Showing posts with label Inquisitor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Inquisitor. Show all posts

Thursday, February 7, 2019

The Inquisitor #6: Last Rites For The Vulture


The Inquisitor #6: Last Rites For The Vulture, by Simon Quinn
May, 1975  Dell Books

Well, I liked this sixth and final volume of The Inquisitor slightly more than the the third volume. Apologies to fans of this series, but I have to conclude that I just don’t dig it. It’s not the fault of Martin “Simon Quinn” Cruz Smith, as he delivers exactly what the label on the spine promises – a “Mystery” novel. That’s all this series is, even though it was packaged and sold (and thus tagged here on the blog) as men’s adventure.

Despite the salacious copy on the first page preview and the back cover, there’s nothing in Last Rites For The Vulture that would be out of place in a TV movie of the era. If anything this one’s even slower-paced than Nuplex Red, and throughout Smith is content to dwell on scene-setting and dialog. As for the elements expected of the genre – sex and violence – he is not concerned with them at all. In many ways this series is similar to another slow-burn “men’s adventure series,” Dakota, though thankfully not as sleep-inducing. (But then how could it be?) 

The novel opens with a nicely-written but ultimately digressive scene in which a young pair of backpacking tourists in Spello, a village in Umbria, Italy, turn out to be traveling assassins. They use a contraption of their own invention to spray a poison in the face of an 80-year old monk – a monk who, strangely enough, seems quite able of handling himself against two opponents. But they spray him regardless and he dies of a heart attack, one that will seem to be natural in the ensuing autopsy. When series protagonist Francis Xavier Killy enters the fray, it’s weeks later and he’s here with his boss Cella, both of them come to Spello to see if the murdered monk, Brother Pietro, is worthy of sainthood. If you’re looking for a peek into the machinations of the Chuch, then this is the series for you.

If you’re looking for action and sex, it’s not. It’s very much in the mystery mold as Killy, posing as a priest, investigates Spello and Pietro’s past at the behest of Cella. Smith excels in the description of Spello, bringing to life its hardscrabble peasants and shifty town leaders who yearn for Brother Pietro’s sainthood. Though, in a nice moment that undercuts the sap, Cello eventually reveals that Spello is dying while a nearby city is thriving, and why? Because that other city has its own saint. It seems that having a town saint is a tremendous boost for tourism.

Meanwhile Killy has discovered that Brother Pietro’s heart attack might not’ve been as natural as believed. Here Cella also reveals another big tidbit – that Pietro was at one time known as “The Vulture,” and he was an ally of Al Capone who ran whores and whatnot. He was extradited from the US shortly before WWII, going on to live in wealth in Italy. Then the Nazis rounded him up, he escaped, freeing the prisoners with him, and eventually went into hiding as a monk in Spello. But he took to this simple life and stayed that way until his murder, his vast resources funnelled into a Mexican banking firm called Condor. Now the question is, who killed him and why?

Killy next heads for Baja California, and we’re treated to a practically endless hang gliding race in which one of Killy’s opponents, unbeknownst to him but made clear to us readers, is one of Pietro’s assassins. From here Killy, posing as a gadabout sportsman, ingratiates himself into the jet-setting fold of Roberto, Allan, and Alexandra Ciccio. The former two are the assassins, we readers know, but their dayjob entails running the Condor bank. Alexandra is the hot-to-trot granddaughter of Brother Pietro – a carefree babe who tears her jeep across the Baja desert while smoking grass.

Alexandra provides most of the thrills in the novel, not to mention the little salacious content. She is of course horny for our hero, and the two exchange barbed dialog before the inevitable screwing. For it must be said that Smith shines in the dialog department, particularly Killy’s deadpan lines. Alexandra’s most notable sequence displays her rock star lifestyle; after some hard drinking and dopesmoking she insists on driving Killy back to her place in her new sportscar, but instead she intentionally flies off a pier and lands the car in the ocean. It’s submerged to the doorhandles and sharks swirl outside, and she and Killy are trapped in here until the tide goes out, taking the sharks with it. Smith as expected leaves the ensuing sex off-page.

But it does just go on and on…Killy hanging with Roberto and Allan, who have proclaimed him their new best bud, while Killy suspects the pair might be involved in something nefarious. Meanwhile he’s here to keep an eye on Alexandra…it turns out that the assets of Condor are being used in a land-buying scheme in the desert near San Luca or somesuch. Later on Killy flies to Tokyo for a few pages and then to Montreal for a few pages more, each time coming upon a businessman who has just been murdered; more to do with this property scheme.

It’s not until the final quarter that the novel really kicks into gear – and mind you, Killy hasn’t gotten in a single gunfight or killed anyone yet. The most he’s done is get in a brawl with a drunk rival of Condor during a yacht party. But at this point Roberto and Allan are forced to finally show their hand, and meanwhile Killy’s deduced why they’ve been treating him like their BFF; they intend to kill Alexandra, the last obstacle in their gaining all of Condor’s assets, and make it look like Killy did it. And of course they’ll kill him, too; the goal will be to make it look like an accident.

This leads to another nice sequence with Alexandra, with her and Killy stranded on a cove that’s used for sea turtle burial; the place is surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a faroff sniper prevents Killy from scaling over it with a towel. Instead they put those turtle shells to use and dig their way out. Throughout Killy keeps Alexandra from realizing the life-or-death situation they’re in, trading more of that deadpan dialog with her. Some of it is pretty funny, like Killy’s “Talk about problems” when Alexandra notes that his shoulder is bleeding from a .22 bullet.

The finale slightly ramps up the tension. Killy and Alexandra escape Florita via a sailplane – Smith seems to have had a major interest in hang gliders, sailplanes, and vintage light planes when he wrote this one, because it seems that a good portion of the narrative is given over to Killy flying various small aircraft. But they’re chased by Roberto and Allan in their old Vampire plane and they crash in the desert. Killy’s again hurt, getting a concussion, and they hole up in an old mission for a few days, slowly dying of thirst and hunger.

But they’re able to escape again, and we get another long aerial chase, as if the previous one was just a bit of page-filling to meet the word count. And folks, at least in Nuplex Red Killy lived up to his name and killed someone. I mean I don’t expect much from my men’s adventure protagonists, but I at least expect that! But again, take a look at that label on the spine…we’re reading a Mystery novel. Mother nature ends up doing Killy’s work for him. He leads the Vampire into a lightning storm, and while Killy’s sailplane has no issues, flying into a storm in a light plane like the Vampire is “like jumping off a cliff.” Smith even teases us that Killy might shoot someoneone, earlier on; he takes a revolver from some dirty Florita cops he knocks out, but ultimately the gun’s just used to kill a few snakes.

However it must be stressed that this lack of exploitative content doesn’t mean Last Rites For The Vulture is bad…it’s just very safe and mainstream ready. It packs in just a few memorable moments of weirdness, but never goes too far with them. Killy comes off like a paperback James Gardner with his glib dialog and self-deprecating manner, and he lacks the merciless nature of the average men’s adventure protagonist of the ‘70s. In fact it’s surprising this series hasn’t been republished or epublished with appropriately bland, photoshopped covers, as with the recent bowdlerized Specialist ebooks. There’s nothing here Smith should be ashamed of, and it’s safe enough for grandmothers to read.

While the writing is fine, the depth of characterization above the genre norm, and the snappy dialog certainly beyond anything else in the genre, overall The Inquisitor just doesn’t do much for me, because it’s not what I want from the genre. It is, for the third and final time, really just a mystery series, more focused on sleuthing. But as for me personally I found a lot of it, like Nuplex Red, downright boring. So I doubt I’ll seek out any more of these books, which as mentioned previously are more expensive than they’re worth.

Monday, July 24, 2017

The Inquisitor #3: Nuplex Red


The Inquisitor #3: Nuplex Red, by Simon Quinn
May, 1974  Dell Books

Like Operation Hang TenThe Inquisitor is one of those series that goes for high dollars these days, mostly because “Simon Quinn” was a pseudonym of future bestselling author Martin Cruz Smith. Over the years I debated tracking down this six-volume series, but a while back I decided not to when I learned that protagonist Francis Killy, the titular Inquisitor, serves as a soldier for the Catholic Church but tries his best to refrain from killing in the line of duty. Isn’t that like a porn movie where the actors don’t have sex??

So I passed up on a few opportunities to pick up the series, never at a nice price to begin with, but recently I got a few of them for a pittance. This is the earliest one I have, and now that I’ve read it, I have to say I’m glad I never went to the trouble of tracking down the series. Perhaps it’s just this third volume, but I have to say I didn’t enjoy it at all; Nuplex Red is padded, boring, and poorly constructed, with a cipher-like hero lost in the quagmire of intense info-dumping about nuclear plants and nuclear waste and nuclear etc; there’s hardly any action at all until the final pages, and even then it is so hazily sketched out that it fails to leave an impression. Surely Smith banged this one out to meet a deadline, and it cannot be compared to his “serious” work (or perhaps even the other five installments).

Overall the book has the vibe of Nick Carter: Killmaster, which Smith also wrote a few installments of (the first-person volumes from after Lyle Kenyon Engel left the series), mixed with a bit of a Catholic overlay. Francis Killy (arbitrarily referred to as “Killy” or “Frank” in the narrative), according to the interminable backstory arbitrarily shoehorned into the text midway through the book, was a wayward punk kid in ‘50s New York (where he tossed a desk at a stern Catholic priest in school), before finding his way to ‘Nam and eventually the CIA. In overlong, summary-style backstory we are informed that, after a Catholic priest prevented an attempt on Killy’s life during his Agency years, Killy eventually learned that this priest (actually a Monsignor) headed up a newfangled Inquisition branch of the Church, and was looking for Inquisitors; Killy got the job, and now globetrots as a Church troubleshooter. I have to admit, I find no interest in the series setup.

But I also have to admit, maybe if Nuplex Red was more compelling, I might be more into it; this is not the best introduction to the series. It has more in common with the average thriller of the mid-‘70s, as I know off-hand of a few cime novels dealing with plutonium heists, only Smith pads out the pages with way too much info on how nuclear reactors run, what kind of damage nuclear waste could wreak, how security works on nuclear reactor sites, etc. It’s just deadening stuff, folks; I mean there are parts where nuclear scientists go on and on in technical detail for a few pages of unbroken dialog. To the point where the reader is about to yell, “Just shut up and KILL SOMEONE already!!”

The majority of the novel has Killy in Maryland (where I was born – useless info alert), posing as a representative of the Church at a meeting of the Atomic Energy Council(!). His commander, Monsignor Cella, has tasked Killy into looking into a bomb that was made for some mysterious individual; in the first instance of nuke info-dumping we’ll be assaulted with, the novel opens with a dying nuclear scientist creating a dirty bomb for a group of priests in the Vatican, expositing on the act step by step, and informing them that he’d been paid to make a similar one. So off Killy goes to Hessian, Maryland, where he spends like a hundred or so pages sitting around and listening to nuclear scientists info-dump on nuclear research.

Meanwhile a guy named John Peay, the security chief at the AEC meeting in Hessian, is masterminding a heist that’s about to go down at the Mohawk nuclear base in New York. Smith spends more time with the heisters, many of whom are Haitians; strange backstory, awkwardly written like most else in the book, has it that Peay “fell in love” with the people of Haiti or somesuch, and is pulling off this nuke rip-off to benefit the island. His men are sadistic, too, gunning down Mohawk guards in cold blood. This only happens after lots of “scene-setting,” with the heisters posing as truck drivers, etc. The book is almost methodically paced.

Two of the nuke scientists come to the fore: Kitakami, a Japanese pacifist who survived Hiroshima (as did Monsignor Cella in more backstory), and Vera Tesaru, a science-babe from Russia who also happens to be a KGB spy. In between all their expositing Tilly is called into Peay’s office, where Peay reveals that he knows Killy is a fake – and in fact he knows Killy himself, as back in ‘Nam Peay was responsible from exfiltrating fellow CIA agent Killy out of the latest hellhole. Then the Mohawk heist goes down, and Peay, still posing as the security chief, pretends to answer the summons of the hijackers, catering to their whims to fly out a few nuke scientists to confirm that the heisters have in fact created a nuclear bomb on their own. Killy goes with them.

Our hero makes his first kill of the book on page 160(!), taking out a guard with a .38 revolver – this is after Killy has glibly informed Vera that Peay is behind the heist, Killy having figured it out from the suspicious way Peay’s been acting. Peay wants 100 million in diamonds, and there begins this incredibly drawn-out bit where he sends his demands to the White House, and meanwhile Killy is in communication to, all of it via Telex, and there’s all this stuff about “nuplex red,” which is the shortwave radio designation for a nuclear disaster, yet it’s a Federal offense to not declare nuplex red, or to somehow assist in the disaster spreading, thus everyone washes their hands of it, including the president(?!). I guess this was back in the days where one could still get arrested or charged for something in Washington; these days you can just leak classified info to your pal so that it spreads in the news, even if you’re the head of the FBI, and no one seems to care!

So Killy finally takes out a guard or two, and in one of the novel’s few memorable bits one of the Haitian heisters, fatally shot by Killy, says “Stay cool” as he dies. Then Killy and Vera, who is only in panties, are locked in the Mohawk control center, where Vera asks Killy if he’s ever fantasized about being the last man on earth, running into the last woman – they engage in somewhat-explicit sex (“Killy took her standing up… Inside she was softer and hotter than he expected.”). Immediately thereafter Killy realizes that Peay intends to destroy Mohawk all along, which leads to a tense bit where he and Vera must defuse two dirty bombs, however it turns out one of them’s a fake. Running around in radiation suits, they confront Peay, armed with an M-16, who leaves them with the last bomb before he escapes. In the defusion of this one, Vera plummets to her death in the reactor core. Oh, and Peay shoots Killy in the gut and he’s more dead than alive.

The novel’s final chapter picks up months later, and Killy has just barely survived that gutshot. He’s 25 pounds lighter, still mostly bald from radiation poisoning, but he’s tracked Peay to Haiti, where even here Smith denies us much in the way of action. Instead Killy confronts Peay on this super-bizarre corpse-smuggling business Peay has started up(!?), and Killy reveals that Peay’s latest batch of corpses, conveniently sitting around the room, might not be dead after all – some of them start moving, and Killy ends up shooting Peay when Peay draws a gun. Turns out the corpses were cops, and all this was an elaborate sting operation. WTF? The end, at least.

The book is just, I don’t know, bad. Listless and dull.  It’s just so poorly constructed and awkwardly written, vague when it should be focused and focused when it should be vague. And Killy does nothing to capture the reader’s interest, even considering the ultra-lame “one-liners” Smith tries to give him. Like when Vera asks him, “How is it you are on one side and [Peay] is on another?” To which Killy replies, “I was breast-fed; maybe that has something to do with it.” Mind you, that’s the funniest one-liner he has, and it sucks!!

Here’s hoping the other volumes I have of The Inquisitor are better…but judging from this one, I’d say this series does not deserve the exorbitant prices.