Showing posts with label BCI Crime Paperbacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BCI Crime Paperbacks. Show all posts

Thursday, January 7, 2021

The Dynamite Freaks


The Dynamite Freaks, by Donald Ryan
No month stated, 1972

This is another of the short-lived “Now Books For Today’s Readers” series, book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel’s vain attempt at catering to the counterculture market of the day. Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms credits William Crawford for this book, but I’m thinking Pat Hawk got bad info (maybe it was a sting operation!). While another of the Now BooksThe Cop-Killers, was clearly written by Crawford, this one doesn’t bear his trace at all. If I had to guess from Engel’s “stable” at the time, I’d suspect George Snyder or Jon Messmann, but even then I’m not sure. Perhaps Hawks was just under the assumption Crawford wrote all four of the Now Books

But all those Crawford staples we know and love – grizzled cop protagonist, arbitrary backstories, characters shitting themselves – are missing in The Dynamite Freaks. Crawford as we know was a cop himself, and also of a different generation than the protagonists of this book; whoever wrote it was clearly a little more familiar with the “Youth Movement” of the day, which is why I lean toward Snyder – he was, after all, the guy Engel was paying at the time to write another counterculture cash-in, Operation Hang Ten. But again Snyder’s typically surly narrative tone isn’t glaringly evident here. What is evident is an almost pseudo-Burt Hirschfeld narrative style, a la Jon Messmann. All of which is to say I don’t really know, other than that William Crawford didn’t write it. 

Well anyway, just a few short years ago a book like The Dynamite Freaks, with its plot about left-wing hippie terrorists and their riots and bombings, would’ve seemed dated. But given how our recent “summer of love” inexplicably turned violent, the book now seems quite timely. It’s also another sad reminder of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just as most of Antifa (and even a lot of BLM) seems to be composed of suburban white kids from wealthy families, kids who have no personal stake in the plight of the downtrodden people they claim to be “protesting” for, so too are the hippie terrorists of The Dynamite Freaks. I saw at least three videos on social media this past summer of black people yelling at all the white Antifa and “BLM” protesters who claimed to be there to “represent them,” telling them they weren’t even from the area and didn’t know shit. This sort of thing is prefigured in the novel as well – there’s a part where a Martin Luther King-type civil rights leader basically tells the white hippie terrorists to get the hell out. 

I’m very interested in this project of Engel’s; it seems he was trying to tap in on topical youth issues of the day, yet the books aren’t packaged that way…it seems more like The Now Books For Today’s Readers were intended for older readers who wondered what the hell was going on with those crazy kids. Both this and The Cop-Killers have a very conservative tone; even though The Dynamite Freaks focuses on younger characters more than Crawford’s book did, the youth still come off like violence-prone savages who lash out against an establishment they don’t understand, let alone appreciate. What I mean to say is, judging from the two novels in this “series” I’ve read, these books are nowhere in the league of true “movement” books like Trashing; they’ve clearly been written with an older or at least more conservative audience in mind – any hippie head who picked up The Dynamite Freaks would no doubt consider the whole thing reactionary. 

Our main protagonist is a case in point: young Carol Warring, 19 and beautiful, about to graduate as the valedictorian of her college. She’s innocent, naïve, and a virgin to boot – clearly not the type of protagonist you’d expect in a novel titled The Dynamite Freaks. But we know the direction she’s headed, as the novel opens with a creepy chapter in which a girl runs screaming from a downtown tenement building that’s just exploded; the firemen arrive on the scene and exclaim stuff like “Look at them boobs!” as they gawk at the “full young breasts” of the naked female corpses strewn about. (The clothing, incidentally, was apparently blown off by the dynamite which destroyed the building.) Curiously Ryan will not return to this opening chapter, so that we readers must infer who is who among the victims – and the mystery of who the girl was who ran away isn’t played out at all like I suspected it might be. 

From there we jump back just a few weeks and meet Carol as she’s about to drop a big surprise on the audience at the graduation ceremony: not only is Carol wearing a bikini beneath her gown, but she’s also planted an explosive on a famous statue on campus grounds. All this occurs in Minnesota, in a subburb of Minneapolis, a “straight” town that Carol now rails against. Predictably she comes from wealth; her dad is a successful businessman, one who is just as successful with the ladies…and Carol herself has a thing for him (a twisted subtext that Ryan admirably doesn’t dwell on too much). But this past summer, we learn, Carol spent some time in Europe, where she met expat American Kurt Hoeffer, a long-haired hippie her age who radicalized Carol into the various socialist movements of the day. Carol is now prepared to use the knowledge she’s gained as part of her degree in Chemistry to strike various blows for democracy and the downtrodden peoples and etc. 

Carol with her innocence is our guide into the violent world of the hairy freaks; the novel in this regard is a Morality Tale in that Carol will gradually change from a peace-loving virgin to a bomb-planting radical given to gang-bangery, not to mention the occasional injection of heroin. But it should be mentioned that all this is done to her against her will! No, Carol doesn’t want “anyone to get hurt” by her bombs, and also she’s peer-pressured into the gang-bang scene, veritably forced by Kurt to lie there while a whole bunch of hairy freak hippie guys form a line to have their way with her, one at a time. As for the heroin, that’s just introduced to let Carol “calm down” after it turns out one of her bombs actually, you know, kill someone. So as you can see, Carol isn’t only incredibly naïve, she’s also incredibly dumb at times, and there were many parts in the book where I was laughing when I shouldn’t have been. 

Kurt Hoeffer is the character who makes me wonder if George Snyder wrote this; he’s an arrogant, loud-mouthed jerk, and seems to have walked out of one of the Operation Hang Ten books. After Carol blows up the statue she rushes from the graduation ceremony and into Kurt’s waiting VW bus, which we’re informed is brightly colored and decorated with the expected leftist signs – “Legalize abortion now,” and etc. Later Kurt will hand Carol a joint and then force his hairy body onto hers, ultimately taking her virginity; a masterfully-relayed scene in which Carol can’t get over how Kurt is nothing like the men she’s often fantasized about, clean-cut men who smell of cologne and aftershave…men like her father. Ryan leaves this sex scene (and all others) off-page; there’s even a conservative tone to the narrative, with “breasts” only occasionally mentioned (a male readership was clearly in mind) and curse words only infrequently appearing. Again, it’s nothing like Trashing, a book that was written by someone involved with the whole “resist!” movement. 

Carol really is dumb, and it’s hard to feel any sympathy for her. We’re often reminded that she got into this whole thing due to her desire to help the “poor black kids” of the cities, the “subjugated American Indians,” and also of course “the Mexicans.” (?!) Yet at the same time we’re to believe she morphs into the figurehead of the “Bombers of America” movement, the new SDS-type hippie terrorist faction she starts with Kurt. Carol is desperate to belong, you see, to have a family – and she believes she’s found one with Kurt’s inner circle. This itself is comical, as one of these people is a “big-breasted” girl named Vicki, who constantly mocks Carol and calls her “Rich Bitch,” taunting her that she doesn’t belong, that she isn’t a true revolutionary, etc. Carol also soon gets a glimpse of how little these people care about each other, stupidly wondering if she herself would so easily be forgotten were she to get arrested or die for the cause. 

We get more of an understanding of who the novel is intended for via the introduction of Bob Arnett (we’ll just assume he’s Will’s father), a ‘Nam vet in his early 20s who attended college with Carol and likes her, but wanted to wait until he’d graduated and gotten a job and such before he asked her out(!?). He approaches Carol’s distraught parents and offers to find Carol for them, given that she’s run away with a bunch of hippie creeps and all – a plot that mirrors an actual Burt Hirschfeld novel, Father Pig. Arnett then is the true hero of the tale, a short-haired conservative type who is there to serve as the intermediary for the (presumably) older readership; he may be of the hippie generation, but he’s not part of it. Actually there’s a minor part with Arnett that makes me think “Donald Ryan” might’ve been an older writer, after all; Carol later accuses Arnett that he “never made love” to her, and this same phrase is used by Arnett himself earlier in the book when he wonders why he didn’t immediately “make love to Carol” when he first met her. While this phrase initially seemed jolting, I recalled that in earlier years “make love” had the same connotation as “romance.” I’ve heard this phrase in movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s and you can sure bet they didn’t mean “have sex” in them! Joseph Breen and his censors would’ve cut that out in a hot second. So in other words, earlier in the 20th Century Carol’s “you never made love to me, not even once” line to Arnett would’ve meant that Arnett never asked her out or otherwise tried to romance her or whatnot. But I think for a young person writing in 1972, “make love” would have the same meaning as it would today – hardcore shenanigans of the adult variety. So, to end an overlong paragraph, this could be more indication that Ryan was indeed of an earlier generation. 

Anyway, Arnett proves to be incompetent. We learn late in the novel that not only is he a ‘Nam vet, he was also a Green Beret. This sets the expectation for some Rambo-esque violence, Arnett wading into hippie territory and bashing hairy heads, but all the dude does is ignorantly walk around and get himself knocked out. In fact there’s no real action in the book, other than the bombs Carol plants, and as mentioned she always ensures no one gets hurt by phoning in bomb threats to the target locations. This doesn’t work out very well in a gripping sequence in which Carol plants a bomb at an Army recruiting office in Chicago but is unable to get anyone on the line until seconds before the blast. A young officer is caught in the explosion; Carol sees his body flying like a ragdoll and is haunted by the image. Later she’ll be informed the kid’s dead, and this will as mentioned lead her into the beginnings of heroin addiction. 

But Carol’s route to bomb-planter is a gradual one; her first big moment is at a march in Minneapolis, Kurt and comrades protesting an urban development that threatens the tenement buildings occupied by lower-income blacks. Reverend Mills, the MLK-type mentioned above, resents the presence of Kurt and all the other hippies, given the bad press they bring – remember, this is back in the days when actual “peaceful protests” were attacked by the media…those sadly-gone days in which you would never see a so-called reporter standing in front of a burning building and claiming he was in the middle of a “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.” Back then the media was the Establishment…actually today the media is still the Establishment, it’s just of a different political orientation. Reverend Mills also resents that Kurt and his fellow hippies don’t really give a damn about the blacks in those buildings, and are just using the protests as an excuse to wreak havoc and cause trouble. No doubt more indication of the reactionary tone of the novel, but no doubt pretty much true as well. 

At this Minneapolis march Carol realizes that protests don’t cause anything to happen, so she takes matters into her hands and blows up one of the buildings that have been put up in the cleared area. This makes her a hero of the movement, not that Vicki still doesn’t taunt her as “Rich Bitch.” From there things progress to the Bombers of America initiative, with Carol designing bombs and Kurt’s people planting them in various locations. Locations which, Carol eventually learns, are being supplied by an infamous conservative politician who is running on a Law and Order campaign. He not only gives Kurt the locations, but money as well, and Carol can’t understand why they’re taking money from the enemy. Kurt, who becomes increasingly deranged and “evil” as the short novel races for its conclusion, claims that “cash has no politics” and that he’s taken money from conservatives to liberals, all of it used to blow up stuff – and also, he happily reveals, he doesn’t even give a shit about the various causes he’s rioting for, it just makes for good publicity. Especially if a child’s killed in one of the blasts, as one is in a nail bomb Kurt places in a bank lobby. 

This is the final straw for Carol…I mean the forced gang-bang and heroin addiction were one thing, but this is another! She once again decides to take matters into her own hands, which leads us to the events that started the book. Meanwhile Carol’s 15 year-old sister, Anne, has also caught the revolutionary bug, planting a bomb at her high school. (Mr. Warring puts his head in his hands and wonders where he went wrong with his two daughters…!) She then runs away from home, finds Bob Arnett in Greenwich Village, and after coming on to him (he turns her down) demands that he take her to Carol, whom Arnett has finally found. The book ends with Anne announcing she’ll continue Carol’s bomb-making work, asking Arnett to join her…a ridiculous finale that has no setup, as it makes no sense. Arnett of course turns her down and walks off into the sunset, making for an anticlimactic ending to what is, at only 160 pages, a very rushed book. 

Overall The Dynamite Freaks is marginally entertaining, particularly in how it predicts the situation of today; it was very strange reading this book, given current events. Actually it was kind of depressing, because all this shit is coming back up again. I read the book last week and wrote the majority of the review then, but today as I am finishing it up and setting it to post on the blog, protesters from the right are storming the Capitol Building.  I have to say, I find it incredibly ironic that they’re being denounced as domestic terrorists by the very same pundits who defended the Antifa and BLM riots this past summer. (Of course these are the same pundits who spent the past four years telling us Russia interfered with the 2016 election, but now say there’s absolutely zero evidence of any fraud in the 2020 election...but such hypocrisy is expected in what currently passes for the United States.)  So I guess the main difference is that Donald Ryan was writing in a more rational, more sane world – the country wasn’t on the brink of another civil war due to irreconcilable ideological differences.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Killer At Large


Killer At Large, by Don Bannon
July, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Back when I was collecting these BCI Crime Paperbacks I tried to find out who had written this one, but no info was available; “Don Bannon” wasn’t listed anywhere, even in Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms. So I assumed it was written by William Crawford, given the similarity to Crawford’s BCI crime paperback The Rapist. Now, finally having read Killer At Large, I can say with complete certainty that it is the work of Manning Lee Stokes. It’s his style, with solid prose but padded plotting, ten-dollar words, recurring phrases and situations from previous novels, and even the trademark in-joke character names (“Doctor Engel,” ie book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, and “Superintendent Stanton,” ie Stokes’s pseudonym “Ken Stanton” on The Aquanauts). 

Trading on the same sleazy vibe as the other BCI crime paperbacks, this one’s about a serial rapist named Billy Starret who breaks out of prison and goes on the hunt for one of his previous victims, a policewoman named Marion McManus. She collared Starret five years ago, getting raped and her back broken in the process (it happened in the subway, and she fell down some stairs while trying to escape). Starret vowed revenge at the trial. Meanwhile, in the undisclosed city in which all this occurs (we learn at least it isn’t New York or Los Angeles), Marion heads up a newly-formed Sex Crimes Unit that’s intended to get a handle on the city’s increasing number of rape cases.

The main protagonist is 27 year-old Sgt-Detective Rick Preston of Vice, fairly new to the force but rising quickly in the ranks. We’re informed he’s a hunk of a man with tons of women at his disposal, and at novel’s beginning he’s wondering if he should give it to the clearly-willing new policewoman in his precinct, Priscilla Foxx. A pretty blonde with a small-but-shapely figure (we’re often reminded), Priscilla is the one who tells Rick about the new SCU team and also that she’s heard on the grapevine that Rick is going to be co-running it, which is news to our hero. She also begs him to transfer her to the unit, as she was raped as a teen and wants to help crack down on the rapists out there.

Preston brings along his current partner, grizzled Charles Kuttner, but argues with his captain when he’s ordered to also bring along Tom Varantz. New to this particular division, Varantz has a bad rep and is seen as a problem; he was basically kicked off his previous unit. Preston’s captain wants to get rid of Varantz by sending him along with Preston to the SCU. In addition there’s a towering, muscular policewoman named Cordellia who might be in love with little Priscilla Foxx, and who berates Preston for putting such a “green” female cop in the unit. And commanding the SCU is beautiful but icy cold Marion McManus, of the “stiff manner and even stiffer back.” Oh, and Marion’s partner that night she was raped five years ago was none other than…Tom Varantz, who sent her out to waltz along the subway as rape bait and then went off to get drunk, not providing the cover he’d promised her.

Yes friends, this motley crew of misfits is intended to reign in the rape epidemic; one gets the impression they’d spend most of their time fighting each other. SCU HQ is an old fire station, with the men on the first floor and the women up on second, with even the pole still there for them to slide downstairs. Surprisingly though, Stokes does very little with the actual SCU setup, as the novel quickly becomes more concerned with two intertwined elments: Rick Preston falling in love with Marion McManus upon first glimpse of her, and Billy Starret’s escape from prison and the gauntlet formed to protect Marion from him. There’s also an arbitrary subplot about Rick going out on a limb to help an old friend of his, a black high school teacher named Ray Foster who has been accused by a slutty white trash student of grabbing her boobs. This stuff is so incidental to anything that you wonder why Stokes didn’t fill those particular pages with more-appropriate material like, you know, the SCU handling rape cases. But then that’s Stokes for you. I was more impressed that this time he actually resolved this particular arbitrary subplot, even tying it into the main plot.

Killer At Large features all those typesetting tricks Stokes employed in his latter novels: bulletins, various memorandums, teletype twixes, transcripts. Some of it, as usual, is as egregious as can get, like when Rick reads a pages-consuming report on the objectives of the Sex Crimes Unit. But anyway I mention this here because the novel opens with a lengthy digression on Billy Starret’s past, all courtesy the prison psychiatrist who brefriends him. But again surprisingly Stokes actually works this stuff into the narrative, much later on, in particular the nugget of information that Starret has a security uniform stashed in his parents’ home. It by this novel means that Starret will be able to elude the police dragnet out looking for him; we’re informed many times that the average person develops a blindness to a man in uniform, automatically seeing him as a cop.

We find out Starret has escaped in the first quarter of the book, and initially I was surprised because it seemed as if Stokes left the event off page. “That’s not the Manning Lee Stokes I know,” I thought to myself. Sure enough, the next chapter reverted to Starret’s perspective and spent 31 whopping pages detailing his escape, step by step. Long story short, Starret makes a box kite and flies it off the prison in the middle of a blizzard, almost killing himself in the process. He kills a guard and later rapes and kills a woman whose house he breaks into, seeking refuge from the blizzard.

I always get the impression Stokes was chomping at the bit to get sleazy, back when he was writing in the ‘40s and ‘50s (like in The Lady Lost Her Head); here he goes Full-Bore Sleaze, because the unfortunate woman happens to be a hotstuff horny housewife whose husband is away for work, so she gets drunk, dresses up in garter belt and stockings, and screws herself with a cucumber in explicit detail…and Starret happens to come upon her house, sees the light inside through a window, and starts watching her. Stokes keeps the rape-murder off page, however, but word gets to the SCU and they know it’s the work of Starret.

Stokes doesn’t get lost in the details of police beauracracy, yet at the same time this isn’t an action-packed roller coaster like Crooked Cop. In fact, Rick doesn’t even pull out his gun until the final pages. We get a few brief summaries of some rape cases the SCU handles, but for the most part the focus is on Rick’s sudden love for Marion, a love he keeps to himself. When word gets out that Starret has escaped and Rick learns she was raped by him five years ago, he pulls strings to be put in charge of the case. At this point the subplot about Rick’s old friend, Ray Foster and the white trash girl who has accused him, sort of falls by the wayside. Here Rick also learns, again via Kuttner, that Varantz was Marion’s partner the night she was raped – and meanwhile Kuttner’s found out why Varantz is so hated by fellow cops. He’s a coward, as Kuttner found out first-hand during an off-page collaring of an armed rapist.

As with practically every other Stokes novel I’ve read, I realized over halfway through Killer At Large that hardly anything had happened in the narrative, yet regardless I was sufficiently caught up in it. I get the impression Stokes put a bit more of himself in this one. He certainly doles out some memorable lines: “Now let’s go see if we can find the character who likes to cornhole little boys,” “…a guy can’t chase freelance cunt all his life,” and this jawdropper: “So what’s it going to be, Lisa? Drop the charges and forget the whole thing? Or let your parents find out you suck cocks in a junkyard?” Special mention must also be made of this line, which is one of the greatest I’ve ever encountered, both silly and profound, both stupid and cool: “He was now less than a minute from his future.”

Things all come together during the climactic search of the aforementioned junkyard, where Stokes resolves both the Ray Foster and Tom Varantz subplots. The former via the deus ex machina discovery that white trash “victim” Lisa is such a frequent visitor to the junkyard, sucking off various guys, that the proprietor has started charging the guys who come see her; this elicits the unforgettable line above, as Rick successfully blackmails her into dropping the charges against his friend Ray. However Stokes leaves it a mystery whether Ray really did grab her, as Lisa sticks to her story despite being outed as a cheap whore. As for the Varantz subplot, Rick takes the opportunity to beat him up and tells him he’ll beat him up every day until Varantz quits the force!

Stokes dwells in more uber-sleaze in a later chapter which sees a member of the SCU making a heroic sacrifice, after which Starret’s uniform is ruined. We barrel right through the finale, with Rick and Marion racing to bring down Starret before he can rape Marion’s sister as a proxy for Marion herself, and to do it rogue before the rest of the force finds out this is what he plans to do. In other words they both want to kill him, not arrest him. However the climax is a bit too harried, and I would’ve preferred a slower payoff on Starret’s comeuppance.

This was an enjoyable one, better than some of the other BCI Crime Paperbacks I’ve read and certainly one of Stokes’s better novels. Here’s hoping he wrote some more of these for Engel – I still haven’t been able to figure out the authorship of all of them, so some of them might turn out to be more Stokes yarns.

Monday, December 17, 2018

The Chinatown Connection


The Chinatown Connection, by Owen Park
February, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Of all the BCI crime paperbacks I’ve yet read, this one comes closest to being the first installment of a men’s adventure series that never was. “Producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel likely tried to pass it off as such, as The Chinatown Connection is unlike his other standalone crime novels of the day; this one is more along the lines of Dark Angel, with a bit of Mace thrown in for good measure, and leaves the possibility open for more adventures. Either the readers or Pinnacle didn’t bite, though, so the series never happened. But at least Pinnacle mainstay George Bush (H. or Dubya??) gave it a typically cool cover. 

Speaking of Dark Angel, I wonder if James D. Lawrence was behind this one; my only other guess from Engel’s stable of writers at this time would be Nat Freedland and Bill Amidon, who wrote Chopper Cop #3 for him. If I had to go out on a limb I’d guess it was the latter two, given the similarity of setting (San Francisco) and the general vibe of the book. Also, to get a bit lowbrow from the get-go, I think it might be Freedland and Amidon due to the use of the word “pussy,” which to my recollection I’ve only seen in one other 1970s men’s adventure novel – Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert. There is also the focus on making young kung fu-fighting Eurasian hero Tommy Lee hip and “mod,” which reminds me of the authors’s similar attempts at making Chopper Cop Terry Bunker a hip mod cat.

As mentioned our hero is named Tommy Lee; he’s “barely thirty,” the son of a Chinese father and Russian mother who Bruce Lee-style is American by birth even though he grew up in Hong Kong. Tommy has extensive intelligence world experience, drafted while still a teen into serving in ‘Nam; now he’s a successful private investigator who runs a global company called East-West Investigations, with branch offices all over the world and an army of investigators in his employ. While he is as expected a master of martial arts, he’s also prone to carrying a pistol with him and actually gets in more gunfights than fistfights. While Tommy identifies as Chinese – his mother is rarely mentioned, and he seems to have no interest in his Western heritage – the author(s) are at pains to let us know he’s a hip modern young Chinese, one who drives a white Jaguar XKE and wears mod fashions. His main EWI office, in a SanFran high rise, is decorated with “old Fillmore rock posters.” 

When we meet him Tommy’s in the process of beating the shit out of a couple Chinese punks on a dark San Francisco street. Tommy’s been hired as a guard to ward off this recent crop of violent young Chinese thugs; gradually we’ll learn they are members of the Thunder and Lightning gang, a new wave Chinese tong looking to corner the heroin market in Chinatown. Tommy gets wind of it when he learns his new employers – wealthy financier Bartlett Delmonico and his sexy daughter Lisa – are pulling a fast one on him. Delmonico is actualy a Mafia bigwig and he’s looking to crush the competition. And also Lisa’s actually his wife, not that this prevents her from engaging Tommy in frequent sexually-explicit sequences.

As with the third Chopper Cop, there seems to be two authors here: one who handles the intricacies of plotting and one who just wants to get down to the hardcore screwing. Lisa meets Tommy in his office, hiring him to find out who these Chinese toughs are who are threatening her “father’s” business; she and Tommy are in bed within hours of meeting, our author serving up the first of several such graphic scenes. How graphic, you may ask?

[Lisa] threw herself into sex like a berserk Venus, yet it was clear that her piledriving vaginal churnings were the result of a consciously willed plunge into erotic thrills, not a desire that had swept over her uncontrollably.

Or how about…

Tommy bent down and went into the classic sixty-nine position, thrusting his tongue deeply and actively to see if that was the best way to get her off. 

It certainly was, this time. Her muff throbbed up in his face and arched high as he cupped her globed buns from behind. Quickly she drew him into completion and swallowed the discharge. This seemed to be her final signal to shudder brokenly over the orgasm line herself.

And those are just two excerpts from similar scenes throughout the novel; all of them feature such memorably bizarre phrases. Lisa is Tommy’s sole conquest in The Chinatown Connection, with their casual bangs dutifully described every several pages; Tommy will go to Delmonico’s place, get some info, then rush off to a room with Lisa for “documents” or some other pretense. Otherwise there’s no main squeeze for Tommy this time, which I found surprising, though we do learn early on that he has a casual thing going with his sexy cousin, who wears tight Rolling Stones t-shirts and works as his secretary. While the two never break the taboo and have sex, they still provoke each other with racy dialog. Now that I think of it, this is the only other female character in the novel, and she only appears in the opening.

At 183 pages of small, dense print, The Chinatown Connection is a bit overwritten. The author does a capable job of keeping it moving, with frequent scenes of sex or violence, plus a little bit of sleuthing as Tommy tries to figure out who is behind Thunder and Lightning. But there’s just too much fat, in particular the background material on Chinatown tongs or the inner workings of the “Oriental” world. One thing I was glad not to see was a profusion of overly-detailed kung-fu fights, a la Mace. Tommy usually so outskills his opponents that he makes short work of them with a kick or two; his only real martial arts battle is with Hatchet Wang, a notorious axe-wielding thug who sports a silver nose due to an old injury. This fight goes on for quite a while, only for Hatchet Wang to be rendered an almost perfunctory sendoff in the climax.

Upon outing Delmonico as a Mafioso, Tommy is ready to quit, but Delmonico threatens to kill random Chinatown residents every few days until Tommy complies and finds out who is running Thunder and Lightning. Tommy brings in the tongs, resulting in a stalemate between the two forces – the tongs will prevent the Mafia scum from murdering innocents, but the tongs don’t want the T&L thugs around, themselves. So Tommy ends up doing the job, but sort of working with both forces. There is a fair bit of shuffling around, with the Mafia stuff more interesting than the tongs stuff, mostly because the Mafia stuff usually entails sleazy sex with Lisa Delmonico.

There is a bit of a pulp vibe in that Tommy has a host of toys at his disposal, from an armed and armored communications van that’s disguised as a delivery truck to a fancy underwater sled he uses in a climactic scuba sequence (actually this is the first of two or three climaxes – the book sort of doesn’t know when to end). He has all kinds of weapons stashed in safe places in his apartment and office, and can get a sportscar delivered to him on a moment’s notice from one of his army of employees. Even more on the pulp vibe is the late revelation that Tommy is also a master of disguise, and with a few cosmetic tricks can make himself look completely different. We see this in effect in a somewhat-arbitrary part where he stakes out a dingy bar in the hopes of encountering one of the few known Thunder and Lightning members, Tommy posing as a greasy-haired punk just off the boat. 

Action is capabaly handled if a little bloodless. Tommy blows away a couple goons, but mostly beats people senseless with his kung-fu skills. But we get a varied selection of action, from car chases to underwater demolition to protracted martial arts combat. We don’t get much of an idea of what makes Tommy tick, but again this is par for the course so far as the men’s adventure genre goes, and again my suspicion is The Chinatown Connection was conceived as the first installment of a series that never was. I’d love to know more about it, especially who wrote it, but as is typical with Engel’s BCI, it’s shrouded in mystery.

As for Tommy Lee, he went on to other things; word is he eventually became the drummer in an ‘80s hard rock band.

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 19, 2017

Crooked Cop


Crooked Cop, by Bob Parker
No month stated, 1973  Manor Books

Here we have another BCI crime paperback courtesy book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel and boy, is this one friggin’ fantastic – a lurid, sleazy, sex-filled yarn featuring one stone-cold bastard for a protagonist. And as with The Strangler, I’m fairly certain this one was the work of Paul Eiden; while Crooked Cop, unlike The Strangler, is filled with action and sex, it still has the same quality writing, strong characterization, and, most tellingly, that “widely separated breasts” line which Eiden uses in each of his novels.

The cover is a bit misleading, as it makes you think the titular cop is a uniformed policeman. Rather, “hero” Bill Fitzjohn is a plainclothes detective with the NYPD, at 30 the youngest detective on the force. Fitzjohn is almost a protagonist in search of his own men’s adventure series. More accurately, he’s basically a Nietzschean Superman – a towering mass of muscle and cunning guile, who looks down on his fellow mortals (particularly women), makes no excuses for his corrupt nature, and has arrogance to spare. He’s so obsessed with sex that he has especially developed his lower back and quad muscles to give him an extra “boost” in the sack, if you will; indeed, to the point that he is “a formidable sexual gladiator.”

The main plot has to do with Fitzjohn launching a one-man war against a Mafia family for having the gall to try to sell heroin on the streets of New York – heroin is the one thing Fitzjohn won’t abide. Really though the majority of the novel is given over to Fitzjohn’s taming of a veritable shrew: the “top madam” of New York, a smokin’ hot blonde German babe who is not only the top madam but the youngest one to boot; Fitzjohn has dreamed since adolescence of banging the number one whore in the world, and if this babe is the best in New York, then she’s the best there is period.

But whereas The Strangler was a studied, probing sort of police procedural, Crooked Cop is more along the lines of a drive-in exploitation movie. It moves quickly and doesn’t waste time with arbitrary “cop world” stuff. To be sure, Eiden again displays his knowledge of the NYPD (and New York itself), dropping police details almost casually, but while The Strangler was almost a true crime yarn with its bird’s eye view of real-world police detecting, Crooked Cop just uses this material to provide the backdrop for Bill Fitzjohn’s sex-and-violence filled life.

Anyway, Fitzjohn is in the NYPD’s anti-vice unit which is responsible for all the illicit gambling profits in the city; we’re informed this department is “traditionally corrupt” and that many cops spend their careers hoping for an assignment to it. Fitzjohn’s been with the department for a while, starting off as a medal-winning plaintclothes detective before getting this assignment, where he lives off “clean graft;” ie, Fitzjohn is happy to take any of the syndicate’s money, as long as it isn’t from drugs in general and heroin in particular. He has no actual grudge against heroin; he just hates it because he “needs something to hate.”

He has a posh penthouse in Manhattan with a Porsche and a Mustang in a private garage, as well as a hundred thousand or so in the bank, all of it under various cover names; his “real” home is a place in Queens which he hasn’t been to in years. He carries a .357 Magnum and, in addition to his physique (courtesy an “obsession” with weight-lifting he’s had since adolescence), he runs 11 miles a day. (Even after an all-night tussle with the latest one-night stand!) He also has no problem with snorting the occasional line of coke. His ego is only matched by his arrogance; Fitzjohn makes Denzell Washington’s character in Training Day look like Mr. Rogers.

The novel opens with Fitzjohn’s bad-assery in full effect, as he waltzes into the domain of one of the Patriarco brothers, ie the main Mafia family his department takes graft from. He kicks the shit out of a few thugs, breaking one’s knees and literally kicking another in the ass. He proceeds to beat up the Patriaco brother in residence. Fitzjohn just got wind of a heroin deal the capo brothers were planning behind his back – Fitzjohn only allows them to do their usual gambling and other ventures due to that clean graft they give him and his fellow department cops. Heroin is a big no-no, and Fitzjohn doesn’t give second chances. This sets off the war between Fitzjohn and the Patriarcos; he tells them he’s kicking them “out of the rackets,” but instead they go into hiding and plot his death.

Soon after this, though, Eiden gets to the real focus of the novel – Fitzjohn’s sexual adventures. After a night of bar-hopping he picks up a sexy brunette in “a turquoise shantung pant suit” (the novel is filled with such ‘70s touches, by the way) and takes her back to his penthouse for some Eiden-typical explicit sex. But we also here see Fitzjohn’s assholery: when the gal (whose name Fitzjohn doesn’t even learn until the next morning) implores him to take her, he inspects her, uh, “portal,” deems that she is not fully aroused, and berates her for not really being “ready” yet! He then goes on a tirade about how women fake being horny in order to please their men, with the ultimate effect that the women then have subpar sex and eventually turn to lesbianism. (This same argument was made by the titular character in The Strangler; more indication that this book is by the same author.)

But Fitzjohn is a regular Nick Carter – a demigod in action and in bed. He works the gal up good and proper and then has her really begging for it. And, naturally, he’s the first guy to ever make her orgasm, but next morning he treates her with disdain and practically kicks her out of his apartment. This brunette does not appear again; rather, the focus of Fitzjohn’s sexual powers is Hildegarde, a sexy blonde German babe Fitzjohn spots on the streets of Manhattan that very day – he sees her in the distance, recognizes her from someone having pointed her out to him the other year, runs over to her, and says “Hello, whore!” by way of introduction!

Hildegarde’s description is further evidence that Crooked Cop is the work of Paul Eiden: “The breasts under her striped jersey dress were so full and widely separated that their outer curves hid part of her upper arms.” As mentioned before, Eiden has used a variation of this phrase in all of his books, so I’m certain now that it was his veritable calling card. Fitzjohn knows of Hildegarde, that she’s the “top madam” in New York, and it’s been his dream since childhood to bang the world’s number one whore – as he tells Hildegarde later, he’d rather have her than a few virgins. Their banter is humorous and outrageous – when Fitzjohn tells Hildegarde, who is from Germany, that she doesn’t have much of an accent, she retorts that she speaks seven languages. “But can you fuck?” Asks Fitzjohn. “Just try me,” she replies.

And boy does he ever! There are a handful of graphic sex scenes between Fitzjohn and Hildegarde, and in each we get a glimpse of what a bastard Fitzjohn is. First, when Hildegarde refuses to kiss him during their initial boff, Fitzjohn kicks her right between her nude buttocks, flipping her over on the bed (something John Eagle also did, by the way, in the Eiden-written John Eagle Expeditor #13: Operation Weatherkill), then ties her down, gets out a heavy belt, and whips her mercilessly! Of course, this only serves to make her super-aroused. Gradually – and I do mean gradually, as Eiden wants us to know what kind of a bastard we’re dealing with for a protagonist – we learn that Fitzjohn’s doing all this as an “experiment,” to see if he can make a woman out of Hildegarde…as he tells his partner, D’Amato, the only way to get to a whore’s heart is to treat her like shit, as all whores suffer from self-hatred, even if it’s subconcious, and the only way to get their respect is to play to that. Or as Eiden later puts it, Fitzjohn treats Hildegarde in a “hard-nosed pimp manner.”

He only gets more degrading from there: “Roll your Dutch [sic] ass out of bed and make me something to eat,” he orders her next morning. All this occurs in Hildegarde’s multi-suite apartment, which, Xaviera Hollander style, is actually a cathouse. Here Hildegarde runs her company, and a lordly Fitzjohn moves in, bossing her around, demanding that she pay him a hundred bucks a day for his services! He also promises to beat the shit out of her if she turns any tricks; she’s his “john,” and he won’t share her with any other men. As I say, Bill Fitzjohn is such a stone-cold bastard that you can’t help but laugh throughout Crooked Cop. “You stink of whore sweat,” he later tells her – then lovingly gives her a bath. I do say, a very strange romance ensues, with Fitzjohn almost growing to love Hildegarde, whom he routinely refers to as “bitch.”

Fitzjohn’s day job has him looking into various vice-related crimes. One of them leads to the novel’s second action scene; following leads on a heisted whiskey truck, Fitzjohn and D’Amato get in a shootout, Fitzjohn blowing the heister away with his .357. But as ever, Eiden’s heroes dole out clean, non-messy kills – pretty damn hard when you’re hitting people with a Magnum slug, I’d wager. But the Patriarco business increasingly takes center stage, especially when two men who not only resemble Fitzjohn and D’Amato but also happen to be seated at the same table the two men just dined at are gunned down in an obvious mob shooting. Despite past history of “racket guys” not killing cops, it would appear the Patriarco brothers are looking to take out our hero.

It gets more real when Fitzjohn’s almost hit by a drive-by shooting out at his seldom-visited place in Queens; he fires back and, invigorated by the action, gives chase on foot. He ends up blowing away all three would-be killers in another shootout. He notches another kill when he takes out a crook involved with a jewelry heist – that is, after Fitzjohn’s partaken of the dude’s cocaine stash, which gives him a “cold, clear mind.” Meanwhile the Patriarcos have “gone to the mattresses” (Eiden proving he’s read The Godfather); Fitzjohn gets leads on various family soldiers, including a memorable visit to an old flame who is now married to a minor Patriarco enforcer – Fitzjohn tells her he’ll be back sometime to enjoy more of her “champion head!”

While Fitzjohn, who started the whole war, treats everything as if it were a fun time, his partner D’Amato becomes more unglued. Married, overweight, saving up all his graft for his family, D’Amato wants to take out the Patriarcos before it’s too late. Thus he is the one who pushes Fitzjohn to abduct the first Patriarco soldier they find; they take him to an abandoned warehouse, where D’Amato urges a reluctant Fitzjohn to electrocute the bastard for intelligence. (Surprisingly, they let the guy live – Fitzjohn even congratulating him on how tough he is!) Unfortunately the climax is a bit rushed; Fitzjohn finally tracks down the Patriarcos and their consigliere in a house in Hackensack and, armed with a Remington shotgun he’s illegally modified to automatic, he blows them all away – I was hoping for more of an action-packed finale.

Rather, the brunt of the finale is given over to the Fitzjohn-Hildegarde relationship. Earlier Fitzjohn has told her that he doesn’t “handle prossy cases,” ie prostitutes; further, he tells her it’s only a matter of time before her cathouse is busted. This happens – while Fitzjohn’s lounging in the foyer. A few of his department colleagues come in with various gals, pretending to be johns, and Fitzjohn knows it’s a bust. While Hildegarde pleads with him to do something, Fitzjohn merely repeats his “no prossy cases” line and takes his leave.

If anything Eiden is a master of avoiding sap. He builds up a thread with Fitzjohn thinking more and more about Hildegarde, how she’s gotten to him more than any other woman; even after the climactic shootout with the Patriarcos, a wounded Fitzjohn sits bleeding in his car thinking about Hildegarde. But when he goes to see her at the courthouse later that morning, he basically just tells her she got what was coming to her, and turns a deaf ear to the fact that, without her green card, she’s surely going to be deported back to Germany. “Goodbye, darling,” says Fitzjohn, and that’s that – both for the relationship and for the novel. As I say, it’s pretty great how Eiden just takes all the maudlin glurge you were expecting and basically kicks it in the crotch.

All told, I loved Crooked Cop; it was one of the best standalone crime thrillers I’ve read, and it would’ve made for a great drive-in flick (only one actor could’ve played Fitzjohn, for my money: William Smith!). Eiden does drop the ball here and there, though, likely indication that this was a quickly turned-out contractual work: for one, D’Amato just disappears from the narrative, and Eiden doesn’t bother to follow up on an eleventh hour subplot that the Feds are cracking down on Fitzjohn’s department – his boss, Orlowski, has promised Fitzjohn that he’s “putting in his papers” the next morning to avoid any legal indictments, but we get no resolution on this.

But this is just a minor complaint. Otherwise I had a blast reading this one and I highly recommend it. Here’s hoping Eiden wrote some more of these crime paperbacks for Lyle Kenyon Engel – at the very least, it has me looking forward to reading the two volumes of Mafia: Operation he turned in for Engel as “Don Romano.”

Monday, June 5, 2017

The Strangler


The Strangler, by David Black
No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

Yet another of the crime paperbacks “produced” by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel and his BCI outfit in the ‘70s (which I refer to as BCI Crime Paperbacks for ease of tagging), The Strangler is for the most part a slow-moving police procedural, but a well-written one, so absorbing in its unassuming way that its 224 pages fly by.

My initial assumption was that William Crawford served as “David Black,” given that Crawford wrote some of these BCI crime paperbacks (under various pseudonyms), and also given that the novel was very grounded in real-world police details, as if it were written by a cop (as Crawford himself was). But now that I’ve read The Strangler I have to guess it is not the work of Crawford; the novel is much too focused. The few Crawfords I’ve read all suffer from the same A-Z plotting, with inordinate backgrounds spun out for practically every character, no matter now minor.

There is none of that to be found in The Strangler, which stays focused on the plot and its central characters throughout; just compare to the similar BCI crime novel The Rapist, which was written by Crawford; that one’s a mess of extrapolated character backgrounds and arbitrary cop-world details. And it’s a boring, tedious novel, whereas The Strangler is a fascinating read – if lacking in lurid details or any action sequences.

It’s a longshot, but if I had to guess from Engel’s writing stable at the time, my suspicion would be that Paul Eiden might’ve written The Strangler. This is mostly due to one particular (and peculiar) phrase which appears in the novel, describing one of the strangler’s victims: “The breasts…were so full and widely separated the outer curves of them hid part of her upper arms.” A variation on this phrase has appeared in each Eiden novel I’ve read, particularly in his four John Eagle Expeditor offerings, so my assumption is this was Eiden’s calling card, if you will.

The novel takes place in New York City, and the author was clearly familiar with the place…or had a helluva city guide. Our hero is Rocco “Rocky” Amalfitano, a junior detective in his early 20s who has just been placed with the Nineteenth Precinct as a probationary detective, given his solid track record as a uniformed officer. On his first day on the job the first of what will ultimately be eight victims is discovered in Manhattan – the corpse of a lovely young lady who has been strangled and raped. Amalfitano is assigned the case.

This is not a Dirty Harry-esque yarn at all; The Strangler almost reads more like a true crime book, focusing as it does on the sometimes-tedious grind of actual police work and detecting. If I were to compare it to any novel yet reviewed on the blog, it would have to be Midtown North, so those approaching the novel hoping for a lurid action yarn will be disappointed. Indeed, Black keeps the strangler’s kills for the most part off-page, cutting away just as he straps his belt around the throats of his victims. To be sure, I had no real problem with this – there’s only so far I want to peek into the abyss.

After his kills the strangler carves “Herostratus” in ancient Greek letters on the chests of the women. It takes a while for the cops to figure out what the words say – a college professor provides the clue – and they learn that Herostratus was notorious in the ancient world for burning down the temple of Diana so that his name would live on in eternity. The strangler too hopes his name will be remembered forever – for strangling 26 women in New York, going alphabetically by their middle names.

Black juggles viewpoints so that our two main characters are Amalfitano and the strangler himself, who turns out to be a computer worker on Wall Street named George Stafford – a tall, dark-haired young man who looks similar to Anthony Perkins, as is often noted. Gradually we’ll learn that Stafford’s mother was a heroin addict…and used to “choke the living daylights” out of her little boy with a belt! This then explains Stafford’s taunting “how do you like it?” as he strangles his victims. Having worked at the department of health for a few years, he has compiled a list of sundry New York-area women, with their full names and addresses, and has inserted himself into their lives under a variety of false names – all of them variations of famous murderers (ie “Dick Speck,” after Richard Speck).

Amalfitano is the only cop who sees this, which leads him into confrontations with the older, veteran, more cynical cops in the precinct, in particular Captain Gregory, who flat-out despises Amalfitano and mocks him in front of everyone. An interesting thing about Amalfitano is that, despite being a junior detective, he doesn’t take any shit. Some of the most entertaining parts of The Strangler are when Amalfitano snaps at Captain Gregory, refusing to lie down and be walked over. Amalfitano is indeed an interesting character – he has no sense of sarcasm, or even much of a sense of humor, and is driven to stop the strangler case not out of a sense of justice, but hecause he’s just sick of the murders and wants them to end. He also encounters flack from his co-cops because he becomes somewhat emotionally invested in the case.

Another big difference between Amalfitano and the protagonists of the novels I usually review here – the dude’s still a virgin!! As is his fiance, Jeannete “Jimmy” Maloney. Both of them still live with their parents. They’re engaged to be married in a few months, and they stay true to their “no sex before wedding” vow, so there goes any hopes for any sexual tomfoolery in The Strangler; as mentioned, despite the incredibly lurid plot material, overall the book is pretty mundane so far as exploitative stuff goes. For that matter, the author appears shy to even use the word “fuck;” there’s a part where a surprised Amalfitano’s curse is rendered as “F –!”

A major factor of The Strangler is a ground-eye view of what detective work was like at the time. We go along with Amalfitano as veteran detectives walk with him from apartment to apartment in the crime zones, knocking on doors, interviewing potential witnesses. There are no chase scenes, no shootouts. The author was either a cop or knew one or just did some serious research. We also learn about fingerprint databases and portrait mockups and the various storehouses of data cops could then access. The job is presented as the grind it no doubt is, and by novel’s end the reader is as weary as Amalfitano himself is.

The chapters are long, and instead of “Chapter 1” and so forth, it’s “Victim One,” “Victim Two,” etc. A curious thing is that the women who become victims of Stafford are probably the most memorable characters in the novel. We only meet them briefly, but in some cases it’s enough for you to feel the impact when they are killed, as is the case with a vivacious lady who gives psychological readings to old movies. Others have weird hang-ups, like a self-hating woman who worries she’s a lesbian because she has no interest in sex with men, and literally begs Stafford to kill her(!), sitting dociley as he straps the belt around her throat.

Stafford himself is a somewhat memorable character; he’s socially awkward and gives off “leave me alone” vibes, yet for all that he’s able to get scores of women to be interested in him; some of them practically demand they go back to their apartments for sex. Stafford’s role becomes greater and greater as the novel goes on, and he’s given a lot more dialog than Amalfitano is. The author is very skilled with dialog, by the way; even an arbitrary scene in which Stafford gets in an argument with some bar patrons over the JFK assassination is entertaining due to the fast-moving dialog, despite the fact that it really doesn’t have much to do with anything.

The novel’s few moments of humor are due to Amalfitano’s lack of a sense of humor. In particular when he and his partner, “the moon-faced Ochs” (“moon-faced” being used practically every time Ochs is mentioned!), come upon a ravishing “Amazon” of a witness: Maria, a haughty German megababe who was friends of sorts with one of the victims and claims that she sees the victim’s “boyfriend” (aka Stafford) every day at lunch, as he works here at Wall Street and sits out in the park sometimes. Taking advantage of the fact that the police department wants her time, Maria demands a thousand dollars a day, and also insists that she be put up in a hotel fancier than the Waldorf. Amalfitano again proves himself an unusual protagonist for these sorts of novels; when Maria bluntly asks him to spend the night with her, he shows her a photo of his fiance and says no thanks!!

But Maria proves the means through which Amalfitano finally breaks the case, months after it started and eight victims in. Again he is mocked by Captain Gregory and the veteran cops, all who think Maria is an untrustworthy witness and who doubt that the police sketch made from her description of the man she’s seen is based on a real person – they think she’s made everything up to get more money out of them. But Amalfitano, about to be kicked off the force due to his latest run-in with the captain, realizes that so far all of his hunches have proven correct – and given that he also believes Maria, he figures this hunch will be correct, too.

Meanwhile the strangler is coming to the end of his latest list of potential victims, and desperately seeks one that will represent the middle initial he’s up to. Here David Black goes where I was hoping he wouldn’t – he makes it personal, but lamely enough it’s personal solely due to coincidence. Yep, folks, George Stafford just happens to have the name “Jeannette Maloney” on his list of potential victims, having met her months ago at a typing class…and just as Amalfitano is walking around Wall Street handing out photocopies of the drawing based on Maria’s description, Stafford is scoping out “Jimmy” as his next victim.

Despite how lame this is, it’s still suitably tense, as Stafford gets Jimmy in his car and goes increasingly insane, abducting her and taking her back to the home she’s about to move into with Amalfitano. Meanwhile our hero has gotten a postive ID on George Stafford and is calling up various people to find Jimmy, having found her name on that list of potential victims in Stafford’s apartment, which Amalfitano has broken into. The climax maintains the tense vibe, but I was seriously buzzkilled that Amalfitano, upon rushing into the house and finding Stafford wielding a knife and standing over Jimmy, only pulls out his .38, yells at Stafford…and then just arrests him! That’s it! I mean, I wanted to see the sonofabitch’s brains blasted onto the walls.

And here The Strangler ends, on an incongruous joke, as Amalfitano realizes that all the glowing words Captain Gregory has to say about him in the newspaper are the work of Amalfitano’s friend on the paper, putting words into peoples’s mouths (fake news!!). Meanwhile Jimmy insists that the reporter be invited to their wedding – the end. I guess so far as a Happily Ever After goes, it’s a fine ending, but one wishes for a more fitting comeuppance for the strangler.

Engel “produced” a bunch of these crime novels at the time, and I’m betting this author wrote more of them. The question is just who “David Black” was. I’m pretty confident it was Paul Eiden (thus I’ve tagged the review with his name), because that “widely separated breasts covering the upper arms” line is too much of a clue. Eiden uses it in every book of his I have read, and given that he is the only author I’ve ever read who uses this curious phrase, I’m figuring The Strangler must be his work.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Scorpio


Scorpio, by Steve Lawson
July, 1975  Pyramid Books

Scorpio is society’s speedballing revenge on an age of outrages, a lethal era when our world, rigid with fear, is engorged with blood. He is the first shot in an assassination of the unspeakable…

              -- from the hyperbolic back cover

Yet another obscure crime fiction paperback copyright book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, Scorpio was the first and only appearance of its titiluar protagonist, Lt. Edd Scorpio, a Los Angeles-based homicide/narcotics cop very much in the Bullitt mode. According to Hawk’s Authors’ Psuedonyms, “Steve Lawson” was in reality Robert H. Turner.

This is one of those instances in which Engel clearly had a different story in mind than what his author delivered. The cover art and back cover copy make Scorpio sound like a blitzkrieg of violence and cop thrills, but Turner instead turns in a sloooow-moving tale that becomes almost an endurance test to read. The book’s only 190 pages, with the typical small print of almost all Engel productions, but it reads like it’s around 300 pages due to the glacier pace. Not to mention Turner’s fussy, convoluted writing style.

Turner was the last editor on the Spider magazine and reportedly rewrote the vast majority of longtime writer Norvell Page’s final manuscripts; in his 1970 autobiography Some Of My Best Friends Are Writers But I Wouldn’t Want My Daughter To Marry One, Turner supposedly dismisses Page’s writing as “typical pulp stuff” without merit. (I’m sure I read this in Robert Sampson’s Spider, but having recently gotten Turner’s autobio via InterLibrary Loan, I couldn’t find the quote anywhere in the book...the dude didn’t even include an index!)  The irony here is that Page’s writing, judging from the Spider novels I’ve read, is leaps and bounds above Turner’s. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Hawk’s Pseudonyms I would’ve sworn Scorpio was written by William Crawford. It reads almost exactly like his work, with the forward momentum constantly stalled by pointless digressions and diversions.

Anyway, Scorpio is in his early 40s and now works almost in a freelance fashion, a specialist who helps out the LAPD on tough cases. He drives a ’68 Jag that has a phone in it and even has his own secretary, a black lady who talks in ‘50s slang. He carries a Cobra .38 revolver and has curly black hair, and you might as well just go ahead and envision ‘70s-era Elliott Gould in the movie that plays in your mind. In backstory that isn’t delivered until midway through, we learn that Scorpio was an orphan, left as a baby outside of a oprhanage with the name “Edd” (sp) on a note on his blankets. A government employee, heavy into astrology, calcuated that the baby must’ve been born under the sign of Scorpio, so that became Edd’s last name.

Scorpio has an ex-wife and two teenaged kids. He has a casual sex thing going with a half-Japanese gal his age named Mugsie; in one of the novel’s many, many backstories we learn that Mugsie is a widow, her husband killed in a freak train wreck. Scorpio’s got friends all over the place, in particular a retired pro football player turned private eye named Al Poularis. This guy is working on a case for wealthy socialite Madeline Stewart-Brooke, whose suicide opens the novel; ravaged by her heroin addiction, the lady has blown her brains out, leaving a note that she hopes her seventeen year-old daughter won’t fall pray to the same troubles.

Only, we quickly learn that the daughter is also dead, of a heroin OD. This turns out to be the real cause of Madeline Stewart-Brooke’s death; the gunshot to the head was delivered by her heroin contact, who showed up to discover the famous woman dead and panicked, hoping to distract the cops into thinking she’d shot herself. Later the heroin contact too will be rubbed out, with more and more underworld lowlifes meeting violent ends. And all of them knew Stewart-Brooke or her daughter, and all of them are dying before they can talk to Edd Scorpio, who is now actively working the case.

Here’s the thing about Scorpio: it reads a lot like a private eye novel. You almost wonder why Al Poularis wasn’t the main protagonist. As for Scorpio himself, what with his car phone and his black secretary and the way he works solo, it’s almost like you’re reading a Mannix novelization. There’s no cop stuff like you’d expect, with random shootouts or car chases; rather, Scorpio just gets on the Stewart-Brooke case and chases leads, leads which ultimately lead him to a blackmailing scheme – again, all of it just like something you’d read in a private eye novel.

Something you do have to admire about these ‘70s crime novels is how lurid they can be, with incidental details that just drip with sleaze. Like the heroin supplier who likes to have sex with heavyset women who have mannish features, or the motel owner who jerks off over the nude corpse of a young woman…! Turner co-wrote three of the Mafia: Operation books for Lyle Kenyon Engel, each of them brimming with sleaze; he brings a bit of that here, but having read Scorpio I’d have to guess Turner’s cowriter on those books, Allan Nixon, was the one who must’ve been responsible for the good stuff.

Because honestly, Scorpio just sort of drags on and on. And like the Narc or Headhunters books, Scorpio is yet another cop protagonist who comes off like a minor character in his own novel; most of the text is given over to the sundry lowlifes who peddle heroin in LA, in particular the leader of the pack, a black-Hispanic named Jesus Martinez. A muscle-bound lothario with yellow eyes, Martinez is as cold-blooded as you can get. It gradually develops that he boffed both Madeline Stewart-Brooke and her teenaged daughter, having it all secretly photographed so he could later blackmail them.

Martinez did this for a big cash payoff, which he intends to use to buy in on the Mafia’s heroin business, promoting himself as like a district supervisor or somesuch. Meanwhile Scorpio just goes round and round, asking questions, reflecting on past cases. He doesn’t even pull his gun until the climax of the book, and even then he doesn’t kill anyone. Turner delivers a few sex scenes here and there, to make up I guess for the paucity of action, but even these lack the outrageous lurid quotient of his Mafia: Operation work. In truth, the whole thing’s just sort of listless.

As mentioned, the actual “A plot” only comes and goes, with Turner constantly stalling the momentum with digressions and detours. Anytime a character is introduced, no matter how minor he or she might be, we’ll get a few pages of background history about them. Again, exactly like you’d read in one of William Crawford’s books. But periodically Turner will return to the main plot, like when Scorpio’s footballer-turned-P.I. buddy Poularis is almost beaten to death, and later when Scorpio, right after having a face-to-face meeting with Martinez, loses his Jag to a carbomb, which instead blows up the mechanic who was trying to fix the car for him. 

Like a later listless cop novel, Hellfire, Scorpio emerges from its doldrums in the final stretch with a Hollywood-escque climax. Martinez, on the run, tracks down Inez, a gorgeous young woman who sings at his nightclub, and abducts her, the lovely lady having offered to blab about her boss’s nefarious doings. But Inez is staying with Mugsie, Scorpio’s gal. This makes the reader expect something bad is going to happen to Mugsie, but Martinez just knocks her out and runs away – strange, given how ruthless the guy’s been presented to us, killing off scads of people and even, in another backstory, a female narc, raping her and then murdering her before she climaxes.

Martinez absconds to the Lower East Side home in which he was born and there rapes Inez, discovering after the fact that the lady was a virgin. But then Martinez goes nuts; due to a childhood injury he got while skateboarding(?!), he periodically suffers migraines and blackouts, usually coming out of them in an altered mental state. So in the final pages he goes into this childlike mentality and is about to paint up Inez’s face, when Scorpio shows up; cue a bareknuckle brawl between the two, with Scorpio quickly losing his gun and having to resort to his fists and feet to bring the bigger man down.

And Scorpio’s a by-the-rules cop; instead of blowing the scumbag away, like the reader would want, he instead cuffs him and calls in the precinct. (Luckily Martinez does us the favor of doing away with himself.) The case successfully closed, Scorpio is presented with a replacement ’68 Jag, bought for him by Mugsie, Inez, Poularis, and even his eternally pissed-off chief, who just got back from vacation.

This gives the impression that our hero is being set up for more adventures in another installment, but this was not to be, and whether by accident or design this was the one and only apparance of Lt. Edd Scorpio. So I guess he must’ve successfully assassinated the unspeakable.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen


Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen, by Sheila Brady
March, 1975  Pocket Books

My friends, it’s my pleasure to present to you another ‘70s sleaze masterpiece, one that comes off like a combo of Massage Parlor and Mafia: Operation Porno. And like that latter book, Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen is yet another production of Lyle Kenyon Engel’s BCI outfit, one of those standalone mystery/crime paperback novels he produced during the early-mid 1970s and published through various imprints. 

Purporting to be the “memoirs” of a young woman who is now hiding from the Mafia, thus using the “Sheila Brady” pseudonym, Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen is clearly a work of fiction, which is how it’s labeled on the spine and the copyright page. No idea yet who wrote it, as the Catalog Of Copyright Entries just states “Lyle Kenyon Engel, employer for hire,” and “Sheila Brady” isn't listed in Hawk's Author's Pseudonyms. It could’ve actually been written by a woman, who knows, but if I had to guess from the pool of Engel’s “regulars” I’d say it was either Allan Nixon or Robert E. Turner, who together co-wrote three of the Mafia: Operation novels for Engel and separately wrote a few standalones for him under their own names and pseudonyms.

Coming in at 238 pages of small print, Memoirs isn’t just a bunch of sleaze, though to be sure there’s tons of that. In fact “Sheila” opens the tale right on the action, so to speak, as she’s shooting her first hardcore scene. Her “co-star” is Jeff Burgess, Sheila’s seven foot tall and massively-endowed boyfriend. It’s Jeff who has led Sheila to this predicament, as Sheila never had any designs on becoming a “porno queen.” But rather than just settle for outright exploitation the author develops a nicely-done storyline in which our heroine gets mixed up with the Mafia – not to mention picking up a healthy heroin habit.

Sheila’s narration reminds me very much of that of “Jennifer Sills” in the aforementioned Massage Parlor, with that same sort of wide-eyed naivety. But Sheila’s no prudish shut-in, having slept around with her share of men in college. In her early 20s, Sheila has found love with Jeff, a star basketball player in college who will be a sure thing in the professional circuit. Sheila has had a rough life; in a darkly humorous sequence we learn that her father, a “famous industrialist,” lusted after Sheila, and in an outrageous cap-off to this sequence we are presented with the image of a father masturbating to the nude image of his teenaged daughter.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, friends; before Memoirs is finished we’ll have multiple scenes of hardcore sex, porno filming, lesbian interludes, and even a dash of besitality as our narrator gets it on with her Mafia boss’s doberman pinscher. Every single base one could think of is covered here, and none of it is shrouded in the purple prose or Burt Hirschfeld-style analogies and metaphors typical of some ‘70s trash fiction. It’s all clearly detailed and leaves nothing to the imagination, and is, as I wrote above, a goddamn masterpiece of sleaze.

It develops that Jeff’s brother, Roger, a handicapped ‘Nam vet, is the culprit behind Sheila and Jeff’s entry into the world of porn. The novel opens in January 1973, and then flashes back to the month before. Roger, having gotten hooked on heroin, inadvertently sets Jeff up with the Mafia, who has denied Roger his heroin due to lack of payment. If Jeff skims off a few points of an upcoming game, the Mafia will give Roger his dope. But it turns out that the Mafia is actually more interested in Sheila.

Roger, in addition to being a star basketball player, wants to be a director, and several months before sent out to Hollywood producers an arty film of a nude Sheila walking around the woods. This film ended up in the hands of Brendan O’Mahoney, a once-famous Hollywood director who is now a boozer reduced to directing porn under various pseudonyms. O’Mahoney himself is in deep with the Mafia, and as part of a convoluted scheme he’s told them that this busty redhead Sheila Brady would make for perfect porno queendom, especially given the fact that she has bombshell measurements combined with the face of a little girl.

So, long story short, the Mafia, as represented by Frank Cavaleri, leader of a California branch of the mob, forces Sheila and Jeff to have on-screen sex in a new O’Mahoney film, or else. The movie is titled Jackie The Giant Layer and plays off Jeff’s large size – and I don’t just mean his height. But Sheila finds that she begins to really enjoy shooting porn, and soon enough is secretly filming “loops” with O’Mahoney, ie having sex with various men for little films that will be shown in peepshows and porn theaters. She hides all this from Jeff, who has made it clear that he’ll only cater to the Mafia’s demands if he and Sheila “act” with only each other.

Sheila’s doing this not just because she enjoys the on-screen screwing, but because of the “vitamin shots” she’s been given her first day on set, courtesy Dr. Segadelli, Cavaleri’s heroin man. Sheila has an addictive personality and within days becomes a heroin freak, going secretly to Jeff’s brother Roger for her heroin fix. The author builds up a lot of good material with Sheila hiding her twin pursuits – loop-filming and heroin-shooting – without Jeff finding out. And it’s to the author’s credit that he (or she) is still able to make us root for Sheila, who despite it all comes off as a likable protagonist.

Our heroine gets more and more involved, even after leaving Hollywood to go back to the unspecified home state in which she lives with Jeff. Here the Mafia has more production facilities, and she not only does more loop material but also stars in more films helmed by O’Mahoney. In particular there’s Down On The Farm, which features the bestiality mentioned above, Cavaleri showing up on the set with his guard dog and informing O’Mahoney of his desire to have it screw Sheila in the film!

And Sheila herself, you won’t be surprised to learn, gets off on it all. She finds that she doesn’t need heroin when she’s screwing on camera, but once she’s between projects she needs a fix. This leads her into trouble; after getting caught shooting up in the restroom of a restaurant, Sheila’s put in a women’s detention center where she awaits trial. Jeff never visits her (she finds out later it’s because Cavaleri wouldn’t let him – the Mafia has been clear that Sheila is not to use heroin, so she’s been hiding this from them as well, and they’re pissed royally), so Sheila ends up cozying up with her pretty cellmate, Cindy.

More explicit lesbiana ensues when Sheila is escorted into the presence of the “head mistress” of the place, a foxy chick who wears lingerie and has her own private room. After Sheila pleasures her with a big dildo the two go at it full-tilt, with the outcome that Sheila now becomes the lady’s favorite. And meanwhile she’s kicked heroin, or has she? Because as soon as she’s free on bail, her Mafia-appointed lawyer getting her out scott free, Sheila’s already trying to score from O’Mahoney. She’s become a true whore, now, something she admits to us, as she begins to trade sex with the director for the heroin he can get her.

We get more porno material, like this weird-sounding project of O’Mahoney’s which is a “porno comedy” that involves cranked-up film speeds and a massive gang-bang where Sheila takes on several dudes at once (with some of the dudes going at it with each other, O’Mahoney somehow believing that this hetero mixed with homo material will go over well with his audience). But things get out of hand when Jackie The Giant Layer is released and in the ensuing backlash Jeff is kicked off his team and loses his scholarship. Now our couple is in dire straights, penniless, and it gets worse when Jeff, outraged when he discovers all the pornos Sheila has secretly filmed, burns down the Mafia’s porn warehouse.

Clearly, this is not a smart idea, and Jeff pays for it – his hands shoved into a meat grinder, lopping off his thumbs! We go into the homestretch with O’Mahoney aligned with Sheila and Jeff in a desperate attempt to escape Cavaleri’s clutches. The director has stashed money by skimming the profits of his films, and he has a ghost town in the Nevada desert that he bought years ago which no one knows about. The three ditch the Mafia and make a hellish trip across the desert. The director’s ghost town is almost idyllic, with a water supply and stashes of canned food. But O’Mahoney himself proves untrustworthy, wanting to kill Jeff and make off with Sheila alone…

Eventually Sheila and Jeff, on the run and in disguise, end up in “Sudden Falls, Iowa,” which Sheila informs us is her fictional name for the real Midwestern town they now live in. Running the only hotel in town under assumed names, they’ve found happiness. Sheila has finally kicked heroin after a nightmarish withdrawal process; when she comes out she learns from Jeff that her famous father has died, which Jeff learned on the news. Sheila realizes that her addictive drive for heroin and on-screen sex was all fueled by her daddy issues, and now that the bastard is gone she can live free and normally.

Sheila ends her tale on a note of worry – will Cavaleri’s stooges ever track her and Jeff down? She has an extra reason to be concerned now, especially given that she’s about to have a child as the novel ends. There’s more dark humor in this as she’s not even sure who the father is – it could’ve been Jeff, O’Mahoney, or any of the untold number of dudes she had sex with during her porno filming; in her heroin addiction, Sheila forgot to take her birth control. But Jeff, who may get back his dexterity with prosthetic thumbs, is super understanding and excited to raise a child with her. The end!

Friends, I had a helluva fun time reading this novel; besides the sleaze factor it has great dialog, believable characters, and a well-crafted, entertaining storyline. Also, it proves once again that Lyle Kenyon Engel was a master “producer” of ‘70s paperback originals. Not to take credit away from whoever actually wrote it, but Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen demonstrates how Engel excelled at divining what was hot in the fiction marketplace and turning out a product that not only was in line with it but surpassed it.

Like The Nursery, this is one of those sleaze masterpieces that begs to be quoted:

I was in front of a camera, before a small movie crew and financially interested spectators, performing film-recorded sex for the eventual satisfaction of movie-house masturbators, voyeurs, and other assorted come-freaks. -- pg. 11

“Keep ‘em rolling,” O’Mahoney ordered. “We can use some of this extraneous action in loops. All right, Jeff. When you come, be sure and let Sheila pull away. Our customers want to see that the actors are really making it. We want to see the semen spurt. Got it?” -- pg. 12

O’Mahoney smiled a smile that didn’t match the closed door of his eyes. “They should stop rerunning The Untouchables. There’s no such thing as the Mafia, silly baby, you know that, eh?” 

“Cavaleri, he seems to be the head one. And Segadelli, and that tough one, Santarpio. Italian names.” 

“So what? You anti-wop?” he said off-handedly, so off-handedly I knew he was lying. “I’m as Irish as you are. What about Sy Borofsky, the chief cameraman? A heeb. Ellisopulous, the sound man. As Greek as a cock up the ass.” -- pg. 33

“That’s when I started having lesbian sex.” -- pg. 46

“All right, you cooze-teaser, I beg you.  I beg you. Eat me!” -- pg. 68

When I awakened Jeff was gone; unfortunately the humiliation wasn’t. I was lying on a pee-soaked mattress and my stomach was fermenting with nausea. -- pg. 111

He insisted we meet in a downtown coffee shop. When I called, suggesting I come to his hotel, he was as nervous as a pregnant whore. -- pg. 113

When suddenly, of his own volition, the big dog mounted me, I was ready, willing, and able to take him! My original feeling of degradation had long since been washed away by the periodic tongue baths he gave me those three days. -- pg. 143

“When I’m not sucking cocks, I keep my mouth closed pretty good.” -- pg. 154