World War X - Ring One, Round One

 

Carter Brown, Terry Harknett, Crime Does Not Pay, Ryder Stacy, Tim Waggoner, Laurence James, Frank Rich, and Leo Kessler stay in ring one for round two.

Blood and Ice by Leo Kessler

Blood and Ice (aka Frozen Mountain)
by Leo Kessler (Charles Whiting)
1977, Futura

I've seen this listed as either 7 or in 8 in the SS Wotan and/or Dogs of War series. If it followed a larger group, at this point the series is down to Sergeant Major Schulze of the SS. Schulze, leading green European conscripts, moves through the mountains of Budapest in a suicidal diversionary action. When defeat is certain, Schulze leads a group of deserters and teams up with Jewish refugees to evade both the Soviets and Germans on the way to Austria.

Violent and sleazy, though a titch tame when compared to other 70s British historical exploitation. The scale of the story jumps back and forth between blow-for-blow action and high level summarizations - kind of inevitable in war fiction, but felt more abrupt than usual. 

The book didn't exactly glamorize the Nazis, but the author clearly had a lower opinion of the Soviets. Schulze gets more anti-hero cred than I'd like to see a Nazi get, but it's not like any of this is morally defensible. Schulze hates Hitler and the Nazi establishment, but is a virulent racist in his own manner. 

Available from Amazon

Jake Straight 1: Avenging Angel by Frank Rich

Jake Straight 1
Avenging Angel
by Frank Rich
1993, Gold Eagle

The Jake Straight series is set in a pseudo-communist dystopian future, more punk than cyber (Joe Strummer was Prime Minister at some point). After the world was torn apart in the Corporate Wars, the Party, led by corrupt officials, have taken tenuous control, opposed by more radical factions, fascist skinheads, wino crusades, and corporate remnants.

Straight is a Bogeyman, a semi-official executioner styled as a hardboiled private detective. Straight prides himself on only going after the worst criminals, but is tricked into assassinating a poet wanted on a political warrant. He goes after the truth, and his fee, and of course some dames are involved.

Aside from a gyropistol which acts like a modern gun, and various synthetic food substitutes, not much in the way of technological advancement. The plot is pretty basic, ending abruptly after a dramatic build up, but works to showcase the setting and characters.

Jake Straight himself is a complicated character, a former soldier who was supposed to die in a suicide mission, not fitting into the Party establishment nor the counter-culture, dealing with PTSD, and of course being drunk most of the time.

The 2007 reprints use the same artist (Tim Bradstreet) and I think the same model (Tom O'Brien) as the early Garth Ennis Punisher run, though not the exact same shots.

From Amazon

The Brood by Richard Starks

The Brood
by Richard Starks
1979, HarperCollins

A couple is going through a rough divorce, with the wife getting controversial therapy for the childhood abuse she received from her mother. Their kid has signs of abuse and hubby tries to get custody, and to get his ex away from her therapist. Meanwhile, his mother in law is killed by a child-like humanoid.

Somehow, the therapy is causing the wife to spawn physical manifestations of her rage, which go on a killing spree. Hubby tries to reconcile, saying they need to be a family again, and failing that he strangles her, the end.

Novelizations of horror films often suffer from pacing problems, with background and exposition taking up more page space than the horror elements, and this is no exception. Has no resemblance to a horror story for well over the first half, and makes no attempt to describe Cronenberg's visuals.

I haven't seen the movie, but if it's like the book, Cronenberg abandons all pretense at subtext and just openly fantasizes about murdering his ex. The story is based on his own divorce and child custody case, to the point of casting lookalikes. This may beat out Taken for the most divorced film ever made.

Overpriced at Amazon https://amzn.to/47jZoes , listen to the Audiobooks of the Damned version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyyFF4GMjyg

Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

Devil Rides Out
by Dennis Wheatley
1935, Hutchinson

Some good guy magicians are in spiritual battle with foreigners and the disabled. One level it kind of reminds me of the magic battle of Asian cinema, except that it's boring and almost nothing happens. Wheatley is capable of writing engaging thrillers, but this wasn't one of them.

Mostly just Duke de Richleau spitting out a random hodgepodge of supernatural knowledge: More candles! The sheets must be white and absolutely clean! The Germans did no wrong!

Standing out is one effective sequence involving Saiitii manifestations, which seems to be an homage to William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories.

"A dim phosphorescent blob began to glow in the darkness; shimmering and spreading into a great hummock, its outline gradually became clearer. It was not a man form nor yet an animal, but heaved there on the floor like some monstrous living sack. It had no eyes or face but from it there radiated a terrible malefic intelligence.

Suddenly there ceased to be anything ghostlike about it. The Thing had a whitish pimply skin, leprous and unclean, like some huge silver slug. Waves of satanic power rippled through its spineless body, causing it to throb and work continually like a great mass of new-made dough. A horrible stench of decay and corruption filled the room; for as it writhed it exuded a slimy poisonous moisture which trickled in little rivulets across the polished floor. It was solid, terribly real, a living thing. They could even see long, single, golden hairs, separated from each other by ulcerous patches of skin, quivering and waving as they rose on end from its flabby body–and suddenly it began to laugh at them, a low, horrid, chuckling laugh."

Overpriced on Amazon https://amzn.to/4asuXW9

Killer Flies by Mark Kendall

Killer Flies
by Mark Kendall
1983, Signet

Escaped genetically altered flies eat people and later mutate into giant flies before being stopped by organ music. I guess flies can bite, but this is one of the less plausible animal attack books. More pages are devoted to romance. A rancher widow's child dies in the fly attacks and she spends her time wondering if she should hook up with the scientist who killed her daughter or if she should keep banging one of her employees.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/48aIMXs

Bunco Brawl: Hand Two

 

Breed is quicker on the draw and wins hand two

Fancy Hatch by Zachary Hawkes

Fancy Hatch
by Zachary Hawkes (Alan Riefe)
1984, Pinnacle

Fancy Hatch is on the trail of revenge for her beloved, finding employment as a deputy in small towns to use the resources of law enforcement to track the killer down.

Fancy solves a murder, foils a bank robbery, and sees her target stand trial in a sequence I completely skipped. Trial scenes are dull enough, mad much worse when the reader has first hand knowledge of the crime. Well written but light on the action, some shootouts resolving in a couple sentences. The obligatory three sex scenes were so badly done either someone edited those in or Riefe wrote them absurd purpose out of protest. I got the sense he'd rather be writing a Hec Ramsey style Western procedural than a proper Adult Western.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3KrcSfh

Writing Westerns: How to Craft Novels that Evoke the Spirit of the West by Mike Newton

Writing Westerns: How to Craft Novels that Evoke the Spirit of the West
by Mike Newton
2012, Writer's Digest Books

Quick primer to writing westerns, perhaps not enough to actually write one, but enough to know what you're getting into. Good overviews of types of westerns, history, technology, and slang, with resources for further reading.

Newton's non-fiction is very thorough, which kind of works against him here. I don't think we need to know how many episodes of Branded were on TV, or the exact number of Western comedy films released in the 80s. A lot of this pads out a short work. Felt like those excesses could be trimmed and the remainder either be introductions to a more thorough work, or be a smaller, and cheaper, work.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3QWDxUJ

Breed 1: The Lonely Hunt by James A. Muir

Breed 1
The Lonely Hunt
by James A. Muir (Angus Wells)
1976, Sphere

Azul, aka Matthew Gunn, is a half White, half Apache who returns home to find his tribe slaughtered for their scalps. He tracks the killers to and from Mexico, picking them off one by one.

Some inconsistent morality from Azul, sometime helping people like a farmgirl and a priest, other times torturing or killing relative innocents as it's convenient. Possibly the most violent of the Piccadillys I've read, with the scalp vendor ending up like something out of Clive Barker. 

Available from Amazon

Bunco Brawl: Hand Two

 

Aaron Fletcher leaves the table and three more cowpokes face off - Breed, Fancy Hatch, and Mike Newton.

Witches 1: The Prisoner by James Darke

Witches 1
The Prisoner
by James Darke (Laurence James)
1983, Sphere

Set during the English Civil War, John Ferris is a former soldier seeking revenge on the witchfinders who killed his parents and have taken his beloved. The melee fights are as plentiful as the sex, rape, and torture, and works equally well as adventure as it does for sleaze.

From Amazon

Doc Savage: Czar of Fear by Lester Dent

Doc Savage
Czar of Fear
by Lester Dent
November 1933

Doc is accused of murder while facing the hooded Green Bell, who is destroying the industry of a small town. The kind of case Doc can face in his sleep, and the added element of him being a fugitive just meant he had to duck down in his car a couple times.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3zEtb66

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protege by Tim Waggoner

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protege
by Tim Waggoner
2005, Black Flame

Years ago, Freddy kills a pregnant woman and implants part of himself in the unborn child, who survives. The child is protected from Freddy's influence by a dream catcher until he accidently breaks it, causing his dark side to take over.

Good characters and matches the feel of the original films better than most Black Flame books, but suffers from the same page bloat as the others and could have been cut in half.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/42ODy1H

John Eagle Expeditor 2: The Brain Scavengers by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)

John Eagle Expeditor 2

The Brain Scavengers

by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)

Pyramid, 1973

John Eagle is a White man raised by Apaches who answered Mr. Merlin's classified ad for a secret agent. His mission is to eventually go to Siberia and blow it up. Half the book follows Russian scientists around and generally lounges around, but the basic idea is that Russia is kidnapping Western scientists and keeping them in an underground base.

The action half of the book isn't much of an improvement. Some decent snowbound survivalist adventure, but the action scenes weren't much and Eagle largely just waltzes in and out of the base without much trouble. Instead of firearms he has a gas gun and bow and arrow, neither of which seem to perform much better than a silenced pistol.

I guess Stokes felt obligated to squeeze in a sex scene somewhere, and he does so in the worst way possible. A scientist he's "rescuing" seems to panic, so he uses the time honored Apache method of making a woman submit by raping her. It was a titch more "dubious consent" as they say in the romance novels, but it ain't great. Eagle isn't exactly the most heroic of characters, reminding his allies that they're expendable or outright threatening to murder them.

The book felt a bit of early Nick Carter Killmaster, which Stokes also wrote for, with some added superficially outré elements that didn't amount to much.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/45Qg9xI

Doomsday Warrior 2: Red America by Ryder Stacy

Doomsday Warrior 2
Red America
by Ryder Stacy

The ultimate American Ted Rockson infiltrates and liberates a Russian brainwashing factory. Afterward he runs into a native American biker community, which would have been painfully stereotypical except that they all talk like beatniks. More sex than most post-apocalyptical books of the 80s, including a peyote fueled romp.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3XyvFNp

WWX Young Guns Title: Calder vs Sonnet

 

Frenzi retains the Young Guns title.

Frenzi 2: Florida Guns by R.J. Calder

Frenzi 2
Florida Guns
by R.J. Calder
2022, Point of Impact Publishing

Former mob hitman John Frenzi lays in low in Miami, but he can't stay out of trouble for long. He runs into mafia assassins, crooked union thugs, and is approached by Cuban exiles to assassinate Castro. Frenzi tries to stay out of the game, but is spurred to action to protect a dame. The action was smaller scale than the first one, but still action packed.

Available from Amazon

Carnage on 84th Street: Splatter Crimes by Judith Sonnet

Carnage on 84th Street: Splatter Crimes
by Judith Sonnet
2023

One of a series mixing splatterpunk and 70s crime cinema. I'm not up on modern extreme horror, but this reminded me of the little of Edward Lee I've read, in that it's a pile of gross out with a razor thin plot to justify it. The story here has a woman kidnapped to be tortured and raped by a gang boss while a hitman decimates his crew. For my tastes I prefer violence to come out of the action, rather than just stacked up for it's own sake, but you certainly get what's on the tin here.

From Amazon

WWX Young Guns Title: Calder vs Sonnet

 

Our new champion RJ Calder faces his first defense against the Siren of Splatterpunk Judith Sonnet.

Squirm by Richard Curtis

Squirm
by Richard Curtis
1976 Ace

The novelization of the film, which I'm mostly familiar through MST3K. A downed electrical line causes worms to attack humans. Eventually. Mostly it's a city nerd trying to hook up with a country gal and them finding and losing skeletons.

I'm guessing this was based on the earlier script, though very close to the movie. A flashback to how Roger lost his thumb is the only full new scene. All the characters are described as amazingly attractive, skinny Mick is described as 175 pounds, and the Sheriff is a smooth talking ladies man.

Gorier and with more ambitious effects than the film - Roger's final form is as an ambulatory pile of worms. Biggest loss was that the best line - "You gonna be the worm face" is written as "Now we’ll see what you look like after the worms get you!"

From Amazon https://amzn.to/4ebP9x8

Along Came a Swapper

Along Came a Swapper
by Richard B. Long
1970, Adult Books

Two couples swap partners, eventually leading to a swingers party. I guess Long thought a subplot was needed - one of the husbands talks to his boss every few dozen pages about how it would suck to be industrial espionaged. After the swingers party turns out the entire set up was to blackmail him in an industrial espionage scheme. The wife worries about her reputation so she divorces him and moves in with the blackmailers, while the husband tells his boss, who doesn't care.

Available from AmazonAvailable from Amazon

Crime Does Not Pay, April 1970

Crime Does Not Pay
Vol 3 No 1, April, 1970

They Hanged Charlie Birger

Gang warfare in prohibition era rural Illinois. His war against the KKK was not mentioned.

London's Vampire

Blood obsessed acid-bath serial killer.

Gus Greenbaum

The life and death of mobbed up casino owner.

King of the Dope Traffickers Elias Eliopoulous

Broad overview of heroin trafficking.

Capone's Iron Fist

Edward O'Hare secured the patent for the robot rabbit that dog's chase at the track and went into business with Capone. He was assassinated after hiring the accountant that testified against Capone. O'Hare airport is named after his son. The author was evidently unware that O'Hare was cooperating with the IRS, including fingering the bookkeeper, helping to break the book's code, and tipping the court off to the bought jury.

Sex, Syndicate Style

Confession style story of a woman who slips deeper into mob controlled sex work, including crooked cops and a lecherous prison nurse. Her story is somehow related in detail to the narrator and certainly not made up whole cloth.

Pool Hustler

General overview of the scam.

They Called it Hell's Alley

Characters of Gallatin Street, New Orleans, including firebrand Bricktop Jackson. They misattribute the "Nemesis of Neglect", which referred to Whitechapel.

Rig Warrior 4: Knockdown by J.A. Johnstone

Rig Warrior 4
Knockdown
by J.A. Johnstone
Pinnacle Books, 2020

William W. Johnstone has been dead for a quarter century, but his byline shows up on hundreds of titles, mostly westerns. They haven't revived his horror or post-apocalyptic titles, but some of his few thriller series are still going. The plot synopses read like a madlibs of Newsmax chyrons: After a Black president bans guns, Muslim Mexican cartels invade and force gay healthcare on everyone; stuff like that.

Johnstone published three installments of the one truck driver army Rig Warrior, and decades later we have a new installment. I think it may be tied in to another series, Dog Team or something. The one Rig Warrior I read was mostly just yelling at a journalist for being liberal, and J.A. really captures that original spirit.

Knockdown starts off with some light racism, then offers some information that makes the intro slightly less racist - checkmate, lib! We get constant exchanges like:

"Say, that's not politically correct."
"No, but let me explain in depth why that's OK".

Only took 40 minutes into a 10+ hour audiobook for one of Johnstone's patented "journalist as liberal strawman" scenes which leads into a discussion about how there are only a handful of white supremacists in America and liberals are too mean online.

J.A. was kind enough to frontload a couple of weak action sequences as samples so we can know we're not missing anything, unless you just like having your prior beliefs validated by fictional characters. Even if you're the fan of old fashioned pulp adventure that "you're not allowed to do any more" (ed note: you're totally allowed to do it), there are plenty of alternatives.

Nobody's stopping anybody from using Mexican cartels or Islamic terrorists as the baddies in their book. J.A. could have just done that, but they get so mealy mouthed and weaselly about it they vacillate between apologizing or being defiant that they're not apologizing, rather than showing some stones and just doing it, like they're more worried about what some Tumblr lefty will think about it than trying to be entertaining.

As always, I am available to ghost write a revival of the "Satan inspired" series.

From AmazonFrom Amazon

Revenger 2: Arms for Oblivion by Joseph Hedges

Revenger 2
Arms for Oblivion
by Joseph Hedges (Terry Harknett)
1973, Sphere

Stark hooks up with a mob connected rich party girl and continues his attack on The Company in France. I like the Revenger series more than most, mainly for the grim and sleazy atmosphere. It suffers from padding and under-plotting in places, but when it gets going it goes hard. The darkest element was the sex club the Company used to dump bothersome women, where they all feared a session with the mysterious Jacques.

Ebook from Amazon https://amzn.to/3V81V75

WWX TV Title - Dark Sun vs Scimidar

 

Neither book pulled ahead of the other, leading to a time limit draw. Dungeons & Dragons retains the Television Title!

Scimidar by R. A. Jones

Scimidar
by R. A. Jones
2017, Airship 27

Set in a late 80s style post-apocalyptic world where the only difference is slightly more crime. Scimidar has the powers of empathy, and can feel others emotions when she loves or kills. This also gives her the ability to absorb skills, like Taskmaster. Her metabolism processes drugs and alcohol quicker, and she has an implant that acts as birth control and a cure to all STDs, about the only scifi element in the piece.

Scimidar is a mercenary or something and the plot involves her chasing down a terrorist bomber. Plenty of fight and sex scenes, but mostly exposition. The comic was mature, but this was pornier than I was expecting.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3MNQCP6

Dark Sun: City Under the Sand by Jeff Mariotte

Dark Sun
City Under the Sand
by Jeff Mariotte

Stepping away from Forgotten Realms to another Dungeons & Dragons setting, Dark Sun. Dark Sun is a set on a dying planet, ravaged by magic gone wrong, where metal and water are scarce but psionics are common. Darker than other settings, with some twists - elves are a despised underclass and halflings are feral savages. 

Half-elf Aric, a blacksmith with the ability to communicate with metal, is recruited by the Shadow King to join an expedition to retrieve metal from a long-buried city uncovered in a sandstorm. The activity unleashes an ancient evil and Aric must rush back to warn the city.

Most of the story concerns the fights and struggles to get across the desert, while the main plot, and subplot of a serial killer attacking elfin women, felt a bit rushed. These books often assume a working knowledge of the source material, and I had to look up a few monsters to know what they were supposed to look like.

Available from Amazon

WWX TV Title - Dark Sun vs Scimidar

 

Tie-in Titan Dungeons and Dragons faces Scimidar to defend the TV title

Eve, It's Extortion By Carter Brown

Eve, It's Extortion
By Carter Brown
Horwitz, 1957

Al Wheeler investigates an accident with a suspiciously high insurance payout. I appreciate how Wheeler isn't a particularly smart detective, he just waits for the bad guys to try and kill him, or waits until he runs out of characters for suspects. At least in this era of Brown, each story has a woman Wheeler recruits and/or sleeps with, putting her in danger.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/44ubQ9P

Bloodsisters by John Russo

Bloodsisters
by John Russo
Pocket Books, 1982

A college student wants to know who her father is. Many, many pages later she's targeted by a figure from her past, then the book ends. We have many, many pages of astrology and placing want ads to fill out the length.

A couple of slit throats, not enough to be horror, more of a thriller that never gets started. Exposition heavy as always, Russo solves the mysteries either before or right after they're introduced. We know about the father from the opening sequence, and other elements that might have been a surprise, such as the transgender/split personality business, was just spelled out, with the characters themselves never learning about it.

There's an astrology based, feminist secret society, sometime intimated that controls sections of society, but ends up being 13 women who barely manage to cover up their own murders that they commit to cover up other murders. They don't play much in the plot either.

For the exciting conclusion, our heroine is kidnapped (off page), rescued (off page), and learns of the fate of her tormentors from the newspaper. The worst of Russo's that I've come across.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3YJVhWe

Butler 1: The Hydra Conspiracy by Philip Kirk

Butler 1
The Hydra Conspiracy
by Philip Kirk (Len Levinson)
Leisure, 1979

One of the worst novels I've ever read by one of my favorite authors. Not even any camp value, just a dull grind to a word count.

Butler is a CIA agent who gets fired for his objections to the agency's interventions in South American. He's recruited, via plot convolutions, to join a secret international conspiracy The Bancroft Institute to oppose a secret international conspiracy Cobra. This takes the first half of the book.

The second half has Butler being hired as head of security for a billionaire, getting involved in a military coup, and defusing a nuclear bomb. Butler occupies a weird place on the spectrum between le Carré and The Man From B.O.N.E.R. - the plot is too sparse and bad to be serious espionage, not enough sex to be a farce, and not funny enough to be parody.

Speaking of sex, three scenes, the first two fade to black shortly after beginning. Not enough for a spank book or sex farce, but present and creepy enough to overwhelm the other elements. To say it doesn't age is well is an understatement, as Butler's main seduction move is to hope she doesn't press charges.

The writing, especially the first half, felt like the author was blocked, kept typing through it, and didn't go back to revise. Butler wanders around not doing anything, conversations go in circles with speakers repeating things back to each other for pages, just completely aimless.

The series ran twelve books, with Levinson doing the first six. The later ones are strangely more collectible, probably smaller print runs, but I'm guessing it's more for the covers than the content.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3rrlKex

An Earthman on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

An Earthman on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley
Originally The Radio Man
1924, Argosy

An earthly radio operator zaps himself to Venus, where he is captured by and assimilates with ant people and people people. Kept waiting for the admin to get out of the way (learning the language, customs, getting a job, etc) so we could get to the adventure, but I suppose all that was the point of the story. More planetary romance than sword & planet.

Available from Gutenberg 

The Gore by Joseph Citro

The Gore (aka The Unseen)
by Joseph Citro
1990 Warner Books

The titular gore is a surveying term for a slice of land which goes unclaimed due to surveying mistakes. We start off with what I remember most from one of Citro's other books, a depiction of depressed rural Vermont and miserable men drinking themselves to death. Some stones are brought to the attention of the university, there are a some mysterious deaths, and finally bigfoot sightings around an abandoned hotel.

Pretty early in the process the bigfoots are revealed to be...

World War X

What's better than a battle royal? Five battle royals!

Introducing World War X!

Four rings with 20 authors each, fighting it out until there are five left in each ring. The last twenty will meet in the center ring until there is only one survivor left. As this will likely take years there will be multiple title defenses sprinkled throughout, as well as multiple hands of Bunco Brawl.

Rage on the Page in a Cage results

 George Fielding Eliot claims the Cruiserweight Title.

Forgotten Realms clings to the TV Title

R.J. Calder's Frenzi defeats fan favorite Dillon for the Young Guns Title

Startling Detective holds firm against Bronze Thrills to retain the Tag Team Title.

Joseph Rosenberger successfully defended the European Title.

Ray Garton remains our Intercontinental Champion.

Up-and-comer Derrick Ferguson defeats upstart Startling Detective Adventures to claim the US Title.

Ray Garton snatches away the World Title from Donald Hamilton to become our first double crown winner.

The dicks from down under Carter Brown and Larry Kent win the Rage on the Page in a Cage for team Private Eyes.

Stay tuned for our next event, the biggest, brashest, most tedious yet!

RPC World Title Match: Ray Garton vs Donald Westlake

 

Westlake slips and Garton takes the advantage, becoming our new World Champion and first double crown winner.

Lot Lizards by Ray Garton

Lot Lizards 
by Ray Garton
Mark V Ziesing, 1991

A group of vampiric lot lizards (sex workers who hang around truck stops) travel with a bestial queen vampire in the back of a truck driven by fat, sleazy trucker familiars, the Carsey brothers. Trucker Bill Ketter, a trucker turned reluctant vamp, hunts the group, finding them at a truck stop where his ex-wife and kids happen to be stranded.

Sleazy, violent, and fun. My only complaint is the short length, as there was a lot of room in the story to expand.

Available from Amazon

The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake

The Hot Rock
by Donald E. Westlake
1970, Simon and Schuster

Thief Dortmunder and his crew make multiple attempts to steal an emerald for an African country. Dry to the point I wouldn't know this was supposed to be a comedy if I didn't know in advance. I was expecting it to be a bit broader with bumbling characters, but everyone is mostly competent, if occasionally mildly quirky, and the humor is supposed to come out of the repetition.

As with the Parker novels I've read, the actual heisting isn't the highlight as much as the business surrounding it, and for me the heisting sequences fell as flat as the humor. Which is a shame because I loved the humor in The Man with the Getaway Face.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3zoQyNN

RPC World Title Match: Ray Garton vs Donald Westlake

 

The irresistible force of Ray Garton meets the immovable object of Donald Westlake. This one's for all the marble.

Rage on the Page in a Cage

 The barney's done and Carter Brown and Larry Kent bashed the competition, winning for Private Eyes.