Few Die Well

“After the success of I Killed Stalin, Sterling Noel (1903-1984) settled into a niche of writing international espionage and crime-noir fiction with a distinct emphasis on atomic energy and its protection from various Communist regimes. Few Die Well, published in 1953 by Dell, continues that same trend.

The book introduces Jeff English, an American spy who's employed by a defense contractor named Bureau X, the same agency Noel utilized in his I Killed Stalin narrative. English's leash is long when it comes to not only defending US intellectual property, but seeking and destroying Communist cells throughout the world. In one unfortunate mix-up in Teheran, English, posing as a Frenchman, kills two Soviet agents and is placed on a hit list by the Russians. The assassin is a man named Constantine Bardor, a determined Russian who never forgives or forgets.

English's most recent assignment is to assume the identity of a U.S. Army Captain named Randall McCarey and infiltrate an atomic laboratory in New Jersey. His mission is to kill a scientist who is collaborating with the Russians and spilling state secrets. To do this, he must contend with a number of Russian informants who have been implanted among the facility's 900 residential laborers. Noel's harrowing narrative has English essentially living with the enemy while locating the leaks and attempting to make the facility more impenetrable in the future. Once Bardor appears to settle the old score, English and a few allies are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. It's a fun position for the readers, but a rough ride for the good guys.

Few Die Well is an absolute treasure. Without giving away too many spoilers, Noel's slower character development regarding a love interest is effective. It's this element that adds a personal touch to what is otherwise a violently cold, calculated mission to fight Russian agents and Communist sympathizers. It's certainly a period piece, explicitly reflecting the heightened Cold War era in a methodical, action-oriented way. Noel knows his audience, loves this style of writing and delivers another top-notch spy entry.

Note – In one humorous parody of Noel's newfound success, he describes English reading a “rip-snorting and impossible spy-chiller called I Killed Stalin by somebody by the name of Sterling Noel.” It's enjoyable to see authors have fun with their fans.

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Dirty Harry #02 - Death on the Docks

After the third Dirty Harry film, The Enforcer, star actor Clint Eastwood announced he would no longer contribute to the film franchise. The studio, Warner Brothers, decided that fans of these flicks would still be willing to shell out cash for more of the character's adventures. Under their publishing brand of Men of Action (S-Com, C.A.T.S.), the studio licensed 12 paperbacks starring Dirty Harry himself, Lieutenant Harry Callahan. The house name was Dane Hartman, but in reality the books were authored by Richard S. Meyers (1953- ) and Leslie Alan Horvitz (1948- ). Strategic marketing created striking, illustrated book covers to lure men's action-adventure readers like myself. I happened upon the series second installment, Death on the Docks, published in 1981.

A San Francisco labor union called Local 242 of the Brotherhood of Longshoremen has found itself in a political upheaval. The union is led by a vile criminal named Braxton. A candidate to the union's presidency, Tuber, hopes to wrest control from Braxton, but those attempts are quickly flushed in the novel's opening pages. In a violent crescendo, Braxton has hitmen kill Tuber and his family. Problem solved...until Callahan is called in to lead the murder investigation.

In what becomes a familiar pattern, Callahan is handed various clues in haphazard fashion from shallow characters that have a one or two chapter lifespan. The author doesn't attempt to create a mystery or develop a story in which Callahan, and readers, slowly solve the crime. Instead, the chapters just feature Callahan being directed to various locales – bar, dock, store, house - and shooting a criminal. When the action is exported to a small Caribbean island, where Braxton has fled, the climax comes in baby steps that fail to deliver an explosive, plausible or satisfying conclusion.

In short, Death on the Docks is like one of those dives located south of the Mason-Dixon Line that swears they have real New York pizza. After a few bites you realize it's just a soggy, messy imitation. No validity. It's just not authentic. On sample size, these novels aren't of the same quality as the film franchise. They won't "make your day"...only ruin it.

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Day of the Gun

After enjoying a trio of crime-fiction novels by Clifton Adams (1919-1971), my first look at the author’s prolific western sagas was the 1969 novel Tragg's Choice, winner of a coveted Spur award. Appreciating his unorthodox approach to traditional western storytelling, I was excited to test another of his genre works, 1962's Day of the Gun.

Sam Engels is an elderly, widowed man and a former Field Marshal in and around the boomtowns of the Oklahoma Territory. I could immediately sense that Engels had a few hills he chose to die on, but miraculously survived all of those battles. Through brief backstories it's conveyed that his wounds and age, combined with the approach of the 20th Century, has led Engels to the twilight of his career. Now unemployed, Engels has arrived in the small town of Guthrie, Oklahoma in hopes of obtaining a U.S. Marshal job.

After departing the stagecoach, Engels has a brief, violent encounter with three young cattlemen after they push the “old-timer” into the dust. Afterwards, Engels meets the local Marshal and learns that his application was denied due to age. Later that night, the dejected Engels is once again attacked by the three cattlemen. After three broken ribs and a vast array of bruises and cuts, Engels is left in the dirt to die. He awakens to find a woman named Kit tending to his wounds in a makeshift doctor's office. After talking with the young woman, he learns that Kit is actually an orphan that he saved years ago.

Kit explains to Engels that a deranged killer named Elsey has victimized her for a number of years by murdering her husband and anyone else who attempts to befriend her. Fearing that Elsey will now target Engels, she urges him to heal up and leave town. But in an odd twist of fate, the man who won the U.S. Marshal job asks Engels if he can ride as a posse-man (the lowest tier of 1800s law enforcement) to capture Elsey. Engels must then decide to either swallow his pride and accept the lowly servitude or simply leave town and pursue his next career choice as a cattleman.

Once again, Clifton Adams approaches the western genre with an abstract method of storytelling. In the same way that Tragg's Choice was so compelling, Adams creates an aging, experienced character who has reached the end of his career. It's a familiar formula, the elderly striving to stay relevant in an age dominated by youth and change, but Adams is able to incorporate outside elements to distance himself from just an average retelling. The narrative focuses on a number of conflicts, primarily Engels contending with a younger, more resilient partner while tracking a killer. Engels' mysterious past is purposefully left unexplored, allowing readers to come to their own conclusions on his murky history. These are just small nuances that help create a unique reading experience even for seasoned western fans.

Like Claire Huffaker and Lewis B. Patten, Clifton Adams isn't a mainstream name within western fiction. While fans flock to talents like Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, Luke Short and Max Brand, it is perhaps this second tier of talent makes up some of the genre's best literary works. Day of the Gun is another excellent western tale from an author that mastered the genre. At some point I would like to sample his Amos Flagg series, but with so many excellent stand-alone titles, it may take some time to properly evaluate that series.

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Web of the City

Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) is mostly known for his work as a science-fiction author and essayist. While going through U.S. Army basic training in 1957, Ellison wrote his first published novel called Web of the City that was initially released under the title of Rumble in 1958 when juvenile delinquent novels were a hot property. Hard Case Crime reprinted the novel in 2013 while also adding three of Ellison’s street-gang short stories to the volume.

Web of the City is a novel about a fictional New York street gang called The Cougars. Ellison claimed that he researched the book by going undercover in a Brooklyn street gang called The Barons using a fake name, and he served as “war counselor” for ten weeks before leaving. For the record, I think that story is somewhere between wildly exaggerated and complete bullshit. Nevertheless, he wrote a memoir about his supposed street gang internship called “Memos from Purgatory,” a 1961 release before fact-checking of outlandish claims was a thing.

In the novel, 17 year-old Rusty Santora declares that he wants to leave his position as president of The Cougars, but his former street gang members have other ideas. In order to prevent his desertion, gang members stomp Rusty down, and convince him that he’s good as dead if he doesn’t fall in line. Meanwhile, tensions are mounting between The Cougars and their arch-enemies, The Cherokees (the Brooklyn variety, not the Native Americans). As you may have guessed, a rumble is inevitable.

The juvenile delinquent genre tropes come at the reader fast and furious in this thin novel. You have the high school shop teacher with the heart of gold encouraging Rusty to leave the street life behind and pursue a career as an industrial designer. Rusty’s sister is following in his footsteps as an up-and-comer in The Cougars Girls Auxiliary (“The Cougie Cats”), and he’s terrified that she might never see adulthood. Some of the tropes are quaint - much of the drama takes place in soda shops and the gangbangers use switchblades and broken bottles when violence explodes at the teen dances.

Eventually, an actual plot emerges when gang activity hits close to home for Rusty. His sense of grief and street honor compel him to seek revenge, and Ellison treats the reader to a compelling vendetta storyline that keeps the tension mounting until the final climax. It’s nothing you haven’t read before, but this iteration is extremely well-crafted.

The fight scenes - and there are many - are vividly drawn and offset the corniness of the story. It’s a fun read if you’re looking for a throwback to a simpler time when guys were guys and dolls were dolls. I’m sure it was written as a serious sociological peek behind the curtain of an grim urban subculture devoid of hope. These days, it’s just a bit overwrought and a mostly entertaining time capsule. Buy a copy of the book HERE

Wasteworld #04 - My Way

With 1984's My Way, the four-book Wasteworld series comes to an abrupt end. Authored by a combination of Laurence James and Angus Wells, this post-apocalyptic series centered on U.S. military veteran Matthew Chance and his perilous endeavors to reach his ex-wife and kids in Utah. Beginning in New Orleans, each book showcases Chance's road to survival through warlords, mutants and dictators in the same manner that popular doomsday series titles The Survivalist, Doomsday Warrior and The Last Ranger also did.

In the Wasteworld third installment, Angels, Chance had seemingly met his match with a vicious gang of Hell's Angels bikers. Thankfully, a female Apache warrior named Kathi saved the day in the book's grandiose finale. My Way is a seamless continuation as Kathi and Chance head north into Nevada. After a couple of quick run 'n gun battles, Kathi's part of the narrative concludes and Chance arrives in Las Vegas to begin another adventure.

After meeting a nice mechanic and his hospitable family, Chance learns that Vegas is now controlled by two brothers, Al and Tony Clementi. Like a 1950s crime-noir paperback, the two brothers control the city's gambling venues and drinking halls. When they target the mechanic's young daughter, Chance is thrust into a war with a doomsday crime syndicate. After killing Al, Tony's faction declares war on Chance. While that narrative comes to fruition, a side-story develops with three bounty hunters from Texas hunting Chance through the Vegas rubble.

Despite the book's exciting premise, My Way fails to deliver a pleasant reading experience. Far too often the authors digress from the narrative to explain a minor character's history or to inform readers of an outlaw's infamous history. For example, there's a whole segment on Billy the Kid. While the action was enthralling, I felt it was misplaced and untimely. When key scenes required gunplay, the reader was served dialogue. But when a descriptive scene analysis is required, the characters just shoot it all to Hell.

While publisher Granada probably had a limited circulation (UK and New Zealand only), the sales numbers just didn't produce a commercially-successful series. Unfortunately, My Way wasn’t written as a series finale, so invested readers aren't provided a proper conclusion to Matthew Chance's epic struggle. This novel's poor execution ensured that interest in a proper ending likely dwindled among readers. Looking at the series as a whole, the first and fourth books were lukewarm while the second and third installments were very enjoyable. Having read the Wasteworld saga once, I'm not terribly interested in ever reading it again. It might be worth the time and effort to track down the series, but there are certainly far better books to pursue.

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The Captain Must Die

Of the 20-or-so crime novels written by Robert Colby in the 1950s and 1960s, the overall consensus is that The Captain Must Die is his masterpiece. The book began as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original from 1959 and has been reprinted several times thereafter, so you should have no problem landing yourself a copy - particularly if you open your heart to reading vintage fiction on a Kindle.

Fawcett packaged the paperback as a WW2 novel, but that’s not the case at all. The story takes place in the 1950s - at least a dozen years after the main characters left the war behind. Three former platoon-mates meet in Louisville, Kentucky with a load of guns to deal with some unfinished business from the war. The title of the paperback betrays their plan to murder a former U.S. Army captain, but it’s way more involved than you’d think.

The former captain is named Gregory Driscoll, and he’s a successful local businessman in Louisville. Most of his wealth was inherited, but he’s made the most of his head start by living with servants and a trophy wife on a sizable estate. As we meet Driscoll, he is being harassed with 3am phone calls, vandalism to his car, and the shutting off of his utilities. He’s also got a secret in his basement that he keeps from his the world. The three ex-soldiers’ awareness of the basement’s secret - coupled with seething hate and a lust for revenge - drive the action forward towards a violent confrontation.

The author dishes out the revelations of The Captain Must Die in drips and drabs. Why do the guys want to kill Driscoll after all these years? What’s the captain hiding in his basement? How does his lusty wife fit into all this? Revealing too much would spoil many satisfying surprises, and the The Captain Must Die is a treasure trove of twists and turns worth experiencing without too much foreknowledge. It’s a vendetta story, a heist novel, and a tough-guy story of graphic violence rolled into 180 pages of 1959 paperback perfection.

If you’re looking for the type of war story depicted on the cover, look elsewhere. However, if you want a brilliantly-layered novel of crime and revenge, you can’t do much better than The Captain Must Die. Highly recommended essential reading. 

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Johnny Liddell #04 - Bullet Proof

Parallel to crime-fiction staples like Mike Shayne and Shell Scott, Johnny Liddell was a no-nonsense private-eye operating under the bright lights of The Big Apple. The series was authored by Frank Kane and consisted of 29 novels over a 20-year period between 1947 and 1967. Arguably, the series most defining moments are in the early 1950s era, so I decided to explore fan recommendations and try Bullet Proof, originally published in 1951 by Dell.

The novel begins with Liddell receiving a phone call from a woman named Jean Merritt. She wants a second opinion on her father's death by suicide. Fearing that he was murdered, Merritt requests to meet Liddell on a lone cross-street at 10:30 PM to discuss pertinent facts about the case. Only Merritt doesn't show, instead she is replaced by a black Cadillac filled with hardmen. In an explosive opening chapter, Liddell dives for cover as Tommy guns eradicate a phone booth and nearby store. During the firefight, Liddell is able to kill one shooter but the man's identity leads to a number of questions and an intense interrogation inside the police precinct.

Learning that Merritt wired a $500 retainer for his services, Liddell is determined to learn what happened to the woman and her father. With the help of a wise medical examiner and a tenacious reporter named Muggsy (a series mainstay similar to Mike Shayne's Lucy Hammilton), Liddell delves into the Merritt family's history and their early ties to organized crime. When Liddell gets too close to the truth, he becomes a running target for a number of assassins. With riveting gunfights in the streets and hotel corridors, the aptly titled “Bullet Proof” delivers the goods in grand fashion.

While I enjoyed the 1947 Liddell debut, About Face (aka Fatal Foursome), I found it to be mired in mystery mud with very little action. Kane takes a cue from Mickey Spillane's red-hot character of that era, Mike Hammer, and adds a prevalent edginess to this book. There's even a scene with Liddell punching a beautiful prostitute in a hotel suite. The author uses the familiar genre tropes – hazy cigarette smoke, copious amounts of alcohol – to provide a seedy, darkly lit nightlife for the hero to operate. The atmosphere, engaging investigation and intense action sequences contribute to what is essentially the best Liddell novel I've read. Bullet Proof excels on all levels.

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