Butcher 32 The Hoodoo Horror by Stuart Jason

The Hoodoo Horror
by Stuart Jason (Michael Avallone)
The Butcher 32
1981 Pinnacle Books

A generic guru Father Pequet goes to the hospital for a heart attack.  The Butcher is sent by White Hat to protect him.  He fakes injury in a car accident to access the hospital where he's involved in a couple of explosions between banging nurses.

Another agent, The Candy Man, helps him escape police questioning and joins the Butcher in finding Pequet after he's discharged from the hospital.  Here we come as close as we're going to get to a plot.  Pequet faked the heart attack, intending to amaze the world with his ability to recover enough to make a speech three days later.  A little weak, as far as miracles go.

Pequet's theology is incredibly vague - part Hindu guru, part Billy Graham.  Pequet admits that he's using the dark power of Hoodoo...


...which is vague bad-guy magic stuff.  Pequet says this power will destroy the military and make him the world's master.  Which is a good enough reason as any for the Butcher to murder everyone.  He does, getting the Candy Man killed in the process.

This is my first reading of an Avallone Butcher, and he continues in the eccentric writing style of the original, only more repetitive and adding Avallone's trademark of having not much happen.  In places it reads like Lionel Fanthorpe doing hardboiled detective, which is not a good thing.  But we end up with lines like:

"Some women's home plates can be like stubbly forests, barbed wire fences, gravel pits - "

Sexy stuff, that.

Available used on Amazon for too much.

The Butcher

The Butcher
35 Books
Pinnacle Books 1971-1982
by Stuart Jason (house name): James Dockery 1-9,12-26; Lee Floren 10-11; Michael Avallone 27-35

The Butcher is Bucher, who only has one name like Cher or Sting, and is pronounced more like "booker", so it doesn't really work.  He was left on the doorsteps of a Knoxville church and named after a 16th century theologian.  He fell asleep in a train car at the age of ten and ended up on the streets of Chicago.  He befriended a mobster's kid and was adopted into the family after the child dies of leukemia.  He worked his way up to heading the East Coast division of the Syndicate.

Bucher has an attack of conscience and quits the Syndicate, resulting in a bounty on his head.  He was approached by the mysterious government agency White Hat and given an offer to use his skills against the Syndicate.  He agrees under the condition that he plays by the Syndicate rules, because having an attack of conscience shouldn't mean you have to stop murdering people.

The Butcher is the first (I think) cash-in on the success of the Executioner, but it has a closer feel to the James Bond knock offs that preceded it, with a bit of Matt Helm and Mike Hammer.  I've only read two so far, and they have a weird, almost beat poet vibe to them.  They also followed a very specific formula.

In the first chapter Bucher dispatches a team of two Syndicate hitmen, both with depraved back stories.  No real action, he just takes them out cowboy style.  There is then a country threatening menace that ties into the Syndicate, although the Syndicate doesn't actually make another appearance.  In both of the books I read, there is a red herring about scientists creating body doubles.

Reading the Butcher I'm reminded of some of the riffs in the MST3K version of Agent From H.A.R.M.


Mainly about how there are big budget ambitions done on a shoestring.  Things like setting and location cost money when you're making a movie, not so much for a book.  If anything, I would think it would be easier to write a giant underground base than it would getting into the minutiae of rural Alaska.  The Butcher books I've read start off with large scale menaces, but Bucher mainly ends up puttering around and failing to keep people around him from being murdered.

The Stuart Jason name was also attached to several Mandingo style plantation exploiters, presumably also written by Dockery.  I've heard the Avallone books are an improvement, so we'll see.

Much more at Spy Guys and Gals.

The Butcher 07 - Death Race

Death Race
The Butcher 07
by Stuart Jason
1973 Pinnacle

I'm calling horse hockey on this one.  What the hell was this, Jason?

Bucher is sent to an Alaskan village to find out if soldiers manning the Dewpoint early warning defense system are being replaced by duplicates.  After the obligatory dispatching-sleazy-mob-hitmen scene, he's off to a tiny village to speak with Sonja Rostov, an Eskimo woman whose brother has been replaced.  Lucky for Bucher, he speaks this particular Eskimo dialect and knows all their customs, because that information was useful when he was the head of the west coast syndicate.

He hangs around the village a bit and sends someone off to relay a message to his handlers at White Hat.  He's attacked by three Eskimo thugs, including the unlikely named Sugar Hazard, and the sight of Sonja disemboweling one of them sends his heart aflutter.  A good half of the book is them being cutesy together, with the sex all off page.

Bucher sees an old school picture of an Eskimo child that he recognizes as Dr. Wan Fu, distinguishable by literally having a second brain on the outside of his face.  Sure.

Butcher 02 - Come Watch Him Die

Come Watch Him Die
Butcher 02
by Stuart Jason (James Dockery)
Pinnacle Books 1971

from Spy Guys and Gals

"While a lethal but beautiful blonde stalks Bucher, he must find - and stop - a crazed chemist turned killer!"
"Once again Bucher is on the line...caught in a cross fire between his Mafia Masters and the undercover agents he now serves.  Butcher is wearing of trusting no one.  He allows himself to succumb to the softness of a woman - a devastating dame who plays the deadliest game in town."

The Butcher was the first series to capitalize on the success of the Executioner, and it's good to see an example of the genre before the style got fossilized.  And one thing the Butcher series has is style.

The Butcher is Bucher, a mafia hitman who quit and is now working for the mysterious government organization White Hat.  The Butcher is investigating a Nazi scientist's plot to replace politicians with exact doubles for the Mafia, while he is being stalked by mob killers looking to collect on a $1,000,000 bounty and a prostitute who believes only a man as manly as the Butcher can give her an orgasm.

Not much plot wise - the Butcher goes to a place, somebody tries to kill him, he kills them, he goes to the next place.  The situations are definitely quirkier than the Executioner - you won't see Mack Bolan fighting giant snakes.

The text is very stylized, often to the point of annoyance.  The Butcher shoots the gun out of someone's hand Saturday matinee cowboy style, and the narrator spends the next several pages in a cartoon drawl.  The gangsters all speak in a weird patois of Jersey tough guy, hippie, and beatnik, with "a-roonie" suffixing half the dialogue.  But it's all worth it for gems of pure nastiness like this:

"Blow-John made his hits with a blowtorch when practible; said he liked to hear 'em scream because it shushed a funny noise inside his head.  Snyder Key preferred a carpenter's ordinary brace and wood bit to bore angled holes in the helplessly bound mark's skull, pack the holes with cotton soaked in cigarette lighter fluid and fire up, listening to the hillbilly music of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and masturbating till the mark's brains boiled and popped his skull."

I think I'll be reading more of the Butcher.