QUICK SHOTS: The Sharpshooter #5: Night of the Assassins by Bruno (Len Levinson) Rossi

 Ah, the twisted world of Johnny Rock came calling. It'd been a minute since I cracked open a volume of The Sharpshooter, and that's a wicked shame. The saga of The Marksman/The Sharpshooter/The Assassin is one of my favorites of the 70s Men's adventure offerings. Because this is where things get weird.

The books are sloppier than Don Pendleton's work. They are hastily thrown together pulp cranked out by pure id and a few days of hazy typing. Most of them sorta work in some sort of dreamscape where things just happen. They seem like bar room tales told over an ever-increasing amount of beer, where parts of the tale don't quite add up and lucky coincidences run rampant. That all depends on who's writing them of course.  

This one's the work of Len Levinson, an all-around terrific storyteller who spins the most level of all of these paperbacks. Len gives Johnny Rock more personality than the other writers who worked on the series, who paint Rock as a raving psycho. I mean, he's a raving psycho here too, but he'll have a few human emotions too. Rock's got the usual vigilante trappings, the mafia killed his family, and he goes out kills the mafia. Don't mess with something that works. 

In Night of the Assassins, he finds himself in Miami and sets out killing various mob dudes. In-between his a-murderin' Rock gambles a little, plans his hits a lot and has some fun with various woman who seem very willing to bed down a half-crazed stranger. Along the way's there's scuba raids on casino boats, long-range sniping, machine-gunnin,' dumb cops, dead mobsters and some rough complications. All in all, it's a good time between the covers. Len makes Rock interesting and you don't mind just spending time with him as runs around Miami, that isn't to say that the action is fast and furious when it happens. This one's got some great set-pieces (one's on the cover) and quick action. 

Like I said, Len can write. You'll probably never be disappointed if he wrote it. This series and its sister series' can be a mixed bag and unfortunately their all getting pretty pricey these days. I used to buy 'em for a buck or two in used bookstores and I've even bought a couple at that truck stop. Now most of them will run $5-$10 and some of the choice ones, the ones written by Len or Russell Smith will go for crazy prices. That's what happens when you become a legend.

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Dead Man #5: Blood Mesa by James Reasoner

The other day I was rearranging bookshelves. Call it my form of mediation. It started out as a book hunt, a "do I have that book, or have I just been thinking about buying it?" Then I spotted some things that didn't belong in their respective spaces, and I decided to remedy that situation. This snowballed into a light rearranging that took a whole afternoon. I recently finally gave up my day-job for my side-work and make my own schedule now and spending an afternoon hip deep in the library organizing sure put my head on straight again. Ah, Zen. 

It's inevitable that if you dig around your own shelfs enough, you find the forgotten treasures. I finally tracked down an elusive copy of Walter Wager's 58 Minutes that I'd been searching for and a wayward stack of the Dirty Harry books by Warner books. But I also dove into my trade-paperback and hardback shelves, which I honestly don't look at much. The mass market paperback is the finest book format ever created, and I'll die on that cross. So, I was surprised to find the second volume of the Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin lead Dead Man series that I didn't remember actually buying. I enjoyed the first volume immensely but got side-tracked keeping up with it. After an afternoon of bookwork, I decided on a treat. 

The Dead Man series is the classic Men's Adventure set-up. A revolving door of authors tackling entries in a series built around a badass protagonist. Here it's Matt Cahill, a man who died in an avalanche until to be un-frozen, only to see the evil that a certain Mr. Dark has infected people with. Before you can turn your TV to The Fugitive or The Incredible Hulk, Matt hits the road searching for Mr. Dark and having adventures along the way. I suggest you read the first novel first to get the whole set-up, but after that they can be read at your discretion. 

It had also been too long since I had read anything by James Reasoner, so I flipped this second volume to his entry Blood Mesa, cracked open a cold beer and started reading. Matt finds himself in New Mexico on a remote archeological dig as a truck driver. Naturally this dig on top of the titular blood red mesa and of course Mr. Dark's evil is a problem again. With its remote location, there's a bit of a "siege atmosphere" as the members of the dig turn into crazed killers, leaving Matt and his trusty axe to save the survivors. There's a little interpersonal drama, plenty of axe-action, some explosions, rotting people, ancient curse-stuff and a beautiful woman to fall for Matt. This is a quick, tense read, the length of The Dead Man novels is one of the series great strengths. They fly by and keep you wanting more. 

Reasoner is a helluva writer. I always mention his private eye novel Texas Wind and his sadly aborted Men's Aventure series Diamondback whenever his name comes up, but the truth is you can't go wrong any of his work. He's a true-blue pulp writer cranking out wonderful adventure tales. He works a lot in the western genre, and he infused a little of that into this horror/action tale, and it really work for me. His entry it got me itching to read more of his stuff AND more adventures of Matt Cahill. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Landshark #1 by Irwin Zacharia

One of my little paperback obsessions is books published by the fly-by-night publisher Carousel (a division of American Art Enterprises, the porn publisher) and the crown jewel of their output is the work by Irwin Zacharia. In my humble opinion anyway. I've covered his The Protector series about the sumo-wrestling private eye who fights supernatural menaces and one of his Vendetta books about Will Power, vigilante for hire. It took a long time, but I finally tracked down both books in his Landshark series about Salamander Shark. As you can see 'ol Irwin had a thing with goofy names. 

Irwin certainly had a thing for other names if the general consensus is correct that Irwin Zacharia is actually Paul Little who supposedly wrote something like 700 novels (whew) under a ton of names. Obviously, the supposedly mafia-adjacent Carousel Books records aren't around now, so we might never know who Irwin actually is. I do have some other novels that are known to be Little's work and I'll have to read them to compare the writing. I DO think that it was singular man writing as "Irwin Zacharia," the goofy names, some distinct odd turns of phrase and some preoccupations shine throughout all the books. 

So, this was after the SNL skit's where Chevy Chase played a landshark so I'm just going to assume that was the germ of the idea. But here the titular "landshark" is Salamander Shark, a man of Native and Asian descent who is part Tarzan, part Robin Hood, part Bruce Lee and all paperback hero. He lives in the desert with his family and steals to improve the lives of native Americans. He's also basically superhuman. He can move without sound, climb up anything, expel poison with thought and even CHOP MOTHER FUCKER'S HEADS OFF WITH HIS HANDS.

Yeah. He's a cool 70s macho dude. Here he robs a cabal of rich douchebags to build a hospital. This gets him tangled up in a government investigation of said douchebags. The G-Men are onto the bad guys, but they need a Superman to take them out and Shark is reluctantly drawn into a dastardly plot to overthrow a whole country with a drug-fueled army. Along the way there's plenty of night raids, sexual shenanigans, ass-kicking and chopping off of body parts with bare hands, vaginal contraceptive foam used as a weapon, scaling tall buildings in loincloths (yes, Virginia, the book's cover actually happens) and all-around Men's Adventure fun. 

The whole set-up is vaguely familiar to fans of Men's Adventure, owing a little to John Eagle, Expeditor and a whole lot to Tarzan and Doc Savage and the like. This is a slim book, and it was clearly written in a couple of sittings (maybe with some help from some uppers, smokes and a little whiskey to taste, but it was fun for what it is. It's pretty modern in some ways, the treatment of the Native American characters (though total stereotypes) is pretty favorable, and it's got a strong distrust of rich people (always appreciated) and a lot of the books at the time weren't even that progressive. 

These are the books I really enjoy. The weird outliers, the rush jobs. Stuff like Kirby Carr's Hitman or Norman Conway's Clown-covered Hunter or Andrew Sugar's Enforcer. The stuff that was really playing with the conventions of the genre and taking it to some odd places. I'm glad I have the awesomely named second book (and last) book in the series: Landshark #2: Piranha, Piranha to enjoy, I'll savor it as a treat. 

QUICK SHOTS: The Executioner #68: Prairie Fire by Don (Mike Newton) Pendleton

It had been a while since I dug into a Mack Bolan, and I figured as the year closed (I read this last week) I might as well ring it out with something I'd been meaning to read for a while. Prairie Fire has a good reputation within the series. Plus, it takes place in my home state of Kansas so, I've always been hankering to check it out. But I don't buy Executioner books online. They are plentiful around my book-buying parts and are often under a dollar, so I scrounge around and eventually come up with the ones I want. 

So, I've had this one on my TBR pile for six months after paying a quarter for it at my local's clearance rack with a stack of other Mack's. I usually just go to the copyright page and check out who actually wrote them and go by that. Picking up mostly the ones by Mike Newton, Stephen Mertz, Chet Cunningham and the like. I knew this one was my next Mack Bolan, but it was just a matter of time. 

I've dug Mike Newton's work in the field for a while, in both fiction and his awesome non-fiction book, How to Write Action Adventure Novels. I got into his stuff from his early work Terror at Boulder Dam from Carousel Books. Newton's a very solid writer of men's adventure and westerns; his stuff is meat and potatoes. Delicious tales that go down easy with some substance to them. This was the first Bolan I've read from him, and it won't be my last. 

Prairie Fire picks up in medias res with Bolan escaping the clutches of this book's evildoers. I haven't read #67 so I don't really know if it's a continuation of that book, but you don't really need to know. Bolan explains that he's on the run again, from the mob, the feds and anyone else evil. Here, the evil dick is The Cowboy, a mercenary who grew up watching westerns and decided to model is whole vibe off it. So, hat, mirrored shades, western clothes and a shiny Smith and Wesson M29 .44 Magnum. He's a worthy opponent to our buddy Mack and a real slimy bastard you want to see get his componence. 

Mack finds himself in an isolated farmhouse with a crotchety old WWII vet, his nice lady wife and their conveniently widowed (and hot) daughter-in-law. Gee, I wonder what happens with her and Mack. Besides some random henchmen that's our whole cast of characters, which is pretty refreshing since a lot of Men's Adventure can get bogged down in side characters and extra plots. This one's a straight-ahead siege tale, like Mack Bolan starring in Assault on Precinct 13. Mack doesn't have all his gear, making do with a pump-action .22 and some MacGyver'd grenades. It's a real quick tale that barrels to its finish with a little humor and a lot of action.

In a lot of ways this feels like a modern action tale with its stripped-down feeling, you could easily see this being a DTV action film starring Michael Jai White or Scott Adkins. It might have been a great place to start a film series for Bolan back in the 80s, certainly would have been cheap enough to film. I think I like these early Gold Eagle's before it became such a factory set up and the early authors like Newton and Mertz actually knew Pendleton and made some effort to mold his style into the house style. But they're a little looser too with great ideas like this one and Mertz's Return to Vietnam.  

I'm far from a Bolan expert, but I always enjoy dipping my toe into the waters occasionally. This might be my favorite Executioner novel I've read, even more so than some of Pendleton's own work. It's exactly what I want when I pick up this kind of novel. It moved, the characters were well-defined within the story, and action ruled. This copy had an ad to join and get the "Live Large" bumper sticker in it and if the offer was still valid, I'd send away for it for sure. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes by Michael Kurland

I'm quite the fan of Micheal Kurland's work and I'm still on a mystery-bent, so the second (and final) Alexander Brass mystery called to me from the bottom shelf where I keep my hardbacks. It's pretty clear by now from this blog that I'm a paperback guy, so I have to REAL interested in a book to even consider reading a hardback. The only hardbacks I've ever really liked where the slightly squatter ones the Mysterious Press used to do. I read a bunch of Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters that way from the library. But I digress.

Michael Kurland is mostly known for writing about Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Moriarty in a long running series and for the Greenwich Village Trilogy of hippie-sci-fi. He wrote the middle book The Unicorn Girl and appears as a character throughout the trilogy. Men's Adventure fans might know him from his excellent War Incorporated series of 60s spy novels, some of the best of the era. Kurland's a very good writer, clever, suspenseful, and very witty. He wrote a lot of sci-fi and I'm not much of a reader of that genre, so his gems in the mystery/adventure field are extra special to me. 

The Alexander Brass books started in 1997 and finished in 1998. Brass is a syndicated columnist for a major New York paper in the 30s. He's a man of the people, knows cops, crooks, politicians, actors, actress and busboys and everyone in-between. Naturally being a mystery novel, he gets involved with various murders and blackmail plots and the like, sending out his aid-de-camp Manny DeWitt out to uncover the clues while Brass writes his column. 

It's a set-up that is vaguely reminiscent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books. Though Brass is, um, more "active" than Wolfe. It's a series that also treads on the same field as the aforementioned Stuart Kaminsky series, where fictional characters interact with real folks (Dorthy Parker and Robert Benchley from the Algonquin Round Table here) though there's less emphasis on it here. Kurland knows the period, the whole thing feels pretty authentic with some mystery in-jokes like Manny hanging out with Black Mask writers and the like. 

The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes is a complicated story about the disappearance of "Two-Headed Mary" a beggar who hangs out in front of theaters and makes friends with all the chorus girls. But is that all she is? There are gangsters, show business types, con-artists, cops, and newspapermen. If you enjoy the old pulp tales of Daffy Dill, "Flashgun" Casey or the Kennedy and McBride stories this is for you. It's got a lot of the same vibe as those reporters-playing-detective-stories. Plus, it twists and turns and lands somewhere pretty satisfactory. 

Kurland's an old pro and this is the work of an old pro. Is it going to change your life? Probably not. Are you going to consistently entertained? Yes, undoubtably. Unfortunately, the series must not have done well. Kurland might have been too late on the 30s/40s nostalgia mystery book for the era, it was kinda a crowded space at the time. So, he only got two books out of Brass and one short story in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits. What a shame, but luckily, he returned to the time period recently with a WWII spy series called Welker and Saboy. I guess I have to go buy those right now. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Leonardo's Law by Warren B. Murphy

I came to Warren Murphy's work not through his most popular co-creation, The Destroyer but through his comic mystery novels about the insurance investigator Trace. I stumbled onto the Trace books because I had been reading Gregory MacDonald's Fletch series and the covers of the Trace books ripped off Fletch's design. Big font with the title, bold colors, littler font with a snippet of dialog from the book. So, I guess ripping something off does indeed work from time to time.

All in all, I eventually came to like Devlin "Trace" Tracy more than I.M. "Fletch" Fletcher, Trace's books are more consistently entertaining. So, Murphy was on my radar. The old Thrilling Detective Website told me that Trace is the same as Digger, a character from a different publisher. I liked those as well. The same website told me the Razoni and Jackson who appeared in a Trace book had their own paperback series. I liked those too. then I was off and running reading, The Destroyer and other books like Grandmaster. I was a Murphy fan and somewhere along the way unbeknownst to me, he wrote Leonardo's Law for the short-lived publisher, Carlyle.

When I discovered the book, I promptly bought it and filed it away on a shelf and sorta forgot about it. When winter fully embraces the Midwest, my mood tends to run toward mystery novels, I don't know why it happens, but it seems to every year. Then I start rooting around for forgotten favorites or new-to-me books. I was considering re-reading a Razoni and Jackson when I saw this one shelved next to it and felt like I won some sort of forgotten prize. I cracked it open. 

On the cover you see it's a "locked door mystery." My mystery tastes tend to run toward the hardboiled stuff, but I've read a few Ellery Queens and John Dickson Carr and the like, but it had been years since I've dipped my toe into that particular pool and the idea of Murphy tackling the usually quaint and gentile genre in a paperback original from the 70s was an interesting prospect. From his writing I get the picture that Murphy was a bit of a curmudgeon, his characters like to complain, his plot like to satirize (even if I don't fully agree with who he was poking fun at) and they have a wonderful cynical edge about them, what would a cynical, grumpy locked-room-mystery look like? 

Lenardo's Law is obviously supposed to the first in a series of mystery novels. Murphy was a series guy, especially at the time, and you generally don't write a detective novel to be a stand-alone. Our hero Leonardo is an impossible man, much like Poirot or Holmes. He's a professor, an un-official police detective, super handsome, super smart and tools around in a '37 Cord. He borders on parody as a character and his opposite the regular Joe cop Lt. Anthony Jezail (also the narrator) is a fairly stock paperback cop, if a little Murphy-fied. Their dynamic is fun, and it does echo Murphy at his best, when he has two disparate characters bitching at each other, but it doesn't quite boil over enough to be Razoni and Jackson or Chiun and Remo. Maybe if the series continued. 

The "locked door mystery" is fairly interesting, an asshole author is murdered in, you guessed it, a locked room and there's enough suspects to give you pause. Murphy plays it fair and if you pay attention, you can kind of figure it out (I knew a certain character played a part but didn't know the why) and the ultimate solution is wonderfully ridiculous (like the best locked door mysteries) where the book sorta faulters is spending too much time with some really unlikeable characters. We have to put up with Jezail's boss who's just despicable and it rides the nerves after a while. Murphy's asshole characters are usually entertaining to hang around, but Chief Semple is just too much. It's a slim book; I would have rather hung out with Leonard himself more throughout instead of frustrating jerks. 

I always find these aborted series books interesting. Obviously, Murphy might have found his groove with the characters by book #2 and we could have a totally different type of Warren Murphy series to enjoy. Also, this isn't for sensitive readers, there's a lot (too much) casual racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. etc. I sorta of skip over that shit and just get on with the book and I think Murphy was trying to use it all in the satire, (he had done it better elsewhere) but it's still a drag to have to read all the time. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Dead Ringer: A Hank Bradford Mystery by Mike Warden

 

A while back I went down a major paperback rabbit hole and started tracking down books published by Carousel Books, a division of American Art Enterprises a, uh, porn publisher trying to go "legit." To do this they hired some up-and-comers and some seasoned pros to (it seems) write whatever the hell they wanted. How else could you account for Irwin Zacharia's Protector books or his Vendetta books. Not to mention his Landshark series (which is recently FINALLY tracked down and need to read and review) which features no actual sharks. Chet Cunningham did some work for them, with a couple of Team Three books and some westerns. Mike Newtown also wrote Terror at Boulder Dam for them, an awesome slice of private eye action, again with some westerns and an action series called Intersect File as John Cannon among others. 

I ended up buying a wide variety of books published by Carousel. Westerns, Gothics, Horror, Science Fiction, Action, and Mystery books by random authors probably working under pseudonyms. It's a stack of books that I will eventually read because publishers have a certain flavor all their own. Pinnacle is sorta one thing, Paperback Library is another thing. Leisure is yet another looser thing and publishers like Carousel are so looser they're falling apart. It's clear that there was little in the way of editorial supervision, so a lot of the books are, well, technically BAD. Sloppily written, wrapped up in a hurry once the word count is met, and very much rough first drafts. That's stuff I love for some reason. Don't blame me for bad taste, I came by it honestly.

One of their longest series is the Hank Bradford mystery series, he's sometimes referred to as a "supersleuth," which coincidentally I want on my tombstone with no explanation. Mike Warden either had a few books in his sock drawer waiting for an eager publisher or wrote them all in a blindly white heat over a couple of years. I haven't been able to track down anything on Warden, if that's his real name. So, drop a line if you know anything about this paperback writer. There's precious little information about Carousel books out there in general. 

So, I have several of the Hank Bradford books and figured it was time to try on. Hank's an ex-cop turned part-time criminology professor. He sorta left the force under a cloud after his partner went on a bust by himself instead of waiting for Hank. Hank stuck around long enough to bust the guys who killed his buddy and then turned in his badge. Now, he's sorta broke living in an apartment, looking to get laid, avoiding his crazy landlady and taking it easy mostly. He's far from a hardboiled character; he doesn't pull out a .38 from his cookie jar or slug a baddie anywhere in the book. Mostly he hangs out and talks up his liberated upstairs neighbor and tries to sleep with her. 

But wouldn't you know it, suddenly his lady friend is getting obscene phone calls with death threats. 'Ol Hank sees this as a great time to try and get into her pants, not that she isn't interested either. Hank must be studly. Anyways, toward the end of the Hank finds a dead body of a guy who he saw in another neighbor's apartment, then that neighbor turns up dead after Hank calls his police nemesis, Oscar. And wouldn't ya know it; Hank's lady friend is the prime suspect. So, Hank plays detective for about two chapters and then the obvious conclusion happens. 

This is a pretty half-baked book. The first have of this (luckily) slim novel is all about Hank dealing with his landlady who sneaks into everyone's apartment, getting sick, then hanging out with his lady friend while she's afraid of the phone calls. Then it's like Warden remembered that it was a murder mystery book and killed a couple of people, only to breeze on past any sort of "investigation" on Hank's part. We hardly ever even leave the apartment building. It kind of feels like Warden was describing one lazy weekend he had but threw in some thriller elements to spice it up.

But you know what? I sorta liked it. It was like an hour read all-in-all, the pages flew by and Hank's a pretty okay protagonist, in a regular joe sort of way. It makes me wonder if the temperature every goes up in the series or if they are all "hang-out jams" like this one. Good thing I have more of them.

HANK BRADFORD BOOKS: 

(I think this is a complete list, correct me if I'm wrong)

Wasp in the Woodpile (1980)

Kill F-M (1980)

Death Beat (1980)

Bitter Homicide (1980)

Dead Ringer (1980)

Model for Death (1981)

The Topless Corpse (1981)

Twins in Trouble (198?)

The Condominium Killings (198?)

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!