Showing posts with label Assassin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Assassin. Show all posts

Monday, November 7, 2022

New Book Listed At Tocsin Press

 
FYI a new book’s been listed at Tocsin Press – The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch, by one Bruno Scarpetta. Fans of The Sharpshooter will revel in this action and sex-packed tale in which The Triggerman, Johnny LaRock, blasts his way through 1970s New York in his never-ending quest to shed Mafia blood. 

Curiously, “The Triggerman” was the name of the pseudo-Sharpshooter in Len Levinson’s The Last Buffoon. Even more curiously, Len’s Triggerman character was named Johnny Ripelli, and we’re informed in Brains For Brunch that Johnny LaRock’s real name is…Johnny Ripelli. Very curious indeed! 

(Just to clarify, Brains For Brunch was not written by Len Levinson!!) 

So if you like The SharpshooterThe Marksman, or even Bronson: Blind Rage, I think you’ll really dig The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch

And let’s not forget the other books currently available at Tocsin Press… 


The Undertaker #1: Death Transition, one of the best books I read this year – and with its funeral parlor shenanigans, the perfect post-Halloween reading. 


The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder, which was another of the best books I read this year – I mean if you get the first one you should get this one, too! 


The most sleazy and grimy book at Tocsin (so far!), Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers is also great Halloween-time reading, what with its rapist-freak zombies… 


And hey, if you like thigh-boot wearing Nazi She-Devil vixens, and you like John Eagle Expeditor, then you’ll certainly enjoy John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth

And like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s more to come…

Monday, August 5, 2019

The Assassin #3: Boston Bust-Out


The Assassin #3: Boston Bust-Out, by Peter McCurtin
December, 1973  Dell Books

The Assassin comes to a close with a final chapter penned by Peter McCurtin himself. At this point there doesn’t seem to be any effort to make this a “class” crime novel a la the first volume was; Boston Bust-Out is just as rough and wild as the books McCurtin, Russell Smith, and others churned out for The Marksman and The Sharpshooter.                             

Even the schtick of Robert “The Assassin” Briganti making tape recordings and sending them to the FBI has been dropped. Briganti at this point really is Magellan; the climax of the novel even has him working out marksman trajectories, so “Marksman” was certainly a better handle for the character than “The Assassin.” But as I mentioned before, several volumes of The Marksman had already been published before this original series even hit the shelves; it seems clear that Belmont-Tower and Leisure got their product out more quickly than Dell Books (as evidenced by the plentiful typos and grammatical errors in those B-T and Leisure publications!).

I’ll tell you one thing McCurtin whittled down when he took Briganti over to Belmont Tower and changed his name to Magellan: the references to Briganti’s “dead son.” While The Marksman never had an origin story (because it was contained in the first Assassin volume), the authors who worked on the series would occasionally remind us that Magellan’s family had been killed by the Mafia. It seems to me, looking back on the blur of the volumes I’ve read, that most often it was Magellan’s wife they referred to, with his young son only seldom mentioned. I would imagine this is because a murdered child is a helluva lot more impacting than a murdered wife, comparatively speaking, and in a way adds too much “emotional content” to what is intended to be just a cheap revenge thriller series.

At least that’s my interpretation. And McCurtin would seem to agree, as in this final volume Briganti often thinks of his murdered son and these parts have more emotional resonance than anything else in the Assassin/Marksman/Sharpshooter mythos. But also Briganti reflects that he’s been able to get a handle on his wife’s murder, given that she was in her early 30s when she was killed and had been married, “borne a son,” etc. An abruptly-ended life to be sure, but at least a mostly full life. The same could not be said for Brigainti’s son. And for this reason, we learn, Briganti is often so “tortured” by memories of his son that he has to drink himself to slumber.

This is heavy stuff, and wisely was cut from the series when Briganti became Magellan (and occasionally “Johnny Rock”). In those grungier Belmont and Leisure books Magellan/Rock was more of a human killing machine, impersonal as a robot – something else McCurtin dwells on here, seemingly paving the way for the work of Russell Smith, who delivered a completely psychotic Magellan. Boston Bust-Out occasionally dwells on Briganti’s lack of emotions, how in the past year since his family was murdered he himself has killed so many mobsters he no longer keeps count, how he can so easily go into a killing frenzy with no emotional fallout afterward. He even bluntly – and truthfully – tells a beautiful young “Mafia whore” that he’ll kill her in cold blood and sleep soundly that night.

Another reason these morbid musings were likely cut was because Dell required a bigger word count, or so I’m suspecting; as with the previous two volumes, Boston Bust-Out comes in at an unwieldy 192 pages, compared to the shorter BT and Leisure publications (which had bigger print as well). But despite the extra emotional baggage, this final installment really does come off more like one of those Marksman books, as there’s no concern with realism and Briganti is occasionally so unhinged in his quest to quash “Mafia pigs” that he might as well just be referred to as “Magellan” in the text. He even takes the opportunity to tie up and drug that “Mafia whore,” just like Magellan does in so many of the Russell Smith Marksman novels.

Okay, time to rein in the review a little. We meet Briganti with no pickup from the previous volume; he’s just barrelling through Boston when some state cops come after him. Briganti reflects that he’s yet to kill a cop but likely will if he’s pushed to it. Regardless he avoids them, ditches his car (and his arsenal), and catches a bus to Maine. He spends a few months on the farm of old Lem Perkins as a hired hand. Lem’s an even better shot than Briganti and shows him a thing or two. Then one day while shooting at squirrels Lem himself is blown away – by a pair of Mafia snipers who have somehow trailed Briganti up here. Our hero dispatches them quickly, then vows to return to Boston to wipe out the only person who could’ve sent the killers: Don Franco Toriello. 

So begins Briganti’s war of attrition. One thing I found interesting is this time Briganti has to rebuild his arsenal, which comes pretty easily – he just kills a few mobsters and picks up their dropped guns. His main weapons this time are a pair of Magnum revolvers, a .44 and a .357. He also gets a machine pistol of German manufacture (don’t believe the model is specified). McCurtin is more liberal with the gore than I recall previous volumes being; we get copious detail of bullet-riddled bodies leaking blood, guts, and brains. And Briganti’s pure hardcore this time around; he hates “Mafia pigs” with such vehemence that he’s almost granted superpowers; during a hit on a Toriello whorehouse Briganti gets so pissed when two torpedos blow away an innocent girl that Briganti steps out of cover and calmly walks forward, guns raised – and neither mobster is able to hit him, their aim apparently thrown off by his heavy vibes.

Briganti’s here at the whorehouse thanks to a tip from lovely “Mafia whore” Louisa Fioretti, a redheaded beauty who is Toriello’s kept woman. She comes into the text via an assault Briganti stages on an apartment complex in a running battle that’s very well done, complete with Briganti swinging Tarzan style between buildings on a television antenna cord. Louisa is perhaps the most memorable character here, a cool beauty who trades banter with Briganti despite the corpses strewn about the place. But I’d advise against getting a copy of this book for your feminist pals, because Louisa is raked over the coals, and in a major way.

First Briganti casually tells her he’ll kill her without a second thought, all while calling her a whore and whatnot. Then he ends up giving in to her wiles, screwing her in somewhat-explicit fashion. After this he drugs her to sleep, ties her up, and later squeezes her and hits her when she won’t give him the info he wants. He even threatens to throw scalding coffee in her face, which he says will permanently disfigure her beauty. Then he lets her escape, intending to use her to set up some in-fighting in Toriello’s camp. When she reunites with Toriello things get even more extreme. The mob boss is certain she “fucked Briganti,” that she wasn’t even raped by him but wanted it. Toriello strips her and starts slapping her around in front of his underlings, all while she keeps pleading that she loves him. Then Toriello blows her away with a .38 before revealing to a stooge that he too loved her!

This and the material about Briganti’s murdered family is really the only stuff that sets Boston Bust-Out apart from the average Marksman installment, in that this material has an extra dimension of depth. In particular when Briganti, hiding out, goes to a John Wayne movie and reflects how his son was such a fan of John Wayne. McCurtin drops some unexpected emotion into this scene and it’s very refreshing after the various brutalisms Briganti has perpetrated in the previous pages, like his merciless setup of Louisa. Here we are reminded that the people he’s up against actually murder children and thus do not deserve any mercy, even the “otherwise innocent” women who sleep with the murderous scumbags.

And as mentioned the finale is fitting because it points the way to the ensuing Marksman novels, if for no other reason than, for one, the term “marksman” is actually employed, but also more importantly because Briganti goes to elaborate lengths to plot out sniper trajectories. Even down to doing math equations in the mud with his finger; he lures Toriello and a few others into the mountains of Maine, painstakingly ensuring he’ll be able to shoot accurately with his rifle. This part though goes on a little too long, with Briganti climbing the mountain, the others struggling to follow, and Briganti picking them off one by one.

And that’s it for The Assassin, so far as the original series goes, but as mentioned (way too many times now) this volume, with its focus on violence, sadism, and cold-blooded brutality, already has more in common with Briganti’s further adventures over at Belmont-Tower.

Monday, September 11, 2017

The Assassin #2: New Orleans Holocaust


The Assassin #2: New Orleans Holocaust, by Peter McCurtin
November, 1973  Dell Books

The Assassin, that ur-text of The Marksman and The Sharpshooter, continues with a second volume which Lynn Munroe theorizes is a collaboration between Peter McCurtin and an author named George Harmon Smith. But perhaps what is most notable about New Orleans Holocaust is that it marks the origin of the infamous “hippie disguise” that Philip Magellan wears in so many volumes of The Marksman, particularly those written by Russell Smith.

It’s now over a year after the first volume (despite this book being published in the same month) and hero Robert Briganti has become a legend in his own time; something whittled out of the Marksman books is how famous Briganti/Magellan has become due to his mob-wasting activities. We learn that psychiatrists even appear on late-night talk shows, offering their own analyses of Briganti, and newspapers offer him “free legal counsel” if he’ll just turn himself in. Another element dropped is Briganti’s constant stream of audio tapes which he sends to the FBI, which themselves only serve to further the legend about him.

A big point of difference between The Assassin and the two series that followed after it is the attempt at making Briganti seem human – at least when compared to Philip Magellan or Johnny Rock. In fact if one were to argue that the Marksman novels (and those Sharpshooters which started life as Marksmans) really are the continuing story of Briganti, only with his name changed to Magellan, the validation could be found in this book, as here Briganti a few times finds himself thinking of his happy past, with his wife and child, only to quickly cut off any emotion and shut out the past. As readers of the later books know, Magellan is practically a robot, his flashbacks to his pre-Mafia war life few and far between, and one could argue that he has become the perfect mob-killing machine that Briganti aspires to be in this origin trilogy.

Not that Briganti isn’t perfect enough already. He pulls off a series of superhuman feats in New Orleans Holocaust, like when he scales down the side of a building while people gawk up in awe at him from far below. This is explained by Briganti’s circus past, where he was taught such tricks. Another hallmark of the later Marksman books is that, while Briganti denies himself memories of his wife and child, he has no problem seeking out people he knew prior to his married life. In New Orleans Holocaust Briganti briefly meets up with Anne Brady, daughter of Wild Bill Brady, the man who taught Briganti to shoot; Wild Bill himself appears in The Marksman #7 – which ironically was published one month after this book. I wonder if anyone back then collected these two series from different publishers and noted the bizarre overlap.

Anne, who makes her living as a topless dancer named Starfire LeFevre, comes on strong to Briganti when he meets her in New Orleans; she claims to have carried a torch for him since she was a kid. But Briganti’s just as much a sexless robot as Magellan and tells the gal to shove off. She promptly disappears from the narrative. McCurtin is more concerned with action. The novel immediately displays its laissez-faire approach to reality in the opening pages; Briganti takes out two Mafia chase cars which are pursuing him in the Everglades with a handy bazooka, then goes on his merry way. His target is Benito Bonasera, in Sarasota – who is in reality Benito Coraldi, brother of Joe Coraldi, the Mafioso who was responsible for the death of Briganti’s family, and who met his own death in the first volume.

Briganti is a helluva lot more unhinged than fellow mob-buster Mack Bolan. Within the first few pages he’s screaming about “Mafia pigs” and shooting down unarmed and injured men. He is in fact “sick with killing,” as a “Mafia whore” informs him, for which she’s slapped around. But Coraldi’s in New Orleans for a big Mafia summit, so off Briganti goes to bust ‘em up. There he seeks out old friend Sam Rubi, in whose shooting gallery young “Bobby” Briganti learned how to handle a gun; Rubi’s now an old pimp, and one of his gals is sleeping with Mafioso for intel. Humorously, absolutely nothing is made of this, as if the author(s) completely forget about it, though it seems clear the intent is for Briganti to meet up with this woman, who doesn’t even appear.

Rather as mentioned the focus is on action, action, action. Posthaste Briganti’s hiring a chopper and having himself dropped off on the roof of a hotel where some mobsters have made their HQ; he guns some down, realizes he’s gotten in over his head, scales down the wall like Spider-Man, and makes his escape. Before this he’s somehow used an everday portable radio as a car bomb to take out a bunch of mobsters at the airport. He doesn’t have the “artillery case” that Magellan would use in the Russell Smith books, but his main weapons here are that bazooka, a grenade launcher, and a Browning Hi-Power, which is gushed about so much as the greatest handgun in history that you wonder why Magellan started using a Beretta in the Smith books.

In addition to Sam Rubi, Briganti’s comrade this time is old retired police captain Donofrio, who was sent to prison years ago on trumped-up charges. He’s an old cop type, very much in the William Crawford mold – indeed there is a definite Crawford vibe to this novel – and he helps Briganti blow punks away with his magnum revolver. The two get involved in this endless action scene midway through; a certain character has been killed by two Mafia hitmen, one of whose father runs a voodoo church in New Orleans(!). Calling himself “The White Zombie” (after “an old Bella[sp] Lugosi movie;” as usual with a McCurtin novels, classic movie references are rife), this guy, whose real name is Connolly, ends up siccing his armed followers on the two interlopers.

Unlike his later incarnation of Magellan, Briganti often gets in tough scrapes which he fears he won’t survive. So this shootout just goes on and on, with Briganti ducking and weaving heavy fire as he beats a retreat. The same is true when he takes on one of the hitmen: Connolly’s son, a gay bodybuilder who hangs out in a gay joint. There are all kinds of slurs here that would quickly trigger the sensitive types of today. These two get in a knockdown, dragout fight, heavy with the Crawfordisms, particularly when it comes to kicking an opponent to death. Whereas superhuman Magellan would take out this guy with no fuss, Briganti sweats and struggles and strains – not that he’s much winded afterward. And he’s just as brutal, killing people he’s promised not to. Another miss here – and perhaps indication that two authors wrote the book with little collaboration – is that Briganti doesn’t even bother telling Connolly Jr that Connolly Sr is dead.

Another humorous miss is when Briganti goes back to the home of Sam Rubi’s equally-elderly sister, where Briganti’s been staying, and finds a sleazy PI there trying to threaten the old woman in her bed for info on where Briganti is. Briganti wastes him, and Sam’s sister dies in fright. Yet old Sam doesn’t even seem to care, and in the very next scene is joking around with Briganti! Sam does help out in the climax, though – that is, after Briganti’s staged an anticlimactic (and brief) assault on the Mafia summit, which is being held in a newly-opened convention center; he tosses a few grenades in there and that’s that.

But Benny Coraldi’s still alive, given that he’s been on a boat all this time, refusing to go to the summit meeting. He’s imprisoned a bunch of hookers out there, and later we learn he tossed ‘em all overboard and ran ‘em down for sport. Sam pilots a trawler and Briganti, once again hefting that damn bazooka, metes out another dose of justice to the Coraldi family. And that’s it – we’re presented with an overlong “transcript” of Briganti’s latest audio missive to the FBI that basically goes over everything we just read. Briganti figures that it’s only a matter of time before “the best hitmen in the world” are hired to kill him, apparently setting up the events of the next volume – or perhaps a Marksman or Sharpshooter I haven’t yet read.

Overall New Orleans Holocaust is passable entertainment, filled with “Mafia pigs” getting gunned down, but Briganti isn’t as interesting as Magellan, despite being the same character. Magellan’s just more crazy and unpredictable, but admittedly I’m mostly thinking of the Russell Smith version. In McCurtin’s installments, Magellan’s basically the same as Briganti, only without the “regular audio transcripts to the FBI” bit. The writing is also good, all things considered, very spare and economical, but not as seriously presented as in the first volume – which in itself might be evidence of Lynn Munroe’s speculation, that this one was possibly ghostwritten (or just co-written) by George Harmon Smith.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

The Assassin #1: Manhattan Massacre


The Assassin #1: Manhattan Massacre, by Peter McCurtin
November, 1973  Dell Books

Here it is, the veritable ur-text of the Marksman series. Peter McCurtin wrote the three-volume Assassin series for Dell Books while he was writing (and editing) the Marksman series for Belmont Tower. The protagonists of these two series, despite their different names, were actually one and the same.

As I mentioned in my review of The Marksman #6, Marksman hero Philip Magellan is the same person as Assassin hero Robert Briganti. There are even installments of The Marksman that play out on elements introduced in this first volume of The Assassin, for example #7: Slaughterhouse, another McCurtin novel, which has Magellan working with the son of carnival owner Wild Bill Brady – a character mentioned in Manhattan Massacre as the man who taught young Briganti how to shoot.

But one thing missing in all those Marksman installments is Magellan’s origin story. That’s because it’s here, in the first volume of The Assassin. Interestingly, Manahattan Massacre was published after several of those Marksman novels, which would appear to confirm my theory that Belmont Tower got their product out a hell of a lot faster than the more “respectable” publishers. At any rate McCurtin pulled the same thing Nelson DeMille did with his Ryker series, where he changed his character’s name to Keller and moved over to Manor Books.  (The irony here being that DeMille likely did this because he got pissed at McCurtin, his editor, who used DeMille’s name for Ryker #3, which was really by Len Levinson.)

Anyway, Manhattan Massacre opens with the transcript of a senate committee hearing in which various government reps, including members of the FBI and CIA, discuss the recent events of September, 1972. Robert Briganti is the focus of their discussion; born in 1935, growing up in New Orleans, Briganti became a master sharpshooter in the Wild Bill Brady carnival, going on to become a salesman of military surplus, particularly in South America. In this capacity he did odd jobs for the CIA. Then ten years ago Briganti quit this life, moved to Connecticut, and opened a sporting goods store there.

Then one night Crazy Joe Coraldi, a good-looking and well-known Mafioso (who was jailed as a teen on “two convictions of sodomy,” by the way), showed up in Briganti’s store and demanded that Briganti get him some heavy-duty weaponry. Briganti told him to go to hell. Then when Briganti’s wife of ten years, Nancy, picked him up after work, their 9 year-old son Michael along for the ride, a car with New York tags sped by and opened fire on them. Nancy and Michael died on the scene. Briganti recuperated in the hospital and slipped out from under his police guard. Then he declared war on Coraldi.

I was under the incorrect assumption that The Assassin books were written in first-person. This is only true for the opening chapter, in which the senate committee plays one of the reel-to-reel tapes Briganti has sent them. In an interesting angle McCurtin didn’t keep when he changed Briganti to Magellan, Briganti records his thoughts onto audio tape and mails the tapes off to the FBI and to ABC. While this schtick didn’t make the transition to the Marksman books, it does at least explain why Magellan is so well-known to the general public, as Briganti’s tapes make for a media sensation.

McCurtin’s writing here is also different than in the Marksman books, and also another indication of the difference in quality between a Belmont Tower book and a Dell book. Honestly, some of McCurtin’s Marksman novels are awful, like Slaughterhouse. But he takes his time here, turning in a book as well-written as his first installment for the similar (and also McCurtin-created and edited) Sharpshooter series, The Killing Machine. Actually, McCurtin’s style here seems very influenced by the Parker books, with terse, no-fat description and dialog.

Another line of demarcation between Belmont Tower and Dell is page length. Manhattan Massacre is much too long for its own good, coming in at 192 pages of small print; much longer than McCurtin’s Marksman novels. This has the unfortunate effect that, while being better written, the Assassin novels come off as more slow moving than the Marksman books, with McCurtin quite clearly struggling to meet his unwieldy word count. This is mostly accomplished through Briganti’s cynical ruminations. 

Briganti is also like Parker in how he’s so cold and methodical. Rather than grieving and raging over the loss of his family, Briganti instead finds himself in this subzero sort of calm. He can’t even get worked up about it, and fakes wild anger only when trying to psych out various mobsters. But he’s more vicious than Parker ever would be, killing people even when he promises them he won’t. He figures he’ll even kill a cop if one gets in his way, and when he sneaks back into his old military surplus company to steal various weapons, he could give a shit that his actions will have dire repercussions for his old work buddies.

McCurtin as always delivers good action scenes. They aren’t very bloody – McCurtin doesn’t much play up the gore in any of his books I’ve read – but they’re very tense. Briganti’s first real score is Fallaci, Coraldi’s top guard who runs a porno theater in Brooklyn. Briganti ends up beating him nearly to death with his bare hands, the one and only time he lets his anger break his otherwise placid surface. He finishes the guy off with a few kicks to the temple, which is pretty brutal. Next he takes out the guys who made the hit on his family, Al and Rio, twin brothers who supposedly look like Frank “The Riddler” Gorshin!!

McCurtin delivers a bit of sex as well, with Briganti realizing he needs an outlet other than violence. The lucky lady turns out to be a bar whore, and Briganti goes back to her place for a little vaguely-described shenanigans. This leads to another action scene, where some hitmen try to get the drop on Briganti. But they’re just “punks,” hired goons who are no match for our merciless hero. And Brigani is smart, too; realizing that no matter how many fleabag hotels he hides in the cops or Mafia will eventually find him, he rents a furnished office in a ratty building on 907 Broadway. He knows no one would ever think to look for him in a business office.

Coraldi’s in hiding somewhere in New York, due to his war with rival mob boss Carlo Gambelli. Briganti gets in touch with the latter, who sends Briganti in the direction of a Harlem preacher named Joshua Moon, who now goes by the name Brother Mwalimu. Figuring to hell with coincidence, McCurtin has it that Briganti and Moon know each other, as Moon was also in the Wild Bill Brady carnival and indeed Briganti saved his ass from being lynched, back in 1948. But now Moon preaches to the Black Power movement, and McCurtin again page-fills with a looong sermon courtesy “Brother Mwalimu,” who tells us that Columbus was black, Abe Lincoln was a Jew who hated blacks, and John Wilkes Booth was not only a hero, but black, too!

Despite the coincedental nature of it all, the Briganti/Moon relationship is interesting and well handled, with Moon now a coke fiend who wonders why Briganti saved him all those years ago. Moon informs Briganti that Joe Coraldi is hiding in a closed police precinct in Harlem, but Briganti discovers later that it’s a trap – Carlo Gambelli’s plan is for Briganti to kill Coraldi, and then for Moon’s Black Power comrades to take out Briganti. Now, armed with a grenade launcher, a Stoner 63 machine gun, and an Uzi, Briganti ventures into Harlem to even the score.

The climactic firefight is very similar to what one would read in The Marksman, with Briganti dishing out most of the death via grenade and then mopping up what few survivors remain with his machine guns. Even Coraldi’s demise is perfunctory, but this goes well with Briganti’s now-robotic persona; he realizes he’s just going through the motions, and has now become a veritable human Terminator. Actually this also jibes well with the whole “Briganti = Magellan” deal, as Briganti thinks to himself a few times that “Robert Briganti” died with his family.

McCurtin only wrote two more Assassin novels, though obviously the Marksman books went on for much longer. I’m curious what caused the move over to Belmont Tower. Either Dell took too long to publish McCurtin’s manuscripts or maybe he just got a better deal at BT, though I doubt it; they were apparently notorious for never paying their authors. Or maybe Dell just gave McCurtin his walking papers, as that publisher really didn’t get too involved with the men’s adventure genre, and indeed The Assassin is the only men’s adventure series from Dell that I can think of at the moment. 

Anyway, I really enjoyed Manhattan Massacre, even though it was a bit too sluggish at times. But McCurtin’s polished-but-pulpish prose was almost masterful in how it captured the right vibe, and like I said the book came off as more entertaining and memorable than any the McCurtin Marksman novels I’ve read yet.