Showing posts with label Russell Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russell Smith. Show all posts

Thursday, July 28, 2022

Murder Machine (The Marksman #20)


Murder Machine, by Frank Scarpetta
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower 

Russell Smith turns in another volume of The Marksman that’s just as crazed as his others, with the added bonus that Murder Machine features what I’m sure is some intentional in-jokery, as well as a self-awareness that’s very unique for the series. My assumption is by this point the manuscripts Smith had written the year before were coming out in paperback, and he saw how editor Peter McCurtin was butchering them, changing them wily-nily into Sharpshooter novels, and for this book Smith decided to hell with it – he was just going to have some fun. 

Lynn Munroe apty summarizes Murder Machine as a “a schizoid read,” but he also detects the hand of fellow series ghostwriter George Harmon Smith in the work. I personally didn’t detect Harmon Smith’s style at all – to me his style is very noticeable, a sort of sub-John Gardner, with very literate prose but a tendency to overdescribe the most mundane of actions. See for example #18: Icepick In The Spine, which was certainly the work of George Harmon Smith. Murder Machine on the other hand has the stamp of the other Smith on the series: Russell, with the same loosey-goosey approach to plot, a bunch of lowlife loudmouth Mafioso who talk like rejected Jerky Boys characters, and a “hero” who comes off like a monster. I mean Russell Smith’s unique style is evident throughout the book, like for example: 


This excerpt, while displaying Russell Smith’s distinctive style, also demonstrates another new element with this volume: a constant reminder that Philip “The Marksman” Magellan will keep killing Mafia until he himself is dead. Again, I get the impression that, given that we’re already on the twentieth volume of the series, someone at Belmont Tower must’ve felt a reinforcement of Magellan’s motive was in order. There are frequent parts in Murder Machine where Magellan will resolve himself to the destruction of the Mafia, given their murder of his wife and son – an event which happened, of course, in the first volume of a different series: The Assassin

But speaking of how Philip Magellan started life as Robert Briganti in another series, and then turned into “Johnny Rock” for the Marksman manuscripts McCurtin arbitrarily turned into Sharpshooter installments, this brings us to the intentional in-jokery I mentioned above. I strongly suspect that, by the time he was writing Murder Machine, Russell Smith saw that McCurtin was publishing his Marksman manuscripts as a completely different series – see for example The Sharpshooter #2 and The Sharpshooter #3. I say this due to nothing more than an otherwise random comment early in the book. When the mobsters in New York start freaking out that Magellan’s in town, one of them says, “You remember that Sharpshooter guy from last year? Magellan’s his name?” 

Now, never in a Marksman novel has Philip Magellan ever been incorrectly identified as “Johnny Rock.” It’s only in The Sharpshooter where the “Magellan” goofs appear, or where Rock, the Sharpshooter, is incorrectly referred to as “The Marksman.” Because, of course, those novels started life as Marksman manuscripts, and poor copyediting resulted in a mish-mash of protagonist names. But after this early “Sharpshooter” mention, Magellan is consistently referred to as “The Marksman,” even in the narrative. Magellan also frequently thinks of himself as “The Marksman,” ie “the luck of The Marksman was with him” and etc, as if Smith were doubling down on the fact that he was writing a Marksman novel, but with that sole “Sharpshooter guy” bit he was acknowledging his awareness of the situation. 

There’s even more subtle in-jokery in Murder Machine: there are characters named Frank and Peter, ie “Frank Scarpetta” and “Peter McCurtin.” But I think the biggest indication here that Russell Smith was in on the whole twisted joke is that Murder Machine shows the first signs of self-awareness in the series. Another minor Mafia stooge later in the book goes over Magellan’s modus operandi, noting how the Marksman generally just shows up in a city, with no particular purpose, but somehow gets involved with the Mafia – usually due to their own stupidity – and then Magellan doesn’t leave town until he’s killed everyone. In other words, the “plot” of every single Russell Smith installment. The stooge basically implies that Magellan is a supernatural force who gets by on luck, something Magellan himself realizes. Bonus note – the stooge apparently tangled with Magellan “a year ago” (and lost an eye in the fight), in “New Brunswick,” a reference to the earlier Russell Smith entry #14: Kill!

Another new element in Murder Machine is the sudden focus on sleazy sex. Russell Smith has turned in some sleaze in prior installments, but this time it’s really over the top. Lynn Munroe speculates that this material is “grafted in from some porn novel,” but again it is similar to the sleaze material in previous Smith installments. Personally I just thought it was a quick (and dirty) way Smith figured he could meet his word count. Because of all the Smith books I’ve read, Murder Machine most comes off like a first draft that was cranked out over a single weekend, the author fueled by a steady stream of booze and amphetimines. Again this could be more indication of a “who gives a shit?” sentiment, given Smith’s recent awareness that his manuscripts were being butchered during publication. 

And just to clarify, this is all my impression – Lynn Munroe could be entirely correct that Murder Machine is a collaboration between the two Smiths, and the sleaze stuff is indeed grafted in from a different novel. Lynn performed a herculean task of figuring out the development of this series, and who wrote what volumes. To me though it just seemed like every other volume of Russell Smith’s I’ve read, with none of the literary flourishes of GH Smith. 

Well anyway, there’s of course no pickup from the previous volume, which was written by a different author. Curiously there seems to be a pickup from an earlier Smith installment, possibly #15: Die Killer Die!, as when we meet Magellan he’s flying back to the US, returning from a trip to France. That was the most recent volume of the series Russell Smith wrote, so it seems likely that Murder Machine picks up after it. As I’ve written before, Russell Smith’s books – from both series – could be excised into their own separate series, with even a bit of continuity linking them. Otherwise though there’s no plot per se, and Murder Machine is a lift of every other Russell Smith installment, following that same setup mentioned above: Magellan goes to New York, literally bumps into a Mafia thug on the street, and then starts killing them all off, ultimately wiping out a heroin pipeline. 

But Magellan’s practically a supporting character. As with most Russell Smith installments, there’s a big focus on one-off characters, all of them mobsters. There’s also a convoluted subplot about a triple-cross involving a bank robbery, heroin, and bombs. It’s hard to keep up with all this because these characters all talk the same and there’s a lot of flashbacks that jumble up the forward momentum. Also it soon becomes clear that the author himself is not paying attention to his own plot. As usual though Magellan has nothing to do with any of this, but he acts almost like a divine force in how he just screws up all the carefully-laid plans…without even expressly planning to. 

The central characters here would be Frank Savago, Manny Weintraub, and Leah Castellano – who per Lynn’s note is abruptly referred to as "Lily” for several pages later in the book, demonstrating how sloppily it was written and edited. There are a ton of run-on sentences and typos throughout, but there’s also an undeniable energy; I mean just look at the excerpt above. Oh and we learn this time that Magellan has spent “years” searching for a mysterious figure in the Mafia – indeed, a figure whose legend almost matches that of the Marskman’s: a shadowy figure called “Mister Lee.” But Smith doesn’t even bother to play out the mystery because it’s quickly clear who “Mister” Lee really is. 

Now let’s take a look at the sleaze. It runs rampant in the novel, and again could be evidence of some in-jokery. For one, there’s Manny Weintraub, aka “Manny Wein,” an apparently older and heavyset Jewish mobster who has a young hotstuff wife…who, in every scene, is giving Manny a blowjob. Even in the parts where Manny is with other characters, he’ll be thinking about his wife’s blowjobs. Oh and meanwhile we’re informed that while she is performing her oral duties, the wife herself is being orally pleased by some naked woman. All of them sitting on a big round motorized leather couch Manny has specifically purchased for sex. Actually oral sex is the most frequently mentioned topic here, particularly on the female end of the spectrum; there’s a several-page sequence where Leah has hot lesbian sex with her live-in “winsome Negress” maid (who in true ‘70s fashion smokes a joint before the festivities). 

Russell Smith takes us into a whole different world of sleaze when Leah indulges in a bit of necrophilia. Per that triple-cross mentioned above, Leah finds herself in possession of a ton of money and heroin, and she buries it all in the cellar of a desolate mansion upstate. Then she murders the brawny stooge she’s used to do all the labor…ahd has sex with his corpse: 



Magellan himself even gets laid this time, a rare event to be sure, but it happens off-page. It’s courtesy an Asian hooker Magellan gets in his hotel (as with every other Russell Smith installment, the majority of the tale features Magellan checking into and out of various hotels)…who, apropos of nothing, tries to lift Magellan’s wallet the next morning. But Magellan is only pretending to sleep, and catches her in the act. He drugs her with his usual assortment of syringes, shaves her head and “pubic mound,” and then even more randomly tapes her “from ankles to thighs” with adhesive tape, “like a mummy,” and tosses her uncoscious form in the elevator and sends it to the lobby! Just another ultra-bizarre scene of random sadism, but that’s what we expect from Russell Smith. Oh and Magellan secretly watches the lez action with Leah later in the book, getting super turned on: “It was an incredible orgy scene Magellan would not soon forget. He’d not seen anything like it in his life!” 

As ever Magellan totes around his “artilery case.” For the first time ever (I believe), we’re given a list of its contents: 



In addition to this we’re informed that a photo of Magellan’s wife and son are on the inside lid of the case, as if “guarding” his weapons. As stated there is a big focus in Murder Machine on the loss that made Philip Magellan become The Marksman in the first place. This I assume is there to explain away his sadism, but as the drugging and shaving of the hooker would indicate, the guy’s just nuts – I mean the hooker has absolutely nothing to do with the Mafia. 

As expected, everything “climaxes” exactly how every previous Russell Smith installment has: all the villains do Magellan the courtesy of conveniently gathering in one location so he can blitz them from afar. Smith shows no mercy in his rushed finale – no mercy for the reader, either, telling us almost in passing of the bloody deaths of his various one-off characters. The most notable bit here is the “eerie calm” Magellan always feels after one of his massacres, which fills him with a sort of profundity. 

Man, what a crazy one this was – almost like a “greatest hits” of Russell Smith’s work on the series. It went through absolutely zero editing and you get the sense that they just printed everything straight off of his typewritten manuscript. But for that reason alone it was pretty entertaining. Oh and finally, Ken Barr’s cover illustration actually (sort of) illustrates a moment in the book; during an action bit where Magellan finds out that a private eye force is closing in on him, he goes up on a rooftop and knocks out a would-be sniper. Russell Smith pointedly mentions the “door” on the roof, which makes me figure we have here another instance of editor Peter McCurtin directing his author to include a specific scene, so there would be a part in the book to match the already-commissioned cover art – a la McCurtin giving Len Levinson a similar direction for Night Of The Assassins, in a bit Len later spoofed in The Last Buffoon.

Thursday, March 18, 2021

A Dirty Way To Die (The Sharpshooter #15)


A Dirty Way To Die, by Bruno Rossi
No month stated, 1975

How in the world have I gone over two years without reading a Sharpshooter? Maybe I’ve been putting it off because, as hard as it is to believe, there’s only one more volume after this one. It’s taken me over ten years to get this far, which only again reinforces how quickly this series was written and published – all these books came out within the span of two years. 

Once again a big thanks to Lynn Munroe, who revealed that A Dirty Way To Die is a sort of collaboration between series editor Peter McCurtin and series mainstay Russell Smith. As Lynn notes, “McCurtin only wrote the first chapter. The rest of the book has different characters and is actually a different story, changed ever so slightly to tie it to Chapter One.” We might be in a similar situation to another McCurtin venture, The Camp, for which McCurtin wrote the first chapter and Len Levinson wrote the rest. But whereas Len at least hewed a little closely to McCurtin’s opening chapter, Smith seems to turn in an entirely unrelated book, so I guess another possibility is that McCurtin welded a chapter of his own to Smith’s manuscript, so as to set up the storyline. Because as ever Russell Smith turns in a “plot” that requires the reader to do some very heavy lifting in order to make sense of anything. 

So in chapter one, which clearly seems to be by McCurtin, a New York Don talks to a dirty New York cop about that perennial problem, Johnny Rock. The cop’s novel suggestion is to kill a kid and pin it on Rock; there’s mention here, finally, that Rock has gunned down women and hookers and whatnot in his past exploits, but the public at large, we’re told, has sort of brushed off these kills given that the women were involved with the Mafia anyway. Thus Rock’s folkloric heroism is strong as ever. But if a kid were to be killed – especially a “problem” kid – and Rock was blamed for that, the situation would change. The cop even has a kid in mind – the retarded eleven year-old son of a Mafia floozy whose husband was killed years before by Rock; she beats the kid anyway, so they’d be doing him a favor. The Don likes the idea and gives the go ahead. The cop says he didn’t come up with the idea alone, that he hired a “one man think tank” psychologist “in California” named Dr. Dorelli to come up with a way to finally bring down Rock – and thus the idea was Dorelli’s. 

So there’s the setup. Next chapter opens, and we’re thrust without preamble into the typical surrealism of a Russell Smith novel. We meet Rock as he’s in Palo Alto, California, scoping out VAPA, the Veteran’s Association of Palo Alto. This hospital for vets is where Dr. Mario Dorelli serves as chief psychologist, and Rock’s here to settle a score. So then, the killing of the kid has already happened…but what’s curious is that we learn so little about it that one gets the impression Smith himself doesn’t even know what happened. All we’re told is that Rock is furious because “every cop in New York” is out to get him, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to get the heat off. But even more curiously this concern is never brought up again, nor is whatever brought Rock out to Palo Alto…for the most part, he just seems to be stalking Dr. Dorelli, whom Rock only suspects of being involved with the mob. 

Whereas McCurtin’s chapter vaguely set Dorelli up as a “one man think tank,” in Smith’s narrative Dorelli is a Mafia bigwig who was previously known as Joseph Reitano, and who worked with the CIA in ‘Nam and ran a dirty black ops squad that was known for sadism. For reasons never really disclosed, Rock is the only person in the entire world to figure out that Reitano and Dorelli are one and the same, and Rock decides to jolt the doctor by leaving a message in his office at VAPA under the name of “Joseph Reitano.” Rock gives the message to Dorelli’s lovely assistant, Eleanor Wood, a Jamaican woman “as black as a moonless Jamaican night and equally as romantic.” This sets off a strange cat and mouse game between Rock and Dorelli, with Rock at one point disguised as a doctor and spying on Dorelli inside VAPA, then later asking the always-horny Eleanor on a date to get info out of her on his prey. Meanwhile Dorelli – who as typical for a Smith novel gets way too much narrative space of his own – frets over who could know that he was once Joseph Reitano, or if it’s just some cosmic fluke that this guy has the exact same name that he once did. 

Smith serves up what have become staples of any of his Sharpshooter or Marksman manuscripts; Rock gets a room in an old hotel, murders a few thugs in cold blood, captures and interrogates a few people, and ultimately ends up on a boat. Smith also refers back to many of his previous manuscripts, in particular Vendetta, given that Rock ventures over to Sausalito, “well remember[ing] his last trip there.” Of course Smith’s narratives have been published as both Sharpshooters and Marksmans, even though they all clearly feature the same protagonist (Vendetta for example being a Marksman installment), which yields an extra metafictional layer to it all. There’s also curious mention here of a supposedly-recurring minor character named “Frank,” a short-statured Mafia flunky who has run into “Rock” three times in the past and has just managed to escape death each time. I have no recollection of this character, but presumably he must’ve appeared in previous Smith novels (in either series). 

One interesting “new” element in this one is that Rock actually gets in a firefight; in most other Smith yarns, Rock (or Magellan) just shoots down his prey in cold blood, usually while their backs are turned. He does that here, of course, gunning down some thugs who have shown up to ambush him in a bar, but later on he gets in a protracted gunfight with more thugs in yet another bar. This is in another of those surreal Smith sequences where Rock just goes into this dive with zero explanation or setup, talks to one of the Asian hookers who work the joint, then figures out the place is a Mafia front. Some thugs come in to get him and Rock blasts away with a pistol in each fist: the customary Beretta 9MM (which has appeared in every Smith manuscript, despite the series) in his right and a Colt .38 revolver in his left. The gore factor is very pronounced in this one, with characters puking at the sight of the shattered, brain-spewing skulls left in the wake of Rock’s bullets. 

But as mentioned, regardless of the series, Smith has always and ever been writing about the same protagonist, and since Philip Magellan came first then that ultimately means that A Dirty Way To Die is just another Smith installment of The Marksman. As the novel proceeds it only becomes more apparent. “Rock” wears a “nylon cord” around his waist, lugs an artillery case, wields the same 9mm Beretta, has a penchant for disguises, and drugs up a few random women before interrogating them in sadistic fashion. These are all hallmarks of Philip Magellan. Anyway I’ve beaten this dead horse enough in past reviews so it’s safe to say that by this point we all understand that, for the most part, Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan are one and the same, at least when the book is written by Russell Smith. 

I would say that all the Smith novels from both series could be gathered together and a running narrative might be found within them, but that sure as hell isn’t the case. Smith’s “plotting” is just as nuts as his protagonist. Things happen for absolutely no reason throughout A Dirty Way To Die, with no setup or explanation for most of it. This is why I suspect that McCurtin’s introductory chapter might’ve been added after Smith submitted his manuscript. Otherwise Rock just arrives in Palo Alto, stalks Dorelli, kills a few thugs, captures, drugs and interrogates two women, blows away a few more thugs in a rushed finale, and only at the very end are we even given a hazy explanation of why Rock’s here: In ‘Nam, when Dorelli was a CIA spook named Reitano, he would murder servicemen about to return home and then sell their IDs to other soldiers who were desperate to get out of the war. But Smith still forgets to inform us how Rock figured out that Reitano became Dorelli, or even how Rock became personally involved in the situation, save for a vague but compelling mention that one of Dorelli/Reitano’s affairs in ‘Nam “involved Rock.” 

So there’s no mention throughout of the “special kid” whose fate was determined in the first chapter, and it’s possible that the line early in chapter two that “every cop in New York” is out to get Rock could’ve been a McCurtin amendment to Smith’s manuscript. But without McCurtin’s opening chapter the novel takes on an even more surreal vibe, as Rock stalks and strikes Dorelli even though he’s not certain until the very end that Dorelli is really in the mob and is trafficking cocaine. Smith really drags this out past the breaking point, clearly trying to fill pages – we know from the get-go that Dorelli’s in the mob, given the parts of the narrative devoted to him, and we also know that Rock is in town trying to figure out how dirty Dorelli is. Yet the characters themselves don’t learn the truth about one another until toward the end of the novel. Dorelli’s realization that the young doctor calling himself “Dr. Joseph Reitano,” who just arrived in town is indeed Johnny Rock is especially ridiculous, given all the thug-killings that follow in the wake of “Dr. Reitano’s” presence…not to mention the little fact that “Reitano” has the same exact name as Dorelli’s original one! 

As Lynn Munroe notes, Smith also worked in the sleaze market, and if what he serves up late in A Dirty Way To Die is any indication of the kind of books he wrote for that market, then you’re well advised to steer clear, as it’s grimy and gross to the max. So out of nowhere, really absolutely nowhere, we suddenly learn that Dorelli has a sadistic self-punishment streak. For one, kind young Eleanor Wood, that “moonless Jamaican night” babe, turns out to be his private “slave owner,” torturing Dorelli in the office between patient visits. There’s some real sleazeball stuff here, like how Eleanor enjoys using her panties to give Dorelli a “rubdown,” and how Dorelli later must do something rather unseemly with the “soiled panties.” This part alone might have the less hardy reader racing for the restroom to spew his guts. 

Even more outrageous is the later off-the-cuff revelation that Dorelli has a live-in Filipino maid named Alicia who is hooked on coke and thus will do any sort of depraved sex act for him; we don’t see one happen, but witness the disgusting aftermath of a particularly depraved orgy, in which the stench of “shit” and “vomit” fills the room in which Dorelli and others “gang-banged” Alicia, who by the way spends the entire novel in a drugged stupor. Rock later comes upon her comatose form in the aftermath of the orgy, Rock having broken into Dorelli’s house, and wakes her up, sickened at the sight of her “chewed-up vagina” (!!). He is taken aback how casual the girl is about everything; she says she’s in no pain and instead just wants to take a bath; Rock figures she must be “used to being gang-banged!” 

Here there’s also promise that Rock himself might get in on the dirty festivities; a Mafia stooge shows up at Dorelli’s house with a hotstuff floozy in tow, assumes Rock is Dorelli, and tells him that the hotstuff babe is the latest scheme to rope in the Sharpshooter. Rock, pretending to be Dorelli, listens patiently and then excuses himself; he rushes outside, blows off the head of the Mafia stooge’s driver, and leaves! And not much else is made of the proposed floozy entrapment. But this is just how Smith rolls; it’s one wild sequence after another, usually followed by lots of page-filling where characters sit around and reflect over recent bizarre circumstances. It’s like they’ve all been plunged into a surreal nightmare in which nothing makes sense, which pretty much sums up ever Smith novel I’ve yet read. 

The helluva it is, Smith shows that he can deliver memorable characters: Eleanor Wood, despite the eleventh hour revelation of her sadomasochistic impulses, is a likeable character with a gift for sarcastic comments. Rock takes her on a “date” in which he first mows down several Mafia thugs and then threatens to kill Eleanor if she doesn’t get on a Chris-Craft boat he steals in Sausalito (the same boat he – as Magellan – stole in Vendetta), and throughout Eleanor keeps joking about when they’re going to get around to eating dinner. Of course Rock ultimately drugs her up (this after copious description of her vomitting due to sea sickness) and, when she won’t talk, terrorizes her with water snakes in what is clearly a shoutout to when Rock terrorized his captives with rats back in #3: Blood Bath (another Russell Smith joint, and another that clearly started life as a Marksman manuscript). 

Oh and Rock also captures another woman, just out of the blue; after the gunfight at the dive, Rock jumps in a car and beats the woman behind the wheel silly. He appropriates the car, taking the comatose woman along with him, and then tosses her, naked, into the hold with Eleanor. Absolutely no explanation is given of who this woman is…Smith seems to imply she’s a “driver” for the Mafia, but she’s presented as yet another innocent caught up in the sadistic sway of “Rock.” She too will be drugged, but Rock doesn’t even interrogate her, thus her entire presence is as baffling as anything else that happens in the novel. And another thing – after all this cruelty, Eleanor’s interrogation is mostly off-page! We are informed she’s privy to all of Dorelli’s mob dealings, but after Rock spends “ten minutes” explaining to her the dangers of narcotics and how they damage the “society he still believes in,” Eleanor’s suddenly on Rock’s side…despite all the torture with the snakes, some of which tried to crawl between her legs, we’re informed. 

Meanwhile Dorelli gets a lot of his own text, as does a Mafia executioner named Zanicchi who is fond of “hanging a man on a meat hook, drenching him in urine and shit and watching him die slowly.” Zanicchi we’re informed will get a $90K bonus for killing the Sharpshooter, but what the actual bounty is we’re not informed. Regardless this particular plot, which promises so much, goes nowhere – as is typical for any Smith venture. Zanicchi’s goons are the ones mowed down by Rock while on his “date” with Eleanor, after which Smith seems to forget about Zanicchi…until the final three pages, in which Rock dispenses justice in customarily rushed fashion, wiping out sundry villains who as ever have all gotten together in one spot so he can conviently kill them all at once with his Uzi. 

Sometimes these books give a peek into the disturbed mentality of their authors, and A Dirty Way To Die is a definite case in point. Lazy plotting, go-nowhere digressions, random acts of depraved sex, and torture with water snakes. Smith is so focused on all this that he, as typical, races through the last pages with such abandon that you can almost feel his joy at finally meeting his word count. In fact the finale makes as little sense as anything else in the book. So we’re informed, again in the very final pages, that Dorelli would kill ‘Nam soldiers about to return home and sell their IDs, with the compelling hint that one of his “atrocities” over there “involved Rock.” So Rock gets Dorelli, blows apart his guts with the Uzi so he’s near death, and then straps him onto a gurney in the Chris-Craft…and apparently sets the controls for Vietnam, over the horizon? After this he calls Eleanor, who asks him to “hurry” over to her place because she “wants” him! The end! WTF?! 

By all accounts the next volume, Mafia Death Watch, is just as depraved, if not more so. That one was written by series newcomer Dan Reardon, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. While this was it for Smith on The Sharpshooter, he was still churning them out over on The Marksman, so we’ll be seeing more of him in future reviews. Oh and Bob Larkin’s (uncredited) cover for A Dirty Way To Die is one of the best in the entire series, and not just because of the cleavage! Okay, so maybe the cleavage has something to do with it, but still!

Monday, January 22, 2018

The Marksman #15: Die Killer Die!


The Marksman #15: Die Killer Die!, by Frank Scarpetta
February, 1975  Belmont-Tower Books

Russell Smith takes The Marksman back to France, one year after the events of #9: Body Count. Anyone expecting a continnuation of that storyline, which was unceremoniously and inexplicably dropped, will of course be disappointed. But then anyone hoping for such things has come to the wrong series. As ever Smith is more concerned with documenting “hero” Philip Magellan’s sadism, in what proves to be the exact same story outline Smith has used in all his previous Marksman books.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why Magellan’s even in France this time; early on it’s hinted that he was “lured” here for some reason, but I don’t think Smith ever gets around to stating what it is. And there’s no mention of the previous year’s French adventure, other than a couple arbitrary parts where Magellan reflects to himself that he was here a year ago. But despite what I know about this grungy series – namely, that these books were probably pounded out over the course of a single coke-fueled weekend – I still sorta hoped for at least some callback to that earlier French excursion…you know, like at least how the hell it ended.

But Russell Smith has a template and he’s sticking to it, so there’s no time for any of that stuff. I’ve mentioned before how James Dockery’s The Butcher is based on a strict template, each installment basically a rewrite of the one that came before. Russell Smith’s volumes of The Marskman (including of course those that were transformed into Sharpshooter novels) are the same. Each volume follows the same outline – Magellan goes somewhere new, we get lots of dithering among the mobsters he’s come here to kill; Magellan will stay at a hotel, and coincidence be damned the very same mobsters are staying there too; Magellan will murder a bunch of mobsters, usually while they’re using the restroom; Magellan will pick up a floozy, who may or may not be a traitor. The end – if we get an actual end – will feature Magellan summarily shooting everyone or blowing them up. 

So for Die Killer Die! (lord knows who that’s supposed to be on Bob Larkin’s awesome cover – surely not Magellan??), Magellan is in France, and he’s being hunted by Santi Visalli, a “creeply evil-looking mobster” who tries to blow Magellan up on the train to Monte Carlo. Smith plays some narrative tricks with time, having Magellan escape the attempt and then backtracking to show how he boarded the train in the first place. But from here the story branches off into the usual detorus and digressions we expect.

For one, there’s this hazy backstory that, back in New York, Magellan bought traveller’s checks from pretty Ana Regio, checks which turned out to be counterfeit. He also at some point hooked up with a pretty gal with “delicious breasts” named Dominique, looking forward to lots of sex with her here in France – one of the few times Smith’s otherwise-robotic Magellan has actually displayed a libido. But poor old Magellan is crestfallen when he spies not only Anna Regio but Dominique herself consorting with Santi Visalli at the very same hotel Magellan has checked into!

These three are key players in a plot devised by Mafia boss Virginio Tranquili, a bigtime mobster on the European scene; surprisingly, Magellan has never heard of him, and doesn’t even learn about him until late in the novel. As far as Magellan is concerned, his main target here is Santi Visalli, and as usual Smith delivers a few “action scenes” which are comprised of Magellan sneaking up on unsuspecting Mafia soldiers and gunning them down in cold blood. There are however a handful of genuine action scenes in this one, with some of these guys getting off a shot or two of their own before meeting their expected fates.

Magellan meanwhile is all jazzed up about the latest addition to his arsenal: a “new Italian silencer” for his “new Beretta,” which we’re informed is “a modified Luger 8” overall,” whatever the hell that is. This silencer is enthused over throughout the novel – indeed, on the level of the Bucher’s silencer in those Dockery Butcher novels. When Magellan isn’t shooting people he’s doing weird shit, like when he discovers the two girls hanging out with Visali in the hotel courtyard, and immediately breaks into each of their hotel rooms and steals their luggage(!).

Smith without question wrote his novels in a hurry, with no time for pause or reflection, however he continues to dole out some bonkers lines, like this assessment of Magellan’s in regards to the hotel’s maid: “Her mental agility and her physical adroitness was comparable to that of a grammar school dropout.” That’s almost Joseph Rosenberger level weirdness. Then there’s the page-filling, banal dialog that goes on between Tranquili and his underlings, chief among them an Onassis-type dude named Emil Phatir; most of this stuff sounds like try outs for the Jerky Boys, with the focus more on inventive ways of cursing than any actual plot or character development. But this “mobster banter” is part of the Smith template, as are the inordinate, ultimately unimportant backstories he gives us for each of the main villains.

Another Smith Marksman mainstay: our hero begins to systematically drug, strip, and imprison his enemies, this time on a level unseen since Blood Bath. And this time he gets some women, too – both Dominique and Ana, the latter whom Magellan intensely dislikes, given her over-confident and aggressive manner, traits Magellan loathes in a woman. But each gal is drugged, tossed in Magellan’s rented car, and eventually deposited in a cabin of a yacht Magellan rents, nude and chained together – weird shit here when, late in the book, Magellan sees the nude women holding each other for comfort in their sleep, and thinks of it as one of the most “touching displays” he’s ever seen. WTF??

Right on cue Magellan picks up another babe, this one who becomes his accomplice – and he actually has sex with her, though Smith leaves it all off-page. Her name is Alice, and she’s a young American nurse working in the nursery in Magellan’s hotel. This entire subplot is super weird, as Magellan decides to use Alice, subtly letting her know he’s the Marksman, and Alice being all for helping him – they even have a goofy rapport of repeating the same jokes and loading their comments with sexual innuendo. Alice’s nursing skills come in handy when Magellan’s actually hurt, a rarity in a Smith Marksman, shot in the arm during the latest firefight with Visalli’s thugs.

But most of the shootouts are one-sided, and usually at the reader’s expense – not once but a few times, Smith pads out the pages with inordinate setup concering the latest special squad of thugs hired to find and kill Magellan, and each time Magellan stumbles on them, catching them unawares, and kills them without much fuss. Like the six goons who converge on Magellan’s yacht, only to be sniped from afar on the jetty. Smith continues with his fascination with stories set on or around a body of water, with the climax consisting of Magellan setting off on his yacht, which is now filled with prisoners he has accumulated, Santi Visalli among them.

Magellan summarily dispenses with them in yet another display of his cold-bloodedness; the fate dealt Ana Regio is particularly surprising. Having “already decided her fate,” Magellan takes her up to the deck, tells her to jump off, and when she won’t he shoots her in the heart, having determined that she’s done no good for anyone and has forefeited her right to life(!). The men he merely drowns. As for Dominique, he actually lets her go. And as for Alice, after treating all of this as a game, she apparently sees the true brutality of Magellan in the climax, when he guns down Tranquili and some goons in cold blood, moments after finally meeting them.

But folks, Smith is such a sloppy writer/plotter that he plumb forgets about Santi Visalli. Magellan’s brought him along, using Visalli as bait and also wanting to tease out his assured death, and the last we see of the “creepy” mobster, Magellan’s handcuffed him and thrown him on a couch. Smith never tells us what happens to him! He just has Magellan gun down Tranquili, wave goodbye to a propery-horrified Alice, and then get in his rental car and head out of town.

All of which is to say, Die Killer Die! is just as messy, rough, and wild as all the other Russell Smith Marskman novels. At this point if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all – they only differ in the particulars of Magellan’s sadism. For Russell Smith’s Philip Magellan is a complete whackjob, one that even the mobsters fear; or, as Santi Visalli so memorably puts it, “Only a beast like Magellan would murder a man while he was vomiting in the toilet.”

Monday, May 1, 2017

The Marksman #14: Kill!


The Marksman #14: Kill!, by Frank Scarpetta
December, 1974  Belmont Tower Books

Sporting one of the greatest, most succinct titles in men’s adventure history, Kill! is courtesy the fevered imagination of Russell Smith and comes off as a sort of sequel to an earlier Smith novel, No Quarter Given, which happened to be published as the 8th volume of The Sharpshooter, with editor Peter McCurtin simply changing the name of hero Philip Magellan to Johnny Rock. (And speaking of McCurtin, he no doubt came up with the title of this novel – per Len Levinson, McCurtin came up with the titles for every volume of The Marksman and The Sharpshooter; Len didn’t even bother titling the three manuscripts he turned in to McCurtin). 

Lynn Munroe, whose research into the twisted roots of this series can’t be praised enough, has Kill! as being a collaboration between McCurtin and Smith. Lynn always knows of what he speaks, but the book seems like pure Russell Smith to me, with no detectable McCurtin presence. Perhaps McCurtin listed himself on the copyright submission for the book because he came up with the title, who knows. But none of McCurtin’s more careful, straight prose is to be found in this one, which follows the usual brutish Russel Smith template: “hero” Magellan shows up in a new city, appraises the Mafia situation, ties up and drugs a few captives, and eventually begins murdering his prey, usually while they’re in the bathroom.

Such is the case with Kill!, which takes place in New Brunswick, NJ, home of Rutgers University – which here is a cesspit, mostly controlled by the local mob of Nick “The Screw” Corisco. Indeed Smith is at great pains to describe Rutgers and its environs as a hellhole; when Magellan arrives on the scene he quickly drives through town and can’t believe how shitty the place is. Magellan is here, through one of the more contrived backstories ever, thanks to an ad he saw in a friggin’ mens adventure magazine, I kid you not – one placed there by a Rutgers geology professor named Dr. Jeremy Bowles. Magellan even goes to the Argosy classified ads office in New York to research the mysterious advertisement; we’re informed that it ran in many men’s adventure and detective magazines.

Smith informs us that this installment occurs one year after Magellan has begun his war on the Mafia, an incident which was relayed in The Assassin #1 (which ironically enough was published one year before this book). The only clear element to tie this volume to a previous Smith manuscript is later in the book, when it’s stated that Magellan’s “most recent” anti-Mob activity was in Norfolk, Virginia, the events of which were detailed in No Quarter Given (which I guessed at the time was yet another Smith book…ah, the sweet taste of vindication). Those editorial Magellan/Rock gaffes so common from other books aren’t as apparent here, mostly because this one started and ended as a Marksman manuscript; other that is than a humorous slip on page 41: “Magellan…the man known as the Sharpshooter.” What more proof do we need to confirm my theory that The Assassin, The Marksman, and The Sharpshooter were all the same messed-up dude??

I’ve read enough of these Smith installments to figure out that he basically writes the same book over and over. Whatever city Magellan goes to will not only be mob-run but filled with competing mobs, and Smith will page-fill with various one-off mobsters plotting against each other. There will also likely be dirty cops in attendance. Magellan will arrive on the scene, check into a sleazy hotel (in which the mobsters themselves might also be staying), and he slowly figures out what’s going on. To do so he’ll capture a few people, tie them up, drug them, and interrogate them. “Action scenes” will be comprised of Magellan sneaking up on mobsters and shooting them in the back; more often than not this will happen while the mobsters are using the john. Along the way Magellan will hook up with a young woman, usually a waitress, who might have been abused by the local mobsters. The young woman will ultimately have nothing to do with anything, not even for a genre-customary sex scene (Magellan is as sexless as a robot, for the most part). The finale will be a harried, anticlimactic affair in which Magellan kills off the villains, all of whom have conveniently gathered in one spot.

Given this, it’s no wonder Smith turned in so many volumes of The Marksman, many of which were changed into Sharpshooter books. In addition to the above recurring elements, Smith will fill out his books with almost stream-of-consciousness dialog between the lowlife mobters, most of whom are only capable of spouting paragraphs of profanity. We’ll also get behind-the-scenes peeks into how the Mafia rakes in the cash through various illicit ventures. It’s the same thing over and over again in each Smith book, with only the barest details changed, and it explains why there were so many volumes of these two series published in such a short time – clearly, there was no quality control going on at Belmont-Tower or Leisure Books.

Which isn’t to say these books aren’t fun. I mean, I really love them! There is something admirable about the way Smith has figured out his hero is a psychopath, and thus Smith appears to write the novels themselves through a sort of psychopathic lens. His Marksman books take place in a strange alternate reality, and one thing you can never say about them is that they aren’t entertaining. But after so many of them you kind of want something a little more straight, something that doesn’t seem to have been dashed out in a single boozy weekend.

And Kill! is really dashed out in a hurry. The novel is filled with arbitrary, chapter-long arguments between mobsters and the dirty cops who work with them, and seemingly-important subplots are built up only to be completely forgotten. Like the bizarre tidbit that Dr. Bowles and Magellan look identical. This is played up, both characters puzzling over the mind-boggling improbability of it(!), but for the most part it’s just used for the occasional scene where Magellan pretends to be the kindly doctor, who has been blackmailed by Corsico’s mob – Bowles was in deep due to how expensive his global archeology trips are, and in exchange for repayment Nick the Screw now uses Bowles’s archeological site hauls from the Yucatan to smuggle heroin and guns.

Bowles has sent Magellan the coded letter in those men’s mag classifieds so as to get Corsico off his back. But while Magellan researches the situation, other characters are about ready to do the job for the doctor anyway: Joe Girotti, a psychopathic rival mob boss, is about ready to begin a war with Corsico, and aiding him is corrupt Captain Boffin of the New Jersey State Police. Smith page-fills with abandon as these various characters dither with one another, but occasionaly he throws in unexpected detours like when Girotti brutally – and arbitrarily, so far as the narrative itself goes – mutilates and murders Corsico’s wife in her bed. This lurid scene is so random and barely-explored as to be hilarious, but unquestionably Smith intends it as just another bit of his trademark dark humor, as evidenced via Corsico’s reaction to his wife’s bloody murder: “It was a brand new mattress, too!” 

Meanwhile Magellan dons his customary “hippie disguise,” drives around town in a rented Volvo bus, and “mingles” with the hippified students at Rutgers. Boy would I have loved to see Smith describe just a little of this. Eventually Magellan begins to impersonate Bowles, sometimes bullshitting his way out of situations by acting like the strong-willed professor. Surprisingly, though, Magellan has yet to kill anyone – even by page 90 the Marksman has yet to claim a life, which is quite unexpected, particularly for a book titled, uh, Kill! Instead Magellan knocks out a couple Corsico thugs, ties them up, and dumps them in the “university garage” where Dr. Bowles’s crates are stored. Later on Magellan proceeds to his other favorite passtime: tying up captives, drugging them, and then dropping them in the garage.

One of the captives he lets go, in a bit that’s not further explored: Maria, lovely young wife of a guy Nick the Screw has set up as his second in command in New Brunswick. Magellan abducts her and drugs her, carting her around per his usual method – and then when she wakes up he just talks to her! She gives him info on Corsico’s doings in town…and then Magellan lets her go! All very strange to say the least. Maria wants vengeance on Nick and whatnot, but you won’t be surprised to know that this is just another subplot Smith completely ignores and/or forgets about.

Magellan by the way is a bit off his game this time out, overly cautious and indecisive; there’s a part where he even wishes that he had an advisor who could suggest what actions he should take(!). Magellan’s uncertainty is no better displayed than a bizarro bit where he scopes out Joe Girotti’s house, standing on a trash can to look in a window. Magellan hefts his Uzi (which we’re informed he hasn’t used “in a long time”) and blasts away at the three stooges in the place, but the recoil knocks him off-balance – and he falls off the trash can, banging his head on the brick wall! For one of the few times in the series our godlike hero is completely at the mercy of his enemies, totally unconscious…but wakes in the room of lovely young Sally, 17 year-old sex captive of the mobsters. She’s real thankful that Magellan came along and killed all those guys, and hangs out with him for the remainder of the book, doubtless to never be mentioned again.

Smith injects the novel with his usual dark comedy, in particular a sequence in a diner. After saving young Marie, Magellan takes her to a diner. Per the usual Smith fondness for coincidence, a bunch of Girotti stooges roll into town and pick this exact spot to eat. So Magellan resorts to his customary method: sneaks into the bathroom while each is using it and blows them away. Then another mobster will go to check on the ones who are taking so long in the john, puke at the gory ruin within, and meet his own fate from Magellan’s silenced Beretta. Smith includes a running joke here with Magellan coming back to his table after each kill and dealing with an increasingly-impatient waitress, who wants Magellan’s order; the scene caps off with Magellan, who has now murdered all the mobsters, telling the waitress, “Well, now. I think I’ll have ham and eggs.” 

The story really belongs to the mobsters, who as mentioned fill up pages with, I kid you not, “conversations” that are almost completely made up of strung-together expletives. Nick the Screw, set up as the main villain early on, abruptly fades away and the villain slot is filled by Joe Girotti, whose sadism is barely explored, just casually detailed; he talks corrupt Captain Boffin into going into business with him and screwing over Nick the Screw. Action is periodic and arbitrary, like a part near the 100-page mark where Magellan finally makes his first kill, staging an impromptu raid on a Mafia gambling venture. Here Magellan uses something new in his arsenal, a sulphur grenade, donning a “plastic surgical mask” to protect himself from the fumes.

The finale is the usual rushed Smith job, so anticlimactic as to be hilarious. While Magellan poses as a worker, scoping out Captain Boffin’s mansion in the middle of a lake(!), Nick the Screw’s men pull an assault on the place. Magellan has been so out of it this volume that he’s yet to figure out that Dr. Bowles has been kidnapped, and indeed is being held captive right there in the lake house. He also shows no interest in Bowles’s hippie daughter, who first appears nude in the good doctor’s loft – Magellan is so razor-focused on Mafia-killing that he doesn’t even check out her nude body, or at least Smith doesn’t even properly exploit it. But Bowles is abruptly gone, clearly and obviously kidnapped like fifty pages ago; Magellan is really slow on the uptake this time around.

Anyway, they’re all here for this final “action sequence,” including even a dude Magellan has kept tied up for the past few chapters – I mean, with no explanation at all, the dude, a Mafia hitman who has been drugged and bound since halfway through the book, is there with Nick’s enforcers as they storm Boffin’s home. How does Smith explain how this guy made his escape? He simply writes, “Magellan was never to know.” Once everyone’s done killing each other (off-page), Magellan hoists his Uzi and another of those sulphur grenades and stages his own assault, perfunctorily killing Nick the Screw and conveniently enough saving Dr. Bowles – and only here does Magellan even realize Bowles had been kidnapped!

And that’s it for Kill!, which per the usual template just flat-out ends with no real resolution or wrap-up. All told this was a weird one, filled with that patented rough Russell Smith charm that I find entertaining despite its many, many faults. If anything I appreciate how this guy clearly banged his Marksman manuscripts out without wasting his time on editing or revising or any of that other limp-wristed stuff.

Monday, August 22, 2016

The Marksman #13: Kiss Of Death


The Marksman #13: Kiss of Death, by Frank Scarpetta
September, 1974  Belmont Tower

Philip “The Marksman” Magellan returns in another wild and wacky installment courtesy Russell Smith – and one that actually appears to pick up from a previous Smith entry, indeed the volume published directly before this one, #12: Mafia Massacre. This is a rare occurrence indeed, and the first time in a long while that a Smith manuscript has been published in order.

As we’ll recall, Mafia Massacre featured Magellan in Miami, where he was taking out some local Mafia scum. Kiss Of Death doesn’t pick up on any of the dangling cliffhangers from that book, but it does open with Magellan on an airplane – flying out of Miami. It’s a meager thread for sure, but we’ll take what we can get…I’ve said it before, but piecing together Russell Smith’s ongoing Marksman narrative from the jumble McCurtin made of it is almost like seeking out the Q Document in the Synoptic Gospels. Only with more sex and sadism!!

Lynn Munroe has this one as by McCurtin’s fix-it editor George Harmon Smith, mostly because Smith’s family recalled seeing this title in his collection, but I think if anything Harmon Smith only performed a few embellishments here and there – if that. For this is pure, unadulterated Russell Smith, written in the crazed style so familiar from Blood Bath and Vendetta, with short sentences of mundane description followed by wild violence and tons of exclamation points. There’s a single part midway through where Magellan briefly ponders his existence, and this brief part may have been the work of Harmon Smith. But even this could’ve been written by Russell Smith. At any rate Kiss Of Death features the Russell Smith version of Magellan we all know and love, taking people captive for no reason, murdering mobsters in cold blood, and arranging their corpses in garish displays.

It also features Smith’s casual flair for coincidental plotting, as the novel opens with Magellan just happening to be on the same flight as Joseph Fatima, Salvatore Curci, and Benito Fiori; “Joe Fat” has just gotten the other two men released from a notoriously-harsh prison in Rome, and they all are now on their way to Alberquerque via Miami (?!). Their weird intercontinental route took them through Miami, you see, which is where Magellan boarded the plane…and coincidence be damned again, he just happens to get a seat behind them. Thus he overhears their conversation and realizes these three are no doubt Mafia. Even readers willing to completely suspend disbelief will be muttering “yeah, right” at this.

But Smith only gets more brazen. Magellan’s going to Alberquerque to hang out with an old ‘Nam pal, A.P. “Apple” Locker, apparently a commanding officer of Magellan’s and a fellow Green Beret (even though Smith states that both of them were in the Marines…). And guess why Joe Fat got Curci and Fiori out of that notorious Rome prison? That’s right – to help him take over A.P. Locker’s ranch and various business interests!! Well anyway, this is a Marksman novel, after all, so it isn’t like we should expect careful plotting. Smith doubtless banged this one out in record time, following the same template as all the other volumes he’s written.

For, right on cue, Magellan hooks up with a pretty waitress, same as he’s casually and easily picked up other waitresses who became unwitting or witting accomplices of his in earlier Smith books. This one’s named Peggy “Tootsweet,” and she’s a hotstuff Eurasian babe (Canadian French and Chinese) who seems to like Magellan just fine – while meanwhile Magellan is busy checking out Joe Fat and his two Italian pals, who are dining at a nearby table. Tootsweet being Eurasian is another recurring bit of Smith’s; he must’ve been obsessed with them, as Montego, no doubt written around this time, even featured two of them. But Tootsweet, whether she likes it or not, becomes Magellan’s latest comrade, bringing Magellan info on what the three men are doing and telling him all she knows about Joe Fat, who lives nearby and is a known businessman in the area.

Apple Locker is a big dude who lives on a rolling ranch with his teenaged wife, an American Indian beauty named Snowbird who likes to walk around half nude – another motif from Montego. What all A.P.’s business ventures exactly are Smith doesn’t really specify, but at any rate Joe Fat does want this ranch. In addition the mob boss does heroin business with another mobster who lives by, this one accompanied by a lovely Mexican gal who packs a pistol. All this is just page-filling, though. As usual Smith just likes to pile on a bunch of characters with various plots and counterplots and then ignores it all by having Magellan blithely go around killing everyone.

In another bit of brazen self-thievery, Smith rewrites the scene from #5: Headhunter, with Magellan again hiding in a hotel bathroom and killing the occupying mobsters one by one as they come in to use the john. Hell, Magellan even muses to himself that he’s done this before. And the mobsters are just as dumb as ever, cluelessly sending one guy after another to see what the hell’s taking whatsis name so long to piss, and then Magellan just casually blowing their heads off as they walk into the bathroom. Goofy stuff for sure. But again this sort of thing is what passes for action, for the most part; Magellan will gun down mobsters in cold blood and then move their bodies around for no reason other than his own insanity.

And there’s no sex this time around, Smith once again leading up to it but then changing his mind when it comes to the actual sleaze. Tootsweet is super-horny for Magellan, even going out with him to his car (which we’re constantly informed is a six-cylinder Volvo) to mess around, but Magellan as usual is all business, putting the shenanigans to a stop so he can send the girl off on some mission or other. But when Magellan later goes up to Tootsweet’s hotel room to cash in on that long-simmer offer for sex, he’s for once surprised – Tootsweet calls “Joe?” to Magellan’s knock on her door. Thus Magellan discovers that Tootsweet is in fact another employee of Joe Fat, and has been monitoring Magellan expressly at her boss’s wishes.

Smith actually fills the novel with attractive, eager women; in addition to Snowbird, Tootsweet, and the Mexican heroin-dealing babe, there’s also Dusty Cummings, a sixteen year-old hooker Joe Fat hires to seduce A.P. Locker in a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere. Smith introduces the young whore at great word expense and then just happens to have Magellan run into her…then ends the chapter there and only bothers to inform us later that Magellan talked to the young beauty, figured there was something odd about her, and then just basically left! And meanwhile Locker has bigger problems on his hands than jailbait (apparently he only prefers very young girls, or something…), as Joe Fat’s men have kidnapped Snowbird and also murdered the poor woman’s dad and brother, all of it occurring off page.

But you don’t read Russell Smith for tight plotting and character depth. It’s more for the bizarre sadism, as Magellan initiates one of his typically-brutal wars of aggression against Joe Fat’s men. Probably the highlight of his sadism this time around is when he shoots one guy in the groin and then pistol-whips him, and then later ties his corpse to the back of his Volvo and hauls it to Joe Fat’s place, where he leaves it at the door. But sadism as ever isn’t relegated just to the mobsters. Poor Snowbird suffers a horrific fate of her own, as off-page she’s raped by six men who take turns with her in the back of a freight truck or something…and yet when Magellan sees her later, Snowbird’s just hanging out with Joe Fat and crew and indeed even seems to be getting horny for Tootsweet! Again nothing much ever makes sense in the world of Russell Smith.

Smith even follows his normal template for the “climax,” conveniently holing up all the central characters in one location so Magellan can slaughter them. This takes place in a bar, in which Joe Fat has a secret room on the top floor. Here he, Tootsweet, Dusty Cummings, Snowbird, the sexy Mexican gal, and other assorted enforcers all hide away, while Magellan tries to figure out how to get to them. Smith develops an eleventh-hour subplot that Snowbird, who remember has been raped all night, is getting all horny for Tootsweet – and indeed we’re informed that the two actually had some hot lesbian sex (between chapters!), with Joe Fat even joining them for a three-way! But again, all this occurs off-page. In fact the last we see of Joe Fat, he’s all relaxed and happy because he’s had sex with all the gals, up here in his little hideaway above the bar.

Meanwhile Magellan just sneaks around, once again in his “hippie disguise” (another Smith staple). He guns down various cronies who are dumb enough to leave the hideaway, and finally Magellan is able to get up there – the final image of Kiss Of Death is Magellan standing over a sleeping Joe Fat, about to blow his head off. And once again Smith ends the novel right there, no resolution on the subplot about Tootsweet’s treachery, or the whole deal with Dusty Cummings, or even any kind of reunion for Snowbird and Apple Locker.

It’s all just lifeless and perfunctory, poorly plotted and conceived, yet with that lovably bizarre quality so inherent in Smith’s work…reading his books is like staring at a car wreck. You know you shouldn’t look but you can’t help yourself.

Monday, July 4, 2016

The Marksman #12: Mafia Massacre


The Marksman #12: Mafia Massacre, by Frank Scarpetta
June, 1974  Belmont Tower Books

Russell Smith turns in another wild installment of The Marksman, one that picks up from an earlier Smith volume, Muzzle Blast – which wasn’t even published as part of the Marksman series but was clumsily transformed by editor Peter McCurtin into an installment of The Sharpshooter! And speaking of McCurtin, I share Lynn Munroe’s sentiments in that McCurtin likely fixed up Smith’s manuscript for Mafia Massacre. For while psychotic hero Philip Magellan is still as nuts as ever, it would appear as if his rough edges have been somewhat softened.

When we meet him Magellan has just landed in fictional Opa-Locka airport in Miami, somewhere near Biscayne Bay, we’re told. The events of Muzzle Blast were just three days ago – and unsurprisingly we get no details on what exactly happened in the aftermath of that novel’s climax; as we’ll recall, Muzzle Blast featured one of the most arbitrary “endings” in published history – and Magellan has made the impromptu decision to come down to Florida. Why? Because he read in the paper about the massacre of the Tarburton family here in Miami and figured it for a mob hit.

Magellan, “thirty-nine, white and proud,” promptly left Provincetown after reading about the massacre, and now here in Miami he plans to find out what’s going on. So begins a Marksman plot that’s slightly more complex than the average installment. For we learn early on that crooked judge Vito La Malfa was behind the hit, his goal to move in on Tarburton’s vast interests. Tarburton was an island developer or somesuch, creating manmade islands in the Bay, Treasure Island being one of them. There the Tarburtons lived in a mansion, where all of them were hacked to death, save for one, who wasn’t there at the time – young Mary, a 23 year-old so mysterious and reclusive that it’s rumored she doesn’t even exist.

Smith as is his wont fills up lots of pages with bullshit backgrounds on his various Mafia characters, how they got started in the life and etc, and he’s also just as fond of wasting pages by having these characters engage in go-nowhere conversations. In many cases these dialog exchanges go over material we readers have already encountered, which only hammers home how egregious they are. In addition to Judge La Malfa and his various Mafia underlings there’s chief of detectives Captain Stagg, a dirty cop on Malfa’s payroll. Smith fills more pages with late revelations that Stagg gathers evidence on La Malfa in case he ever has to bust him to protect his career, which for once in this clumsy series is a subplot that actually goes somewhere.

As for Magellan himself, his sadistic impulses have been neutered for the most part. There’s none of Smith’s notorious stuff where Magellan will chop off heads or arrange mobster corpses in garrish displays. True, he does flat-out murder and massacre several of them, usually killing them in cold blood, but each time he does so we are reminded of Magellan’s rage and how he lost his hummanity after his wife and son were killed. In other words we are told, as well as shown, that Magellan has gone insane from grief and now lashes out in bloody vengeance. In previous Smith books it seems to me that there was much less telling and more showing, to the point that Magellan’s past was overlooked and it was more about him gorily torturing mobsters before killing them.

Otherwise Smith’s writing is the same as ever, with frenetic prose and exclamation points all over the place. We’re also barraged with the word “fuck,” especially in the first several pages. Here I must again agree with Lynn Munroe, who in the above-linked piece on McCurtin opines that many of Smith’s later Marksman manuscripts were polished either by McCurtin himself or by McCurtin’s go-to ghostwriter, George Harmon Smith (whom I once mistakenly believed to be the “real” Russell Smith; ie that “Russell” was just a pseudonym used by George H.) At any rate one can detect what appears to have been some editorial tinkering in Mafia Massacre, with some actual, genuine care placed on telling a believable story with believable characters.

Another change here – and which also calls back to the volumes actually written by Peter McCurtin – is that there’s more of a focus on action scenes. I mean genuine action scenes, with an outgunned Magellan ducking and dodging and returning fire. In most other Russell Smith volumes there isn’t any action per se; it’s just Magellan randomly and wantonly killing off usually-unarmed mobsters. Here though we have several sequences in which Magellan must actually fight. In one part he’s ambushed by a trio of gunmen with assault rifles, and in another sequence he gets in a machine gun battle with a boatful of Mafia soldiers.

Smith (or Harmon Smith, or McCurtin) also does a good job of keeping Mary Tarburton off the page for a long time, making the reader interested to find out if she’s real or not. Magellan shadows the young woman and black chaffeur (and boy are we reminded often and at length that this guy’s black) who supposedly work for Mary, which leads him into a few of those gunfights. Also when saving the chaffeur from some La Malfa thugs we get a brief return of the old Magellan, when our “hero” blows out one guy’s brains when he won’t answer a single question. Later Magellan handcuffs another thug to a speedboat and beats him into bloody hamburger. Oh, and Magellan also tortures a pair of cops for info at one point – however it happens off-page.

Mary, who turns out to be an oceanographer who lives on a swanky houseboat, is a tomboyish but beautiful blonde with “small, apple-sized breasts;” Magellan finds her after discovering a secret passageway which runs from Tarburton’s private cove on Treasure Island to his mansion. As usual with Smith this passageway is built up greatly in the narrative, with Magellan constantly marvelling over it, whereas the reader is more so “who cares?” The same goes for all of the nautical stuff in the book, which is a recurring theme in Smith’s installments, I’ve found; they all feature at least some action that takes place on wharves and harbors and sailing vessels.

For the most part the plot of Mafia Massacre trades off on Magellan trying to figure out who was behind the Tarburton massacre while, in their own subplots, La Malfa and his underlings discuss Magellan and how they can stop him. Smith also hopscotches in time, like he’s some low-rent Elmore Leonard, with most of the chapters featuring La Malfa and Captain Stagg taking place before the ones we just read with Magellan. It sort of drags on for the duration, until, per the norm, things ramp up for a clumsy finale.

La Malfa has called in a legion of soldiers, and Magellan perfunctorily and quickly massacres them all in Tarburton’s mansion, gunning them down with his favored Uzi. But Magellan does have his setbacks in Mafia Massacre; while he and Mary are on her boat for no reason at all, they are attacked by a boat filled with La Malfa’s men, and in the skirmish Magellan gets shot in the left thigh. Here the Marksman is actually injured, thus denting his otherwise superhuman armor for once. He even resorts to popping pain pills before gunning down those unarmed soldiers in the Tarburton mansion. 

But it all wraps up with Magellan and Mary capturing Stagg on Mary’s houseboat. Speaking of which, Smith builds up a rapport and respect between Magellan and Mary, not that it goes anywhere – as ever, the Marksman has the libido of a robot. Mary freaks out when it’s revealed, at long last, that La Malfa was in fact the man behind the death of her family – in another go-nowhere subplot, we learn that La Malfa has lusted after Mary since she was a kid. So Magellan pistol-whips Stagg…and then has him hop off the boat and swim back to Miami(!?).

So yeah, our boy Magellan has undergone some sort of personality overhaul; the old version of Smith’s character would’ve sawed off Stagg’s head. And meanwhile La Malfa, having learned of Stagg’s treachery, abandons ship and hops on his personal plane to the Bahamas or something…and Magellan swears vengeance.

Yeah, right! I’ll be surprised if La Malfa or the events here in Miami are even mentioned in another Marksman (or Sharpshooter) novel, let alone if the cliffhanger finale of Mafia Massacre continues in a later installment.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Montego


Montego, by Robert Dupont
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

A couple years ago when I was doing some fruitless research on The Marksman and The Sharpshooter, I came across a Catalog Of Copyright Entries from 1975 that listed this book as the pseudonymous work of Russell Smith. I got the book and forgot about it, figuring from the cover it was just a lame slavesploitation deal, only to be reminded of it in Lynn Munroe’s recent Peter McCurtin checklist.

As Lynn notes, Montego is actually more of a Man From U.N.C.L.E. sort of deal, but more goofy and zany. (Actually that would sum up many episodes from the show’s third season.) Russell Smith as ever is on his own wavelength, writing like no one else I can think of, though a vague comparison might be Dean Ballenger mixed with Joseph Rosenberger. But Smith is his own thing, and it’s a weird thing, and it’s typical of his work that you can read up to page 100 and still not know what exactly the book’s about or where exactly it’s going. 

Anyway Montego tells the lurid tale of a “smuggler” named Charles Grimes who is in fact a slave trader. Running a small operation that employs contract sort of employees around the globe, Grimes specializes in abducting runaways, the poor, the wayward, or the lost, and selling them to various persons or organizations. Grimes lives in total secrecy with only two people at his constant side: Jakowleff, formerly of the French Foreign Legion and now Grimes’s bodyguard, and Ming-lan, Grimes’s sexy Chinese mistress, who usually traipses around Grimes’s quarters in St. Thomas in the nude due to the heat.

On Grimes’s trail are the operatives of SMEET, a top-secret spy organization (we’re never informed what the acroynm stands for) that focuses on international slavery. Working this assignment is martial arts wizard Wangti, an obese fifty-year-old who is described so much like Sammo Hung that you can’t help but picture him; an American named G. Bayer who himself is a “trifle overweight,” and who “causes more headaches than aspirin can cure;” and finally a junior SMEET agent named Ching-sha, aka Melody, an “attractive Oriental girl.”

So as you can see, Smith has this weird “triplets” theme working here, with sexy Chinese gals repeated on both teams. And there’s more replication, with Ming-lan and Jakowleff having an affair behind Grimes’s back and Melody and Bayer falling in love while keeping their romance a secret from Wangti. Why exactly Smith has even come up with this theme is a mystery, as he doesn’t do much with it, and indeed it serves for a lot of reader confusion. As ever Smith jumps scenes and perspectives usually without giving the reader any white space, so there are parts where we’re reading about the SMEET gang and then suddenly it jumps over to Grimes’s gang, and you’re confused.

Wangti is in charge of the SMEET team and they’ve come onto Grimes’s tail due to a 707 cargo plane that’s gone missing. Turns out it held a few hundred Chinese corpses, men Grimes kidnapped and attempted to sell, but who were all killed by an accidental overdose. Now it’s chalked up as a loss, though Grimes when we meet him is attempting to collect at least some sort of payment, chopping off the thumbs of each corpse as proof that he held up his end of the bargain! But Melody, in the SMEET offices in Paris, has gotten wind of the plot, and now she, Bayer, and Wangti head to the Caribbean to track down various leads.

From here it’s a slow-moving exercise in info-dumping about slave trade operations, banal dialog between the SMEET team or the Grimes team, or brief “action” scenes that are as clunky as those Smith wrote in his Marksman books. Only, none of these characters have the memorable charm of Magellan, let alone the memorable sadism. Wangti is a kung-fu badass but is more content to bully Melody for not being aware at all times. (That said, he does rip a dude’s nose off.) And Bayer really doesn’t make much of an impression, though he does use the same gun Smith gave his version of Magellan, a Browning 9mm Parabellum. Oh yeah, and Wangti is given to wearing false moustaches. 

Speaking of Magellan, the first half of Montego takes place in the Caribbean isle of St. Thomas, which Magellan visited in the Smith-penned Marksman installments #3: Kill Them All and #5: Headhunter. Grimes has one of his bases here, and uses the locals to get wind of the three “FBI agents” who have come here snooping around. Grimes and Wangti become aware of various people tailing them, which leads to brief action scenes, such as when Bayer corners one tail as he’s boarding a plane and beats him senseless with the silenced barrel of his gun.

Another callback to Magellan is the SMEET team’s penchant for capturing people, tying them up, stripping them, and then drugging them. This is done to Ming-lan and two of Grimes’s American agents. Most focus is placed on the torture of Ming-lan, whom Melody finds snooping in her hotel room. Subjecting the nude girl to “itching powder,” Melody quickly reduces her to misery. Placing it first on her bare feet and then on her “almost hairless crotch,” Melody watches happily as Ming-lan suffers. (“The fire inside her vagina was unbearable!”) Unlike the Marksman books, though, our heroes are more merciful, though Bayer does murder the two American agents off-page and leaves their corpses sitting in the hotel bathroom, a la Magellan.

But Montego really tries the reader’s patience. The entire novel is basically comprised of the three SMEET members going around St. Thomas while the Grimes team watches them, with long exposition between each team recapping who they have seen and wondering who they are – the SMEET team wondering if “the Spanish-looking man” they’ve seen in a club might be connected with the 707 disappearance, and meanwhile Grimes’s team wondering if the “two men and the oriental girl” might be FBI agents or something. I mean it goes on and on! And what makes it all the more frustrating is there’s only like ten characters in the entire novel!

As for the sleaze quotient, it’s not as prevalent as you might expect. In fact there isn’t a sex scene in the entire novel. Smith focuses more of his sleaze on oddball, out-of-nowhere scenes, like when a sexy native gal does an erotic dance for Grimes. Smith goes into graphic detail as the girl pleasures herself while dancing. As mentioned, Melody and Grimes fall in love and have sex for the first time in St. Thomas, but Smith cuts to the scene after the deed has been done, with a blisfful Melody going on and on about Bayer’s “beautiful cock” and how she can’t believe they waited so long. But otherwise Montego steers clear of any straight-up porn stuff, such as what Smith was writing at the time for Midwood Books and others.

Smith can’t even give us a finale that takes place on the titular Montego, a sparse no-man’s-land island near St. Thomas which Grimes owns. The SMEET gang is all set to go there, thanks to Ming-lan spilling the beans after her itching torture…but then an FBI team closes in on them. The “climax” my friends is Wangti explaining their mission to the FBI agents…and then turning the case over to them!! Even Bayer is like, “You mean we aren’t even going to go on the raid with them?” And Wangti is like “Nope!” I couldn’t believe it as I read it, my friends. After hundreds of pages of stalling, Smith clearly hit his word count and said to hell with it.

At the very least he does have Grimes captured, courtesy Ming-lan; the very last page has Wangti heading out to his car, only to find a bound Grimes and Jakowleff sitting in it, apparently captured and delivered by Ming-lan, who also sits in the car and tells Wangti she is a “present” for him, or something. Wangti grunts and gets in another car and drives off – the end! Whether Montego was intended as the start of a series is unknown, but it’s so middling and pathetic that you can only be glad it wasn’t. I feel as if parts of my soul have been chipped away from the reading of this book. 

Smith’s writing is as indecipherable as ever. I used to think his bizarre style in the Marksman books was due to lazy editing from series edior Peter McCurtin, but Montego is just as screwed-up in the narrative department, despite having a different publisher. Just check out some of these humdingers:

Considering the immensity of Grimes’ criminal enterprises and contrasting it with the few individuals governing and administering; and keeping in mind the staggering profits earned, its continuously functioning successfully was a bitter pill for the agents of SMEET to admit even existed much less swallow… -- pg. 48

She was referring to the man who had rushed up to the Chinese Ming-lan in the Castle lobby and Bayer’s noting the similarity between him and the man he shot on the road. -- pg. 176

Had Wangti been wearing a hat it would have blown off when he next listened to an eager Talus beeping out a latitudinal/longitudinal perimeter fix on a powerful transmitter he had accidentally made signal contact with only an hour before Wangti’s “SMEET” signal from the airport tower shot into his earphones back in Montmarte. -- pg. 206

I know that Smith and many of these guys were just contract writers, looking to make a buck, with little emotional investment in their work. And I’m fine with that. But still, I like to think there’s at least some creative impetus in their novels, some perhaps even subconscious yearning for self-expression. And yet I can find nothing to justify this in Montego. The novel is listless, bland, and merely just exists. Why Smith even wrote it will be a mystery, and I’m certain he didn’t rake in the cash from it (Manor supposedly was notorious for not paying its authors).

Ultimately, if the author so clearly doesn’t give a damn, then how can the reader be expected to? Despite too-brief flashes of Smith’s patented bizarre charm, Montego is otherwise a nonentity, and I’d say it has fittingly been consigned to obscurity.