QUICK SHOTS: Crockett #3: Brand of Fear by Brad Lang

I can think of nothing more relaxing to do in my leisure time than picking up a 70's Leisure Book. See what I did there? I was in the mood for some private eye action and settled in with Brad Lang's Crockett series. I've had the first two for a long time after reading about them on the Thrilling Detective Website back in the day. I think the third one, "Brand of Fear" was a newer pickup, and it seems to be a harder to track down on. I'm pretty sure it came home to me via an eBay lot. Anyway, I finally decided to read one of them and I picked the third one to start, go figure. 

Brad Lang's Fred Crockett series was short lived, three books from 1975 to 1976 with a "hippie detective" gimmick. Crockett's got long hair, ya see. Crockett is a younger detective with the trappings of his age bracket. He casually smokes weed, hangs out in dive bars, drives a GTO, etc. etc. He may be younger but he's an ex-cop with a criminology degree who packs a 4" Smith and Wesson .38 in a shoulder holster and can crack wise with the best of them. He's a lively, different but comfortably familiar paperback detective. 

"Brand of Fear" is a blackmail novel. You know where that leads, don't you? Murder. Or various murders. Crockett is hired by a guy named Beacher who's getting squeezed for cash because of a compromising photo that proves that he is gay. To complicate the matter the man he's with in the photo is a prominent figure. Crockett's on the case and when the blackmailer turns up dead and Beacher is arrested, only Crockett can prove his innocence. Along the way there's gunfights with mob-guys, hitman, sleaziods, lots of oddball underworld-types, parties, hippies, prostitutes, tough talk, casual sex, getting knocked-out and all the rest of the fun stuff. 

You can tell Lang was younger than most of the paperback writers of the era. Casual mentions of Spock from "Star Trek," pinball halls and Crockett watching his favorite TV cop show, "Baretta." Not to mention the fairly ahead-of-the-time treatment of the gay characters in the book. Sure, a few slurs are used, but that miles ahead of how gay characters are usually treated in that era. Especially when you think that it was packaged as an action series for macho men. 

Brad Lang's got a nice midwestern, young thing going, and I couldn't help but think of Max Allan Collins early work in the Nolan series. The writing is tight and reads quick. I breezed right through the book and had a helluva time with it. It didn't break the mold, but it tweaked it enough to be consistently interesting. It's a shame Lang didn't continue the series or continue writing. These are ripe of reprints.

Texas Night Riders and Other Drive-In Books: Early Pulp of Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale

I've touched on, more than once, that Joe R. Lansdale is a corner stone in want has made me the reader (and writer) that I am today. Probably, much to his chagrin if he ever caught word. It's an odd relationship reader/writer, it's all a once more personal and less personal of a connection than say being struck by a movie star. You spend a lot of time inside someone else's head when you read a book, but you don't see them, you don't know how they move or what they sound like. After middle school's worth of reading Alexandre Dumas, James Bond and The Saint novels, I had switched my recreation time to horror flicks and vintage muscle cars. The bloodier and the faster the better. 

Somewhere down the two-lane blacktop, I got wind of "Bubba Ho-Tep" which put together of two of my favorite horror-guys, Bruce Campbell and the director Don Coscarelli and it was taken from a short story by a fella named Joe R. Lansdale. An old Elvis fighting a mummy in an East Texas nursing home? Hell, I was sold. My local library had a copy of "Writer of the Purple Rage" that the novella was contained in and boy-howdy I was hooked. Soon, I read most of his stuff I could lay my hands on. Some of them in by dashboard light in my hot rod 1968 Plymouth Fury coupe. I must have been out on the highway avoiding The God of the Razor and staying out of weird Drive-In's. 

Lansdale was the first writer I encountered that seemed to understand life in the small-town/country way with a vernacular to match to boot. I knew guys and gals in flesh in blood like the ones in Lansdale's words. When I read a Hap and Leonard novel, I imagine my late-father as Hap, he was cut from the same country-boy/hippie cloth. An ass-kicker too, 'natch. I guess Lansdale taught me that writing can sound like anything, that it doesn't have to come from the pen of an English ex-spy or some other stuffed-shirt. And he wrote all the things I liked, mystery, horror, sci-fi you name it and it all sound exactly like Joe R. Lansdale talking to you, spinning yarns making you laugh and then turning it on its head and making a shiver run up your spine.

"Texas Night Riders" came out in 1983 from Leisure books with Lansdale writing under the name Ray Slater and it's an all-out tale of western revenge in under 200 pages. Before this he wrote a porn novel called "Molly's Sexual Follies" as Mark Simmons (with Brad W. Foster) and his shattering novel "Act of Love," which is one helluva book. Then came out with a one-two punch of "The Magic Wagon" and "The Nightrunners." Whew. Anywho, "Texas Night Riders" might seem like a typical western. Farmer Jubil Rains used to be a solider in the Confederate army and now is living peacefully with his wife and son...you see where I am going with this, right? 'ol Jubil has his son murdered before his eyes by three bandits and plugged buried alive in the coffin of his recently deceased wife. Well, Jubil does what most cowboy heroes would do and straps on his six-guns and heads out with revenge on his mind. Along the way he comes across the baddies now leading a pack of the titular Texas Night Riders, masked riders out to push people off of their land. Jubil takes up with big time farmer, Brennan and his men in order to kill the nasty Thorton who ran his son through with a saber.

Jubil is a fairly conventual western-type hero, a quiet man out for personal revenge. Lansdale's leads are usually more colorful and interesting characters, but this after all was written for a Leisure pulp-paperback and Lansdale gave them a pulp-paperback hero. He's certainly not a bad character, he's just Clint Eastwood on the page. Thinking about it, what more do you need? This is still clearly a Lansdale novel; his quirks and themes seep in through the mud and the blood. The farmer's daughter, Mattie is a tough lady, like a lot of Lansdale's ladies, who can handle the action with aplomb. While all the side characters are stock players, Lansdale makes them tough, funny and wild in their own ways. And the action is all Lansdale, brutal and wild and at times reaching his early "splatterpunk" levels of gore. There's a hint of horror in the mix, early on the town drunk refers to Jubil as a zombie, all dead inside but walking. There's a bit of "The Night of the Living Dead" as the Night Riders siege a walled-up farm in the dead of night. It's not a book that is going to be amongst the best of Lansdale's work, but it's a fascinating look into the foundation of the writer he became and what was always in there. 

A couple of years later Lansdale returned to the western, albeit with a less traditional tale with "Dead in the West," starring a rascal of a preacher-man named Jebediah Mercer who lands himself in Mud Creek, TX to try to get some soul saving done. It's a good thing he's a pistol-packin' preacher cause soon the dead start to rise, and he's got to stand up and fight. "Dead in the West" is a wonderful little book, seriously little, the only drawback is that there's ain't much of it and you want more of it. It seems like it's ripped out of the pages of "Weird Tales," a fever dream about putting Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Roy Rogers and George A. Romero in a blender then spill it out over a typewriter. Little tips of the cowboy hat to "The Necronomicon" and such put you in the right mindset. The voice is (as always) pure Lansdale. It's funny, it's profane, its gross and blood. So, you know...pure Lansdale and boy howdy how I had fun with this one.

Then a few little years later Lansdale took the western vibe into the apocalyptic future filled with zombies in "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folk." It's a novella which is its only downfall, there should be more of it, there should be a near endless supply of stories in this world. I read this many, many years ago and in rereading it (and knowing more and more about Men's Adventure fiction) now it makes me long for a Lansdale M.A. series penned in the 80's about this bounty hunter named Wayne and his '57 Chevy wandering the new terrifying west. It's a place of (somewhat) domesticated Zombies, lawless border towns, the vague aftermath of the "Chevrolet/Cadillac war" and all measure of scoundrel. If you're not aware Lansdale did contribute to the "M.I.A. Hunter" series with always excellent Stephen Mertz but if Lansdale had had his own series product the Post-Apocalyptic Men's Adventure genre would have been the one, he was most suited for, even over an action series or an adult Western. Sigh. If only. A reader can dream. The novella itself is top-shelf, naughty, vulgar, non-stop action fun piled to the brim with exuberance and wild little touches. Shit. There need to be more of it.

There's no other writer like Joe R. Lansdale. I'd imagine there's folks that wouldn't dig what he is putting down. There are always wrong people in the world. In digging further in his back log I'm stuck by the ferocity of his work. Not just what he puts on the page, then emotion behind it. They read like something he HAD to put down on paper. The young and hungry author syndrome. Lansdale has kept the spark throughout the years, though he's gotten a bit more respectable and written some books that a truly brilliant, easily better then pretty much whatever the "big literary" books are (I'm looking at you, "The Bottoms" and "The Ticket") but he always never lost his spark of weirdness, thank God.   

A Quintuple Blast of 70's Action

SO, I moved, I dunno, several thousand books last month from one house to another, plus all my other shit. It's as pleasant as it sounds. To break up the monotony and save my back, I read three slim paperbacks. Sorry about they super late reviews but sorting, organizing and cataloging has been quite the chore. But here's a bunch of reviews.

I started with "The Big Needle," after reading about on Paperback Warrior (a vastly more put together and comprehensive collection of entertaining reviews) I was intrigued because it was an early work of Ken Follett. The early pulpy works of authors who later became well-known can sometiems be excellent and other can be just a tepid and boring as most mainstream fiction. Paperback Warrior didn't care for this book, as I am VERY easy to please I came away from it wishing the final two chapters in the "Apples" Carstairs trilogy weren't so hard to find. I'd read them in a heartbeat.

Ken Follett as Symon Myles here creates "Apples" a swinging London building contractor out for revenge with his two girlfriends in tow. The book rolled over my eyes like a wonderful 70's Eurocrime movie, probably made with Italian and British money and probably staring Richard Harris, or maybe Michael Caine. Anyway Apples is a rough sort in a higher pay bracket, with a background in crime reporter and the military and most likely anything else the story might need at that point races off (literally) after finding out his daughter is in hospital after ODing. Not a lot of this book makes sense, I get that right out there in the open. Apples flip-flops from being pissed about drugs and drug dealers to banging any chick he can and the ideas about lesbian/bisexual are very back-asswards, but surprisingly Apples girlfriends are some of the better characters in the book. The story plays fast and loose with Apples trying to set up a drug buy to trap his prey, along the way he pulls a "French Connection" with a car packed full of heroin, drives in his super-cool Jaguar, does some businessman stuff, drinks and smokes weed. I think I like him because he's a lot hipper then the usual "drug-buster" character and Follett's tongue seems to be creeping through his teeth into his cheek throughout.

"The Big Needle" was a slim book, but "The Syndicate" by my friend and yours Peter McCurtin is practically a novella. The cover promises "Godfather" like insight into the inter workings of the dreaded Mafia, luckily that's just Belemont-Tower pulling your leg. James Broderick is a badass Mafia killer sent out by an aging Don to kill a dick-ass Nazi in ancient Irish castle built up like a fortress. Yeah, now that's a plot synopsis.

Broderick is a lot like most McCurtin's protagonists, kind of a wise-ass mixed with utter badass. That's about all you get or need to know. It's a wallop of a fun plot that probably could have used a second draft with a little bit more book injected into it. Maybe it was written in a booze-fueled weekend to catch a deadline by the balls. Yeah, that might be it. So, there's a Neo-Nazi bent on doing what Nazi's do best: fuck shit up and it's going to get in the way of the Mafia's operation. This is a nice idea and twist on the initial set-up. The fist bit plays like a spy story with a lone agent going to pick up his latest assignment from his boss, only the boss is the Don and instead of national interests its pure finical interests. Sooner or later this Nazi is going to cost he mob money and they aren't going to like that. Enter Broderick. So, tangles with goons, a Nazi-She-Devil or the Doctor Nazi-She-Devil variety, breaks out of a castle and kills who's gots to get kills. It's all over before you know it, which is a shame. Nothing is used to it's full potential but ts written in the McCurtin style which is professional action writing, it's okay but pales in comparison to his other work. It might have worked better within one of McCurtin's series works like as a Marksman, Sharpshooter or a Soldier of Fortune book.

The next book I read had some meat on it's bones "Lone Wolf #1: Night Raider," by Mike Barry or
Barry Maltzberg as it says on his taxes. I've been wanting to dip my toe into the pool of this particular series for a while but was informed that they HAVE to be read in order as it builds and builds over the series. So, I finally picked up a copy of #1 let it sit on a shelf for months, remember I wanted to read it and picked it up. That's how I roll.

Easily this is the best book of the five, it's a rock solid example of Men's Adventure Fiction. It's going up there in the hall of fame. Burt Wulf (get it?) is a Narc who's lady-friend is found dead by him after ODing. Basically his mind goes POP! and he decides to do the long road to revenge thing. It's not an original plot but Malzberg is a damned fine writer and continuously ratchets up the tension and lets Wulf's sanity slowly slip away. All the side characters are unique and interesting, with nary a stock character in the mix, like a mobster on a tear with a wife glued to the TV who doesn't pay attention to the world around her and the love he feels for his 10 year old Buick and Wulf's old partner, a African-American rookie who became a cop because people have to take notice of him when he's in uniform. Malzberg creates whole characters in little bits. The story is simple enough Wulf follows the trail of baddies, whooping their ass until he can move on the next one, much like a super bloody Mario Bros. Wulf's a dick and psycho but he's a thinker too and his solution to killing this episodes bad-guy is pretty clever compared to the simple "shoot-everyone" climax often used, but is also still satisfactory. It'll be interesting to see how Wulff gets crazier and crazier as the books progress. I also like that Wulf looks like Mr. Fantastic with a .45 on the cover.

Like a lot of fans of Men's adventure I'm an avid reader of Glorious Trash as it's practically the bible of the kinds of novels. It's a blog that has cost me a lot of money and much more joy. The review of Dean Ballenger's Gannon series has made my mouth water for a couple of years but I never held out much hope for tracking any of them down cause it's the same sad story, too few copies and too high of prices. With a coupon and a little (okay a lot) of cash I ended up with #2 "Blood Fix" and #3 "Blood Beast" and my tiny heart grew six whole inches. I dove head first in the insane world of the "little tiger" Gannon with his spiked brass knuckles, his .357, sweet Mercedes and a thirst for murdering the rich and evil. The rich is key word, the Gannon landscape has Depression-Era vibes, class warfare and out-dated slang fill the book. It's a book out of time simultaneously feeling, 20's, 70's and no time that has ever existed. It's a trippy R-rated comic book landscape with Gannon has a Batman/Punisher who boinks all the ladies and beats people to a pulp and shoots people to a pulp, ya know to help the downtrodden. IT'S AMAZING.


A small town gas station owner is set-up with a false rape-charge by an insidious rich guy out to buy the land the gas station sits on cause a highway is coming right by it. The gas station owner calls Gannon who's pretty famous for ass-kicking to come help him. Gannon likes ass-kicking so he rolls into town and faces off with a nasty killer and all sorts of goons. People die in horrible ways, people act like no humans ever have and Gannon is near superhuman in his ability to murder folk. The women  have it the worse in the book and none of them are particularly believable, so if you have a problem with that you might want to skip it. I prefer authors with distinct voices and Ballenger had that in aplomb. More then anything it reminded me of a 70's version of Carroll John Daly's Race Williams and Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner stories. All three writers liked lighting fast-paced stories, their own vernacular and tough guy heroes. I'll be shelling out the cash of Gannon #1 fairly quickly. It's a shame Ballenger seemingly didn't produce more then a handful of novels but he wrote a lot for the sweat mags. I suppose he wouldn't be everyone's taste but if you like you mayhem with a little knowing humor you could do worse.

Frank Scarpetta was a lot of different guys, "Slaughter-House" Scarpetta was Russell Smith, who wrote a fair number of Marksman/Sharpshooter novels. This was my first Smith novel and it won't be my last. This was a bloody, goofy seat-of-the-pants affair that through logic out the window and replaced it was brains on the floor, fishing line used a grappling hooks and .38's, .45s, .357s, and .44's blowing Mafia's hoods heads, chest, and necks apart. Philip Magellan is the Marksman when he's not Johnny Rock The Sharpshooter. They are the same guy, plus they are also Robert Briganti AKA "The Assassin." Go to Lynn Monroe Books for the full-scoop on the ins and outs of The Marksman/Sharpshooter/Assassin series and a lot of the work that Peter McCurtin did as a writer and as an editor.

Magellan goes back to a carnival where he was a trick-shooter and since his new occupation is mafia buster the mafia is pulling strong arm moves and wanting protection money from said carnival. Magellan is pissed off by this and shoots a bunch of goons and starts an all-out war between carnies and the mob (I wish, that'd been cool) but he does get a lot of carnies killed in the process including the woman owner who's son is along for the ride, as Robin to Magellan's Batman. He comes in pretty handy as he casually owns a sloppily deactivated mortar that comes in handy when they want to blow a mob-honcho's house to pieces. Also luckily Magellan knows a place where the mortar shells are kept and also has a key for the building. That's some good luck. The book moves a fast clip of shootings told in grizzly detail. Magellan doesn't get laid which is a change of pace from the usual paperback hero, he seems to get his rocks off with the mafia-murdering he does. Really the book didn't make a whole lot of sense but the characters were wonderfully colorful and the plot is simply "death to bad guys." As a potato chip, the book rates very high. Russell Smith has made me a fan, I'm glad I have more of his work in the series and one of his stand alone's "Montego" as Robert Dupont.

Triple-Shot of 70's Men's Adventure: Radcliff, The Liquidator, Shannon!

Paperback racks had a bit of a swell for the influx of "Blaxploitation" cinema in the early 70's with the likes of "Shaft," "Coffy," and "Superfly."  The good folks at Holloway House seemed to want to get in on Pinnacles "Executioner" action and brought out a couple of contenders. One being Joseph Nazel's "Iceman," a high-class pimp vigilante and Roosevelt Mallory's "Radcliff," a stone cold mafia hit-man who shouldn't be fucked with. Roosevelt Mallory should be counted along with the great work of Donald Goines and "Iceberg" Slim in the Holloway House line, or any publisher for that matter.

Reading an Iceman is a fun way to spend an afternoon, but reading a Radcliff is closer to looking down the barrel of a sawed-off double barrel, tension ratchets up and Radcliff is a whole lot of damned trouble and it don't seem to matter to him. Radcliff lives in the same type world that Richard (Donald Westlake) Stark's Parker lives a noir wasteland of thugs, dirty cops, evil men and women. "Double Trouble" is the third book in the series it's suitably gritty, a wild blast of funky 70s Men's Adventure. Radcliff is a badass assassin on the run after being set-up by the mob for killing several cops. It was a fast read that really hits all the right buttons. If you like the idea of slightly seat-of-the-pants writing writing for fast money, quick moving, very violent action and the feeling of being surrounded by shag carpet and wood paneling while reading it, then it's a book for you. It wasn't a perfect book it suffered a common problem with a lot of these books: too much build up and a rushed resolution plus some hyped stuff on the cover that didn't amount to much but it was entertaining enough to be forgiven, plus a little too much focus on the other characters when all I really wanted was Radcliff using his dual .38's to gets some payback. I got one more Radcliff and it's a shame that they are so hard to find because this was a fun hard hitting book.


Larry Powell was R.L. Brent for this medium length series called "The Liquidator," I picked up the
whole series almost accidentally before reading a single word of it, then to top it off I started with the second book cause I'm a weirdo. The good thing about most serialized 70's fiction is that they are made for you to have missed a book or two, so they explain everything you need to know in most of the volumes. "Contract for a Killing," told me Jake Brand was an honest cop who's brother is killed and he takes it personally (of course) and decides to take on the mob single-highhandedly. The Penetrator, The Executioner, The Liquidator, Lone Wolf,  Death Merchant and the like might have got the job done quicker if they had just teamed up to face the mob, but what do I know?

Brand is out of jail and looking for the hitman-dude who iced his brother and gets mixed up with the paid killers next hit, a woman who Brand wants to warn and basically use as bait to snag his killer. Brand spends the time on the run, gathering guns and whooping information out of people. Also sexing ladies. This is all standard stuff but Powell writes well and it unfolds at a nice pace, never bogging down with any filler-bullshit. Brand is a likeable enough version of the mob-killer archetype, the ex-cop/ex-con thing is a nice touch cause he's truly alone no cops or crooks would trust him. It builds to a nice ending that's a bit of a cop-out but it's that way to keep the series going. There's just enough of a ending to the volume for it to feel like a full book. Powell is now on my radar, I have a couple of Nick Carter: Killmasters he wrote and I'll have to move them up to the To-Be-Read pile. This is solid B-level stuff; it's not going to change your life but it's certainly better written then some.

Finally Shannon #1: The Undertaker is the TECHNICALLY the worst book of the three but I probably had the best time reading it. This is a utterly ridiculous book in the best ways. I think it belongs to the the unsung-genre of Men's Adventure Fiction: The Inaction Adventure book, right there with Hardy by Martin Meyers and Decoy by Jim Dean. Patrick Shannon our "hero" doesn't do much action stuff. In fact he mostly drinks, boinks ladies and fucks up until he defeats the baddies with I dunno, luck?

Jake Quinn was J.C. Conaway who wrote a bit of this type of stuff two female P.I. series that seem to be the same character roving around under different names, i.e. Janna Blake and Nookie, er, um. Also horror books, gothics, stand alones and this three book series, some under names like Jim Conaway and Ross Webb. I'll tell you I had enough fun with it that I bought a large sample of his work half way through. Why you ask? Because I'm certifiable. So, Shannon works for a top-secret spy agency, has a butler named Joe-Dad who's racial insensitive to two demographics, a penthouse, a Porsche, a untraceable Beretta and a stocked bar. Someone is kidnapping beautiful blondes of the street, starlets, figure skaters, models, that type of blonde. Shannon looses a girlfriend, snoops around, gets an old blind woman killed, looses more women, adopts a cat and plays with a god-damned Seal over the course of this novel. Also has sex with EVERY female character, including a lesbian because its the 70's and a pulp novel. Eventually (like the last 20 pages or so) he fucks up enough to get kidnapped and shipped in a coffin to a bad-guy island in a coffin and almost inadvertently saves the day tangling against a deformed villain/henchman combo and literally saving his penis. Also then has some more sex. All in all this is the stupidity, violence and twisted fun I want in a funky 70's paperback. Conaway seemed like he was "in" on the joke to me, which makes it worthwhile as pure entertainment.