James Arch Howard (1922-2000) was a World War 2 pilot who later earned a doctorate in psychology. He also wrote crime novels in his spare time under his own name as well as using the pseudonym of Laine Fischer. To the extent that he is remembered at all, he’s known for the Steve Ashe series of four mystery paperbacks between 1954 and 1957. His first stand-alone crime thriller was “Murder Takes a Wife,” a Pocket Books original from 1958 that’s available now as an affordable ebook.
Narrator Jeff Allen is a hit-man with a specialty of killing wives at the request of their husbands - usually to save the client’s some future alimony. He charges $10,000 per hit, plus expenses, and he’s very good at his job - never working more than five jobs per year. In the shocking opening scene, Jeff tosses a radio into a tub during his target’s bubble bath and then stages the scene to look like an accident. It’s the kind of brutal, Manhunt-esque opening that really grabs the reader by the throat and demands attention.
Like the Max Allan Collins character “Quarry,” Jeff is a smooth professional who gets close and ingratiates himself into the lives of the women he’s engaged to kill. Sometimes, he gets laid. Unlike Quarry, Jeff prefers to stage his murders as accidents. It’s also interesting to read the utter lack of compassion he feels for the women he kills - referring to them as tramps and leeches.
After finishing a brutal murder, Jeff relocates and falls in with a group of wealthy Fort Worth businessman with wives worth killing. Jeff gently nudges these country club types toward the idea of offing their wives to create some liberation from the bonds of marriage. The long sales cycle takes up most of the book, and the reader becomes immersed in a bit too much interpersonal drama among the couples. Using his cover as a wholesale pharmaceutical salesman, Jeff is very good at getting inside this group of friends, so the manipulation can begin.
This all culminates in some interesting murders, and a conclusion that I didn’t find particularly satisfying. However, the author is clearly a real talent, and I now want to explore his Steve Ashe series. Overall, I’m not upset to have read “Murder Takes a Wife,” but don’t confuse it with a masterpiece of the genre.
Acknowledgment:
Special thanks to the excellent blog, The Rap Sheet, for providing biographical background on the author.
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Henry Kane (1918-1988) authored over 60 novels, some utilizing pseudonyms like Anthony McCall, Kenneth McKay and Mario Sagola. His most successful character was 'Peter Chambers', a Manhattan playboy private eye that appeared in over 30 of Kane's novels. As a new Kane reader, my first experience with his writing is the early stand-alone title “Edge of Panic”, originally released by Dell in 1951 for a quarter.
“Edge of Panic” is the stereotypical crime-noir novel that possesses a tried and true formula that heaped huge rewards for many crime novelists of the 50s and 60s. The concept? Well, it's fairly elementary. The drunken man simply wakes up with a corpse. Even prolific crime novelist Day Keene titled one of his novels after the familiar prose - “Wake Up to Murder” (1951). Depending on the author, even an over-utilized plot can still be entertaining.
The book's protagonist is Harry Martin, an ordinary family man working as a successful insurance agent in New York City. For those unfamiliar with the insurance industry, agents are typically rewarded with lavish trips and bonus awards that are sometimes saturated with alcohol depending on how high the numbers bounce off the monthly quota. Martin has prospered at Alliance Mutual and in the past enjoyed many sales conferences with Scotch and the company's vice-president Quigley. After meeting his wife Alice and becoming a father, his wild and woolly days are in the rear-view. Now it's pork chops, club soda and nights with the newspaper.
After a client's husband passes away, Quigley brings the policy and it's cash payout to Martin with an invitation to catch up over drinks. Martin's plan is to meet with a wealthy female client later that night, so he takes Quigley up on the offer. After several glasses of Scotch (a mainstay beverage in Kane's novels), Martin starts to become woozy. With endless pouring, Martin goes on a full bender before departing for his prospective client's apartment.
Soon, Martin passes out only to awaken a few hours later in the woman's apartment...and she's been bludgeoned to death! Disoriented and drunk, Martin is dismayed to find he is holding a bloody hammer. Petrified that he's committed a murder, Martin flees the scene and holes up with a friend across town. Surprisingly, the book's changes gears and places Alice into a primary role. She works against the dragnet to learn more about her husband's activities while attempting to convince the authorities of Martin's innocence.
This is a breezy crime novel that works well within the “drunk finds a corpse” niche. While not terribly original (or innovative), Kane delivers the goods in a propelling way. While never dull or lifeless, the mystery takes a few twists and turns before culminating in the inevitable reveal. Overall, a pleasing, well-told crime novel from one of the genre's most consistent writers.
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In this episode, Tom discusses the career of crime-noir author Milton Ozaki, including his 1958 paperback "Case of the Cop's Wife". Eric continues his WW2 theme from last week with a review of 1979's "Sergeant Hawk" by Patrick Clay. Tom takes us to the Macon County Line with a book buying road trip in Georgia. Listen below or download directly LINK. Also, stream on any popular streaming service.
Listen to "Episode 12: Milton Ozaki" on Spreaker.
After a decent run during the 1970s, the “Soldier of Fortune” series by Peter McCurtin (1929-1997) discontinued in 1978 after nine installments. He resurrected the series and main character in 1984 for nine more paperbacks over the course of 15 months with cheap photo covers. I grabbed a copy of the 17th book in the series, “Bloodbath,” from 1985, but I could never figure out if it was written by McCurtin or a ghost writer because Ralph Hayes and Paul Hofrichter also wrote books in the series under McCurtin’s name. Leisure Books never bothered to register the copyright on the paperback, and the eyewitness trail has gone cold. In either case, the paperback was almost certainly edited by McCurtin based on his plot outline, and the writing sure feels like his.
The Soldier of Fortune narrating the series is Jim Rainey, a badass for hire to whatever cause and hellhole has the cash to pay for his combat expertise. “Bloodbath” opens with Rainey on vacation in Hawaii where he witnesses the explosion of a Honolulu children’s hospital - an act of terror so unthinkable even Rainey is briefly shocked by the destructive carnage. A meeting with police discloses that the bombing was likely the work of the Hawaiian Liberation Army, a Polynesian terror group seeking to drive the Yankees off the island chain and restore the monarchy to the lineage of King Kamehameha. Oh yeah, they’re also commies.
Because Rainey is a merc in close proximity to the explosion, he’s immediately considered a suspect by local police. They don’t have enough to hold him, but he is ordered not to leave the islands and placed under tight surveillance. With his reputation and honor to protect, Rainey decides to hunt down the terrorists himself to clear his name. So, with the simple turn of the page, Rainey the death dealer becomes Rainey the gumshoe with a dastardly crime to solve.
After finding and wasting (Mack Bolan-style) some of the revolutionary foot soldiers, Rainey decides that the only way to dismantle the Hawaiian sovereignty group is to get hired as a mercenary by them - a busman’s holiday for the paid warrior. Once he has infiltrated the terrorist group, the novel’s action slows down with lots of planning and bickering among the Hawaiians and their Caucasian hired muscle. The climax of the paperback speeds things up considerably with the kind of carnage-filled conclusion you’d expect.
As with every book McCurtin ever touched, “Bloodbath” is just pure popcorn fun. The conversational tone and first-person narration from Rainey is something unique in the men’s adventure genre. The author’s knowledge of Hawaii’s geography and culture almost certainly came from a World Book Encyclopedia and a Fodor’s Travel Guide, but you don’t read books in the ‘Soldier of Fortune’ series to walk away fully informed about divisive issues, even ones as silly as Hawaiian sovereignty. You come to the series for, well, a Bloodbath. By that metric, this paperback certainly delivers. Recommended.
Addendum:
The series order of the 1984-1985 installments is puzzling since the nine unnumbered books were released over a 15-month span and historical records are spotty. The Vault of Evil Pro-board lists a helpful - but speculative - series order with each novel’s setting. I revised their list based on my own research utilizing the publisher serial numbers of the books.
01. Massacre At Umtali (1976) - Rhodesia
02. The Deadliest Game (1976) - Argentina
03. Spoils Of War (1977) - Lebanon
04. The Guns Of Palembang (1977) - Indonesia (by Ralph Hayes)
05. First Blood (1977) - Panama (by Ralph Hayes)
06. Ambush At Derati Wells (1977) - Kenya (by Ralph Hayes)
07. Operation Hong Kong (1977) - Hong Kong (by Ralph Hayes)
08. Body Count (1977) - New Guinea (by Ralph Hayes)
09. Battle Pay (1978) - Caribbean (by Ralph Hayes)
10. Golden Triangle (1984) - Vietnam
11. Yellow Rain (1984) - Afghanistan
12. Green Hell (1984) - Ireland
13. Moro (1984) - Phillipines
14. Kalahari (1984) - South Africa
15. Death Squad (1985) - Nicaragua
16. Somali Smashout (1985) - Somalia (by Paul Hofrichter)
17. Bloodbath (1985) - Hawaii
18. Blood Island (1985) - Western Samoa (by Ralph Hayes)
British printings of the series were marketed under the series name “Jim Rainey: Death Dealer,” but I’m unclear how many of the 18 originals were printed for U.K. release.
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I like boxing stories. I like Plantation Gothics. As such, I was excited to read “Mantee” by Robert J. Hensler from 1969. Based on the cover blurb, it’s about a black slave who becomes a boxing champion. Mandingo meets Rocky! What’s not too like?
Then I saw this posting on the Internet from the author’s son, Eric:
“My father wrote this book. He’s not proud of it or the other pulp he cranked out in the sixties but it kept food on the table for our little family. Before you judge too harshly, remember that somebody had to demean themselves to write this in the first place. Just a quick note to give a glimpse behind the curtain...”
Wow.
At first this review/apology made me re-shelve the book. I read for entertainment and escapism, not to open the old wounds of a nice family’s shame. Upon further reflection, I needed to know if this book was something truly worth causing inter-generational embarrassment. Curiosity clawed at me every time I walked by my library. To be sure, plantation fiction was a salacious and tawdry sub-genre that leveraged America’s discomfort with topics like racism, inter-racial sex, and the repugnant stain of slavery on our nation’s past. However, I don’t think these books are racist. The slaves are almost always drawn in a sympathetic light, and their evil masters generally get their comeuppance in slave uprisings forming the novel’s climax.
I couldn’t find much info about the author, and my initial attempts to contact his son failed. I know Hensler wrote an innocuous-sounding book about Washington, D.C. during his career, but I was unable to identify any other pulp fiction bearing his name. None of the vintage fiction experts I consulted knew of the guy. If he wanted this chapter in his life to be forgotten, he’s done a fine job staying under the radar for the past 50 years.
Anyway, onto the plantation book:
“Mantee” takes place on Alabama’s 250 acre Rosebriar Plantation in 1859 - four long years before emancipation- where the slaves pick cotton and take whippings from the dysfunctional Darby family. The cast of characters is an array of stereotypes. Benson is the patriarch who rules his land with an iron fist. Evangeline is his compassionate abolitionist wife. Lance is the cruel heir who loves to order up whippings. Marlena is the horny daughter - physically excited watching the muscular black bodies suffer abuse.
On the slave side of the plantation, Mantee is the biggest, strongest, and most handsome of the indentured blacks on the property. The comely Marlena is hot-to-trot and fascinated by the idea that Mantee likely has an enormous dong. You can see where this is headed. There’s a whole mess of slaves who fill every archetype required by the genre, and Hessler wastes no words detailing the rape and torture of slaves in graphic detail. After awhile, these scenes became rather stomach-turning and I can only imagine that they served to pad the page count and thicken the paperback to a market-friendly length. The consensual and non-consensual sex scenes were extra pornographic and extra long - even compared to other plantation novels.
Accused of rape, Mantee becomes a runaway slave leaving his torturers behind. It is during his flight that he encounters a series of white saviors and eventually the sport of boxing. The fight scenes are absolutely fantastic and resemble early MMA in their brutality rather than the gloved Queensbury Rules we know today. Once the boxing story kicked in, the author really brings his A-game.
To be sure, “Mantee” is an imperfect novel. The author’s choice to write the dialog in a phonetic southern dialect wore thin pretty quickly. I would have also preferred more punches thrown and fewer girls deflowered along the way as the sex scenes became tiresome and repetitive. Nevertheless, the paperback never failed to hold my attention, and I mostly found myself enjoying Mantee’s adventures - vertical and horizontal. Plantation novels were written to be salacious, but these fictional dramatizations will inevitably bring readers greater empathy for the people forced to suffer through this shameful chapter of American history.
And that’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
After I completed the “Mantee” review above, I finally heard back from the author’s son, Eric Hensler. He reports that his dad is still around at age 86.
“Our family grew up everywhere. New York, California, Texas, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Florida,” Eric said. “Within those states, we lived in more cities than can be counted without aid from him which is, unfortunately, not to be had at this point.
The reason for all the moving around? “His primary career was in radio,” Eric explained . “He was, I suppose you might say, an itinerant DJ. Rarely staying at any one station for more than six months, full of a wanderlust insatiable. Or such was the case until the early 1970s. At that point, he attached himself to WSST in Largo, Florida and stayed for nearly 20 years. He rose through the ranks and for his second decade there, he was the general manager.”
“My father never held particular political positions or otherwise,” Eric said. “He was an experimental man and a pragmatic one at the same time. He wrote hippie-porn, plantation fiction, poetry, non-fiction and on and on it went. He has published well over 50 books but the difficulty lies in that he used many different pen names. So many, in fact, that I have done much hand-wringing in trying to compile a bibliography. He is still alive, but unfortunately, he has advanced dementia and is of little help in this regard.”
Eric pointed me in the direction of a 1977 Pocket Books novel titled “Washington, D.C.,” a title so generic that it’s hard to find much information about it. Eric explained that it was the only other work of fiction released using his real name. I did find a single online review of the book that described the novel as being about power, sex, and sixties-style revolutionaries who want to blow everything up but are too inept.
Eric explained that a lot of his dad’s books were published under pseudonyms, including “Robert Scott, R.J. Scott, Arjay Scott and so on.”
Bingo! This explains a lot.
There were a bunch of Bee-Line erotic novels written under the pen name of Arjay Scott that are clearly the work of Robert Hensler. They had lurid titles like “Circus of Flesh” and “Fornacation, Inc.” His novel “Diabolical Chain” features the tagline: “Hollywood Voluptuaries in an Orgy of Lust...and Blood!” Most of his Bee-Line porno books have non-descript covers with no art. However, his paperback “The Swapping Game” features an attractive photo cover with some decent graphic design.
My personal favorite of Hessler’s titles was “The 27-Foot Long Love Machine.” However, my enthusiasm was dampened when I learned that the Love Machine in question was a camper van. His erotic fiction work for Bee-Line explains the author’s comfort in writing long, graphic sex scenes in “Mantee.”
“All of the pulp of any ilk that he did publish was through his agent, a man who went by the name Jay Garon,” Eric said. “We heard his name and saw the checks all the time when I was a boy.” I learned that Garon, who died in 1995, represented several working authors of pulp fiction around that era, including Michael Avallone, author of the Ed Noon mystery series.
Eric has heard rumors that his mother may have a box of dusty old books from dad’s writing career. “I need simply to convince my mother to direct me to it. She, you see, is a devout Christian and wants nothing to do with them, but as he fades, she softens to anything to do with his life and history,” he said.
Like many senior citizens in his condition, Hensler has good days and bad days. Eric told his father about the upcoming Paperback Warrior feature, “I explained what was going on to my father and he smiled and said he would like to read it. He was clearly amused, at least for a few moments until slipping back into his unfortunate fog.”
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'Dennison's War' was a mid-80s men's action-adventure series published by Bantam. The books were written under house name Adam Lassiter by Steven M. Krauzer, a journeyman author who contributed four novels to the 'Executioner' series as well as penning the nine-volume western series 'Cord' (with William Kittredge). My jumping on point is the fourth entry, “King of the Mountain”, for no real reason other than the book's catchy cover art.
The idea behind the series is fairly straight-forward. Dennison is a US ex-military operative and Vietnam veteran. During the war he worked under Peter Chamberlain (probably CIA) and had a team of six to ten hardened warriors. Now Dennison's retirement consists of freelance opportunities to support Chamberlain on various assignments where an unofficial military presence is needed.
During the harrowing curtain jerker, armed commandos ascend a windswept, snowy mountainside in Glacier Park, Montana. The team quickly kills the US Secret Service squad before entering a posh ski-lodge to capture the US Vice-President. Then a call goes out to Washington D.C. that the team wants a chopper loaded with gold, a Russian prisoner and Dennison brought to the lodge in exchange for the Vice-President. That call then gets routed through command channels until it reaches Chamberlain. The reader must suspend his disbelief that anyone would bother to kidnap a Vice President. You might as well kidnap the White House pastry chef if you really want to make an impact in Washington.
Chamberlain wants Dennison and his team to take out the bad guys and rescue the VP. But things get a little more convoluted when a backroom deal buys another team that ultimately wants to sacrifice Dennison's crew to the enemy while making the greedy grab and go during the crossfire. This plot-twist was used five years later in the fourth 'Eagle Force' novel “Red Firestorm”, which coincidentally was also published by Bantam and also used a snowy mountain setting for the action. It also used the same cover model for both books – Jason Savas. Go impress your friends.
“King of the Mountain” has a great beginning. The middle of the book is a long flashback scene involving Dennison and Chamberlain's operations in Vietnam and the double-cross by US operative Mitchell Horn, who is the villain of the book. Most of Krauzer's writing is of the espionage/spy variety which is surprising if you are looking for a simple 'Phoenix Force'/Able Team' sort of novel. At the standard 190-pages, the book seems a bit more dense than the average shoot'em up. It's not an easy read, but a worthwhile one if you really concentrate on the action. I'd be interested in reading more of the series.
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Considering the enormous success of series staples like “Mack Bolan,” “The Butcher,” and “The Penetrator,” it would make sense that publishers would want to steer their marketing and branding efforts into the look and feel of the Gold Eagle or Pinnacle product lines. Brutish bullies, fast cars and the damsel in distress surrounding bold fonts, a serial number, and an immortal gun-toting hero. These elements are the centerpiece of the book’s plot, so why not run with that for the marketing flair? Back in the day, every bookstore and pharmacy in America had a prominent display of these book covers depicting all of the above hallmarks of the 70s and 80s costume party known as the Men's Action-Adventure genre.
This packaging approach was an economic success story for a lot of publishers. But what exactly could publishers do when they didn’t really posses written content suitable for a Men’s Action-Adventure series? That seemed to be a problem confronted by Berkley Books back in the day, and they had an interesting solution to this lack of supply.
In 1981, book shoppers may have seen a new action hero adorning their paperback aisles. His name was Raven, and Berkley released “Raven #1 – Raven Settles a Score” in the US with a tag line that introduced “The playboy ex-cop in the sizzling new action series.” The cover design certainly dressed the part with the scantily clad woman, a sleek car, and a turtleneck-clad hero with gun-in-hand. New subscribers had a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor with this alluring new series. The problem with “Raven #1” is that it wasn't a new series at all. In fact, this novel was actually the sixth book in a pre-existing series originally marketed as the 'John Raven Mysteries' – and the story was a far cry from the cover’s promise of an extraordinary action-hero debut.
'Raven' author Donald MacKenzie received most of his official education at a hodgepodge of England, Canada and Switzerland's school systems. However, like so many of writers, his true education came through life experience. MacKenzie was jailed numerous times - once in the U.S. for five years and another time in England for three. In fact, his life was so tumultuous that he wrote two autobiographies chronicling his checkered past - “Fugitives” (1955) and “Gentlemen at Crime” (1956). He began writing stand-alone crime novels in the late 1950s, with titles like “Manhunt”, “Knife Edge” and “Double Exposure.” But it wasn't until 1974 that he really hit his stride.
The 'John Raven Mysteries' ran from 1974 through the writer's death in 1993. The series comprised 16 total entries about an ex-British Inspector named John Raven. It was published in England by Macmillan and featured standard and unremarkable mystery novel cover designs that bore zero resemblance to the gun-toting bold font and Raven branding that Berkley invented for this benign series. To their credit, the bland covers of the original novels made no attempt to deceive or rook their intended audience. The plots themselves are more international man of mystery stories. There's plenty of espionage, international escapades and a sense of heightened alert – but John Raven just isn't an action hero in even the broadest definition of the genre. They were more like Tom Clancy writing Sherlock Holmes starring Spenser. Not exactly 'Hawker' or 'The Revenger' as Berkley conveyed the series in their deceitful packaging.
The grift behind “Raven Settles a Score” was simple enough for Berkley. After obtaining the license from British publisher MacMillan, they falsely staged the books as a new American series by dressing them up in packaging dripping with testosterone. The publisher either didn't know the chronological order of the original stories, couldn't get the rights to the earlier books, or simply just didn't care. It appears that Berkley simply slapped a #1 on whatever book was handy to score some quick cash from ill-informed male book shoppers looking for some action.
Berkley’s opening shot, “Raven Settles a Score,” begins with a walk down memory lane among series regulars John Raven and Inspector Jerry Soo. The whole scene is confusing to the uninformed reader with talk about a recent marriage, Soo's current happenings and the presumed defeat of a villain named Drake. Later, some alliances form that were clearly the bi-product of some incidents in prior books from the British Raven mystery series. Any reader believing this was truly the opening episode in a new series is bound to be lost. To hamper things even more, the “Settles a Score” reference in the book's title actually refers to the prior book altercations between Raven and his nemesis, Drake - a malevolent figure in this book that Soo/Raven both want to defeat for the greater good. Again, there's very little action and most of the book is simply positioning characters in key locations where Korean Embassy officials are hiding bad deeds while utilizing drug squad members as cover. There's a damsel in distress, but she’s buried in dialogue and never actually seems to need Raven’s help all that much. In fact this whole novel (or the 95-pages I could tolerate) is really just a ton of dialogue among a humongous cast of characters with very little explanation or entertainment value.
Apparently, Berkley's ruse didn't generate an enthusiastic reaction among readers. The publisher ran only four titles before canceling the whole debacle:
Raven #1 - Raven Settles a Score (originally 1979's sixth entry)
Raven #2 – Raven in Flight (oddly the second novel from 1976)
Raven #3 – Raven After Dark (renamed from 1980's fifth book, Raven Feathers His Nest)
Raven #4 – Raven and the Paper Hangers (originally the seventh title from 1980)
The entire 'John Raven Mysteries' series:
Zaleski's Percentage (Macmillan, 1974)
Raven in Flight (Macmillan, 1976)
Raven and the Ratcatcher (Macmillan, 1977)
Raven and the Kamikaze (Macmillan, 1977)
Raven Feathers His Nest (Macmillan, 1980); US title Raven After Dark
Raven Settles a Score (Macmillan, 1979)
Raven and the Paperhangers (Macmillan, 1980)
Raven's Revenge (Macmillan, 1982)
Raven's Longest Night (Macmillan, 1984)
Raven's Shadow (Macmillan, 1984)
Nobody Here by That Name (Macmillan, 1986)
A Savage State of Grace (Macmillan, 1988)
By Any Illegal Means (Macmillan, 1989)
Loose Cannon (Macmillan, 1991)
The Eyes of the Goat (Macmillan, 1992)
The Sixth Deadly Sin (Macmillan, 1993)
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