Crow 1 - Red Hills by James Marvin

Red Hills
by James W. Marvin (James Laurence)
1979 Corgi

Just to let us know what we're dealing with, the book opens with our hero Crow slapping a girl and shooting a dog.  It just gets worse from there.

Crow is a lieutenant with the US Calvary, serving under a psychopathic, alcoholic, cuckolded Captain.  The bulk of the novel is Crow using his cool head and measured tactics to take on Sioux raids under less than ideal circumstances.

In contrast to his calm demeanor in combat in his personal life he's pretty much a sexual sadist.  While there are plenty of psychopaths and borderline personalities among the Piccadilly Cowboy heroes, Crow is a full blown child-murdering, revenge torturing serial killer.

So we'll be seeing more of Crow in the future.

Available in Kindle from Amazon.

Read a sample.

Caleb Thorne 1

First Shot
Caleb Thorne 1
by L.J. Coburn (Laurence James)
1977 Sphere

Caleb Thorne starts out as one of the most distasteful western protagonists put to page, and I hope he stays that way.

He's a rich, bullying layabout who mocks the fighting men of the military and delights in killing them off in duels.  He's engaged to a girl of a rich family but is more interested in her mother.  Thorne has some mother issues, and by that I mean he's banging his mom.  Just shy of a full blown sex scene, it's made pretty clear he took his dad's place after he killed him, so he's got the whole Oedipus package going on.

After a pretty nasty sex scene of him with his mother-in-law to be during the First Battle of Bull Run, his fiance and mother both die in the conflict, giving Thorne his Batmanesque motivation to join the Union Army.

As luck would have it, his new commanding officer is the father of a man Thorne killed in a duel.  He's made the leader of a Dirty Dozen style special troop of condemned criminals forced to fight in suicide missions.  We wrap up with a quick mission to blow up a bridge.

I'm guessing there's going to be some Joseph Campbell thing where our hero undergoes a personal transformation to not be a such a horrible human being, but I hope not.  The series only lasted five issue - there's mention that Civil War books didn't sell well at the time.  I'm guessing because you risk alienating half of your reading public depending on what side your protagonist is on.

Read a sample

Get the Kindle ebook from Amazon

Angel Chronicles 3 - Guardian Angels by Mick Norman

Guardian Angels
Angel Chronicles 3
by Mick Norman (James Laurence)
1974 New English Library

This installment, set in the future year 198-, draws inspiration from the real life killing of a fan by a Guardian Angels working security during a Rolling Stones concert.  In the near future there's a trend of double bill acts, one aimed at teenies, one aimed at "middies", or middle aged women.  The women have become increasingly violent during these concerts, so promoters hire the Angels to work security.  There's a sleazy bit in the middle where they have their way with some underage groupies, chain them up, shave their heads, body paint them, and parade them on stage as a warning to the other fans not to misbehave.

It kind of fizzles out towards the end, but Laurence goes into overdrive with the inside jokes and obscure references, even dropping in Dinsdale the hedgehog and a dead parrot from Monty Python.

Angel Challenge

Angel Challenge
Angel Chronicles 2
by Mick Norman (Laurence James)
New English Library 1973

When last we left the Last Heroes in Angels From Hell, they had gone to Wales to meet up with a mythic Angels chapter.  The two chapters merged, so we have way too many y's and w's in the names.  The pendulum has swung, and now the police protect the rights of the criminals and bikers are popular anti-heroes.

Another bike gang has challenged the Last Heroes, the gay glam Ghouls, who are infinitely more interesting than our protagonists.  How do these two gangs duke it out for supremacy?  By solving highly literal puzzles in a race sponsored by a tabloid newspaper.  Oh, England.

There's a smidgen of violence, but mostly it's people dickering over the overly complex rules of the game.  This installment definitely misses the sleaze and fun of the first book.

Angels From Hell

Angels From Hell
Angel Chronicles 1
by Mick Norman (aka Laurence James)
1973 New English Library

It's future year 197-.  Biker violence has resulting in the erosion of civil liberties and the rise of vigilante gangs.  While set in the future, it's really more of an alternate present - think Clockwork Orange.

Only a handful of bike gangs remain, including the Last Heroes chapter of the Hell's Angels.
An art student turned soldier decides that society needs shaking up, so he decides to join up with his girlfriend.  We're treated to the cliched initiation before fast forwarding several months.

The upstart is challenging the leadership of the group, wanting to bring discipline to make the Last Heroes a money making criminal enterprise, while others in the gang prefer the chaos.

The short novel is basically three set pieces.  A banker has his daughter kidnapped and ransomed off.  It doesn't end well for either of them.

Next, an exploitation film director wants to use the Last Heroes as extras in his upcoming film.  The cast and crew are pretty much all gay because, you know, Hollywood.  The gay male lead makes some passes, while the gay female lead plays the tease.  You can guess how that ends up.

The police are closing in on the Last Heroes, but they strike back in a bloodbath that kills fifty cops.  This makes them folk heroes, and they ride out to join a mythical lost Welsh bike gang.

James Laurence was the editor for New English Library, which produced tons of excellent exploitation.  There's some sex, which is not as graphic as the violence, with heads being tossed around aplenty.

While not incredibly explicit, the novel is definitely nasty in tone.  There are little touches, like mentioning that a cop's wife is having an affair and won't miss him as he's being murdered

You can tell Laurence is having fun with it, and plays around with the form as he goes.  He breaks the fourth wall, stops to go inside the heads of the characters, and uses transcript and screenplay format in places.

The good news is that the Angels series is available on the cheap through Amazon.  The bad news is that, like other fellow NEL products such as Richard Allen's Skinhead series, the OCR and formatting is criminally poor.  Random characters, about a third of the punctuation is missing, and about half the novel is underlined.