Showing posts with label Butcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Butcher. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance


The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance, by Stuart Jason
January, 1975  Pinnacle Books

At this point my enjoyment of The Butcher is relegated to spotting which previous installments James “Stuart Jason” Dockery rips off. In Blood Vengeance it seems to mainly be #4: Blood Debt that he’s rewriting, given that the book features characters from that earlier installment, but there are also elements lifted from #8: Fire Bomb

But then, Blood Vengeance is the same as every other Dockery installment since the first volume. The opening sequence with the deformed Syndicate thugs versus Bucher, the slackjawed cop who must let Bucher go, the briefing with the never-named White Hat director, the bustling about the globe on the “latest crazy caper” which becomes ever more convoluted as the narrative progresses. The very few action scenes, all of which are the same and feature Bucher’s fast-draw technique making our hero almost superhuman. The grand guignol finale in which all the characters get together for a sadistic send-off, with Bucher wandering off with “the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth…” 

All of it is here, as it is in every other Butcher written by James Dockery. The only difference with Blood Vengeance is Dockery’s sudden obsession with castration. This theme runs through the entire novel, with four characters castrated during the course of events; the finale is especially over the top, with three of them being emasculated at the same time. And in true “sweat mag” style the guy turning them into eunuchs is a sadistic “dwarf” who is so skilled at this particular “treatment” that he can castrate his “patients” before they even realize he’s started the procedure. 

All of which is to say Dockery’s dark humor is even more prevalent than normal this time. Also it seems clear that Dockery realizes his readers are in on the joke – that they know he’s just rewriting the same book over and over again, and he’s not fooling anyone. His deformed Syndicate goons are even more deformed this time around: just a few of them would be Warts, who has “large, ugly, horny seed warts all over his face and hands;” Mole, a heroin addict who looks like the animal of his namesake; and especially Spastic Sniggers, a goon who makes an unfortunately too brief of an appearance but whose bio takes the cake: 

Spastic Sniggers was a depraved psychopath who derived delicious enjoyment from watching others die. At the moment of death, at that instant when the soul fled the body, something deep in his fetid mind switched over to a wrong relay and he would be seized by fits of sniggering, all the while starting and jerking convulsively in limbs and body in the manner of a hopeless spastic. 

That made me laugh out loud when I first read it; it still makes me laugh out loud. So clearly The Butcher is for a special type of reader, as this sort of super-dark comedy runs throughout. And also, when I read something like that I realize there’s no way at all that James Dockery is on the level. His tongue is definitely in his cheek…which makes it all the more frustrating that he keeps writing the same book over and over. This is one of the more puzzling things in the world of men’s adventure, how a writer as talented as Dockery couldn’t be bothered to write an original story and just kept ripping himself off, volume after volume. 

To be honest, at one point I thought of extending the joke and making every one of my Butcher reviews the same, only changing the occasional particular – or rearranging them – but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just lazily churn out the same review over and over…and unlike James Dockery, I’m not even getting paid for this! 

Well anyway, for once we get some indication that time has passed in the series; early in the book, when Bucher is taken in by a cop per the template, it’s none other than Captain Handsome Staggers (what a name – up there with “Delano Stagg!”), a cop who apparently arrested Bucher in a previous volume, and knows from experience that Bucher will be let out – even though he carries a silencer “even God” would be arrested for. Checking my reviews, it looks like I failed to note the appearance of Handsome Staggers in that previous volume, which is surprising. His arrest of Bucher is stated as being “some months before” the events of Blood Vengeance, which by the way opens with a hapless stooge getting a phone call that Bucher’s here in Miami, and quickly getting out of town. 

From there to Bucher being stalked by the thugs Mole and Warts, with Bucher offing one of them – with the interesting development that the other will return to plague him, later in the novel. Usually these opening stalking thugs are one-offs, but this time Dockery integrates them into the overall storyline – which has nothing at all to do with the back cover. For the most part, at least. I’ll admit, I was fooled – the back cover notes that beautiful blonde Candy Merriman, one of the biggest stars on TV and the daughter of some bigwig, has been adbucted by a hippie terrorist-type group and held for ransom. I assumed we were going to get a take on the infamous Patty Hearst case. 

But as it turns out, Candy Merriman is a passing thought at best in the actual narrative; she isn’t mentioned until page 65, and even then only appears on a few pages. Rather, the villains of the piece are a left-wing Ethiopian radical group run by a guy named Egor Ginir, and comprised of Sudomics – a cult that is “the Thuggees of Ethiopia.” Working with another of Bucher’s old Syndicate colleagues, Sabroso, Ginir plans to kidnap children of wealth and hold them for upwards of fifteen million each, the money to be used to fund a revolution. But this isn’t enough for Dockery, and as per usual the plot becomes more and more convoluted until it ultimately involves atomic bombs and whatnot. 

Also as per usual Bucher almost immediately finds himself leaving the country, and as ever going someplace where Islam is the chief religion – Islamic culture is so frequently referenced in The Butcher that I assume James Dockery was either obsessed with it, or had worked in these areas and felt informed enough to refer to them. So it is that we get a lot of cultural stuff about Ethiopia, which is where Bucher immediately heads. And here we get more reference to a previous book, with Bucher shocked to discover his local contact is French-Arabic blonde beauty Barbe, who last appeared in the fourth volume, the events of which were “almost a year ago.” 

Checking my thorough review of Blood Debt, I see that Bucher and Barbe had a spatting relationship, and that Bucher referred to Barbe as “ugly.” Not so here, where she’s so gobsmackin’ hot that Bucher wonders why he never gave in to Barbe’s pleas in that earlier volume to get busy with her. But then, no one has yet gotten busy with Barbe; she’s a virgin, saving herself for the right guy. And guess who she’s decided it will be? Of course it is Bucher…leading to one of Dockery’s peculiar off-page sex-scenes. I’ve said it before and will say it again: it’s downright bizarre how Dockery will be so lurid and sleazy with his deformed villains and his focus on rape and torture…but will always cut away when Bucher’s about to have sex. Even the customary exploitation of the genre is curiously absent; there’s a part where Barbe and another hotstuff female agent get naked so as to distract someone, and Dockery can’t be bothered to give either girl even a cursory juicy description. 

That other hostuff agent babe is Eden Massawa, an Ethiopian woman who is related to the new prime minister. This volume is very heavy on the Ethiopian culture and whatnot – and this is where the castration angle comes in. Eden has a cousin who runs a slave trade or somesuch, and with just a call she’ll have someone over to castrate a guy into a new eunuch for such-and-such’s harem. This is actually the fate of two of the Syndicate goons who have tailed Bucher to Ethiopia…Dockery just giving us a taste of the sordid darkness to ensue when the guys are tied to a bed and then informed they are about to be castrated, and start screaming when “the doctor” comes in and lays out his tools. 

We’re often told how nauseated Bucher is by all the killing and torture, and frequently in the book he tries to stop it – but in every case he’s stopped by a woman. It’s an interesting subtext to the series, but otherwise Bucher is even more cipher-like than normal in Blood Vengeance, only getting in a few action scenes to boot. This has never been an action-heavy series, and the vibe is always more along the lines of a Western, with Bucher using his “kill-quick-or-die” fast-draw technique to blow away a handful of goons. And they’re always clean kills, too, with Dockery also curiously sparse with detail on the fountaining gore. That said, there is a humorous WTF? bit were Bucher calls one of the thugs “anus.” 

The other volume Blood Vengeance rips off is Fire Bomb; that one featured a letter Bucher was handed by another character, a letter Bucher put in his pocket and conveniently forgot about – only to read much later and discover that, if he’d read it sooner, he would’ve saved himself a lot of trouble. There’s a very similar bit here in Blood Vengeance where Barbe, who apropos of nothing has found out she has a degenerative eye disease that will leave her blind within a year(!), writes a letter for Bucher…and he puts it in his pocket and forgets about it until near the end of the book. 

But it’s Blood Debt that is most ripped off; that one also featured a famous TV personality who happened to be a hotstuff babe, Twiti Andovin, who ultimately turned out to be the main villain. Blood Vengeance rips all of this off in the form of Candy Merriman, who is first seen being executed – in an eerie foreshadowing of real-life Isis videos – on a tape the Muslim terrorists send to a US tv station. There we see (broadcast uncut on television!) a screaming Candy being forced to her knees and then her head chopped off by the High Priestess of the Sudomac cult – but Bucher suspects something fishy about the whole thing. 

Dockery is also pretty bad with pacing. Bucher hopscotches around the globe, from Miami to Ethiopia, back to Miami and then up to Yellowknife, Canada, but nothing much really happens. The final quarter is especially slow, with Bucher and Eden hooking up with a Canadian mountie and flying over an island Bucher suspects Egor might be hiding his atomic warheads on. But it just goes on and on and it’s clear Dockery is trying to meet his word count; the book would’ve been a lot more brisk without the convoluted plotting and a little more on the action front. 

That said, the sudden focus on castration is also puzzling. In a standard trope of the series, one of Bucher’s female conquests is brutally murdered – Bucher, as ever, almost casually sending the girl off to her grisly fate, completely mindless to her predicament per series template – and Bucher is all fired up to get vengeance on the sadist who “sodomized and garrotted” her. This entails one castration, but late in the novel Dockery introduces yet another go-nowhere subplot, one in which Ginir has also kidnapped a bunch of preteen girls to sell them as sex slaves, and Bucher rescues a fifteen year old who has been repeatedly raped by Ginir; she is insane with the desire to see Ginir castrated. 

The finale is especially dark, with Bucher and a few comrades assaulting Ginir’s island base, which of course has a dungeon where the villains can be strung up to be castrated; I mean James Dockery himself has gone castration crazy this time, with Blood Vengeance ending on the image of three men screaming as they are castrated, a group of people gleefully watching the spectacle. Not Bucher, though – he’s already walking away with that damn “bitter-sour taste of defeat” in his mouth. 

Overall, the castration angle really is the only thing unique about Blood Vengeance. Otherwise it is, like the volume before it (and the volume before that, and etc, etc), just a lazy rewrite of the first volume of the series. Here’s hoping that eventually Dockery will write something new, but I’m not holding my breath.

Thursday, January 12, 2023

The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death


The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death, by Stuart Jason
April, 1974  Pinnacle Books

I was under the impression I didn’t have this volume of The Butcher, but I was looking in the box where I store the other volumes of the series I have, and lo and behold…well, you can probably figure out where I’m going with this. There it was in the box! So anyway Valley Of Death was the second of two installments written by Lee Floren, who previously wrote #10: Deadly Doctor

It’s been a long time since I read Deadly Doctor, so I went back to check my review. I found it humorous that I referenced Russell Smith in it, because as I was reading Valley Of Death I kept thinking to myself how much it read like a Russell Smith novel. The same surreal vibe, the same writing style; only Smith’s patented exclamation marks were missing. But this one was written by Lee Floren, as it’s clearly a sequel to Deadly Doctor, the events of which are referenced throughout. I only have one other novel by Floren, an early ‘60s sub-sleaze PBO titled Las Vegas Madam (written as “Matt Harding”), but I’ve yet to read it. I’m curious if it too is as surreal and rough as his work on The Butcher

Because this is one rough novel. Again, it is almost identical to something by Russell Smith in that it’s clear the author is winging it from the first page to the last, and not taking anything seriously. Random events happen and only gradually does a plot come together. Like the previous Floren yarn, there is a definite attempt at mimicking the style of main “Stuart Jason” James Dockery. As James Reasoner and I discussed in the comments section of my review for Deadly Doctor, Dockery and Floren both lived in Mexico, so it’s likely they were friends and this is how Floren came to write for The Butcher, not to mention why he strived to capture the style of Dockery for his two contributions. 

So we have the “bitter-sour taste of defeat,” the “koosh!” for Bucher’s silencered Walther P-38, and the recurring character of the director of White Hat (his title, curiously, is never capitalized). Also the repeating Dockery motif of Bucher being arrested by a smalltown sheriff and then being let go after a call to White Hat. But Floren toys with Dockery’s ever-recurring themes. Also, he skips some stuff: there’s no opening moment, for example, where Bucher is stalked by two superdeformed Syndicate thugs he soon blows away. And Floren expands the smalltown sheriff character from the one-off of the Dockery installments into more of a presence in the narrative. A weird presence, it must be stated. 

For that is the main thing Floren captures in his Dockery-isms: the weird, perverted nature of Dockery’s average Butcher story. There is, as in the Dockery books, the feeling that none of this is real, that it is all taking place in some alternate reality; Bucher himself muses at the end of Valley Of Death that this latest caper has been “like a bad dream.” I’ve gone on way too much in previous reviews that the idea is almost like Bucher himself is dead and cast in some purgatory where he relives the same nightmarish scenario, again and again into eternity. Like the entire series is based on the final chapter of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, where the criminal protagonists are trapped in hell. Lee Floren captures that vibe in this novel, more so than he did in Deadly Doctor

Like a Dockery installment, the “plot” only gradually comes together. But basically White Hat tasks Bucher with figuring out why elections are not going the way the “experts” predicted they would, both in the US and abroad. Yes, folks, we have another vintage men’s adventure novel with a plot that is relevant today. I mean check this out – the only thing missing is the name “Dominion” for the voting machines: 



But what I love is that, even in this surreal, fictional world, there is still enough rationality that everyone acknowledges that the election results are suspect. Floren keeps his politics to himself but does go the expected route and make “the Conservatives” the bad guys in both the US and Poland; we learn there is a new right-wing party, with fascist ties (because of course), that is gaining ground around the world due to those voting machines. But folks there are a lot of parts in this one where Bucher sits around watching TV or listening to the radio as election results come in. In the US it’s the Democrats versus the Republicans, with new party “The Conservatives” faring well in cities but not in rural areas…a curious reversal of today, but then again this book was published in 1974. And in Poland the right-wing Conservative party, dubbed the Sons of something or other over there (I was too lazy to jot it down), have beaten the Communist-backed party, and Russia isn’t happy about that. 

Oh, and there’s also something about the ridiculously-monikered “World King,” this volume’s main villain who is behind the nefariousness. This turns out to be the lamest bit in the novel because Floren does nothing with it. Anyway Bucher’s sure, as ever, that the Syndicate is behind the plot, whatever the plot is. So, the way these things go, he flies a Cessna to the Mojave Desert. That’s another reminder of Deadly Doctor, where Bucher suddenly became a pilot. The “flying fiction” isn’t as egregious in Valley Of Death, but in addition to the Cessna Bucher also flies a helicopter and an F4 Phantom jet. This latter factors into an aerial sequence that seems to be inspired by Chuck Yeager’s near-fatal accident in the NF-104 (which Tom Wolfe later brought to life in The Right Stuff) – an incident Floren was likely familiar with, given that he also names a minor Syndicate thug Zeager. 

The Dockery inversions are most apparent with the slackjawed yokel sheriff, generally a one-off character in Dockery, but here expanded into a supporting character: Sheriff Julia Whitcomb. That’s right, folks: a woman!! Indeed, one with “high breasts…a healthy young female animal.” We’re also told she’s so hot that even usually-unperturbed Bucher is taken aback. But spoiler alert – and we learn this pretty quickly in the novel – but, uh, she is really a he. That’s right again, folks: a transvestite! Boy, Lee Floren was batting two for two in the “relevance for today” department, wasn’t he? This gender-bending switcharoo is revealed when “Julia” is in bed with a Syndicate flunky named Mario Niccoli. 

The villain of the piece, Niccoli is the brother of the two other Niccolis Bucher killed in The Deadly Doctor. Again, Valley Of Death is a straight sequel to that one, with the sole surviving Niccoli burning up to get revenge for the death of his brothers. But Floren further tells us this about Mario Niccoli: “A fag himself, his two brothers had in fact been his wives, for they too had lusted after men, not women.” This tidbit is casually dropped in the opening; again, just very Russell Smith in vibe. Later Niccoli is in bed with “Julia,” and it’s revealed that “no female breasts” are beneath “her” padded bra. 

But it gets even weirder. Adding to the surreal texture is that Bucher is constantly getting “updates” from White Hat which inform him of practically everything going on in the plot, and the backgrounds of the various characters he encounters. Actually it’s the director who gives Bucher these updates, giving the impression that the old man is omniscient – and now that I think of it, furthering the whole “purgatory” conceit of The Butcher, with the White Hat director serving as god to Bucher’s doomed soul. But Bucher is constantly being informed off-page about this or that, so that he is caught up with what’s going on, to the extent that his presence seems unnecessary. White Hat knows all, so why can’t it do all? 

Well anyway, in one of those updates Bucher is informed by the director that Julia Whitcomb is really a guy – curiously, Bucher is informed of this right after we readers learn of it via the scene with Julia and Niccoli, which again gives the idea that all this is a “bad dream” with info gathered and incorporated into the story in real time. So Bucher starts hitting on Julia, asking her out to dinner and making insinuating comments about getting her into bed, and Julia becoming increasingly excited at the prospect. Just weird, wild stuff. But again it’s like Floren is just winging it, or the booze has run dry as he’s been typing, because he drops all of it with Julia leaving Bucher’s room in a huff and the incident never being mentioned again. 

Bucher does get laid, though – by a woman (not that I’m a biologist, you understand, but Floren tells us she is). This too is on the strange “dreamlike” tip: her name is Sandra Stone, and she claims she is a reporter when she boldly approaches Bucher in Poland. (He’s come here, for no real reason, to get more evidence on those voting machines.) Bucher immediately knows Sandra is a Syndicate spy, but soon enough the two end in bed. This actually happens between chapters, so Floren gives us absolutely zero in the way of sleaze. Which, again, is reminiscent of the Dockery books. So too is the weird misogyny on display throughout – Bucher treats Sandra like shit, telling her to take off and leave him alone, even though he knows the Syndicate intends to kill her. Her (expected) fate is still shocking given how casually Floren treats it in the narrative – surely the most blackly humorous moment in a blackly humorous novel. 

Action-wise there’s a bit more going on than in the Dockery books, with Bucher often getting in shootouts. The gore is not as pronounced, though. And also Bucher is slightly more human; Floren’s Bucher still experiences fear, and reacts close to panic at times. He is not the “Iceman” of the James Dockery books, and he’s more prone to displaying his emotions. He does a bit of deducting in the novel but it’s very lame because it’s based on coincidence. Like when in the small town in the Mojave, he just happens to see some “scientist types” go into a building, after which a balloon rises from the building. Gradually Floren will tie this together with the voting machines, but it’s all so hamfisted that it’s just more indication that he was winging it from first page to last. 

This is further demonstrated by the non-event that is the so-called World King. As with a Dockery novel, it all ultimately comes down to the same characters Bucher has been dealing with since the beginning of the book, characters who are suddenly revealed as being more important to the Syndicate plot than we readers were led to believe. Bucher sees more action here – but I forgot to mention! Suddenly Bucher has become a field tester for various White Hat gadgets. In Valley Of Death, he has these pellets he fires from his P-38 which knock a man into a deathlike state that lasts for twelve hours. There are so many scenes of Bucher shooting someone with these – usually firing the pellets straight down their throat – and then watching TV later on as the news reports on the “dead men” found in such and such a place, who later wake up with absolutely no memory, and the doctors trying to figure out what’s wrong with them. 

Oh, and Bucher also has this pole with a choker on it, or some such contraption, which he uses to ensnare various bigwigs. So there’s a lot of stuff where he’ll capture people with this, then shoot them with the deathlike-amnesia pill…it’s just super weird, folks. I mean the whole novel is like a lost installment of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman, we’re talking that same weird, surreal, “booze-fueled first draft” vibe throughout. All of which is to say that Valley Of Death was kind of fun, in a deranged sort of way. Floren’s imagination is so off-kilter that I would’ve enjoyed more installments by him…the book might not be great, or hell even good, but at least it isn’t the same story over and over like James Dockery was doing for the series.

Monday, April 4, 2022

The Butcher #12: Killer’s Cargo


The Butcher #12: Killers Cargo, by Stuart Jason
September, 1974  Pinnacle Books

James Dockery returns to The Butcher after taking a few volumes off (his last one was #8: Firebomb), and he does the same thing he always does: he basically rewrites the first volume. At this point the “wash, rinse, repeat” nature of this series is insulting, that Dockery, series owner Script Associates, and publisher Pinnacle thought so little of their readers that they figured no one would notice that each volume of The Butcher was an echo of the one that came before. 

To wit, we’ll meet Bucher, aka Iceman, formerly known as The Butcher, in some unstated city as he’s being stalked by a pair of deformed Syndicate goons he used to know back in the day. He’ll kill them easily, get arrested due to all the shooting, and then be sprung, to the slackjawed amazement of the top cop who is about to throw the book at him. Then our hero will be briefed by the never-named White Hat Director on a Lear jet as it wings its way somewhere, usually Europe. Bucher will be informed of the latest globe-threatening plot that involves another of his former Syndicate pals. Bucher will investigate, usually a lovely female White Hat operator at his side. He’ll gradually find the time to engage that lovely female White Hat operator in some off-page lovin’, though Bucher will initially fend off her eager advances. Ultimately he’ll find himself either in Mexico or the Middle East, where the “goddamn crazy caper” will prove to have multiple strands, and also there will be the revelation that one of Bucher’s colleagues is actually working against him. Things will generally end on a grand guignol vibe, with the final scene taking place in a torture chamber or something similar. Also generally at this point Bucher will have to kill an evil woman, even though he’s “never killed a woman before.” And, of course, the final line will be a variation of “the bitter-sour taste of defeat,” as Bucher grimly walks off from this latest massacre…to go through it all again in the next volume. 

All of that is true for Killer’s Cargo, with only the most minor of deviations. For once Bucher does not go to the Middle East, but he does spend the entire second half of the novel in the jungles of Mexico. Otherwise it’s all here, even the “abritrary” pondering from Bucher that he’s never killed a woman before. All of it a complete lift/ripoff of previous volumes. It makes so little sense to me. How could a writer just do the same exact novel every single time – and how could the publisher not say anything about it? I guess Pinnacle just didn’t question it, as the series clearly sold enough to keep running through the ‘70s. Maybe Pinnacle figured their readers didn’t notice. But at this point I’d say that I like Death Merchant better than The Butcher. Hell, so far as Pinnacle publications go, I think I’d even say I like The Destroyer better, and that series bugs the hell out of me. 

About the only new thing this time is the cover art; gone are the sketch-like illustrations that previously graced the covers, replaced by staged photos. There was a photo cover on the second volume, but this new direction is a different design…and it must not have gone over well, as it only lasted a few volumes. I personally liked the sketch covers of the previous volumes; I thought the illustrations of Bucher perfectly captured the character, though I can see how they might have seemed repetitive, with Pinnacle concerned that readers might not be able to tell volumes apart. Hey, that just occurred to me – the covers of The Butcher were just as identical as the plots! But anyway, these photo covers are nice if for no other reason than that many years later they’d lead Zwolf to write, “Some of these books had a picture of a real guy on the cover instead of artwork.  Wonder what that guy's doing now.  Probably sitting in some nursing home telling people ‘I used to be the Butcher!’” For years and years now that line has popped into my head at the oddest of times and made me laugh. 

My favorite part of this series is always the opening, with Bucher being stalked by goons. It always gives the impression that James Dockery’s Syndicate is made up of inhuman freaks: they usually have “lizardlike tongues” and some physical abnormality, and of course they get off on killing people. The two this time aren’t as memorable as previous ones, but another notable thing about Killer’s Cargo is that for once Bucher goes up mostly against Syndicate freaks this time. Usually we just see them in the opening, and then Bucher will go off on his assignment. Bucher only kills a few people this volume, but all of his victims are Syndicate torpedos, all of them with either some physical deformity or some weird sexual kink, like Pierre, the guy who enjoys strangling women for a full hour. And as ever Bucher is familiar with all these guys from his past as a Syndicate bigwig himself; Dockery has never reconciled how Bucher was able to deal with these mutant freaks back in the day. Even though he too was a crook, it would appear that Bucher was always essentially good. 

Oh, and another recurring gimmick is that Bucher has a score to settle with one of these guys; in this case it’s Nick Ferroni, established early in the novel as being behind this latest plot. Bucher’s already vowed to kill the guy, given that Ferroni murdered a woman Bucher cared for, many years ago. So what is this latest plot? The usual series Maguffin; the White Hat Director informs Bucher of Professor Bruno von Kessler, a German scientist living in the US who has developed a tranquilizing gas called H(G) A-7. But Kessler and his daughter have gone missing – and it’s yet another recurring gimmick that the guy Bucher will be looking for has a hot daughter. In this case it’s Isabella von Kessler, and she will prove to be the novel’s main female character; she’s a hotstuff brunette Bucher first meets in Europe, though initially he thinks she’s an enemy. As ever Dockery doesn’t do much to exploit his female characters; Isabella’s most memorable physical quality is that “Maverick” is tatooed on her abdomen. 

Prior to Isabella, Bucher spends his time with Yvette, the template-mandatory lovely female White Hat operator Bucher meets in Paris. She’s a blonde of such beauty, with “full, ripe breasts,” that Bucher can’t stop staring at her. But again, Dockery is not one to exploit. Those “ripe breasts” are only infrequently mentioned, and even a seemingly-random bit where Bucher and Yvette visit a nude spa, Dockery does absolutely nothing to bring the sleaziness to life. Mostly Bucher just tells Yvette that the towel he carries with him isn’t just to hide his Walther P-38, but also to hide his, uh, tumescence. I think the adjective “jiggling” might be used here, but that’s about it – what I mean to say is, even though this blonde of gobsmacking beauty with an awesome bod is fully and completely nude as she walks around a Parisian spa, the reader could come into the scene late and not even be aware of it, for Dockery does precious little to exploit the situation. Indeed, one almost gets the impression that the nudity and “girl stuff” has just been added due to editorial pressure. 

And, par for the series template, when Bucher does get down to it with his female colleauges, Dockery leaves the entirety of the event off-page. It’s not with Yvette, though; Bucher’s attracted to her, but as usual is all business and fends off her open interest. Then he takes off for Mexico, leaving Yvette in Paris…and ends up with Isabella. She is Bucher’s comrade during the majority of the text, traveling with him in a Land Rover through the jungles of Mexico. She also soon begins throwing herself at him, even though initially she’s afraid he will “molest” her. But the tomfoolery is not at all described, and again seems like Dockery catering to a requirement. But pretty much the entire second half of Killer’s Cargo is comprised of Bucher and Isabella driving through the jungle, with intermittent action scenes – usually just Bucher quickly and easily dispatching some Syndicate goon who is involved with Ferroni’s plot. 

Another recurring element of The Butcher is the reliance on exposition. It becomes especially grating this time, with Bucher, Isabella, Ferroni, and others baldly expositing; the impression given is that Dockery paints himself into such a corner, with his endless spiral of plots, counterplots, and reversals, that his characters have to exposit in order to make sense of it all. So that’s true here, with Bucher working his way through a variety of underworld thugs who give him a progressive breakdown of the plot. And of course along the way Bucher will find out someone else is really behind it all, someone with a goofy code name; this time it’s the mysterious “Number One.” The veteran reader of the series will already know where this is headed when Bucher demands “Who is he?” when grilling some thugs on Number One’s identity, and the thugs look confused…the veteran Butcher reader, of course, will deduce from this that Number One isn’t a “he” at all. Plus, Bucher always ends up taking on a female villain, even though the series reset at the start of each volume causes him to forget this. 

No spoilers, but this volume does detour from the template in that Bucher does not kill that female villain; another character does, in ghoulish fashion, strapping her to a torture chair with an iron collar. But yes, that part of the template is in place – the torture chamber-set finale. Speaking of female characters, poor Isabella gets raped by a few Syndicate thugs in the last quarter, the event occurring off-page…and happening, of course, because Bucher’s left Isabella by herself. Every time Bucher leaves a female acquaintance she suffers miserably, but again the series reset causes Bucher to forget this. Well anyway, Bucher’s attempt at consoling Isabella comes off as unintentionally humorous in our #metoo era, given how unfeeling it is: “Don’t think about it and it’ll go away. You’ll forget about it time.” When Isabella starts to cry over the situation, Bucher scolds her, “You’re not the first woman ever to be forced.” To which Isabella responds, “Damn other women!...Do you know the definition of gangbang?” 

Compared to this sort of insanity, the climax itself is almost forgettable. As mentioned it features a villainous female character choked to death by an iron collar, and then another of the villains, crazed by the H(G) A-7 gas, trying to go after Bucher. But at this point my enthusiasm for the whole thing was at a complete nadir. Even the recurring final line (“The bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth”) did little to flag my spirits. I felt that I’d read this same sequence, or at least a variation of it, several times already. Perhaps Dockery’s intent was that the reader would feel as benumbed as Bucher by this Groundhog Day-esque repetition of events, volume after volume, but for me personally it made me question if I should wait even longer between volumes. At this point the repetition is just getting old.

Thursday, August 20, 2020

The Butcher #9: Sealed With Blood


The Butcher #9: Sealed With Blood, by Stuart Jason
November, 1973  Pinnacle Books

The most interesting thing about this volume of The Butcher is that it clearly wasn’t written by usual series author James Dockery; nor was it written by Lee Floren, who turned in the next volume. This unknown writer seems to have been briefed on the series, but turned in his (or her) own take on it. Unfortunately, this new take results in a middling, boring installment in which hero Bucher comes off more like a government flunkey than the terse badass of the Dockery books.

At any rate I can attest from the get-go that this is not Dockery. For one, the narrative style is completely different. For another, Dockery’s usual repetitive plot is not here – though, curiously, this ghostwriter has retained Dockery’s penchant for setting tales in the Middle East. Otherwise, the usual Dockery flourishes are absent: no opening sequence with Bucher gunning down a pair of Syndicate mutants, no obligatory bit in which Bucher is jailed over his illegal silencer and then freed by a phone call from some local politician, no outrageous plot change in the second half of the book. And no “bitter taste of defeat” as the last line of the book. And it’s not Floren, either; it’s been a few years since I read his installment, but as I recall Floren was prone to referring to Bucher as “Butcher” in the narrative – something Dockery never does in the narrative, only in the dialog – and also there was more action in Floren’s book than there is in this one. And also Bucher didn’t come off like a bureaucrat in Floren’s installment, as he does here.

I almost get the impression this poor writer was given a half-assed overview by Script Associates, the outfit behind the series:

“His name’s Bucher, he was known as the Butcher when he was in the Mafia, and now he goes by Iceman and he works for the government. Sometimes his capers take him to the Middle East.” 

“Okay…does he work for any specific governmental agency?”

“You can just say ‘the government.’”

“Does he use any particular gadgets, like a special gun he favors or anything?”

“Uh…nah.”

And from there the poor bastard just winged it, coming up with his own team that Bucher works with, humorously enough presenting them without any background, as if we’ve encountered all of them before. In particular there’s Stanton, Bucher’s 27 year-old “Government” contact, who so far as this volume goes has enjoyed a long working relationship with Bucher…not that we’ve ever heard of the guy before. In a way I appreciated this ghostwriter’s brazen disregard for the fact that eight volumes preceded this one. That is, if the dude even knew there were volumes previous to his; as I say, I think he got a half-assed series overview. But anyway Stanton only ever appears via phone calls with Bucher, setting him up with info, orders, equipment, and partners.

That last regard is one of the bigger changes from the Dockery installments; here Bucher is always being partnered up with a team of “government” men. This would be fine, save for the curious element that he’s always explaining himself to them. I kid you not. Bucher, practically a monosyllabic glacier in Dockery’s books, runs at the mouth constantly in Sealed With Blood; even in shootouts with mobsters he has to explain to his men why he wants them to take up certain positions, or even why he wants to go after the bad guys in the first place. It’s the most extreme emasculation of a series protagonist since Richard Blade #9. I mean Bucher even declares – not just once but a couple times – that he values his life and wants to keep living and all this other jazz. While such sentiments are of course understandable, voicing them goes completely against the grain of the terse bad-assery Dockery presented in the previous volumes.

We know something’s up from the first pages, which concern a bunch of one-off “Organization” bigwigs discussing Bucher, and how to do away with him. There’s also mention of some business in the Middle East. From there to Bucher…not being shadowed by a pair of freaks, but simply snooping around an airport in New York. The muddy plot has something to do with farm cargo to Israel being used to transfer something of vital interest to the Mafia. Some shady types are working on the cargo and Bucher’s ordered by them to leave. He’s jumped by some thug, but turns the tables and beats the guy up…then talks him into taking a ride in a taxi so he can tell Bucher what’s going on(!?). It gets even more WTF?! when Bucher gets in a conversation about Manhattan traffic with the cabbie, all while secretly holding a gun on his captive.

Oh, and that’s another funny element: Bucher’s pistol is only ever referred to as “gun.” Actually, all of the weapons throughout the book are just “guns,” with no specific make or models given, save for an arbitrary part where Bucher reckons that a gun being trained on him is “foreign.” So clearly firearms are not a speciality of this particular ghostwriter. Nor is plotting; it takes a good forty or fifty pages for us to even find out why Bucher’s looking into this “cargo for Israel” scheme. Hell if I’m not mistaken, we’re not even told the opening action is in New York until the sequence is almost over. It’s all very generic and half-baked, with lazy detailing and plotting.

Eventually it turns out that gold and weapons are hidden in the cargo. Bucher’s not the brightest, though – after the opening bit, where he makes off with the beaten thug (who is killed in a drive-by shooting immediately thereafter), Bucher realizes that there might’ve been a bomb on the cargo plane, which meanwhile has already taken off. This folks makes for some of the most lame “suspense” I’ve ever encountered in an action novel; Bucher calls Stanton, our first taste of the incessant explaining Bucher has to provide the younger man so far as his reasoning and logic go, and begs for the cargo plane to be turned back around so the cargo can be checked for a bomb. Stanton’s like, let me get back to you. Then calls back and he’s like, nope, we lost contact with the plane. And this goes on for pages…only to eventually turn out that the plane had a minor electrical gaffe or something and the flight’s fine, and meanwhile it’s already halfway to the destination so let’s just let it keep on going. Oh and Bucher, why don’t you head on over to Israel yourself?

Seriously, our hero is bossed around relentlessly in this one, even by the one-off government agents who make up his team, from Waltstrom, who gets in constant arguments/discussions with Bucher, to Hamid, who is apparently new to the team or something. Action is infrequent, and not very gripping. Bucher and team get in a shootout in a building with some thugs in New York, and even here Bucher gets in intermittent arguments with his cronies. Violence is minimal, and there’s a curious focus on Bucher’s team members getting shot, Bucher fretting over them, and then Bucher later being informed that so and so will make it, after all. Actually “fretting” sums up Bucher’s entire demeanor in this installment; it’s like the real Bucher took a bit of a vacation and hoped no one would notice a stand-in had taken his place.

As noted the finale tries to retain the vibe of Dockery with the action occurring in the deserts of the Middle East; Bucher and his team get in intermittent firefights with Bedouins, who are being used to transport the weapons and gold smuggled in on the cargo planes. The only female character appears here: Aza, a hotstuff dancer who has worked undercover for one of Bucher’s government dudes before. Another example of this author’s lack of plotting skills, Aza contributes nothing to the tale, save for an arbitrary part where Bucher dreams that he’s about to have sex with her. Yes, seriously. In the last pages he finds her in the confidence of the Bedouin leader, meaning that not only is Aza a traitor but that she’s set Bucher and team up to be killed. But curiously Bucher is mostly okay with this, and basically sends Aza off with a stern talking to.

Honestly though, Sealed With Blood is a passable installment, having nothing in common with earlier or later volumes – unless this unknown contract writer turned in any others. No idea who it was, though early on I wondered if it might be our old pal Paul Hofrichter, particularly given the arbitrary discussions that occur throughout the novel. But there’s more action in Sealed With Blood than the typical Hofrichter book. Whoever the writer was, hopefully this will be the last we see of him (or her!) and this emasculated version of Bucher.

Thursday, September 19, 2019

The Butcher #8: Fire Bomb


The Butcher #8: Fire Bomb, by Stuart Jason
October, 1973  Pinnacle Books

This time I’ll try skip my usual belabored overview of how this volume of The Butcher sticks to the same repetitive theme as the previous installments, with only the most minor of variations. Instead I’ll just bluntly say that at this point James “Stuart Jason” Dockery’s series is becoming almost a chore to read, with each volume coming off like a lazy rewrite of one that came before.

So we open, as always, with Bucher in some unstated city, being trailed by a pair of Syndicate goons out for the bounty on his head. These parts are always my favorite in the series, but Dockery doesn’t get as outrageous this time, other than that one of the goons goes by the handle Rum Dum Lagoona, but Bucher knows his real name is Percival Pinkham. Other than that it’s the usual “kill quick or die” from Bucher, who guns both down without breaking a sweat…on to the customary jail scene, followed by the customary “out of jail” scene thanks to some calls behind the scenes. This time we don’t get the customary “illegal for Jesus Christ to own” line about Bucher’s silencer, though.

Bucher’s already on his assigmnet: trying to figure out how big shipments of heroin are getting into the country. As ever it has something to do with a Syndicate bigwig he knew years before, when he too was a Syndicate bigwig. This one’s named Johnny Procetti and his nickname’s “Fireball” because he likes to douse women in gasoline and light ‘em up. And also we get “foreshadowing” that the plot will make its customary left turn midway through; Bucher just happens to see in the paper that some people in Mexico and the Southwest are coming down with radiation burns, and something in the back of his head is alerted by the news, though he ignores it. Of course, this will be brazenly shoehorned into the main plot before novel’s end.

First stop is Reno, where Bucher storms his way into a bar owned by another Syndicate associate of years past. He and Procetti were once pals but now the sleazebag reveals that he has a hit out on Procetti and hasn’t seen him in months. Bucher for some bizarre reason takes off immediately upon learning this, but runs into the “dowdy” hostess he just got fired from the bar, the owner pissed off that she allowed the Butcher to get past security. Her name is Anna Helm and she claims to know where Procetti is, but will only tell Bucher if she can come along: her sister was firebombed by Procetti and Anna wants revenge.

Bucher as ever is all business, even after Anna is revealed to be a smokin’ hot, built babe, whose “dowdiness” was really just a disguise. She claims it was defense against the notoriously-lecherous bar owner. As ever though Dockery does not exploit his female characters in the least; he refers to them in almost a romantic poetry vibe, with little of the “upthrusting” or “curvy” or even “jiggling” that this genre demands. And while Bucher is gobsmacked by this beauty to the point he doesn’t even realize it’s the same Anna Helm he agreed to bring along, he promptly gets back to worrying over the case, with absolutely zero thought on how to get her into bed posthaste.

The trip to Mexico is over in a few pages, only lasting long enough for Bucher to run into a quartet of infamous Syndicate hitmen who are humorously built up as being the most dangerous, vile group of killers in history – and then are casually dispatched by Bucher in just a few sentences. More importantly, here Bucher briefly runs into Blood Red Sal, an old Syndicate flame of his whose nickname comes from her penchant for eating raw meat to preserve her beauty. This bit goes nowhere other than for Sal to inform Bucher that Procetti is likely in Iraq – so in other words, once again Bucher is headed for the Middle East.

Here in Baghdad Bucher gets wind of the infamous Hashashin, aka those favorites of pulp writers everywhere – the mystical order of hash-lovin’ assassins who in Medieval times were sent out by the Old Man of the Mountain. Well, they’re back in business, and an always-masked personage dubbed “Ibn Wahid” is their mysterious leader. Bucher learns all about it thanks to Karamene, hotstuff mistress of disguise who, along with her brother, operates for White Hat here in Baghdad. Once again Karamene is described in terms having more to do with grace and beauty, and Bucher finds himself falling for her, to the point where he thinks he might be in love. Whoever guesses what happens to Karamene wins a no-prize.

Meanwhile Bucher does believe it or not get laid; Anna Helm has been throwing herself at him relentlessly, and Bucher finally gives in…and, as ever, the incident happens entirely off page. This is bad enough, but what’s worse is the lazy plotting Dockery presents us with; shortly after this Bucher remembers that Karamene had translated a message from White Hat for him – Bucher just put the note in his pocket and forgot all about it. Well, he remembers finally, reads it…and this letter he’s had all along in his friggin’ pocket tells him who Ibn Wahid is, what the plan is, and etc! And if he’d read the note a few chapters before certain characters would still be alive.

What’s crazy is Dockery is a fine writer, at least in his dialog and bizarre characters. But man he needed some help with plotting. Or who knows, maybe The Butcher was intended as a satire, one played so dead straight that no one noticed? Even if that’s so, the dude could’ve at least come up with something new each volume. As it is, Fire Bomb is nearly a direct ripoff of  #4: Blood Debt, even down to the “surprise” reveal of the main villain’s identity (and gender) – someone Bucher has become “close” to. But then, Bucher already knows who Ibn Wahid thanks to that note, thus the removal of the villain’s mask isn’t a shock to him. The strangest thing is that it’s mentioned here that Bucher’s never killed a woman, even though he did way back in #3: Keepers Of Death, where we were told it was the first one he’d ever killed.

I was really digging this series when I started it, but now it’s looking more like the later ones by Michael Avallone – of which I’ve only read one so far, #34: The Man From White Hat – might be better. Dockery’s stubborn insistence on sticking to the same damn plot, over and over with only slight variations, is quickly sinking The Butcher. Seriously, if you’ve read one you’ve read them all.

 Here’s the last paragraph:

Then slowly he turned from the scene of violence and death, turned toward the helicopter beside the runway a few yards distant, the weary slump in his shoulders more pronounced and the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

The Butcher #7: Death Race


The Butcher #7: Death Race, by Stuart Jason
July, 1973  Pinnacle Books

My assumption is Harlequin Books briefly took over The Butcher, at least for this one volume, as James “Stuart Jason” Dockery gives us a slow-moving yarn in which usually-gruff Bucher falls in love with a lovely young Eskimo gal, spends lots and lots of time pondering his feelings, and ultimately decides to quit White Hat and live here in Alaska happily ever after. At the very least, Dockery can be credited for finally straying outside the rigid template he has followed for the preceding six volumes.

I’ll skip my usual belabored rundown of the purgatory-esque sequence of events Bucher experiences in each and every volume: let it only be said that yes, the novel opens with him being tailed by two superdeformed Syndicate goons who knew him back in the day, and yes, Bucher makes short work of them. After which he is, once again, bailed out of jail by a slackjawed local yokel cop who can’t believe this grim-faced killer has such governmental clout. From there to the assignment briefing with the aged Director of White Hat, who has it that the Dewline defense system on the US-Canada border has been compromised.

In yet another similarity to a previous volume, duplicates of the thoroughly-vetted defense personnel are apparently being put in place by a mastermind (or “The Snake,” as Bucher eventually begins to think of him, apropos of nothing). Due to a random accident one of the dupes was outed, and now the Director is frantic that all of the remote Dewline outposts, each manned by one person, have been compromised by lookalikes. But as usual there’s nothing to go on, no leads to track. All White Hat has is a letter the sister of one of the personnel sent to the President, complaining that her brother was acting strange lately, probably due to all the pressure running his outpost. The Director suspects that her brother is one of the dupes.

Bucher flies to Alaska to investigate. It’s page-filling of the most egregious kind as we’re informed of all sorts of “life in Alaska” bullshit. I experienced a bad flashback to the similar page-filling “life among the Eskimos” stuff in John Eagle Expeditor #7. Dockery pulled similar stunts in previous books, usually with shoehorned detail about the Middle East or Egypt or whatever, so this time it’s at least a change of scenery. But it does go on and on, with zero in the way of action. It gets worse when Bucher meets Sonja Rostov, the sister who wrote that letter to the president about her brother – and it’s love at first sight.

The Butcher gets all lovey-dovey as our hard-assed hero finds himself acting like a smitten fool around Sonja. We’re informed she’s not classically beautiful, but appropriately hot, with a jawdropping but petite body. More importantly, there is a “primitive” look about her – she makes her appearance draped in animal skins and wielding a Bowie knife – and gradually Bucher understands that the two are very alike. Soon enough she’s giving him a leather band that symbolically binds them as mates(!). There follows lots of crap seemingly lifted from a RomCom as Bucher relaxes in a steam bath, shocked when Sonja and a female friend happen to see him nude, Bucher embarrassed and getting tongue-tied and etc, and you just wonder to yourself, “When, Lord, when will Bucher start killing people again??”

After an extra-long haul some action presents itself: Sonja is being hassled by two locals, and after an interminable sequence of setting the situation up they arrive in the village. Bucher goes out to confront them, first shooting their dog as a sign of his bad-assery. But other than this it’s anticlimactic as all get-out; Bucher whips out his Walther, and it’s “koosh-koosh,” goodbye both tough guys. We’re back to the romance stuff…and by the way, as ever Dockery is reluctant to provide any explicit material. About all we get is Sonja wrapping her arms around her stomach and murmuring how she feels she’s been “wifed” good and proper. And meanwhile Bucher has decided that this is his last job, he’s going to quit White Hat, stay here in Alaska, and get married.

But Dockery hasn’t forgotten the other mainstay of his series template: the mission Bucher’s been sent here on abruptly changes. Ostensibly he’s here in this backwoods Alaskan village waiting for Sonja’s brother to arrive; White Hat arranged for Rostov to be sent home on a temporary leave of absence, with the idea that Bucher would be waiting here for him and figure out if he’s the real thing or a dupe. Sonja for her part is certain the man she saw a few months ago was not her brother, which is why she wrote that letter. Okay, so we’re waiting for all this to happen. Then the Director swings into town and reveals that Sonja’s brother is not coming, and also it was all a mistake and there really were no “dupes” as such, just personnel who were pretending to be dupes, as part of a diversionary meaure to distract attention from the real plot of the mastermind behind all this!!!

And who is the mastermind? In some of Dockery’s lazier plotting, Bucher early on just happens to see an old photo of some village schoolkids, and one of them has a hideous birthmark on his face. Identical to a Chinese doctor Bucher once knew named Wu who was employed by the Syndicate but was finally retired due to the fact that he liked to strap people up and feed them to his trained dogs. Well guess what, folks. Wu is, believe it or not, the mastermind behind the Dewline plot!! The Director reveals as much, and also that Wu’s real plot appears to be the unleashing of an army of saboteurs into the US.

As if waving a big middle finger at his readers, Dockery then has the big climactic action scene occur off-page; the Director reveals that a team of Marines are right now converging on Wu’s hideout! Indeed, more priority is put on the “big revelation” that the Director’s real name is Sam White; he comments that he always wondered why Bucher never asked him what his real name was(!). So now Bucher’s job is to voyage out into the Alaskan wild and get the list of saboteurs from Wu’s training base, which is of course nearby, him being a hometown boy and all. Bucher will be assisted by an Amazonian White Hat agent named Olga. Sonja of course manages to bully her way into going along on what Bucher vows will be his last mission – he’s already tendered his resignation to the Director.

Now, anyone who even harbors a suspicion that Sonja might make it through Death Race alive is in serious danger of flunking Men’s Adventure 101 (and there is no remedial class!). As Marty McKee succinctly put it, “It comes as no surprise that Sonja doesn’t live to the end of the book.” So of course, she’s dead before the last page. But let’s take a moment to dwell on her murder, which Dockery delivers as expected, but in such a half-assed manner that I had to laugh at his bravado. I mean, Bucher has lost lady loves in previous volumes; it’s part of the template. But this time, we’re led to believe, it’s much different – he plans to marry Sonja, he plans to quit White Hat for her. Yet when Sonja’s assassinated by a sniper, just a few pages before the end of the book, we’re never informed who shot her!

Bucher’s kissing her goodbye, about to make his final assault on Wu’s lair, and Sonja’s shot at that moment. Bucher watches in a daze as she falls, dead…and then the next chapter has him storming in upon Wu, who’s in the midst of feeding a fresh victim to his dogs. Wu is shocked that Bucher is even here; the sadist has so descended into full-blown madness that he’s not even aware his main base has been attacked. Plus he hasn’t seen Bucher since his Syndicate days. We’re informed that Bucher killed off Wu’s two sole security guards on his way in, so that would mean it wasn’t either of them who shot Sonja – not only were they guarding the boss, but the boss wasn’t even aware Bucher was around! So it wasn’t Wu or any of his men who killed Sonja.

So then…who the hell was it? My guess is it must’ve been White Hat itself. In fact it’s the only possibility. The Director is initially startled that Bucher intends to quit, then brushes it off with a smile and something to the effect that he loves how Bucher is a man of his convictions and could make such a life-changing decision so quickly. In reality though, “Iceman” would be too valuable an agent to lose, so clearly Sonja Rostov must die. The more I think of it, I’m sure this was Dockery’s intention. Otherwise no info is given on who killed Sonja, and I’m betting no mention will be made of her in the next novel, which will see the usual “game reset” taking place.

But anyway as mentioned Wu, when we finally meet him, is about to feed an old Eskimo man to his dogs. And it still drives me nuts that Dockery creates these crazy, disgusting villains and never properly exploits them. I mean, Wu has two brains, one of them on his face, and he gets his jollies tying people up and setting his dogs loose on them! But as with all the other main villains in the series, Wu stays off-page for the duration, only showing up right before the very end – and only then to meet his expected fate: becoming dog food. At least Dockery goes full-bore with the graphic violence here, with Bucher feeling like he’s about to puke as he watches. Not that he stops watching it.

Here’s the last paragraph:

Bucher stared grimly at the grisly scene for a long half minute, then turned from it and headed out of the cave toward the cabin, the bitter-sour taste of galling defeat strong in his mouth.

On an unrelated note, only one post next week – it’ll be up on Wednesday.

Monday, January 29, 2018

The Butcher #6: Kill Time


The Butcher #6: Kill Time, by Stuart Jason
July, 1973  Pinnacle Books

The sixth volume of The Butcher follows the same template as the previous five, once again courtesy James “Stuart Jason” Dockery, whose bizarre writing style is impossible to miss. I’d love to know more about this guy, but information seems less than scant. I also wish he’d been a bit more experimental in his Butcher manuscripts instead of turning in the same story, again and again.

This one offers a few new quirks: for one, we learn in a prologue the history of our godlike hero, Bucher, nee “the Butcher,” and currently “Iceman” for the top-secret intelligence agency White Hat. He was deposited as a newborn on the steps outside a church in Knoxville; Reverend Isham Green, a roaring drunk, happened to be reading a book on Church notables when the government clerk came by to name the baby, and the book happened to be on the page about Bucher, a famous 16th Century botanist or somesuch. The reverend was too drunk to realize he’d just given one name for the child, and the government clerk was too bored – so “Bucher” it was, and nothing more.

When he was a young boy Bucher ran away from the orphanage and ended up in Chicago, where he befriended the son of Tino Oragio, a kid Bucher’s age who was dying of leukemia and who looked upon Bucher as his brother. Tino Oragio meanwhile was the head of a newly-formed crime syndicate. When the boy died Bucher basically became Tino’s new son, going up in the ranks of the syndicate until he was a bigwig himself. We learn that Tino was gunned down 11 years later, when Bucher was 21, and from there our hero went on to even greater Syndicate heights until he had the famous bout of conscience which resulted in his quitting the Syndicate and eventually becoming an agent for White Hat.

That taken care of, it’s on to the Butcher template as we know it. Bucher’s in New York, on the latest case, and per the norm being hounded by a couple of freakish Syndicate gunners out for the reward on his head. Leading them is Coke Leedoe, a rat-faced ghoul who, in the usual grand guignol-esque vibe of the series, is known for crucifying his victims and flaying off their skin. Dockery actually tries to build up tension here, with Bucher surrounded by six gunners, and wondering if he’ll survive – as if the author thinks those of us who read the previous five volumes don’t understand that Bucher is practically God with a gun.

For once the elderly director of White Hat is on the scene, wielding an EX-M27 experimental machine gun which he doesn’t even use; cagey foreshadowing, as Bucher later uses this very same gun in the climax. Bucher takes out all six gunners before they can even fire, all while the director watches in satisfaction. Strangely, the director insists that Bucher allow the police to arrest him, to avoid more of a mess, so White House can spring him – cue the usual scene of the crusty police flunky getting his mind blown over how he has been ordered to let a notorious criminal like Bucher go scot free. However for once this time we don’t get the “illegal for God to own” bit about Bucher’s silencer.

The director gives Bucher his latest task: to prevent the “Uccidere Ogni” (aka “kill all”) that depraved, sadistic, simian Big Ugo Ugheri is trying to wage between his Syndicate family and the Talaferro family. The mere thought of Ugo makes Bucher have nausea – as usual he knows the guy from his own Syndicate past – and he considers Ugo “the worst of the lot by far.” Anyone who has read any previous volumes knows this is quite a statement. And Ugo truly is a horrific creature, a mass of muscle whose entire body is covered by hair, save for around his eyes; he likes to cage women, make them go insane, and rape them at his whim. But as usual with Dockery, he keeps this monstrous villain off-page until the very end of the book.

Bucher’s job is to find lovely young Theresa Talaferro, who Romeo & Juliet style plans to marry young Mark Ugheri, a union which would end the Uccidere Ogni and unite the families. But Ugo doesn’t want this, and Theresa has disappeared, last seen in familiar Butcher stomping grounds of Atlanta, where she was spotted with immigrants Jose and Francesca Hiacha. Bucher heads there promptly, even thinking back to the events of #1: Kill Quick Or Die and how he broke the local operation of Big Sid Lujac.

Action is infrequent, and follows the usual template: bizarro Syndicate flunkies tail Bucher, try to get the drop on him and collect the bounty, and Bucher summarily disposes of them with his silencered P-38. But Bucher sort of acts the fool in this one, practically falling in love with a woman to the point that his guard, for once, is totally let down. After getting zero info out of Francesca Hiacha, other than seemingly-unconnected info about a leftist anti-American party based out of Guatemala called the Contrados, Bucher ends up running into a young assistant theater director named Gretchen who has a top ten figure (“truly a priceless rarity of her sex”) mixed with a “comically ugly face.” 

Dockery has a grand old time describing how ugly indeed Gretchen is, but she is otherwise lovely and has maintained her schoolgirl crush on Bucher, even keeping a few scrapbooks of his exploits. She insists that Bucher come back to her place to hide out, and as per usual with these stories, Bucher has no leads and thus nothing to do, so he accepts the offer. Also as per usual, Dockery keeps the ensuing sex off-page. Indeed, Dockery is a rarity himself, at least in the world of men’s adventure authors, in that he rarely ever exploits his female characters – there is seldom if ever much salivating detail on “supple breasts” and whatnot, and, at least for me, his material with Bucher’s conquests each volume have almost a clinical feel.

On page 95 we get the expected plot switch – Whte Hat says skip the Ugheri-Talaferro jazz and head to Guatemala, because the big threat now is that Big Ugo got hold of an experimental weaponized fungus, created by Mark Talaferro (who happens to be a biochemist!), and he has sold it to the Contrados (remember them?), who no doubt will use it to destroy the US. Francesca Hiacha informs Bucher that her brother might be involved in this as well, and also if that Bucher goes to Tatzl, Guatemala, headquarters of the Contrados, to watch out for the Kechecotl Indians: notorious headhunters who nonetheless prophecize that a white man will impregnate one of their women with the Kechecotl messiah(!).

So who will be surprised when Bucher, clad in tweed outdoors clothing(!) and armed with C-4 and that EX-M27 gun, runs smack dab into these very same Indians not even an hour outside of Tatzl? But though they surround him, they smile in welcome. Strange shit here, as Bucher meets two captive westerners, each who have been here several years and who consider the place paradise. More goofy but expected stuff: Bucher just so happens to speak ancient Mayan(!) and easily converses with the Indians, who unexpectedly take this as a surefire sign that he is the prophecized one. Meanwhile the native women are described as squat and ugly and Bucher “harbor[s] no inclinations for shagging any of the Kechecotl women.”

Again reflecting on a previous caper – namely, how he found himself in a similar predicament in North Africa with a tribe of warriors in #4: Blood Debt – Bucher repeats history by bluffing his way out of this enforced stud service and putting together a band of warriors. The Indians hate the Contrados, who lurk nearby – but it’s another Dockery fakeout, as when they get there the action’s mostly off-hand as the Contrados are gone, the fungus virus taken with them. And guess where it’s gone? That’s right – back to Atlanta!! Again, it is clear that Bucher is cast in a sort of purgatory, reliving the same events over and over and over – it’s a recurring staple that the climactic events occur in one of the previous locations Bucher visited in his fruitless wanderings. Oh, and the entire Kechecotl subplot is abruptly dropped.

Meanwhile, in yet another recurring element, this volume’s leading lady has appeared as deus ex machina as possible; young Gretchen, who has chartered a plane and come down to Tatzl, due to her love of Bucher. Our hero has more off-page sex with the horrifically ugly but incredibly built babe, only to discover next morning that “Gretchen” is really Theresa Talaferro, who disguised her lovely face with makeup! She professes her love to Bucher, claiming the “Gretchen” scam was a way to avoid her Syndicate family, and also that the marriage to Mark Talaferro was itself a sham, as he plans to marry some Sicilian girl and thus the family war will be averted(!). Despite her young age of 18, she vows to Bucher that she is now “his woman,” like it or not.

The final scene has Bucher staging an assault on the Contrado HQ in Atlanta, where he finally comes face to face with Big Ugo in his room of caged, psychotic beauties – almost a prefigure of TNT #1. The grand guignol vibe continues as Bucher first beats Big Ugo to bloody meat with his brass knuckles, and then the psycho women are accidentally freed, and then they converge on Ugo and eat him. However the biggest shock is this – Theresa Talaferro survives the novel!! I figured it would be a given that she’d turn up in Big Ugo’s lair in the finale, his latest caged victim, but for once Dockery foregoes the usual template and Bucher’s latest bedmate lives through the novel. The last we see of Theresa, she’s in Atlanta and tells Bucher she’ll be waiting for him. We’ll see if she appears or is even mentioned next volume.

I’m on the fence about The Butcher. There’s something I really like about it – the sadistic, whackjob freaks of Dockery’s Syndicate are always fun to read about – but the repetitive nature of the stories kind of sink it. And I always find the stuff with Bucher being hunted more interesting than the latest “spy caper” he’s been sent on. As I’ve mentioned before, what’s most frustrating is that Dockery can write, so you expect more of him when it comes to the plotting. If he’d backed up a bit on the dark comedy and treated it all slightly more seriously, I think he would’ve had the best Pinnacle series of them all. But instead he’s content to basically write the same tale over and over again, which ultimately means that taking long breaks between volumes makes for the best Butcher reading experience.

Here’s the last paragraph:

With no little effort Bucher made himself look over the big room once more then he turned tiredly from the gory scene. Wearily he made his way toward the door through which he had entered, the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

The Butcher #5: Deadly Deal


The Butcher #5: Deadly Deal, by Stuart Jason
January, 1973  Pinnacle Books

At this point, I think I can safely say that each volume of James Dockery’s The Butcher is practically the same book. I’ve detailed the formula elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point for this fifth volume – I’ll just leave it that, if you’ve read the first four books, you’ll know exactly what you’re in for with this fifth one.

I’m too lazy to look it up but I’m almost certain the first chapter of Deadly Deal is a direct lift of the first chapter from the previous volume or another earlier volume – I mean down to the same sentences, with only the names of the one-off Syndicate hitmen being changed. Let it just be said I experienced some serious déjà vu as I read the first chapter of this book. But then, Dockery’s Butcher is built off of a strong template that seldom veers off course.

One new thing this installment is we get lots of references to previous volumes, something not done much before. In particular there are many references to #1: Kill Quick Or Die, the events of which are stated as occurring “about two years ago.” Bucher early in the book goes to Atlanta, where that first volume played out, and meets again with Captain Stokes of the Atlanta Police Department. Throughout Bucher also briefly remembers his past adventures, but despite the sudden focus on continuity, there is still a jarring note – early on we are informed that Bucher has never killed a woman, not even in self defense. However he did this very thing in the climax of #3: Keepers Of Death, even remarking at the time that it was the first time he’d done so. Either Dockery forgot this, or Bucher has suppressed the memory, or perhaps this volume was written earlier, who knows.

But we open with the standard template in effect; Bucher’s in a new city, scoping out leads – the latest White Hat assignment has him seeking out Noma Kiva, a smokin’ hot 29 year-old Pueblo Indian babe who is turning evidence on the Syndicate, claiming they are onto something “more important than money.” Bucher sees Noma’s photo and thinks she is one of the “few truly beautiful” women he’s ever seen. Noma claims she witnessed Number Two Synidcate man Leo Lucho murdering someone in cold blood. Why someone as high-ranking as Lucho would get blood on his own hands is something Bucher puzzles over. Of course it goes without saying that Bucher is familiar with Lucho from his own Syndicate days and has a score to settle with him, etc.

Bucher does the usual – runs around the country on various wild goose chases, killing a few Syndicate flunkies along the way. Bucher kills less than his usual quoata this time, only a handful. They’re the usual superdeformed lot, though. While Lucho himself is fairly normal (other than that he’s soaring on amphetimines when we finally meet him in the last pages), the various torpedoes Bucher encounters are up to the usual series standards, like one of them who gets off on bombing airliners and whose face is like “a large wad of flesh-colored dough.”

Another staple is the “lizardlike tongue” some of these buttonmen have, and Dockery here has not one but two characters with the same feature; indeed, Dockery regurgitates the same material we already read at the beginning of Deadly Deal; midway through the book Bucher goes to Denver, where he experiences the exact same setup as the opening: two Syndicate goons come after him, one of ‘em with that lizardlike tongue, and Bucher blasts both – even calling White Hat to spring him from jail again.

Dockery gives us a bit more info on Bucher this time, but doesn’t elaborate much. In Miami he briefly meets up with a Syndicate cathouse madam named Maria whom Bucher was in love with, ten years before, before he had to “sell” her to a rival mob boss, one who was threatening Maria’s family if Bucher didn’t “give” her to him. Dockery doesn’t do much with this, other than Bucher relating the long story of why he had to sell her; I think this is the most Bucher has talked in the entire series. More interestingly, also in Miami Bucher meets – again too briefly – with Mario Lollo, an old Syndicate bigwig “who raised Bucher from the time he was seven years old.” So practically this guy is Bucher’s dad, but other than a few words about Lucho’s insane schemes, Dockery doesn’t do much with it.

Our author also doesn’t do much with the burning drive Bucher has throughout Deadly Deal. While in Atlanta, he makes passing acquaintance with a “hippie newspapergirl” named Mazie who tries to sell Bucher papers and info, and ends up getting her throat slit by Syndicate goon Studs Joveno. Bucher is hopping mad for Studs’s blood, willing to ignore his own vow to stop all the killing – another recurring staple, that Bucher will only kill those who have “forfeited their place in the human race.” But man, what wasted opportunity. Studs doesn’t even appear in the novel, off-page the entire time – and when he does get his comeuppance, it’s rendered off-page as well! It’s grisly, at least, Bucher using Mario Lollo to get another Syndicate goon to cash in on a deal with Studs – namely, to castrate the sonofabitch.

From Miami Bucher goes to Denver, wasting more time – the guy he’s looking for here is already dead, but as mentioned he runs into two more would-be assassins. Meanwhile White Hat has located Noma Kiva, who is hiding in Taos, New Mexico. Bucher flies himself there and finds her hiding in an adobe hut in the desert; it’s lust at first sight, and Bucher for once doesn’t immediately turn down an offer for sex, though per series standard Dockery keeps it off-page. Now that I think of it, practically everything in Deadly Deal is kept off-page.

One positive thing I have to say about Dockery is he has what I consider the true gift of a pulp writer – he can turn out a couple hundred pages in which pretty much nothing happens, yet it all still moves at a fast clip. Even though Bucher spends the majority of the narrative hopping from one city to the next and “puzzling” over this latest caper, it never really comes off like the wheel-spinning it actually is. One does wish though that Dockery could’ve tightened up his plotting skills and delivered the occasional yarn with a bit more variety or even dramatic impact.

Instead he sort of drifts through the climax. Lucho is in a mine in New Mexico – his USSR-funded plot is to buy out all the platinum in the US, and a group of Russian hardliners called the Doshinkos wil attempt to have the money standard changed from gold to platinum, as Russia has much greater stores of it than gold. Bucher shoos Noma off and flies a helicopter there, teaming up with a redneck sherrif. Then Noma flies into the skirmish with two State Dept reps who have bullied her here, mostly so she can fulfill that other series-template requirement – the woman Bucher loves who is killed. This time Bucher actually cries over her corpse.

Even more sad, his vengeance on Lucho is underwhelming. Another recurring motif is that, at the last moment, Bucher will decide he isn’t going to kill the main villain, after all – Bucher almost always decides he’ll just take him alive and let the courts dispense justice. And without fail, the villian will do something that either forces Bucher to kill him in self-defense, or somehow the villain will cause his own death. As happens here, with a speed-freaking Lucho plunging to his screaming death. 

Something occurred to me about all the repetition in the series; another staple is for Bucher, late in each book, to mourn the violence in his life, the endless tide of death and suffering, and wonder when it will end. Only with Deadly Deal did it hit me that this is likely more dark or at least in-jokey humor from Dockery – the bloody violence in Bucher’s life will never end because he is living the same events over and over again, like some men’s adventure version of Groundhog Day. The names of the players might change each volume, as do the locations, but the essentials are the same, and it’s almost as if Bucher, for his past Syndicate sins, has been cast into a sort of blood-soaked purgatory, damned to relive the same events into eternity – or at least until Michael Avallone takes over the series in 1979. 

Here’s the last paragraph:

Bucher walked to the edge of the drop-shaft and for a long time stood looking down into the hole that so recently had become a grave. And as he stood there, the heavy weariness he had experienced a few minutes ago enveloped him like an invisible shroud. At last he turned, slowly, the bitter-sour taste of defeat in his mouth, and began picking his way through the slag piles toward the direction of the helicopter.

Monday, February 6, 2017

The Butcher #4: Blood Debt


The Butcher #4: Blood Debt, by Stuart Jason
October, 1972  Pinnacle Books

James Dockery must’ve already been getting bored with The Butcher this early in the game, as for the most part Blood Debt is a snoozer, only featuring a bit of the lurid craziness expected of the series. A large portion of the narrative is egregious detail about “life among the desert Arabs,” not to mention a hard-to-swallow subplot that has tough-guy Bucher falling in love(!).

At least it starts off with the template well in place; Bucher’s in Miami, chasing leads on his latest assignment. Someone going by the handle The King of Spades has been bombing businesses in the southern US with miniature torpedoes with atomic warheads. As with every other Butcher opening, we read as Bucher waltzes into town, well aware of the Syndicate creeps out to nail him for the bounty on his head. This opening is the highlight of the book, as Bucher hangs out in a Syndicate-owned dive where the sexy waitresses wear nothing but stockings and high heels.

One of these waitresses is a hotstuff brunette named Lela who happens to be a junior White Hat agent, on her first field assignment. Bucher helps her out and blows away a couple goons who come blasting for him. This leads to the inevitable second part of the series template: Bucher is arrested by the local cops and must be sprung by a local politician, with the local sheriff saying something to the effect of how illegal Bucher’s silencer is. The senator who springs Bucher is accompanied by his ultra-gorgeous blonde niece, none other than mega-famous TV personality Twiti Andovin, who is famous for her awesome bod and sexy on-screen dancing.

Bucher heads to St. Denis, France, on the lame possibility that a former Syndicate acqaintance named Capusini might be working with the King of Spades. Here Bucher is immediately confronted by another gal: Barbe, a French intelligence agent who is half Arabic and who is “ugly,” per Bucher. True to form, he won’t allow her to sleep with him, and Barbe is the first character to openly question Bucher’s strange aversion to sex…perhaps he prefers other men? This only elicits rage from Bucher, but I myself have wondered this.

The St. Denis sequence provides the one and only part in Blood Debt where Dockery gives us the weird stuff we expect of the series: the superdeformed freaks who make up the Syndicate in Dockery’s messed-up world. In one of the very few times he’s caught unawares (but not to worry, as he bullshits his way out), Bucher comes back to his hotel room to find two Syndicate gunmen waiting for him, one of them holding a gun to Barbe’s head, the other “furiously masturbating” on a nearby couch(!). Here Dockery delivers what we expect of him:

Larpy Kazar had fallen face-forward into a fire as a child, long before the present day profficiency of plastic surgery. When the burns at last healed he had no hair, one ear, part of a nose, a lipless pucker of flesh for a mouth and one eye that never closed. He depicted the tangible epitome of a Karlofian nightmare and this, plus personality increments of acid hate, caused most people, in his presence for the first time, to be reminded of an indestructable obscenity.

But these moments are few and far between in Blood Debt. Bucher hurriedly dispenses of both freaks, after making up a bunch of stuff about being sent here by “Mr. Big,” infamous, never-seen leader of the Syndicate. As an indication of how quickly and carelessly Dockery likely wrote the novel, Mr. Big is soon elaborated into a bigger character in the book, despite the fact that Bucher brought him up apropos of nothing. But gradually Dockery will confuse Capusini, the hood these two goons work for, the King of Spades, and Mr. Big.

Eventually though Dockery will forget about all of it and just write egregious, interminable stuff about Bucher hobknobbing with the desert natives near Rabat, Morocco. Like so many other Butcher novels, our hero soon heads to the Middle East, having learned Capusini is operating somewhere in Rabat. Dockery clearly spent some time in this part of the world or was just inordinately interested in it, as each book of his I’ve read features at least some sequence there, and of course we’re often reminded that Bucher is fluent in Arabic (as so many real-life Syndicate gunmen are, no doubt!!) from his time spent there.

As mentioned, Barbe, who goes along to Rabat with Bucher, is half-Arab, and her grandfather is a notorious sheikh. Well friends, I knew I was in for a bad time when the whole sequence opens with Bucher “proving” himself to the Arabs via some ancient tradition of brawn. It has nothing to do with anything and proceeds to spiral out of control. We get lots of stories of desert dwellers and customs and whatnot; the explanation for Bucher’s presence is so the sheikh can get all the locals at his command in Rabat to root out Capusini, but the reality of the situation is just that Dockery has some pages he needs to fill.

And to continue with the half-assed nature of the plotting…none other than Twitty Andovin shows up at the camp! You know, the friggin’ TV star!! Dockery explains it that she’s here in Morocco to scout out locations for a new TV special and to also hire some local dancers. She’s escorted by her sleazy producer. Here Blood Debt gets even worse, as Bucher finds himself falling in love with Twitty, based on nothing more than her looks, a conversation with her, and her super-sexy dancing skills, which she shows off in the buff for the sheikh and his people. I kid you not, several scenes in the book feature Bucher mulling in his tent, wondering why he’s feeling all these strange feelings for Twitty!! There were times I felt like I was reading Casino Royale again.

Dockery at least mixes in some sex, this time. For one a mysterious woman visits Bucher’s tent one night, and the sex is more so literary than hardcore, but we know Bucher had a grand old time. Of course it turns out to be Twitty. To overcome his growing feelings for her, Bucher does the unexpected – has sex with another woman a few pages later. This is sexy junior White Hat agent Lela, who has followed Bucher here to Rabat. We get even less explicit material this time, but Lela does inform Bucher, “I love the way you fornicate.” We also get a return to the Butcher stuff we’re more familiar with as Mr. Big’s top hitman shows up at this very moment, but Bucher is always ready to kill would-be assassins, even when he’s in bed with a girl.

It takes a long time, but we finally escape from the desert life narrative quagmire. Bucher, working with Lena (whose sexing didn’t succeed in making Bucher stop loving Twitty), finally locates Capusini…only for the friggin’ guy to already be dead!! We’re almost at the very end, and the reader’s time has been fully wasted at this point. But Dockery isn’t done. Bucher heads back to the US, where the King of Spades has struck again, even blowing up an orphanage, killing 47 kids. And meanwhile a fuming Bucher sits in his hotel room, reading the daily copies of Rabat’s newspaper which are brought to him by a local news vendor’s kid. Seriously!!

Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a lame spoiler. Bucher, reading that day’s Rabat paper, can’t believe what he’s seen. It’s a photo of Lela’s corpse(!). Last we saw her she was about to fly off with a suddenly-sick Twitty Andovin, who’d come down with some mysterious disease. Well, Bucher puts it all together – and realizes Twitty is the friggin’ King of Spades!! No fooling, Dockery spins out this half-baked yarn within a few pages, that Twitty’s sleazy producer was married to a woman who was really an undercover agent for the Red Chinese(!) and who was aware of a pipeline of missile launchers beneath the ocean. Twitty got this info and was using the warheads to strike various businesses, but went “crazy with power” or somesuch, and the bombed orphanage was a mistake. I’m not making any of this up. A heartbroken Bucher confronts Twitty and leaves her a gun to kill herself with. She does so. The end!

As bad as it was, I still enjoyed Blood Debt more than Deadly Doctor.

Here’s the last paragraph:

He stood there motionless for a long time, still as the dead girl in the room behind him, the flat crack of the little pistol thundering in his ears. Then he turned and walked slowly down the hall, a weary slump in his big shoulders, an acid sting from the gall-bitter taste of defeat strong in his mouth.