Showing posts with label Illusionist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Illusionist. Show all posts

Monday, September 5, 2022

The Illusionist #2: All Of Our Aircraft Are Missing!


The Illusionist #2: All Of Our Aircraft Are Missing!, by John P. Radford
No month stated, 1974  Canyon Books

It’s been seven years since I read the first volume of The Illusionist, and it’s taken me this long to recover from it. As we’ll recall, The Illusionist pretends to be a light-hearted caper series, but in reality it’s nothing but gutbucket sleaze. The sleaze isn’t even the problem; it’s that the sex is thoroughly unpleasant, with author John P. Radford clearly trying to gross out his readers. 

I still don’t know if Radford was a real person or some ghostwriter using a house name. The novel is copyright Canyon Books. The writer certainly appears to be the guy who wrote the first book, and also I have to wonder if he was involved with the Space Race. Series hero Joe Maguire worked on the Apollo Program as an engineer, and Radford peppers the novel with a lot of aeronautical engineering details. What I mean to say is, he seems to know a lot about the subject, and also the setup for the series is that Maguire is out for blood ever since “The Great White Father” (ie Nixon) dropped NASA’s budget, leaving guys like Joe (as Radford refers to him in the narrative) unemployed. This is such an unusual setup that I wonder if Radford himself experienced Joe Maguire’s backstory. 

Radford also gives this installment an aeronautical setup. Joe, in France after making “heavy bread” in the first book’s caper, becomes interested in the nascent Concorde program, and soon devises a way to con his way into more money. The previous book had a setup where Joe and his two henchmen pretended to kidnap some kid, or some such shit, even though the kid was never in danger. So is the case here, with Joe coming up with the idea to make it seem like a bunch of Concorde jets have been hijacked – though it will just be trickery. 

This then is what makes Joe “The Illusionist.” In perhaps the only interesting part of the novel, we learn that Joe was a teen in the Depression and listened to a lot of radio shows and read a lot of pulp. He sees himself as the modern incarnation of his favorite character, The Shadow. He doesn’t go for a disguise or even use any weapons; instead, Joe concocts schemes and then acts as a guy who is merely carrying out a job for a mysterious mastermind. His two helpers, Bob Sidak and George Ross, are unaware that Joe is really the plotter of the cons they work on; Joe just calls them up and says he has a new gig he’s working on for a mysterious employer, and once again Bob and George help out. 

All this though is just window dressing. All Of Our Aircraft Are Missing, like its predecessor, is devoted to the sleaze. Endless pages of hardcore tomfoolery, and let’s not forget Joe is in his mid-40s and looks like Woody Allen. But he’s got a big dick, folks! We can’t forget that. But yes, he’s an ex-NASA engineer who looks like Sol Rosenberg or whatever and he picks up chicks left and right. He spends most of the novel banging June, an American girl here in Paris for stewardess school – specifically, a Concorde stew. June is also casually banging Pierre, an engineer on the Concorde program, and Radford uses the opportunity to saddle the book with lots and lots of exposition about aeronautical engineering. 

Exposition is in fact the name of the game here, and I swear I’ve never read a book where even the sex-dialog is exposition. I mean check it out: 


So it seems clear that John P. Radford is not taking any of this seriously (note the alliterative phrases), and in fact the sex scenes achieve this same vibe throughout the novel. Now last time Radford also tried – and succeeded – in grossing us out. I re-read my review of The Most Happy Con Man and regretted it, because I’d managed to forget the puke-inducing bit where Joe graphically screwed his “dirty whore” girlfriend…literally dirty, and literally a whore, and who never cleaned up after her johns. We don’t quite get to that disgusting level here, but the sex scenes are still so thoroughly unpleasant as to be nauseating. And Radford does try to make us sick – like when Joe finally gives it to June the one way he hasn’t yet (think “backdoor shenanigans”), and she, uh, lets one rip, and Joe “delights” in the “warm anal air.” 

Yeah, and there’s other stuff too, like when Joe visits yet another dirty whore, this one French, and Joe is so digusted with her poor hygiene and her copious body hair that he serves her up “the crowning insult to a French whore” and, uh, “He shit[s] in her bidet.” There’s also a random two-page anatomical lesson on female private parts, and speaking of bidets, there’s another grossout bit where June sits on a bidet after yet another boff with Joe, and Joe looks in the bidet and sees the spewage that has spilled out of her…well anyway, enough of that. 

Oh what the hell; here’s the random two-page anatomical lesson: 



Other than that, the book lacks thrills or excitement. We get lots of page-filling dialog in between the page-filling sex; later in the book it turns into a travelogue across France, with yet more screwing as Joe and June still avidly go at it while seeing the sights. What’s funny is that the novel practically reeks of a condescending attitude; nothing is good enough for Joe Maguire, and one can’t help but see it as a reflection of the author’s personality. And also it’s clear again that the author hates his readers, hates anyone who would even want to read sleaze like this, so he goes all-out to ridicule them by serving up the most unpleasant filth his perverted mind can conceive. 

As for the con, it takes forever to get underay, same as the previous book. And it’s lame; Joe and his two comrades manage to fool various airlines and airports into believing some Concordes have disappeared, but it’s all some trickery via radar. By novel’s end Joe’s once again into some “heavy bread,” and also June and Pierre get married – which is real weird because June spends almost the entire novel screwing Joe. But whatever, who cares. 

The craziest thing is that there were two more volumes of The Illusionist. I’ve only got the third one – the fourth one appears to be impossible to find – and I’m in absolutely no hurry to read it. It’s gonna take me another seven years to get over this one.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

The Illusionist #1: The Most Happy Con Man


The Illusionist #1: The Most Happy Con Man, by John P. Radford
No month stated, 1974  Canyon Books

Published by Canyon Books, the same outfit that brought out the first few volumes of the Hitman series before they went out of business, The Illusionist ran for four volumes and, judging from the covers, you’d assume this series was a light-hearted caper sort of thing.

My friends, do not be deceived. The Illusionist is actually sleaze – unrepentant sleaze at that. More typical of the sort of thing published by sleaze purveyors like Bee-Line or Midwood, the series is straight-up porn. And like most of those old sleaze books it’s porn of the most unerotic kind, with pages and pages and pages of sex scenes with little steam, just an endless barrage of anatomical terminology. Worse yet, “John P. Radford” is determined to gross us out; some of the material here is almost puke-inducing.

But I perservered and read the damn thing, which let me tell you was not a pleasant experience. What makes it all the stranger is that Radford, who I’m betting was just a sleaze writer using yet another pseudonym (the book’s copyright Canyon), can actually write, with some goofy lines and bursts of philosophy. But for all that his characters speak in the most wooden, expository dialog, and his talent for “plotting” leaves much to be desired. He’s also not much concerned with forward momentum, with the story just sort of drifting along for 190 pages until the big caper plays out in the last fifteen; but then, this is just a sleaze novel, and the focus is more so on the rampant sex scenes.

Our hero as such is Joe Maguire, 45-year-old former engineer who served as an executive on the Apollo space program throughout the 1960s and was instrumental in getting man on the moon. Joe was once ultra-wealthy and had a wife and children. But then Nixon came into office and it all went to hell. This book bashes Nixon so frequently that I started to suspect that the author himself had been wronged by the man in some way. Anyway, Nixon fired everyone on the Apollo staff and Joe’s vast fortunes quickly plunged. Soon enough his wife left him (as for the kids, the author doesn’t really say what happened to them).

Now Joe is penniless, so down and out that he’s forced to live with a “dirty whore” named Midge. Staying in a dank fleabag apartment in Hollywood, Joe, who we’re informed looks like “an aging Woody Allen” with his scrawny frame, short height, balding head, and glasses, is basically a kept man, there to serve streetwalker Midge. Here’s the gross stuff. Midge, my friends, refuses to bathe – or to clean herself in any other way. Radford shows us what we’re in store for in the first few pages of the novel, as Midge comes home late at night after her daily whoring duties and demands Joe make his daily payment to her: in order to stay in the apartment, Joe must have sex with Midge every night.

Here we go – and grab your barf bag. I mentioned Midge never bathes. Well, she doesn’t clean up at all. And she’s just been with like thirty guys. And that’s just tonight. So now Joe must do his duty after all these other dudes have been, uh, filling the hole, and the stuff Radford writes here is so tasteless as to be beyond belief. The author spares no details. Did I mention that Joe has a ten-inch dong?? This causes most of the gross-out issues, particularly given those aformentioned details on how Midge never cleans up after screwing her johns. Puke city, people. Seriously! And afterwards we’re duly informed how Joe cleans himself off with vodka and hard soap scrubbing and etc.

So as a porn novel, we’re already off to a bad start, as this is easily the most disgusting “sex scene” I’ve ever read. But our author’s just getting started. The next night Joe’s at his favorite bar and runs into Esther, hot young tramp who once worked as his maid. Esther informs Joe that she’s long desired to have sex with him and practically demands they go back to a hotel room, which she’ll pay for. On and on this one goes, with the gal gorging on Joe’s humongous dong, lots of detail on Esther’s private areas, and again with the gross-out material as we’re informed how hairy she is down there, both on the front and in the rear….!

Reading The Most Happy Con Man, you soon assume that “John P. Radford” hated both the reader and himself, and was determined to just offend everyone. But somehow after the pages-long bangings we get the beginnings of a plot. Esther mentions she’s now a maid for the wealthy Richards family. They have more money than they know what to do with. But the issue now is, due to a photo story about their lavish home in the L.A. papers, they’ve made themselves easy prey for criminals, in particular a recent kidnapping threat on their young daughter, Karen.

It turns out the would-be kidnapper was some young black kid in Watts, one who had no clue what he was doing. As Esther happily goes over all the things the kid did wrong (giving the Richards family too long to collect too small a ransom), Joe thinks to himself how he could’ve done a better job. He’s already been thinking of getting into crime, but not in a way that would harm anyone. Indeed, he doesn’t even want to do actual crime but only the illusion of a crime having been done; in Joe’s mind, this would be the perfect criminal, a person who only pulls off things that seem to have been crimes but in reality weren’t.

Meanwhile Joe has run into an old Apollo program pal of his (at the same damn bar – the author could give a shit about coincidence): Bob Sidak, an electronics wizard who further fuels Joe’s interest in crime by relaying the long story of how he built this gizmo that made long-distance calls for free on Ma Bell’s dime. And yet it wasn’t illegal at the time due to the wording of Bell’s usage laws.  This makes Joe think again of how a smart criminal could get around vague laws.  Bob’s now buds with a salesman named George Harris, who proclaims himself an “old con man,” and has further tales of the sort-of criminal cons he has run in the past.  Joe begins to hatch a scheme.

Inspired by “his favorite television program,” Mission: Impossible, Joe decides to put together his own team of caper specialists. Only his team will be devoted to thievery. (Despite what the back cover proclaims, Joe Maguire is not a “Robin Hood, 1974;” he steals for his own good and doesn’t give the loot to the needy or whatever.) Meanwhile, lots more screwing occurs. In true sleaze novel fashion it’s as arbitrary as can be, from more bouts with Esther to even a completely-arbitrary part where Joe’s driving around one night and comes upon a young hippie girl, who gets in the car, announces she’s horny from a “pot party,” and begs Joe to pull in to the nearest parking lot so she can screw him right there in the car.

The book runs 190 pages and around 65% of it is porn, but as mentioned it’s the bad kind of porn that’s just explicitly-detailed screwing, with no emotion or anything behind it, which as I’ve said before would be fine if we were talking about a porn movie. But when it comes to a novel you need a bit more, otherwise it just comes off as junk, as is the case here. But on it goes, Radford giving us incredible detailings of Joe’s explorations of the hippie girl’s nether regions, with the expected gross-out stuff of how she cleans herself afterwards by peeing in the parking lot. Oh and as double bang for your buck, this scene, between the screwing, features more expository dialog in which Nixon is again thoroughly bashed.

Well anyway, Joe has decided he’s going to become “The Illusionist.” He’s going to run a crime caper in which he won’t even commit a crime. He brings in Bob and George, and here’s one interesting thing Radford delivers – Joe even runs a con on them. Telling them he’s been hired to perform a prank on a mega-wealthy dude, Joe lies to his buddies, making them think it’s a simple job for which they’ll each get a thousand bucks. What Joe really intends to do is fake the kidnapping of young Karen Richards and demand a ransom of a quarter million dollars.

We get lots of material of how thoroughly Joe plans this. We’re informed how he was once known for his project management skills, and now will use the same legendary brilliance that he used to get a man on the moon to pull off this caper. But ultimately it’s stupidly simple, as he just uses the specialities of other people. If it wasn’t for his pal Bob’s wizardry with phone lines or knack for impersonations, “The Illusionist” wouldn’t be able to run a con in the first place. As for salesman George, his simple job has him fidning out which banks the Richards family uses.

As mentioned it all plays out in the final fifteen or so pages. Joe’s ruse has him calling Karen’s private school to inform them her mother has had a stroke, and a cab’s being sent for the girl. When the school calls the Richards home to confirm, Bob breaks into the line and mimicks the servant’s voice, confirming the false story. Joe then calls Mr. Richards and demands payment in five minutes, secretly waiting there in the bank lobby and watching him come in and hurriedly collect. The money’s dropped in a car driven by George. Meanwhile, young Karen Richards is taking a mere cab ribe home – something her parents only discover after they’ve forked over a $250,000 for a kidnapping that never happened.

Leaving money for “dirty old slut” Midge (along with a “six dollar douching kit”) and his accomplices Bob and George, Joe takes the vast remainder of his loot and absconds to France, where we’re informed he’s already hooked up with “a Paris whore.” We leave the Illusionist wealthy and excited to continue his life in pseudo-crime, but god give us the strength to read about it. And yet, given that I have the next two volumes, someday I probably will…