Showing posts with label Paul Hofrichter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Hofrichter. Show all posts

Thursday, March 5, 2020

The Sadist (aka Ryker #6)


The Sadist, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

This was the last installment of Ryker to sport a painted cover, and as usual with Leisure Books I figure it was commissioned for a different novel – the guy that’s supposed to be Ryker has blond hair and is toting what appears to be a .45 automatic, and the white-haired doctor looming over the naked woman on the operating table doesn’t exist in the book. In fact, the villain of the piece, the titular “Sadist” (though he’s never actually referred to as such), has dark hair and is relatively young. There is a part where Ryker visits the morgue and views the burned corpse of a female victim, so maybe the cover artist just got his wires crossed.

At any rate The Sadist is a slow-moving chore of a read, lacking the spark of the earlier De Mille installments. Ryker here has been emasculated into a cipher, with none of the blowhard assholery of the De Mille original, nor even the fiery gumption of the version Len Levinson gave us in #3: The Terrorists. He lives only for his job, and when not at work sits at home and watches TV or reads magazines. He doesn’t fight with his fellow officers, and indeed has a friendly, respectful rapport with his commanding officer, Lt. Sal Fiscetti, referring to him on a first-name basis. But otherwise the same recurring characters and locations appear as in the De Mille novels –  there’s fellow cop Bo Lindly, and Ryker works out of the same fictional department, the Twenty-First Precinct on West 68th Street – which leads me to believe that series editor Peter McCurtin at least tried to retain some order of semblance with the original De Mille installments. Ryker even reads with his lips, a habit De Mille noted in his books. The Sadist also follows the late ‘60s/early ‘70s settings of the De Mille novels, taking place in 1970.

Thanks to Lynn Munroe we know that the first writer to serve as “Edson T. Hamill” was Paul Hofrichter, who turned in the fifth volume, The Child Killer. I have that one but likely will never read it, or at least not anytime soon – a novel about a creep who rapes and kills little boys just doesn’t sound like something I want to read. As Bill Crider so aptly put it, “It’s probably best that some books remain forgotten.” And thanks to Lynn we also know that Hofrichter wrote this volume as well – and it’s on the same level as all his other work. There’s hardly any action and the book is mostly comprised of arbitrary situations featuring the main villain or Ryker just sitting around and brainstorming about the case.  There is a bland, meat-and-potatoes narrative style and zero spark to the characters or the situations.

And as with most other Hofrichter books I’ve read, the supposed protagonist is a supporting character in his own book. The true star is Michael Marlin, a professional hitman in his 40s or 50s who has spent the past few decades killing women – older housewives in particular. We meet him in action, in an overlong sequence in which he chases some poor woman to her death in the Columbus Circle section of Manhattan, which we’re informed at night becomes a no man’s land of junkies, rapists, and pickpockets. Marlin forces the woman to climb an endless series of stairs to the rooftop, holding her at gunpoint, and then throws her down the chimney stack. After this folks we get a 32-page backstory on who Marlin is and how he got into this particular game; a specialist, he charges twenty thousand bucks a hit to rid wealthy husbands of wives they no longer want.

Meanwhile Ryker sits around in the precinct house and gabs with “Sal” and Lindly about the case. There’s a gruesome bit where he and Fiscetti visit the morgue at Bellevue, all of it uncannily similar to the part in Death Squad where Keller views a corpse being embalmed. In fact this part goes aboveboard in the “too much information” department, Hofrichter clearly striving for legitimacy in his otherwise lethargically-paced procedural, as Ryker views the horrifically charred body of the woman killed in the opening chapter and we get to know every little detail of what he sees.

Marlin is the star of the show, even picking up a woman for himself, a “sleazy” blonde go-go dancer who lives next door at the grungy hotel he’s staying in. (Ryker for his part goes without a woman – but he’s such a cipher he wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway.) Marlin despite his killing specialty is a hit with women – you might even say he’s a lady-killer if you were into lame puns – and he picks this babe up with ease, though Hofrichter keeps the tomfoolery squarely off-page. Eventually she figures out there’s more to her mystery neighbor than she suspected, leading to another gruesome sequence in which Marlin employs one of his fallback termination methods: Drano.

Women fare very poorly in The Sadist; it only occurred to me after I read the novel that every single female character in it is killed! In fact on the same night Marlin uses his Drano technique, he also flat-out strangles a woman he’s been hired to kill, another “sleazy” type who comes on to him. It’s all very lurid but undone by Hofrichter’s typical penchant for page-filling and padding. For example, Edward Marcel, the husband of the woman killed in the opening chapter, is giving his own inordinate subplot in which hardly anything happens. What makes it all the more annoying is that his name, Marcel, is so similar to “Marlin” that you can’t help but confuse the two characters.

There isn’t much of an attempt at bringing sleazy ‘70s Manhattan to life. Occasionally we’ll get the mention of a certain street, or maybe a topical detail like “a seedy hotel on Ninth Avenue,” but there’s no feeling of grungy veracity like you’d get with Len Levinson. But anyway Ryker and “Sal” basically just drive around the New York area and interview people who knew Mrs. Marcel, leading to reader annoyance in that they go over stuff we readers were privy to way back in the first chapter. What’s worse is we have lots of brainstorming sequences where the two cops try to figure out how Mrs. Marcel was killed and who might’ve hired her killer. This does at least lead to Ryker detecting a pattern; there are a few other murdered housewives in Manhattan, and Ryker begins to suspect they’re courtesy the same serial killer who has been offing housewives across the United States over the past few decades.

But there’s no action, nothing memorable. The “climax” involves Ryker rounding up Marcel and a few other husbands whose wives were “mysteriously murdered” and grilling them for info. Eventually he finds the bookie who arranged the hits, a sleazy character named Poagie. There’s a lot of stuff where Fiscetti – a police lieutenant, mind you – questions Ryker on basic investigative method and delivers bald exposition on this or that. And again as is typical with Hofrichter the book features an abrupt switch to “action” for the harried finale…poorly-handled action that doesn’t deliver a jolt because it’s so unexploited.

Marlin has relocated to another hotel, and a dragnet has surrounded him there without his knowledge. Ryker, Fiscetti, and Lindly go in with guns drawn and try to get the jump on Marlin, but he sees them and starts shooting with his .38. Lindly is hit in the chest, and the last we see of him he’s lying on the ground with a pale face.  Hofrichter never bothers to inform us if he lives or dies. This is another interesting paralell, because the “real” Lindly, ie De Mille’s original creation, was also killed in the line of duty, in Death Squad (despite appearing without any explanation in The Smack Man, which took place after Death Squad!). So I guess Bo Lindly just can’t catch a break. 

Anyway Ryker’s knocked out but then chases Marlin up to the roof, where the two get in a knock-down, drag-out fight in which Marlin kicks Ryker in the balls twice. Finally our hero, who has been instructed to take Marlin alive (the dude’s killed literally thousands of women and they want him to get the chair), decides to hell with it and hoists Marlin in the air and tosses him. And then delivers a lame one-liner, calling Marlin a “devil,” which seems incredibly underwhelming given how many innocent lives the guy has taken. And that’s it for The Sadist, and I guess that’s also it for me and Ryker…unless I ever decide to read The Child Killer.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

The Marksman #17: Killer On The Prowl


The Marksman #17: Killer On The Prowl, by Frank Scarpetta
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower

This volume of The Marksman seems to have been written by a committee, one that couldn’t agree on anything except that the book should be written in English. In one plot Philip “The Marksman” Magellan is in New York to take out a notorious Mafioso, and in another plot a trio of smalltime crooks kidnap that very same Mafioso for ransom. In a third plot the Mafioso’s “family” engage in internecine warfare to determine the new leader. And seldom do these three plots meet.

Once again a big thanks to Lynn Munroe, who revealed that Killer On The Prowl started life as a manuscript by Paul Hofrichter but was rewritten, perhaps by George Harmon Smith, a writer often used by series editor Peter McCurtin to fix up manuscripts. Harmon Smith’s presence is a guess on Lynn’s part, but the writing doesn’t seem to me the same as that in supposed Harmon Smith offerings, like Savage Slaughter.

Whereas Harmon Smith was given to almost literary flourishes, especially when compared to the genre average, the writing in Killer On the Prowl is stilted and bland, given over mostly to flat, declarative sentences. Lynn spoke with Hofrichter, and had him look over the novel. What’s strange is that Hofrichter remembered some of the stuff in Killer On The Prowl as things that had interested him at the time – rocket launchers, one of the settings, and such – but he didn’t recognize much in the book as being his own writing. So one wonders why his manuscript was even used…for example, the novel opens with Magellan in California and hating it; he wants to get back to action. Then he sees in the paper that infamous Mafia boss Vito Narducci is about to make a deal with the army on some new rocket launchers.

And yet, this is never mentioned again in the narrative; Magellan recognizes Narducci’s name and decides to head back East and kill him. First though he mails his guns to himself so he doesn’t have to worry about getting busted carrying them. The front and back cover copy refer to Narducci as “The Animal,” and have it that he’s been sicced on Magellan to finally take him down. But in the novel, Narducci comes off more like a businessman, running his empire from behind a desk. The author(s) clumsily inserts a reference to him being called “The Animal” by other mobsters, but this comes off as editorial emendation.

Narducci’s given an elaborate background overview first courtesy Magellan, who does his research on his target, and then in the section featuring the three punks who have decided to kidnap him. All this stuff seems to have come out of Mario Puzo and perhaps might be the work of some other writer other than Hofrichter or Harmon Smith; it’s certainly not the former. We also get inordinate backgrounds on the kidnappers, one of whom is a jockey – cue more page-filling stuff about one of his races.

Magellan is at his most cipher-like here, going about his motions in a matter-of-fact, almost robotic nature. Surely the intent is to make his actions appear even more savage, because this time Magellan does some crazy stuff, perhaps even more so than in the average Russell Smith installment…for even Russell Smith never had Magellan gun down defenseless women in cold blood. He also literally “fondles” his guns in the comfort of his hotel room. In other words he’s a deranged freak, and this author doesn’t even waste our time by introducing a female companion for him…this version of Magellan is more Terminator than human.

We learn Magellan’s been fighting the mob for two years. He doesn’t have the usual “artillery case” this time, but he’s got a ton of goodies, from pistols to submachine guns. He’s also got a “knee mortar,” one of the things Hofrichter told Lynn Munroe he was studying at the time; this is a WWII mortar that got its name because some soldiers mistakenly thought they could prop it on their knees or thighs when firing. Later Magellan gets some explosives from a dealer who operates out of a grocery store. There’s a lot of gun-talk and info on plastic explosives, as well as lots of detail on the scuba gear Magellan buys at a sports store for an underwater raid. 

However it must be said that Magellan rarely appears in the book; it’s really given over to Narducci, the kidnappers, and various one-off characters. The trio of losers who kidnap Narducci are given the most narrative, followed by the underlings in Narducci’s family who vie for power. When Magellan appears, he’s in total robot mode, planning hits and buying the supplies needed for them. The author(s) studiously avoids giving Magellan any personality; we’re given modicum details about when or where he eats, or what he’s thinking. But we’re with him step by step as he haggles for plastic explosives or buys scuba gear for his hit on one of Narducci’s boats.

And as mentioned, Magellan is more ruthless than ever in this one. He starts assaulting Narducci’s places and possessions, not aware that the man himself has been kidnapped…blowing up those boats, shotgunning one of Narducci’s lieutenants in a drive-by, starting a fire in one of his sleazy hotels (though at least here Magellan gives the innocents a fighting chance for survival). It’s still surprising though when Magellan blows away a gaggle of hookers in Narducci’s employ as they walk across the street:

When [the hookers] were passing a group of darkened stores in the middle of the block, [Magellan] swung directly across the street towards them, lifted the machinegun and aimed it at them, as he used one hand to steer the car along. 

The girls looked at him in amusement, thinking him to be a john, until they saw his submachinegun and screamed and began to scatter. 

He fired in short bursts, watched them twist and turn and fall as the bullets chewed into their perfumed flesh. The girls fell down on the sidewalk and turned it red. He continuted to fire until his clip was empty. Then the car swung away from the lane in which it was in and went back into the lane in which Magellan had been driving. As he sped off, he looked into his rearview mirror. At least half a dozen bleeding forms lay on the sidewalk. He smiled. 

When news of this got around no more dirty, little whores would be coming around to work for Vito Narducci.

Those poor hookers!! But seriously I think this is the most vile thing Magellan’s done in the series, which is really saying something. And of course note how he fires until he has an empty clip and then smiles…you don’t have to be Dr. Phil to realize the guy’s a fucking nutcase. And he’s the hero of the series! It’s for reasons like this that I’ll always prefer ‘70s men’s adventure novels to the ones from the ‘80s…they’re just so much crazier and more lurid.

Everything proceeds in the usual Marksman template, with unthrilling “action scenes” that entail Magellan shooting unarmed mobsters or blowing places up. This includes the “climax,” in which he takes care of a ton of guys with that knee mortar. But it’s all rendered so blandly that you could yawn and miss important events. Here’s a late action sequence, which demonstrates the meat and potatoes, “see Spot run” vibe of the prose – not to mention how “important characters” are so anticlimactically killed:

They saw Magellan and fired at him. He fired back. They sought cover. The two Mafioso saw them and assumed they were with Magellan and offering supporting fire. They turned and began to fire at the police. 

Dunn lifted his pistol and fired two shots at them. Royden lifted his gun and fired. A lucky shot struck Dunn in the chest. He fell. Stemmer was at his side, pulling him towards the bushes as Wimark crouched and fired at the other men. 

But Dunn never made it, he expired before they reached the bushes. Stemmer dropped him, shouted the news to Wimark and they ran into the bushes and up the street to take up a more favorable position.

And on it goes, with no dramatic thrust or impact upon the reader. This same sort of lifeless, juvenile prose marred Roadblaster, which makes me assume Hofrichter was responsible for a lot of the book, or at least the Magellan parts. And finally, any action series author who uses the word “expired” to describe a bad guy’s death needs to be sent to men’s adventure remedial school.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Roadblaster #3: Blood Ride


Roadblaster #3: Blood Ride, by Paul Hofrichter
No month stated, 1988  Leisure Books

This is one of those books that makes you take a long hard look in the mirror; the kind of book that has you reflecting on your life and all the poor choices you’ve made – particularly your choice to read this book. Yes, it’s the final novel of the Roadblaster series; the surprise isn’t that the series only lasted three volumes, it’s that it actually made it this far.

It’s four whole days since the nuclear events of the first volume, which as we’ll recall precipitated such armageddon-like events as people driving around the mountains outside San Francisco and complaining about the price of gasoline. Only four days have passed, folks, and we’re like 500 pages into this “epic.” Loser “hero” Nick Stack has yet to get off his ass and head to New York to find out if his wife and kids are still alive; the poor sap is constantly getting caught up on some random assignment, eternally prevented from starting off on that cross-country journey. A journey which, if you’ll think about it, is apparently the entire friggin’ point of this stupid series, but three volumes in and the dude’s in the same exact area he started off in.

But then, it would appear that Paul Hofrichter is already bored with the series concept. Blood Ride opens, arbitrarily enough, with a flashback-dream sequence in which some older woman who lived in Stack’s apartment building many years ago has a “panic diarrhea attack” and plummets to her death from the roof of the building. I’m not making this up, friends. That’s how the damn book starts. And Nick Stack sees her falling, then wakes up to the real world and it’s post-nuke hell and will spend the rest of the novel randomly flashing back to the time he saw that lady fall off his apartment building. 

There is in fact a New Agey vibe to this series, but Hofrichter takes it to new realms in the final volume…Stack is prone to lots and lots of soul-plumbing introspection, up to and including an overlong bit where he taps into the minds of crabs as they’re being boiled. There’s lots of “man’s inumanity” shit throughout Blood Ride, which of course makes the book even more of a beating to get through. Worse yet, the action, while never much of a concern for Hofrichter, is even less pronounced this time around, with basically nothing happening until the climax…a climax which, by the way, is basically a retread of the climax of the first volume.

The dialog is as soul-crushingly banal and exposition-laden as normal; when asked why he doesn’t just stay here with his new Californian friends instead of voyaging all the way to New York to find his family, Stack responds, completely serious, “I have more emotional investment in my wife and kids.” Really, Stack?! But honestly it’s like that throughout. And, like last time, the exposition isn’t just relegated to the dialog; anytime a new character is introduced, we get lots of arbitrary backstory about them, even including various sexual encounters. Oh and speaking of which, sex finally makes its return to Roadblaster, in typically bizarre fashion, but more of that anon.

Anyway the preceding installment featured the typical time-wasting development of Stack promising some injured dude that he’d try to find the dude’s family to let him know he’s okay. Keep in mind this is at the expense of Stack finally leaving for New York to find his own family. So off Stack goes with his Harley Davidson club buddies. This entails an overlong but pretty suspenseful bit where they have to scale the towering ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge, which has collapsed in the nuclear maelstrom. Even here, climbing high above the churning water, Stack finds the time to ruminate on digressive philosophical asides.

And folks we settle in for the long haul; they get to the town they seek, they ask an old guy for directions, down to the specific street intersections, and they trudge along on their quest. They find a town of inhabitants who are just sort of hanging out, drinking tepid beer that isn’t cold, due to the lack of refrigerators, due to the lack of electricity, due to the friggin’ nuclear war that just occurred a few days ago. Here the group also finds a couple who dance for the entertainment of the townsfolk: Aaron Dragon and the attractive Gina. Stack checks her out, wonders if she’s doing Aaron exclusively, and then the locals say they’ve hauled in a bunch of crabs, so let’s have a crab feast.

The long haul gets even longer now as we have this nigh-psychedelic nonsense as Stack commiserates with the poor little crabs, about to be boiled alive; he empathizes with their terror, the misery they endure before the bitter end…not that this stops him from going for seconds and thirds of crabmeat. And all this ruminating extends to your basic “man’s inhumanity” drivel that no one in their right mind would expect to encouter in a paperback “action” novel titled Blood Ride. After this everyone goes out to skinny dip and Stack comes upon Aaron and Gina “coupling” in the waves; he watches in secret, reflecting that he’s gone without a woman so long.

When Aaron goes off to “urinate” (and Hofrichter also has to inform us that Stack takes a piss, too, just in case we were concerned), Stack lingers a bit and Gina spots him. She was happy he watched and eagerly asks, “Would you like some?” Stack momentarily forgets about the wife and kids and heads on over. When he tries to slip it in, Gina says, “Not there. Put it where Aaron had it. In my ass. I can take it there. I like it that way, too.” This, she informs Stack, is “Nature’s birth control.” The sodomy goes on for a few pages, with the humorous “climax” that Gina, unbeknownst to Stack, doesn’t even get off, and after the act rushes away to “handle” herself! Our hero is such a loser, folks, that three volumes in when he finally gets a chance for sex, he doesn’t even satisfy the woman!

Oh, speaking of sleaze, we’ll recall the sleazeball bikers who were the main villians in the first volume. Well, they’re back, led by Lance Zoyas, who is the “son of a Mexican wetback.” Whereas in the first volume their prime goal was to round up preteen girls and force them to give blowjobs(!), this time these bikers are amost presented as their own famiy unit, caring for one another – hell, Zoyas and his co-leader fight back tears and hug each other when Zoyas finally returns to the fold, presumed dead after the events of the first volume. There’s another set of villains afoot, criminals led by a dude named Arnie Vastra, who actually do all the heavy lifting in the “thrilling climax” while Zoyas and his bikers watch from afar.

Stack is again used as a post-nuke courier, heading back into the mountains to reconvene with the downed B-52 crew. Along the way we get a sermon on buffalo. Seriously, we do. Here Stack gets the sad news that he won’t get to bum a ride on the plane, once it’s repaired; it will more than likely be sent on a mission to bomb Russia. Stack here finally recalls Rayisa, the preteen girl who was basically the supporting character in the first volume; that is, until she was captured in the final pages, forced to orally please a biker, and then Stack shot the dude’s dick off while it was still in Rayisa’s mouth. Not much in men’s adventure fiction can compare to that scene, friends; too bad the rest of the series never lived up to it.

Anyway Rayisa returns on page 162 of Blood Ride, having remained off-page the entirety of the previous volume; she tells Stack she wants to go with him no matter where he’s headed, thus forces herself on him for the trip to New York. He says okay and leaves; Rayisa’s in the book for like a page and a half and never seen again. And yes, that’s page 162; you’ll note that not much has happened in Blood Ride, which as you’ll note is a recurring friggin’ theme of the entire series.

The finale sort of picks things up; the nukes are being removed from the B-52 via convoy, and Arnie Vastra and crew, in stolen armored vehicles, attempt to route it, leading to a bloody firefight in which Stack again takes part. But as usual with Hofrichter, not much is resolved; Vastra fails in his attempt and escapes, and meanwhile Zoyas and his bikers, who have watched it all, try to follow the convoy but somehow lose it. So meanwhile they’re still out there, likely plotting some tomfoolery. As for Stack, he’s hanging out in a cave with another new friend, who tells Stack it’s perhaps due to the “cosmic pattern” that Stack has ended up here in California.

And that’s it, folks, it’s over! The book – and series – is over! We made it!! I hate to say it, but Roadblaster necessitates an emergency reformation of the men’s adventure tribunal which previously dealt with the abonimation that was The Penetrator #22. Paul Hofrichter has been found guilty by a jury of his men’s adventure peers for multiple counts of narrative padding, go-nowhere plot digressions, copious philosophical ponderings, bald exposition, banal dialog, buffalo sermonizing, misleading titles (both series and individual volume), misleading cover art, and one count each of nonclimactic sodomy and needless crab-boiling. Sentencing is to be carried out immediately.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Roadblaster #2: Death Ride


Roadblaster #2: Death Ride, by Paul Hofrichter
No month stated, 1988  Leisure Books

The Roadblaster series continues with a second volume that picks up a few hours after the soul-wearying first installment. At least this time Paul Hofrichter has realized that his series occurs in a post-nuke world, so there’s a bit more shock and horror among the characters, who last volume spent the duration drinking beer and talking about the price of gasoline, despite the fact that friggin’ World War III had just gone down. That being said, Hofrichter dwells a little too much on the nightmares of nuclear holocaust, with material that seems to be shoehorned in from some nonfiction study on the subject.

Loser hero Nick Stack once again graces us with his presence; this time he’s been given more of a melancholy nature, often reflecting on “the bitch that is war” and whatnot. In fact Stack’s musings take up a lot of the book’s too-long length. Once again he’s sort of fired up to go find his wife and kids in New York, but once again Hofrichter prevents this by having Stack get involved in something completely unrelated. As we’ll recall, the first novel ended with a big battle to prevent some bikers from taking over a downed nuclear bomber; now Stack intends to hitch a ride on the bomber – as repayment for saving its crew! – to New York.

The crew is all for it, but first they need orders, plus a mechanic. So will Stack head into nearby San Francisco and see if the local commander there will issue both those things? Sure thing, but first Stack has to check on preteen Rayisa, who was sexually abused in grimy detail last volume (FYI, there’s no sex at all in this volume). Still traumatized – after all, it was just a handful of hours ago that Stack shot a cock out of the girl’s mouth – Rayisa freaks out when Stack says he’s gonna go back to New York. She wants to go with him, and Stack says sure – and then Hofrichter removes her from the book, having her stay back in the small town of Montieth while Stack heads for SanFran. 

Stack’s back in his camper, and along for the ride come that division of “nice” Harley-Davidson bikers who showed up in the final pages of Hell Ride to help out against the bad bikers. Hofrichter as ever writes dialog that’s humorously exposition-laden, and the initial dialog with these guys made me chuckle:

“If you’re going to San Francisco, our Harley-Davidson club can join you and help find the military people in command. We planned to go down there anyway to search for the relatives of one of our members who live in Sausalito, across from San Francisco. I already explained to you last night that we’re part of a Harley-Davidson user club which travels the country attending various events. The war caught us in the mountains, and now we have to find out the whereabouts of our loved ones. Since we’re a team, each of us is going to travel to the homes of the other members to help him find his relatives.”

This must be how people talk “less than 48 hours” after WWIII. Stack for his part has been retconned into a surly ass; whereas the previous book gave the impression of a potbellied simp, this one has Stack as a grim warrior prone to melancholy introspections about the evils of hummanity. I did though appreciate his frequent diatribes against moronic left-wing thinking:

They came to a large, intact wall covered with graffiti from another time and place. In blazing red letters now almost burned off were two words: TOTAL ANARKEE. A twisted spelling of the word anarchy, which said a lot about the present world. And next to that, RONALD RAY GUN, a pithy comment about a past President whose politics the left had not liked. It made Stack wonder, if America had been stronger, whether [World War III] would have happened. No, he told himself, and silently cursed what the left had done to the country in their endless orgy of emasculation.

Ironically, it’s that “endless orgy of emasculation” which eventually brought the men’s adventure genre itself to an end; Len Levinson oncce told me that his left-wing female agent in the late ‘90s flat-out told him that publishers no longer wanted to focus on “fiction for men,” and hence he lost all of his writing contracts. Could it just be coincidence that the generation that was raised without any men’s adventure fiction was the generation that came to be so accurately known as Generation Snowflake? 

Stack’s grimness expands to the Almighty, as witnessed in another humorous diatribe, accompanied by an even-more-humorous response:

“I’m not that way. I say to God, you fuck me and it’s all over, I’m not your dart board. You want me to show love and respect, treat me in a way that will merit it. Love has to be earned, even by a God. You may find my attitude brazen and hard, but I think even so small an object as a human being, while showing respect for God and asking for his mercy, has to draw the line somewhere. This far and no further, even for the Master of the Universe. One should be as good a son to God as he is a father to us. It’s a two-way street.” 

“I’ll have to think that over,” Dellatore said.

Eventually Stack et al get to bombed SanFran, encountering horrors along the way, including an army of rats. Upon arrival they save a gangly, balding guy from two Arabs who are trying to kill him. The gangly guy is Bushnell, a “leftist liberal” who lives with a conclave of hippie-types. He reveals that, since the war, the Arabs have been chasing down gays, hippies, and Russians, claiming that they’ve been spreading AIDs. Stack mulls it over and finds the colonel in charge of the area. He makes his request for mechanics for the bomber, but instead the colonel deputizes Stack and demands that he go back and defend Bushnell’s people against the Arabs!

“There’s a time to make love and a time to kick ass,” Stack tough-talks Bushnell’s hippie comrades, and let’s remember that Stack was the guy who said “no thanks” to saving a bunch of people in the previous volume. He then ventures over to the gay area, led by Francis Pelf, and feels uncomfortable as he’s checked out by a transvestite Burlesque dancer named Gravy Train. Hofrichter doesn’t go too wild on the gay stuff, and indeed has a few “tough gays” who served in ‘Nam and are happy to join the war party Stack’s putting together. We also get a visit to the Russian area, for more drafting.

But despite the retconning, Nick Stack is still a chump. Here’s the funny thing…about a hundred pages in Stack and an ally do a “soft probe” of the Arab area. Turns out it’s just a few Arabs who lead the group; it’s also composed of native Americans who were caught up in the AIDs paranoia (the novel was clearly written in the late ‘80s). Stack briefly captures a sentry and issues a warning; he tells the guy to let his Arab leaders know that Stack’s in town and there’s going to be new rules. Stack then leaves…and the Arabs immediately launch an attack on the gay and hippie sections, massacring countless people – while meanwhile Stack himself is obliviously hanging out with an old National Guard commander!!

Hofricther shines in unexpected moments, like a strange-but-charming New Agey bit where a one-off character is killed in the massacre and leaves his body and connects with departed friends in the afterlife! But Hofrichter’s terrible with the POV-hopping, changing perspectives between paragraphs with no warning; this gets to be painful in the chaotic action scenes. Finally Stack – working with Bill Batthurst, aforementioned National Guard pal – launches a counterattack.

As with the previous book, Hofrichter delivers a runing action sequence that comes off more like war fiction than men’s adventure; Stack leads various fire teams on attacks on the Arab’s compound, dwelling more so on the agonies and horrors of war rather than on the exploitative gore. And there isn’t a single part where Stack shoots someone’s dick off!! Lots of one-off characters are introduced, given inordinate backgrounds, and then promptly killed off, a page-filling gambit that occurs throughout the book. Even more sadly, when the main villains meet their long-awaited ends, Hofrichter delivers them anticlimactic deaths.

The novel ends with Stack promising to help find Batthurst’s family; the National Guard commander has suffered an injury in the battle and now will be unable to continue his search for them. Uh, Stack, didn’t you start off the novel bound and determined to find your own family? And what about poor little Rayisa?

Well, there was only one more volume to go, so we’ll see. Oh, and word of warning – two entire volumes now and Stack hasn’t blasted a single damn road. What the hell??

Monday, July 18, 2016

The Sharpshooter #12: Scarfaced Killer


The Sharpshooter #12: Scarfaced Killer, by Bruno Rossi
February, 1975  Leisure Books

Paul Hofrichter, the man who gave us the abysmal Stiletto, returns to the Sharpshooter series with an installment that turns out to have been written as a volume of The Marksman but changed by editor Peter McCurtin into a Sharpshooter. Yet for once the copyediting is fairly good, with only a handful of slips in which Johnny Rock is mysteriously referred to as “Magellan.”

As Lynn Munroe points out in his awesome Peter McCurtin checklist, McCurtin employed a ghostwriter named George Harmon Smith to polish the occasional Sharpshooter or Marksman manuscript. I wonder if Scarfaced Killer was one of those manuscripts, as the early pages display a level of qualitity inconsistent with Hofrichter’s typically-clunky style. Whereas Hofrichter’s typical novels are filled with pedantic dialog and scant description, the opening of Scarfaced Killer is for the most part pretty good, with Johnny Rock heading into the small town of Boyle, Oklahoma, which has been subtly overtaken by Mafioso who want to control Boyle’s newly-discovered gold mines.

Another thing that makes me think McCurtin or Smith tinkered with the book is the phrase “Soon he would again taste Mafia blood,” which appears early on and reminds us of Johnny Rock’s mob-killing psychosis. The phrase “taste Mafia blood,” to my knowledge, only appeared in the three volumes of the series written by Len Levinson, and given that it appears here makes me think that either McCurtin liked the phrase and used it in his polishing of the manuscript, or perhaps Hofrichter had been given copies of Levinson’s three books as study material before writing his own. But anyway, gradually the polished feeling of the opening page is replaced by the clunkiness we expect from Hofrichter – the same sort of style he was still employing over a decade later, in the Roadblaster books. 

But McCurtin (or one of his copyeditors) slips at times, missing the occasional “Magellan” in Hofrichter’s original manuscript and not changing it to “Rock.” However the reader gets the suspicion that this might’ve started life as a Marksman novel early on; when Rock checks into his hotel in Boyle, he gives the fake name of Phil Marsalla – ie Philip Magellan, the Marksman. This “subtle” joke clearly made more sense in Hofrichter’s original version, where it was Magellan. Curiously, a minor character in Scarfaced Killer is named “Emil Scaretta,” which is so similar to the Marksman house name of “Frank Scarpetta” that you wonder if this was yet another in-joke on Hofrichter’s part or if it was just an oversight. (At any rate, Scaretta’s accidentally referred to as “Scarpetta” on page 163.)

Anyway, as usual with this stuff, it doesn’t matter. Hofrichter’s Johnny Rock/Philip Magellan is such a cipher that it really could be either character; only minor details, very late in the novel, betray that the character we’ve been reading about started life as Magellan – namely, the tidbit that “Rock” once worked in a carnival. As all fans know, that’s Magellan’s background, not Johnny Rock’s. Also, this version of “Rock” is fond of carrying a “suitcase” around with him, in which he stores his arsenal; surely this is none other than the infamous “artillery case” Magellan lugs around with him in every volume of The Marksman written by Russell Smith.

Oh, and speaking of that suitcase – Scarfaced Killer is filled with typos, like a ludicrious amount of them. For the most part they’re the usual Belmont Tower/Leisure screwups, like “shair” instead of “chair.” But my friends, on page 180 we come across this humdinger: “…holding the handle of the heavy shitcase.” Yes, friends, someone actually wrote “shitcase” instead of “suitcase.” How this could possibly happen – let alone not be caught – will have to remain a mystery, but maybe it was the copyeditor or McCurtin or even Hofrichter himself letting us know what they thought about the book.

Anyway, Rock surveys Boyle and discovers that it’s practically the fief of a Mafia bigwig named Franklin Ditrinco, who rules the small town with a crooked mayor and the police in his employ. Only a hardscrabble group of salt-of-the earth types oppose Ditrinco’s complete takeover of the gold mines, and Rock finds out about them thanks to Carl Cortner, the town drunk. Leading the miners is Hank Belmann, Cortner’s son in law, and the man Rock gradually teams up with to take on Ditrinco’s goons and dirty cops. In particular Ditrinco retains a trio of wheelchair-bound killers, the Celebano brothers, who go around town on electric wheelchairs, toting shotguns. Their leader, sadistic Wendell, may be the “scarfaced killer” of the title and hyperbolic back cover copy, but probably isn’t – this is likely another indication of McCurtin once again coming up with a suitably “tough” title.

One thing that can be said of Hofrichter is that he doesn’t shy from the gory violence. While there isn’t even a hint of sex in the novel (the only woman in the book is an old lady who has maybe a line or two), there’s a ton of action and carnage, with Hofrichter, as in the inferior Stiletto, taking a sort of relish in describing how eyeballs pop out of skulls when a person’s gunned down or blown up. And Rock as ever is a straight-up killer in this one; his first victims being a pair of Ditrinco-paid lowlifes who occasionally rape runaways and then murder them. Rock catches them in the act of doing this, waits until they’ve raped and killed their latest prey(!!), and then guns them both down. This initiates his war of attrition against Ditrinco.

It’s constantly hammered home that Rock has been fighting the Mafia “for two years,” and practically everyone has heard of him. However in Hofrichter’s hands he’s kind of a moron. After his first hit Rock’s in his hotel room and falls for a Celebano brothers swindle; figuring the new guy in town is Rock, they send a flunkie up to his room, posing as a sandwich seller. Rock, who just killed two henchmen moments after rolling into town, buys himself a sandwich and doesn’t suspect a thing. It takes town drunk Carl Cortner to explain to him that it was a ruse to suss Rock out.

While he might be stupid, Rock is still sadistic – not to mention deadly to his friends. Learning that Ditrinco and the crooked mayor are hosting a dinner for various town notables, Rock steals a bunch of nitro, gets a job as a busboy at the restaurant, and then fills the coffee percolators with the nitro. After the tediously-overdescribed setting up of the explosives Rock escapes before the blast hits – and he wipes out around 70 men and women at the banquet. This leads to the first of many running battles in the novel, as Rock, armed with Uzi and grenades, takes on hordes of Mafia soldiers in the woods outside the restaurant.

Another long action sequence quickly follows, as poor ol’ Carl is gunned down by dirty cops who open fire on Rock’s hotel room, hitting the drunk instead. Rock blows ‘em all up with grenades, and then gets in another big firefight at Frank Belmann’s place. Oh, and speaking of which, that patented clunky Hofrichter dialog appears in an interminable chapter in which Belmann convinces his sickly wife to leave town until the action’s over; there are go-nowhere conversations throughout the novel, in particular the stuff with Ditrinco and his butler Scaretta, most of it recapping stuff we’ve already read.

The majority of the novel trades off between Ditrinco plotting to send killers after Rock and Belmann’s men and then Rock and Belmann fighting them off. Things really come to a head in the finale, in which Rock comes up with the “master plan” of serving himself up as bait in his hotel room while Belmann’s force capitalizes on this concentration of forces and heads for Ditrinco’s supposedly-defenseless home. Meanwhile, Ditrinco quickly deduces it’s a trap and Belmann and his little army is massacred in another running action sequence which sees more heads exploding and eyeballs popping out. 

The Celebano brothers are the highlight here, riding specially-made heavy-tread electric wheelchairs with armored shields covering their bodies, shields which have slots to see through and slots for their shotgun barrels. (“In them, the brothers looked like creature[sp] from Mars.”) These three butcher Belmann’s army, killing them to a man on a battle that rages on the streets of Boyle, and for once the reader figures Johnny Rock might be up against some stiff competition. But the finale is a total copout; in just a page or two Rock takes the three brothers out, shooting under their armored plates and then blowing them up with dynamite.

More focus is placed on Rock’s knife fight with Emil Scaretta, who is a master with the stiletto; here we get the background detail that “Rock” grew up in a carnival and thus is a master of knife-throwing. As for Ditrinco, he does Rock the favor of offing himself – after which “There was no one else left to kill,” and that’s it for Rock’s war upon Boyle, a war which humorously enough has seen the death of everyone, mobster and innocent townsperson alike.

As mentioned, despite the clunky prose and the headscratching amount of run-on sentences, Hofrichter really doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to the action and the gore, which makes Scarfaced Killer more entertaining than any of Hofrichter’s other novel’s I’ve yet read.

Monday, February 1, 2016

Roadblaster #1: Hell Ride


Roadblaster #1: Hell Ride, by Paul Hofrichter
No month stated, 1987  Leisure Books

Graced with a misleading cover that makes it look like some sort of futuristic cowboy-biker sort of deal, Hell Ride, the first volume of the Roadblaster series, is in fact a post-nuke pulp. The series ran for three volumes and had absolutely no relation to the cover painting – the “hero” of the tale, Nick Stack, could more accurately be depicted as a potbellied simp in a wifebeater shirt.

Roadblaster was packaged almost identically to another Leisure Books post-nuke series, the longer-running and infinitely superior Phoenix. Almost the same color scheme/hyperbolic cover copy was used for both, but whereas Phoenix fired on all cylinders, Roadblaster is more of a middling affair, boring and padded, and indeed calls to mind the sort of books Leisure/Belmont Tower was publishing back in the 1970s, with the same sort of endearingly amateurish prose you’d find in say The Marksman or The Sharpshooter

No surprise then that author Paul Hofrichter got his start writing for those very books. I must offer Lynn Munroe a huge debt of gratitude for his recent Peter McCurtin Checklist, where in the Assassin/Marksman/Sharpshooter section he detailed who exactly wrote each volume of those series. Lynn has revealed that it was Paul Hofrichter who wrote the atrocious Sharpshooter #9: Stiletto, one of the worst novels I’ve had the displeasure of reading since I started this blog…a novel in which characters aimlessly drove around and engaged in mundane conversations before hastily-sketched firefights would break out. 

Sadly, over ten years after writing Stiletto Hofrichter still hadn’t much improved. I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those internet reviewers who constantly bitches about these genre books being “bad.” In fact the goofier they are the more I love them. But friends, Hell Ride should come with a pack of no-doze. It’s a soul-crusher of a read at times…I mean, nuclear war breaks out but characters just aimlessly drift around the mountains of central California and engange in mundane conversations. And in another callback to Stiletto, one of the main topics of conversation is the inflated price of gasoline.  Perhaps this is something Hofrichter himself obsessed over in the real world.

Anyway, another interesting similarity to Phoenix is how the opening of Hell Ride so closely mirrors Dark Messiah. Just like Magnus Trench, series protagonist Nick Stack is enjoying some hunting in the mountains of California when nuclear war breaks out. And just like Trench, Stack has a wife and kids back home in New York City; Stack’s 36 and owns a “radio dispatch private cab service.” Unlike Magnus Trench, though, Stack doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to get back to New York and save his family. Rather, the nukes hit and Stack just sort of takes his good ol’ time getting to his van and leisurely heads on back to civilization.

Driving to the small town of Montieth Stack promptly comes across a teenaged runaway named Rayisa Gilchrist. Apparently recalling to mind his daughter, Stack offers the naïve young girl a lift into town. The two engage in some of the most humdrum, mundane, expository dialog this side of William W. Johnstone. Remember, nuclear war just occurred. More banality ensues as Stack gets in an argument with an old coot who runs a gas station and demands inflated prices. “Not all mountain people are bad,” Rayisa reminds Stack, who agrees. Remember, nuclear war just occurred.

In Montieth Stack and Rayisa hobknob with the locals, and Stack has a few beers…! His family apparently forgotten, he decides to head to the biggest nearby city, Fresno, to assess the damage. Rayisa happens to be from there and tags along to see if her family is dead. They pick up more people – a family who has somehow escaped the mass nuclear destruction – but they find Fresno bombed to rubble. Stack hooks up with an army lieutenant in charge of rescue operations and offers some half-assed help, but mostly just ends up puking his guts out after eating radiation-poisoned seagulls he shoots down with his Savage 99F hunting rifle.

Stack busy puking, the narrative cuts over to a seemingly-arbitrary setpiece which concerns a B-52 bomber making an aborted run on China in retaliation for the nuke strike on America. But engine problems force them to turn back around to their air base, which has been destroyed in the interim. They end up landing in the middle of nowhere…not far from Montieth. In another extended setpiece, we cut over to another new group of characters: the Santa Monica Bloodsuckers, a 50-member biker gang led by Lyle Rokmer, aka San Quentin Sal.

The bikers decide that chaos now reigns and decide to rip some shit up. Here, after so much deadening banality, Hofrichter displays his true gifts: sleazy sadism. Apparently the number one thing to do if you’re a bad guy in the post-nuke world is to force preteen girls to give you blowjobs. This Rokmer and gang proceed to do posthaste – that is, after they’ve stolen gas from the mean old coot Stack ran into. The bikers strap the old man up to his gas tanks and set him on fire; Hofrichter spends four pages on the sequence, dwelling on the terror and mutilation and destruction of the old coot.

This is just the first of Hofrichter’s descents into sadism; the Bloodsuckers (who apparently drive Kawasaki motorcycles, rather than the more-expected Harley choppers) head into the small mountain town of Vista Royale and promptly murder the owner of a grocery store. They then force the teenaged girl who works there to give them each blowjobs, and Hofrichter writes a seven-page sequence for this, providing uber graphic detail. Total XXX porn stuff, folks…and while I enjoy the lurid, OTT aspects of men’s adventure fiction, I do have to say my brain hasn’t been rotted enough yet that I get off on reading about a preteen girl being forced to suck off several guys.

It gets crazier and crazier, too, with the bikers getting pissed with the girl, and when she can’t take anymore and pukes(!) they slap her around and drag her off for more fun later. Meanwhile a few one-off characters, Vista Royale residents, band together to fight off the bikers. It goes on and on, not thrilling in the least, and ends with the expected outcome of the bikers victorious. But what of Stack? Once he’s done puking seagull meat he takes his leave of Fresno, and I kid you not his parting words to his new lieutenant buddy are, “This has been a unique and interesting experience.” That’s how I’d sum up my time in a nuke-ravaged city. 

Stack further displays his half-assery when he gets back to Montieth and the sheriff, who is putting together a group of men to go save nearby Vista Royale, asks Stack if he’d like to join. Stack’s response, my friends, is “No thanks.” This is the only instance I can think of in the entire universe of men’s adventure fiction where the “hero” says “no thanks” to saving a bunch of people. The sheriff’s force is decimated in another overlong/underthrilling sequence, but when a biker scouting party arbitrarily snatches young Rayisa, Stack finally decides to get involved.

The ensuing sequence isn’t too bad, as Stack sneaks silently into darkened Vista Royale, armed with a knife and his hunting rifle, and kills a few bikers. These are Stack’s first kills, and he actually ruminates on them – unexpected soul-plumbing from Hofrichter – because unlike most heroes of this genre Stack isn’t a war vet. He did serve in the National Guard, though, where he took “commando courses.” More inappropriate porn ensues as Stack quickly and easily locates the home in which Rayisa is being held captive; he spies through a window as the nude 14-year-old is first whipped by a leather belt and then forced to give the biker a blowjob. (By the way, forced oral sex is the only sex in the novel.)

Now, does Stack sneak up on the otherwise-distracted biker and slit his throat? No sir. He takes him out in what must be admitted is a “unique and interesting” method of dispatching someone:

Stack watched [Rayisa’s] mouth glide along the swollen shaft of the biker whose pants were now down around his knees. The biker’s head was back and his eyes were shut tight. The goon was in heaven. His hisses filled the air.

Stack grew very cold now. He aimed the rifle at the base of the thick shaft. Then, as Rayisa pulled back, letting the hoodlum out of her mouth, almost to the tip of the cobra-hood head, Stack fired. The sound of the shot reverberated in the hallway as the goon’s shaft disintigrated into strips of bloodied meat and hundreds of flying droplets of blood. Rayisa screamed as she drew back, the stub of his now-destroyed manhood falling from her mouth, while blood jerked from the crotch of the screaming hoodlum, who was quickly going to his knees.

This is clearly not the best way to save a traumatized young girl, and it’s to Hofrichter’s credit that he has Rayisa appropriately dazed for the rest of the novel, even getting doctor treatment once Stack has safely gotten her back to Montieth. But remember, Rayisa, “not all mountain people are bad!” Oh and meanwhile Stack saves someone else – none other than a member of that B-52 crew, who stumbled upon the bikers while looking for help. Now there’s more than just the fate of Vista Royale at stake; if the bikers get to that B-52, which is loaded with primed nukes, there could be even more nuclear misery on the way.

With the assistance of a gang of good bikers who just happen to show up (members of the Harley Davidson Family Club or somesuch), Stack and more Montieth locals get in an extended battle for the B-52. This isn’t a bad sequence, with lots of flying blood and gore and bikers getting run over by cars. Meanwhile, biker leader Lyle Rokmer escapes. From there it’s back to Vista Royale, which Stack et al eventually liberate in another long action setpiece, one in which Stack even blows away a few female bikers (for which he feels the need to lamely explain to his comrades that they were armed).

Hofrichter ends Hell Ride on a cliffhanger: both Rokmer and his second-in-command, Lance Zoyas (aka Samurai Sal), get away, each of them vowing revenge. And meanwhile poor Rayisa lies in a friend’s bed and ruminates over how some dude’s cock was blown out of her mouth while she was blowing him…

Yes, this is a strange, sometimes-unsettling book, my friends. I suspect the title of the novel has more to do with the reading experience itself rather than the actual content. The crazy parts are crazy and the goofy writing is just the icing on the cake (John Tigges is another point of comparison), but overall the mundane parts are just too hard-going. That being said, here are two more reviews of Hell Ride I hope you will enjoy: a typically-great and concise one by Zwolf, and a hilarious one at the awesomely-named Paperback Warrior blog.

Monday, August 9, 2010

The Sharpshooter #9: Stiletto

The Sharpshooter #9: Stiletto, by Bruno Rossi
August, 1974 Leisure Books

This was #9 in the 16-volume The Sharpshooter series, but, thanks to this informative essay by Rayo Casablanca, I read it second. Stiletto appears to pick up shortly after #1: The Killing Machine, and unlike other books in the series it features Iris Toscano, voluptuous assistant of main character Johnny Rock who played such a big part in The Killing Machine, gathering intel for him and assisting in his strikes against the mob.

Given this, Rayo believes that Peter McCurtin, author of The Killing Machine, must've also penned Stiletto. However I cannot agree with that. The author who churned out this piece of garbage could not be the same as the one who gave us the genuinely-entertaining The Killing Machine.

For, sad to say, Stiletto is by far the worst men's adventure novel I've ever read. Indeed it's so bad that it could make one give up the men's adventure genre cold turkey. It's inept, poorly plotted, filled with banal dialog and plastic characters, and on the whole just plain sucks monkey balls. It's not even so bad that it's good. It's just so bad that it's...bad.

The novel opens with Johnny undercover as a hitman out of El Paso, visiting up north for a job. He's grown a moustache, wears his hair long, and darkened his skin with "Man-Tan" to complete the disguise. But within pages he's uncovered and a deliriously gory shootout ensues. This is our first clue that this is not the same author who gave us The Killing Machine. That book had action to be sure, but it wasn't as spectacularly over-the-top as the violence in this one. Each hit of each bullet is described in loving detail, complete with eyes popping out and blood and brains splattering about the walls, leaving "psychedelic art" in their wake.

Johnny was an okay character previously but here he is a cipher -- actually he's more of an asshole. Nothing matters to him but wasting mobsters. This isn't a theory, he says it several times in the novel! Johnny discovers that the mob has stolen several thousand gallons of gasoline which they plan to sell at a staggering one dollar a gallon! (Cue laughter.) I know, I know, that was a whopping amount in the early '70s, but still.

For some reason Johnny decides that this job is too big for him alone, so he drafts his Uncle Vito to help. Vito was a WWII paratrooper who now lives in a rundown house with his wife. Johnny and Iris visit the old couple, where the wife gives them both a good browbeating for breaking the law. Vito comes home, turns down Johnny's offer, and that's that. Meanwhile his wife, out cooking dinner in the kitchen, is gunned down by mobsters, who have been watching the house in case Johnny ever visited. The old lady dies, and immediately thereafter Vito says he'll help Johnny.

So let's consider this. A couple married for 30 years, the wife murdered solely due to Johnny Rock's presence. And yet Vito brushes off any blame Johnny should rightly be given. Further, consider how Vito reacts. He basically shrugs and says, well, I guess my decision has been made for me. All of the characters act like this in the novel -- they aren't even human beings, just paper-thin caricatures moved about on a wobbly chess board by an inept player. (To make it worse, later in the novel Vito buys a new car...and when it gets damaged he rants about it for a page -- more of a reaction than he gave the death of his wife!)

Perhaps the biggest victim here is Iris Toscano. A vivacious, dynamic personality in The Killing Machine, here in Stiletto she's reduced to a yes-girl. Literally. Her first line of dialog is "Anything you say, Johnny," and everything she says afterwards is pretty much just a variation of that. She barely speaks at all, reduced to less than wallpaper. There's no way the writer who created this character could've turned out the bland mockery presented here.

And to make it worse again -- spoiler ahead, but spoilers are only spoilers if the story and characters draw you in -- Iris is killed halfway through the book. Johnny's reaction? Johnny doesn't react. The death occurs during a shootout with the mob; after getting away, what does Johnny do? He washes his car. He looks out at the woods and feels "depressed" because the last time he was here, Iris was with him. It's like her death occurred years and not seconds ago. And he doesn't even mention her for the rest of the novel!

Yes, Johnny Rock is a loathsome prick in Stiletto. I wanted the mobsters to gun him down and not the innocents he dragged into his hellish life with him. He ruins the lives of many in his psychotic quest for vengeance, and yet he chalks it up as part of the job. Innocent women are killed in his attacks on the mob. His aunt is murdered because of him. Iris Toscano dies because of him. And yet Johnny pushes on oblivious. This is in no way the same character we met in The Killing Machine, and it's a shame.

I implore you to pass this one by. Everything is bad, even the action scenes, which are just the same thing over and over -- Johnny blasting at a few thugs with his shotgun. The dialog is incredibly hamfisted; the only memorable exchange is one that comes out of left field, Vito saying something about how "the pizza in this area is made by the Spanish, and their sauce is too thin."

It's so inept as to be hilarious. I mean, there are gore-packed action scenes which end, literally, with our "heroes" wondering where they should go have dinner! It's as if each paragraph has nothing to do with the one that went before it.