The Trailsman #303 - Terror Trackdown

Journeyman David Robbins has authored over 200 novels under seven different pseudonyms. Along with horror and science-fiction works, Robbins created and wrote over 40 books in the Endworld and Blade post-apocalyptic series. As David Thompson, Robbins authored over 70 installments of the western series Wilderness and eight frontier books under popular western writer Ralph Compton's name. My first experience with Robbins' work is his contribution to the massively successful The Trailsman series under house name Jon Sharpe, specifically Terror Trackdown, released in 2007 as the 303rd novel of the series.

The book features “The Trailsman” Skye Fargo leading a small column of Army recruits through the northern Rockies in 1861. While the patrol features two experienced officers, the rest are all young baby-faced raw recruits with no formal training. Fargo has been hired as an Army scout to explore this portion of Montana in hopes of finding a suitable location to establish an Army outpost or fort. The opposition will be numerous Native American tribes that continue to resist the white man's invasion of the great Northwest.

Over the course of the westward trek, the crew begins experiencing mysterious events – bucking horses, missing gear and...murder. Once Fargo and the men meet Mountain Joe and his sexy daughter Prissy, the soldiers begin dying one by one. In the dense wilderness, Fargo must determine if the men are being killed by Native Americans or if there is a murderous traitor within the ranks. The investigation is saturated in blood and leads to an elevated level of violence for Fargo and the reader.

Aside from a short paragraph, I was surprised to find Terror Trackdown is devoid of any graphic sex. Fargo and Prissy do the obligatory nasty, but Robbins doesn't spend much time describing it. I'm sure dedicated series fans find this alarming, but I've never had a penchant for reading erotica. The substance is the story and Robbins delivers a superb narrative. The action extends from Montana into Minnesota and incorporates both the wilderness and a small farming community as locations.

While not quite a traditional western, Robbins' writing proves to be rather diverse. Without spoiling it for you, there's an early look at criminal profiling and serial killers, both a pleasant and welcomed surprise for a western yarn. Overall, this is another stirring installment for this wildly popular series. Terror Trackdown is worth tracking down.

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Pick-Up

In 1955, Charles Willeford (1919-1988) was in the U.S. Air Force stationed in California and later Newfoundland. That was the year that his second published novel, Pick-Up, was published as a paperback original from Beacon Books. Since then, the novel has been reprinted several times, so finding an affordable used copy should be a cinch. Moreover, it’s also currently available as a eBook.

Narrator Harry Jordan is a short order cook in a San Francisco diner working a quiet night shift when Helen Meredith arrives to have a cup of coffee at the counter. She’s very pretty and very drunk. Harry’s also a prolific boozer, so they hit a bar together after work. Helen has just arrived in town, and it’s clear that being shitfaced isn’t a rare thing for the girl.

Harry and Helen fall madly in love, and the reader is treated to a dysfunctional romance between two hard-core alcoholics with room-temperature IQs. It’s a lot like a David Goodis novel, but Goodis always thrusts his hard-luck losers into crime-fiction dilemmas fairly early in the novel. Willeford appears to be taking his time getting to the point until it finally occurs to the reader that there is no goal here other than bearing witness to the protagonists’ descent.

Pick-Up isn’t a much crime novel, and other than a couple bar fights, there’s not much action. Technically, there’s a killing but not the kind we normally see in paperbacks from this era. As expected, it’s rather well-told, but the book is basically just a prose blues song about two suicidal drunks in a doomed romance.

The final line of the book has a plot twist of sorts that probably knocked readers on their asses in 1955, but isn’t nearly as shocking 65 years later. In any case, I found Pick-Up to be a well-written slog that doesn’t hold up to brilliant Willeford works such as The Woman Chaser or Wild Wives. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

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Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 26

On episode 26 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast, Tom explains the allure of The Saint series by Leslie Charteris, including a review of “Alias The Saint.” Eric covers Soldier of Fortune #2 by Peter McCurtin , and the guys have impromptu discussion about the work of Shepard Rifkin and Louis L’Amour. Listen on any podcast app or stream below. You can also download the episode directly HERE. Listen to "Episode 26: The Saint" on Spreaker.

Iceman #01 - Billion Dollar Death

The black exploitation phenomena of the 1970s captivated theater audiences nationwide, so it's only natural that iconic characters like Shaft, Willie Dynamite and The Mack would influence men's action-adventure fiction. Los Angeles publisher Holloway House had a successful marketing run by introducing African-American characters and culture within the backdrop of the urban 1970s. Along with Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, Joseph Nazel was among the publisher's most prolific authors.

Nazel authored over 60 literary works ranging from biographies, romance and action-adventure. While serving as an editor for Holloway House, Nazel also edited African-American magazines like The Wave, Players, The Sentinel and Watts Times. But, his work with hard-hitting, violent series' like Black Cop (written under pseudonym Dom Gober), My Name is Black, and Iceman catered to men of any color. These were grimy, intense street thrillers that readers historically loved or hated. My first experience with Nazel is the debut installment of Iceman entitled Billion Dollar Death. It was released by Holloway in 1974 and features artwork and fonts that are clearly marketed to The Executioner and The Penetrator consumers.

First and foremost, kudos to both Holloway and Nazel for including the book's cover scene in the actual narrative. There really is a dueling helicopter fight in the skies over Las Vegas featuring two bikini-clad martial artists and the turtlenecked Iceman himself, Henry Highland West. In reality, this whole book carries that same sort of zany, over the top feel shown on the book's cover. It's often ridiculous, unintentionally funny and left me debating why my David Goodis collection remains unread while I spend hours flipping through books like this. But, Paperback Warrior covers a lot of ground no matter how slippery the slope is.

Essentially, West is a rags to riches drug dealing pimp who's graduated from a petty, street level gig in Harlem to a West Coast crime king. His empire is built on drug money, prostitution and corruption, all of which are the pillars of his Las Vegas fortress city aptly titled The Oasis. Think of Nevada's Bunny Ranch as a frolicking pay to play haven spaced out over 10-square miles. The Oasis is a self-contained city run by West.

In the opening pages, a mafia kingpin is blown to pieces by a half-ton of TNT. West's reputation of elaborate, high security host is blown and he wants answers. Billion Dollar Death then settles into West and his two kung-fu kittens cracking down on sparring Mob families, a crooked politician and a former friend of West's who may or may not be the middle man in a backdoor coupe to dethrone the Iceman.

Based on my small sample size, the Iceman series isn't very good. Nazel's writing is one-dimensional and often I found myself mired in deep discussions without any real payoff or connection to the real story. There's some gun-play, a fun fight scene in a garage and of course the aforementioned helicopter scene. But even these small slivers of joy are ruined by the overall drivel that refuses to deliver anything noteworthy. I'm putting Iceman in the deep freeze.

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Gregory Hiller #03 - The Spy Who Didn't

Journeyman author Jack Laflin wrote four books in the Gregory Hiller spy series - plus a prequel explaining how a Soviet spy named Piotr Grigorivich Ilyushin eventually became the American CIA’s greatest asset. I had trouble getting into the second installment, The Spy in the White Gloves, but I didn’t want to give up on this unique character so I’m continuing into the third novel, The Spy Who Didn’t from 1966.

The opening page brings the reader up to speed on Hiller’s background as a Soviet defector who is now living as a freelance writer between CIA special assignments. However, this time the assignment stumbles into a vacationing Hiller in the form of a battered old man on a road who collapses in Hiller’s arms outside a mysterious Long Island, New York sanitarium. Before losing consciousness, the old man tells Hiller that the nation of Israel needs to be notified, and “Von Eckhardt has to be stopped!”

Hiller is quickly confronted by the escapee’s pursuers and we get to meet our pulpy cast of cartoonish villains lead by Doctor Rolf Von Eckhardt, who we immediately know is a real villain because he wears a monocle. He’s also the operator of the private sanitarium, Shady Knoll, from which the old man escaped. By page 17, Hiller is captured by the bad guys, including a human giant named Man Mountain McGill, and taken to the sanitarium. The context clues for Hiller and the reader are enough to make everyone come to the logical conclusion that Von Eckhardt is an escaped Nazi officer doing very bad things inside the sanitarium walls.

Laflin writes The Spy Who Didn’t in the over-the-top pulp fiction style of The Shadow, The Spider, or Doc Savage. It’s a lot of fun as long as you aren’t expecting a John LeCarre or Robert Ludlum spy story (in fairness, the paperback’s cover should have been a clue.) The torture scenes inside Shady Knoll were particularly brutal, and the secrets of what else is happening inside the creepy place are revealed mostly through monologues from the villain oversharing with our restrained hero.

Eventually, the action moves from beyond the sanitarium walls and into Mexico. Heller’s mission is one that’s been done in dozens of times in other, better novels, but that’s not the point. The Spy Who Didn’t is a violent and propulsive bit of pulp fiction that exists for the joy of the ride. Laflin is a good storyteller even when he is trading in genre tropes for his CIA hero. Mostly, this is a book I can recommend without reservations because it was a hell of a lot of fun. I probably won’t remember the plot details in a year, but I’ll certainly recall the good time I had in this vicarious adventure.

The Gregory Hiller Series:

0: The Spy Who Loved America (1964)
1: A Silent Kind of War (1965)
2: The Spy with the White Gloves (1965)
3: The Spy Who Didn’t (1966)
4: The Reluctant Spy (1966)

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Steve Ashe #01 - I'll Get You Yet

After serving in WW2, James Howard (1922-2000) earned a doctorate in psychology and began writing crime novels as a side hustle. He put his name on the literary map with a four-book series starring journalist Steve Ashe published between 1954 and 1957. The first book in the series was I’ll Get You Yet published by Popular Library’s Eagle Books imprint with misleading and uninspired cover art. Thankfully, Cutting Edge has new editions of this series available in physical and digital.

As the story opens, unemployed newspaperman Steve Ashe is leaving Neon City for the greener pastures of Omaha. His truck driving buddy Scotty is giving him a lift in a big rig when they narrowly evade an collision with a sedan careening out of control on the snowy highway. After both the truck and the sedan come to a stop after scraping one another, the men rush over to the car to find the female driver beaten within an inch of her life. The damage to her face far exceeds what could have been caused by the mere sideswiping of Scotty’s truck.

After the woman regains consciousness and the blood is cleaned off her face, Steve recognizes his old childhood crush, Vicki. She’s running from a Denver syndicate boss named Mario Carazzi whose goons roughed her up and forced her 17 year-old sister Gina into prostitution by getting the kid hooked on dope. Steve agrees to rescue Gina for Vicki while exacting some revenge on the mobster and his goons. With this promising set-up, we are off to a very Mack Bolan-esque start.

Today we call it “human trafficking,” but in 1954 it was “white slavery” and mobster Carazzi controls the action on the 1,100 mile stretch between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Helena, Montana. Steve begins his hunt in Omaha tracking the syndicate muscle who worked over Vicki. 

At times, this really felt more like a well-written 1970s Pinnacle book with one man on a revenge mission against the underworld than a 1954 crime paperback. But whatever the era, I’ll Get You Yet is some primo vendetta stuff - albeit without a pure vigilante edge - starring a stalwart hero with a self-deprecating sweetie worth avenging.

Steve’s way to ingratiate himself into Carazzi’s organization is to pose as an amateur heavyweight boxer seeking to rise through the pro ranks. It helps that Steve really knows how to use his fists in a scrape, so fans of pugilistic drama will enjoy the boxing segments of I’ll Get You Yet. 

When things go sideways for the hero, there are plenty of outstanding action set pieces. The fact that Ashe is a newspaper reporter is largely irrelevant to the plot until the very end and may play a bigger part later in the series. For the purposes of this debut novel, he’s just a badass. Of course, all of this leads to the climactic confrontation between Steve and Carazzi that you won’t soon forget.

I previously read and reviewed Howard’s stand-alone novel, Murder Takes a Wife. It was decent but nowhere near as awesome as this opening installment in the Steve Ashe series. Ignore the lame cover art. This one is a balls-out, hardboiled, 1950s action paperback written for guys like us. I’m confident you will love this paperback as much as I did. It’s really something special.

Addendum:

Steve Ashe series by James Howard:
1. I’ll Get You Yet (1954)
2. I Like It Tough (1955)
3. Blow out my Torch (1956)
4. Die on Easy Street (1957)

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Cry Blood

During the 1950s, California author Harry Vernor Dixon (1908-1984) produced nine paperback originals for Fawcett Gold Medal who sold a lot of his books to voracious crime-fiction readers. Unfortunately, Dixon remains largely forgotten today outside the world of vintage paperback collectors. In 2017, Stark House Press reprinted two of his 1956 novels, Cry Blood and Killer in Silk in a single volume with an informative introduction by Donald Napoli. Cry Blood won the coin toss for the coveted Paperback Warrior review, so here we go:

The narrative begins with a lovely 14 year-old girl named Diana B. Halloran vanishing after school one day never to be seen alive again. Her disappearance becomes national news in the manner it always does when a photogenic white girl goes missing. Months go by with no meaningful leads, and finally the police close the case unsolved. However, fears surrounding this horrible crime continue to plague the residents of Bayside, California.

Enter Gary Malone. Age 28. Married. Childless. Architect. Veteran. Country club member. Nice guy. His world is changed forever one evening when his wife finds a pair of girl’s sneakers squirreled away in their basement. The initials stenciled near the soles: DBH. Coincidence? At first, Gary is skeptical that the shoes once belonged to the missing Diana. After all, how on earth could the missing girl’s sneakers wind up in Gary’s basement? Gary’s wife insists they call the police, and Gary’s nightmare begins.

Media speculation about Gary’s culpability - largely fed by the police - fuels distrust among family and friends in a viscous feedback loop similar to the one depicted in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl decades later. The third-person narration switches perspective between the innocent Gary and the increasingly-skeptical police chief. This police procedural mystery depicts the cops using their investigative skills to develop evidence against an innocent man. Meanwhile, Gary is caught in a web of the wrongfully-accused man forced to prove his innocence and find the real killer to save his own hide from the gas chamber.

The interplay of these two competing perspectives are balanced nicely thanks to Dixon’s superior storytelling ability. However, the police procedures are a total mess. Even if you don’t demand realism from your crime novels, even layman readers will find themselves yelling at their paperbacks, “Cops would never do it that way!” The author was never a law enforcement officer, so he can be excused some of the plot-points designed to increase the drama at the expense of realism, but the reader is forced to repeatedly suspend disbelief throughout the paperback.

The mystery itself was pretty solid. Clues were presented in a coherent fashion, so an astute reader could come up with the solution a few pages before the characters do. I also enjoyed the characters quite a bit as Dixon did a nice job at making them three-dimensional people and not just cut-outs playing the roles of various archetypes. Overall, I enjoyed Cry Blood. It was a quick read and never failed to hold my attention. While it failed as a police procedural novel, it generally succeeded as escapist entertainment. Recommended with reservations. 

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