Showing posts with label John Weisman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Weisman. Show all posts

Thursday, April 20, 2017

The Headhunters #4: Quadraphonic Homicide


The Headhunters #4: Quadraphonic Homicide, by John Weisman and Brian Boyer
October, 1975  Pinnacle Books

The last volume of The Headhunters is the best, as far as I’m concerned, injecting the series with more action than the previous three books combined. One wonders if this has anything to do with the promised “major motion picture” of the cover (which unfortunately never came to pass). Whereas volumes 1-3 were more along the lines of Razoni & Jackson, with only occasional patches of action, Quadraphonic Homicide (greatest title ever??) comes off like a rollercoaster.

But anyone hoping that this volume would see the titular protagonists in the starring role for once will be disappointed; once again The Headhunters belongs to the villains. And authors Weisman and Boyer have even introduced more villains to the fold to further steal the show from the supposed main characters. For that matter, this volume also drops the “headhunters” angle itself; while heroes Captain Eddie Martin and Lt. TS Putnam are Detroit internal affairs officers (aka the cops other cops hate), the authors break free of this restraint and have the pair basically going rogue so they can take on recurring series villain Henry Pacquette in Los Angeles.

Not sure how long this is after the previous volume (which was published a year before), but we open on the action – Pacquette is in the process of moving to Los Angeles, setting up shop in his usual grisly way. The authors prove at the outset that Quadraphonic Homicide will move more quickly than previous installments, as we witness the gory murder of a man (who happens to be a cop) in a Detroit recording studio. His killer is the latest Pacquette henchman, a mountain of muscle from Haiti named Boutique who speaks in monosyllables and can tear people apart with his bare hands – he kills the cop and rips out his eyes, which he pops in his mouth! His employers stop him when he voices his wish to move on to the dead cop’s liver. 

Boutique is the aforementioned new villain who gets more pagetime than the two heroes combined. But while Boutique is certainly crazy – inhumanly strong, cannabalistic, “ceremonially scarred,” with an almost Terminator-esque imperviousness to harm – he quickly grated on my nerves, mostly due to how fantastical he was. One wonders why Pacquette waited three volumes to bring him out. Speaking of which there’s some proto-Tarantino style dialog in the opening, as even Pacquette’s usual goons, themselves sadistic killers, complain about how violent Boutique is. But the authors are enamored with the character, even though they often refer to him as an “ape” or “King Kong” via metaphors and analogies that would likely be unacceptable in today’s crime fiction.

Pacquette, the goliath-sized “heroin czar,” has decided to set up shop in LA. To this end he has tasked yet another new henchman, Mr. Dust, a black killer who wears a lime green pimpsuit and platform shoes (and drives a lime green Cadillac – and wields a lime green switchblade!), to murder the Los Angeles music biz people who refuse to start buying their cocaine from Pacquette. Between chapters Pacquette and his entourage move to a mansion on the beaches of sunny California, but Pacquette himself is soon bedridden and only appears sporadically in the book; the authors have it that he’s suffering from kidney failure, but he’s apparently all better by book’s end. That being said, he’s still capable of the ESP abilities honed in the previous volume, which I thought was a cool ‘70s touch. 

This isn’t to mention recurring Pacquette underlings Dovell and Sonny Hope (Pacquette’s adopted son), who have their own subplots; heroes Martin and Wallace are lucky to even get in a few scenes of their own. But TS (aka “Tough Shit”) Putnam is doing fine when we meet him; in bed with his black supermodel girlfriend, who, without informing Putnam, has invited along her cousin to Putnam’s bed. Putnam thinks this is taking things a bit too far and calls them freaks and jumps out of bed(!). Meanwhile his boss, Captain Eddie Martin – who we’ll recall is so wealthy he has a Gucci-designed gun holster (more on the name brand-onslaught below) – is coincidentally enough planning a brief vacation in Los Angeles.

Martin and Putnam are given slightly more gung-ho makeovers this final volume; Martin for his part starts to act like a genuine men’s adventure protagonist, trying to find out what Pacquette’s up to in LA while dodging the bullets and other weapons of the various assassins “The Dove” sends after him. This element brings up an interesting subplot in which Dovell runs afoul of Sonny Hope for this very reason – Hope is the de facto boss while Pacquette is bedridden, and he’s pissed that the Dove has been trying to kill Martin, given Pacquette’s orders to never kill cops. The authors seem to set up Hope as the future “heroin czar” of Detroit, but as mentioned Pacquette’s apparently recuperated by novel’s end, but the series never went past this volume so the point is moot.

The authors were never shy about in-jokery and the novel’s filled with references to real-life reporters, singers, football players, and movie producers, most notably for the latter via Arthur Marks, producer of Detroit 9000 and, according to the interview Justin Marriot did with Michael Weisman in Men Of Violence #2, was the person who aimed to bring The Headhunters to the big screen. In the novel Marks is downright chummy with the LA cops, on first-name basis with Martin’s LAPD headhunter counterpart, and even ends up loaning his yacht to Martin and Putnam as a safe zone, hidden from the barrage of black assassins who keep coming after them.  Humorously, the Los Angeles cops are presented as a lot more easy-going than their Detroit counterparts, and seem content to let acts of crime play out without any interference from the law!

Weisman and Boyer also continue to excel in dark humor, with Quadraphonic Homicide getting the most outrageous yet. In particular there’s a running gag about Mr. Dust killing sundry music biz people off-page; a laugh out loud bit has one chapter being an article by a rock reporter, promising to look into these strange murders assailing the music world, murders in which a lime green Cadillac is always spotted at the murder scene, along with a black man in a lime green pimp suit. He promises to get to the bottom of the story. The next chapter opens with a brief news snippet about this same reporter’s murder – noting that a black man in a lime green suit was spotted at the murder scene! 

From their homebase of Marks’s yacht, Martin and Putnam (who has come to LA at Martin’s request, and we even get a cross-volume recurring joke where Martin tells Putnam not to pack his clothes in a plastic bag, like he did last time) take the fight to Pacquette. This includes a very unexpected bit where Martin even dons scuba gear and checks out the mysterious yacht that might be Pacquette’s – I mean, Martin’s doing this, and previously the dude was the type to run from a fight and call for backup. It’s a very Bond-esque scene, with Dovell and Sonny Hope dropping depth charges on the mysterious scuba diver beneath their boat, along with having Boutique hop in and swim around with a machete, but Martin avoids all harm.

Boutique gets in the water again in a later sequence which has him going up against a great white shark like a regular Shark Fighter, hacking it in half with his machete. Here we even get a Jaws in-joke, even the inference that the shark is Jaws itself; per the interview with Justin, Weisman was friends with author Peter Benchley. Dovell and Sonny watch the bloody carnage in the water as fellow sharks are drawn by this dying one’s blood, and even these Detroit killers are sickened by the violence – a very effective scene, and wonderfully written.

There’s a definite vibe of decadence here, given the ‘70s Los Angeles setting; Putnam, who poses as a Detroit writer for Kreem magazine, hooks up with a busty ultra-babe named Naomi, who works as a PR rep in the music industry. They go to a music biz party at the palatial estate of Upchurch, a record producer who happens to be involved in the big cocaine deal which has brought Pacquette to LA. Speaking of Pacquette, we also learn this volume that one of his many illicit enterprises is Piston Platters, a Detroit record label with crappy artists (one of which is a group of white rockers who dress up like transvestites to cash in on the glam scene), headed up by the awesomely-named Righteous Jones.

The authors bring to life the trash fiction ethic in this party scene at Upchurch’s house, which reminded me of similar sequences in Norman Spinrad’s Passing Through The Flame. The authors also bring back something that was missing from the previous volume – hardcore sex. This time we get ultra detailing of Putnam and Naomi making oral explorations of one another. In fact she’s set up to be a steady flame for Putnam, who eventually reveals to her that his name is not “Jackson Jackson,” which is how he’s been presenting himself to industry people; he even tells her he’s a cop, and she gets involved in the occasional car chase and shootout right alongside him. Again, it all does have the vibe of a “major motion picture,” and while Quadraphonic Homicide is lacking the sort of creepy, sleazy feel of the first two books in particular, it actually comes off as a more entertaining read.

There is some of that creepy sleaze at times, though, in particular a Gannon-esque bit of ultraviolence in the climax, in which a character is gorily run over by a car, one driven by Righteous Jones as he tries to escape a shootout started by Putnam, who has come across a Pacquette-planned coke deal on the beach. The authors take a sick relish in describing the horrific death wounds this character suffers while being run over – I won’t give any spoilers, but it’s someone who has befriended our heroes, and who usually suffers the most in these ‘70s crime thrillers?? But even here the authors don’t give us the sort of firefight expected from the genre; it’s a more (likely realistic) affair of characters shooting and running and not even knowing if they’ve hit anyone.

And once again it’s the villains who end up doing the heroes’s job for them. Upchurch and colleague intend to burn Pacquette in the drug deal (just as Pacquette intends to burn them), and end up trapping Boutique in a dug-out cistern and “killing” him. In a scene that could come out of an EC horror comic, Boutique digs his way free and brutally murders the two men in Upchurch’s home. But I have to say I was glad to see Boutique himself at least gets dispatched, even though there were no more volumes and thus it didn’t matter anyway. His sendoff is pretty unique; he swallows a few bags of cocaine to hide them and one of them ruptures in a fight with Putnam. Boutique goes wild before collapsing, his entire middle half “freezing,” and we’re informed later that he died of what is the largest known cocaine ingestion in history.

And that’s it for Quadraphonic Homicide, and the series itself. Pacquette, who has taken his yacht to St. Maarten, announces that he’s all better now, ready to resume control of his organization, and makes immediate plans to return to Detroit. Weisman and Boyer give no indication that this was intended to be the final volume, and really it’s all just business as usual – none of the main villains have yet died and each volume has seen basically the same thing happen again and again: Pacquette plans some nefarious deed, the Headhunters try (and usually fail) to stop him, and Pacquette manages to come out on top.  My guess is the series was cancelled due to the deadliest men’s adventure antagonist of all: low sales.  Either that or the authors just got fed up with having to fly to meet each other to collaborate, which per Weisman in his interview with Justin is what they had to do at this point, given that they lived in separate states.

The writing as ever is good, with nice scene-setting and characterization, not to mention sometimes-hilarious dialog, but the POV-hopping gets to be distracting…but not as distracting as the egregious name brand-dropping throughout the book. Friends, I kid you not, there are at least three brand names mentioned per page. It gets to be annoying fast. Brand names for clothes, cigarettes, sunglasses, binoculars, even gun holsters, just on and on. Even the pens the characters use! I was going to list some examples but time is precious these days and I felt it was better spent elsewhere. Just let it be said that even a reader who goes into this book thinking to himself, “A few name brands here and there won’t bug me,” will still be bugged by the name brand onslaught in Quadraphonic Homicide.

I wouldn’t rank this as one of the greatest action series ever, but The Headhunters is my favorite of Pinnacle’s “tough cops” books, and it would’ve been nice to see what a fifth installment might have been like.

Monday, November 3, 2014

The Headhunters #3: Three Faces Of Death


The Headhunters #3: Three Faces Of Death, by John Weisman and Brian Boyer
October, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Once again coming off like a Blaxploitation movie in novel form, this installment of the Headhunters series again presents a colorful cast of streetwise criminals and terrorists and the titular cops who are always three steps behind them. While Three Faces Of Death doesn’t reach the lurid heights of the previous volume, it’s still a lot of trashy fun, churned out by two gifted authors.

Whereas the previous two volumes took place in grimy, crime-ridden Detroit, this one moves the locale to Chicago. According to the interview Justin Marriott published with series co-author John Weisman in Men Of Violence #2, other series author Brian Boyer had himself moved to Chicago after writing the second volume, taking a position with the Chicago Sun-Times. The two would continue writing together, taking turns each Friday to fly to one another’s homes. That’s some serious dedication to pulp, isn’t it??

But even though sometimes-ineffectual heroes Eddie Martin and Jake “T.S.” Putnam are in a new city this time around, it’s still just as grimy and crime-ridden as Detroit…mostly because it’s now filled with criminals from Detroit. Recurring series villain Henry Pacquette (obvious inspiration for Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction) has come to the Windy City with a legion of armed thugs to rescue one of his henchmen, Sonny Hope (who we learn this time is in fact Pacquette’s adopted son). Sonny is kidnapped in the opening pages along with a publishing scion named Jack Day, the abductors spiriting them away to Chicago and issuing their ransom demands.

As usual, the villains are given a lot more focus than the heroes, same as what Marc Olden did in the Narc series, but somehow here it’s just more enjoyable. Mostly because these authors are having fun, whereas Olden generally sticks to a grim and “serious” tone. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, the Headhunter books are so Blaxploitation that you can almost hear the Luichi de Jesus soundtrack playing in your head. In fact, again according to the interview in Justin’s magazine, filmmaker Arthur Marks, who had directed Detroit 9000 (a Tarantino favorite, incidentally), approached the authors with the intent of making a Headhunters film, asking them to write a script which combined the first two volumes.

Obviously, the film was never made, but Weisman and Boyer are so adept at capturing their creations that a movie practically plays in your mind; they have a definite gift for getting the details, though sometimes the name-dropping does get to be a little grating, particularly when they provide inventories of the brands of clothing their characters wear. And as usual Pacquette’s men are dressed to the the nines in ‘70s fashions, as is Jake Putnam. Even the white characters get in on it, this time, with a recurring joke being the expensive wardrobes of the federal agents in Chicago, who are used to the good life.

Sonny and Day have been kidnapped by a pair of Palestinian brothers named Yusif and Abdul Karim, who claim to be of the Mideast People’s Army, Inc. Their leader is a transvestite German named Schwul who will occasionally don a blonde wig and become “Greta.” He also has a third personality, in which he speaks with an Irish brogue. Finally, he was in the Waffen SS in the war! The cover and first-page preview are cop-outs, by the way; both imply that Greta is a woman (the first-page blurb is even sluglined “A certain kind of bitch”!), which had me hoping for one of those pulpish female villains I so enjoy. But nope, Greta’s a dude.

There are several more Palestinian fighters in the group, and a few other Germans, all of them former Nazis, one of them with the awesome name Wolfmann Chack. They’ve abducted Sonny and Day, we eventually learn, due to the former’s connection to Henry Pacquette, in vengeance over the blow Pacquette and his organization delivered to Malcolm 4x Saladin and his Islamic militants in the previous volume. As for Day, the dude’s grandfather is uber-rich, and thus they demand they want like a hundred pounds of gold for the two.

Martin and Putnam are of course Internal Affairs officers, which as far as I’m concerned limits the kind of action they can get into. But the authors skirt this by having Day’s grandfather insist that they handle the case, given their friendship with Jack Day. At any rate the two of them fly over to Chicago and hook up with a bunch of well-dressed federal agents and lawyers, and try to figure out where and when Pacquette will strike. There’s a nice recurring joke in which Putnam, not prepared to fly, has a plastic bag of dirty clothes as “luggage.”

As usual, the authors provide some great camaraderie between Martin and Putnam, with them riffing on one another in much the same spirit as Warren Murphy employed in the Razoni & Jackson series, which was also being published by Pinnacle Books around this same time. To tell the truth, I actually prefer the Headhunters series; the riffing isn’t as frequent or funny, but the authors provide more engaging material, from gory shootouts to lurid sex scenes. Well, save for this particular volume – there isn’t a single sex scene in it. But it does feature a crazed “action” scene of utter sadism in which Pacquette and his hulking bodyguard Henry Dovell blow away a car full of Chicago cops.

Speaking of Pacquette, the authors add a few interesting touches to the former police chief turned crime czar. We’re now informed he has a “Fu Manchu” moustache – something likely mentioned before, but I’d forgotten it. But he also has been heightening his ESP powers, instructed by Dovell, a “master of extrasensory perception,” and there’s this weirdly cool scene where Pacquette exercises in a sauna and then sits in meditation, trying to mentally trace Sonny’s location. The scene features an even weirder climax in which Pacquette leaves the sauna, to find one of his goons butchered and gutted outside, with a note from the Mideast People’s Army pinned to the corpse.

And just as Marcellus Wallace would later promise to “get Medieval” on his enemies, Pacquette here vows to “use some Israeli Army tactics” on the terrorists. Thus he rents a touring bus, assembles forty of his best “murderers,” dresses them in outrageous golf gear (their weapons hidden in the golf bags), and heads for Chicago. Here they soon begin tearing the city apart, not that Schwul/Greta and his cronies aren’t also doing damage, killing innocent bystanders and cops. In fact, cops get wasted throughout Three Faces Of Death, and unlike the previous volumes they aren’t crooked cops.

Another element that returns from previous volumes is the in-jokery, with several Chicago Sun-Times personages mentioned in the narrative, usually in completely egregious ways, like photographer Randy Winker telling coworker Herb Larkin that hotstuff reporter Dallas Brooke is a nympho, and Larkin openly hitting on her, only to get karate-chopped. Whether these are real people or just fictional analogues of people Boyer worked with, I don’t know. But per Justin’s article on the series, Boyer and Weisman enjoyed peppering their books with in-jokes.

Three Faces Of Death features a strong action finale that Martin and Putnam for once take part in. Delivering up the ransom, Pacquette pulls a fast one by having an explosive created and coated in gold (a scene which features the priceless, too-short appearance of Pacquette’s armless and legless chemist). When Schwul and company repair to a foundry to melt the gold, chaos develops, with the Germans killing off the Palestinians (the money, we learn, is to rebuild the Reich, not to fund Palestine). A pitched battle ensues, with the cops arriving on the scene.

Of course, Martin and Putnam really just take cover and shoot a few people; the majority of the action is handled by Schwul and the Germans, who run around with shotguns, blasting everyone apart. Again, the authors aren’t shy about the gore, with unfortunate men getting their privates blasted apart in the melee. In fact, our heroes are still so uncomfortable around violence that Putnam even pukes before they head for the foundry. Putnam actually gets injured in the climax, we learn via dialog at the end, suffering a concussion and temporary blindness (due to the unexpected, devestating explosion of Pacquette’s secret explosives), but apparently he’s on the way to a complete recovery.

While it didn’t have the lurid factor of the previous two books (though the brothers Yusif and Abdul did take a lot of sick pleasure in killing victims with their “curved daggers”), Three Faces Of Death was still an enjoyable read, brimming with that funky ‘70s flavor I so enjoy. Unfortunately, the next volume was to be the last.

Monday, September 23, 2013

The Headhunters #2: Starlight Motel Incident


The Headhunters #2: Starlight Motel Incident, by John Weisman and Brian Boyer
April, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Hard to believe it’s been three years since I read the first volume of the Headhunters series. This second installment is a direct pick-up from it, with our heroes Eddie Martin and Jake “T.S.” Putnam of the Detroit police internal affairs division once again coming off like guest stars in their own book; like Marc Olden’s Narc series, the Headhunters novels are more about merciless crooks and dirty cops.

One difference between the two series would be that Narc has a much stronger focus on action. Martin and Putnam in fact shy away from battle, and spend the majority of Starlight Motel Incident either tracking leads or investigating crime scenes. I guess this would be a problem with making your protagonists members of the internal affairs division; for the pair to even be involved, the majority of the storylines must revolve around crooked cops or internal corruption, and as with the previous volume that is once again the plot here.

However the plot moves a lot faster this time, and one thing I should mention is, despite the action-avoiding protagonists, The Headhunters is without question one of the more lurid series to ever see print. For pete’s sake, the first-page excerpt/preview is about a white reporter coming to consciousness “in a pool of blood from his ruptured sphincter,” having been sodomized by several black inmates…and now they’re coming after him for more! I mean, did Pinnacle think prospective buyers would peruse this first page and then rush for the checkout line to buy the book?? (Though to tell the truth, it did get my attention!)

Martin and Putnam (who by the way is still invariably referred to as “TS,” “Putnam,” and “Jake” in the narrative, which is pretty confusing) appear in maybe a quarter of the novel. Instead the majority of the tale goes once again to Henry Pacquette, crime kingpin of Detroit, who finds his kingdom threatened by the Black Saracens. Lead by the mysterious Malcom 4x Saladin, who has never been seen, the Saracens are trying to corner Pacquette’s market of drugs and hookers and whatnot. What brings our heroes into it is the fact that a lot of cops happen to be Black Saracens.

Reading Starlight Motel Incident could leave one pretty paranoid about cops, especially those in Detroit circa 1974; practically every one of them are on the take, and have side jobs as executioners for either Pacquette or Saladin. And the corruption runs right up to the top, with of course Martin and Putnam being the only two clean cops we meet. You wonder why they don’t just say to hell with it and bust out of town – which, as the acknowledgements page would indicate, is exactly what Weisman and Boyer themselves did. They dedicate the book to their wives, for talking them into leaving Detroit, “the most dangerous city in the world.”

The titular event occurs in the first pages, as a group of Black Saracen cops burst in on a group of Henry Pacquette’s cops as the latter play poker in the Starlight Motel, hookers squatting beneath the tables and giving them blowjobs at the same time! (I told you this series was lurid…) The Saracens blow the cops away (they allow the hookers to live, though), thus setting off a war between Pacquette and Saladin’s men. We learn this from the outset from the scenes with Pacquette, who again is surrounded by his top two henchmen: Sonny Hope and Dovell, but it takes Martin and Putnam a while to put everything together.

There isn’t much “action” per se in the novel, other than a scene where Putnam, who goes undercover as a Saracen inductee, is chased by a trio of Saladin’s cops, who quickly deduce who Putnam is. Again though these heroes don’t do anything heroic; Putnam just runs from the Saracens, even stealing some guy’s car to make his getaway. In fact the people who do “heroic” things are the villains, with Dovell and Hope swooping in to save Putnam, a foreshadowing of the finale, in which they save both Martin and Putnam from the Saracens.

But while there isn’t action, there are definitely sordid hijinks. As mentioned above there’s the sad plight of Joe Thomas, a Detroit reporter who stumbles on the fact that the Black Saracens have friends in high places; for his trouble he’s set up on a bogus rap for heroin possession, sent to jail, taken to a notorious wing, and tossed in a cell with several black inmates (and yes, the authors inform us the inmates are all black). After he’s gang-sodomized by the lot of them, Thomas comes back to consciousness only to have his throat slit by the Elephant, Saladin’s top henchman and yet another dirty cop, not to mention the person who set Thomas up in the first place. Talk about a sick bastard – Elephant not only set him up, but initiated Thomas’s raping, and then waited around for him to wake up so Thomas would be conscious while Elephant slit his throat!

There are other instances, though none of them reach this exploitative high (low?). Another of Saladin’s cops is caught by Pacquette and his men in a darkly humorous scene, with Pacquette posing as a bus driver, and the guy’s tossed to the bears in the Detroit Zoo; both Martin and Putnam puke at the sight of the mauled remains the next morning. And once Saladin is uncovered (his identity is easily figured out, though), he too suffers a horrifying fate at the hands of Dovell and Hope – thrown against a sheet metal-lined brick wall and smashed against it by an armored truck!

As for our protagonists, Martin and Putnam don’t even shoot at anyone, and throughout are at least one step behind Pacquette and Saladin. This concept does make the Headhunters interesting, as of all the men’s adventure series I’ve read, this one features the least effective protagonists. But then they’re moreso there just to framework the stories; the tales really belong to the colorful cast of villains. Be forewarned, though, if you’re sensitive to such things; as in the previous book Weisman and Boyer go out of their way to make their black characters “talk black,” which gives the book a humorous Blaxploitation tone, whether intentional or not.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Headhunters #1: Heroin Triple Cross


The Headhunters #1: Heroin Triple Cross, by John Weisman & Brian Boyer
February, 1974 Pinnacle Books

Thanks to Justin Marriott's Men of Violence magazine for bringing this unsung series to my attention. This was the first of four volumes which detail the gritty adventures of Detroit cops Eddie Martin and Jake "TS" Putnam, the "Headhunters" of the title. Members of the Detroit Police Internal Affairs division, it's their job to ensure their fellow cops don't yield to the rampant vice and corruption of Detroit and go over to the other side.

The cover proclaims this as "an exciting new series" and the spine is tagged "Adventure," but The Headhunters series is only nominally part of the men's adventure genre. It's more "Elmore Leonard" than "Don Pendleton." This is basically just a crime novel that revels in its own lurid nature, filled with gutter-talking conmen and gangsters with colorful names (and even more colorful wardrobes), of two-bit hoods who go on murder and theft rampages. And our two heroes have none of the diehard resolve of the usual men's adventure protagonist; indeed Martin and Putnam barely even appear in the novel, and have little to do with the plot, climax, or resolution.

Eddie Martin is the boss, a WASP-type married into money who considers himself one of the few uncorrupted cops on the Detroit force. But behind his conservative veneer lies a true hellion, most notably in the turbo-charged engine he's installed in his VW bug. But otherwise Martin's one of those guys who likes to play old jazz on the high-fi while reading the newspaper.

Putnam is the new guy, a young black cop who likes to gamble and wears the latest superfly threads. A confusing bit in the narrative is that authors Boyer and Weisman can't seem to figure out how they want to refer to Putnam. Sometimes he's "TS" (which stands for "tough shit"), other times he's "Putnam," and most confusingly sometimes he's referred to as "Jake." (It took me a second to figure this out...because when Putnam's first referred to as "Jake" in the narrative there's no indication we're reading about Putnam...it was only after jumping back to the brief bio handily inserted into the text that I learned that Putnam's first name is "Jackson," thus "Jake!") One of the basic rules of writing is to only refer to your character by one name, and one name only -- other characters can call him by a million different names, but the author must be consistent.

At any rate the villains are the true protagonists of Heroin Triple Cross. They take up around 85% of the narrative, and there are a bunch of them: first and foremost there's Henry Paquette, the series' recurring villain. A hulking black former cop, Paquette is now the kingpin of Detroit's inner-city crime ring who poses as a law-obeying entrepreneur; Paquette's a grandiose figure who steals the entire book. His core group is just as showy: there's Dovell, Paquette's hit man, another black tough who happens to be gay and apparently gets off on murdering; and there's Sonny Hope, an over-the-top type who dresses as loudly as possible and occasionally bursts into impromptu song. Then there's "Gloves" Lewis, a black cop on the take; he works for Paquette and lives a double life, one as a cop with a bad attitude, the other as a high-roller who lives in a fancy penthouse.

Finally there are three black youths who provide the thrust of the narrative. Street punks who kill cops, steal cars, and rob Paquette-owned businesses, all within the first few pages. The entire city wants them, but most of all Paquette, because they have taken from him. He tasks Gloves Lewis with killing them, all while making it look like they were resisting arrest. During this Martin and Putnam (I almost typed "Martin and Lewis") attempt to crack down on Paquette, trying to figure out who his inside man is. The novel alternates between all of the above characters, again giving it the feel moreso of a grungy crime story than your average men's adventure novel.

As you no doubt noticed from the character rundown, the majority of the characters here are black. And Boyer and Weisman, white authors, go out of their way to have them "talk black." In many ways Heroin Triple Cross comes off like one of those latter Blaxploitiation movies, the majority of which were written by white screenwriters, filled with a sort of psuedo-jive dialog. The n-word is dropped more times than on a rap album, so if you're sensitive to such things, you've been warned. But then the novel would scrape the nerves of anyone too sensitive: this is one sordid, lurid piece of trash fiction, filled with gruesome murders, cops who fart and discuss their own stink, and some very unerotic sex...in particular a platinum blonde bimbo who "does blacks for kicks" and who does something so "shameful" with them that even her own cheeks burn with embarrassment at the thought of doing it. (Boyer and Weisman however leave what exactly this is a secret; my own sordid imagination came up with all sorts of stuff.)

According to Justin Marriott's informative article, Weisman and Boyer were journalists for Detroit's Free Press newspaper, and there's a definite air of legitimacy to the inter-office rivalries, police corruption, and gangster vice, no doubt gleaned from their many interractions with Detroit's cops and scumbags. Per the authors however this first novel was quickly written, and it shows. There are a ton of grammatical and narrative errors strewn throughout, things which could've been caught with a cursory edit. But in a way this rough nature lends Heroin Triple Cross a sort of underground charm -- it reads like a fictional counterpart to the Nark! pieces Joe Eszterhas was writing at the time over in Rolling Stone magazine (which supposedly were mostly fiction themselves).

I've got the following three volumes in the series and look forward to them, particularly Quadraphonic Homicide, the final volume and the one Justin investigated the most in his article.