The Evil Days

During the 1950s, Bruno Fischer was one of the mainstays of crime fiction. His bestselling novel, “House of Flesh,” sold 1.8 million copies following its 1950 release. After 21 years of writing, followed by a 14-year hiatus from new releases, Fischer’s “The Evil Days” (1974) was his last published book at the age of 62. Stark House Mystery Classics has repackaged the novel for modern audiences as a double along with Fischer’s “The Bleeding Scissors” (1948).

“The Evil Days” was marketed as a “novel of crime and suspense in the suburbs.” The plot setup is one we’ve seen before: Caleb Dawson’s wife finds a bag of jewels that she wants to keep to supplement the family’s meager income. Caleb thinks it’s a bad idea, but acquiesces to his money-hungry wife’s ill-conceived scheme. As you may have guessed, there are unsavory people who aren’t excited to just walk away from a lost fortune and want the jewels recovered. Meanwhile, there’s a violent murder in the same suburb that serves as the basis for a satisfying mystery. Could the two events be connected?

Fischer spent much of the 1960s working as an editor for two large publishing houses, and he puts his industry knowledge to good use in “The Evil Days.” Caleb works for a respected publisher that has been acquired by a large corporation. The inside baseball treatment of the publishing world is an interesting aspect to this novel for avid readers with an interest in the way a book is brought to market, and the way that editors speak about writers when they’re not around. The snappy dialogue feels authentic because Fischer has been there.

Another interesting way to read this novel is with the knowledge that Fischer was an honest-to-goodness Socialist. His early career was spent editing leftist publications, and he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1938 as the Socialist Party Candidate (spoiler: he lost). The ideas that workers are exploited by their bosses and that lust for money invites unhappiness are recurring ideas in his books and stories. “The Evil Days” has elements of both themes.

But even if you don’t read this paperback as a Marxist allegory, it remains a helluva mystery filled with moral dilemmas, poetic intrigue, sex, and murder. His politics aside, Fischer was an outstanding writer who honed his craft writing short-stories for the pulps, and that fat-free approach to storytelling carried forward for decades to this fine tale. It’s not filled with action or violence, but the Hitchcock-style mystery is plenty tense. Fischer was a pro at this game, and this final novel was a fitting close to a remarkable body of work. Highly recommended.

Bonus Tip:

The best work by Bruno Fischer that I’ve ever read was a 40-page novella called “We Are All Dead.” It’s about a fouled-up getaway after a heist. It’s only $1.49 on your Kindle, and it’s a damn masterpiece. Thank me later.

Swampmaster #03 - Unholy Alliance

If Paperback Warrior celebrated a Hall of Shame, then two of the three books in this 'Swampmaster' series would absolutely be inducted. David Alexander's hog piss 'Phoenix' would be in as well as the 'Roadblaster' atrocity committed by Paul Hofrichter (also known here as He Who Creates the Horror). I despised Jake Spencer's (real name Jerome Preisler) series debut (“Swampmaster”, Diamond 1992) and its 232-pages of utter nonsense. The author redeemed himself with a quality sequel called “Hell on Earth” the same year, moving the action from St. Augustine, Florida to the Gulf Coast. The book, while wildly ridiculous and equally nonsensical, had a good story to propel its over-the-top violence and mayhem. The third and final book in the series is “Unholy Alliance”, once again released by Diamond in 1992. 

Jerome Preisler, my God man. Why? Why did you write this?

In theory, a book showcasing a drug deal between post-apocalypse criminal factions at an abandoned Disneyworld is tantalizing. It's a fascinating concept – bad guys running around the most famous amusement park in the world while a war party featuring acrobatic twins and a Seminole (they are the good guys mind you) are attempting to stop them. Just for shits, throw in 8-pages of Black Bear vs Doomsday Cowboy, a gladiator game of motorcyclists mowing down human heads and a drooling wheelchair bound madman residing in Cinderella's Castle. 

I mean...Jerome, how do you screw this up? 

It's essentially like Peter North just showing up on the set and having no idea where to put it. This should be an easy one. Instead, it's pages and pages and pages of junk. Gun porn galore, mindless conversation about Cuban cartels, pointless backstories on meaningless characters that become decapitated in throwaway “cut” scenes. This is absolute garbage. It's worse than garbage. If garbage had a waste can that they put their own garbage in, then this book would be the filth-ridden wallpaper adorning its inner aluminum shell. 

Thankfully, this series was trash-canned, thrown onto the back walls of garage sales worldwide, finding solace in its obscurity and staying away from unknowing readers who might seek out the answer to “Who is Swampmaster”. He's John Firecloud and he'll rain on your Macy's parade every single Thanksgiving. He's the guy who hid the chocolate bunny on Easter and told you asparagus tastes great. He only left you a quarter for pulling that bloody stump of a tooth out of your pink gums and John Firecloud is the guy who crapped in the work toilet and left it there to dissolve knowing you'd see it and never unsee it. 

Jerome Preisler did all of that too. 

'Swampmaster' is the warning label for bad fiction: Contents inside may put you at risk of blindness, erectile dysfunction and lethargic bouts of coma-like fatigue. Do not operate heavy machinery if you are reading 'Swampmaster' and contact your physician or nearest urgent care if you reach page 10. In other words, don't read this, don't look at it, don't buy it...pretend it doesn't exist.

Adam Steele #04 - Valley of Blood

It was the cover art that got me intrigued enough to read this 'Adam Steele' western. For once, the cover is perfectly faithful to a scene in the story--- in fact, it’s the most eye-opening scene in the book--- so let’s take a look.

Our hero has come to a frontier town controlled by a greedy rancher and his henchmen. Four masked hardcases corner Steele one night. We know that these are the same creeps who’d gang-raped the book’s helpless young leading lady a couple of chapters back. Things go badly for Steele at first (he takes a punch to the stomach and a kick in the crotch), until he suddenly produces a three-inch “tie pin.” With it, he swiftly skewers the testicles of one bad guy, whose shrieks of agony distract the others long enough for Steele to get the drop on them. A fast gunfight leaves that trio dead, and Steele blows the head off Punctured Testicle Guy for good measure. Next, he strips all four of the thugs nude and hangs their bodies on a barbed-wire fence before castrating them.

I’ll leave it to others to speculate where the author’s fascination with groin trauma comes from, but the over-the-top violence isn’t a surprise. The book is credited to George G. Gilman, but the author is Terry Harknett, the British pulpster who wrote these 'Adam Steele' books along with the even more brutal 'Edge' westerns. Steele has a bit more humanity than Edge, but that’s not saying much considering what a stone-cold sociopath Edge is, and he shares Edge’s habit of cracking a bad pun at the end of most chapters.

Harknett’s characters exist in a stark spaghetti western landscape. That gives his stories a somewhat different flavor than what you get with conventional westerns by American authors. Tough-guy heroes are nothing new, but in these books the hero has a hard, cold core like an under-baked potato. The same traditional themes of good versus evil are here, but there’s an emotional detachment which makes it hard to really care about anyone, or about what happens to them. That’s just as well, because the author is fond of killing off virtually every named character in a given novel, and it happens here too.

Even the unfortunate leading lady gets killed off, casually and pointlessly. A beautiful young widow who’d helped him earlier in the book, Steele pauses to reflect on why he nevertheless feels nothing for her. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muses, “But I’m looking for the best and you were banged around too much.” Maybe it’s just as well that Steele doesn’t pause for reflection very often.

It all winds up in an action climax, but I found the ending pretty unsatisfying, and apart from the spasms of colorful violence this is a fairly dreary, downbeat book. The pacing is reasonably brisk and I was grateful for the brevity of its 148 pages, but reading “VALLEY OF BLOOD” just isn’t much fun.

Alley Girl (aka Renegade Cop)

The 1954 stand-alone novel “Alley Girl” by Jonathan Craig (real name: Frank Smith) was re-released in 1959 as “Renegade Cop.” I suspect that the book was written and published following the success of Jim Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece, “The Killer Inside Me”, as both novels feature sociopath cop protagonists.

The main character of “Alley Girl” is highly-regarded Detective-Lieutenant Steve Lambert, and the first time we meet him he is pounding whiskey before his morning shift while the naked 18 year-old he’s been banging is haranguing him about his bad habits.

The central mystery of the novel concerns Tommy Nolan who may or may not have killed somebody in a whiskey blackout. Detective Lambert is working the case and promised Tommy’s hot wife that he’d keep Tommy out of the electric chair if she sleeps with him. Classy guy, right? Meanwhile, someone else wants to make sure that Tommy is convicted for the crime and is willing to pay Lambert a ton of cash to make sure that happens. The detective has no ethical qualms about this conflict of interest and appears personally uninterested in the truth behind the allegations against Tommy.

Meanwhile, a good and honorable cop named Dave Kimberly wants to solve the murder for all the right reasons. His cop instincts won’t let him mind his own business and allow Lambert to work the case without the scrutiny of an honest colleague. Dave’s character is a ray of light in this novel filled with ill-will and corruption. Dave’s quest for the truth makes this crime novel a straight-up whodunnit mystery with a satisfying conclusion. 

Lambert is a reprehensible protagonist, and you need to be comfortable with that fact to make it through this short paperback. He feels like a 1950s prototype for the Vic Mackey character on the TV show, The Shield - a talented cop with no moral compass. If you can stomach spending so much time with a villainous main character who forces another man’s wife into depraved, coercive sex, you’ll find a pretty compelling police procedural here. I’m embarrassed to say that I enjoyed this book a lot. You might as well if you’re a twisted soul.

A couple postscripts:

The title “Alley Girl” makes no sense, and was likely the idea of someone at Lion Books rather than the author. There’s no obvious Alley Girl in the whole book. There’s a secondary female character of humble beginnings who could arguably be the Alley Girl, but naming the novel after her doesn’t add up. Blame the publisher. As a title, the 1959 Diamond Books re-release as “Renegade Cop” makes more sense even if it shows an utter poverty of imagination.

Jonathan Craig also wrote a bunch of police procedural novels called the '6th Precinct' series. The paperbacks spanned ten installments between 1955 and 1966. At first glance, it would seem that the series was trying to capitalize on the popularity of Ed McBain’s '87th Precinct' series, but Craig actually beat McBain to the punch by a full year. The '6th Precinct' novels follow two NYPD detectives - Pete Selby and Stan Rayder - through a series of murders that always seems to start with the discovery of a dead, nude woman. Craig’s series never saw the commercial success of McBain’s (both were inspired by “Dragnet”, it seems), but Craig was a solid talent and the books seem to be worth a shot. For what it’s worth, the late Bill Crider loved them, and the never-late Paul Bishop was lukewarm on the '6th Precinct'. I intend to break the tie and get back to you.

We have a feature on Jonathan Craig on the third episode of the Paperback Warrior Podcast.

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Felony Tank

Malcolm Braly's life ironically mirrors his 1961 prison novel “Felony Tank”. Braly was born in Portland in 1925 to the son of an automobile dealer. After that stint fell through, Braly's family hit hard times during the depression. Meaningless robberies eventually stacked up, culminating into multiple sentences in the clinger. While serving time in both Folsom Prison and San Quentin, Braly began to hone his craft – writing books about guys just like himself. Surprisingly, he wrote “Felony Tank” in 1961 behind bars. In fact, Braly went on to write two more in the pen - “Shake Him Till He Rattles” (1963) and “It's Cold Out There” (1966). All were originally released by Gold Medal due to editor Knox Burger convincing Braly to write during a visit to San Quentin. Arguably his best work was “On the Yard”, published in 1967 and adapted to film in 1979. Sadly, after Braly's parole, he only gained 15 years of freedom. He died in an auto accident at age 54.

“Felony Tank” follows a hopeless 16-year old named Doug, who in essence is simply Braly reliving his own helter-skelter youth. Doug's childhood and upbringing has led him to become a vagabond, riding the rails and hitchhiking to the next town and the next robbery. After leaving Phoenix, Doug arrives in the southwestern city of Ardilla (state never given). It's here that he commits nearly the same crime as the author – robbing a feed store for a few bucks before picked up by the police. He's taken to jail and placed in an upstairs “penthouse”, an ill-fated mid-point between county jail and prison. Most of the inmates at Ardilla are hardened lifers, they know the drill and are well-aware the next stop is a prison term. 

The book really becomes interesting with the internal politics. Without ruining it for you, deals are made, cigarettes are exchanged and Doug's cell of no-jobbers has a hacksaw blade. In a daring escape, the second half of the book begins with Doug and his older ruffian/mentor named Agnes on the run. Paralleling one of Braly's own robberies, the duo break into a laundromat to steal clothes (and a suit) and rob a nearby grocery store for what amounts to pennies. After sleeping in abandoned buildings and cars, the two find a warm hostess with stay-at-home mom Marion.

While the book possesses a turbulent blend of jail, escape and pursuit, the heart of the book is Doug's struggles with establishing some kind of existence. It's this moment when he meets Marion that really ebbs the tide. Marion is a mother of two, seemingly neglected at home by her husband, a sailor. With Marion's spouse gone for a few weeks, she invites the inexperienced Doug to her bed. He falls in love, but that's just another chapter in what amounts to be a full-circle novel that hopelessly reflects Braly's life behind bars. 

It had to be incredibly fulfilling, satisfying and all-together victorious for Braly to not only pen his own struggles, but to have a novel published by Gold Medal while in prison. “Felony Tank” is written from the heart on a gravel road of conviction and authenticity. It's a stellar first effort (nominated for an Edgar) and one that cements Braly's position in the “prison drama” niche of novels. While action and adventure fans may be swayed off course, Doug's story is so tragic that it warrants another page flip to see what's coming next. I highly recommend “Felony Tank” and it's available as both a Black Gat Books reprint (2016) or together in a Stark House collection with “Shake Him Till He Rattles/It's Cold Out There” (2016).

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Hell to Eternity

Edward S. Aarons started his writing career cranking out short stories for the pulps under the name Edward Ronns. The popularity of men’s paperback original novels in the 1950s gave Aarons a market to spread his wings with his stand-alone men’s crime and adventure books. His most successful venture was the Sam Durrell 'Assignment' series of spy novels that spanned over 40 installments between 1955 and 1970.

“Hell to Eternity” is an anomaly in Aarons’ body of work. It’s a 1960 Fawcett Gold Medal novelization of a screenplay (written by someone else) based on a true story from World War II. Although the events in the book ostensibly happened, the story has been filtered through the meat grinder of time and fictionalization: events occurred in 1944 that were recounted to a screenwriter 15 years later that were adapted for a book by the successful action novelist. This is good news for a reader who wants to enjoy a kick-ass war novel that reads nothing like a high school history textbook. The fact that the hero was a real guy is just an added bonus.

“Hell to Eternity” is the story of Hispanic USMC Private Guy Gabaldon and his experience at the Battle of Saipan during the war. For those without a deep knowledge of history, here’s what you need to know: Saipan is a small island in the Pacific about 135 miles from Guam and 1500 miles from Tokyo. The island was taken over by the Japanese during World War I and liberated by American troops during the sequel war. The isolated nature of this event allows the reader to enjoy the story of this battle without taking a deep dive into all the war’s machinations. It’s a bite-size story in a super-size war.

The reader is in good hands with Aarons as the storyteller. He introduces us to Gabaldon as he and his fellow Marines are positively terrified at the prospect of fighting the Japanese on the heavily-fortified island of Saipan. Flashbacks to Gabaldon’s childhood give us insight into his humble beginnings and the circumstances that taught a poor Los Angeles kid to speak fluent Japanese after he developed close relations in that immigrant community. As always, Aaron’s writing is superb, and the reader really comes to know young Gabaldon as a person while creating a rooting interest in his survival and success on this important mission.

For his part, Gabaldon is an understandable and imperfect hero. Fresh out of boot camp and scared out of his wits, he is far from a typical action star as he storms the beach on Saipan under enemy fire. He’s also conflicted as he sees Japanese soldiers dying at his feet because the immigrant community meant so much to him growing up. Flashbacks to Gabaldon’s life following Pearl Harbor and the internment of his Japanese-American friends add additional moral nuance to this exciting adventure story.

The interior of Saipan is a mountainous jungle pocked with caves deep into the woods. Those caves became fortifications and hiding places for the Japanese soldiers during the U.S. invasion. These hideouts serve as a great set-piece for Aarons to show us the way Gabaldon uses his language skills to coax enemy soldiers from the safety of their hiding places into surrender and interrogation. Meanwhile, there are plenty of bloody battles as the Marines fight Japanese Imperial soldiers armed with both guns and samurai swords. Aarons knows his way around a good action scene, and “Hell to Eternity” has plenty.

Later in life, Gabaldon went on to become a losing candidate for the U.S. Congress and the owner of a seafood business on Saipan where he lived as a civilian for 20 years before relocating to Florida for his final years. Before his 2006 death, Gabaldon wrote a non-fiction account of his war experiences called “Saipan: Suicide Island.” I don’t know much about Gabaldon’s own book, but there’s no way it’s more entertaining and exciting than Aaron’s fictionalized version of the story. “Hell to Eternity” is essential reading for fans of pulpy WW2 adventures. It will fit perfectly on the shelf next to Len Levinson’s 'Rat Bastards' series. Highly recommended.

Black Eagles #01 - Hanoi Hellground

I’ll be honest with you. I’ll only read one or two thick doorstop books a year, because I hate taking the risk that I’ll be trapped in the middle of a long-ass book that isn’t going anywhere. And at 330 pages and a tiny typeface, “HANOI HELLGROUND” is more than twice the length of the standard action/adventure series novel. But I’ve had a lot of luck with Vietnam War pulp lately, and I love the grinning skull covers on these 'Black Eagles' novels, so I tore into this series’ debut. Fortunately, the book keeps moving from start to finish.

It’s basically “THE DIRTY DOZEN” in Vietnam. An elite squad is put together for special combat missions, and the first assignment is to seize a huge pagoda complex way up in North Vietnam, kill all the military bigshots inside, find a hidden code descrambler there, and get out of the country with it after blowing up the place. 

The pagoda is the headquarters of an evil, ambitious general who curries favor with his superiors by maintaining it as a party palace where they can do all the nasty things they can’t get away with in Hanoi. Most of those things happen behind closed doors and involve underage boys, but the general himself is fond of the ladies. (As the Black Eagles close in on the night of the raid, he’ll be busily boinking a young commie cutie; his heat-seeking moisture missile will deliver a payload six separate times, a feat which even Longarm might envy.) 

The book is a little schizophrenic. On the one hand, it wants to be a serious military/espionage story, and it’s loaded with lots of details about weapons, strategy, Vietnamese culture and so forth. For example, a sequence where the squad learns high-altitude parachuting isn’t covered in a couple of sentences, but in page after page of exacting detail. 

But then on the other hand, the book wants to be pulpy, and after a few mundane chapters one sordid shocker after another pops up. Some of them are lurid, like the female commando who dates a hated communist enemy just to castrate him and stuff his package into his mouth as he bleeds to death. Some are tragic, like the innocent Vietnamese tribesmen who are captured by the communists and tortured with electrodes attached to their scrotum. And occasionally they’re just psychotically evil, as when the communists punish nuns by forcing excrement down their throats, all for the crime of sheltering the orphans of non-communists. There’s a lot of excess here, and not all of it is fun to read. But like they say, war is hell.

Writing under the pen name of John Lansing, author Mark K. Roberts is clearly trying a different approach than the one employed in his lightweight, sexy 'White Squaw' westerns. For the most part, “HANOI HELLGROUND” works. I liked all the combat action, and the inventive ways in which the Black Eagles deal with various perils on this mission. There was also ample backstory material on each member of the team, which helped flesh them out. (I still wasn’t really able to keep all thirteen of these guys separate and distinct in my mind, but that’s probably my fault rather than the book’s. I was still able to differentiate them as The Black Guy, The Hispanic Guy, The Jewish Guy, The Vietnamese Defector Guy, etc.) 

There was one glaring flaw in the story. The pagoda is situated up in the mountains of northern North Vietnam. There’s no good, level place there for an Army helicopter to land, so the Black Eagles have to parachute down, about a day’s hike away from the target. Okay, fine. Once the mission is completed, they have 48 hours to reach a secret pickup location in a flatter area, where a chopper will land and carry them out of the country. But that pickup location is hundreds of kilometers away, down in the southern part of the country. Huh? There’s no other out-of-the-way place in all of North Vietnam where a chopper can land? That’s insane. But it gives the author a good excuse to extend the book by eighty pages or so, as the Black Eagles desperately hijack vehicles and race south, trying to elude the enraged North Vietnamese who are right on their heels, and hopefully get to the pickup location before it’s too late. Some of the book’s best material is in these eighty pages, including a brutal showdown with the depraved general on a racing locomotive, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Yes, the novel is longer than it needs to be. But it’s lively enough, and there’s some great action in it, so I didn’t mind much. Roberts did a good job with it. And although he didn’t write any of the later books in the series, I’m looking forward to exploring the later chapters of the 'Black Eagles' saga… none of which are nearly as lengthy as this one was.