Dirty Harry #03 - The Long Death

I had failed to find any enjoyment with the first two Dirty Harry installments, Duel for Cannons and Death on the Docks. However, I read the fourth and fifth installments, The Mexico Kill and Family Skeletons, and found the series had started to come into its own, a separate entity from the film franchise that inspired it. I had missed The Long Death, the third entry, in my early reading, but was happy when I located a copy. Was it the novel that converted this series from mediocre to great? 

The Long Death, authored by Ric Meyers (Ninja Master) as Dane Hartman, is a fun novel that soaks in all of the action-film formulas that were thriving at the box office at the time of publication. In fact, Meyers even delves into one of the other hot commodities of 1980s Hollywood, the beloved slasher genre. Meyers references films like Halloween and Mother's Day, as well as the Italian Giallo scene led by the likes of Dario Argento. In the book's first chapter, the author zeroes in on some really disturbing shock tactics to setup Dirty Harry's opponent, a child sex-trafficking ring.

A film student named Barbara is captured by a couple of masked men and taken to a secluded shed. Here she is tied with hundreds of restraints (seriously) and drugged. Somehow, she ends up escaping but is later recaptured and dragged to a macabre sex show where she is brutally raped to death. Some of these scenes made me very uncomfortable. At the same time, I was begging – pleading – for Dirty Harry to blow these monsters to smithereens. It was one of the most effective first chapters of recent memory.

Meyers uses low-hanging fruit for this novel, a crazy “race war” plot device that has been used by so many of these paperback action titles like The Enforcer and Narc. In this one, the traffickers are setting up a local black militant group as the mastermind behind their operation. The militants, fearing the feds will prosecute them for crimes they didn't commit, immediately go into defense mode, a sequence that lights up the city with violence and police action. None of it really matters that much. We all bought the book to read about Harry putting bullets in brains. By the book's end, the body count is a bloody tower.

The book is highlighted by Harry fighting an active shooter on a college campus. Another long scene has him shooting it out with criminals in an aquarium. As an enjoyable bonus, one of the baddies gets eaten by a shark. The book's finale has Harry in a gunfight with the traffickers in a film studio before the action transitions to an island fortress. I found this final fight interesting, as Meyers will do the same thing again in the next book, The Mexico Kill, as Harry penetrates an island fortress. Weird. 

Some cool references are made to the Dirty Harry film The Enforcer, and the character's famous quote of “do you feel lucky” from the original. Also, Meyers mentions “Any Which Way but Loose” when describing one character, an obvious reference to the 1978 Clint Eastwood film. Also, the author has some book fun by throwing in a character's name as Roy Henkel, probably homage to the great Roy Krenkel, an American illustrator who painted several paperback covers. He also includes a doctor named Steve Rogers (Captain America).  

The Long Death is absolutely ridiculous, but effective. This is cartoon Dirty Harry performing somersaults and leaps through the air, firing on the run and rarely missing. It's pointless and trashy, but damn, it is just so enjoyable. I want to read every Dirty Harry book now. Sign me up for more senseless fun!

Get The Long Death HERE.