Showing posts with label William Crawford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Crawford. Show all posts

Monday, August 2, 2021

The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter


The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter, by Jim Peterson
June, 1973  Pinnacle Books

I’ve been looking forward to this volume of The Executioner for several years now. Even though it’s hated by hardcore fans of the series, Sicilian Slaughter sounded interesting to me because, for one volume at least, it was as if Bruno Rossi or Frank Scarpetta got hold of the keys to the kingdom: the refined, skilled touch of Don Pendleton is gone, and for once “hero” Mack Bolan comes off as vile and sadistic as the mobsters he’s up against. 

Per his interview with William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, Pendleton himself never read Sicilian Slaughter, and never knew who wrote it – however he clarified that he held no ill will toward whoever did write it. Young himself was unable to find out how’d written Sicilian Slaughter, but we know now that it was William Crawford. Young did reveal something I’ve not read anywhere else: That Pinnacle was ready to keep The Executioner going as by “Jim Peterson,” a house name that would be filled by a revolving cast of ghostwriters, and Pinnacle even mocked up covers for the next Peterson volume (which turned out to never be published), Firebase Seattle. This is a mystery I’ve chased for a while, and I have some of the details I discovered below. 

It makes sense that Crawford got the “Peterson” gig first, as at the time he was sort of being groomed as Pinnacle’s flagship author. The imprint published several of his books, even devoting full-page ads to them. And having read a few of Crawford’s novels it was clear to me from the get-go that he was indeed the author of Sicilian Slaughter. Most of Crawford’s hallmarks are at play: an asshole protagonist, rampant misogyny, interminable digressions concerning one-off characters, perspective hopping, periodic sermons to the reader on the shittiness of the world, and an overall dispirited vibe. One Crawfordism that does not appear is the typically-mandatory scene in which a character shits his pants or pukes his guts out. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told him to reign that in. 

But then, Ettinger seems to have done some tinkering to Crawford’s manuscript, as it’s more streamlined than most of Crawford’s other bloated books. And also there’s a lot of flashbacks to previous Executioner volumes, so either Crawford did some serious research (which doesn’t seem likely from what I’ve learned about these contract writers) or Ettinger went into the manuscript and added these touches. I suspect the latter, given that Pendleton also told William H. Young that Andy Ettinger wrote the prologue for the following volume, Jersey Guns: this volume saw Pendleton’s return to the series, and given that he refused to read Sicilian Slaughter it was up to Ettinger to pen the prologue. 

And it’s a good thing Pendleton did refuse, as there’s no way he could’ve retconned Sicilian Slaughter into his overall storyline. The one thing we know about William Crawford, thanks to Will Murray’s research in his 1982 article about Nick Carter: Killmaster, is that he was a cop. Thus Crawford sees Mack Bolan as a criminal; he has absolutely none of the heroism Pendleton gave him. In this novel Bolan shoots unarmed people, murders a woman (in a very sadistic manner), gets another woman to take a severe beating for him, threatens a cop, and basically just acts like an asshole throughout. Even established relationships are skewed; Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man in the Mafia, basically hero-worships the Executioner in Pendleton’s novels, as evidenced by the various “what a man!” reflections he’ll have when encountering him. Turrin shows up in Sicilian Slaughter as well…and thinks to himself what a “pain” Bolan is, wondering if he should just turn him in to the capos and be done with it! 

Turrin was also in the previous volume, and Crawford tries to pick up the story from directly after. Bolan’s shot up and bleeding and heads to an underground doctor Turrin told him about years ago. Here we quickly see that this isn’t your grandma’s Mack Bolan when our “hero” decides he’s going to have to kill the doctor who just saved him. But as it happens the doctor has ulterior motives of his own and is about to call in some gunsels and collect the bounty on the Executioner. Meanwhile of course our hero has a surprise of his own in store for the good doctor. Bolan is a mean-spirited son of a bitch throughout, almost identical to other s.o.b. Crawford protagonists, like Stryker. But he’s a lot more action-prone than others, carrying along an artillery case of heavy firepower. I’m betting Crawford also had military experience – I know he also published some Vietnam War novels – as evidenced by the firearms and military details sprinkled throughout Sicilian Slaughter

Bolan decides to take his war directly to Sicily; this was set up in the previous volume with Bolan getting irked that the American mobsters were starting to import new blood from the mother land. The sequence in which Bolan flies to Italy is like something out of The Marksman or The Sharpshooter; the “Mack Bolan” here could easily be Philip Magellan or Johnny Rock. First he threatens the sleazy private pilot into the job, and then, in the most outrageous moment in the novel, Bolan decides to get rid of the pilot’s busty assistant. She, uh, deserves it, though, given that she’s a former hooker and drug addict and works as a stringer for the Mafia – and plus she’s recognized Bolan and plans to snitch on him. As if it wasn’t enough to show Mack Bolan killing off an unarmed woman, Crawford has it happen in the most vile way possible – the girl’s naked, offering herself to Bolan in the cabin, and Bolan coldly shoots open a window so that she’s sucked out, screaming in terror, thirty thousand feet above ground! 

What’s surprising is that series editor Andy Ettinger even allowed this material to be published. If there’s anyone Pendleton seems pissed at in his intervew in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, it’s Ettinger. And one can see his point. It’s surprising that the series editor and the imprint would even publish Sicilian Slaughter with its sadistic “hero;” it makes it very clear that they just saw The Executioner as product, something they had to get on the book racks at a certain date to keep up the publishing cadence. They couldn’t have cared less about the mythic hero the series creator had painstakingly built over the preceding fifteen volumes. In fact, the editorial embellishments throughout make it clear that Ettinger was indeed involved in Sicilian Slaughter, and one would think he’d be like, “No, Mack Bolan probably wouldn’t blast some nude and unarmed girl out of an airplane.” 

To be sure, though, I like this crazy stuff and always have, and if this had been a volume of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman it would’ve been one of the best installments of either series. What I do mind is Crawford’s typical penchant for undermining himself; his books come off like bloated bores what with the constant background detail on one-off characters, just egregious crap that’s there to meet the word count. Even the buxom victim has several pages devoted to her sad-sack history, which only further undermines Crawford, given that the reader sort of feels sorry for her…and then the “hero” mercilessly kills her. But then perhaps it’s intentional on Crawford’s part, more indication that he saw the Executioner as a villain. But then again, it’s surprising that the sequence even made it into print, given that the guy who’d served as series editor for the past fifteen volumes was involved. Surely someone at Pinnacle must’ve figured that at least some readers might be shocked by all this, but apparently the driving goal was more to get the product in the stores. 

Another annoying penchant of Crawford’s is that he’s never consistent in what he calls his hero in the narrative. It’s either “Mack” or “Bolan” or “the man in black” (which made me think Johnny Cash had suddenly become the Executioner), and it’s never consistent. But then this is one of my pet peeves, and others might not care. I just personally feel that the author should refer to his protagonist by only one name, and one name only; other characters can call the progatonist by various names, but the author should be consistent. And I’m willing to fight for my beliefs! Sorry, lost the thread there. And also Crawford fails to make “Mack” (or “Bolan,” or whatever) likable. Even Magellan, in all his “cutting-the-heads-off-my-victim’s-corpses” insanity was still at least somewhat likable, if only because he was so batshit crazy. But Crawford’s version of Mack Bolan is like all of Crawford’s other progatonists: he’s just a prick. 

Another thing that bugs me about Crawford’s prose is that he uses this half-assed “omniscient” tone, in that he’ll tell us stuff, while otherwise limited to Bolan’s perspective, that Bolan himself doesn’t know. For example, Bolan might shoot somebody, and Crawford will write like, “Bolan blew out Eddie the Champ’s heart,” or somesuch. But the thing is – Bolan doesn’t even know who Eddie the Champ is! For all he knows, it’s just some random mobster thug. Yet we readers know who it is, because Eddie is one of the many one-off characters we’re saddled with in the narrative, a former military dude hired by the Sicilian don to train some troops. And all this stuff here is just lazy retread of the previous volume, with the troops being trained pure military style, with barracks and hiding out in foxholes and whatnot, all of which is sort of ridiculous because it’s like they’re being trained to invade a country or something, not to act as enforcers for dons in American cities. 

And indeed, the climax is basically like a military novel. Bolan, after having blitzed his way through Italy and even posing as a simple country boy to get to Sicily – which entails him hooking up with some busty local babe and having some off-page lovin’ with her – ends up on the training fields of the Mafia recruits and starts mowing them down (in spectacularly bloodless fashion) with heavy weaponry. Here Crawford shows what appears to be some military background, with sidebars on strategy and also the efficacy of the Browning Automatic Rifle. There’s also weird survivalist stuff, like when Bolan’s shot in the back and kicks in a tree, grabs out the “thick spider webs,” and stops the flow of blood with them. Speaking of which Bolan comes off as a brazen, reckless fool in Crawford’s hands, displaying none of the superheroic planning of Pendleton’s original. Several times Bolan will just storm his way into some situation and realize he’s gotten in over his head. 

But one thing I can say about Crawford’s version of Bolan is that he’s mega-tough. Bolan goes through a lot of pain in this one, shot up and beaten and just in general abused, and he just keeps on going. He starts and ends the novel in a half-dead state. Crawford again goes places Pendleton likely wouldn’t when Bolan, late in the novel, shoots up with some morphine to combat the pain. However he’s not a hero by any means; I’ve already mentioned how the poor local girl gets beaten to a pulp for being suspected of having helped Bolan, and all Bolan does is watch from safety and swear to himself he’ll “make it up somehow” to her. But Bolan’s motives are purely driven by sadistic rage; not content to merely kill the Sicilian don, he goes to great lengths to destroy the man’s entire villa so as to prove a point to the rest of the Mafia. 

An interesting element of Sicilian Slaughter is the finale, which cuts to Seattle and features a muscular dude in his 40s with gray hair named Mr. Molto. This guy runs a sort of underground military operation, and has just been hired by the Mafia to kill the Executioner. Molto has an extensive operation, and via computer has deduced that Bolan’s next strike will be in Seattle. This epilogue – which I’m betting was written by Ettinger – clearly sets up the stage for the following volume, same as how Panic In Philly ended with an Ettinger epilogue that set up this Sicilian adventure. However, the Mr. Molto subplot would never be mentioned in any future Executioner novel. 

As mentioned above, William H. Young stated that Pinnacle had done mockup covers for the next “Jim Peterson” novel, Firebase Seattle. Given the title, it was clearly intended to follow up from the climax of Sicilian Slaughter. This Peterson novel was never published, as Pendleton and Pinnacle worked out their legal issues and Pendleton came back to the series for the next volume, which was titled Jersey Guns. Pendleton did eventually turn in a novel titled Firebase Seattle (I assume using the cover originally designed for the unpublished Peterson manuscript of the same title), but obviously it had nothing to do with the events set up in Sicilian Slaughter

This means then that the closing material with “Mr. Molto” was never picked up on, and thus the villain remains a mystery in the Executioner universe. I knew that Gil Brewer had written an unpublished volume of The Executioner, and for a long time I suspected that he’d written the unpublished sequel to Sicilian Slaughter. In other words, I had a hunch that Gil Brewer had been hired to be the next “Jim Peterson.” A few years ago I got my confirmation: the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming has Brewer’s unpublished Executioner manuscript in its Gil Brewer bollection, and friends, it’s titled…Firebase Seattle. And for a mere $50.00, you can get a copy! (They charge 20 cents per page for jpeg copies, and it’s a 248-page manuscript.) 

So I wager that Mr. Molto does indeed appear in Brewer’s manuscript, and further I wager Brewer’s manuscript would have more Andy Ettinger embellishments to keep everything simpatico with the series overall. But I’m certainly in no hurry to fork over so much to read it. Gil Brewer was a great writer, but judging from his work on Soldato he wasn’t a great men’s adventure writer. But if anyone out there wins the lottery and decides to check out the manuscript, let me know!

Monday, June 14, 2021

Stryker #4: Deadly Alliance


Stryker #4: Deadly Alliance, by William Crawford
July, 1975  Pinnacle Books

The cover of this final volume of Stryker promises a Blaxploitation spin on the series, but as it turns out Deadly Alliance is of a piece with the other volumes, and William Crawford’s work in general: an unlikable prick protagonist blitzes his way through a string of low-life underworld types, mercilessly beating unarmed men and women and occasionally shooting a few of them while thinking to himself how cops “need to be respected,” before ultimately being captured and tortured himself. And by novel’s end someone will shit their pants. 

While the previous volume was a streamlined affair, so far as Crawford’s work goes – following a linear plot from beginning to end with no digressive rundowns of various one-off characters – this one returns to the Crawford norm, wasting pages with egregious backstory and digressions. It’s little wonder Deadly Alliance was the last volume of Stryker. I would imagine readers of the day just couldn’t connect with it, as Crawford’s style makes for a hard read. And Stryker is particularly unlikable this time. I mean a protagonist can be lovably unlikable, like Ryker, or even lovably unhinged, like Magellan, but Stryker’s just a prick here, with no redeeming qualities to make the reader root for him. 

Stryker’s driven nature is due to the murder of Paul Stalking Deer, a guy who was “more than a brother” to Stryker and served with him in the war, worked on the Stryker family ranch, and whatnot. This murder occurs toward the beginning of Deadly Alliance; the actual opening of the novel has Stryker shaving off his moustache (which he grew as a disguise in the first volume) and “hating himself” due to the crazed violence of his life. After this Stryker meets with Boyd Frazier, a journalist who claims he can get Stryker exonerated and all the charges on him dropped. Meanwhile Stryker is content to live on his ranch here in New Mexico; one wonders if he’s in a pinochle club with fellow New Mexico ranch owner Dakota

Oh and believe it or not, but for once we actually have a few lines of dialog from Stryker’s daughter, who as we’ll recall was blinded in the first volume. She’s basically being raised by Stryker’s mother, who has taught the little girl to speak in Gaelic. However this will be it for that subplot; once Stryker hears of Paul Stalking Deer’s murder, in “the largest city in New Mexico,” Stryker heads off on the vengeance trail. Thankfully the “flying fiction” is nonexistent this time, and for the most part Deadly Alliance is a violent revenge thriller that moves in a linear line. It’s just that I personally couldn’t have cared less about the guy seeking the revenge. 

But then that linear plot line only follows Stryker’s material. We also have too-long cutaways to Boyd Frazier and other supporting characters, complete with time-wasting backgrounds on their lives. A hallmark of Crawford’s – let’s recall how the first volume even told us how Stryker’s friggin’ grandparents met – and a sad return to form after the previous volume. At any rate Stryker heads into that New Mexico city and tracks the leads on who murdered his friend. While the cover calls out the “black Mafia,” ultimately the villains of Deadly Alliance are a group of young left-wing radicals, a la SDS and the Weathermen, a group that happens to be made up of various races. However early on Stryker gets word that a black Mafia might’ve been involved, only to hear from another character that the whole thing is a shuck, a cover story for the real group. 

There are a lot of tiebacks to the first volume, with Stryker hitting some of the same informants and visiting the same places in his quest for info. We get our first indication of the type of novel we’ll be reading when Stryker gets an informant in his car and proceeds to beat him unmerciful, even slapping his ear to rupture his eardrum. It’s definitely hardcore and all, but it lacks the similar “revenge at all costs” vibe of superior revenge yarns like Bronson: Blind Rage. This again comes down to Stryker. There’s just something irritating about him; I know the intention is to convey he’s a supreme badass, but at the same time he just comes off like a creep and you root for the bad guys. His occasional sermons are also off-putting. 

And your last name wouldn’t have to be “Freud” to detect just a wee little bit of homoeroticsm in Crawford’s prose. Stryker constantly insults his male prey with putdowns involving the derriere – everyone’s “buttface” or “assface” or “asshole” or even “dumbutt.” Also factor in how Stryker’s threats also usually refer to butts: “burn your ass” and etc. And Crawford still does that mega-strange thing of his where “hard” curse words appear in the narrative but are bowdlerized in the dialog; ie “Motherf– ” and “C–,” whereas both words are clearly stated in the narrative. Coupled with the curious obsession with male asses – and the fact that Stryker goes ladyless this time – this makes everything rather strange to say the least. The fact that Crawford clearly wasn’t even aware of how all this comes off makes it even more humorous. But then, maybe he was; in Deadly Alliance Crawford shows a sudden familiarity with pop culture, referring to movies and TV shows quite often. At one point Stryker watches “the great television series Star Trek,” and later on Crawford even mentions Dennis Hopper. 

Well anyway, Stryker goes around town and beats up various men and women. A lot of it is repetitious from every other Crawford novel I’ve reviewed here. Stryker just bashes heads for info, usually not using his own head. There’s a part where he goes into a bar run by a black guy he beat up in prison, and Styrker realizes too late he’s unarmed and outnumbered. Then someone puts a gun to Stryker’s back, but our hero delivers a merciless beatdown despite the odds. He’ll learn this guy, a young black man, was hired to kill him. Cue another brutal torture sequence as Stryker drives the guy out into the countryside and beats him to pulp to find out who hired him. But Stryker has a soft side, folks; he feels bad for the kid and gives him some money and tells him to get the hell out of New Mexico! 

Given the nature of the villains this time, the novel is filled with sermons against the left, particularly the radical movement – “It wasn’t what the world was coming to, but the kind of people now living in the world.” The left-wing terrorists Stryker faces are a hate-filled lot of drug-using freaks, led by a black man who is stoned out of his gourd most of the time (ie, “He blasted hash for breakfast,” and etc) and who just fumbles through the usual speeches to his mindless but dangerous lackeys. There are of course many parallels to today throughout this sequence, with the caveat that Crawford was writing in a more rational world: the Federal agencies, we know from Stryker’s various asides, are staffed with lawmen just itching to get their hands on these left-wing radicals. 

In addition to the radical movement, the terrorists are also heavily into heroin. Stryker gets wind of this soon enough, following the drug pipeline until it takes him to a pair of girls, one white and one black, who are users. Stryker beats the living shit out of both of them in a sequence that was probably unsettling in ’74, let alone today. The white girl is fat and we get lots of stuff about her being so unattractive to begin with, let alone her heroin addiction and how it makes her willing to do anything. But she has info on the radicals and she’s the one Stryker really sets in on – she’s also the character who shits herself this time, right in Stryker’s car. Luckily this happens off-page, but we’re to understand that, due to her cold turkey heroin withdrawal, the girl barfs and shits all over the interior of Stryker’s car…and just as he’s hosing it down he’s taken captive himself by the very radicals he seeks. 

They call themselves the National Alliance of Liberationists and ostensibly they’re led by Lynlee McGuire, the so-called “Fied Marshall,” but really it’s an American Indian girl named Carolina who runs the show. A “Reservation cousin” of Paul Stalking Deer, she was sent to college thanks to money Stryker’s mom raised for her, but she pays this back with hatred and resentment, having been fed endless propaganda about America’s racism and whatnot. Honestly the whole thing is dispiritedly tiresome in our current era, but at least Crawford pokes holes in their propaganda – Stryker’s comments in particular starting on page 156 are basically an indictment of what is now referred to as “systemic racism,” Stryker arguing that blanket accusations against an entire society make for an easy copout for one’s own individual shortcomings. 

Carolina is especially loathsome and there’s none of the “sexy villainess” stuff I generally demand in my pulp. She’s just a stone cold whackjob and so committed to her radicalism that she’s chomping at the bit to kill Stryker. Oh and it develops that they’ve targeted him because they want Stryker’s mom to sell her ranch so they can use the money for the movement or somesuch. The plan is to abduct Stryker and get his mom to pay for his ransom via selling the ranch. Stryker goes along with it, tied up and slapped around, as usually happens to every Crawford protagonist is in the final pages. But he himself is determined to kill Carolina – and gets his opportunity when he’s condemned to death after a kangaroo trial with the Field Marshall presiding. 

But the crazy thing is, Crawford jumps to the epilogue just as Stryker has his chance to fight back. The struggle with Carolina is tense and brutal, and after which Stryker realizes he’s surrounded by several armed radicals. Crawford for whatever reason blows through all this, serving up an anticlimactic finale of Stryker blasting away with an AR-15 and showing these punks what terror’s all about. That said, there’s a great bit where the Field Marshall trots in, using a nude girl as a human shield, and Stryker shoots her in the thigh to get her out of the way! But after this it’s a quick flash-forward to after the melee, and Stryker’s safe at home back at the ranch. 

While Deadly Alliance was the last volume, Crawford clearly had another installment in mind: the novel ends with Frazier convincing Styrker to head into New York City and bust up some dirty cops. Stryker is definitely interested, but obviously readers weren’t, as there were no further volumes. It seems at this point Crawford’s tenure with Pinnacle came to an end, even though at one point he was so prolific for the publisher that they ran full-page ads for his novels. After this he was back to penning pseudonymous novels for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. Moral of the story: If you want a long-running action series, at least make your protagonist somewhat likable.

Thursday, May 7, 2020

Stryker #3: Drug Run


Stryker #3: Drug Run, by William Crawford
October, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Now this is more like it – with the third volume of StrykerWilliam Crawford finally figures out how to write a fast-paced, violent ‘70s crime paperback; reduced – but not gone – are the random asides, arbitrary digressions, and incessant POV-hopping that mired his previous books. Same goes for the overwriting; Drug Run is a mere 146 pages, of pretty big print.

But the good stuff Crawford’s always done is here, and thus undimmed by the usual excess baggage: a hard-bitten bastard of a hero, moments of gory (but realistic) violence, and of course, characters puking and shitting themselves (a Crawford staple if there ever was one). Oh and lots of “flying fiction,” another Crawford staple, but not as pages-consuming as say The Assassin.

It’s some unstated time after the second volume; long enough for Stryker to go into “temporary retirement,” living on the family ranch with his mother. But Colin Stryker’s no ranch-hand mama’s boy like Dakota; within the first page he’s decided to go back out into the world and kick some ass. (Oh and it’s revealed this time that his mother’s sort of a witch…and that Stryker inherited a bit of a sixth sense from her!) The memory of Kitty Tiel, the pretty young blonde who overdosed in the previous book, enslaved into drugs and whoredom and whatnot by unscrupulous drug-runners, is what pulls Stryker back into his newfound role of vengeance-dispensing.

Stryker hops on his Cessna and heads on over to the little town in New Mexico where Kitty’s mom and dad live – only to find the dad dead via shotgun suicide and the mom about to OD on drugs. The same bastards have gotten hold of the parents; Kitty was forced to pose for “pornographic photos,” and these were sent to mom and pop, provoking the latter into suicide and the former into the squalor of drugs…which were provided to her by the very same sadists who got Kitty hooked. And, just as with Kitty, they’ve got mom turning tricks – in her own home! Stryker quickly displays that he’s not your average good samaritan action hero; he slaps Mrs. Tiel around, forces a water spicket down her throat, then stands by as she pukes several times – Crawford quickly developing his “someone will puke” theme.

Stryker also soon displays his bad-assery when it comes to his opponents; when two thugs come by Mrs. Riel’s place to ensure she’s dead from an OD, Stryker so savagely hits one of them that his jaw is broken in three places, and later guts him with an icepick. The surviving thug gets a molar ripped out and his face bashed to pieces, but Stryker’s true to his word and lets him live in exchange for info. Kitty, a promising actress, was ensnared by Hollywood players who were in reality drug runners; they hooked her on heroin and had her in porn flicks and turning tricks. So Stryker decides to just smash the heroin pipeline itself.

This entails that other Crawford staple – a long sequence set in Mexico. In fact, practically the entirety of Drug Run occurs in Mexico. Stryker learns of a major kingpin in the siera mountains, and looks to an old colleague named Flok – a former Mexican cop – for info. Stryker discovers the kingpin is named Villa, and heads into the mountains to snuff him out. He’s promptly captured, another mainstay of Crawford’s fiction; stripped naked and held in a pitch-black cave, his only cellmate a screeching bat. This is definitely a hackle-raising sequence, and Crawford skillfully plays out the tension and creepiness.

Stryker’s interrogated by two of Villa’s men, one a big brute and the other a cane-wielding sadist. This sequence plays out unexpectedly, thanks to the presence of the elderly female cook employed by Villa; Stryker gets one look at her and realizes she is a witch on the level of his mother. There’s a strange supernatural element here with Stryker getting a quick whiff of some unholy stench (which of course causes him to barf), and later it’s intimated that this was the ghostly stink of the woman’s long-dead husband and son, both of whom were apparently killed by the brutish thug. It’s not explained, left as a mystery, but it all works in Stryker’s favor – a bit unsatisfying so far as the genre goes (an action-series protagonist should never get out of a jam thanks to supernatural mumbo-jumbo), but it’s at least played mostly on the level.

Stryker gets himself an M-1 carbine and a couple horses and heads out of the mountains before Villa and his men can return. This leads to another nice action scene, where Stryker walks into an ambush but again turns the tables. Crawford’s action scenes never have the bigscale vibe of other men’s adventure novels of the era, operating more on a personal, as I say realistic, level, but when they hit they hit pretty hard. So here we have heads blown into gory mush and a dude soiling his britches when Stryker gets his grips on him. This leads to another good bit, where Stryker stages a raid on Villa’s place, gets the man himself, and tosses him out of his Cessna – a sequence only ruined by unnecessarily-technical flying description.

Curiously the book seems to end here, but limps on for an unspectacular final quarter as Stryker heads to LA, looking to take out at least one of the runners who got their heroin from Villa’s pipeline…heroin they’d use to prey on naïve starlets and hook them into whoredom. The book is on the same level of drug-paranoia as Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve; Stryker (and Crawford) isn’t just against heroin – he thinks marijuana is a tool of the devil, as well. But then as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a lot of similarity between the writing styles of Crawford and Martin Caidin; both have incredibly reactionary tones along with interminable “flying” sequences.

Unfortunately all this comes off like anticlimax after the material with Villa. Stryker sets his sights on a former actor turned drug runner; he might not be the guy who got Kitty, but he’ll just represent the whole damned group and suffer for it regardless. But instead of gun-blazing action, Stryker goes about an elaborate sting operation where he poses as the “new Villa” and tries to get this guy to go in with him, intending to set him up and burn him. Unfortunately the guy’s guard is a heroin junkie himself and decides to take matters into his own hands – a tense scene which has the ludicrous climax of Stryker bad-mouthing the guy until he puts down his gun!

Crawford here develops a subplot that a lawyer wants to help Stryker get all the charges from the first volume dropped, so Stryker can “go home,” ie be a cop again. The novel ends with Stryker back on the ranch with his mom and blinded daughter (who humorously has yet to get a single line of dialog in the series), planning to give the lawyer a call. There was only one more volume, so perhaps it will serve as an actual resolution to the series. Crawford was poised to be Pinnacle’s “house” writer – as William W. Johnstone later was – but it seems that his involvement with the publisher came to a sudden end in 1974. His last publications were pseudonymous novels for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. I’d still like to know more about the guy, but my assumption is he passed away sometime in the late ‘70s.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

The Assassin


The Assassin, by Paul Ross
No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

I was under the impression this was another of those BCI Crime Paperbacks produced by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel, given that “Paul Ross” was the same house name used for Engel’s Chopper Cop series. Also, I knew from Hawk’s Authors’s Pseudonyms that this particular “Paul Ross” was really William Crawford, who wrote many of those BCI Crime Paperbacks under various pseudonyms. But Engel’s name doesn’t appear in the copyright of The Assassin, so this was a solo Crawford affair.

However there are enough similarities to the Engel-produced Mafia: Operation Hitman, also published in 1974, that I began to wonder if The Assassin was actually a rejected manuscript that Crawford sold to Manor. In other words, perhaps The Assassin started life as Mafia: Operation Hitman but Engel didn’t feel it was up to snuff…perhaps because the Mafia’s not in it, and also because there’s more about flying than there is about assassinating. Honestly, a more accurate title for this novel would be “The Pilot.”

Otherwise, this is certainly the most streamlined Crawford novel I’ve yet read. Whereas all the others have suffered from constant stalling, repetition, and arbitrary info-dumping, The Assassin moves at an assured pace and pretty much sticks to linear events, focused solely on our titular character, Lance Martin, with only occasional detours into the backgrounds of various one-off characters. The only thing that sinks the book is all the damn flying material. I’m not joking when I tell you that the second half of the novel is mostly concerned with Lance flying a new plane.

Egregious flying material is a Crawford hallmark, as is a bitter, mean-spirited “hero” who does his best to piss off everyone, including the reader. Another hallmark, again on display here, is the Hemingwayesque machismo of the protagonist, who does all those manly things of yore. And again we have the Mexican setting, right on the border of Mexico – and as ever we’re not told precisely which state the novel occurs in, though you can guess it’s New Mexico a la Stryker and some of Crawford’s other work. But one thing missing this time is a character shitting himself – typically that’s a William Crawford staple.

The cover photo of the faux-Oswald (or whoever really killed Kennedy) sighting down with his mail-order rifle is misleading; Lance (as Crawford refers to his anti-hero throughout), like the protagonist in Mafia: Operation Hitman, makes his jobs look like accidents. We see him in action in a suspenseful opening sequence; following a convoluted payment scheme, in which cases of money are dropped into the field of a farm house he owns near San Antonio, Lance leaves his main home in Mazatlan and heads for Los Angeles. Here he kills an advertising bigwig at a football game, making it look like a heart attack.

Lance has been a professional assassin for fifteen years, and next Crawford shows us his origin story. Born to a hardscrabble life in some unstated Southern city, Lance grew up tough and mean, then was shipped off to Korea. He came back on a football scholarship and ended up marrying the Homecoming Princess (referred to as “The Princess” throughout). A leg injury cost him his football career and scholarship, so eventually Lance got onto the police force in the fictional town of Frontera, confusingly enough right across the border from a town in Mexico of the same name.

But Frontera, Lance learned, was a “controlled town,” with vice and unchecked corruption to the highest levels. Lance, not long after joining the force, gave a ticket to the latest girlfriend of some Frontera VIP, and after this his life went to hell thanks to pressure from the corrupt town leaders. After various mishaps Lance started fighting back, which made things worse; an informant turned out to be the ringleader of a sting operation, and, just like Colin Stryker, Lance was set up on various charges and sent off to prison for three years. Also, like Stryker, Lance has a disabled daughter, but this one’s disabled from mental problems “caused by a father who is a dirty cop,” per the Princess in the divorce papers she files soon after Lance’s incarceration.

This entire sequence is well written, but comes off like a retread for anyone who read Stryker #1, as it’s basically the same story. Lance gets out of prison – where he learned such handy con skills as disguise and flying an airplane(!) – and goes about getting some old-fashioned revenge. He scores big when he takes out the informant who was really behind the sting, finding money stashed all over the guy’s house. This is used to get Lance’s daughter out of a state-run hellhole insane asylum and into a better private facility. Humorously, nothing more is said about the daughter, or what happened to her, even though all this is fifteen years ago, and thus the girl would be 20 or so during the time in which the main events of The Assassin take place. 

Crawford as ever makes strange writing decisions…we’ll get chapters and chapters of Lance executing various moves in one of his planes, but when Lance skins alive one of the men who set him up, Crawford leaves the act off-page. Anyway an old judge contacts Lance about a year after he begins his revenge mission; the same judge who sent Lance off to prison for three years. He claims to know Lance is the man who has killed the other plotters, and pleads that he himself was forced into the sting; the judge is gay, and compromising photos are being used to frame him. This is the man that brings Lance into the professional killing game, setting him up with jobs and arranging his payment methods. The first kill, naturally, is of the guy who is blackmailing the judge.

Lance Martin is definitely an asshole, as is mandatory for any Crawford hero, but he lacks even any basic compassion. Crawford only slightly studies the mentality that could make a person a professional killer; we’re told that Lance just feels nothing at all for the people he kills, which is something he himself doesn’t try to understand. We do learn that he no longer takes jobs in which the target is a woman. He’s killed two of them, and apparently this is what’s caused him to suffer a strange sort of impotence.

In a subplot so arbitrary it was clearly shoehorned into the narrative to meet an editorial request, Lance we learn can’t climax when he has sex. In Mazatlan he’s known as a high roller, and a guy at the nearest posh restaurant often fixes Lance up with busty babes who are vacationing in town. We get a lot of “big tits” exploitation as Lance checks out the latest babe’s impressive equipment, but as ever Crawford leaves the sex off-page. But Lance still can’t orgasm, much to the woman’s dismay (in a nice bit Lance muses that he’s the “compleat assassin,” in that he “kills” something in these women, taking away from them the one thing they thought they could make any man do).

Nothing else is said about this condition for the rest of the novel. As we’ll recall, the protagonist of Mafia: Operation Hitman suffered from a similar sexual condition, also due to his killing of female targets, and eventually had to resort to sadomasochism to get off. This bit was what made me suspect that The Assassin was Crawford’s attempt at writing that Mafia: Operation installment. I know that in most cases Engel gave his ghostwriters a treatment or outline to follow, so Mafia: Operation Hitman certainly had a requirement that the protagonist not be able to get his rocks off due to subconscious guilt over murdering women – this would explain why Lance’s condition suddenly comes up (so to speak), is made into a big deal for a few pages, and then abruptly dropped.

Anyway “the old fruit judge” died years ago, and now Lance handles his own jobs, ensuring that his identity is never uncovered by prospective clients. We’re often reminded how two former clients tried to rip him off, and suffered fatally for it. But sadly these flashback kills are all the “assassin” stuff we get in the novel. For midway through Lance is offered a contract to kill a populist politician named Elmore “Josey” Josephsen who threatens to change the course of American politics with his massive public support. This becomes the main and only assassination job Crawford focuses on for the rest of the novel.

That and a whole helluva lot of flying. Crawford was buds with fellow Pinnacle author Mark Roberts, himself a pilot (or at least an armchair pilot), and these two writers are similar in how they shoehorn interminable flying sequences into their novels in a gambit to fill pages. It’s almost like showing off, really. “You wanna read about a professional assassin or a lone wolf mob-buster? Sorry, pal – I’m a pilot, so you’re gonna read about airplanes!”

So we have this overlong heist of a twin-engine aircraft Lance wants, followed by a lot of flying maneuvers. However the plane does at least factor into his assassination plan – at length Lance decides to take the Josephen job, mostly because the political figure is going to appear at a rally in Frontera, and standing beside him at the speech will be the town Mayor: Jeffrey Woodhull, one of the men who framed Lance all those years ago. And the only one of them Lance never got to kill. A former bigwig cop, Woodhull lives under such security that Lance gave up all hope of killing him. But now he’ll be out in the open with Josephsen, so it would be the veritable two birds.

There’s almost as much haggling as there is flying; Lance keeps calling the mysterious group that offered the Josephsen contract, demanding a million from them. This takes a few calls and Lance is pretty persuasive, but I personally wouldn’t recommend calling potential clients things like “butt-mouth.” Our hero is in total asshole mode during these phone calls, lending the sequences a darkly humorous touch. He also goes on wild rants about how these men claim they want to kill Josephsen in order to “save the country,” but in reality they don’t give a good damn about the country or its people; they just want to protect their own interests. Josephsen is not aligned with either political party, nor the corrupt “uniparty” which controls both parties behind the scenes, thus he has become enemy number one to the media, even though he was beloved by the media just a few years before. I experienced severe déjà vu as I read this part.

Lance gets the agreement for a million payoff and goes about planning the hit. At least his plane factors into it; he’s gonna take Josephsen and Woodhall out with a minigun! Yes, Lance just happened to buy a minigun years ago and has it lying around in his home in Mexico. He’s got all kinds of weapons, but sadly he doesn’t use any of them in the course of the book. And also the Josephsen stuff, while built up and seemingly promising more development, is pretty much dropped at this point; the book’s more about Lance stealing that damn plane, prepping himself for the job, and handling the hit in the final pages – no personal confrontation with either Josephsen or Woodhull. 

Crawford drops enough foreshadowing throughout the book that the reader can suspect where it’s all headed. I did like the subtle way Lance’s hardcore drinking factored into the climax. We’re often told Lance learned from professional athletes to get super drunk two nights before a hit, leaving him edgy and angry. We’re also told that Lance’s doctor has told him the drinking is getting too heavy and will have repercussions on Lance’s mind and health. We see this proven in the finale, though Crawford doesn’t beat us over the head with it. Basically, Lance has overlooked several things due to his drinking, not realizing he’s goofed until it’s too late.

 Also Lance’s thorough attention to detail, upon which he prides himself, causes him much misfortune. Not that the reader feels too bad for him, as Lance actually takes out a ton of innocents in his hit – he’s got tracers interspersed with the minigun ammo, and uses them to lock in on Josephsen and Woodhull on the review stand. Too bad for the crowd standing in front of the stand as Lance lines up the hammering spray of bullets – 300 rounds a second, we’re told. He leaves utter devastation in his wake, but this is only relayed via a radio report he listens to in the cockpit. The climax plays out on a tense, gripping sequence as Lance tries to escape from his sinking plane. I mean even in the friggin’ climax the plane is more important to the story than the assassination, but at least it’s very suspenseful.

I think this was my favorite Crawford novel yet, though it lacked the casual brutality of his other novels, such as The Chinese Connection or The Cop-Killers. I think I liked this one mostly because Crawford stuck to a single storyline and for the most part followed a beginning, middle, and end structure, without all the random stalling of his other books. But the egregious flying stuff was annoying. The book did inspire me to start calling people “butt-mouth” more often, though.

Monday, October 22, 2018

The Cop-Killers


The Cop-Killers, by Steve Scott
No month stated, 1972  Manor Books

“We got a new manuscript from that book packager guy, Lyle Kenyon Engel. Somethin’ about commie terrorists killin’ cops. Waddaya think we should do for the cover?” 

“Lemme think a minute…okay, how about a closeup photo of a hand on the ground, with a broken bottle beside it, so you get the idea this poor bastard just got his clock cleaned…and we’ll have a cop hat lying there with the badge showing, so you know it was a cop. And a bunch of blood everywhere, so you know he’s dead…maybe some bloody gobs of brain matter, too.” 

“I love it!...Hey, you wanna do Chinese for lunch?”

              -- Possible conversation in the offices of Manor Books, 1972

One of the earliest novels published by William Crawford, here posing under yet another pseudonym, The Cop-Killers was part of an obscure “series” book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel created in the early ‘70s titled “The Now Books For Today’s Readers.” I’ve only been able to discover four books in this series, and three of them were written by Crawford under various pseudonyms: The Wasters as by Bill Williams (Macfadden Books, 1972), The Dynamite Freaks as by Donald Ryan (Manor, 1972), and this one. (The fourth, High Heaven by Peter Harmon, is also from Manor in ’72 but it’s so scarce I have no details on it…but Justin Marriott has a copy! Per the Catalog of Copyright Entries “Peter Harmon” is also a pseudonym, so it might be Crawford again.) Like other Engel productions, this series started life at Macfadden-Bartell but went over to Manor when Macfadden folded.

The so-called “Now Books For Today’s Readers” were basically the same as the standalone crime paperbacks Engel would later “produce” in the ‘70s, so I’ve tagged them thusly for convenience. They’re really the same thing: for the most part, lurid crime thrillers featuring older, right-wing cop protagonists. Actually The Wasters is about the My Lai massacre, but in that regard it’s similar to another standalone Crawford later wrote for Engel, this time under his own name: Gunship Commander (Pinnacle, 1973). It appears, judging from the blurb in The Wasters, that the “Now Books” were intended to capitalize on the affairs of the day, to seem so timely that they were hot off the presses, as it were.

This is clearly indicated by the plots of The Cop-Killers and The Dynamite Freaks, both of which concern left-wing hippie terrorists sticking it to the Man. But given that Crawford was the ghostwriter chosen for the job, it’s a safe bet we won’t get a peek into the minds of these terrorists, to see what makes them tick. As ever, Crawford’s “hero” is a hardcore cop who is such a bastard even his fellow cops despise him. He’s also part of an older mindset, and doesn’t cotton much to all this progressive liberal bullshit that’s soiling society as we know it. As for the hippie terrorists, they’re heroin-addicted bloodthirsty freaks who make Antifa look like the Hare Krishnas.

We already know our protagonist, Lt. Warren “Web” Burnell, is in for a hellish time when we meet him; the novel opens with Burnell nude, shackled, maimed and beaten, the punching bag of a muscle-bound sadist named Clacker. All we know is Burnell’s gotten into this predicament because he was taking things “personally.” At length we’ll learn that Burnell, a Korean War vet, is the chief (and sole officer) of his city’s Intelligence Unit, and he alone suspected that this rash of cop-killings around the country was part of a plot. His bullheaded research has led him here, captured by the very people he has been seeking.

Curiously, Crawford never tells us where all this takes place – he just keeps referring to it as “the city.” It’s clear it’s near the Mexico border, so one can assume it’s in New Mexico, familiar Crawford stomping grounds, as demonstrated by Stryker. But we know the city is large enough that it requires it’s own police intelligence unit, and Burnell, we learn via the usual Crawford arbitrary-backstorying, has been placed in charge of it because his fellow cops hate his guts and they want him out of their hair. Why? Because Burnell bucks authority and resents the spineless twits who run the police department, all of whom are more concerned with politics than protecting the people. 

And speaking of which, Crawford displays all his strengths and weaknesses throughout the text; any character, no matter how minor, is given inordinate setup and background material, and the background stuff is almost brazenly shoehorned in with absolutely no regard for narrative flow. Different characters are given similar names: Bennie, Berny, Burnell. We’re “treated” to abritrary “cop world” details, usually relayed via overlong flashbacks to cases Burnell worked on in the past. But then flashes of ultra-sadistic violence will come out of nowhere, with at one point even a character’s eyeball getting knocked out by a chain and dangling there by threads of muscle. Not to mention Crawford’s strange focus on characters shitting themselves – at least a few of them, including Burnell himself, soil their drawers before the book ends.

But as I’ve mentioned before, what makes all this sadistic shit so strange is that Crawford is unwilling to use the word “fuck.” To me this is actually creepier than anything, and perhaps an indication of this guy’s strange personality…I mean, he’ll use racial slurs (brace yourself for the dreaded N-word), feature scenes of rape and torture, and have characters shit themselves, but he writes “F –” instead of “fuck” every single time. It’s just bizarre. I mean why draw the line there? And for that matter, there’s no sex, also as usual for Crawford, other than that rape bit, which is part of another of those overlong, arbitrary backstories; it’s his model girlfriend Robi who was the victim, one guy “in her” and the other burning her with a lit cigarette, and Burnell stomped the two to pieces, killing one in the process, and thus met Robi, who later became his on-again, off-again girlfriend. 

Other than the flashback stuff, which ranges back over the years, the main plot of The Cop-Killers occurs over a few days. Cops are being massacred around the country, but “Jesus Edgar Hoover” of the FBI insists it is not a conspiracy. So too does the lily-livered chief of police in Burnell’s city, even after a couple of his own cops are shotgunned to gory pieces in an ambush. Burnell bucks authority and tracks down leads…but humorously, it’s all practically handed to him by Robi in some of the laziest plot-developing ever; basically, Burnell visits Robi and mocks her reading habits, and this ultimately leads him to the cop-killing terrorists!

Robi, hotstuff member of the jet-set, is a big fan of the “spy thrillers” of Millard McKinna, which sound awful but regardless are huge sellers – left-wing diatribes narrated by a spy for hire, with simple plots, capitalist villains, and “America is rotten” themes. McKinna is the pseudonym of Keith Ross, a liberal college professor (redundant term, I know) who lives, wouldn’t you believe it, right here in the city, and is so famous students fight to be in his classes. He lives in a secluded, gated and guarded community called Picana, and Robi was recently at one of his parties, hence the latest signed book on her shelves which sets Burnell off.

But Robi says maybe McKinna’s gone too far, as at this party a group of people were talking about the cop killings and they were all laughing and excited, and Robi’s certain McKinna and his crew, including a big guy named Clacker and a nuts-looking gal named Margo, are somehow involved with the murders. Burnell decides to investigate the whole lot of them. We get another Crawford staple: the interrogation-torture, as Burnell captures and beats around a hapless punk named Berny who has taken up with the terrorists. But Burnell kind of pities the kid so this part doesn’t have the merciless brutality of similar scenes in Crawford’s oeuvre.

Unfortunately, McKinna doesn’t get much text time – he is as expected small and wimpy, and spreads his left-wing, anti-cop, “power to the people” invective from the safety of his heavily-guarded mansion. (Crawford understands that hpocrisy is always lost on these types – the book is certainly timely in that regard!) Rather, big brawler Clacker comes off as the main villain, though late in the game Crawford changes his mind and brings in psycho-babe Margo, who turns out to’ve pulled the shotgun trigger at a few of the massacres, so eager to kill cops that she’s willing to take out her own comrades if it means she’ll get a chance at killing Burnell.

The novel, which runs 160 pages, quickly builds toward the incident it opened on: a captured Burnell, naked and in chains, captive of Clacker and Margo, his “insides busted” from merciless beatdowns. His left ear in particular is cauliflowered beyond repair, and Clacker continues to beat on it, sending Burnell into shamelss crying, puking, and shitting fits. As Zwolf said, Crawford’s work is almost “scat-porn” in that someone’s always “evacuating” at some point in his novels. Then Margo comes in, shotgun at the ready and crazy eyes fixed on Burnell, and our hero tries to use their insane, drug-addled impulses against them.

There isn’t much action per se in The Cop-Killers; indeed, all of it’s in the final pages, which features as mentioned a chain to the eyeball, someone getting shotgunned in the arm, another person being forcibly OD’d, and another shotgun blast to the chest at point-blank range. But Crawford leaves too many threads dangling. McKinna never returns to the narrative, and we only learn via dialog that he and his comrades will eventually be killed by their own kind, thanks to the disinformation Burnell managed to plant in their terrorist network – and Burnell’s not going to do a damned thing to save any of them. In fact he displays his hardcore makeup in a memorable finale in which he basically gives the kiss of death to someone he trusted, someone he’s only just learned was part of the terrorist group.

Overall The Cop-Killers was a quick, mostly satisfactory read, but it just wasn’t any fun…and it only now occurs to me that this is true of all the Crawford books I’ve read. None of them have the fun, escapist nature I demand in my lurid pulp yarns. They’re brutal and sleazy, sure, but there’s just something too nasty about them. Or maybe it’s just the arbitrary backstory page-filling and sloppy plotting that sets me off. (Or maybe it’s just the disgusting cover?) But at least this time such stuff is toned down a bit, likely because this one’s a good 20-30 pages shorter than the others of his I’ve read – the lower Crawford’s word count, the better the novel.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Stryker #2: Cop-Kill


Stryker #2: Cop-Kill, by William Crawford
February, 1974  Pinnacle Books

As Marty McKee so succinctly put it, in this second volume of Stryker our titular ex-cop hero “busts some fuckers up.” William Crawford once again excels in sadism and hardcore violence along the lines of Gannon, but as ever lessens the impact with arbitrary digressions and character backstories. In many ways, Cop-Kill is almost a rewrite of Crawford’s earlier The Chinese Connection; the stories share many similarities.

It's around a year after the first volume, and Colin Stryker’s gotten lean and mean from riding horses and working all day on a farm or something. But he gets word that Sapper Kell, the killer who took out his wife and blinded and crippled his daughter – and humorously enough the daughter once again spends the entirety of the novel off-page, thus robbing any sort of dramatic impact – has himself been killed in prison. This upsets Stryker greatly, as he wanted Sapper to be raped every day in prison by “spade lifers.” Have I mentioned before that Crawford’s heroes are hard, mean bastards with little of the niceties of today?

So begins Stryker’s systematic search for whoever put the hit on Sapper, a search that entails the usual Crawford sadism and Crawford plot detours. Once again the dude appears unsure how to write a novel – no matter how minor a character introduced, we get elaborate background story about him or her, most of it ultimately having nothing whatsoever to do with the novel. As Marty also noted in his review, this sloppiness extends to plot construction – the character who pulled the hit on Sapper, Johnny Cool, is elaborately built up, only to be abruptly killed off-page, never even meeting Stryker. Meanwhile Stryker spends pages beating the shit out of the guy who killed Johnny; apparently it never occurred to Crawford to combine these two characters into one.

Stryker was once a decorated cop in New Mexico, but now finds that he is a “leper” when trying to talk to his fellow brothers in blue; cops go out of their way to avoid him. As mentioned before Crawford himself was a cop so he brings a lot of realism to these scenes. Stryker, who spends the majority of the text in Phoenix, keeps in frequent phone contact with his old partner Chino Bellon back in New Mexico. We also get arbitrary detours to other cop-world characters, like this page-filling bit about the FBI agent assigned to secretly monitor Stryker’s mom in case Stryker tries to contact her, given how Stryker breaks a bunch of laws in his gradual assault upon the mob and is soon wanted by the Feds.

Another missed opportunity is the character of Vic Antro, aka Vic Cave (no relation to Nick Cave, I assume), the Phoenix mobster who ordered the hit on Kell, and later the hit on Johnny Cool, ie Kell’s killer. He too is excessively built up only to be dispatched off-page, with Cave and Stryker never even meeting face-to-face. Rather, Stryker spends the majority of the novel tracking down, capturing, and torturing various Cave flunkies. But this isn’t “dark comedy” torture like in The Marksman. This is just plain dark, similar to Crawford’s other novels, in particular The Chinese Connection, with stuff like Stryker savagely stomping a guy and then nearly drowning him in a bathtub.

There’s a bit more action this time around, like an extended scene where Stryker takes out a car full of thugs who come after him – featuring a memorable hardcore bit where Stryker, knowing he’s being followed on a dark road, parks his car with the lights off in the middle of the road so that they ram right into it when they race around the blind curve. From these thugs Stryker gets some grenades and AR-15 assault rifles. These weapons are later used in an assault on a private runway, to take out Cave’s plane as it prepares for takeoff, but the mob boss isn’t on it.

Another added element this time is sex – Stryker gets laid, folks. This is courtesy Kitty, a hotbod teen(?) who was forced into prostitution by Antro’s thugs due to her heroin addiction or somesuch. I had a hard time understanding if she was still 17 or older now; Crawford isn’t very giving with the nitty-gritty details. It would appear so, as Kitty sleeps with the mobsters on demand due to incriminating photos she’s afraid will be turned over to her parents. Yet Crawford writes the character as if she’s in her 20s, with the maturity of an adult. Anyway she offers herself to Stryker after he comes through on his offer of giving her the photo negatives (which he got on one of his torture raids), so that she no longer has to worry about being blackmailed. “I know it’s been used and abused, but you’re welcome to what’s left,” she says, offering up her nude body. Stryker after a bit of uncertainty complies, leading to an off-page sex scene; Crawford, for all his sleaziness (Stryker for example has taken to calling his enemies “big cunt” this time around), always refrains from writing actual sexual material.

But otherwise the sleaze is on the level of Bronson: Blind Rage; the sick bastards Stryker is up against are ultra-creeps of the most deviant sort. In his vengeance-quest Styrker uncovers a sort of sexual slavery ring – complete with evidence of the women being tortured and mutilated as punishment – as well as a friggin’ baby-selling scheme, one that’s run by a vice cop at that. This would be Bowman, a big bad dude – “by far the toughest” man Stryker has ever fought – who is another of those minor characters who hijacks the narrative for several pages, given an overdone backstory of several pages. While Stryker is taking on this guy in a knockdown, dragout fight in a steam room – the same place where Stryker tossed the slave-ring runner onto burning rocks, leaving him there to die so that his sizzling corpse makes everyone puke – another Antro thug is on his way to New Mexico to kill Chino Bellon.

This elicits Stryker’s last run of vengeance; Crawford skillfully employs Stryker’s Scottish heritage, how his MaGregor clan was the very one ordered to be killed “by fire and sword” by the Queen. The finale features Stryker carrying out his vengeance by those very means: he sets a fire, traps his prey, and ends up decapitating him with a machete. It’s another grueling bit of darkviolence; Crawford should’ve garned a loyal following of readers who were into hardcore, no punches pulled violence, but it looks like he faded into obscurity, his final works turned out in a variety of pseudonyms for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. My assumption is he died in the late ‘70s, as there’s nothing by him I can find later than that.

The finale sees a burned-out Stryker heading to his mother’s place for some rest…apparently his daughter is there as well, though once again we’re only told about her. Stryker has taken out everyone behind the murder of his wife and friends, but has come upon the realization that perhaps he’s been put on earth to do this sort of thing – take out sick bastards. In particular he’s riled up by those photos of tortured and beaten women he found; he’s since discovered that many of the women were murdered. He’s certain there are other such sex-slavery rings out there, and by god he’s gonna smash ‘em. I’ll try to get to the next installment a lot sooner than I got to this one.

Monday, July 3, 2017

The Chinese Connection


The Chinese Connection, by William Crawford
September, 1973  Pinnacle Books

I was under the impression, due to a misleading comment on a Goodreads.com review, that this was a BCI crime paperback. But producer Lyle Kenyon Engel’s name is nowhere to be found in the book, which is copyright William Crawford himself; it was published around the time he was also writing the Stryker series for Pinnacle.* In fact one gets the impression that Pinnacle was looking to make Crawford the William W. Johnstone of his day; the first Stryker includes an ad for Crawford’s other novels for the imprint, and also he was given the job of turning in the infamous 16th volume of The Executioner.

I’d like to know more about William Crawford; all I know is that he was a cop of some sort, that he was friends with fellow Pinnacle Books scribe Mark Roberts (Roberts mentioned Crawford in The Penetrator #9 and dedicated The Penetrator #17 to him), that he clearly lived near the US-Mexico border, and that he did some novels for Lyle Kenyon Engel under various pseudonyms (including a few volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster which were never published). He also seems to have done all of his writing in the ‘70s. At least, I can’t find anything published by Crawford after 1977, which is the year The Death Connection came out (which he did for Engel under the name “Roger Brandt”). The latest book of his I can find is a Pinnacle reprint of this novel, The Chinese Connection, from 1979 (I’m unable to find the cover online). We do know from a comment Crawford’s stepson left on Zwolf’s hilarious review of Stryker #1 that Crawford is dead, so perhaps he passed away sometime in the late ‘70s.

Anyway, this book is not to be confused with the Bruce Lee film of the same title. It is very much in the vein of Stryker and does in fact live up to its cover proclamation of being “savage.” Of the three Crawfords I’ve read, this one by far is my favorite, with the caveat that, though Crawford once again turns in a tough novel with almost brutal, Gannon-esque violence, he constantly undermines himself with too many digressions –overlong background histories of one-off characters, too many endless and arbitrary cop-world details, too many page-filing lectures on the drug trade, government corruption, and what-have-you. To be sure, this sort of thing isn’t as egregious as it was in, say, The Rapist (another one Crawford wrote for Engel), but it does make the book a bit of a chore: The Chinese Connection runs to 223 pages of small, dense print, but with some savvy editing it could’ve been much snappier at the 180-page Pinnacle Books norm.

One recurring theme in Crawford’s work is that his hero will be a grizzled, older cop who, while not sporting the gym-culture physique of the genre norm, is still as tough as they come. Real salt of the earth types. His grizzled protagonists hate everything, particularly the young (not to mention Hollywood), and they resent the encroaching, emasculating societal changes that are being forced upon their profession, not to mention how the world of policing is being hamstrung by liberal lawyers and by new recruits just out of college with “fresh ideas.” Crawford protagonists are hard men, not handsome or humorous or even polite, with bony frames and sunken cheeks and flinty eyes – in other words, Steve Holland types.

Such is the case with the hero of this novel, Tom Belcher, a 20-year veteran of some narcotics agency. Folks, I had a helluva time figuring out what kind of a cop Belcher is…my best guess is he’s a US Marshall, as he keeps referring to his department as “the Service,” never “the agency” or “the Bureau.” For the latter, he certainly isn’t in the FBI as he’s constantly looking down on that agency. The DEA isn’t mentioned, nor is the ATF. He’s not a city or state cop, as his partner is killed within the first few pages and later Belcher refers to him as a “federal agent.” Otherwise I have no idea who exactly Belcher works for – not that it much matters, as he quickly goes rogue and begins his own trackdown of “the Cinese Connection,” which, by the way, is never referred to as such in the novel itelf. Nope, it’s “the Chink Connection,” friends – even referred to thusly in big and bold print on the back cover! 

Belcher is a stone-cold bastard, of the type who could probably even give Joe Ryker pause. When we meet him he’s on the Texas-Mexico border, waiting for an informant to come across into the US with a batch of heroin supposedly gotten from a mysterious Chinese supplier. Mostly though Belcher’s sick of his annoying new partner, a college grad punk kid. Belcher goes out of his way to insult and belittle him. When the truck with the drugs barrels through the border, dumping out the body of Belcher’s informant, a biker roars by, blasting a shotgun, and takes off his partner’s head. Belcher could give a shit; when his boss later tells him that the partner “Left a wife and two small children” behind, Belcher quips: “Don’t they always?”

Regardless, Belcher goes out for revenge; later he will even admit to himself that he could care less that the kid was killed, and isn’t avenging him per se, but rather is avenging the fact that someone killed a Federal officer and the higher-ups are more concerned about red tape than about finding the killer – not to mention finding all the heroin that just slipped across the border. Belcher is basically fired by his stupid chief, who insists that Belcher take a month’s vacation after this snafu; Belcher knows that, like many men his age, he’s being put out to pasture. So he decides to take the law into his own hands. He’ll find the killers of his partner, the heroin, and “the Chink Connection” too, all on his own – he needs a big collar like this, so as to regain favor in the agency.

Sounds like a lean and mean yarn, and it has the skeleton of one. But here Crawford begins his, uh, Crawfordisms; Belcher’s murdered informer was named Pacheo, and abruptly we’re taken into an extended flashback on how Belcher recruited the Mexican drugdealer, including egregious and arbitrary background on Pacheo, not to mention his blonde slut of a wife, Gloria – I’m talking incidental backgrounds on each that have nothing to do with the novel at hand but go on for pages and pages. Such nonsense will occur throughout The Chinese Connection, constantly stalling forward momentum. Anyway it’s through Pacheo that Belcher learned of the Chinese contact who claimed to have a vast source of heroin, and Belcher quickly deduces that it was Gloria Pacheo who likely set up her own husband to be killed – she’s a notorious whore and was sleeping with his comrades, among others.

Belcher breaks into Gloria’s home and ties up a has-been actor named Rick Rawlson who is living with her. More Crawfordisms ensue as Rawlson goes on for pages and pages about his sad-sack Hollywood career and how he’s mooching off of Gloria ‘cause he heard she’d come into a windfall. But when Gloria shows up the bad-assery comes back in full force. Friends, you remember that part in the almighty Bronson: Blind Rage where Bronson interrogated that gal and lit her pubic hair on fire? Belcher pulls the same schtick here – and it’s possible that the still-unknown “Philip Rawls” who wrote Blind Rage might’ve been inspired by The Chinese Connection. (Good Lord…could it have been William Crawford??? Nah….)

Stripping Gloria down and trussing her up (noting of course her big boobs – Crawford seemed to’ve had an obsession for “silicone tits” while writing this book, as practically every female character has massive mams due to implants), Belcher squirts lighter fluid on Gloria’s exposed privates when she refuses to answer his questions (this after he’s done the same to her hand and actually set it on fire). He threatens to get her where she “lives;” she’s a nympho, and if Belcher takes away that special part of her anatomy, what the hell is she going to do with herself? “If you don’t tell me, then I’m going to burn your goddamn snatch off,” he informs her. The gal breaks, the fluid is never lit, and Gloria and Rick Rawlson disappear from the narrative, making the reader wonder if Belcher did in fact kill them.

From here it’s to El Puerto, Texas, where Belcher has been put on the trail of Rajar Creasy, a foul-smelling biker of monstrous proportions who’s a “pukepot stone queer” to boot (Crawford’s books, by the way, are almost blueprints of a pre-PC worldview; there’s even a part later on where Belcher, and therefore Crawford, defends his right to use the words “chink” and “gook” and etc). Rajar operates out of a strip joint called the Sandbox, where he runs a whips-and-chains biz for other “stone queers.” He’s notoriously rancid, not having washed himself in decades, and he’s even more notorious for his sadism.

Not to fear – Belcher captures Rajar, putting his precious chopper on fire and then sapping him. He takes him out to the desert where he gives the bound Creasy a Gannon-esque beatdown. The novel is almost relentless in its brutalism; it’s only a shame that Crawford keeps hamstringing himself with the constant stallings and out-of-nowhere lectures on this or that. Creasy turns out to have been the biker who shotgunned Belcher’s partner, but Creasy was actually hired to kill Belcher, only he missed. He blabs a few more names for Belcher to track down; hating himself for his weakness, Belcher lets the biker live, and heads on down to Mexico, where he’s promptly captured by the crooked cops who work for heroin kingpin Umberto Garcia.

Baddass Belcher “wonder[s] how long it was until midnight,” as being tied up, stripped, beaten, and having his balls crushed by a bicycle lock is “the kind of thing that ruin[s] a man’s whole day.” Our hero endures more suffering than practically any other I can think of at the moment; we’re informed that his balls are so swollen afterwards that he can barely walk. He’s being tortured by a pair of Mexican cops, and when Belcher reveals that he too is a cop they’re immediately shamefaced. Garcia lied to them, making them think Belcher was just some American hustler or something. After a phone call to Belcher’s cop buddy Daol over in El Puerto, our hero limps to freedom, where he spends several days in the hospital.

Oh yeah – another recurring motif in Crawford’s work is that someone, somewhere in the narrative, is going to shit himself. It’s happened in each Crawford I’ve read, usually more than once. And the protagonist isn’t excluded from the rule; Belcher we’re informed shits and pisses himself here, and pukes as well. There are other characters who shit their pants during the course of The Chinese Connection, to the point where you wonder about Crawford’s obsession; as Zwolf so aptly stated in the above-linked review, it’s almost like “scat-porn.”

As mentioned Crawford and Mark Roberts apparently knew one another, and I wonder if they were fellow aviation freaks; anyone who has read Roberts’s The Penetrator installments knows how some of them make unexpected detours into what is basically aviation porn, with longwinded descriptions of the private planes hero Mark Hardin is piloting. Belcher hooks up with a friend of his – a writer who struck it big and lives in Arizona – and borrows his private plane (the guy is much too successful and famous for it to be a fictional analog of Mark Roberts, though). But yeah, our grizzled, old-fashioned veteran cop can also, uh, fly his own planes, and thus he takes himself into Mochis, Mexico.

Here Belcher digs up the corpse of Pacheo, his informat, and finds that it’s been “eviscerated.” Heroin was stashed in the empty cavities, which is now gone. Belcher is jumped in the cemetery and gets in another quick but brutal fight, killing one dude with a shovel blade to the face and another with his two-shot derringer. Belcher next picks up a local floozie named Chinita – small but big-boobed, of course – and Crawford doesn’t even provide us the details, just throws her into the book and tells us that Belcher’s screwed her off-page and is happy his equipment still works. For that matter, Crawford shows a curious reluctance to use the word “fuck;” twice in the narrative he writes it just as “f – ” as if self-bowdlerizing, but in the final pages he actually writes the word. It’s strange and off-putting…it’s like Crawford is fine with writing about “chinks” and “silicone tits” and threats of burning off “snatches,” not to mention guys “coming a quart” in their excitement, but “fuck” is where he draws the line!

More aerial fiction ensues as Belcher gets in a plane chase, realizing he’s come upon all the heroin and has been set up for a contrived bust. He’s chased after by none other than Umberto Garcia, who, for no other reason than “why the hell not?” also has Gloria Pacheo and Rick Rawlson in the plane with him. Belcher manages to make them crash, circles back and lands, and finds everyone dead but Umberto, who is dying. To continue with the savage theme of the book – not to mention the general misogyny of Crawford’s oeuvre – we’re informed that Gloria’s breasts have been lopped off in the crash, given how she was killed by the crushing force of the crashing plane due to an improperly secured seatbelt.

From the dying Umberto – Belcher gives him a pistol to off himself – our hero learns of the mysterious Chinaman, Ky Sao, who is operating out of Mazatlan. Crawford finally cuts out the fat – the stuff in Mochis was weighed down with inordinate material about Belcher hanging out with a group of hard-drinking pilots and also dodging a contrived setup in which heroin was stashed in his plane – and delivers a taut finale, as Belcher, armed with a carbine and explosives, scopes out Ky Sao’s gated villa and determines that his best bet is to corner him on his boat while he’s meeting his various underworld contacts. A brief shootout ensues in which Belcher captures “the Chink.”

The finale takes place in that gated villa, with Belcher shooting down Ky Sao’s guard dogs and some more of those Mongols. Crawford develops a last-minute reversal in which Belcher’s pal Daol turns out to be working with Ky Sao – or is he? This leads to the ‘70s-mandatory downbeat ending in which Belcher, who has gotten his vengeance and stopped the heroin pipeline at the cost of his freedom (he’s now on the FBI wanted list for all the murders he’s committed), gets in his plane and heads out of Mexico, not caring what happens to him.

So overall The Chinese Connection is pretty good, especially when it’s getting down and dirty and skipping the lectures and arbitrary backstories. When Crawford reins himself in he’s capable of delivering violent pulp fiction that hits all the ‘70s bases, and I enjoyed this one enough that it’s made me figure I should probably get back to his Stryker books.

*I was also under the impression that another Crawford paperback, The Assassin, credited to Paul Ross and published by Manor Books in 1974, was also a Lyle Kenyon Engel joint, but it isn’t; it’s just copyright Manor. But from Hawk’s Authors Pseudonyms we know it was by Crawford.

Monday, July 7, 2014

The Rapist


The Rapist, by Don Logan
October, 1975  Pocket Books

Jeez, here’s Don Logan with the feel-good book of the summer!! Seriously though, The Rapist is another of those lurid crime paperbacks copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, just like Manning Lee Stokes's Corporate Hooker, Inc. And, according to Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms III, “Don Logan” was none other than William Crawford.

Last year I read the first volume of Crawford’s Stryker series, which I found a little frustrating due to Crawford’s tendency to constantly stall forward momentum by doling out inconsequential backstories about every single character introduced or mentioned. He does the same thing throughout The Rapist, though not quite to the extent of Stryker #1. I wonder if Crawford was a cop, or a former cop, or maybe just a cop junkie or something, because once again he has turned out a cop novel that seems very much grounded in reality and research.

Also, like Stokes’s novel, The Rapist reads a lot like the ‘70s work of Herbert Kastle, in particular Cross-Country. It’s a dark, dark tale, about the titular character’s horrific and gruesome assaults upon strong-willed women in mid-‘70s New York City, and it pulls no punches. Suprisingly though, the novel never once trades in outright sleaze, and despite the lurid happenings it doesn’t comes across like a cheap work of exploitation. In fact there isn’t even a single sex scene, though Crawford does provide a few violent shooutouts.

The rapist of the title is a young, good-looking guy named Timothy Johnson (though Crawford at first only refers to him as “the Rapist” in the sections from his perspective). He’s tall, muscular, and very attractive to women. He’s also got tattoos all over his arms, and we eventually learn in a “boy how the times have changed” moment that tattoos are generally the sign of a criminal, though “there is no direct correllation between the two.” The Rapist opens the novel with one of his “hits,” stealing an attractive young woman off the streets, killing her instantly, and raping and mutilating her corpse in his windowless delivery van. 

Crawford never actually describes one of the Rapists’s attacks, but he does serve up the lurid details when the cops inspect the corpse he leaves behind. It’s so desecrated and defiled that even hardbitten vets run to the john to puke. However our two heroes manage to keep their gorge down, despite how revolted they are: Burrell Mackey, at 48 one of the older men on the force, but a mountain of muscle nonetheless, and Lee Cotton, a younger but still experienced cop who was a Green Beret in ‘Nam. Both men are detectives, with Mackey the lead, and Crawford serves up details about how crime fighting has much changed from when Mackey joined the force back in ’46, right after fighting in the war.

Another of Crawford’s annoying tendencies is referring to his characters by multiple names in the narrative. He does this in The Rapist, and it gets to be confusing at first, like for example how he refers to Mackey as “Mackey,” “Burrell,” and most confusingly (at first) “Burr.” It might sound like a minor thing, but it does cause for some disconnect when the reader’s trying to figure out who the author is referring to. Even more disconnect is caused by the arbitrary backstories that spring up in the text, usually so unnecessary as to be hilarious, like when Crawford mentions that a doctor helps out the precinct anonymously and then explains that he does so because he wouldn’t want his regular patients to know he is helping the cops. Just little things like this, like the Stryker installment I read, really halt the forward momentum for no good reason.

The cops are in an increasing panic as Johnson murders and ravages several more women, leaving mauled corpses in his wake. Instead of following on this story, Crawford instead gets in this long subplot where Mackey and Cotton begin hassling the well-known Johnson brothers, local criminals who have often had run-ins with the law. They check with them merely to see if they can get more info about this rapist – at this point, the fact that his last name is also “Johnson” is not known by the police; it’s all just lazy, coincidental plotting. But at any rate it leads to this very long gunfight in which a few of the brothers end up dead. 

Meanwhile the rapist gets clawed up by one of his victims, and later during his getaway he runs into cops, attacking them. When Mackey and Cotton see the guy at the next morning’s lineup of all people arrested the previous day, they instantly suspect him, due to his tattoos. At this point he’s given his name as “Johnsen,” but our protagonists can’t get over how his facial features are so like those other Johnson brothers. At great length it develops that “Timmy Johnson” killed his dad when he was a kid and almost killed his stepdad, and thus was placed in a mental ward, the majority of his brothers disowning him and insisting he change his last name. So in other words, he really is another of those criminal Johnson brothers the author so lazily introduced.

The rapist goes free after the lineup – only later do the cops learn who he is – and continues about his campaign. But The Rapist is also like Corporate Hooker, Inc. in that it starts off being one thing but ends up being another. When an A.P.B. is put out on the rapist, he spots a motorcycle cop following him, and runs him over. But with his dying breath the cop gets off a few shots, each of them hitting the rapist. Half-dead, he holes up in a building, eventually resorting to one of his brothers for help.

Now the novel becomes just another “fugitive on the run” tale, and this goes on for well over a hundred pages, with Crawford adding to the page count with anecdotes about what it’s like to be a cop. There’s also lots of time-filler stuff with Richard Rivers, yet another of those Geraldo Rivera-type journalists who always pop up in these pulp crime novels, as an eternal thorn in authority’s side; he starts up CAPJAL, or “Capture Johnson Alive,” an uber-liberal initiative to ensure Timothy Johnson is not killed via the usual “police brutality.” All of this ultimately leads nowhere, though we do get the memorable image of Rivers shitting himself when he finally gets a chance to meet Johnson – Crawford, as shown in Stryker #1, has a special fondness for having his characters shit themselves.

It all builds up to a gradual climax in which Johnson holes up in the apartment of his first victim in the novel, taking captive the girl’s roommate, Tawny. After lots of (undescribed) degradation of the poor girl, as well as traded rants with the cops, it culminates with Mackey and Cotton attacking the apartment, with Cotton in these final pages going into “Vietnam mode” and wanting to kick some shit. It all leads to a downbeat finale, with one of the two cops dead, but it sort of lacks punch because, despite the amount of time spent with these guys, it’s not like we got to know either of them.

I think Crawford is a good writer, with dialog and incidental details that seem cut from real-life, but I just don’t think he’s a very good novelist. Which is to say, he has the details and the dialog, but when it comes to putting it all together into a cogent whole, he sort of fails. The novel comes off more like lots of arbitrary cop stories interspersed with periodic flashes of sadism, before building up to a hasty and anticlimactic finale. In other words The Rapist is a lot like the later lurid crime novel Hellfire.