantly reminding us he’s talented in; my favorite part is when he poses as a “sex researcher” and goes to each clerk’s home and interviews their wives about how their husbands are in bed! Again, it has no bearing on anything that happens in the novel, but it’s so goofy that it’s entertaining.

Jane departs the narrative (she pleads with Merlotti to run off with her, but he’s given his word he’ll see this case through) right before Merlotti launches a raid on a boat importing the heroin. This is one of the few action scenes in the novel, as Merlotti and Waves find that the drugrunners don’t surrender as quickly as Merlotti expected. A smallscale war ensues, Merlotti blowing away goons with a machine gun. After this though the placid nature returns; Merlotti and Waves discover that the drugrunners were actually carrying sugar, not heroin, and so they begin trying to figure out what’s really going on.

Here the doldrums really set in, as Deane fills pages with tons of unimportant and uninteresting stuff. Things liven up a little when Merlotti picks up yet another gal, Faye, who we are told is even hotter than Jane (it cracks me up though that Deane came up with such similar names for his female characters, Faye and Jane…but then, they are pretty much clones of one another). The highlight of The Great Pretender is all of this pre-PC stuff, with Merlotti picking up chicks and etc; he meets Faye by basically stalking her, first catching a glimpse of her chest in the window across from his own apartment, and thus he begins staring out the window for more glimpses of her magnificent mammaries (which he describes ad naseum).

Things also liven up with a few brief action scenes, Merlotti ambushed by gunmen sent after him. Deane proves he can also dole out the graphic violence, with Merlotti blowing out one of the dude’s brains. But for the most part The Great Pretender is heavier on the brainwork (and breast-oggling) than the action – even the finale lacks much action or any violence, with Merlotti, Waves, and Faye corralling Passantino (whom Merlotti at great length has pegged as the villain) and Gianfreddo on an airplane, outing them in front of a hidden news camera, and then parachuting out over Florida. It’s intended as a big finish, but it’s kind of stupid.

Besides the Decoy series, Jim Deane only has two other books to his name: The Mistress Book, a 1972 Pinnacle release that falls right into that early ‘70s “sex book” category, and The Fine Art of Picking Up Girls, a 1974 Pinnacle book that might be a retitled republication of The Mistress Book (the front cover is the same as the back cover of The Mistress Book). All of the Deane books however are copyright “Paul Gillette Enterprises,” a corporation which is still around…I wonder if Jim Deane and Paul Gillette are one and the same. Gillette is a name I’ve seen before; he’s published several novels over the years, one of them being 1965’s Satyricon: Memoirs of a Lusty Roman, which I have on my first toga porn list.

Finally, I thought I’d share a few of the more memorable quotes from The Great Pretender. See if you can spot a recurring theme!

I lay on the beach at Fire Island looking at tits and wondering why I felt so grumpy. -- pg. 18

I tuned in on her tits before I became aware of the rest of her. Lying dune-side on the beach, looking out over the tit-sea at the real sea, I saw these gorgeous grapefruit-sized beauties roll to life as she flopped over from prone to supine and stretched her lovely long arms into the sun. -- pg. 19

I was really getting pissed off. It’s bad enough striking out with a chick you meet on the subway. But when they come to a beach and pop tits into your face and let their pubes stick out of their bathing suits and still shoot you down, even when you happen to be one of the very few males on the island, it can get a mite depressing. Only my lust for that fantastic body drove me onward. -- pg. 21

What happened to her tits during the backstroke was not to be believed. They didn’t quite bounce, owing mainly to the water pressure. They just sort of slid around. And every stroke of her long arms sent each jug in a massive elliptical slide that would’ve been enough to blow the top of my head off even if her gorgeous pubes weren’t showing through the front of her sheer minikini panties – which, as a matter of fact they were. -- pg. 22

Tits! -- pg. 80