Gun in Cheek (25 page)

But Gray/Brooks had a tendency to revert to his pulp origins from time to time, partly because he wrote very fast and was too prolific—it is estimated that he published in excess of 36 million words in a forty-five-year career—to take much time with plotting or polishing. Further evidence of this was a cheerful tendency toward self-plagiarism; Butler points out that nearly all the Norman Conquest novels in the 1940s were thinly rewritten versions of Gray/Brooks's "Waldo the Wonder Man" novellas for the
Union Jack
a decade or two earlier.

One of these forties novels is
The Spot Marked X
(1948), in which Conquest sets out with his wife Joy to save a friend from the clutches of a "Crooks' Union" that operates out of a country estate and deals in diamond smuggling. There is virtually no plot; scenes of action and peril are strung together, most of them improbable, until Conquest forces the Head Crook into a public confession of guilt by having a "corpse" sit up and accuse him. There are also innumerable passages of the following sort: "'If this car wasn't standing here last night, I'm a chunk of Lemna polyrhiza,' "and "'I mean that we've got half an hour to cook up a nice little cauldron of hell-brew for these gentlemen . . . half an hour of complete freedom. They won't move out of the library until the end of that time, and they'll be guzzling whisky solidly to keep their peckers up.'

Some of the fifties Conquest novels are even pulpier than the rewritten pulp novellas.
Conquest Goes West
(1954) is one—another action-filled romp in which Conquest agrees to steal a compromising photograph of a young film starlet, instead winds up stealing one of the most valuable diamonds in Europe (diamonds figure prominently in several Conquest novels), and gets himself entangled with a gang of murderous thieves, a "haunted" house on the Cornish coast, a secret passageway that leads from the house to a hidden sea cave, and an electric motorboat, used to transport stolen goods across the Channel to France, which operates on batteries recharged by virtue of a very long electrical cord extending from the house down the passageway and into the cave.

Conquest is his usual jovial self in both novels, defying his old police adversary, "Sweet William"; bantering with his wife (whom he calls young Pixie and old thing, among other endearments); writing his trademark number "1066" on crooks' foreheads with indelible ink; and generally engaging in all sorts of roguish behavior. His most interesting trait, though, manifest in both books, is the contemptuous way in which he talks to villains once he gets the drop on them.

Now it is true that several British thriller writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties were fond of having their heroes bad-mouth the enemy. Sydney Horler was one of the most proficient at this, as we've already seen; another notable exponent was "Sapper," who put all sorts of slangy invective into the mouths of Bulldog Drummond and his pals. But none approached the art of name calling with more verve and scorn than Berkeley Gray and Norman Conquest, as these examples from
The Spot Marked X
and
Conquest Goes West
will demonstrate:

"Better make up your mind, you slimy toad! Make this confession and I'll get you out of this jam."

"If you're arrested, and the case goes for trial, you'll be booked for the gallows as sure as you're a double-crossing hellhound."

"There are a lot of things you don't know, reptile."

"Save it, wriggler," interrupted Conquest with such contempt in his voice that Sir Mark winced.

"Reach, slugs!" he said calmly.

"Less talk, Useless, and more action."

"You, disease, are the man who was known in the early part of the late war as the Kensington Fiend."

"It's a shame that a chunk of hellspawn like you should be one of the throng."

"Say that again, filth, and my trigger finger will give a very nasty jerk."

"I enjoy mucking about with the law, I confess, but I make a point of having no truck with vultures and buzzards. It's not my business to hand vermin over to the cops, but you're different."

"I've told you before, foulness, that I don't make deals with buzzards of your type."

The gay, free-spirited life-style of the twenties and thirties came to an abrupt end with the advent of World War II, and along with everyone else, the gentlemen rogues were forced to adopt a more serious demeanor for the duration. Some of that sobersidedness carried over into the postwar years; none of the desperadoes was ever quite the same jolly, devil-may-care character he was in his salad days. But his popularity, in every case, nonetheless continued unchecked through the ensuing decades, partly because of film and television incarnations, partly because of nostalgia, partly because of a faithful readership and the talents of the individual author—and still continues today in the case of The Saint, who has already passed his golden anniversary and who remains the titular king of the rogues.

Despite the ongoing popularity of the gentleman rascal, however, a different kind of outlaw began to develop in the fifties: the antihero, the avenging angel who works outside the law because he considers it to be weak and ineffectual, and who dispenses his own brand of deadly justice; the Mike Hammer syndrome. For a decade after Mickey Spillane's meteoric rise, rogue private eyes, rogue cops, and rogue amateurs bulled their way through countless blood-spattered pages, killing black-hearted gangsters and other evildoers with guns, knives, bombs, bare hands, automobiles, and impunity. And always, of course, in as much graphic detail as possible. The postwar public, especially in the United States, had a taste for blood and violence, and Spillane and his imitators were only too eager to pander to it.

In the sixties, still another type of antihero evolved—a combination of Mike Hammer and an updated and downgraded A. J. Raffles; the true outlaw, the professional thief and professional killer. The most successful of these characters was Parker, the laconic and coldblooded gunman who appears in some fifteen novels by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) published between 1962 and 1974. Parker and others of his type are hardly Robin Hood figures; they steal for personal gain and would ridicule (or shoot) any of their number who suggested giving all or part of the spoils to someone else. Their only redeeming quality is that they seldom steal from or murder anyone in the mainstream of society; that is, their victims are for the most part other criminals, usually of a much nastier variety than they. They have a certain code and they operate within its boundaries. The crooks they plunder and destroy have no code at all and are in fact the same type of vicious cutthroats that Mike Hammer was bent on eliminating.

One of the more interesting Parker imitations is a man also known only by his last name—Sand, the protagonist of a number of novels by Ennis Willie. An ex-Organization man, Sand spends most of his time traveling around the country murdering hoods and avenging past wrongs—an odyssey Don Pendleton and others would make highly fashionable a decade later. Sand's escapades are short, tersely written, full of sex and graphic violence, and would probably have won him a legion of fans if Willie had not chosen to publish his books with a Chicago-based soft-core-porn outfit called Camerarts, whose chief claim to fame was an erratic distribution network. For the most part, Willie's prose has a certain rough lyric quality ("He had been many places many times, and he had never been a tourist"). Plots, however, were not Willie's long suit. It may even be said that plots were not his short suit.

To illustrate, we have
The Case of the Loaded Garter Holster
(1964). Sand embarks on a trip to Miami to avenge the death of a Cuban woman named Carmen Sanchez, who has died of a brain hemorrhage. But Sand suspects (and rightly so) that the hemorrhage was induced by outside forces. When he finally determines what those forces were, we are given what may be the most unique, not to mention most bizarre, murder method in the history of the genre:

". . .The guy who killed Carmen Sanchez is a very clever fellow, diabolically speaking."

"You know how—"

"The fire extinguishers. There are two of them on the floor. They stuck a gag in her mouth to keep her from screaming, stuck a nozzle in each ear while they held her down and turned the extinguishers on. The report called it a massive brain hemorrhage induced by some outside force. Well, there's your outside force and that's just what it would induce."

True enough. But one is left wondering why the police and/ or coroner failed to notice that Carmen's ears were full of either dry chemicals or foam. Or, if the tire extinguishers contained carbon dioxide, why there were no traces of frostbite. Or, even if the hoods cleaned out the ears, why no traces of any kind showed up under forensic scrutiny. But Sand doesn't seem to worry about this, so why should we?

The antihero of the seventies, it may be said, took a somewhat regressive and deviant turn into the realm of sadistic violence for the sake of sadistic violence. The Mike Hammer syndrome allowed for plenty of sadism, to be sure, but in small doses and with sex receiving equal, if not greater, consideration. The new, supermacho style is to eliminate, or at least to sublimate, the sexual aspects and concentrate on unabashed bloodletting and general mangling of human tissue. The outlaws of this ilk are not private or police detectives, nor are they professional criminals; they are one-man armies, soldiers-of-fortune-cum-fanatics embarked on a personal crusade to destroy the Mafia, the "Communist conspiracy," or similar organizations/ideologies in the name of justice and/or democracy, and by whatever means necessary.

The pioneer rogue of this type is Mack Bolan, the Executioner, who was born in the typewriter of Don Pendleton and the publishing offices of Pinnacle Books in 1969. Bolan's one-man war is against the Mafia, a local branch of which has murdered several members of his family; in more than thirty novels, he travels all over the United States (often in a 26-foot GMC motor home known as the Warwagon and outfitted with electronic intelligence-gathering equipment and a variety of "firepower"), and through most of Europe as well, slaughtering hundreds of Mafia criminals and somehow managing to elude law-enforcement agencies of every sort.

The amazing success of the Executioner series (several million copies sold) naturally spawned the usual bunch of imitators, some of whom enjoyed a certain dubious success of their own. The standout among them is Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant, created by Joseph Rosenberger and also published by Pinnacle Books. Camellion is a sort of rogues' version of James Bond, in that he is primarily occupied in eradicating threats to the free world arranged by Communist forces or members of an organization called Spider. He, too, travels all over the world; the only difference between Camellion and Bolan is that the folks he slaughters are usually foreign "boobs" of one nationality or another.

It has been said that the Death Merchant series is of such style and quality that it is not pastiche but parody and that Rosenberger has unappreciated comic talents. There is no internal (or external) evidence to support this theory. The truth would appear to be that the Death Merchant is pure pastiche, and that Rosenberger, after his own fashion and by intent if not always by effect, is a "serious" rather than a comic writer.

This is how he puts words and sentences together to create his own inimitable style:

Vende looked sicker than a Bible salesman on a cheap shot to nowhere when he found himself staring into the big blackness of an Auto Mag muzzle. The Indian's face twisted like a pretzel! Camellion could see that he was sorting through the metal junkpile of his mind, desperately searching for the right answers.

"Drop the HK and pretend you're trying to grab a couple of clouds from the sky," Camellion said lazily. "NOW!"

Surprise and confusion flickered over the faces of the other men. Dr. Panduhabaya looked as depressed as a sailor who had hoped for love but had been forced to settle for a pint of cheap booze and mechanical sex with a cheap slut. (
The Death Merchant #20: Hell in Hindu Land
)

Keeping in a low crouch, Richard ran to the end of a row of boxes marked "Musical Panda Dolls" and peeked around the corner. Thirty feet away was the door that led to the outside. There was more than that! The gate guard had heard the gunfire and now was looking around the edge of the doorframe. He didn't like what he saw! Seeing Camellion with a pistol in his hand, the guard snapped off a shot with his 1VIAB auto, then slammed the door. The slug missed Richard and whizzed into one of the crates, striking one of the panda dolls and somehow setting off the mechanism that controlled the music. Immediately, the tinny tune of the "Marseillaise" began issuing from the toy panda.

The Death Merchant shook his head in disgust.

The vicissitudes of a capricious fate are indeed inconsistent and incommensurable! Damn it!
(
The Death Merchant #6: The Albanian Connection
; italics Pendleton's)